Posts in Category: Dynamic Photo HDR
Burr Oak Forest on the Prairie
As I mentioned yesterday, all the trees you see on the “tops” of the drift prairie of North Dakota are plantings…installed by human hands as wind-brakes around dwellings and homesteads. What native trees there are are mostly cottonwoods and ash, deep in the river valleys, where the periodic prairie wildfires could not get to them, and where water was reliable all year. The exception is the Burr Oak and Ash forests that grow along the ridge of the Missouri Coteau, the glacial moraine that marks the edge of the ice advance. This is Hawk’s Nest Ridge, southwest of Carrington. It is on private land, but it draws people from hundreds of miles around, to hike and camp in the one of the only real forests in the state. These days most people call the landowners to get permission. Generations of some North Dakota families have camped and hunted on Hawk’s Nest.
And I can understand why. Even for an easterner like me, well acquainted with forest, the Burr Oak forest of Hawk’s Nest is a place of wonder.
Under the bright prairie sun, it is not an easy forest to photograph. Even my in-camera HDR left the highlights overexposed, so this is a traditional 3 exposure HDR assembled and tone mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR and processed in Lightroom.
Canon SX50HS. 24mm equivalent.
Falls on the Baston. HDR
The falls on the Baston in Emmon’s Preserve in Kennebunkport are, like the Redwood Forest, another subject that has always proved difficult to capture. The falls lack the scale of the Redwoods, but they are well shaded by trees, and present the added difficulty of bright white highlights from sun on the foaming water. Once more, a subject that demands deeper HDR than my in-camera HDR can provide.
Which is why my last Sunday photo-prowl found me down by the Baston with my Fat Gecko, carbon fiber, shock-corded tripod. As I had suspected, 3 exposure HDR also gives a nice understated silky look to the rapids, without the need to resort to long shutter speeds.
This is not the falls at their most difficult. The leafless state of the mostly maples that combine with the pines to shade this stretch of stream let more light in than there will be later in the season. I will go back in 6 weeks and try that challenge.
Canon SX50HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. -2 1/3, -2/3, and +1/3 EV exposures. Blended and tone mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing in Lightroom. This is one of those HDRs that challenges the eye, or at least my eye. The range of light is so natural that the image looks a bit painted. We just do not expect this effect in a photograph.
Fallen Glory
I still have a lot of images from my trip to Arcata California and the Godwit Days Spring Migration Festival that I could share. This is one of my deep HDR experiments at Founder’s Grove in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. I like the way the Richardson’s Geraniums and a variety of ferns are growing on this fallen Redwood trunk. My guess, given the legendary durability of Redwood, is that this trunk has been down for well over 1000 years, to reach the stage of decomposition where it now supports it’s own micro-habitat. And I suspect it will be another 1000 years (or more) before all trace of the tree is gone. That is a long time!
It takes at least a 3 exposure HDR, with the highlight (dark) shot at least at -3EV, and the exposures well separated, to capture the range of light on the floor of Founder’s Grove. Canon SX50HS. 24mm equivalent field of view. From a tripod. Exposures blended and the HDR file tone mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing for my usual intensity, clarity, and sharpness in Lightroom. Auto Color Balance to correct a yellow bias introduce in the HDR process.
Old Falls Maple Red: Happy Sunday!
One of the reasons I invested in a gas powered scooter this year (as opposed to the electric scooter I had last year) was to have the range to reach Old Falls on a regular basis this summer. I want to be able to check this stretch of water at least once a week for dragonflies. I found two unique ones there last fall and I suspect there will be more that I have not seen this summer. Of course, I enjoy photographing the falls in all its seasons. They are not much in the way of waterfalls by any imaginable scale…but they are one of the few falls within a day’s drive of my home in Kennebunk. Southern Maine is worn pretty flat.
I like the way this HDR treatment brings out the red of the maple blossoms, and the intense greens of the young pines and spruces…against the dark water, and under this intense sky, with the boiling white of the falls in the foreground.
Canon SX50HS. Three exposure HDR at -2 1/3, -1/3 and + 2/3s EV. Blended and Tone Mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing in Lightroom.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is the red of the maple blossoms that really makes this image stand out for me…it is also what I was trying to catch. Most people don’t realize, or don’t really notice, that Red Maples are red twice a year…not just in the fall but in the spring as well. I will include a shot from a few days ago in our back yard which shows where the red in the Old Falls shot is coming from.
Our back yard maple flowers are a bit more advanced that the ones on the trees at Old Falls, but you get the idea. The Maples of New England are fire in the fall and fire in the spring. And all summer that fire burns in them, obscured by the green of the busy leaves making food for a season’s growth, for a crop of winged maple seeds to sow the future, and to survive another winter. It is easy to miss the fire in the summer, but it is there.
I would like to think our lives are like that. Fire in the bud, fire in the flower, and fire at last in the fall. If the fire in us is obscured in the summers of our lives by the busy green of making a living, of raising children, of laying up our stores, surely it will rise up in us once more before the final winter. As the world dies out of us, so the spirit should show through more and more. Perhaps that is what we are really seeing when we say a man is in his second childhood. Red in the bud, red in the flower, red in the end. That’s what I hope.
Redwoods Realized
As I have mentioned, it is difficult to capture the Redwood forest in any kind of image. Part of the difficulty is simply the unbelievable scale, but most of it has to do with the range of light. It is relatively dark under the canopy, and yet the sun breaks through in brilliant shafts and patches. That is part of the magic. It is a world of light and shadow, populated by giants. On my up up through the Avenue of the Giants I tired the in-camera HDR on the SX50HS, hoping it would do a better job with the range of light. It did, but the lights, those sun shafts and patches, were still beyond the camera’s ability to render. On my last morning in Acadia, as I was waking up, I began to think about what is, to me, deep HDR. HDR works, if you are wondering, by taking three or more exposures at a range of values and combining them in software after the fact to produce an extended range image. Generally you have one normal exposure, one underexposed (dark) and one overexposed (too light). The software takes the highlights from the dark exposure and the shadows from the light exposure and combines them with the mid-ranges of the normal exposure. It can be over done, and too often is, producing scenes with skies that the eye has never beheld, or landscapes that look almost etched. The Redwood forest is, however, a classic case for HDR. I wondered if I could get better results than the in-Camera HDR provided by bracketing three exposures myself.
It turns out that such bracketing is really easy on the Canon SX50HS. I had planed to use the Exposure Compensation settings to dial down the exposure until I could see detail on the LCD in the highlights. That would give me my underexposure and then I could work from there. I determined that I needed at lest -3 EV (three stops) of underexposure for the highlights. However when doing that, I noticed that there was little symbol in LCD display that I had never paid any attention to. DISP. That generally means there are settings accessible by pressing the Display button. When I pressed it, up came an autobracketing setting that allowed me to set how far apart three autobracketed exposures are. You spin the control dial and two little pointers spread out across the Exposure Compensation scale. Alright! And, they spread from the point where you have Exposure Compensation set on the main scale. I was able to set Exposure Compensation to -1 and the autobracketing control to its widest spread and get three exposures at -3, -1 and +1. I did a few test shots and it seemed like it might give me the raw materials for some interesting HDRs of the Redwoods.
Of course for three exposures to be in perfect registration, so you can combine them in software, you have to use a tripod. My trusty Fat Gecko, shock corded, carbon fiber tripod was just the ticket. It weights under a pound but supports the Canon SX50HS like tripod weighing 10 times as much.
So I spent a couple of hours in Founder’s Grove taking HDR exposures. When I got back to San Francisco and my hotel for the night, I tried a couple of different HDR software solutions. PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements has an Exposure module that works okay, to produce the raw HDR image, but then you have to do the Tone Mapping using standard PSE tools. Tone Mapping? Just as the scene contained a wider range of tones than the sensor could capture, your HDR image contains a wider range of tones than a computer screen can display, or a printer print.Tone Mapping is the process of taking your extended range image, which generally looks pretty flat and uninteresting on the computer screen, and mapping the tones so that they look natural when displayed or printed. It is overcooked Tone Mapping that gives HDR a bad name, and produces those surreal effects. The goal, or at least my goal, when Tone Mapping is to produce as natural a look as possible. My preferred HDR software, Dynamic Photo HDR, gives you lots of very intuitive control over how the tones are mapped.
And even then, I take the images into Lightroom for final processing. Did it work. You can be the judge, based on the image above, and others that I will post over the next days, but I am pretty satisfied. The images I got from Founder’s Grove go further toward capturing the reality of the place than any I have managed before. They are not perfect by any means, but they are satisfying!
1/19/2012: Vegas HDR (The Venetian)
You have to kind of (or at least I have to kind of) disconnect my sense of reality to enjoy Vegas. If I even for one moment allow myself to see through the incredibly expensive veneer (or to think about where the funds that paid for all this came from, which amounts to the same thing), then…well then I don’t like Vegas much. So on my way from my room to the show floor at SHOT yesterday, I carried my camera in my hand and made myself find some beauty. I was looking for images that I could process in Dynamic Photo HDR for interesting effects. The reflections in the canal were eye-catching, and, as I suspected it responded in interesting ways to DPHDR.
Canon SX40HS at 100mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1250. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in DPHDR for a single jpg Tone-mapping. Final processing in Lightroom (Intensity and Sharpness and a bit of noise reduction).
1/17/2011: The Castle, Carinish, North Uist, the Hebrides, Scotland
You know how when you get a new piece of software…an application that maybe does something you have tried to do, but actually does it, or does it better…you know how you are tempted to go back to images that you knew, while solid and satisfying, had just a bit more in them? You know? You know how you dig back into the archives and think, “I wonder what Dynamic Photo HDR [or whatever] could do with that one? You know?
This is a shot taken on North Uist several years ago, one August, on my only visit (so far) to the Hebrides. I had no right to expect the glorious weather I found there. Though it is called “The Carinish Castle” it is actually the remains of one of the Mid-evil Monasteries built on the Scottish and Irish Isles…you know…the ones that kept learning alive during the dark ages. Dynamic Photo HDR brought more definition to the clouds and more apparent detail to the landscape, making what was already a good image pop! (If you like pop. Pop seems very popular these days.) And, best of all, DPHDR manages the pop without the obvious tone-mapping artifacts of some other programs.
This is from my Sony H50, which I bought pretty much for this trip.
Final processing, cropping, straightening horizons, etc. in Lightroom.
1/16/2011: Roger’s Pond, with DRAMA!
When I ran out to photograph the ice coated snow on Saturday there was a front moving through Kennebunk. The sky to the east was still showing some blue, as in yesterday’s shot, but the sky to the west was closed by one of the most impressive banks of cloud I have seen…especially over a sunny snowscape. This is Roger’s Pond, which is maintained in the winter as a skating rink by Kennebunk.
The image is processed as an HDR in Dynamic Photo HDR, but believe me, I have toned the sky down considerably to bring it in line with reality. The clouds have a bit more definition than the the pure Lightroom version, but this is closer to the way my eye saw it anyway.
And, of course, part of the drama is the low sun, warm and bright, casting long shadows across the pond, and lighting up the evergreens.
This is, pretty much, the way it looked! As a fellow Mainer noted in a comment on another post: “this Maine, the way life is supposed to be, no HDR needed.” (Mainers or frequent visitors will get the joke.)
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Dynamic Photo HDR with custom tweaking of the tone map. Final processing (which included a Graduated Filter effect from the top to lighten the sky) and cropping slightly from the bottom to eliminate the road in Lightroom.
1/14/2012: Snowscape with Birches
Another shot from Thursday’s snow storm. This classic country estate with its long reach of pond and covered bridge is pretty in any season, but particularly striking in this winter scene.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/100th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Dynamic Photo HDR, and then final processing in Lightroom.
1/13/2012: Snow!! And a road in the wood.
We finally got our first significant snow yesterday in southern Maine. They predicted 1 to 3 inches, and we got 6 to 8 🙂 Heavy wet snow finishing off in little pellets of ice late afternoon. The roads were as bad as I have ever seen them in Maine. Still that did not stop me from getting out mid-storm to get a few pics. This is a wood road that runs through Rachael Carson National Wildlife land between us and the coast.
This is not sensor friendly light…levels are low in a storm like this…and exposing to hold highlights in the snow almost always results in greens that are grey at best, and mostly verging on black. I was really pleased to be able to pull up the greens while processing the image in Dynamic Photo HDR without losing the white of the snow. This is very much a naked eye view.
Canon SX40HS at 126mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed as a single jpg HDR in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing and a slight crop from the top in Lightroom.
And just for fun, here is the same image processed in Dynamic Auto Painter as a painting.
