Hi Folks:
Last day of the month, and that means it’s time for me to sort through the images I’ve made this past month and pick my favourite. I’ve actually started working on a book of photographs (details will surface somewhere down the road when I get closer to my goal), and part of that means going through, sorting out and editing about a thousand images in Lightroom so that’s been taking up a lot of my time. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
I’ve written a couple of posts before on panoramic photography; this one is about an idea, an experiment if you like, that I tried recently.
There’s a back story for this experiment, and that is that in the downtown area here there’s a panoramic mural on the side of a building that’s approximately 60 metres/ 200 feet long. It’s a nice work, and I wanted to make a photograph of it. It’s on the side of a building, and that side faces a parking lot.
Now most panoramic photographs have one basic thing in common, which is that the location of the camera doesn’t change. If one is using a camera/ lens that’s capable of shifting, then those shifts can be used to capture more image area. Otherwise one rotates the camera to capture each image that is rendered in the panoramic software. I talked about this more in my Photo of the Month article for March. I mostly use Autopano Pro for my panoramas and my HDR work; it works well for me for the most part. I’ve also used Hugin, and more recently I’ve also played a bit with Adobe Photoshop CS5. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
It’s been a busy month of writing and blogging and other things, but I have managed to sneak out with my camera for a time or two! This month I thought I’d make the focus (pun intended) of my ‘photo of the month’ page an HDR image. The image below is a combination of nine photographs made at different exposures. Now most photographers today are at least somewhat similar with HDR, but in my experience most people associate it with the grungy, grainy look that HDR is most famous for. It has its place, but in my experience it’s overused. Besides, HDR stands simply for ‘High Dynamic Range’ and is quite useful as a technique for expanding the dyanic range (the number of tones, from white to black) in an image where the tonal range of the scene is beyond the camera’s ability to capture it. There’s an excellent article on HDR by Alexandre Buisse here.
That’s certainly the case with this image. It was made in a local park called ‘Christmas Hill‘, and it’s one of my favourite places in this area to make photographs. Capturing the detail in the shadow areas without blowing out the highlights where the sun strikes the moss was beyond the camera’s sensor. I uploaded the images into Lightroom, and then used Timothy Armes’ LR/Enfuse plugin to combine them into one blended image. Post processing included the usual (white balance, black point, white point, etc.) as well as some graduated filters to highlight the sun spot.
Click on image to see a larger version
So, that’s it for now. Go out and make some photographs!
Mike.
P.S. I came across this great tutorial yesterday by R.C. Concepcion on using Shadowbox JS to integrate a Lightroom web gallery into a WordPress blog. Maybe next month…
P.S. II, the Sequel: You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.
Hi Folks: As I mentioned back in November, I thought I’d dedicate the last day of each month to a ‘Photo of the Month’ page. This has been a very busy month of writing and posting and holidays and family and… but I have managed to make a few photographs. I’ve made more photographs this month than I’ve had a chance to run through Lightroom; truth be told I’m still processing LAST month’s images, but anyway. Of the photographs I have processed, I had a few choices I was happy with. But of all of the images I’ve made this month I wanted to dedicate this month’s ‘Photo of the Month’ page to an idea more than a specific photograph. It’s a project idea I’ve been playing with for a few years now but never got around to… yeah, one of those. This particular project I call ‘Leaf Shadows’. When the leaves fall from the trees in the autumn, they cover the ground and line our streets and some of them at least fall on our sidewalks. I’ve found that in the right conditions (I’ve asked, but Mother Nature isn’t sharing Her secrets), the rain leaches the tannins out of the leaves and ‘leaves’ behind an imprint of the leaf on the concrete. I was out Christmas shopping in Langford a few days before Christmas and came across some wonderful impressions. All I had with me was my walk-around camera, a Fuji FinePix S1500fd, and I didn’t have my tripod, but I made a few shots anyway. I think they cover the concept pretty well, and I’ll take a more serious look at this idea, maybe next autumn. Fortunately this whole leaves falling from the trees thing happens every year! I’m going to post three of the images I made that day. Of the three, the last one’s my favourite. Different people see different things in them. Are they in clouds? Are they skeletons of leaves left behind? Are they stories unto themselves? You decide…
Mike.
(click on the images for a larger view)
