John Rylands Library by Neil Alexander

The other weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to get into John Rylands Library in Manchester on one of their occasional photographic tours. This means that you’ve got an hour to go pretty much where you like and shoot with whatever you like (lights, tripods etc). Normally you are allowed to take photographs inside the library, but tripods and strobes are strictly forbidden. The library was originally designed by Architect Basil Champneys in 1889, took 10 years to build and was commissioned by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband John Rylands who was a Manchester based entrepreneur and philanthropist in the 19th Century.

John Rylands Library by Neil Alexander

The architecture of the building is absolutely stunning, and today it is operated by the University of Manchester as a public library. The same unfortunately can’t really be said for the lighting. Away from the fancy new entrance, its really quite dark and dingy inside. Right from the word go, I knew that HDR was the way to go – any scene you looked at was a combination of really bright highlights and dark gloomy corners. So these images are a series of 7 frames (a little overkill) tone mapped in Photomatix and then layered and tweaked a little in Photoshop CS5.

John Rylands Library by Neil Alexander

St Peters Square, Manchester by Neil Alexander

If you’ve been following this blog for more than a few posts, you’ll know that I’m immersed in an A-level photography course at the moment, and I’ve been so focused on it of late, that I felt I needed to get out and shoot something different for a bit of mental exercise.

Lately, I’ve been looking more and more into High Dynamic Range photography and found myself drooling over the work of Brian Matiash. He’s a “commercial architecture photographer, writer, and lover of all things social media” based over the pond in Framingham, Massachusetts and I absolutely adore his work. His modus operandi is to shoot specifically for HDR images with a tilt / shift lens and his blog is just a constant stream of inspiration. I’m also conscious of having neglected my Manchester Calendar for quite some time (The last cheque I got was for a sum total of 2 calendars!), so I figured the next available opportunity, i”d head into Manchester for dawn and have a play.

Typically, after all the beautiful sunrises and sunsets we’ve been having of late, the first available opportunity I get to do this is on what looks like is going to be a typical grey and damp Manchester morning. Armed with a fully laden CompuTrekker AW, my tripod and a flask of coffee, I headed into Manchester around 5am.

I had a pretty good idea in advance of what I was going to try and do, in fact I had two or three specific shots in mind. This is the first. Unfortunately it was clear from pretty early on that the best I was going to get was the occasional glimpse of direct sunlight, but generally the light was going to be diffused, soft and cold.

For this image, taken around 20 minutes after sunrise (about 10 to 6), I tried shooting St. Peter’s Square from the very end of the tram platform with the Sigma 10-20mm F4/5.6 right out at 10mm with a 7 stop bracket of a 1/20 exposure. I then processed the image in Photomatix. Unfortunately, as I don’t have the pleasure of owning one of Nikon’s stunning tilt/shift lenses, I ended up with a whole bunch of converging verticals. I just felt that I had to open up the image in Photoshop and apply a little “verticalisation” to it – looks a whole heap better if you ask me – my eye certainly didn’t see it and think “but those converging verticals make the scene look so odd”!

Oh, and I used the brilliant new content-aware spot-healing fancyness of CS5 to remove the cone in the foreground.

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Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander

For the final part of this year’s Photography A-level I’m working towards at the moment, I have been given the theme “Rhythms and Cycles”. I have chosen to make a series of photographs of the the River Bollin. I wanted to show the cycle of water from the rain falling around the start of a river, along its course to where it meets with the sea. I chose the Bollin as I grew up with the Bollin Valley almost as a second back yard, so revisiting it 30 years later felt appropriate considering the theme.

When I first became familiar with the river around the 70s, it was a stagnant polluted mess. I believe that industrial setups in the Macclesfield area used to discharge their raw waste straight into the river, and it just stayed that way. Eventually the Bollin Valley Partnership was formed and they managed to breathe new life into the river and its environs.

After extensive research I finally managed to chart the course of the river in its entirety (on most maps, it appears to disappear in Macclesfield and gets quite tricky to find again the other side), and worked out where the main catchment area lies on the edge of Macclesfield Forest.

Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander

For this first shot, I wanted to make an image of a dank wet forest scene to depict the catchment around the source of the river. Well I got what I wanted! In fact, I got a little more than I bargained for. By the time I was finished, I was absolutely soaked and having left the camera’s rain hood in the car it got increasingly difficult to get it out without drowning it.

I then decided that I wanted to produce this series in black & white. So these images are multiple frame HDR images processed in Photomatix and then converted to black & white in Silver Efex Pro. It may be a little overdone though – I’ve just printed them A3 so I need to get them up on the wall and digest them over a few days.

Early Friday morning I headed into Manchester to shoot some more streetscapes. It was right nippy, and I haven’t managed to locate my photographer’s carpenters fingerless gloves for some time now. However I still managed to put in some time with some long exposure using some ND filters. I shot this with an ND400, and merged 3 separate expsoures together (3, 7 & 15 seconds) in Photomatix.
These are the 3 original exposures:

3 Secs

7 secs

15 secs

I found that once the exposures had been merged and the result tone-mapped, there were issues with the text on the signage to the right. There must have been just enough of a breeze to cause it to flutter slightly and become rather blurred in the tone-mapped output. I opened this tif and the raw file from the shortest of the exposures and proceeded to use a layer mask to just let the sign from the sharpest image (the shortest one) show through. I also had to use curves a little to bring out the sign, as being from the shortest frame it was a little dark.

Headed over to Kinder in the Peak District again on Saturday morning, slightly better equipped this time (I had walking boots & wide angle lens with me this time). The light was clearly going to be a vast improvement on the previous weekend, and my expectations were high. Laden with quite a chunk of kit, I yomped uphill for about 45 minutes eventually making it up to Oaken Clough shortly after dawn. The view was well worth the climb, and the peace and qu/wp-content/uploads/iet was lovely. I stayed up there for around an hour waiting for the sun to rise up over the top of Kinder behind me and begin to kiss the tops of the hills opposite me. I decided to really take my time, and play with a few ideas and was fairly well rewarded.

I also discovered, on the way down, that my new Tamron 70-200mm F2.8 has macro functionality. This was a really pleasant surprise and is actually surprisingly good, though had I discovered this at the top, I’d probably have done some more detailed work on the broken stone wall at the top of the clough.

Shot this at Southport pier earlier this week. 5 exposures converted to HDR in Photomatix. Had to fix some Chromatic Aberration issues in Lightroom first as the underside of the pier was causing me some grief after processing. The problem areas were where the sunlight was coming through the dark spars on the bottom of the platform. Good ol’ Lightroom seems to have fixed the problems though.

I shot this on the way home tonight, and wanted to post it not because I think it’s a great photograph particularly, but more so that I could critique it. It’s 5 exposures blended and tone-mapped in Photomatx and then tweaked a little and vignetted slightly in Lightroom. I spotted the line of clouds rolling in and wanted to capture them somehow, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t find an appropriate accent to get in the foreground, and I think that’s what its lacking. It’s very pretty and all that, but its somehow devoid of something. it has no real focal point other than the sun peaking out from behind the clouds. Unfortunately I’ve seen too many images like this, and not just online, but in print too where more effort is required to make a really good photograph. Whether it could have been something as simple as a tractor silhouetted against the sunset, or a line of trees lit with a bunch of strobes – it just needed something else…. Anyway rant over….

On a side note, I heard this mentioned in the latest Pro Photo Show roundtable, and for a Nikon & Mac user interested in a spot of tethered shooting, it looks a must. It’s called SOFORTBILD, you can get it here, and best of all, its free!! I’ve yet to try it out, but as soon as I do, I’ll knock up a post.