Yaaaay! Apple this morning announced that high dynamic range photography is going to be built into iOS 4.1! Details to follow!
Category: HDR Photography
Well, maybe not exactly “sail”…
Heading north today I diverted into Sausalito for this photo of Andrey Melnichenko’s yacht “A”. Pretty awesome stuff just sitting there cooling its heel (or rudders!).
Categories
Heading to Point Reyes
Later this week I’ll be joining Dave Wyman and Ken Rockwell for a photo workshop at Point Reyes. So looking forward to getting away – and shooting in the fog!
Below is an early RAW image I shot with my first DSLR – a Canon 30D. This image, shot in RAW on May 13, 2007, was just processed tonight in Photomatix Pro (double tone-mapped) and in Photoshop CS5.
Enjoy!
Trey Ratcliff from StuckinCustoms.com has just published “Top 10 HDR Mistakes, and How to Fix Them“, another one of in his new eBooks series.
Trey’s the master of all things HDR – his free HDR tutorial was my tutor when I first started playing with high dynamic range photography a couple of years ago. This new 37 page eBook walks through the top 10 mistakes beginners make when getting started in HDR. One of them, his point about saturation of the three primary colors, was a real insight for me. By the way, both Trey’s new book and his earlier one about his digital workflow both look spectacular on my iPad! I use Dropbox to get it from my MacBook Pro onto the iPad and then into iBooks as a PDF – works slick!
You can order/download this new eBook here for $9.97 – and see his other eBooks here.
(Note: If you click here to buy Trey’s new eBook, I’ll earn an affiliate fee on your purchase.)
I got going early this morning to head over to the Palo Alto Concours d’Elegance sponsored as an annual event by the Palo Alto Lions Club. It’s pretty amazing to get there early and watch the cars arrive – often with their owners in period costume!
Today, like last year, was going to be a hot one. I finally faded about 10 AM – just before Brian Douglas took to the air on KSFO with his auto show.
Here’s a set on Flickr of the post-processed shots from my time at the Concours. These were shot using my Canon 5D Mark II – in Aperture priority. They were post-processed using Adobe Lightroom 3 and Photomatix Pro as single image HDR’s.
A bit abstract perhaps, but I enjoyed how they turned out – and I certainly didn’t feel like lugging a tripod around to shoot multi-image HDR’s!
I was reminded by Chris Gulker’s ’56 Chevy post on our InMenlo.com blog that this Sunday is the annual Concours d’Elegance at Stanford – a benefit for the Palo Alto Lions Club. I attended for the first time last year – and had a great time shooting some great classic cars! Here’s a link to my photo set on Flickr from last year’s event.
Below is another great shot – taken in the classic campground area – of a Teardrop camping trailer. This is an enhanced image – transformed the original Raw file from the 5D into a high dynamic range (HDR) image using Photomatix Pro and cropped to a 16:9 form factor.
Early yesterday, I took off on a photo shoot expedition up to Marin County – and ended up capturing one of my favorite shots of San Francisco Bay with my tiny Canon PowerShot S90.
It’s been a very popular photo on Flickr – and tonight I made a version of it available for personal use on iPads – 1600 pixels wide, 132 pixels/inch – just perfect. It’s available for non-commercial use (like on your iPad!) via a Creative Commons license.
If you’ve got an iPad and are looking for some new wallpaper, take a look at this image! You can customize it (using Photoshop or Preview) to add you own personal information to the image – so that if you happen to leave you iPad behind it’s got its own “luggage tag” built-in. If you want to license it for commercial rights, contact me: licensing@sjl.us.
Enjoy!
PS: You may also want to check out Trey Ratcliff’s iPad wallpaper app – based on his spectacular HDR images that he shares on StuckinCustoms.com daily.
Very early yesterday, I headed into Yosemite National Park for a quick one day photo shoot – with my Canon 5D Mark II and Canon PowerShot S90 in hand. You can see some early results in my Yosemite Flickr set here.
Most of the photos I shot with the 5D were shot on a monopod – good for some stability and sharpness in the individual images but not good enough for post-processing HDR images without aligning the photos.
A few tests confirmed that Photomatix wasn’t nearly as good as Photoshop CS5 at aligning the 3 raw images I had shot for each capture. So my workflow evolved into the following:
- Open the 3 images in PhotoShop as layers in a single document. The simplest way to do this is to use Bridge CS5 – selecting Tools – Photoshop – Load Files into Photoshop Layers… after selecting the 3 images to be used.
- Once Photoshop has opened the images, then select Edit – Auto Align to align the layers.
- Then select Files – Scripts – Export Layers to Files… to export each layer (now aligned with the others). Select JPG when prompted and select a filename and location that makes sense for these 3 images.
- Now that the images have been aligned (this is only a requirement for handheld HDR!), you can go ahead and open them in Photomatix and continue the HDR creation process.
- Once you’ve tweaked Photomatix and saved the resulting HDR image, you may want to open it again in Photoshop and apply a few additional adjustments – sharpening in particular.
That’s it – a bit complicated. Makes me want to go invest in a good tripod – to avoid the need to auto-align the images!
The Canon PowerShot S90 I bought last fall (when my right shoulder was basically out of commission due to a massive rotator cuff tear) has proven to be a great camera for High Dynamic Range photography – in addition to everyday use.
Yesterday, I headed out to try to master the settings for HDR on the S90 – heading over to Berkeley to shoot some photos on the UC Berkeley campus (see this Flickr set). I had posted the basic settings I’ve been using back in late January.
Yesterday, I experimented a bit more – particularly moving away from fixed to Auto ISO and ensuring that the f/stop I used was set to the mid-point of the remaining range available after you’ve composed the shot and cranked in any zoom. Allowing the ISO to be managed by the camera helps ensure that the under and overexposed shots are actually achievable. My earlier experience with fixed ISO was that I’d sometimes end up with one of them not being a full 2 f/stops away from normal.
In post-processing, I also experimented with the new HDR Pro feature of Photoshop CS5. I came away liking some of the results but continue to like the Photomatix Pro effects better. I’ll continue experimenting with Photoshop CS5 as I’m still learning how to tweak the results to come closer to my favorite look with Photomatix. When I have a chance, I’ll post some comparison shots between the two post-processing tools on Flickr.
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to do a photowalk at Stanford with Trey Ratcliff (that’s me with the tiny Canon S90 on my tripod!). It was a rainy, wet day – Trey was tweeting with us in real time about maybe yes, maybe no for the photowalk – yet about 45 of us turned out to meet Trey at the Oval and to then walk with him through Stanford Memorial Church up to the Tressider Union.
This photowalk with Trey at Stanford was one of those experiences you really remember – with Trey taking time to meet each of us – in the rain, helping us with our shooting and even passing out goodies with his Dad (including his Mom’s fudge!) as we relaxed together at the end of our photowalk. In the days afterwards, he shared his comments on our shooting together that late wet afternoon in our Stuck in Stanford Flickr group. It really doesn’t get much better than this in life – a special couple of hours!
Trey’s a pretty interesting guy – he’s the proprietor of a beautiful website at StuckInCustoms.com and the author of one of my favorite books: A World in HDR
Trey’s now sharing some of the unique skills he’s developed as his photography has become his business in a new eBook titled Digital Workflow for Photographers. If you’re interested in learning how a smart pro manages his digital photography workflow, Trey’s eBook is what you need.
The eBook is available in two versions – the basic book ($15.95) and a slightly more expensive version ($19.95) that includes extra screenshots showing how Trey does it along with illustrations for managing the multiple images required for HDR photos.
(Note: If you click here to buy Trey’s new eBook, I’ll earn an affiliate fee on your purchase.)
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