Naquada

Spent the day today wondering along the Long Walk in Windsor Great Park, and as well as being some leg achingly good exercise, I took some more HDR photos.

Although very nice in colour, I wanted to see what they looked like in black and white. So after a bit of black and white channel manipulation in Photoshop, I’m quite pleased with the results. They seem to have a nice balanced exposure, and both photos are growing on me.

I also took some more panoramic shots from the top of the hill at the end of the Long Walk. They will need a bit of stitching together in the next few days, but the thought of how to do HDR panoramic shots did cross my mind. I guess I’d need to take a number of exposures for each part of the panorama, combine each set into a HDR image and then stitch them together, more work to do on DoubleTake and PhotoMatrix I guess.

I’m generally getting much happier at the photos I’m taking. Still not quite the photos I want to be taking, but getting closer with each set..

I’ve been playing with a number of different photo techniques recently, HDR is great fun, as are taking panoramas.

I found this fun little technique for doing pseudo ‘Tilt and Shift’, making aerial photos look a bit like miniature models, much like the old photos of model villages or train sets.

The method is really simple, and doesn’t actually need a real tilt and shift lens (which would probably set you back a fair amount of cash). I’ve used a Lensebaby to get some nice ‘off beat’ type photos, and I think the baby could do the same effect as this, but I haven’t tried yet.

The tilt-shift fake here was done in Photoshop, and there’s some quite nice photos in the Tilt-shift miniature fakes flickr pool. The trick really is getting the right lighting and angle on the photo to get a convincing end result, that doesnt end up just looking like some weird Photoshop mishap.

Christopher Phin has a great tutorial that does a good job of heading you on the right track to get some nice shots. I’ll be playing with some more, and the lensbaby in the next few weeks..

I posted the other week about High Dynamic Range Photos or HDR Photos. After a few test shoots out at Dinton Pastures last week, I headed off to Virgina Water with my camera.

Its a pretty simple task to set up to capture the images for HDR processing. You need to set up your camera for AEB or Auto Exposure Bracketing. I normally set up the continuous shoot as well so the camera takes three consecutive exposures. You need to set the bracketing for the camera at about 2, so it will take a -2, a 0 and a +2 exposure compensation.

Ideally you want to try and take the photos with a tripod, but so far I’ve managed to take pretty much all of the photos with bright lighting and a steady hand. This will give you three photos (one normal, one under exposed, and one over exposed), you can actually use as many exposures as you like. With a steady scene and a tripod you could take five exposures in a compensation step of 1. Basically what you’re looking for is a good range of exposure of the scene your interested in.

You then need to put these images into software that will combine these images, I brought PhotoMatrix on MacOS (although its available on Windows as well), at $99 its fairly expensive, but, personally I’m finding it great for the price. You can then create a HDR image from these images, which will give you the high dynamic range image, which is saveable as a HDR format (or Tiff floating point).

To get something useable, you’ll need to tone map the image down to something that can be saved into jpeg format. Really in the tone mapping you can play with your artistic side. The default value for ‘Colour Saturation’ sits at about 42%. I normally bump this up slightly to about 60%-62%, which gives a bit more of a vivid and rich colour.

You’ll see from the images I’ve started to put up onto flickr that they look quite surreal. I absolutely love this technique for photos, its so simple to take, but the images really are amazing.

I have about another 50 shots that I’ve still yet to convert into HDR, and I think that will be the time when I really play with the tone mapping controls, just really to see what effects I can get.

There are some amazing shots coming out of the Flickr HDR pool, and people seem to like my first attempts..

So I recently discovered something pretty cool, as well as finally working out how to put my 350D into bulb exposure!! I’ve found the whole new world of HDR or High Dynamic Range Photography.

Photographs in extreme lighting are often a compromise, you either get the highlights overexposed, or the shadows underexposed. So wouldn’t it be nice if you could take photos that are nearer to what the eye actually sees than what the cameras photosensor sees ?

Unlike the digital world, the Dynamic Range of real-world scenes can be quite high — ratios of 100,000:1 are common in the natural world. Something that previously digital cameras just cannot capture.

By taking multiple photos with varying exposures, normally via a continuous shot mode with Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB), you can use software to combine them into a HDR format picture. A HDR image stores pixel values that span the whole tonal range of real-world scenes. Unfortunately few, in fact no normal monitors or printers can display this, so the image needs to be tone mapped down to something that a normal monitor or printer can use. The resulting photo, has all the exposure of the combined images, and it as close as you can get to what your eye might have seen.

The colours, and range of light in the photo is much better than a normal single exposure photo. The pictures coming out of using this technique are pretty stunning. I found that using PhotoMatrix Pro on the Mac gives pretty good results, and is currently what I’ve using to experiment with at home.

The Flickr HDR pool shows some amazing shots using PhotoMartix and even Photoshop CS2, which has the ability to create HDR photos built in (although Photomatix does seem to do a better job). I’m looking forwarrd to Sunday, as I’m heading out to try and get some proper HDR images that should be more interesting that stuff around the house shots that I’m currently playing with..

Three photographers, Addi Somekh, Charlie Eckert, and Andy Vermouth, having discovered that they could twist balloons, and make people laugh, decided to engage in a worldwide project; The Balloon Hat Experience.

The three decided that it would be cool if they could go around the world to make balloon hats for people and photograph them. In 1996 they set off for their first trial trip to three central American countries; Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. That started the ball rolling with its success, spending eight weeks in Europe.

They then branched out into West and East Africa, learning to use flash, and fast balloon twists to avoid the huge crowds that gathers in places like Ghana and Burkina Faso.

By the end of their 1998 trip they had visited 34 countries and shot over 10,000 photos. The gallery of photos is impressive, especially Central America and Africa.

Surreal, but interesting…

Its been one of those days again, quite busy and stressful, but working from my home office I had a wonderful view of the sky during the day. Its been bitterly cold all day, and the sky outside my office window looked quite weird, having watched it change during the day, just before sunset I decided to clock off for a bit and take some photos.

I’m not entirely sure why it looked so odd, but there were very interesting and somewhat strange shapes in the clouds. The almost setting sun also picked out the vapour trails of the planes heading over, although I didn’t manage to catch it (flat battery on the Canon!), there was a brief period where the moon was also visible in the setting sun.

I love looking up at the sky, especially late evening, or early morning. There is always a mass of interesting shapes and patterns, and the light cast by the sunset or sunrise always creates an amazing depth to the sky.

I think probably the most amazing looking cloud photos I’ve seen are the ones of Mammatus Clouds taken over Hastings, Nebraska by Jorn Olsen, they are just truly bizarre!! I also found through Jorn’s site some great photos that Kathryn Piotrowski of TwisterChasers.com has taken..

Again it was one of those weekends when I just let my mind free wheel and absorb everything that was going on around it, which is quite possibly the very best thing you can do at a weekend..

No stress, just clear and simple relaxation. Ending up, through a somewhat indirect route via Basingstoke and Winchester on the sea front in Bournemouth.

I’d taken my camera with me and parked in the normal empty car park on the hill above the pier. This was the time to walk off the particularly large meal I’d had at lunch time a few hours earlier, and get some photos and some practise..

I got some really nice shots walking from Bournemouth pier up to Boscombe. Some turned out well, others, like the rain shelter didn’t, not that it wasn’t a nice shot, more that you can’t see the old beach man sat inside it.. His grey matted hair, and dark dirty clothes were in contrast to the fresh white of the shelter.. still not a bad photo..

The lensebaby is working out really well now, although I prefer to use it in black and white, its a personal preference of mine. Mooseherder has some great colour lensebaby photos up on flickr which I’m looking to learn from (love that EXIF data!), how does everyone take better photos than me!!

Moving vaguely back to food, I also took some time to buy The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen by Nigel Slater, which is an excellent book, not just because I love Nigel Slaters cooking, real food with real ingredients, but because its one of the best cookery books I’ve read in a long time.

Its written like a journal, day by day, meal by meal. So everything is always in season, a perfect meal for that time, in fact day, of the year, mixed with descriptive smatterings of daily life its a great resource for those moments when your just stuck for what to cook..

Thoroughly recommended to keep in the kitchen for those drop in guests and short notice meals!!

So look what turned up in the post yesterday..

yeah baby.. bend it!! Its the lensbaby 2.0, the worlds only Bend-able Finger Tip Selective Focus SLR Lens!

I really didn’t know what to expect from the lensbaby when I brought it.. Its certainly different, unique, quirky, odd-ball and above all, fun!!

Its also absolutely nothing like any lens out there.. No auto-focus or digital balancing with this one.. this is 100% finger tip control (literally!)

When I read the instructions it sounded really hard to handle, but once you understand where to put your fingers (so to speak!) its amazingly simple to use.. The only thing I’m really sure of at the moment is that there is a huge amount of playing and experimentation needed to get the best out of it.. I took about 50-60 shots with it last night and liked maybe about 5, I did find, at the moment at least, using the lensbaby in unbent mode, didn’t really create interesting photos. Easing the lens to the side and twisting it created some wild and freaky shots.

I’ll definitely be playing with this more over the next few days and seeing what I can get out of it, if nothing else its a fun little toy..

Expect some baby-bended photos soon..

So, spurred on by the images I found yesterday from Tread and others, I decided to do some of my own toy camera stuff today.

If you click on the image you’ll be able to see the full set I’ve put together. I actually love these pictures now, as they are getting even closer to how I want my pictures to look.. More practise, more photos I think is what’s needed..

I took the plunge and brought a Lensebaby 2.0 yesterday for my Canon 350D, which I think I’m going to have great fun this over the next week.. Its great in that it just destroys all the clean, exact things you want from a digital camera!! I especially love the manual focus (finger tip in fact!).. Dead cool!!

Not quite sure what I like about this set of shots.. I think its the slightly battered feel, especially the one of the fan the slight distortion and the leakage really look nice with the battered fan blades.

I think also in faded colour these would look pretty good as well, but I do like black and white images, but since its a sunny day, and I’m still on holiday for the rest of the week, I could be taking a fair few more pictures.

They still are not as good at Tread’s images but I like them.. Love to know what you think..