Archive for the ‘HDR’ Category

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The Wonderful Dallas Skyline

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

HDR Talk at Alcon Labs

I will be giving a talk on HDR at Alcon Labs in Fort Worth on September 16th. If you work at Alcon, be sure to stop by, it should be a fun time! Unfortunately, the talk will not be open to the public. So the only way in is to work at Alcon, or you might be able to get in if you have a family member working there (emphasis on might). The talk will be sort of an introduction to what HDR is, the science and thought process behind it, why I use it for most of my landscape and travel work, and possibly a brief overview of my work flow if there is time. The talk is being hosted by the company’s photography club and it will be held at 12:30.

James’ Monday Morning Rant

Yesterday on Facebook I came across a post asking what made a photographer a professional. This person simply wanted to know. Is it the list of clients, the amount of gear you have, how much money you have invested into your business, if you have a business license, how many clients you have, etc, etc. I see this type of rhetoric a lot these days, and this is how I feel about it: Who cares!

If you want to be completely logical about the situation, here it is: A professional is someone (no matter what their field) that gets paid for what they do. That is the definition, plain and simple. It doesn’t matter your skill level. You can be a terrible photographer and still be a professional. An amateur is simply someone who does a trade or skill simply for the love of that said trade or skill. No money involved. An amateur can be one of the most skilled photographers in the world, better than any “professional.” It’s just a definition. Being an amateur isn’t necessarily bad and being a professional isn’t necessarily good.

The thing that got under my skin was the constant replies this photographer was getting by others in the field. Saying that you weren’t a professional unless you had a good client list, or really good gear, or super honed photographic skills. This is all fluff! In the end, photography is about creating an image and telling a story with it. It doesn’t matter what kind of gear shot it, whether it’s straight out of the camera or put through hours and hours of post processing in photoshop, whether it was taken with a six thousand dollar camera or a six hundred dollar camera, whether the person taking it had forty years of experience or four days. All that matters is the images, and the visual impact they bring to their viewer. That’s it. Stop worrying about this empty rhetoric and get out there and shoot. For the love of photography, and for nothing else.

The Wonderful Dallas Skyline

So, I’m a member of a local photography group here in DFW, and I saw on the calendar that the group was going to meet in August at the Renaissance Hotel in Dallas to shoot car trails on night from the roof of the hotel. I was in for sure! I got a reminder in my email inbox and I noticed it was Saturday so I got pretty excited. I took my wife Kristin and we headed to the hotel. We got there about thirty minutes before sunset and never saw a single photographer there. We headed downstairs to the lobby to ask where everyone was and how to get on the roof. The gentlemen that helped us knew nothing about this meetup, and it wasn’t until I looked at my iPhone again that I noticed an important clue to our situation: The meetup wasn’t until next Saturday! Ugh!

I’m kind of a dork sometimes (my wife would say most of the time). The man helping us was kind enough to let us on the roof anyways, so as not to waste an entire trip to Dallas for nothing. We waited on the rooftop for about twenty minutes or so before I started to get the light (or lack of) that I was after.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon 70-200mm, ISO 200, 135mm, f/7.1, 2.0 sec



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The Secret Lagoon in Dallas

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Does anybody know where this is located in Dallas? If you can guess where it is, or know where it is, leave a comment below the post and I’ll send you a free set of my HDR Desktop Wallpapers. You can also use them for your iPad, iPhone, or whatever else you can think of.

Its surprising to see something like this in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Dallas. Kind of like Central Park in New York City. It’s nice, it just doesn’t seem to fit in. Or maybe it’s the city that doesn’t fit in? One of the convenient things about photography (and sometimes inconvenient) is that you can use the limitations of the frame to conceal the true location of where the scene is. In the end, art is about creating an image. It doesn’t matter how you get the finished product, just the message you are trying to send with it. An image taken straight from a camera and printed on canvas can have the same impact as an HDR that took countless hours to finish and perfect. It’s all about the visual impact. In the case of this image, I didn’t want to convey that this place was in the middle of a city. You can also take this idea to places like the zoo. Go on a trip to your local zoo and make a point to photograph the animals in a way that doesn’t give away the fact they are in a zoo. If you get a shot of a leopard, try and frame it as if she were on the hunt in the middle of an African field. If your subject is a bird, look for a plain and natural looking background for a backdrop. One that doesn’t give away the feeling of a confined space. Nobody wants to see pictures of an Elephant next to a fence that says “Fort Worth Zoo” on it. Unless your audience is an animal rights group or something.



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Eat, Swill, and Chill

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

The title of this image pretty much sums up the way of life in Hawaii. It’s their version of “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry.” But Hawaii isn’t about being merry, it’s about relaxing. Not that the two can’t go together, but the latter is of utmost importance. One of the great things about Hawaii is the restaurants, like this one. They are all open air seating. But let’s not stop there, so are the hotel lobbies, the airport terminals and the markets. Everything is outdoors. After all, why wouldn’t it be when you have pretty much perfect weather all the time? This restaurant is located on the main strip in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Right across the street I was standing in to set up this image, is the Pacific Ocean. When you eat at any place on this main strip, it’s outside, in the 80 some odd degree weather, with no bugs or mosquito, and the sound of the waves crashing against the sea wall, with the cool ocean breeze brushing across your skin. Yes, Hawaii is pretty much perfect, and I would move there in a heartbeat if given the opportunity. Maybe one day. But for now, pictures like this will have to do :-) .

Photographing places like this at night can be tricky, especially for HDR processing, and especially when you have people moving about during the exposures. Another tricky thing is the color management. With all the tungsten lighting coming from the inside of the bar and street lights, it can become very hard to get an image that looks good. The Photomatix result of this image looked just terrible. But that’s just what you get sometimes, the program has a few issues with maintaining proper color when using the tone mapping portion. To correct this, I laid a Black & White filter over the image, making the entire image…well…black and white. The trick is to use the opacity slide and take the opacity of the B&W layer down. In this case, to 61%. Why 61%? There is no complicated or scientific reason behind it, that’s just how far I took it until it felt right to me. The B&W layer sucks the over-saturation and tungsten lighting out of the image, cooling it down and leaving what you see below. With any filter in Photoshop, there is a mask that comes with it. With the mask selected, I then took my brush and began painting away the mask where I wanted some of that saturation and vibrance to shine through and draw the eyes of the viewer. I brought in this color to the two restaurant signs, as well as the bar area on the top level, and all the little lights strung about the place.

Next time you are shooting or processing an image, pay close attention to the light in the image. Light is what draws the viewer in. How is the light going to accomplish this? Where will the eye go? If it goes somewhere it shouldn’t, is there a way to divert its attention? Focus on the subject of your image and make sure that’s where the eye goes. When you begin to think this way, the possibilities are endless.

If you have any other tips similar to this one, be sure to leave them below in the comments section, we’d all love to hear them!

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8, ISO 125, 24mm, f/4.5, 0.6 seconds, 7 exposures



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A Day at the Lake

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Last Saturday I got the opportunity to head out to the lake with some good friends. And man did I need to get away. We headed out Lake Ray Roberts and spent the day wake boarding, tubing, knee boarding, and just having a good time. I brought my camera to get a few shots here and there, but there really wasn’t too much time for that. I did manage to get some pretty fun shots with my fisheye lens though. Sometimes I do my best to NOT make it obvious that I used a fisheye. As you move the camera and lens up and down while looking through the viewfinder, you’ll see the lines of the horizon shift from dramatic distortion at the top, to very subtle towards the middle. The subtle (yet still obvious to the trained eye) distortion is what I went for in a recent shot I took in Laguna Beach, which I will post below to show the difference. With todays shot, I embraced the distortion, which is fun sometimes! The closer you move the horizon line to the top of the frame, the more rounded it becomes. I also had to hand hold this set of exposures on a boat moving around in the wakes. The interesting thing about that is this was the first time Photomatix 4 majorly failed to remove the ghosting from the image, even with manual ghosting removal. I won’t hold it against them though, I was holding the camera in my hands, standing awkwardly to make sure my feet didn’t get in the frame, on a boat in the water. When Photomatix fails, you just have to fix it in Photoshop. The bit where the program failed was the boat itself. Photomatix nailed the sky and the water, but the boat was just a big mess of multiple exposures laying on top of each other in different places. When this happens, just bring the correct exposure for the subject into Photoshop, place it on top of the Photomatix result, and then mask the subject through to the bottom frame. You may have to do some more advanced masking if color balance is off, but that tutorial is for another day.

And here’s the more subtle approach. You can see just a bit of distortion on the left side of the horizon.



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The Lonely Dock

Monday, August 16th, 2010

A few weeks back, we got the opportunity to stay at a beautiful lake house for a few days in east Texas with the family. To be honest, I’m not even sure what lake it was on! During most trips, you won’t find me anywhere without my camera. I’m always running around everywhere trying to fill up a a few months worth of images for the blog and my portfolio :-) . This trip however was different. I didn’t really feel like taking pictures much. And that’s ok! Sometimes you just have to put the camera down, sit back, and relax. The lake house was extravegant and seems to have been built for relaxing. The middle of the three stories had a beautiful, screened in porch with couches, rocking chairs, a table, ceiling fans, and a nice view of the lake. So needless to say, that is where I spent most of my time. Reading, watching TED videos, thinking, making a point not to think, visiting with family, and just trying to soak it all in. It was a very relaxing weekend!

Running around getting pictures is a blast, and I love every minute of it. But again, we have to make sure that sometimes, we stop to smell the roses. The image below is the only one I took on the trip. The lake house had a main, two level dock with a boat and a platform to fish off of, and then there was this one off to the side (I assume for friends and neighbors to pull in their boats). I noticed the cloud cover and how the water was reflecting it and decided this would be my one shot :-) .



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Ye Olde Petrified Wood Station

Friday, August 13th, 2010

The Petrified Wood Station is a historic gas station located in Decatur, Texas. It’s connected to an old Inn, where supposedly Bonnie and Clyde stayed one night. I don’t know if that is true (it seems like those two stayed everywhere in Texas!) but I have no reason to deny it.

I already processed a similar shot of this station back in December, but I never was quite satisfied with it. It was in full color, and the sky was boring with no clouds. I finally gave it another shot today and I’m pretty happy with the results. Some people go over-board with textures, using them on too many images or applying them too aggressively to images that don’t really need it. The trick I think is to always get the texture where you want it, and then pull it back about 10-20%. Actually, that’s probably true with just about anything in processing. That’s the great thing about Photoshop though, you can always pull back whatever you have done in a certain layer to taste by dragging the opacity slider down a bit. Make sure you mask the texture out of the subject though (in most cases). The subject needs to have clarity and the viewers eyes need to be drawn to it. Simply throwing a texture on top of an image and exporting it is a bad idea. In this image, I masked the texture out of the sign, as well as the gas station itself.

For this image, I wanted the viewer to go directly to the high key whites of the sign. It’s a great subject to draw the viewer in. The sign then points directly to the station itself, providing a natural path for the eye to follow to the station. The texture in the background not only adds an interesting dynamic to an otherwise boring and dull sky, it also separates itself from the subject and does a good job at what it’s supposed to do: be a background.

As photographers, we have to pay attention to the subtleties of light in an image.

  • How does the light serve to capture the viewers attention?
  • Are there bright spots in the image that distract from the subject?
  • Are there distracting objects that compete with the subject?
  • Is the natural light complimenting, or taking away from the texture and shape of the subject?

If you don’t already, start thinking about things like this BEFORE you set up for a shot. This is where you start creating pictures instead of taking them. Have a great weekend everyone! If you have any other input besides the bullets I mentioned, let me know in the comments!



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Twin Palms

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

One of the many good things about keeping a daily blog is finding old photos that I have yet to process. I found this one hiding in the archives today and decided to finally process it. Sometimes, the HDR process is just right for a scene. Other times, the inability of a camera to capture the full spectrum of light can make the scene actually come to life. Other times, I feel that an image should land somewhere in the middle. I have 5 exposures of this scene sitting in my archives. I didn’t even bother trying to combine all 5, I knew that I wouldn’t like the outcome! Once you have processed thousands of photos, you start to develop a sense of how the image should look before you even begin processing it. I knew that I wanted the foreground here to be dark. I knew that combining all 5 exposures would bring in far too much light. So I sent two exposures over to Photomatix, one exposed for the sky, and one of the foreground that was 1 stop underexposed. I then took the result from Photomatix into Photoshop and stacked it with the original two exposures for some masking. I took care of some aberration problems, took down the saturation quite a bit, ran some Topaz filters on it, fixed some haloing issues, and then I had the final image. What do you think?

Can you guess where this place is located? If you can identify the city and state, I’ll send out a free set of my HDR Wallpaper Collection!



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Bienvenidos a miami

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Yet another page added!

Last week I added a page called Digital Camera Recommendations to help viewers who are trying to decide what camera to buy. Yesterday was 11 Tips for Those Starting Out with Photography to well, help those starting out in photography. If you saw that page, you may have noticed that I slipped in even another page – the Lynda.com Review.

Lynda.com is a seemingly never ending wealth of online training videos on just about any digitally creative topic you can think of. I use Lynda.com on the regular to brush up on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, and so on. It’s where I learned HTML and CSS so I can run my blog and website on my own, without having to hire a webmaster. When you visit the page, be sure to click the link at the bottom if you’d like to receive a 24 hour pass to their website. They were kind enough to offer it to the readers here and I think you will be hooked if you try it out!

Bienvenidos a miami

This one is from the financial district of Brickell (right Craig?) in Miami. There is nothing that puts a smile on my face quite like pointing the barrel of my lens straight into the sun. While some people do everything they can to avoid lens flare, I tend to embrace it at times. Something about it brings a warmth to the image that I love. I also am a big fan of the way the morning light brings so much depth to images. Like the way the sunlight is pouring in through the bottom of the palm trees behind the fountain, or the rim light of the water on the right side of the fountain.

If you’re going to photograph something, get your butt up early and take advantage of the sunrise. You will never be sorry!



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Cascade

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Artist Spotlight Series Starting Tomorrow!

If you’re a daily reader here at the blog (and you should be!) then you have no doubt heard me talking about a new series on the blog called the “Artist Spotlight.” Well, I am glad to announce that the first installment will start tomorrow with a very special guest. He’s an artist that I have grown to admire over the last year or so, and he has traveled to the far ends of the globe to pursue the things that inspire him. Be sure to check the blog first thing tomorrow and make sure to leave him a comment to let him know what you think about his work. Nice comments keep artists going!

New Page Added!

Wow, a lot of exclamation point worthy things to mention today! Yesterday I worked literally ALL day to create a couple new pages for the blog. The first one is a list of Digital Camera Recommendations. I get a number of emails and messages from readers and friends wanting to know what camera to buy. Since this is such a hard question to answer in one email or message, I figured the best way would be to have a page dedicated to the camera bodies I recommend.

You may have noticed I said “a couple” pages. That’s right! I’ll announce the second page soon :-)

Cascade | Rainbow Falls State Park

Another beauty from Hawaii today! These are the “boiling pots” at Rainbow Falls State Park, on the Big Island of Hawaii. When the river is flowing because of rain, these little collection pools start to look as if they are boiling. If I remember corectly, there are little tunnels that connect each pool, so instead of flowing over to the next one, they go behind and underneath the next one, causing water to boil up. Or I just made that up, I can’t quite remember. Now, anyone that has been to this place can attest to this fact: I didn’t adjust the color in this water at all! That is just one of the beautiful and crazy things about Hawaii. Everything seems over saturated and unreal, but it all is. Unless Inception is real…

I figure I should also include the image below. This was taken at the top of these collection pools. This just shows how quickly a landscape in Hawaii can change.



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Up!

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Artist Spotlight Series

Big announcement! My dream for this blog is that it will be a sort of hub for creative minds to come and learn new things, discover new people, find inspiration for their own work, and the like. In the next little while, I will be launching a new series of blog posts called the Artist Spotlight Series. These posts, given weekly or monthly (haven't decided yet), will feature creative artists from around DFW, around the US, and even the world. While this blog leans towards photography, I will also be featuring painters, musicians, graphic designers, and more. We creative people are always searching for inspiration for our work, and what better way than to hear the thoughts of other creative minds? Stay tuned everyone, this should be fun :-)

Up!

On the Fourth of July, I went over to the Gaylord Texan hotel and resort to photography the fireworks from atop their parking garage. Man was that a mistake! It was kind of a last minute decision and I had no idea what was in store. By the time the fireworks started there were so many people packed onto the roof of that place that I couldn’t move at all. And to make it worse, there were people surrounding us that had no sense of personal space, they were literally leaning on my wife and she had to tell them to back up!

After the show, we headed over to the hotel and walked around inside. I’m pretty sure the inside is modeled after Alice in Wonderland, I’ll post some pictures of the place later. It’s basically a huge open space with paths winding around restaurants, shops, and photo ops. I walked to the middle of the place and looked up to see this.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon 15mm Fisheye, ISO 125, 15mm, f/4.5, 1.3 seconds



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