Here’s my timeline - it may help other people who are wondering about doing their bike test… it could easily have been compressed - many people take CBT and three days of DAS on successive days. I like the way I did it because I found each day so exhausting, I didn’t really want to jump straight back on a bike the next day.

The most amazing thing I’ve found is how bikes shrink as you get used to them. The 125 which was a monster at the start of my CBT is now a cute little baby bike.

Anyway… the timeline:

July

17 - The Beginning - Decide to look into the possibility of doing the bike test. ‘Net research etc.

August

14 - Book CBT - over phone
15 - Book theory test - on internet
25 - Complete CBT - 9am-2pm, borrowed bike, helmet, jacket, hi-vis, gloves.

September

6 - Book practical test - the training school have dates set aside by the DSA, so they pencilled me in because a theory pass is required to confirm a test booking.
9 - 125cc Hire - one week, borrowed bike, helmet, jacket, hi-vis, gloves.
15 - Theory Test, Kit Bought - theory test of about one hour, phoned my certificate number through to training school to confirm test, then went to buy kit so I could stop borrowing it. Bought helmet, jacket, gloves, trousers, boots.
20 - DAS Day 1 - 6 hours (inc. breaks) on a 500cc bike. One instructor, two trainees, the other trainee was taking his test the following day, so I essentially ‘went along for the ride’ picking up some experience.
30 - DAS Day 2 - 6 hours (inc. breaks) on a 500cc bike. One to one, honing skills to a high level.

October

7 - DAS Day 3 - 6 hours (inc. breaks) on a 500cc bike. Two trainees, a day 1 and me. I was pretty much ready to test after day 2, so day 3 was confidence building on the bike, a few minor changes to my style.
8 - Test Day - Early start, 1.5 hours confidence building, final questions then the 40-minute test. Pass. Ride home alone without the infernal radio stuck on my ear.

The Future

Soon? - Find a bike.
After a few months - Return to the training school for an observed ride to ensure I haven’t picked up any bad habits.
Later - Advanced training.

Do you know how to learn 64 Chinese characters in a week?

Practice…

I just counted my week’s worth of papers, and there are over 60 sheets of A6 filled with characters and pinyin transliteration.

Ah well… it seems to be working. And they’re not wasted sheets because they’re the backs of sheets which would have gone into the recycling bucket.

10 points to anyone who spots an error!

1. Take a suitable source picture. Good things to look out for are:

• Strong lighting - models will normally be lit by a single room lamp. Strong shadows help the illusion.
• High vantage point - it’s rare that you take a photo from ‘inside’ a model, you’re normally looking down on it.
• Long lens - to compress the perspective.
• Large - make sure the resolution is large enough to work on. My source is 1000 pixels wide.
• Simple - the mind won’t accept it’s a model if there is too much going on, or too much detail.

2. Once you have your image loaded in photoshop, duplicate the layer and add a blur to the top layer. It doesn’t really matter how much right now, it’s only for visualisation. I used about 4 pixel Gaussian blur, I think.

3. Now we start getting complicated. Show the layer mask for the blurred layer and create a gradient blur giving black at the focal point and white at the extremes. This means that the blurred layer will be visible in foreground and background, and the sharp underlying layer will be visible only in a narrow plane.

The results can be seen below:

4. Now we start to really pop the model from its surroundings. Working on the layer mask, use a brush and the alt key to pick up the mask value at the ground level of any vertical objects, and paint over the object with that value. So… the base of the house is in focus - being on our focal plane, so we pick up the mask value (black) and paint it all over the front face of the house. Because the front face is in our focal plane, it should have full detail and not be affected by the gradient of focus.

Similarly, any trees or other tall objects should have the colour at their base picked up and painted over the whole object. The results start to look good:

And your layer mask should look something like this:

5. So far, we’ve only been working on our ‘preview’ blur. Now we’ll do it properly.

Duplicate the first (non blurred) layer and drag the layer mask onto it. Discard the ‘preview blur’ layer. We should now have two identical layers, but the one on top has our crafted layer mask applied to it (with no effect right now).

Now, apply a lens blur, taking the layer mask as the depth map source. That means a high-quality blur will be applied with defocussing matching the mask we have created. The settings might look something like the following, but fiddle around until you get a good effect:

6. Our results are now looking pretty good, but there’s a slight hitch. Any defocussed foreground objects will have sharp edges. See the bush in front of the left side of the house? It has blurred detail but sharp edges:

Simply use the blur tool on such objects until their outlines are pleasingly indistinct:

And we’re done.

Via DIY Photography I found an interesting article about setting up a budget photographic studio. The article covers the basic studio setup from the point of view of the low-budget freelancer, but also goes on to cover some other related topics. An interesting part which stands out is the following:

The idea here is to give you new skills you can add to your résumé, not a bad reputation. So before you attempt handling photography for a real-life project, you should definitely make sure there is enough time and money to pay for the work to be retaken if need be.

How can you tell if you need the skills of a seasoned professional right off-the-bat? Ask one. Here is what our photo pro told us to watch out for:

• Architecture, interiors especially. Resolving mixed light sources is a hell you don’t want to enter.
• Shiny Things. Got a prototype with a curved chrome top? Hire a pro.
• Food photography (and beverages, too). You’ve seen bad menus, where it looks like the account exec decided he’d take the pictures. Food photography is difficult, expensive, and worth every dollar you pay for it.
• People. It’s the most tempting one… let’s save some money on the company web site by going out into the courtyard and taking everybody’s pictures. And, heck, maybe it’s all you need. But if you’re putting those faces in the public eye, don’t you want them to look the best they can? Shooting (and lighting) people is a skill that’s often well worth hiring.

It’s good to have professional backup on my fear healthy respect of people-photography! I know that I will gain the necessary skill… just not for a while.

Well, the clocks changed again, and my server went weird again. I’ve always had problems with Linux and the time due to the number of different places the time is held - usually at least the hardware clock on the computer motherboard and the system clock running within Linux.

Well, I found a page at LinuxSA which finally describes a whole lot of clock-based information in one place. It doesn’t cover NTP, which I use to keep my clock synchronized to the US Navy or whichever other atomic clock my server finds on its travels around the intermagoogle. However, the basics on UTC, timezones and the like are all there.

Oh, and I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of a family friend who refuses to switch his watch from GMT to BST and back every year. Although I’ve only done it to the server, and I picked UTC as the time zone. So posts and comments will appear an hour out for half of the year.

Playing with a bit of post-processing. This is a photo I took in April last year at the Forbidden Corner using my old camera. I’ve run it through a Velvia filter, bumped the contrast and finally had a play with layers - I duplicated the image onto two layers, sharpened one and blurred the other, then blended the two to get a ’soft but properly focussed’ look. It’s better if your lens can get that look on its own, but usually it can’t, so postprocessing is necessary if that’s the look you want.

Anyway… on to the image…

click for big

I was reading a magazine last night, which the ever-lovely and helpful Ned gave me during the Oxford SimonG meet. It contains discussion for professional photographers, and made a very good point which I intuitively knew, but couldn’t put my finger on.

There’s the argument that digital photography allows you to take as many pictures as you like, and keep the best ones. This is obviously the best way to get a lot of good photo output.

Or is it?

The way they put it in the article is paraphrased as follows:

If you take ten different photos of the same scene, you will probably end up with a distracting fire extinguisher in the background of ten photos. If you take only one, the fire extinguisher will probably appear in none.

Use your eyes, use the viewfinder, use your feet, move, compose. Get it right.

The day I took this shot I got up before dawn, drove for 20 minutes, walked about with my camera for about two hours, and came away with one photo. I think it was worth it.

Worth considering.

(Note - fill-flash is another issue to be discussed later!)

For several years now, I’ve been experimenting with flash-free (or available light) photography. You’ll notice the SimonG meet photos are mostly free of the harsh lighting that flash gives. Unfortunately, a compromise must be met, and therefore I use a very fast film speed which introduces a lot of grain.

The disadvantages of flash - especially camera-mounted - are:

• The scene is lit brightly from the front which removes all traces of natural shadows and therefore texture.
• A bright light close to the lens reflects back from the blood-vessels at the back of the eye causing our well-known enemy, red eye
• If the flash is just off-centre from the lens (as is usually the case), you see a harsh shadow of your subject on the wall behind
• Flash glares off reflective objects in a most distracting manner

The photo here shows all these undesirable features.

Another problem with flash is the ‘inverse square’ law of light. Light falls off at an initially great rate as distance increases, and slows at greater distances. Therefore, someone three metres from the flash will receive four times the light of someone just six metres away. The foreground is bright, the background vanishes.

If you examine the Eggheads photo - you’ll see that a flash would have brought the head in the bottom-left into prominence - when in fact, we want that to be missed completely. Kouros (the guy nearest the camera - for those who don’t know him) would be completely washed out, and Rich in the background would have been horribly underexposed.

Natural light doesn’t care about distance. The difference between 93,000,000 miles and 93,000,000 miles plus three metres is pretty insignificant. The only effect we see here due to natural light are the directness with which it hits the scene. The table in the background is more illuminated than I would have liked, but sometimes you just have to take the best shot you can given the circumstances.

With flash, the picture of Sam would have rendered a ’startled bunny’. Without flash, the natural window light, and room lighting are allowed to play on the contours and give a sense of depth.

So… give it a go… turn off your flash. Don’t worry if you badly underexpose your digital shots, they can be brought up in photoshop giving a high-contrast, grainy effect. I still think it’s an improvement over the alternative - flat, featureless lighting and demonic expressions!