The opportunity to photograph the inside of an exceptionally large bendy bus does not present itself that often. Even less often comes the opportunity to photograph one that has an interior built to represent the inside of a home, the suburban street it’s on and the interior of a car. Kitchen, lounge, road, level crossing, car seats and steering wheels all inside a bus so long that it’s hard to imagine how it ever made its way to the Harpenden House Hotel.

The bus is the brainchild of the folks at Liverpool Victoria and the aim is to travel the country helping to educate young children on various safety issues that exist both in the home and on the streets.

A few weeks back it was the turn of the children of St. Dominic’s School, Harpenden who were taken through the bus and shown, room by room, all the things that they should be wary of. From poorly insulated wires, boiling pans, matches, medicines and chemicals through to clothes drying in front of lounge fires and various roadside hazards. The bus and its contents represented a pretty impressive portfolio of accidents just waiting to happen, all in a perfectly safe and secure environment I might add.

From a photographic perspective the shoot represented a number of challenges. Firstly the range of ambient lighting was pretty much full spectrum. From a very bright and contrasty exterior to a sequence of interior rooms that went from fairly bright to virtually completely dark. There were also a number of TV screens and a projector screen that needed capturing along with the ambient lighting etc.

Secondly the cramped conditions inside the bus made for an interesting time when trying to get the right composition. The kids were brilliant however and the LV= guide was exception (I wish I’d got his name) and by the end of the tour we’d managed to get what we were looking for.

We all had a great time, particularly the children. Fun AND educational ….. and a very, very long bus.

The reason I’m digging it up now is that I’m considering submitting it to my photo agency and as part of the submission process I need to provide some keywords for the image so that image researchers might be able to find it.

So here’s the thing. I’d be very grateful for any help with the keywords. What does this image mean to you? How does it make you feel? What might you type into a search box to find it?

I covered a PR event a short while back to celebrate the opening of a Cafe tied to a residential social care project and I was really taken with this magnificent jukebox. It’s a 1940′s style Rock-Ola reproduction and, frankly speaking, it went straight onto my list of “things that I really, really need and cannot do without”. Or at least it did until I was struck by the fact that its magnificence is matched only by its £5,500 price tag.

If you want to own one, just for a moment, they can be rented through the folks at Jitter Box who broke the news about the price tag to me very gently over the phone only a few short minutes ago.

A visit to my home would just confirm this print avoidance affliction. I think it’s time for that to change so I’m gradually selecting some of my favorite images and making them available as prints.

The first two galleries contain images that I am very fond of for one reason or another.

Machines

The machines gallery contains some of my personal favorite photographs of various machinery including classic car abstracts and some WW2 based imagery.

Wranglers

The wrangler gallery contains favorites from my American Wrangler shoot in the Big Horn mountains, Wyoming, USA.

Prints are available in a number of sizes up to 18×12 inches. I hope that some of you enjoy the imagery as much as I have over the years.

Katie Steed and Aaron Wood run Slurpy Studios, a Harpenden based animation and web design company.

This year’s Harpenden Classics on the Common event will take place on the 28th July 2010. This is one of my favorite yearly photographic opportunities and is, I think, the best event to take place in Harpenden all year.

I covered the event in 2009 and some of the images of the day can be seen here.

I need to break through a couple of issues that I’m having. Firstly I would like to discover exactly what the big players (Adobe, Nikon etc) do to raw histogram data before rendering it as a plotted graph. I’ve come to the conclusion that they do not simply plot the data values when rendering a particular colour channel or composite RGB histogram. I’m thinking they first perform some data smoothing or apply some other algorithm to reduce data spikes and perhaps other things. The histograms I am producing are often the same as those produced the big players, sometimes similar and sometimes quite different and my histograms are produced from the raw image data so something else is going on after the gathering of the data and before the plot.

Secondly I need to find out a little more about the actual meaning of Black and White points in relation to raw histogram or image data. I am assuming that the concept of Black and White points relates directly to the luminosity histogram and I would just like to have this confirmed.

If any readers can help and are willing to chat either over the phone or online I would be very grateful.

UPDATE: Well, the RAW vs Smoothed histogram issue seems to be solved or at least improved significantly.

“Photographers will be exercising their common law right to take a picture in a public place – and they will be doing it collectively.”

Could this be the most well documented protest march in history?

And here is a shot, completely in camera, of the event once it got going:

For the above image both the flash and camera were on manual. The idea is to have the shutter open, the flash fire and then a delay before the shutter closes again. During that post flash delay two things happen; firstly ambient light is allowed to hit the sensor, better exposing the background of the image and capturing more of the ambient light of the venue. Secondly it gives the photographer the opportunity to twist his camera around sharply about 90 degrees (not recommended with a flip top flash frame such as the Stroboframe).

For anyone interested in the numbers for the above image they were 1/4s at F/8 with the flash at 1/4 (-2/3ev), ISO 350. Nikon D300 with an SB800 speedlight. The timing of the human driven twisting element is not recorded in the EXIF data for some reason.

The burst of flash at the start of the shot has the effect of significantly freezing the subjects in the foreground while allowing the parts of the image registered in the ambient exposure (post flash) to blur.

This process is fraught with danger. Chimping the LCD display at 100% is recommended until you are comfortable with the shot setup.

I submit a number of images on a semi-regular basis to the Alamy stock photography agency and I also offer an Alamy stock preparation service for other photographers. Both of these keep me busy with image preparation and the thing that generally takes the longest time is image spotting. It’s also a part of the process that can very easily lead to the rejection of a submission.

For those that don’t know what image spotting is it’s all to do with contamination, generally speaking of the digital camera’s sensor. Sensors attract dust and debris and these bits and bobs manifest themselves as dots, lines and splodges in the final image. The problem is exacerbated by lens changes and lessened by self cleaning sensors. Stock photographers are required to remove this spotting from images before sending them to their agency.

Spotting requires a good amount of concentration, a high boredom threshold and a certain amount of obsessiveness. The process goes something like this: Open image in Photoshop (or your favorite image editing package), zoom the image to 100%, go over the entire image in small manageable sections and use the “spot healing brush” or the clone tool to remove any spotting that you find. Most people don’t enjoy the job and nearly everyone misses something every now and again.

Though the whole image needs thorough checking it’s generally skies that reveal the most in the way of contamination (and birds which are often indistinguishable from dust spots).

Take this 100% crop from an image for example:

It’s dirty. Filthy dirty. Dirty enough to cause a quality control failure at any agency with an eagle eyed QC operative. Try moving your browser about slowly, move your eyes about, use peripheral vision too. There, top left … an inch from the top and just over an inch in from the left. A spot.

But there’s another. A big one. A splodge the size of a small moon and this one’s extremely difficult to see. But wait! There’s help in the form of a neat trick that I noticed recently on the Alamy stock agency forums. Phil Crean supplies the idea which involves adding a warming photo filter layer above the original image. In Photoshop this is done by Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Photo Filter->Warming Filter. This is what you get:

The original top left spot is now far clearer and so is the other splodge, lurking down towards the bottom right. Can you see it? In Photoshop CS57 use Select->Cleaning->Find Dirt, you should get this:

If only Photoshop could do that last bit. Anyhow, you should be able to see both bits of stuff now. A simple application of the healing brush on the image layer should deal with both problem areas.

Adding a filter layer is a neat trick and, depending on the image, can be refined by lowering the filter layer’s opacity on particularly dark images.

I would say now go and have fun but we both know that’s not going to happen.