This is the fourth and final shot in this small series (the other three are here, here, and here), and is probably my favourite of the four. As you'll see though, if you take a look at the original, my intention to include a sloping horizon didn't quite make it to the final edit :)

There aren't many shots of Finely on the blog as he rarely stays still long enough to be photographed, and when he does he manages to transform himself into the least photogenic child on the planet. On this occasion though, as I'd caught him not long after he got up, he was a bit more chilled :)

If you're interested, I used the techniques discussed in my Portraits: part two and Portraits: part one tutorials to construct this image, the latter of which is currently available as a free subscription. Further details here:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/

On a totally different matter: if you normally view chromasia using the black theme, you may be wondering why it has suddenly gone white. The reason for this is that the style switcher I was using didn't play nicely with Lazy Load, a jQuery plugin I'm now using to manage the content on some of my larger pages.

For example, my thumbnails page which references over 1700 entries, was taking a ridiculously long time to load. Lazy Load gets round this problem by only loading the content that's visible within the browser window (and a user-definable further amount), i.e. anything 'below the fold', or thereabouts, is loaded as and when it's needed. This saves my bandwidth, but also makes a drastic improvement to the speed with which these larger pages are loaded. Take a look at my thumbnails page or gallery pages and you'll see what I mean: they load the images that are immediately visible, as well as those that appear up to 750px below the fold, then wait for you to scroll down the page before loading any more.

Sometimes, the world can seem like an overwhelmingly large place.

In other news: as most of you probably know, clicking on the left side of any image on my blog will take you to the previous entry, while clicking on the right will take you to the next. As this isn't immediately obvious I've added some navigation arrows that appear when you hover over each side of the image: inspired by those on friskypics.com.

This is the third (of four) shots of one of the groyne's at Fleetwood (the first two are here and here), and while it's probably the most understated of the four, I do still like it. And if you read the description/comments on the first one I posted: this is the 'detail shot' that Jason were trying to capture.

This is the third of four images in this small series (the first two are here and here) and is Libby's definite favourite. Initially, I wasn't sure about this one, but it's grown on me. Personally, I still like the first one best, but I'd be interested to hear which you prefer – and why.

I don't think I'll ever tire of photographing this former section of St. Annes pier – it's a wonderful structure. Jason also posted another shot yesterday:

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=280

In other news: I've recoded my templates to make the 'show the original' feature a bit tidier. I've also added the same functionality to the individual pages in my galleries. As best I can tell, it works as it should, but do let me know if you have any problems with. Oh, and my apologies if you're using IE7 or IE6, but IE is such a dog of a browser to code for that I've disabled the feature rather than spend hours trying to write conditional code and CSS to make it work. If you really need to run IE (hint: get Firefox, or Chrome, or any other browser for that matter) then download version 8.

Oh, and I'm also compiling a list of photoblogs that have a 'show the original image' feature that switches one image for another (i.e. I don't mean ones that have the original and processed images both visible at the same time). So far I've come across these ones:

http://movie.leova.com/ (the earliest example I know about)
http://www.escapism-online.com/ (Jason's site)
http://mynicki.net/
http://www.momentaryawe.com/
http://kevoto.com/
http://alangraham.co.uk/

If you know of any others, or are planning on implementing this feature yourself, let me know and I'll update the list.

Update: here are some more blogs that have been drawn to my attention since I posted this entry:

http://www.batailley.net/
http://www.endlessinstant.com/photoblog/
http://www.andreapress.net/
http://dailypicture.v-raven.de/
http://www.butterweck.de/pholog/
http://photoblog.wojciechjarosz.com/

While it's possible to take bad shots of Rhowan, especially when she's not in the mood to be photographed, it's certainly not difficult to take nice ones :)

On a totally different matter: I've switched to using jQuery to switch between my processed and original images, i.e. when you hover your mouse over the link beneath the main image it should fade to the original image rather than just switching it in. I'm fairly sure that it will work in most browser/OS combinations, and have done quite a bit of testing, but if you do have any problems with it please let me know.

This is the third image in my St. Annes sunset series (the first two are here and here) and may well be my favourite of the four.

This one was converted to black and white using the channel mixer (as described in my Black and White: part one tutorial), then toned using the selective color tool (see my Toning Colour Images tutorial).

On a related note, and as you'll see if you read the 'latest news' bit below, you can currently sign up for one of three of our Photoshop tutorials for free. Our Toning Colour Images tutorial is one of these so, if you're interested in finding out a bit more about the toning techniques I use for both my colour and black and white images (e.g. curves, selective color, channel mixer), sign up for that one.

This is the second of four shots of Harmony (here's the first) all of which were taken with my new Panasonic Lumix GF-1. I did mention that I'd post some further thoughts on the camera when I posted my previous entry, but as I haven't had the chance to use it since then I'll have to delay those comments until I post the third shot in this series (probably early next week). In short though, if you're in the market for a small, high quality camera, I can definitely recommend it.

As for this one: it's not my favourite of the four, but is the one that Harmony likes best, mostly because it made her lips look "shiny and silvery" :-)

This is an alternative take on Jason #1, taken while he was shooting this Pepsi can on Fleetwood beach. And beyond that I guess there's not too much I can tell you about this one. As always though, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

What trip back to the UK would be complete without a shot of a washed-up something or other on Fleetwood beach :-) I'll also be posting another shot of this Pepsi can tomorrow: of Jason taking much the same photograph.

Jason's version of this shot is here:

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=274

In other news: between now and the end of May you can subscribe to one of our Photoshop tutorials for free: either Portraits part one; an introduction to Lab Color mode; or Toning colour images. If you're interested, there's some further information at the top of the following page:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/

This is a shot of George and a happy, but slightly embarrassed-by-all-the-attention Rhowan. George lives in a nearby village, and invited us round to celebrate Gergyovden (St. George's day). This was a great day for us to celebrate too, as it was exactly a year since Libby and the kids first came out to join me in Bulgaria.

Dinner was a whole baby goat (minus it's head) that was cooked in a traditional oven: served with a form of mushroom risotto, salad and Rakia. Well, the Rakia had been a pervasive feature of the entire visit, not just dinner, and by the time we left I'd drunk more than enough to keep me going until the same time next year. All in all, it was a good, if somewhat different way to spend the day :-)

If you're interested, this one was converted to black and white using the Channel Mixer, as described in my Black and White: part one tutorial.

This is the second of four sunset shots, all of which were taken on the 9th April down at St. Annes (the first one is here), and despite the similarities between this and the previous one, it was shot over an hour later, just as the sun was dipping towards the horizon. I'll post the other two over the next week or so.

If you're interested Jason's second shot of the same sunset is here …

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=267

… and he's also blogged a shot of me on the pier and some thoughts on how the training went here:

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=269

One of the things I stress when I'm teaching photography is that you should always consider the point-of-view from which you shoot, as an unusual angle or perspective can often make the difference between a mediocre shot and a great one. As such I had Jason spend quite a bit of time crawling around the beach looking for things to shoot during his recent one-to-one training. I can't quite remember what he was shooting at this point – it may have been a Pepsi can, a shot of which I'll blog next week – but, whatever it was, I thought I'd take a few pictures of him while he covered himself in sand.

As you can see though, if you take a look at the original, I didn't get it quite right: the depth of field was too large. This was a silly mistake – I should have been shooting at around f/2.8 – but grabbed the shot without giving it much thought.

Anyway, I took a look at this one not long after I got back from the UK and decided not to work on it: it was just too messy. A couple of days ago though I was looking at a Photoshop plugin review site. One of the featured plugins was Alien Skin's Bokeh. I'm not usually a big fan of plugins, especially those that simply replicate functionality that is already available in Photoshop, but Bokeh allows you to do something that's almost impossible to do in Photoshop alone: i.e. it allows you to decrease the apparent depth of field without introducing any obvious processing artefacts (most noticeably halos around the in-focus elements).

I'll post a more detailed review at some point, as I suspect that this is definitely a plugin I'll use again, but for the time being I'd definitely suggest downloading the demo version and trying it out for yourself.

I still have another nine shots to post from my recent shoot with Jason, but took some images of Harmony recently that I'm going to post too. There are four shots in total, and I'll post two of them this week, and two next week. Of the four, this is probably the 'darkest' of the set, and one of my favourites, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you which I liked best.

And before any of you ring ChildLine, I should explain that even though it looks like Harmony has been imprisoned is some sort of chicken-wire enclosure, she was actually playing in a pen we have for our rabbits. And, despite her expression in this one, she was having fun :)

If you've already checked out the EXIF data for this one you may have noticed that it was shot with a new camera: the Panasonic Lumix GF-1 and 20mm f/1.7 ASPH lens. I got this on my recent trip to Dubai, and while I haven't had the chance to use it much yet, I'm seriously impressed with it so far: both in terms of IQ and speed of operation. I'll post a more detailed review soon.

I'd also like to mention that our latest tutorial went live at the end of last week. It was co-written with Tony Kuyper, and provides a detailed discussion of luminosity masking. It is a fairly advanced technique, and takes a bit of practice to get right, but once you get the hang of it you'll find that it's an extremely powerful method of creating masks to selectively alter different areas of tonal range within your images.

If you're interested, there's some more information here:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/lm1_info.php

Finally, our 17th Mini-PSD was published earlier this morning: a shot of Rhowan and Harmony running down the slipway towards Blackpool's North Pier. Again, if you're interested there's some further information here:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/mini_psds.php

As I mentioned when I posted this shot, one of the things that Jason wanted to cover during his recent one-to-one training was 'seeing creatively'. As an exercise, we took four different shots of one of the groynes on Fleetwood beach. In my first shot it was used as a frame, while in this one it was used as a backdrop. Of the other two shots, one uses the groyne as a leading line, while the other focusses on some of the small scale detail in the wood.

As an exercise, especially if you find a subject a bit overwhelming at first, breaking a shot down in this way really helps to focus your attention: just list the various ways in which a particular element could appear within a shot, and then shoot them all. Some will work better than others, but the more you practice the easier it gets: in terms of thinking about which shots to take, and in finding ones that will produce the most interesting results.