alan frost photography

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills….

St Olaf Church is situated in Wasdale Head, a tiny hamlet at the northern end of Wastwater in The Lake District. A wild and remote place, it is surrounded by hills and mountains including Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England.

In one of the leaded light windows of the Church there is an inscription and etching of Napes Needle on Great Gable. The words are from the first verse of Psalm 121, and for various reasons this Psalm holds a special place in my heart.

Inscription and etching in St Olaf Church, Wasdale Head

I first visited Wasdale Head and this Church thirty years ago. It was on the occasion of our first family holiday following the death of my father from Motor Neurone Disease in 1983.

Twenty two years ago I returned with my future wife. It was during our stay in The Lake District that I proposed and we married a year later. Again we made a point of visiting this Church and we bought a postcard of the window and the inscription. To this day this postcard still hangs on the wall of our cloakroom with other mementos of our visit.

Just three years ago my mother passed away and I read Psalm 121 at her funeral service.

Today we celebrated and gave thanks for the life of my sister who died at the end of March from cancer. She was just 59 years of age. Again I read Psalm 121.

I know this particular post is very personal and poignant and arguably has little to do with photography. To the contrary, my visit to the Lake District thirty years ago, inspired me and instilled in me a love of the countryside and the great outdoors – wild places, where the ever changing light offers so much drama and splendour.

This entry would not be complete without including the full text of Psalm 121 – A Song of Ascents. This is the Revised Standard version and so some of the words used do vary from the inscription.

I lift up my eyes to the hills

From where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord

who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved;

he who keeps you will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel

will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper;

the Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day,

nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil;

he will keep your life.

The Lord will keep

your going out and your coming in

from this time on and for evermore.

‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’ and try and and do justice through my photography to the beauty that surrounds us.

Lake District 121 – pre-visualisation and post processing techniques

This is the penultimate entry about my 121 workshop with Paul Gallagher in the Lake District. There will be a final post concerned with ‘black and white’ printing to complete the series.

When Paul and I first met in the lounge of The Crowpark Hotel in Keswick, one of the things I said I would like to learn more about was how to pre-visualise the finished photograph before releasing the shutter. To start to think of the photographic workflow as one cohesive process, as opposed to a number of separate steps from seeing, to taking, to processing and finally to print or uploading to the web. This one step followed by another had largely been my way of doing things to date, so I wanted to try and link these stages together and change the way I thought about my approach to photography.

Common sense told me that what happens during each stage must have an impact on the next, and so on down the line. I guessed that by pre-visualising the finished image at the outset, decisions could be made at each stage, as the finished image could already be seen in the mind’s eye. The skill therefore would be to know what might be possible and to take the photograph with this is mind.

For me this idea of thinking ahead was best demonstrated when Paul and I drove through Newlands Valley. I spotted a small group of trees on the horizon and although when we first arrived at this scene the clouds were universally grey, there was some movement in the sky, so we set up our cameras for the shot in the hope that the sky and light would improve…….and after about 20 minutes it did.

Straight out of the camera the RAW image looked like this; not too inspiring you might think but Paul had already talked me through his pre-visualisation of the ‘finished’ shot. I used a 1 or may be 2 stop graduated filter just to balance the exposure values between the sky and the foreground.

Back in the digital darkroom and using Lightroom I applied a ‘preset’ to boost the clarity, remove any chromatic aberration and apply a modest amount of sharpening. The next stage was to adjust the saturation and luminance of the blue channel, knowing that when the image was converted to black and white there would be the opportunity to increase the contrast in the sky. Having made these adjustments the RAW image now looked like this.

An improvement on the first image but hardly a photograph to get excited about. The next stage was to import the RAW file into photoshop and then convert the image to monochrome. Using ‘Image’ – ‘Adjustment’ – ‘Black and white’ a window opens which allows you to make adjustments to a range colour channels. Having boosted the saturation and luminance of the blue sky in Lightroom, I further darkened the blue channel to a value of -80. The resulting image is shown below.

You might be forgiven for thinking this image is now worse than the colour version and I would probably agree but the next stage really brings the photograph to life. A ‘levels’ adjustment layer was applied and now the image looks like this.

However some further fine tuning in photoshop was required. A number of ‘curves’ adjustment layers were made to selected areas of the image, before finally sharpening the trees and the foreground, but not the sky. The final adjustment was to crop the photo to balance the composition. Paul is a great believer in cropping to suit the image and not be concerned whether or not the end result conforms to one of the common aspect ratios – i.e. 3×2, 4×3, 5×4 or 1×1. Why be constrained by uniformity if a more custom approach is adopted and enhances each individual image? When I went on the workshop to the Isle of Eigg with Bruce Percy he was a very keen advocate of 5×4 or 1×1, couldn’t stand 3×2, but rarely I think breaks away from the first two aspect ratios. His choice of course but it was good to hear another view. For now I will keep my options open and simply show the finished image.

Three Trees – the finished photograph
OMD EM5 on a tripod with Panasonic f2.8 35-100mm lens
42mm f13 1/100sec ISO200

Personally I really like this shot. I love it’s simplicity, the shape and size of the three trees and how their alignment echoes the diagonal line of the clouds. The ability to pre-visualise this shot at the outset is a great skill and is at the very heart of the photographic process. It’s a skill which I doubt is ever mastered but with practice out in the field my knowledge can only grow with time; after all Paul has been practising his art of fine black and white photography for nearly 30 years. For me though it has opened my eyes to what is possible and that in my view is a great place from which to start.

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Easter inside Fishbourne Church

In a departure from recent entries, I could not miss the opportunity to record the glorious interior of our local parish church at Fishbourne near Chichester in West Sussex, which was decorated with some quite stunningly beautiful flower arrangements this Easter. I wanted to photograph the work of many wonderful and gifted volunteers, as well as having a few images which could be published in the next edition of our Parish Magazine.

All the photographs were taken using the Olympus EM5 and Panasonic f2.8 12-35mm zoom lens, mounted on a Gitzo tripod and ball head.

The east window behind the altar of Fishbourne Church

All the pillars were decorated with flowers and Easter chicks!

Crosses and primroses beneath the altar

A floral decoration on the font

…..and just because I can’t resist the temptation, I have converted a similar image to the first photo in this entry to mono. Although the beautiful colours have been removed there is still something about the black and white version.

Lake District 121 – Post Processing

One of the things I was keen to learn from Paul Gallagher during my recent workshop in The Lake District, was the art, and it is an art, of post processing a RAW file to produce a strong black and white image.

Up until my trip away I had used a combination of Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro2. Rarely would I use Photoshop even though it’s regarded as the ‘daddy’ of all software programs for image editing. Lightroom shares the same Raw converter as Photoshop and is a wonderful tool for your photographic workflow, from importing the images, key-wording, developing and finally to print or uploading to the web. However it does not touch Photoshop when it comes to the fine art of processing a really good black and white image. However I was daunted by the fact that the skills and knowledge to use Photoshop well, take a long time, so I was delighted when Paul demonstrated a few simple techniques which with a little practice I have now been able to apply to the shots I took on the trip.

In the following example the first image on the left is the original RAW file with no adjustments. It’s just as it was when imported from the SD card into Lightroom. The reason for the blue colour cast is down to the fact that this was a 60second long exposure using the Hi-Tech 10 stop ND filter. The second image on the right has simply been converted to black and white and whilst the blue cast has been removed, the image is very flat. The third image is the finished photograph.

RAW file – straight out of the camera

RAW file with simple black and white conversion

Wastwater Rocks – the final image

So what simple steps were taken in Photoshop to arrive at this end result?

Well, firstly in Lightroom I applied a preset which boosted the clarity to a value of 15 and which also applied some sharpening. Amount 50 – Radius 0.5 – Detail 50 and Masking 0. The preset also eliminates any chromatic aberration created by the lens I used for this shot – the Panasonic f2.8 12 – 35mm. On this occasion CA would not have been visible given the blue colour cast.

Secondly I exported the image from Lightroom into Photoshop CS5. Using ‘image – adjustment’ I then converted the RAW image to black and white. This was followed by a ‘levels’ adjustment layer to move the black and white points on the histogram, to give a full range of tonal values. The ‘mid point’ can also be adjusted if required but was not changed for this particular shot.

The next stage was to make local adjustments to certain sections or specific areas of the image using the lasso tool to select the area and then apply a curves adjustment layer. The choice of ‘pixel feather’ is critical to make sure that the adjustment only applies to the area required. This is really where a small but subtle change can make quite a difference. I don’t consider myself to be an artist but there is no question that these small changes are the equivalent of applying the finishing brush strokes to a painting. Poor technique in both cases could ruin a good image, the only advantage of Photoshop is that you can ‘step backwards’ or delete a layer. With a painting it would be much more difficult if not impossible to undo. Knowing when to stop is also very important. An image can very quickly look overworked. Once all the adjustments had been made all the layers were ‘flattened’. (Layers – flatten image).

The last stage was to apply further sharpening using filters – unsharpen mask. Not all areas of an image require or should be sharpened; the sky for example, so a layer mask should used. I created a duplicate layer of the background layer and applied the sharpening to this new layer so the ‘original’ background layer remained unaltered. Once I was happy with the amount of sharpening (easily previewed) the again I ‘flattened’ both layers.

Finally I ‘saved as’ a TIFF file and gave the image a title. Once done this new image is saved in the same folder in Lightroom, so it appears alongside the original image. This is a great advantage as I can still go back and carry out another conversion should I wish.

I think there is still a place for Silver Efex Pro2 in my workflow. After all it has been my default plug in for black and white conversions until now. However my eyes have been opened to new ways of working and I am delighted to have learnt some new skills.

Paul talked about other processing techniques and choices that need to be made before post Processing even starts and I will cover some of these key points in my next entry.

When mono doesn’t always work

Although I largely take black and white photographs there are occasions when I will convert a colour RAW file to mono, only to think that the image looks much better in colour. Stripping out colour can eliminate unwanted distractions in a picture, but equally the colours and harmony of these tones can be at the very heart of the image, so why remove them? As I always shoot in RAW I have a digital negative which contains all the colour data, so it gives me the option of a straight mono conversion or working in colour, whichever I think is the best treatment for the image.

During my recent trip to the Lake District there were two shots I really liked and whilst one is fine in black and white, I much prefer the colour version.

Here are both versions by way of comparison –

and now for the colour version –

Trees at Elterwater in Langdale

I didn’t even consider converting the next shot to monochrome….the colours in the image are just too important in my opinion and make the shot. The warm tones of the foreground contrasting well with the cooler tones in the middle and far distance. These would be lost in a black and white conversion.

Looking towards Watson’s Dodd
taken near to the road from Keswick to Thirlemere

This has though made me think. Am I too restrictive in my choice of shot? Should I consider taking more colour images and not be trying to see the world in shades of grey? Surely there is room for both mediums. There can only be a handful of black and white photographers who never shoot in colour. Similarly most photographers who predominately shoot in colour will occasionally take a black and white picture. At the end of the day this is purely a hobby for me, and therefore it’s all about the ‘taking and making’ of images which give me pleasure but hopefully might please others as well. Whether they are black and white or colour doesn’t really matter. After all it’s simply a matter of personal preference and interpretation.