Monthly Archives: January 2012
1/21/2012: Vegas Dawn
I am at the airport waiting for my flight out of Vegas. This is yesterday’s dawn from my hotel room at the Venetian. I like the sliver of moon high in the sky.
Canon SX40HS at 40mm equivalent field of view. F3.5 @ 1/30th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
1/20/2012: Venetian Gondola
Continuing with found beauty in Vegas, unlikely as that is…
The Gondolas on the Canal in the Venetian are all ornate, but this one is particularly attractive, especially against the blue water and the red brick. I tried this as an HDR, but I like the untreated image better. Any painterly quality here comes purely from the high ISO…though this is pretty good IQ indeed for 1000 ISO on a small sensor in artificial light.
Canon SX40HS at 100mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1000. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
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).
1/18/2012: Cedar Waxwings
I ran one of this set of Cedar Waxwings from last Saturday on Google+ for #songbirdsaturday. They were taken at Roger’s Park in Kennebunk, Maine, on a day of ice coated snow and intermittent sun. I love the silkiness of the Waxwing’s feathers and intensity of the colors.
The first two are at 1680mm equivalent field of view, using full optical zoom on the Canon SX40HS (840mm equivalent) plus 2x digital tel-converter function and the last shot was at 1260mm equivalent using 1.5x digital tel-converter. All are hand held out the window of the car. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
1) f5.8 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. 2 and 3) f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
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.
1/15/2012: Polished Snow
I am traveling today. Already at the airport on my way eventually to Las Vegas for a week of work. This shot is from yesterday. On Thursday we got six inches of snow. Then on Friday we got rain. Then it turned cold. The snow has a thin crust of ice so that it looks like someone polished the landscape. This HDR treatment of the point at Roger’s Pond along the Mousam River shows off the contours of the snow surface.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent. Program with iContrast and -1/3 EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Dynamic Photo HDR and Lightroom.
And for the Sunday thought: the polished contours of the snow obscure all the messy details of a living landscape, reducing the scene to its basic shapes, teasing the light into sculpting a different kind of world for the eye. Clean, cold, pure. Not a landscape we would want to live with forever, but refreshing in small doses. In the spirit it represents a certain state of mind that sometimes comes in meditation. One of the states of mind. Again nothing we would probably want to live with long term, but refreshing in small doses.
When I got back home, after taking this shot, I brewed a pot of tea and sat down to the computer to process. I attempted to get a bit of the clarity and simplicity into the finished image, using some of the most sophisticated and complex software in existance. And so it is in the spirit. A moment of clarity to illuminate our complex lives.
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.
1/12/2012: Classic Portland Head Light
This is an HDR treatment of a shot of Portland Head Light, tone-mapped and detail enhanced in Dynamic Photo HDR. It was already a dramatic image…the tone mapping just brought up detail in the stony beach and added some definition to the clouds.
I also opened it in PhotoShop Elements to clone out a contrail, and in Lightroom for final processing.