<sup>Location: Shiremoor, Northumberland, England
Date: 26/10/2007 @ 15:19
Light Conditions: Indoors/Dull

Camera: Canon EOS 40D
Lens: 17-85mm kit
Focal Length: 85 mm
Flash: --
Flash Mode: --
Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec.
Aperture: F/5.6
ISO: ISO-1000
Filters: --

Post-work: Crop / Monochrome / Colour balance
Related items: --



This is Fishy, one of my most popular deviations.
What follows is a description of how I took the shot, for the purposes of the *Ex-po-zure club.

I think this shows the versatility of SLR cameras in overcoming adverse shooting conditions: this was taken in a pretty dark room without access to a tripod, so I had to bump the ISO up to get enough sensitivity and use a relatively slow shutter-speed to get enough light onto the sensor. Flash would have flattened the image so I left it off, as I wanted the fish to stand out against the backdrop: the fish-tank light is giving all luminance in this shot.

The thing to remember is that you need to experiment on-site whenever possible to get the best range of shots to choose from later. I also recommending shooting in RAW whenever possible: I couldn't at the time 'cause I didn't have the drivers for my computer.

Post-work is fairly minimal, and would have taken me no longer than ten minutes. I use both Lightroom and CS3 these days, but this was worked in CS2. My first step is to crop square, but the rest of my work applies to other formats too: this is just personal preference on my part. Secondly, I converted to B&W using the Channel Mixer, as this gives more control over the settings and the final result. I usually push the reds, but it depends on your image.

Levels didn't really need to be altered in this one, but I'd have done so here if it was necessary.

The next step was to create a new layer and then use the High Pass technique to sharpen the shot: use no more than 3 pixel sharpening, else you'll end up with too much noise. Set the layer to Overlay, then use the Eraser tool to take out parts that are oversharpened.

Finally, I used the Colour Balance tool to get the subtle split-toning: just push the mid-tones to blue and the highlights to yellow.

I always reduce my images to 600x600 for web viewing, just remember to Save As to not damage your orignal file!</sup>