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.
. 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!
