Spectacular Fall

Last week my son Tom had gone for a run down the Kent Trails. I say "the" when really there are many trails in the Kent Trails system. Many years ago the trains pretty much stopped running in Michigan at there was no real place to go. The could not cross the straights up north and the only real access to Canada is over in the Detroit and Port Huron areas of the state. So that left a large number of abandoned rails in the state. Many of these have been relegated to walking, running, bicycling and in some part snowmobiling. In the fall they are just spectacular to take in. This year was a very good year as there have not been heavy rains and strong winds which have left the leaves on the trees for most of the fall season.
Anyhow, Tom came back from his run and proclaimed that I must get down and take some pictures of the colors on the trails. By the time I got around that day the sky had clouded over and I thought I had lost to opportunity. The next day I found it had rained overnight but it was a light shower. I packed my ThinkTANK Shapeshifer bag with my 40D, the EF 24-105 f/4 IS and EF 16-35 f/2.8 lenses and my Induro Carbon tripod with the Really Right Stuff BH-40 ball head.
As I entered the trails I knew it was going to be a good day, the colors were absolutely stellar.I came across this cart bridge for a golf course about a mile from our house and the sunlights was filtering through the trees providing such beautiful shadows and colors. The image above is actually an HDR of three images at Ev-1, Ev 0, and Ev +1. The image below is a screen capture of the original images in Lightroom.

Tom has been in Chattanooga TN attending college for the past four years and said they just don't get to see colors like this. I gotta tell you, Michigan might have its problems but God has blessed it with a natural beauty that can't be beat.
That's going to wrap it up for this week so have a great weekend and go out and enjoy the beuty of creation.


Cya... Doug

Special Night

Well, it’s back to work and the start of the fall season. I’ve had a great vacation over the last seven weeks. We visited family a little, went for some rides on the Harley, and did a bunch of work on the basement/studio. Basically kicked back and just enjoyed being home.

This past weekend my sister-in-law and her husband came in from Illinois and she and Evelyn when for a quilting retreat. That left Bill and I to wonder around and take pictures for the weekend. The first plan was to take Saturday and go to Binder Park Zoo in Battle Creek but it rained most of Saturday. It did clear up, but it was a wash for the most part. We did get a bunch of Photoshop/Lightroom talk done though.

Friday night we were able to go to Holland MI and get some really nice images of the lighthouse and the sunset. The sunset was very nice but the lighthouse is what became the main event.


As the sun went down the lights in the lighthouse came alive. Now I'm not talking about the rotating light but the lights in the lighthouse as if someone was home. In the twenty four years I have been in West Michigan, I did not know the lighthouse had illumination within the structure. It is a very nice touch photographically.


The above image is the result of a three shot High Dynamic Range across three stops of exposure. I had not used the new HDR Pro function in CS5 so it was time for a test drive. Initially the combined image is a little flat but that's what the rest of Photoshop is for. Curves will go to great lengths to give the HDR depths and separation.


The moon was an absolute bonus for the night as when we left the house it was very cloudy and we left on a whim that it might be clear at the coast. What we were treated with was just spectacular. I must give full disclosure here in that the moon was in fact above the lighthouse but it was much smaller. I took an image of the moon at 320mm and placed it in the image to give a better relation to the lighthouse. Cheating? Slightly... Not realistic? Very much so, but that is what photography is about. This is what I saw when looking at the lighthouse.


That will wrap it up for me today.


Take care... Doug

The Verdict Please

AFTER

BEFORE

I have blogged about this picture before and you can read the story about City Falls right here. Then why am I going over it again. Well I have had many comments about this image on how it must be an illustration, It doesn't look real, or it's a great HDR.

Yes the after image has been cropped, adjusted in Lightroom, sent to Photoshop for some adjustments and then back to Lightroom. No smoke and mirrors, just basic post production. The before image is the RAW file straight out of the camera.

I said yesterday that they are going to be short this week so that will wrap it up for today.

Take care... Doug


For more information of our photography, visit us at peekfoto.

HDR... Kind-A

It has been a while since I have dabbled into HDR but I do like many of the images that so many produce using the HDR software that is out there. Having my new MacBook Pro with a fresh copy of CS4 on it, I have been exploring the differences trying to bring myself up to speed on CS4.

One of the functions that I heard was improved in CS4 was the Convert to HDR. Not having three physical images shot a stop apart, I did have this image in Lightroom. So after tweaking the original file just a bit I made two virtual copies and set the exposure at one stop below and one above. Exporting the three images to CS4 and let it do its thing. Once complete I set the sponge tool to saturate with a flow of 100% to make some of the colors pop in the background. The vignette was created by a 2500 pixel brush rubbed around the outside of the image in the gray, never touching the image itself.

I know may people use Photomatix for their HDR workflow and produce some really nice images. This is simply demonstrating what you can do with one lonely image. Here is the original image form Lightroom.

Sorry I was in the shadow of the lights from the building but it is not a fine are print or anything like that. Just some fun with the shutter.

Off to class so that will do it for today.

Cya... Doug

HD-R-Not MkII

I just don't know how Kelby and Ziser do it every day. I mean every day a giant posting. Well ok... Scott Kelby has a guest blog Wednesday and that accounts for one day. And I am pretty sure David Ziser talks his way through a posting and has some voice recognition software translate it. I have seen him hunt and peck on his videos so he can't get all that information up all by his lonesome little fingers.

No I am not bitter or upset, I am in awe in there ability to get out vast amounts of information each and every day. Kudos to the both of them. Me on the other hand... I am still here plodding along in the Blogspot world. So that was a little long for missing yesterdays post, sorry.

So picking up where I left off on Tuesday. The how to on the not so real HDR that looks kind of like an HDR but not the wacky too burned HDR image that I had to recreate because I was a bone head by deleting the original psd file (oops, my bad) is here. Brand spanking new!

Wow that was a though flush. I think I feel a little bit of blood oozing out o my ears :)

So here is a little more of the how to on this image. It was five images (must have tri-pod) at 2/3 stop difference in exposure. The layer panel below shows what I started with. Setting the darkest in the stack to the most exposed on the top of the stack. Add a layer mask on all but the bottom layer and fill them with black to block the layer.

Now the fun part. I really mean that as it allows your creative eye to tell the story in the image of what you thought you were actually looking at. You don't realize it at the time but subconsciously you are picking up all the detail in the scene and during this process you relive the experience of the moment you captured the image. (That was borderline Versace in a zen way).

It is even better with a Wacom tabled as the pen pressure maximizes you control. The process it this. Start with a soft brush at 50% opacity on the first layer mask from the bottom of the stack (layer 1 for those that are keeping track). If the first pass is not enough then you hit it again exposing 100% of that layer. If is still not strong enough, move up to the next layer mask and do it again. Eventually you will get the feel of each exposure layer and be abel to go right to a particular layer to draw the shadows out the way you want. If it sucks? Hey... You are on a layer mask, hit it with black and start over! Sweet!!!

That's it, pretty straight forward. A little time spent in layers and masks and you have yourself an HDR knock-off. But the memories give you a greater connection with that moment in time than you will realize.

Take care and let's see if I am here tomorrow?

Cya... Doug 

HD-R-Not

Hey all, I was a bad blogger yesterday, sorry. It was the first day we had been home together with our son for a while and the day just slipped by. A bunch of traveling and some time in Columbus at work so yesterday was a whole lot of nothing. In a good way. We relaxed and had a good day.

Speaking of Columbus, I was able to bring my gear to work with me and was finally able to get out and shoot. It wasn't until the night before I was to head home but it was an interesting time. Suffice it to say it was a wet experience.

There is this little creek that runs through Gahanna Ohio and I headed down there towards the early part of dusk when there was still plenty of light. Leaving the 5D2 and home I had my 40D with a few lenses. This was a good area for ducks so I was shooting the EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS with the 1.4 teleconverter to get a little more reach. That was working a little too good so I stowed the teleconverter. Later as in the image above I used the EF 24-105 f/4L IS lens to do the majority of shooting.

I titled this post HD-R-Not because the image above R-Not an HDR. But it could be. The set up was the same as shooting HDR. Tri-pod with multiple images at varying exposure settings. In this case I was shooting in aperture priority and simply made adjustments to the exposure compensation by 2/3 stop increments. The how I blended the images will be covered in a later post as I deleted the original psd file by mistake (I hate that when that happens!) so I must recreate it this week some time as I want to send it off for a print.

Anyhow I had pretty much finished and was packing things up when I felt a couple of drops of moisture. It was not white so it must have been rain. Then there was a crack of lightning and the sky opened up and I was in a deluge of water. Evelyn later thought it quite funny that a pilot got caught in the rain. I assured here that at that moment I was not a pilot but a photographer.

The Tenba bag was a trooper as I pulled the rain cover out and got it in place before things got too out of hand. The Enduro tri-pod was not going to have any problems. So the only ting that was wet was yours me to the bone by the time I got back to the car which was about a quarter mile away. I did learn something from that experience though. That is if at all possible I will leave the tri-pod legs extended and wipe them down before I collapse them. They tended to gurgle when I extended them. Kind of like when you go through a car wash and the windows are dry and you roll them down only to see them wet again.

Great fun though and a nice image for my efforts.

Take care... Doug 

Tiz-the-Season

Hey all, Just wanted to get a not out to you before the week ended. We have been having a nice time visiting with our children, spouse and friends this week. They had their house all decorated and it looked so inviting. It also gave a perfect opportunity to take a couple of exposures that would then be prime for a composite. So it really is not an HDR but the intent was the same. You could call this an old school HDR.

I am working next week so this is our Christmas, so I will bid you a Merry Christmas with this image above.

Take care... Doug

Friday... Must Be Vegas

It is not too often when I sit at one location for more than a day or so. I think the last time was in Sept 07 when I spent a wonderful five days on the waterfront in Portland ME. Today is the fifth day that I am still in LAS waiting for a flight assignment. It does give me an opportunity to catch up on some laptop work, get current on the blogosphere, Facebook, and e-mail. I tend not to use my No Blog Day option when I have this kind of time.

Anyhow I just got done watching Matt Kloskowski' post on HDR. If you want to see the post and link to video click here. So I downloaded a copy of HDRsoft' Photomatix software to see how it would work. High Dynamic Range imaging has become a hot topic in photography today and I have been looking forward to jumping into it.

So here I am in my hotel room, I grab my Canon G9 and select it to jpg (I normally shoot RAW) at a 5MP size so I don't have to work with such large files on the laptop as I am starting to max out the hard drive.

NOTE:

This is the first entry into HDR and I did not want to take the final image in this post into Photoshop but rather show an example of what the leading HDR software produces using the default setting. It is obvious further work needs to be done to the image to enhance the tonal range of the final product.

The three images above are what I used to process the HDR image. Notice that each image is two stop up from the previous. This gave me the dynamic range for the  software to retrieve the necessary shadows and highlights. The interface of the Photomatix software is very straight forward. After the importing is complete an adjustment interface panel (shown right) comes up to make the necessary adjustments. Make no mistake, adjustments will be necessary. I just used the default settings and clicked the Process button at the bottom and the image below is what I ended up with.

A couple of points I will make are these:

• Even using the ghost elimination option on the import screen. It is best to use more than three images to start with.
• Do not shoot through a window as any dirt or smudges on the window will be multiplied and picked up as a shadow in the HDR.
• As I said above, you will need to make adjustments to the interface. Experimentation is the operative word.
• A tri-pod is a must. I used my Really Right Stuff G9 Case as the holding device on my window sill.

Just like someone who is new to hue/saturation adjustments, HDR is often over cooked. There seems to be two thoughts on HDR. Provide and "over done" image that is more of artwork and enhance the composite image to provide the viewer with a dynamic range that was available to the photographers eye when the shot was taken.

Sounds like fun to me. Have a great weekend... Doug