Colour Print Winner - Sparrowhawk by Linda Cooper
In May 2022 I attended a long weekend workshop using well-known hides in Dumfries & Galloway. I had my trusty old Canon 90d with a Sigma 150-600mm contemporary lens and a bean bag, and filled several memory cards over the 3 days.
Recently I have been looking through hard-drives with my new Mac Mini and BenQ monitor and found the sparrow hawk again.
usually, I just use Adobe Bridge to go through images, open in Raw, crop, use the light sliders, texture, clarity, a very small amount of sharpening and colour noise management, then convert to Tiff in photoshop and print.
I really don’t like doing a lot of computer processing, and this image needed very little processing before print. I use the superb Canon Professional Print Software and a Canon PRO-300 printer.
I was surprised at the 1st prize to be honest, but it’s often surprising to me how judges make a decision, and it can be so variable from one judge to another about what takes their eye.
Mono Print Winner - Christchurch Cathedral by Ian Monk
This image was taken in Dublin last year with my Canon R5 and RF 24-105 f4 Lens. It was a busy location with a complex road junction. I tried a number of locations. The best I could find was in the middle of a pedestrian crossing on the main road.
I took a series of high burst rate shots towards the bridge between the Dublinia Museum and the Cathedral and to obtain the width and verticality I used two images taken a fraction of a second apart. One fully vertically aligned , so losing a wedge at each side, the other aligned as layers in photoshop to create the final base image. I used a 3rd image of the same scene which had 3 birds in it, duplicated and brushed in photoshop to provided a distraction in the Gap in the sky above the bridge.
The left image below shows the cleaning up required in photoshop to remove cars, traffic cones, some people and the motorcycle headed towards me. This took some time but would be considerably easier now with the release of the powerful remove tool in photoshop. The Right image below shows both images after layer alignment in photoshop. The resultant image was tidied up to eliminate any indications of the fill then cropped and processed mostly in lightroom with the final conversion to mono using the Silver Effects original professional version.
I print my own images using a Canon BJ3100 ink jet printer starting with the image in lightroom to print in photoshop . I calibrate my 27" DEL and 37" BenQ using a SpiderPro but even so the print never matches the screen exactly without some tweaking. This can take a number of test prints. A Pro tip learned from others in the group to reduce the cost of paper and ink to run these tests is to use A3+ paper cut it up into 8 pieces and print 110x165mm to get the correct colouration and brightness. The difference between projected and reflected light can be surprising so usually the brightness and sometimes contrast levels need to be adjusted in photoshop to correct the print to what I see on the screen.
I used to use the ART shop in Kelty for making the mounting boards but with their closure I had to borrow the skills and cutting equipment of another Kelty Warrior to make the mounts using precut boards from Pinnacle. I also use their Premium Lustre A3+ paper. I have since bought a Compact Elite compact cutter and will try next time to do the prints myself. There is a company in Pitreavie Business Park who do board mounting for about £13 each as a plan B.
Digital Photogtraphic image - Wool Cart by David Scott
Wool Cart: I took this earlier this year at a small outback town called Boonah, every year they have an event at the show ground, loads of things happening like; horsemanship, Scottish pipe bands, wood chopping, dog handling, piglet racing and loads more, of course a bar so it's a great day out. This wool cart was lined up ready to do a circuit of the showground and I thought this would make a good subject, I positioned myself for a full-on frontal shot. Of course, there are many distractions in the background, so I had to carry out a fair bit of post processing, I only wish they had actually loaded the cart with bails of wool.
 Equipment. Canon EOS5DS, Canon 70-200mm lens and a steady hand.
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