Harry Metcalfe

On direct lighting

So, I was taking pictures of last night’s supermoon. I tried taking some on the 18th as well, but none of them were coming out how I’d have liked. A few nights before, I took this one:

Which, really, I seriously love.

But all my subsequent attempts didn’t really produce anything as good. This was the best one:

Now, I took both of these in London. So light pollution will certainly have reduced sharpness, and it’s entirely possible that the atmosphere was a bit clearer for the first shot than it was for the second.

But actually, I think it’s more to do with the position of the sun. The full moon is much flatter and duller than the waxing moon, which is rather to be expected — relative to the camera, the sun illuminates the waxing moon from the side, and a full moon from behind. If I was shooting people with flash, I’d expect much the same thing to happen. So — if it’s not too much to ask — it would be excellent if the universe could contrive to stick gigantic remote flash in high orbit around the moon.

Or, failing that, all practical suggestions on how to do a better job for the next supermoon (14th November 2016) gratefully received. Already on the list:

• Longer lens, or an extender
• A thermos, a warm jumper, and a nice hill in the middle of nowhere

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Always post-process your underwater photographs…

A quickie post, really. I took lots of photographs while scuba diving at Sipadan last year. A selection of the nicest ones are in my flickr stream. But when I originally uploaded them, I hadn’t modified them at all. Mostly because I’d had to trawl through 1600+ honeymoon photos and it was rather late in the day.

But today I thought I’d spend 5 minutes seeing if they could be improved — as it was a cheapy point & click camera hired from the dive company, and all the pictures were really flat and horrible. I am amazed how much better they are after a few minutes clicking about in picasa. Here’s a before & after:

Before

After

Click through for bigger versions.

I made some progress just using the I’m Feeling Lucky button, but what really made them come alive was the Tint effect: using a white tint and dragging the bar almost all the way to the top really made everything pop out nicely.

If you have any similar tips, I’d love to hear them…

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