Posts in Category: hdr
Icy Panorama
Back Creek as it enters the Mousam River a few hundred years from the ocean.
We will take a break from hot Honduran hummingbirds today. This is an unintentional panorama, stitched in Photoshop Elements from two images. I was going to post only one or the other, but in looking at them I wondered if Photoshop could make a seamless pano from them. No sooner thought than tried. It took two tries but PE, using the Auto setting on Photomerge Panorama, did the trick wonderfully well, and even automatically filled out to the edges of the rectangle. Impressive software…and, switching gears, an impressive winter we are having. We had maybe 4 inches of fresh snow by morning yesterday, but it got to the low 30s. We are back in the teens today, with below zero temps for tonight. People are hiring bucket-loaders to pile the snow next to their drives, as conventional pick-up plows can no longer push the snow high enough. Two story houses have two story driveway piles. After the first storm, we have been blowing ours so we have a whole yard to fill…but it is indeed filling up. This shot, with the broken ice (broken by the tide), gives you a good feel for our Maine winter this year. 🙂
Two 24mm equivalent field of view, in-camera HDRs, from the Sony HX400V. Processed in Lightroom and stitched into a pano in Photoshop Elements Photomerge tool.
Merritt Island Dawn
Dawn over the lagoons at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, FL
We were out at dawn yesterday to get in a few hours of birding and photography before the vendor area at the Space Coast Birding Festival opened for the day…so early that the gate to Blackpoint Wildlife Drive was still closed when we got there. So…we went looking for the sunrise, or rather for a sunrise shot. This is an in camera HDR take over the lagoons along the main road west of the Visitor Center. You can see a corner of the Launch Facility at Kennedy Space Port peaking out behind the trees on the horizon just left of center.
Sony HX400V at 24mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure: 1/125th @ ISO 80 @ f3.2. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Dawn Mix
Blackpoint Wildlife Drive, Merritt Island NWR.
Early morning action along Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. We were out for the World Digiscoper Meet competition at the Space Coast Birding Festival. This is pool of mixed waders: Snowy and Great Egrets, Wood Storks, and White Ibis.
In camera HDR. Sony HX400V. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Great Backlit Egret
Great Egret, Gatorland, Orlando FL
If you are into bird photography, Gatorland, near Orlando, in winter and spring is always worth a visit. As a senior citizen I even get in for less than half price. Such a deal. The deal at Gatorland is close ups of “wild” birds…mostly Egrets and Herons that nest around the Breeding Pool…where over 300 Alligators are kept for breeding. There are some BIG Alligators in there! And birds. Wherever you find Alligators in large numbers, birds will build a rookery. They feel relatively safe from most predators with the Alligators patrolling the waters below them. You may have noticed the quotation marks around “wild” in the sentence above. The nesting birds at Gatorland are not, of course, captive…but they are so used to humans and human hand-outs that they can not, in my opinion, be classed as wild either. Gatorland is a place where you can take full frame photos of a Snowy Egret from 2 feet with your phone. I know. I did it. This Great Egret, coming into breeding plumage, was something closer to 4 feet from me, standing on one of the boardwalk rails. This is what the Gatorland experience is all about for the bird photographer. I could not resist the effective back-lighting.
Sony HX400V at 414mm equivalent field of view. In camera HDR. Nominal exposure: 1/200th @ ISO 100 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Parker River Dunes in Winter
Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, Plum Island MA
I drove down to Newberryport and Plum Island…Parker River National Wildlife Refuge…to look for reported Snowy Owls yesterday. It is about an hour from home, pretty much a straight shot down I95 and then in through Newberryport to the refuge. I could not find any owls, but was definitely captured by the snowy dunes and the winter marsh. I parked and hiked over the dunes and out into the marsh on the Hellcat boardwalks, and on just about all of the dune side boardwalks. With the light snow cover, and a winter sky, the landscape was transformed.
A Snowy Owl was reported on the dunes yesterday…but I did was not there, apparently, at the right time. Still I am happy with the snowscapes 🙂
Sony HX400V at 24mm equivalent field of view. In camera HDR on auto. Program shift to keep the whites in range of the sensor. Nominal exposure: 1/800th @ f5 @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet. Besides the normal Lightroom preset for the Sony, I also applied two graduated filter effects: up from the bottom to increase exposure and bring up the snow, and down from the top to darken slightly, add some Clarity, and to increase Saturation of the blues slightly to increase pop in the sky.
Snowstract
Snow detail. Kennebunk Bridle Path, Kennebunk ME
This is another deep HDR experiment from my trip out to look for owls the other day. I love the texture of the snow, the way the shadows play across the frame, and the contrasting hard shapes of the cluster of leaves and brush stubble. It is a snowstract…an almost abstract made of snow. 🙂
Sony HX400V at 56mm equivalent field of view. In camera HDR. Nominal exposure: 1/600th @ ISO 80 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Shadows in the snow…
Kennebunk Bridle Path, Kennebunk ME
Even though it was still only 12 degrees at 2 in the afternoon, I had to get out yesterday. After looking, unsuccessfully, for the Snowy Owl at the beach again, I decided to experiment with some snowscape HDR, using more aggressive settings on the Sony HX400V than my normal HDR settings. I like to capture the texture of the snow, while keeping both shadows and highlights looking natural. Not an easy task for a digital sensor, especially one as small as the sensor in the HX400V. I set the Exposure Compensation to -1 to keep the sun on the snow from burning out, and then set the in camera HDR to level 6 to bring the shadows back into range. It worked fairly well. I had to lighten the overall image in Lightroom, but I am happy with the results. On the other hand, Auto HDR and -1/3 EV did almost as well. 🙂
Sony HX400V at 52mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure: 1/800th @ f6.3 @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet. (I used TouchRetouch to remove a small branch that intruded into the lower left part of the frame.)
Big Cypress National Preserve
Cypress Hummock, Big Cypress NP, FL
Yesterday we were treated to a walk (wade) in Big Cypress National Preserve. We went with Everglades Nature Tours, the only company licensed for off the trail walking in the Big Cypress. As I hinted, it was actually more of a wade than a walk as we were in water most of the time. But we got to see the inside of 3 Cypress Heads, or hummocks, and that is something most never do. We found orchids, not blooming this time of year, but full of promise for the spring, and we got up-close and in among the biggest cypress in the neighborhood…those that grow in the ponds at the center of the hummocks where it is always wet. This collage shows a vertical panorama and a horizontal view. It is both strange and wonderful country.
Sony HX400V. Vertical sweep panorama and in-camera HDR. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet. Assembled in Phototastic Pro.
Wood Island Light over Bittersweet
Wood Island Light from East Point Sanctuary
I took a leisurely drive up the coast yesterday looking for Snowy Owls. A few were seen last month in likely places, but none yet this month. I did not find any either. The highlight of the trip was the brilliant display of Bittersweet berries at East Point Nature Conservancy Sanctuary. Of course, in December, they are about the only touch of color in the landscape 🙂 This is Wood Island Light off the Point at the mouth of Saco Bay.
Sony HX400V at 24mm equivalent. In-camera HDR. Processed in Lightrtoom on my Surface Pro 3. There were a number of berry whips which broke the horizon near the center of the frame, so I used Touch Retouch (a brilliant piece of software for the modern Windows interface) to remove them. Simple as painting over them and letting the software do its work!
October Sky, Laudholm Farm
Laudholm Farm, Wells ME
This is not the first time I have shot this view, and it almost certainly will not be the last. 🙂 It is such a classic that the University of New Hampshire Panorama Project has put a panorama post on the spot, though this shot is from nearer ground level.
It is an in-camera HDR, and I used Program Shift to get a smaller aperture and greater depth of field, even on this day of subdued October light. Sony HX400V at 24mm equivalent. ISO 80 @ 1/500th @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on Surface Pro 3 tablet.