Gift Vouchers

I’m making a few new tweaks to the site, and as a first tweak, I’ve added an option to buy gift vouchers! You can buy them at the link below, and they’re valid for 1 year from date of purchase!

https://www.scott-rae.com/v/shop/gift-vouchers

You can also find them under the Gallery and Store page.

Love it or Hate it – HDR Images

Love it or Hate it – HDR images can help overcome the limitations that all cameras have around their sensitivity to light and their ability to handle high contrast scenes.  I have 2 photos that seem to have attracted more attention than any of my others.  One is of Coniston Water at Sunset, and the other one is sunset over Tweed Bridge and the Old Parish Church of Peebles.   These are very different images, but the one thing they have in common is that they are both High Dynamic Range, or HDR photos.

Unlike the human eye, cameras can only record a limited range of brightness before either the lightest parts of the image (highlights, the sun, the sky) become pure white, or the darkest parts (the shadows) pure black.  In bright, high contrast scenes, A camera can normally be set to properly record one of these extremes, but it can be impossible to do both.  Photographers of old would use graduated filters (below), which are darker at the top and clear at the bottom, to help lower the brightness of the highlights (usually the sky) in the image closer to that of the darker areas, meaning that the whole image was then within the sensitivity range of the film, or camera sensor.  A drawback with a graduated filter though is that very few landscapes have straight lines in them, so particularly in hilly scenes, you’d end up with darker hilltops than valleys, where you had to place the graduation to make the sky darker.  It became a bit of an artform knowing where to place the graduation!  Grad filters are also expensive!

Then digital imaging and digital photography came along…  Being able to computerise an image made it a lot easier to manipulate and make changes to images to help compensate for some of these old camera and film limitations (and in fact ignite a whole creative industry manipulating and changing photos to compensate for many other things, allowing new tools and techniques to be invented, and completely destroying the old truth that the camera never lies!)

HDR is one of the techniques that has been created out of digital photography.  I personally find it an interesting tool that, if used properly, can produce images that better represent what your eyes (amazing optical devices connected to a supercomputer brain that see in HDR – and more! – by default) would have seen, but that the camera is incapable of capturing in a single image.  A photographer will shoot a series of photos of a scene, each with a different exposure (usually increasing or decreasing the shutter speed for each image) so that, within the series, you’ve captured the brightest and darkest parts of the image, as well as everything in between.  These images can then be combined in software to create a single image covering the entire dynamic range / brightness in the scene.

Here are the 4 images that went into making up the Parish Church HDR photo.  You can see that the images on the left have too bright a sky but the trees, grass, bridge and church are perfectly exposed.  The images on the right have shadows that are too dark, but you can see the colour in the sky that made the sunset so lovely.  You can see that, if you could merge all of these photos together, you’d get something nice.  However, I bet you’re looking at these photos and thinking “well they’re pretty average, aren’t they!” and I think you’d be right!  More of that in a minute…

Once you’ve merged the images, the software lets you tweak the final image.  It’s this manipulation that can make or break an HDR photo, and is what makes HDR such a “marmite” technique amongst photographers.  Many people don’t like HDR as so many photos they’ve seen have been over-processed so as to look unrealistic, over saturated and containing ghosts, halos and artefacts that detract from the actual scene.  But then some scenes can benefit from more extreme processing – particularly industrial landscapes.  In terms of the Peebles image, well you can see I had a bit of fun with the processing!

My Coniston sunset and Peebles sunset were my first real experiments in HDR, with the Coniston sunset having the technique applied far more subtly than the Peebles sunset, partly due to the fact the Coniston sunset had far less contrast between light and dark than the Peebles sunset.  In fact, as I found out later, I didn’t need to use HDR in the Coniston sunset as there was enough dynamic range in one photo (it wasn’t too light or too dark) that I could create an almost identical photo without using HDR.  The original is on the left, and the resulting image is on the right.  I could never have done that with the Peebles photo though!

You can see that the Coniston HDR image processing is a lot more natural than with the Peebles photo, although you’re probably still wondering how it’s possible to turn the image on the left into the image on the right!  The answer is, it’s possible to use the software to add a grad filter!  It’s another tool in the toolbox than can compensate for lack of expensive equipment, but you’ve got to have an image with enough light data in it to work with.  In this case, I did!

Now this leads us on nicely to another thorny subject:  Post processing – cheating or not?  Maybe I’ll leave that for another day though! 🙂

I hope you’ve found this interesting, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Read More

20% Off Parish Church of Peebles Sunset

My photo of Sunset over Tweed Bridge and the Old Parish Church of Peebles has gained a lot of attention on the Peebles Bletherers Facebook page over the last few days, after originally being posted almost 2 years ago!  It was one of the first photos I posted in public and is probably the photo I should credit for kickstarting this venture for me!

So many of you have asked to buy this picture, so for 2 weeks only, I’ve discounted all sales of this photo by 20%!     It’s available in all sizes, as a print, on art paper (please specify which paper you’d prefer) or on canvas.

Follow this link for details!  http://www.scott-rae.com/v/photos/discount

Offer ends on 18 October 2015, and does not include postage and packaging.  You’ll see the discount removed once you get to the shopping basket page.

What happens when people actually want to buy your work?!

What happens when people actually want to buy your work?  It might sound like a silly title for an article on a website where I have my work for sale, but the practicalities of actually selling stuff hadn’t really occurred to me when I set up my website.  Obviously I hoped  that the awesome people looking at my website (that’s you! 🙂 ) might like my work enough to want to buy it, but I don’t think I ever really considered that anyone would actually click “buy”!

Only you did!  And at that point I realised that the way I’d set up my website really didn’t work well if you wanted to buy things!  Doh…

For starters, very few of my pictures properly fitted the paper sizes I was offering.  Yes, you all know what an A4 or A3 piece of paper looks like, but that isn’t the shape of the picture as it comes out of my camera, or the shape of the picture I put together.  So that meant that you, the customer, had to crop my photo to fit the paper – not ideal for either of us, particularly if you liked the picture in its entirety!  (I know I did, which is why I took it that way)

Secondly, what exactly was it you wanted to buy?  The website gave you (and me) the option to buy prints on photographic paper at different sizes, and it was really easy to set up and run – ideal!  Only it isn’t if you consider what you’re buying (and what I’m selling) is a piece of art to go on a wall, rather than just a nice photo.  You might want it to be a bit special – I know I do!    So photographic paper might not cut it.

I’ve spent some time recently working with a very patient customer to refine the print sizes, prices and available options, making sure they fit the photos and can accommodate pictures of different proportions.  I’ve worked with my suppliers to make sure that the website (and myself) can cope with the changes I’ve made, which means I can now offer a far more personal service, with more appealing print and display options.  This barely scratches the surface of the print and framing options available from each of my suppliers, but I’m working on the basis that simple is best, and if you want something specific, I can probably get it.

The print samples were a real revelation to me – the descriptions don’t do them justice and I’ll try to upload some photos that do!  The fine art papers are fantastic – each with a different character and texture.  I really wanted to see how each of the papers handled the detail and colour in the photos, as logically (you’d think!) detail would be lost in some of the rougher textured papers and colours would perhaps be more subdued.  I was genuinely impressed at how well these papers retained detail – I don’t think anything was lost over normal photographic paper, even on the rougher papers.  The colours were as bright and vibrant as you’d want and expect from a photograph, but because these papers are generally have a matte finish, they almost look like velvet.  I think they’ll look particularly stunning behind glass!

I was really keen to see the metallic paper and I wasn’t disappointed – WOW!  What an amazing effect it has on the pictures!  Whilst it is a smooth, glossy photographic paper, the metallic base adds a real depth to the image.  I’ve seen that written before and never really understood what was meant by that, but in this case, the image almost took on a 3D quality.  I think would be particularly well suited to some of the abstract or detailed work and particularly infrared, where it’s as if you’ve printed the photo on silver paper.   However it does still have a stunning effect on normal landscapes!

I’ll hopefully add a canvas to my sample pack in the next month or so, but given the price, I want to make sure it’s something I want to hang up on my wall and I can kill 2 birds with one stone! 🙂

I’ve also given the site a bit of a refresh.  A friend pointed out to me that, for a photography site, I wasn’t showing an awful lot of photography on the front page!  So I’ve fixed that 🙂  Hopefully you like the changes, but as always, I’m happy to receive feedback, particularly if something doesn’t work for you.  I’ll be changing some of the images over the next few days and add some new photos I’ve taken over the last few months.

OS Map Photo Comp Winner!

2/6/2015

I’m chuffed to bits – I’m an OS Map Photo Comp Winner!  2 of my photos have been selected as covers for the new Ordnance Survey 1:25000 scale OS maps of Peebles & Innerleithen (OS Explorer 337) and Launceston & Holsworthy (OS Explorer 112)!  Click on the links, or head off to the “Peebles and the Scottish Borders” gallery, or the “South West” gallery to find them!

Photos on display in Cross Keys, Peebles

20/7/2014 

I’m a commissioned artist!  Or so say the Peeblesshire News anyway!  JD Wetherspoons, the new owners of the Cross Keys Hotel in Peebles, contacted me a few weeks ago looking for some new work to display in the refurbished hotel after finding my work online.  Well I jumped at the chance!  It’s not every day that a large UK company takes notice of something you’ve done and it means my work finally gets an audience (outside of the website anyway!)  So if you want to know what my photos look like in the flesh, pop along to the Cross Keys, Nothgate, Peebles for a look!

I’ve created a gallery of the work that’s on display in the hotel – you can find it here!

The Cross Keys Gallery Page

Website updated

I’ve added a load of new photos to the site, particularly to “the World” gallery – I hope you enjoy them!

The week I nearly quit photography

Just over a year ago, I nearly quit photography.  It sounds dramatic really and at the time it was surprisingly unsettling, however I’d come to a crossroad in my photography – as I have done with many other things –  and reached one of those points where you are forced to either properly commit to something, or just let it go.

Oddly enough, this mini crisis came about because of my increasing interest in Infrared photography!  In a combination of idle curiosity and a wish to try something different, I had been dabbling with IR for a few years, using filters with my Nikon D90, requiring long exposures of around 30 seconds to get an image I could then work with.  After starting out with a cheap old scratched and battered slide-in Cokin IR filter that let light in all around the edges and caused massive hotspots (which made most of the images unusable), I was finally starting to get really quite pleasing results after upgrading my filter to a screw-in Hoya R72 IR filter.  However it was still a bit of a  hit and miss process.  It took a long time to set up the camera, a long time to take the image and then a long time to process an image, all for a result that, whilst still pleasing, didn’t really seem to resemble the infrared images I’d seen in books and online!  but my interest was piqued!  I was doing something different – something few people did!  I researched and refined my techniques and improved the resulting images, but finally started to feel that my equipment was holding me back if I was to continue.  It was time to consider getting a dedicated Infrared camera.

The most desirable option for me was to convert my current Nikon D90.  The problem is that, once converted, the camera can no longer take normal colour images.  So, if I wanted to take normal photos, I’d need to buy a new camera to replace the D90.   Hmm… OK, this is potentially turning into a bit of an investment!  Therein lies the problem….

I’ve been taking photos for over 20 years, and been taking digital images since 2003.  I’ve got over 100,000 (yes, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND) photos on my PC that I’ve taken since 2003.  Up till last year, in all that time, the only person that had really seen them was me.  Most of the photos were rubbish, some of them were ok, the occasional one was maybe, grudgingly, good.  Even if 1 in 50 photos were ok, that’s 2000 photos that were probably worth spending a little time and effort on to see if if could make something of them.  And I did!  I processed some of them and they looked OK!  and yet I still left them to gather virtual dust on my hard drive, because I had no faith in my ability as a photographer.  So what was the point?

What was the point?

Why spend a fortune on a new camera, and another to irreversibly convert my old one, if I was going to do nothing with the resulting images?  I’d already invested a HUGE amount of time, money and effort in my hobby, and had nothing to show for it!

What was the point in investing?  It would be a waste.  If all I wanted to do was take snaps and capture personal memories but do nothing with them, then I might as well sell my kit and use my little compact camera.  There would be no point upgrading unless I actually tried to do something with my photos.  At least show people!  Publish them to the web!  Have a little faith in myself!  But I clearly didn’t.  As with many things.  A week isn’t a long time really to hum and haw about whether to quit a hobby or properly commit to it (and I’m talking about a hobby for god’s sake – it’s certainly not life and death!) but my hobby was important to me and as someone who tends to over-think, to ask such fundamental questions about something I considered a core part of me was really quite unsettling.  what was I so scared of?

I like to think that sense won out, and it was a conscious decision.  I’m so pleased I did publish my work for people to see, and Flickr has been a particularly useful and positive tool!  I’ve had so many positive comments and it’s helped me look critically at my work, as well as compare it against others.  It doesn’t stack up too badly I don’t think!

Ooooo a nice new website redesign!

So the more observant amongst you will have noticed that my site has changed a lot in the last week.  The original site, created in November 2013, was built to get me up and running and really nothing more, but now it’s time to build the site that I want to properly represent me and my work!  I’d really like to know what you think about the redesign.

The major elements of the site are the Home Page, Info Pages, the Galleries and the Store:

• The Homepage is now dominated by a sliding image menu, which links through to an information page about each gallery
• As well as linking to the Gallery pages, The Info Pages give a brief overview of each gallery, such as locations, maps, descriptions, techniques I’ve used and my driver for each gallery
• The Galleries contain slideshows of all of the pictures, which can be clicked on and bought through the Store
• The Store again contains a smaller sliding image menu, that opens a gallery for each of the categories below.  Again, all of the pictures can be bought.

The main aim of the redesign is to make the site more dynamic, more colourful and let you see big pictures, rather than the tiny thumbnails of the old site – it should scream photography!

I hope you like the changes!  Let me know if there is something you really like, or something that you hate or can’t figure out.  I’m still experimenting in a few areas, so what works one way on one part of the site may work differently elsewhere – please be patient, but also tell me which way you prefer it to work!

Thanks!

Scott

Hello World!

Hi, and welcome to my new website and to my blog!  They are both still a work in progress, but I’ve got to start somewhere, so please keep coming back as the site will be changing over the next few weeks.  I’ll also be adding new images to the site as I go along.

I guess the closest think I got to a new year’s resolution in 2013 was to finally do something with my photos, rather than have them gather virtual dust on my computer.  In fact, my resolution went along the lines of “either do something with your photos or give up photography altogether, cos otherwise you’re wasting your time, effort and money carrying on!”  so here we are…

I’d like to thank everyone who helped me get to this point – friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers!  without your advice and encouragement, I would never have had the confidence in myself to even try this!