This photoblog is run by Nick Prior. In this photoblog I'm aiming to present pictures loosely based on the architecture in the city of Manchester. The city centre is booming right now and there are some fantastic new buildings going up as well as some imposing Victorian and Edwardian piles.

I am happy for you to leave any sort of comment, critical as well as fulsome praise! Tell me how my photographs make you feel, complain about the composition, sneer at the focus - it's all good!

 

I have a variety of 35mm film cameras but most of the shots in here were taken with a Canon 350d and a range of different lenses. These include 10-22mm EFS, 24-105mm f4L, 70-200mm f4L and a 50mm f1.8 prime.

Occasionally I'll post a picture taken with my Bronica SQA medium format camera with either 50mm, 80mm or 150mm lenses, and for a real treat, sometimes I'll post the results of my various pinhole cameras!

But really, the kit doesn't matter, does it? It's the picture that counts.

How I process pictures for Shutterchance:
I use a Canon 350D mostly for these pictures and capture images in RAW format. Then I process the RAW images with Rawshooter Essentials, and I make mostly the same changes each time:

I set:

Appearance: Outdoor strong (or indoor medium in inside)
Shadow contrast: set to between 80 and 100
Highlight contrast: set to between 0 and 20
Saturation: sometimes increase this slightly
Sharpness and detail extraction: set to 25
Noise suppression: sometimes set to 30

Then I look at the Exposure compensation and adjust that if I think it needs it.

Usually I'll have forgotten which colour temperature I've got set in the camera so I adjust the Color Temp setting as well.

Then I save as a JPEG full size.

I resize for Shutterchance with IrfanView and set the height to 1000.

Then I upload and select sharpening on the upload.

So there you go. No Photoshop magic I'm afraid, but it works for me.

 

All photographs in this photoblog are copyright Nick Prior. If you wish to discuss using or purchasing a licence to use any of these images, please drop me a line with the contact form.