Happy Birthday to MJ and Fun with Photoshop

Our friend MJ in Yorkshire had a party last night to celebrate her birthday - no prizes for guessing which birthday was being celebrated! Anyway, the evening was excellent and when the time came to bring out Sarah's home baked delicious birthday cake (complete withe "Secret Strawberries"!), I thought I'd get the camera out and take a pop.

This is where things went wrong as I'm not an excellent photographer and its only a teeny tiny Sony camera and the lighting was all wrong and the cake was too white and everything else was too dark (how many more excuses can I find...). So the originial picture (see small photo on the right) needed a LOT of improvement. So having learned how to banish the blue seawater from my underwater pictures using photoshop, I decided to have a play with this photo of MJ and the cake...

First I improved the exposure and the gamma setting to lighten the picture and improve the contrast to get this result but as you can see, the close up of Conroy's face and nose and the fact that the 40 on the cake is back to front, does not make for the most convincing portrait.

In the end, I decided to crop the picture down, thus focusing on the birthday girl herself (and her mad friend K8 who is clearly has a cake fantasy!) and then to rotate the picture about a vertical axis to reveal the 40 in the candles the correct way round.

Having a tendency to fiddle with things a bit too much, I then thought that a special effect might make the photo even more interesting and this is where photoshop goes absolutely wild! There are dozens of Filters and Effects that produce mysterious results. In the end, and having tried plenty of them, I opted for one in the menu:

Filter -> Filter Gallery -> Stylize -> Glowing Edges

You can judge for yourself as this is the picture at the top of the blog.

But the lesson I've learned is that providing you've got the time, you can take the simplest photo and turn it into a work of art ready for exhibiting in the Tate!

The photos and possibly one or 2 more can be found in my Flickr account

Another sunset in Sale, Manchester

Another sunset in Sale, Manchester
Originally uploaded by richardinsale

OK this might not be quite as exciting as zooming on a boat between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh in Cambodia, but believe me, the view is just as exceptional.

The window from my desk looks out over the southwest view in the Sale suburb of Manchester, so at this time of the year, that means excellent sunsets. Have a look at some of the others on my photo site in Flickr. The range of clouds on view is quite something and makes me smile - in Laos or Cambodia, with a view like this, there would be a queue of people taking pictures with their digital cameras. In Manchester, hardly anyone even notices (most people don't look up) let alone get their camera out...

Lessons learned indeed.

Pink corals near Ko Lipe Thailand

Pink coral
Originally uploaded by richardinsale

Now that I have had the chance to play around with Adobe's Photoshop CS3, I've managed to start to correct the snorkelling and diving photos. There are lots more on Flickr, but I thought the one I would blog would have to be the soft corals.

These pink corals are generally found in the Tarutao region of Thailand especially near the stronger currents of the open ocean. They really are bright pink exactly as seen in the picture. Quite surreal!

So its not southeast asia but it is just as amazing!

Kinder Scout from Cown Edge near Manchester, England

Getting back to the UK in the middle of February was a bit of a shock. The contrast in temperature between Bangkok (about 33C) and England (ca. 4C) is quite something, but I think it is the lack of light that is the most significant factor.
We have actually been very lucky - as you can see in this picture, the weather has been quite beautiful since we returned and it has allowed us to get our for some decent walks. This view is a panorama that I created from several individual pictures using Adobe's Photoshop CS3. We were about mid-way through a walk from a village called Charlesworth that is about 15km east of Manchester (less than 30 minutes drive from our house in Sale).
We had walked up to a series of crags called "Coombes Edge" and thought we would wander over the ridge to see what was on the other side. To be honest, we didn't really know what to expect and were greeted by this immense view of Kinder Scout.
Kinder Scout is about the highest thing near Manchester and its not easy to miss especially as not only is it high, but it is high over a vast area. At this time of the year, it looks very majestic as the Pennine moorland looks so brown and there's a lovely contrast in colour between this and the blue sky.
Kinder has quite a history with one of the most important events being the famous "mass trespass" by ramblers in their quest to gain more access to open moorland in England. The trespass took place on 24 April, 1932 when several hundred ramblers trespassed onto the privately owned summit. More can be found at http://kindertresspass.com
In addition to adding photos from recent days, I am going back through the 1000s of pictures we took on holiday (yes I took about 5,000!) and will be uploading some of the best to Flickr - there are also quite a few more panorama shots to build using Photoshop. Last but not least, I've been uploading various little videos to Youtube. So in many respects the events of our holiday carry on and I'll be updating this blog regularly so please check in whenever you can!