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Photography - creative & technical

This web site was originally (2005) about both creative and technical aspects of photography. Since then it has diversified into several other fields, so I have developed a new home page (Feb 2019). The rest of this page is about the original subject.

This site may be of interest to anyone with a camera. Find out how to take interesting photos of all kinds of things.

Have a go at photographing the night sky. It's surprising what simple cameras can reveal, even from our light-polluted towns and cities. There is a real chance you could spot something new - a nova or a comet.

There are more advanced techniques on these pages for those who are already hooked on astrophotography. Measure your images and do some real science.

This site is continually evolving. A principal message is: take a look at what I have managed to photograph using readily available equipment (not vastly expensive) and go out there, try it for yourself and be amazed. Today's cameras make it possible to capture things that only very determined professionals could do a decade or two ago. I provide some pointers in these pages about how to go about it.

GR's Image Processor (GRIP) is free to download from here and will run on just about any computer. It's not limited to Windows and it can do many things that standard digital photo applications cannot.

And if you are a programmer you can find here all the information needed to extend GRIP to do whatever you want. It's a comprehensive starting basis for very creative or highly technical image processing and analysis.

Along the way GRIP has grown into a flexible general-purpose tool that I use in various ways to assist my own photography. Not only is the complete working software of GRIP available in these pages but also its workings are discussed, along with many aspects of digital photography. This is not a commercial venture. I am simply making it available for others to use.

Scientific uses of the software are possible because GRIP includes many facilities for measuring photographs. There is a printable scale for calibrating photographs when they are taken.

GRIP is written in Java. Some will be quite surprised at the idea of processing photographic-sized images with Java. So one aim of this site is to demonstrate that in fact this is very feasible with today's readily available computing power. Only quite ordinary PC's are required. However, these pages delve into certain quirks of the Java programming environment and how they have to be dealt with in order to achieve satisfactory performance.

If you only want to improve your photographic technique, there are pages about that kind of thing too, so please explore from here. See the contents and index pages.

I have been using Canon EOS digital SLR cameras since the beginning of 2001, starting with the 3 megapixel D30. I have traded up 4 times since then so I am now using a 5D MkII. That has over 21 megapixels. One of its RAW images loaded into memory occupies 124 megabytes. I almost always photograph in raw mode and the significance of that is also explained in these pages. I will show how such images can be processed in only a second or two by GRIP running on a typical PC under Windows.

The third-party library jrawio, used by GRIP for reading raw images, is not yet fully working for the 5D MkII camera, so I first have to convert my raw images to TIFF format.

I have received user feedback that GRIP does also work fine under Linux, MacOS and even the latest incarnation of OS/2. It should work on any platform for which Java (Standard Edition) is available.

My talks

I give a talk entitled "Photographing the Night Sky". It is aimed at photographers, so I assume no knowledge of astronomy but a basic familiarity with digital cameras (not necessarily of the SLR type). The talk lasts for 1 to 2 hours, adjustable for the needs of the audience. I cover 3 stages for beginning astrophotography:

1. Camera only on a fixed tripod
2. Camera only on a motorised (equatorial) mount
3. Camera looking through a telescope

Slides & commentary of my astrophotography talk...

Links related to my talk

Star trail calculator

Jupiter moons identifier

Stellarium - free planetarium program

Photo ephemeris - Sun, Moon, twilight details for photographers

APT - AstroPhotography Tool - camera control