After a previous digital workflow article I was asked if I had experience of a program to save space by finding and removing duplicates on a hard drive. The use of a program like this this being obvious too anyone with multiple Gigabytes of .tif photographs and .mp3's clogging their hard drive. This is an all to common scenario in the modern digital darkroom.

Banksy In Toytown

I have been experimenting with altering depth of field digitally in order to create the appearence of a large format Tilt & Shift camera image without actually using one. The experiment was triggered by seeing arial pictures by Olivo Barbieri over Shanghai and some arial pinhole camera photography over construction in Birmingham, UK.

I thought that the effect of a very narrow depth of field on a large object such as a cityscape when viewed from above created the illusion of the objects appearing much smaller than they actually are. Pushing this even further I found that real scenes began to look like artificial models.

Convincing Black And White Digital Photographs

Original Colour Image © David Toyne

Until very recently I didn't really feel there was anything available for the digital photographer that would add that magic to a black and white digital photograph. I already knew from bitter experience that transforming a colour digital photograph into a convincing black and white print is very difficult and can be inconsistant and unconvincing.

I felt the end results could be lacklustre and the process time consuming. Also doing excellent black and white conversion is beyond most peoples abilities. People want to take pictures not program computers. I resigned myself to shooting rolls of black and white film and paying exhobitant sums of money to develop them. This was the situation until I discovered some software called Realgrain.

The Importance Of Being Anal

As I scurry around preparing myself for upcoming photography jobs I thought I'd write this piece of advice.

People often invest a large amount of time and effort on their post-shoot workflow. They do this without giving quite enough consideration to what they're doing whilst they're actually out shooting. Whilst in the day-to-day run of things this isn't always an issue, it's always an idea to plan for times when it might be a problem.