M A Andrew Black and White Photography Blog

Spent some time on Saturday at Jodrell Bank, which boasts the largest radio telescope in England. This huge dish is 76m in diameter. The observatory was established in 1945 by Sir Bernard Lovell, who wanted to investigate cosmic rays after his work on radar in the Second World War. It has since played an important role in the research of meteors, quasars, pulsars, masers and gravitational lenses, and was heavily involved with the tracking of space probes at the start of the Space Age.

Just added some black and white photographs of verona to the main page:-

www.picturesforwalls.com/cgi-bin/inks.cgi

Here are a few examples. Each print is available for purchase just view the gallery for instructions.

Location: Suffolk, England

Lenses used: Sigma 30 1.4 Ex, Sigma 28-70 2.8 Ex, Sigma 70-200 2.8 Ex, Sigma 10-20 4-5.6 Ex.

Flash used: Sigma EF-500 DG Super

Recent shots from a wedding in the South of England. Color calibration has not been implemented fully on these yet so some do exhibit a slight greenish cast. All shots were taken in raw and then developed in Adobe lightroom.

Istanbul is an ancient city that contains some truly stunning architecture. Over the years, the influences of Christianity, Islam and the Ottoman empire have helped sculped the  city into a unique place. The pictures here show the Blue Mosque - so named because of the Izmir blue tiles used in the construction of its roof,  The Haghia Sophia - one time church, one time mosque and Haydarpasa train station. At this train station, which sits on the Asian side of the Bosporous, you can catch trains to  Baghdad.

You have probably looked around the web and seen images with fantastic clarity and colour fidelity and thought why don’t my images have the same vibrancy and colour rendition? Well chances are you need to follow a couple of basic steps. I use the word basic because I am deliberately avoiding recommending spending (too much) money on costly colour calibration tools. Anyone can get their colours in the right general area.

1) Calibrate your monitor with the tools you probably didn’t know you had installed.

Windows: If you own Photoshop 3 or later, you will probably don’t realise that it comes with a little utility called Adobe Gamma. Find this by doing a quick search and follow the on screen prompts. This should get your monitor displaying colours in the right ballpark.

Mac Users: Use the System Preferences–>Display—>Colours—> and Calibrate to fine tune Mac Colours.

2) Invest in a cheap ebay white balance lens cap.
These are available on ebay for about £1 GBP typically from Hong Kong. Some professionals will pour scorn over the quality of these but again they will get you in the right area colour wise. They are dead simple to use. Before shooting a scene, place over your lens, find your cameras white balance settings and choose custom white balance. Shoot the image with the lens cap on. (You might need to leave your lens in Manual focus mode to shoot). Once the white balance is captured successfully, you are good to carry on shooting.

3) Shoot Raw.
If your camera has a raw/jpg option, choose raw. Raw is like a digitial negative and allows you to make far more adjustments than a compressed JPG image. Professional photographers are shooting raw and with the cheap price of memory today (Raw files are larger), coupled with the speed of most modern computers (for editing raw files), you really have no excuse.

4) Make final adjustments in Photoshop/ Lightroom/ Image Editing
Sometimes, the white balance in a scene might need a little adjusting. Sometimes to true a white balance is not as aesthetically pleasing as you might want. Use a photo editor to adjust contrast and saturation. Hopefully, your shots should be free from colour casts!

A couple more shots from my trip to Venice. All taken with the Sigma SD14 and assorted EX lenses.

More can be seen and purchased on my site : www.picturesforwalls.com

Just uploaded my Venice shots taken about one month ago. Had to get up very early to get some of these as Venice was packed with tourists.

You can see more and purchase them at my site: www.picturesforwalls.com

Just set up a special offer for 3 11 x 8 inch prints on 308gsm fine art Hahnemuhle photo rag for $89USD. The idea is that it will allow customers the chance to get themselves 3 signed pieces of fine art photography at a reasonable price. Hopefully customers will then purchase some of the bigger items.

Just visit my site to see www.picturesforwalls.com

Its been a long time since I posted but have been busy on orders etc. I have decided on a new pricing structure for prints available on my site at www.picturesforwalls.com. Instead of only offering prints, I have refocused the shopping cart so that only 7×5 and 11×8 inch prints are available unmatted. Everything else is matted. It will be interesting to see what effect this will have on sales but I feel I would prefer to send matted prints as the customer then has a finished product that only needs framing. We shall see….

7 x 5 inch prints are now $13USD and 11 x 8 inch prints are now $40 USD. I think these prices allow people to get an idea of the quality of the products I am offering without investing too much. The idea is that once people have ordered these products, they will be more inclined to order matted prints in larger sizes.