Posts in Category: light
Unbroken Snow, with Trees
This is another HDR treatment of the unbroken snow around two small saplings near home. (And, just for the record, we got another 5-8 inches last night!) Again it is mostly about texture, and the way the light plays across the surface of the snow…the subtle shadows…the gentle folds. In this case we have the highly contrasting texture of the tree bark to set it all off. The subtle HDR treatment emphasizes the textures and brings a natural balance to the light and shadow.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F. ISO 100 @ 1/180th @ f4.2. 140mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Unbroken Snow
We have about 14 inches of snow on the ground after this last storm. Someone said Kennebunk and Biddeford Maine got the highest snowfall totals for the whole storm. I believe it. And we have more snow in our yard and the area around our house than I have seen anywhere else in Kennebunk that I have been. We are just at the edge of the tidal zone, and I suspect we caught an extra heavy fall.
I love unbroken snow. I love the way the low winter sun pulls the texture up in the snow. I love the way the bluish, purplish shadows fall across the surface, caressing. I love the way the snow gentles the dips and rises of the land, covering all the scars of human traffic, turning everything to elegant white curves. It is not easy to capture any of that in a photo. But that does not stop me from trying, after every significant snow-fall. 🙂 It is always tempting to make these snow images into Black and Whites, and I did try it on this one. I like the touch of green of the protruding branch.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Smart Auto. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014. I used the HDR Scene filter to pull up detail and emphasize the modeling of the snow surface and then tweaked it a but using the Tune Image controls. I am, by the way, amazed at the quality of the exposures in Smart Auto!
Atmosphere in Texas
This shot is, of course, all about atmosphere. We were on the King Ranch in South Texas. I was one of the leaders on a birding fieldtrip. We went out onto a section of open grazing lands in search of Spraigs Pipit and grassland Sparrows. It was not long after dawn and the sun, still behind the bank of clouds, was drawing water…which is the highly descriptive term for those streaks in the air. I always try to capture it when I see it, and here it had the sweep of grassland an the line of greenwood along the stream in the distance to set it off. Who could resist?
From a technical standpoint this is a complex image. The drawing water effect is not easy to catch. I started with a 3 exposure in-camera HDR using the Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode. The image was better than a standard shot of this very high range scene would have been, but still did not catch the atmosphere. After transferring the image to my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 I processed it in Snapseed using the HDR Scene filter and a combination of Ambiance and Shadow in Tune Image, along with some Sharpen and Structure in Details. That brought it closer but still…
I had some time on a flight from Newark to Denver yesterday so I opened the image again in Photo Editor, a very capable image processor for Android that few seem to know about (the lame name does not help:-). Photo Editor allows you to apply color effects…brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, temperature, etc…to the whole scene or to any shape drawn on the scene…or you can brush the effect on just where you want it. The brush is particularly effective with the Note’s stylus. I used a shape to adjust the color balance of the grasses, which were too blue in the original, and then various brushes to adjust saturation and contrast in the belt of trees. I also used a Clone brush to treat an area of the clouds right in front of the sun which had completely burned out even with the HDR treatment. Then I applied some local area contrast (fine detail enhansement) using the Unsharp Mask tool on just the grasses. Finally I applied a some light noise reduction to the whole image. (I told you, Photo Editor is amazing.)
It is still not a perfect image, but it comes close to catching the drawing water effect…and it was fun!
Light in the forest
In a Redwood forest that has been cut, besides the rings of trees growing from the old roots of one of the fallen giants (see my previous post on the trees of Jack London State Park), you also find many of these double, tripple, quadruple trees, again, clearly, growing from a single root. The rings I think are essentially healty. All the trees in a ring, if it is big enough, have a chance to live. I am not so sure about the triple trees.
At any rate, this image is not about the trees, or only incidentally at any rate…it is about the light…the unique layered, filtered, highly patterned light of the forest floor. The challenging light, from a photographer’s point of view, of the forest floor. The beautiful light on the forest floor, from almost anyone’s point of view.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode (in-camera HDR). Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Ah autumn! Maine.
The leaves are turning. The leaves are falling. It is that time of year again. I found this leaf, fallen in just the right spot to catch some late afternoon sun shining through, along the shore of Old Falls Pond between Kennebunk and Sanford Maine. It was curled to stand just so…and I put the camera on macro mode and placed it practically on the ground for the shot.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F. Processed in Snapseed on the Nexus 7.
Evening at Back Creek
Back Creek is a tidal creek that flows into the Mousam River a few hundred yards from its mouth in Kennebunk Maine. The beach homes you see are on Great Head, across the Mousam. It had been a day of rain, heavy at times, and the front was still moving off the coast…but the sun broke through just for an hour or so before setting. Great light. Great sky. Landscapes are never better, I think, than when the sun breaks through under a stormy sky. You have drama on the land and drama in the sky. What is not to like?
This is a sweep panorama from the Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. I really like the fact that you can hold the camera vertically and sweep it around horizontally…producing a panorama that is fully as wide as a conventional panorama (this one is about 200 degrees), but much taller…not nearly so “pinched”. These tall panoramas also fit computer displays much better…if you click the image above on any computer with a reasonably sized display, it should fill your screen.
As I say, Samsung Smart Camera WB250F in Panorama mode. f4.6 @ ISO 100. I discovered a Panorama trick for these cameras that have sweep pano modes. You pick the part of the view that has either 1) average brightness for your planned sweep, or 2) the brightness you want for the whole sweep (you might, for instance, want to expose for the sky rather than the land), point the camera at that section of the sweep and half press the shutter release to lock in exposure, then swing the camera, holding the shutter half pressed, to the where you want your pano to begin, and fully press the shutter. That way the whole sweep has the exposure you intend, and not the exposure that happened to be at the start of the sweep. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone.
Dawn on the Prairie
Just a quick post from the first field trip of the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival. Samsung Galaxy S4 in HDR Mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the phone.
Bougainvillea
It is going to be a while before we have wildflowers in Maine (or garden flowers for that matter…though we may see crocus soon), so I am dropping back a month or more to the sunny days I spent in San Diego for this Bougainvillea against the classic brick wall of the Conference Center at Mission Bay Marina Village. As you see, the flowers are already gone, but the bracts are still bright against the wall. Of course the picture is about the texture of the brick and the warmth of the San Diego, semi-tropical light.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 175mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, sharpness, and clarity.
Winter Vista: Rachel Carson NWR
There is a small viewing platform around the backside of the loop trail at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters that, if you only visit in summer, you will certainly ask yourself, “Why there?” There is, in summer, when the leaves are on the trees, nothing to see. There is, in spring, a nice stand of Lady Slipper below the platform, on the slope leading down to the marsh, but that came after the platform, as a result of the added light and space clearing a few of trees provided.
It is only in winter that you see what the trail designers were thinking (or seeing) when they put the platform there. In winter you have a view through the bare trees out across the river and the marsh that is quite attractive…even more attractive for the thin screen of trees between you and the marsh. And in winter, the light on the trees in the foreground is wonderful.
This is another In-camera HDR from the Canon SX50HS, and the Mode, plus some post-processing in Lightroom, produces an image very close to what the eye sees here.
45mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif: f6.3 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80.
Kennebunk Plains Sunset HDRs
Nothing is harder than capturing a “natural” looking sunset. If you expose for the drama in the sky then the foreground goes unnaturally dark (to total black), and every allowance you make for the foreground robs the sky of drama. I think sunsets were the original inspiration for HDR. HDR is a technique where three or more images captured at different exposures are combined in software to extend the range of the resulting image…so that, for instance, you take the foreground from the lightest sunset exposure, and the sky from the darkest, and the in-between stuff from the middle exposures. It can be quite effective given the right scene, the right set of exposures, the right software, and a delicate hand with the processing.
HDR can also be way overdone…producing an image that is either flat…with all values given equal weight…so that it looks like an etching, or an image that is so intense and unnatural that it looks like a surreal painting.
With each generation of cameras more and more come with HDR built in. One of the benefits of the fast CMOS sensors today is that these kinds of multiple exposure tricks are much easier. My new Canon SX50HS has the HDR mode right on the main control dial, and the software to combine the images built right into the processing engine. Making an HDR is as easy as setting the dial, holding the camera really still (it is taking three exposures), and pressing the button. The three images are combined before being written to the card.
I have tired auto HDR on other brands of cameras I have owned and found it pretty useless. All the software in the camera could manage was one of those flat, etched, images…and no amount of processing in Lightroom could redeem them.
Canon, however, got it right. The three images are intelligently combined to lighten the dark parts and darken the light parts to produce a very natural and pleasing range of light. With no more than my normal processing in Lightroom, the Canon auto HDRs produce excellent images. Even of sunsets.
If you want a more vivid, over the top, eye-popping sunset, you can turn on both HDR and the Vivid color effect.
Having stood there only last night, I can tell you that the first shot is more natural than the second, but there is no denying that the second version has more impact.
Both shots Canon SX50HS, HDR mode. 24mm equivalent. ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.