Welcome

I am Rod Wynne-Powell, and this is my way to pass on snippets either of a technical nature, or related to what I am currently doing or hope to be doing in the near future.

A third-person description follows:
Professional photographer, Lightroom and Photoshop Workflow trainer, Consultant, digital image retoucher, author, and tech-editor for Martin Evening's many 'Photoshop for Photographers' books.

For over twenty years, Rod has had a client list of large and small companies, which reads like the ‘who’s who’ of the imaging, advertising and software industries. He has a background in Commercial/Industrial Photography, was Sales Manager for a leading London-based colour laboratory and has trained many digital photographers on a one-to-one basis, in the UK and Europe.
Still a pre-release tester for Adobe in the US, for Photoshop, he is also very much involved in the taking of a wide range of photographs, as can be seen in the galleries.

See his broad range of training and creative services, available NOW. Take advantage of them and ensure an unfair advantage over your competitors…


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Tuesday 29 April 2014

Following on, the Gardens at the Discovery Centre

After taking in the exhibition, Colin and I  had coffee and cakes before we parted company and I took a look around the gardens to see what I could capture, and the gallery of pictures is the result.

The refurbished Victorian Greenhouses are nearing completion, and the small conservatory was being worked upon.

It was just a shame that there was no sunshine, but it seemed a waste not to stay that bit longer whilst I was on site. On this occasion I did not visit the long Greenhouse against the wall.

Visions of the Universe

This exhibition, on display in the aptly named Stockwood Discovery Centre till the 8th of June shows some amazing images from a variety of sources that add to our knowledge and understanding of our place in the vast wilderness of Space; although many of the images are obtained from sources other than by photography in the accepted form, they are beautiful art in their own right. Many have been created in false colour to differentiate what they show, but despite this scientific basis they can also be judged by their pure aesthetics.

When you see some of the drawings of earlier scientists obtained laboriously over often many days with comparatively crude equipment by today’s standards, you cannot fail to be amazed by their tenacity, patience and artistic skill to which they apply their intellect. There are examples of sketches that were made set beside today’s technology-created imagery and you can only marvel at the accuracy they achieved.

I visited with fellow photographer Colin Bowles, and both of us were reading items out and recounting our own recollections of when some of the more recent discoveries were made and where we were at the time. I hope the schools make every effort to bring students to view what is displayed here, so they can better appreciate what we now know of the Universe in which the Earth, the planet we inhabit, is a mere speck of cosmic dust.

Tuesday 22 April 2014

College Lake – Greylag and Lapwings

Armed with my 100-400mm lens a short visit to College lake near Bulbourne seemed like a reasonable choice to make. Due to the excessive rains this year the pathway beyond the octagonal hide was flooded, so I took a chance that the hide might just allow me to get some shots.

The first to come my way were a pair of swooping Lapwings, and as I watched I began to get some idea of what was happening, as it seemed as if it was often the female who landed on the spit just beyond the hide and who was then dive-bombed by the male, but this was only supposition my part as I am not a clued-up bird watcher.

I decided I would try to capture what I took to be their mating ritual as the female would display on the ground, than as the male swooped she would squat lower as if in submission, and then they would fly off together for a while before she would land again and seem to repeat the action. I may have misinterpreted it all as the pair flew again together for a while before they went their separate ways and the female flew to an islet and started drinking casually as if she were no longer interested.

The greylag geese which interrupted these goings on announced their departure in typically raucous hooting and I managed to get a reasonable grouping of three in flight, as well as an earlier singleton landing on the water. In the milky sunshine, another pair made interesting reflections on the water as flew by.

Monday 21 April 2014

Easter Sunday, Stockwood Country Fair

The Discovery Centre in Luton hosted their Country Fair on Easter Sunday, and my daughter had mentioned that there was a very interesting character, Ray Smith demonstrating the craft of making a straw beehive, known as a skep. However, for some reason, he did not appear, but I met some of his colleagues and got chatting and was shown some modern wooden ones that could be built from flat packs of wood, and I learned a bit about how they were constructed and why.

I also took a quick trip around the gardens to see how they were growing and watched a flying display of a vulture and owl, but because my intention had been to photograph a craftsman at work and possibly any flowers or plants of interest, I had left my 100-400mm lens behind, and really the 24-105mm was less than ideal to make the most of the aerial display!

I rounded off my trip by a very cursory glance at the exhibition of the Visions of the Universe exhibition, but I will visit that at a later date, when it is less crowded, but it will be well worth a visit as the images and their stories are fantastic.

Friday 18 April 2014

Update – Been Busy with WORK!

It must have been obvious to any regular visitor to this blog that there has been little activity here, but I have been far from quiet; truth be told I have been busier than for a long while. Sadly, this has meant many normally highly important activities have had to be curtailed. Also irritatingly over the last ten days I have been plagued with intermittent connection to Broadband, coupled with numerous visits from Openreach engineers as they struggle to find the cause which broke my concentration at critical times and caused work to come to a crawl.

On the retouching job for a fellow photographer I was working on, one composite image that after some forty odd layers was flattened three more times before adding between ten and twenty further layers to those threw up an interesting dialogue box when saving.

A way through the first stage when saving to TIFF, I received an alert that read: "… some TIFF Readers may not be able to handle files that exceed 2GB, would you like to continue or save to another format?" – the last time I had worked on files that large was a few years back whilst creating a montage that can be seen covering the entire length of the corridor at the charity Refuge, where the ten overlapping images I was working upon, all individually exceeded 7GB, the largest being 8.67GB! Oh, and they were only black-and-white – this job was in full colour at 16-bit.

No sooner had I completed the second part of that job than I was packing for a trip to the coast in Sussex for a spell setting up another photographer to help with his Lightroom catalogues and associated images and setting up his Time Capsule.

Just before finishing the big retouch, I learned of the LaCie Fuel with its 2TB of wireless disc to expand on the memory available to my iPad. On my return it had arrived but I had to collect it from the courier's depot. I had hoped it might be really simple to work, but I am still hard at it trying to get my head around it, but it promises to be an excellent way to have a large body of work to show clients on the iPad.
I just wish LaCie had put as much effort into taking the user through the various steps to set it up as they obviously spent on their promotional videos and the packaging. The packaging is a work of art, and is exceedingly well produced, but it's the box it comes in for heaven's sake, I would rather they provided a soft case for it to travel in! The box is destined to decorate more lofts than be used to house the device. The Product packaging itself is exquisite but there again I would like a user replaceable battery; there's just no pleasing me.