Monthly Archives: July 2013
Roger’s Pond HDR
I have presented this view before. It is Roger’s Pond, a fishing and ice-skating park along the Mousam River just off Main Street Kennebunk Maine. It is one of the few places close to home where I can go to shoot the sky. And it certainly has its beauty.
This is an in-camera HDR from the Samsung WB250F camera…with processing in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4. I am finding the combination of the two Samsung devices to be satisfyingly and surprisingly powerful, and certainly well suited to the photography, and especially, the sharing that I do. The camera is amazingly versatile…I even shot dragonflies with it yesterday using the intelligent zoom feature (while I waited for the long zoom on the Canon SX50HS to unfog from being in air-conditioning in VA too long)…and the Smart Modes, which include the in-camera HDR (Rich Tone), are exceptionally good. I really like the way PicSay Pro works as an editor…it is kind of like Lightroom for Android, with funky filters added (which I mostly don’t use). All in all it is a fun combo. I am I liking the results.
Mind-bending in Kennebunk
Sweep Panorama is a very strange thing. This is a about a 180 degree view of the dam on the Mousam River in Kennebunk Maine, taken from the middle of the bridge over the river. The dam is, of course, a straight line in reality, and the railing is both straight and continuous. I have attempted this pano with conventional stitched panorama techniques and it is next to impossible. The buildings on the left, in particular, never match up in any two shots. Sweep panorama renders what is perpendicular to the motion of the camera very well, as it records one thin line at a time…and the distortions in the other dimension are interesting. On the camera itself, you can view the panorama as a sweep, which is also interesting. Someone needs to create a panorama viewer for the computer. 🙂
Samsung WB250F in Panorama Mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4.
The tallness of birches.
Panoramas are difficult at the best of times to display on a computer monitor or screen…just not enough real estate…and vertical panoramas are especially cramped. Still, when faced with a tall tree, what do you do? This is a vertical sweep panorama of an impressive pair of intertwined Paper Birch trees at Laudholm Farm and Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. It is along the boardwalk through the wet forest behind the dunes and the marsh. The panorama certainly does not do the trees justice, but it captures the tall grace of them better than a normal shot ever could.
Samsung WB250F in Panorama Mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4. (If you have never used “sweep panorama” on a camera, it is actually very impressive. Unlike a normal panorama, which is several “flat” images stitched together, a sweep panorama is “painted” onto the sensor one thin line at a time as you move the camera. It produces a unique and interesting effect. And it dead easy!)
Green Eyed Monster!
The theme is green on MacroMonday, and I happened to photograph this green eyed monster on green leaves yesterday at one of my local dragonfly ponds. It is a teneral dragonfly…one that has only just emerged from its last larval form, and this is not how it will look in a few days. I think it is one of three very similar smallish red Meadowhawks that we have here…White-faced, Cherry-faced, or Ruby. Impossible to tell at this stage. Whatever it is, there were a lot of them at the pond yesterday.
Canon SX50HS. My usual modifications to Program. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom.
Silky Water: Happy Sunday!
Back in the day of slow film emulsions, taking a photo of a waterfall, or water falling over ledges as in this image, especially in deeply shaded glens where waterfalls are likely to be found, resulted in the “silky water effect.” During the long exposure required to capture the image, the moving water painted itself on the emulsion as blur, with all detail submerged in a smooth flow like a cascade of silk. As it happened, the result was very like how some painters rendered falling water, attempting to capture a feeling of motion in the blur. As film speeds and quality increased, it became possible to “freeze” the flowing water, even catching ripples in their run and splashes in mid-air. However, the “silky water effect” never lost its appeal. Photographer’s today go to great lengths, internationally undermining the strengths of their equipment with neutral density filters and the like, to recreate the painterly, traditional, silky water effect.
The engineers at Samsung, when designing the software for their Smart Camera family, included a “waterfall” mode among the Smart Camera Modes. If you have the camera mounted on a tripod, it will take a very long (90 seconds or more) exposure of moving water…resulting in what I would call a “super silky water effect.” I find that the longer I am away from the actual scene…as the sound of the rushing water and the play of the play of the light in the ripples and falls recedes into memory…the more I like the effect. I have to break away from memory and look at the image for what it is, not what was there. For sure, this is not the way I see rushing water…but I can understand the attraction of the image, as an image. I can understand that that rush and tumble and joyful confusion of water in constant motion can be reduced to the calm rendering of silk, and that it captures a different, and equally valid, emotional response to the falling water than I might otherwise feel. I get it. I am still uncertain as to whether I totally approve. 🙂
And that leads to the Sunday Thought. Silky water is not real. It is a photographic artifact, or the imaginative impression created by a painter’s mind and brush. And yet it captures a real emotion…or at least one among many emotional responses to reality. It speaks to a calm in the center of confusion that appeals to us all. In a way, it is, from a traditional point of view, the more spiritual response…a seeing through to the assumed essence of what is behind the rush of our daily reality.
However, I can’t help but feel that it is, at least a bit, a cheat. I think there is as much spirit in the rush and tumble and churn of detail that is our immediate response to falling water (and to life). I appreciate the peace of the long view, but I am not willing to give up the excitement of the moment. My instinct is that they are both elements of the spiritual view. Joy in the confusion. Joy in the underlying calm.
Interestingly enough, by happy accident (if you believe in such things), Google+ assembled two images of the same tumble of water into an animated gif…one taken in waterfall mode, and one taken in Rich Tone / HDR. Hopefully your browser will display it properly. Joy in the confusion. Joy in the underlying calm. Happy Sunday!
A shady spot on a hot day.
Emmon’s Preserve is one of my favorite local spots for photography. It is just a stretch of forest along a river where it tumbles down through pools over ledges, but there is always beauty there, in every season. This is one of the pools from yesterday.
The range of light and shadow at Emmon’s almost demands HDR treatment. This is a traditional 3 exposure HDR…well, maybe not totally traditional :). I shot it on my Samsung WB250 Smart Camera, then transferred the 3 images to my Galaxy S4 smartphone where Google+ uploaded them as part of an Auto-Backup. The Auto Awesome engine at Google+ recognized them as 3 sequential exposures differing only in exposure value, and made them, without my intervention, into an HDR. I then opened the image in what used to be the Picnic Photo Editor, and is now part of the Google+ Photos tools, and gave it a little extra boost. So, no, I guess not any kind of traditional HDR…but certainly what HDR is coming to in this age of instant sharing. 🙂
Knapweed and the Bug
Knapweed is generally tall enough when if flowers so you don’t get this view. For some reason there are some low growing Knapweeds along one of the Quest Ponds. And this one comes with a buggy bonus. Some kind of bee I think.
This is another shot from the Samsung WB250…macro mode…transferred to my Galaxy S4 for processing in PicSay Pro, and upload to Google+ photos. Like the Galaxy S4 camera, the Samsung WB250 records minimal exif data in any of the Smart Modes…so I can’t share exposure information. It must be a Samsung thing 🙂
Social Camera
Owning the Samsung Galaxy S4 has opened a slightly new photographic world for me. It is not that the camera will do anything in particular that my Canon SX50HS will not…but I find myself pulling it out a lot for the quick HDR (when I do not want to set up a tripod for the Canon…no tripod necessary on the phone), or certainly an occasional panorama, and certainly if I think there is any chance I will want to share the image before I get back where I can work with it on my laptop. PicSay Pro on Android is a very capable image editor…I like both the way it works and the results it produces…and it works with full resolution files. Then too, Google+’s Auto Backup is a formidable attraction. I don’t have to do a thing, and my images from the S4 are uploaded to my Google+ account. Once there, Auto Awesome does some interesting things. For instance, if I take a conventional sequence of exposures to use with an HDR program later, Auto Awesome recognizes them as such, and makes the HDR…again, without my intervention. And it does a pretty good job! Then too, I can I can instantly share my PicSay Pro edited image on Facebook, email them to friends and family, etc. etc. The Galaxy S4 is a social camera…and its instant and painless connection to the social side of my life is one of its main attractions.
So that lead me to take a look at “real” cameras…you know, with a real zoom lens, and other creative options…that might provide some of the same experience. The obvious choice would have been the Samsung Galaxy Camera, which is every thing my phone is (except a phone) and a pretty much a real camera at the same time. However it is 1) relatively expensive for a Point and Shoot, and 2) I suspect, due for an refresh (as in Galaxy Camera 2) before the end of the year. So I looked for cameras that would connect to my phone and transfer images painlessly so that I could do the editing and sharing almost instantly on the phone. I knew from past experience with Eyfi cards, that I wanted a solution that let me choose which images got transferred to the phone. The Eyfi cards and their like just dump everything you take onto your connected device. You can fill the memory on a phone or tablet really fast during a full day in the field with your camera. That narrowed it down to a few wifi equipped Panasonics and, of course, the Samsung Smart Camera line. The Samsungs were less expensive and had as good reviews, I am already familiar with how the camera apps in them work, and they got the best ratings on the ease of using them via wifi with a phone or for direct upload to cloud storage, Facebook, etc.
So this is among my first shots from the Samsung WB250, 14mp biCMOS sensor. 18x zoom starting at 24mm equivalent (the wide angle is a requirement for me). All kinds of shooting modes, including in-camera HDR that does not require a tripod, auto bracketing for real HDR (ditto on the tripod), a great Macro mode, waterfall mode, night scene, shot, smart-zoom (automatically reduces the pixel count to maintain quality over the 18x mark), etc. etc  I have only begun to explore. This image was taken in my yard, transferred wirelessly to my phone, edited in PicSay Pro, auto-backuped to Google+ Photos, and now shared here directly from Google+. It all works really quite well. It will not replace my Canon SX50HS for most of my work…but it is a great Social Camera, and goes well beyond what the camera in my S4 can do.
There is probably a Galaxy Camera in my future, when they get around to a refresh, but the WB250 seems to do exactly what I need for now!
Calico Pennant Dragonfly
The Calico Pennant is among the most attractive dragonflies we have in Maine. It is not very big, but the combination of wing patterns and the brightly marked body make it sure to catch your eye when it is around. I have only seen two in Maine so far, and both of them in almost exactly the same spot at one of my dragonfly ponds…though last year’s Calico was not until August, and this one was in June. I particularly like the bokeh in this shot! It is simply a beautiful image…going well beyond an image of a bug!
Canon SX50HS with my usual modifications to Program. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom.
Trees at the Pond
I like these trees, and I like the way they frame the patch of pond and the trees and sky behind. I like it so well that I have taken this shot in most of the seasons when you can get to this place. It is right off the road, but they do not plow a way in in the winter, and it is unsafe to stop on the road and walk in. This is coming on for real summer in Maine. Our first sun, as it happens, in many days of rain…you can still see the mist hanging in the air over the pond.
This is the camera on the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone. Rich Tone / HDR mode. I then processed the image right on the phone with PicSay Pro…using sharpen and boost…but also a touch of Faux-HDR to open the shadows even more.