Posts in Category: ocean
9/19/2010: Walking on Water
Happy Sunday!
I am actually, about now (or at least when this is posted), meeting my group for the first ZEISS/Adorama Workshop in Central Park. This was taken yesterday morning off Parson’s Beach in Kennebunk Maine.
This gentleman was paddle surfing, and his upright posture, and odd garb, really struck me. Of course the story of Peter getting out of the boat and walking to meet Jesus on the water is one of my most favorites. And here is the guy out there beyond the surf, walking on the water. How cool! Of course what fascinates me about the Bible story is the whole faith thing…and the fact that I am convinced that God is always calling us out of whatever boat we are in at the moment to walk on the waves in pure faith. I don’t, of course, do any better than Peter…which is to say I flounder a lot…but then there is always someone there to reach down a hand and pull me back up and get me safe back in the boat.
I am not sure, never having tried it, how much faith it takes to paddle surf. It is not walking on water after all. Still it can’t be easy. I am sure a little faith helps when you are standing on that board facing a big wave head on.
Canon SX20IS at 560mm equivalent @ f5.7 @ 1/640th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
Processed for Blackpoint, Clarity, Vibrance, and Sharpen in Lightroom.
9/14/2010: Blue House
Blue house, blue sky, steel blue sea, and the racing clouds behind the hurricane. It is actually the few warm rocks in the sun in the foreground and the massive clouds that make the image….without them the blues would not be nearly so dominant. (And I just noticed, when I uploaded this to Flickr, the sun-drawing-water effects along the horizon!)
This is another Photomatix HDR, based on three wide angle exposures (auto bracketed) in the Canon SX20IS. Besides blending and tone mapping in Photomatix, the final image was tweaked in Lightroom: a bit of Recovery for the sky, added Clarity and Vibrance, Blackpoint slightly right, Sharpen narrow edges preset, and some distortion control for both wide angle lens distortion and vertical perspective distortion to restore the horizon and straighten the flagpole. Since being able to correct it easily in Lightroom, I find I am becoming more intolerant of obvious camera distortions.
The critical step in post-processing, however, was getting the color temperature right…in the original, the rocks were too blue as well, and the image looked a bit filtered. Just the way the sensor saw it I guess. I added some warmth, but if the rocks looked natural, then the blue of the house, in particular, went too light…this is a compromise which preserves the blue house and balances the rocks. The steel blue of the sea, while not as intense as the original image, is more true to life on a day of storm seas. Or that’s the way I see it anyway.
9/10/2010: Earl passes by: HDR
The skies for two days after Earl were amazing. This is shot looking south from Narragansett point, past Middle Beach to Lord’s Point, and Great Head beyond.
Three exposures using the auto bracket feature of the Canon SX20IS. It is possible to use the Exposure Compensation dial to move the end points of the exposure 3 stop range, and I slid it down to –1.66 to +.33 EV. Blended in Photomatix using detail emphasis tone-mapping. Final processing for Blackpoint, Clarity, Vibrance, and Sharpening in Lightroom. Some distortion correction as well, to bring the horizon back to level.
9/8/2010: Earl passes by, Kennebunk ME
Hurricane Earl passed Kennebunk well off-shore during the night last Friday, or Saturday morning rather…and may in fact have been downgraded to a tropical storm by then anyway. Certainly the only sign we had of it was rain, a stiffish breeze on Saturday AM, and some uncommonly big waves along our beaches…and, of course, some amazing skies. This is from Narragansett point, which separates Middle (or Stony) Beach from Gouches (or Big) beach.
With the sun and warm weather, more like August than September, Earl provided a excellent day for our local, and long suffering, surfers. Surfing in Kennebunk means wetsuits, waves that rarely deserve the name, shorts runs and long swims. Earl provided a rare treat.
I tried some HDR for the skies, which you will see more of in the coming days, but these are straight shots. One of the first things I learned about both panoramic and HDRs is not to try to include anything that moves as fast as surf 
Canon SX20IS 1) 28mm equivalent @ f4.0 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Landscape program. 2) 128mm equivalent @ f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Landscape program.
Adjusted for Blackpoint, Clarity, Vibrance, and Sharpening in Lightroom.
9/3/2010: Cadillac Mountain
On the way back from dropping daughter #3 off at College, we stopped for the afternoon and night in Bar Harbor…mostly to see daughter #1 and #2. Daughter #1 lives there, and daughter #2 is working there in Acadia National Park for the summer. No visit to Acadia, of course, is complete without a drive to the top of Mt. Cadillac. Even though we only had a few hours there, after a hike around Jordan Pond (also a must as far as I am concerned), we drove to the summit on the way back to Bar Harbor and dinner. It was not a pristine day…there was a good deal of haze over the ocean, but the late afternoon/early evening light was interesting on the stone of the peak.
This is an HDR using two exposures and Photomatix Lite. In realty I am not sure I gained much through the two exposures. I am pretty sure I could have adjusted a single exposure in Lightroom for close to this effect. Still, the tone-mapping for detail in Photomatix certainly brought up all the character in the foreground rocks, and I am certain I could not have pulled up the greens in the trees to this level. The greens have always frustrated me in shots from Cadillac, since exposing for rock and sky always leaves the greens running toward black. Keeping the greens vibrant gives this shot three strong layers instead of two. This is good.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. Two shots separated by 3 EV using the Exposure Compensation dial.
Photomatix as above. Adjusted for Blackpoint, Clarity, Vibrance, and Sharpness in Lightroom.
From Acadia 2010.
8/14/2010
Bush Place Panorama
This vista (or the owner of the house on the point, former President George Bush Senior) is so popular that they have had to build a parking area. Well, okay, there is also a famous local feature right below the parking lot called Blowing Cave, a hole in the rocks that spouts a gout of water and booms at the right tide, but most people discover that by accident when attempting to photograph the Bush estate. It was lovely evening, though windy with the passing front that piled the clouds out there over the sea.
This is is 8 shots, 4 across and 2 down, taken with the iPhone 4 and assembled on the phone in AutoStitch, processed on the phone in PhotoGene (levels and sharpen, some straightening), and uploaded to the web from the phone in SmugShot and Flickrstackr.
From iPhone4 HDR and Pano.
8/11/2010
Saint Anne’s Point
iPhone 4 HDR. St. Anne’s point is photogenic from almost any angle. Here from the back, along the coast on Cape Arundel. The Drama of the sky and sun breaking through clouds (including the rays), the strong silhouetting of the buildings against the light, the detail of stony beach and even the rail of the stair…and then the light on the water, produced, to my eye, a powerful image.
Captured and processed completely on the iPhone. Two exposures merged in Pro HDR. I tried my usual Levels adjustment and sharpening in PhotoGene, but then went back to the original HDR with PerfectPhoto for a different set of tools. Increased Gamma, lightened shaddows, increased contrast, and warmed the color temperature just slightly. Uploaded with SmugShot.
From iPhone4 HDR and Pano.
8/9/2010
Summer Morning: River Meets the Sea
Saturday morning I headed out to my favorite birding and digiscoping spot, along the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it crosses Route 9 by the Mousam River bridge. It was one of those clear, cool, summer mornings after days of heat, with bright sun and broken cloud cover and I was hoping to do some more iPhone HDR experimentation. When I got out of the car to set up my scope, I realized that my iPhone was back home on the charger. No HDR today!
But then, as I mounted my digiscoping camera and walked in toward the marsh I was thinking…all I am really doing with the iPhone is taking two exposures, one for bright (sky generally) and one for dark (foreground landscape generally). I could do that with my SX20IS…and actually it might even be a bit easier since I could use the exposure compensation dial…or even the auto exposure bracket built into the camera.
All the magic is in the software. Maybe I could download the images to the iPhone and use Pro HDR to combine them…or, failing that…surely there must be some software available to do it on the laptop. I just got an upgrade notice from Adobe on PhotoShop Elements 8…and didn’t that mention some kind of HDR?
So I took a bunch of experimental images using both the exposure compensation dial, judging exposure by eye, and auto bracket. Auto bracket on the SX20IS does three exposures, 1EV either side of center (you can shift the center point along the scale but you can not increase the range). By eye, I judged 1 EV to be too little compensation for the sky with clouds, though about right for the landscape, and, indeed that’s how it worked out when I came to process the images.
Back home, I found that even if I downloaded the images to the iPhone, they were just too large for Pro HDR to handle (not surprising since Pro HDR expected maximum 5mp images form the iPhone camera). Plan B.
I always try to find a free program first, and I downloaded what looked like the best of then. No. Did not work. So, after some more research, I downloaded the trial version of Photomatix Lite and gave that a try. Excellent. As easy as Pro HDR on the iPhone, and in “enhanced detail: tone mapping mode” it provides a very similar set of adjustments, and, with care, similar results. Best of all, it does the auto alignment of the images just as Pro HDR does, which makes shooting HDR handheld possible. I bought it.
And after all that…the image for today is my first Photomatix HDR. I still find that Pro HDR produces more natural results as its default, but you can achieve the same results with Photomatix with some tweaking of the controls. On the other hand, it is possible in Photomatix to do the massively overblown HDR thing too. I am not tempted that way, but I can understand the temptation.
I took the Photomatix processed HDR into Lightroom and made final adjustments…Blackpoint right, some added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset.
So, one more tool…one more set of imaging possibilities to bring to the landscape.
8/8/2010
Evening Sun on the Haunted House
Happy Sunday!
This is another iPhone HDR from the same evening walk that produced yesterdays pic. This house, exposed on the cliffs above the sea, has a local reputation for being haunted…I suspect it had the rep even before they used exterior shots in notorious movie 15 years ago. In stormy weather, especially in winter, it can look pretty grim. Here clouds were in the process of closing the western horizon, though the sun was still two hands above at 7:30PM in Southern Maine in August, but as I stood framing my shot, the sun broke out momentarily to light the rocks and house with that particular golden glow of evening. It actually happened between raising the iPhone a taking the first shot.
I don’t believe in chance, so I hit the capture button (twice, once for the sky and once for the landscape, since I was planning to use Pro HDR later to combine the images) as fast as I could. I would not want to appear either ungrateful or unappreciative of the Creator’s best efforts. Ever. Camera in hand captures the moment, but I hope one day to be just as sensitive, ready, and aware of what He is doing every second I am awake. Wouldn’t that be something?
Captured, processed, and posted completely on the iPhone 4. Camera app, Pro HDR, PhotoGene. In PhotoGene I straightened the horizon, sharpened the image, and adjusted the color temperature (since Pro HDR tends to make images warmer than life and the light on the rocks was way too intense). Uploaded to my Wide Eyed In Wonder gallery with SmugShot.
From iPhone4 HDR and Pano.
8/7/2010
Across the Harbor Mouth
iPhone HDR. Kennebunkport Harbor where the Kennebunk River reaches the sea, taken from Parson’s Way. The low sun of evening in the summer with the foreground rocks already in shade. This shot breaks the compositional rule of horizon placement (rule of thirds), but I think, with the mass of clouds and flash in the sky, and enough interest in the foreground, it just might work. I could crop it, but however I did it, I would lose. IMHO.
Captured, processed, and posted on the iPhone 4. Pro HDR and PhotoGene used for processing. SmugShot for posting. Auto blend in Pro HDR, with no adjustments. Slight tweaking of levels and sharpening in PhotoGene. Horizon straightened.
From iPhone4 HDR and Pano.