June
Saturday
morning and my copy of AP has arrived as normal. It won’t be long before it
stops though seeing as we have cancelled the subscription. Anyway … I always
flick through it to see what will be worth reading first when I come to relax
with it, and a few items have caught my attention. The first one is a test of
two new backpacks from Billingham, specially designed and aimed at photographers.
There’s two versions of this pack, the 35 at £280 and the 25 at £350. These two
packs look expensive and might be a thief magnate on their own. Add in a load
of photo-kit and temptation rises even more.
Billingham
is a big name in the photo-world along with a number of other makes. Even camera
brands produce their named bags and packs, clearly showing their logo on them
in a few places that can’t really be missed. I don’t have one. I do have a bag
but it’s not a photo-bag. Actually I have two, a larger one that I keep all our
gear in here at home, and all in one place. We both have smaller bags that we
use for our day-to-day use. None of them has a logo on them.
They look
cheap and indeed they were cheap at the time. They are not designed for
photo-use, but so what? Each lens in my bag is in its own smaller bag and is
well protected from the knocks of daily life. There’s another smaller pouch
where I keep my spare batteries and SD cards. I also have an A5 notebook in
there along with a number of pens and pencils, just like all writers should do.
What they
don’t carry is my lappy whereas the bags in this test do. My bag will take my
tablet though, but we are then getting into the area where weight comes into play.
With my camera over my head and shoulder, hanging to my left side and my bag
hanging on my right hip, I am already carrying enough added weight. Don’t
forget a tripod either. And there’s the weight of the bags themselves, not that
the larger bags gets out much these days, our last trip to Mallorca being the
last time it left home.
The reasons
for these bags is two-fold; a, the cost, all our bags cost less than £20; b,
they don’t obviously look like photo-bags. It’s this latter reason that we have
always gone down this route. The only problem we’ve had was when I lost my bag
over in Brum one day, but there again, that could happen at any time and with
any bag couldn’t it. It took a few days for me realise that it was missing, and
by that time it was too late to do anything about. Back the mag then …
Each week
they run a column called Appraisal,
where they take images that a readers’ image and alter it in an attempt to
improve it. In the past I’ve written about this because usually they show the
unaltered image in a small version and then the doctored image much larger. To
me the larger image will always look better anyway. This week they have posted
both images at the same time. On page 40 they printed a shot of a lighthouse.
The original looks too dark and contrasty, even for me who likes a lot of
contrast. So they lightened it and brought more detail in the foreground and in
the sky.
On page
41 however, they have a shot of a church and cemetery that looks nicely
contrasted and lots of cloud details. On reading what they say about it, it
opens a different argument altogether. HDR is the process of layering a number
of images on to each other to bring out more details. In most of them you can
clearly see this effect when they are on colour, and I’m not keen on them. This
image is HDR but I hadn’t noticed that. The photographer has also changed the
sky but editing in a different on. The mags ‘improved’ version is brighter and
the sky has lost all the details; out of the two, I prefer the original as it
was sent to them. The one word they didn’t use in text is ‘cheat’.
There is
an argument about whether or not images should be altered by excessive editing.
One pro-snapper lost his winner tag once a year or two ago when it came out he
had removed and movie camera from the left foreground. The argument circles around
the personal likes and dislikes and whether the image is actually finished once
the shutter is clicked. In film photography that is pretty much as it is.
However, there are ways of changing a negative by the way you develop it and
the same with a print. I was shown one so-called ‘cheat’ in the darkroom by
rubbing hard on the print with the heal of you hand, thereby deepening the back
areas where needed. So cheating has always happened and will always happen.
Today’s
photo …
My dad (one of the few I have), with Pally, his dog. I took and printed this shot myself and I can
assure you that there were no tricks used in this one. I didn’t know any that
time.
Today’s
funny …
"I don't know, and I don't care."
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