In August I was commissioned to take some images for a ceiling company (http://www.stretchceilings.co.uk) at the new South Cheshire College. The images were for promotional use of their installation in one of the main sectors of the building.

The new campus at South Cheshire has been thought out very well, the relationship between the architecture and its function is entwined which makes the building quite unique. I also had a browse around the old campus which was very outdated so the change must have been coming for many years. I read somewhere the building cost £73 million, I hope they produce some excellent graduates for this!

Down to the photography, I used a nice Canon 17mm tilt shift lens for most the images to include the environment in the images of the ceiling. Down below are a few shots from the shoot which will be added to the portfolio accordingly which can be found http://www.jamieknop.com/portfolio/architecturalphotography.php.

OK, so if you don’t know you can change the white balance of your images in camera raw in Photoshop, that is of course if you shot in raw in the first place.

So those of you who don’t care about getting it right in camera and prefer that method is fine, but if you don’t shoot raw your going to have to get it right in camera in the first place.

So what are the white balance settings you have to choose from?

* Auto (automatically configures the white balance)

* Daylight (white balance for a fairly sunny day)

* Shade (white balance for shady areas)

* Cloudy (white balance for them cloudy days)

* Tungsten Light (white balance for shooting under a tungsten light, normally them orange/yellow lights in your house)

* White Fluorescent Light (white balance for white light, you know them thin tubes you can smash over your mates head an not hurt them? Its them!)

* Flash (white balance for when using flash)

* Custom (white balance for when you want to set your custom white balance image with a white/gray card)

* Color Temp (white balance for setting your own color temperature)

So that is when you should use the various settings.

I have created a set of images so you can see the different effects the different white balance settings will have on a normal image in ordinary day light.

Auto white balance

Daylight White Balance

Shade White Balance

Cloudy White Balance

Tungsten White Balance

White Fluorescent White Balance

Flash White Balance

Custom White Balance

Color Temp White Balance

With all these examples what do you think is true white?

White is a highly reflective color so the true color can be deceiving.

Looking at the images, auto white balance looks most accurate but realistically the custom white balance is because of the reflections of the sun going into the white. Which out of the custom white balances looks most accurate? They both look pretty dam close to me, so no need to be arguing if we should use a white card to take the custom white balance or a 18% gray card.

I hope this helped some of you to understand white balance a little better and the effects it can have on our images, for instance having the tungsten white balance setting on when no tungsten light is actually effecting the image the image will turn out blue as this is the color the camera adds to the image to “even out” the tones.

I have just purchased an iMac 24 after much thought. With being a Windows XP fan for many years I have stuck with XP even with the new releases of Windows operating systems such as Vista and 7 but neither of them appealed to me once played around with.

XP seemed to be getting old now, and with being a photographer and web designer I thought its about time I took the leap into the MAC world.

Well so far I am glad I have, the monitor is like nothing you can imagine. Sleek, sexy and bright. The OS it self is so much more efficient than Windows, in the manner that files are controlled and applications are installed. Multi-tasking with applications is made quick and simple.

I am yet to set up the time machine as I have not added my external HD but I am excited about this feature also.

To anyone thinking of making the change from Windows to Mac I would certainly recommend it if you use your PC for powerful applications.

Aside from my freelancing I have now got a job at a local photography studio in Chester named Digital Exposure. At the studio it is all mainly product photography but things get get mixed up from time to time! They produce excellent work and are based an industrial estate in Saltney, Chester.

So if you have a few minutes go check them out here www.digitalexposure.co.uk

Its that time of year again, yet its no longer fun as you get older and older!

How old? I will let you guess that!

Hopefully going for a shoot up a rather tall mountain over the next few days, lets pray for nice weather over the Cheshire sky line!

Hello! Things are busy at the moment with many projects taking place. With the sun shining the light in and around Chester is great.

The gallery will be updated shortly I hope as I am having some difficulty making the gallery W3C compliant (third party code).

Enjoy the sun while it lasts people!

Some changes have been made to the website to make it clearer and easy to modify. I felt the latter was not so consistent in where information was being given. Blog has also been integrated.

New services page mentioning information about architectural photography, product photography, event photography and portrait photography and promoting Chester photography.

Hopefully everything is in good order but if you do manage to spot anything out of place please inform myself, thank you!

Just posting a quick update, some of my work will be in an Exhibition at Kingsway Campus in June, date to be confirmed which I will update in due course.

I will have 3 architectural pieces on display, showing the modern city scape of our society.

To show a comparison in digital vs large format photography I have conducted a basic review of each.

The digital image was captured with a Canon 40D camera and the large format image was taken with 4×5 transparency film on a ShenHao camera. The film was scanned at 2400 dpi on an Epson 4990 flatbed scanner.

Adjustments were made to the perspective of the digital image to match the correct perspective. Why? As this is how the image would be used for its proper architectural purposes.

Below are the two full images, the first being the digital image and the second the large format. The image is not of much importance just a church in the city of Chester.

Digital image file

Large Format image file

Colour difference is unimportant for this test as we are looking at the quality of each of the respective images.

Below are two crops of the images at 100% with the digital image being scaled to the same width as the large format image using the Photoshop image size > Bicubic Smoother tool.

Digital 100%

Large Format 100%

From these two crops you can see a clear difference in the amount of detail and sharpness. At 100% the digital image is clearly unusable whereas the large format file is perfect to printing at sizes of up to 50″ x 40″.

So which format you use will depend on a number of factors, for what is the use and what is the subject. If the image is for web purposes for printing at not bigger than 10″ x 8″ then digital is perfectly fine, but for bigger print sizes the use of a large format camera is required to obtain detail and sharpness. Also as the subject here is architecture the use of a large format camera is desirable for the camera movements but more about this in a later post.

At a later date another basic review shall be conducted comparing the image of a full sensor Canon 5D mark II to a 4×5 large format image.

Everything went smoothly with the exhibition. Not only was there fine art but also fine food!

Thank you everyone that payed a visit.