Here’s another view of the Victorian homes across from San Francisco’s Alamo Square known as the Painted Ladies. There are usually several photographers up on this grassy hillside shooting this scene with the combination of the Victorians in the foreground and the San Francisco skyline in the background.
On this particular morning in February 2009, there was a clearing winter store and the sun had just begun lighting part of the city as the clouds remained in the sky. I had been up on Twin Peaks as the clearing began where I saw the opportunity to capture some interesting light and sky in this classic San Francisco shot.
This image was post-processed first as a single image HDR (from my Canon 5D Mark II) using Photomatix Pro and then in Photoshop CS5 using a combination of techniques that accentuate the drama in the sky and the colors and lighting of the Victorians themselves. Click on the image itself to see a larger version.
I recently took a 1:1 workshop with Jaime Ibarra – wanting to learn more about his technique for post-processing images. His approach to post-processing is strikingly different – and one which I enjoy. And he’s also an amazing photographer as well!
Jaime and I spent a couple of hours together via Skype video talking about both his approach to photography, some new challenges for me, and then his approach to post-processing images in Photoshop. I’ve been to several photography workshops over the last couple of years – but this one was really unique and different – and I learned a lot!
Frankly, I expected our time together would focus mostly on post-processing – but we spent a lot of time upfront talking just about photography, what it means to us, how we approach it, how we’re challenged by it, etc. That discussion was surprising for me – and enlightening. Great fun. Perhaps even more useful to me in terms of my wanting to learn about portrait shooting than the post-processing techniques Jaime subsequently shared.
So, what did I learn? Here’s an example of an image I both shot and post-processed earlier today using some of what I learned from my workshop with Jaime. The colors are different – not exactly unusual, but different. Different enough to matter and capture the mood. The venue is the California Avenue Farmers Market in Palo Alto. The image is titled “Karmel Korn” – shot with my Canon 5D Mark II with the Canon 135mm f/2 lens.
I had a great time this afternoon catching up with my good friend Doug Kaye. Doug’s recently had a pretty serious illness – and we were all worried about him during that time. But, based on my visit today, he’s almost back to his usual self – and about 20 pounds lighter. I hope we’ll be out shooting together again soon.
While we were getting caught up, Doug talked about this reaction to this particular photo of mine that I posted on Google+ last week. It’s kind of a strange shot – taken in a village in Provence, France in 2006 using one of my early Canon Powershot cameras – an S500. I was casually flipping through my portfolio of images in Lightroom when I stumbled across the original and something about it caught my eye. I brought the original image into Photoshop, tweaked it a bit (Tonal Contrast primarily) in Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 before taking it to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2. A bit of vignetting, some subtle toning, and it was complete.
Doug’s reaction was what stimulated our conversation this afternoon – his comment on this photo was:
Love this one! The foreground bars give such a twist to the story. Lighting/vignetting really place the emphasis well. Great composition & crop.
— Doug Kaye
This fall, I’ve been taking a photography course at Stanford and one of the themes the instructor has educated us to is the notion of layers in a photo. I think that’s what Doug saw in this photo – and, perhaps, what I saw when I originally spotted in among a mass of older photos in my library. There are several layers at work here – the outer bars, the wall and ledge with the shoes, the windows, and the reflections in the windows – or both the bars and a more distant wall. Almost seems hard to imagine squeezing more layers into an image like this!
Another area of interest which caught my eye as I was scanning was the two window panes above the shoes with the whiter borders – as if the glass in them had recently been replaced. I like the checkerboard pattern those two panes add to the visual interest of this image.
I suspect I had no clue about any of this when I originally took this shot! But, it’s great fun to look at it now – and to appreciate a bit of what it teaches us about the power of layers and the treats those layers provide to our eyes!
Here’s an image from a recent visit to Stockholm, Sweden – shot just at sunrise with my tiny Canon PowerShot S95.
I did a bit of post-processing using a combination of David Nightingale’s curves adjustments along with Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4. I love how these colors turned out – they so captured my memory of this morning.
Tonight, on my way to my Stanford Continuing Studies photography class, I shot this image of Stanford Memorial Church using my new iPhone 4S. Obviously, they’re setting up for an event this weekend!
The image was post-processed a bit in Photoshop using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 to add a bit of contrast. The iPhone 4S is such a great camera to have in my pocket!
Yesterday, I headed north to Sausalito to join the Marin Photo Club’s charter boat heading out onto San Francisco Bay for the Blue Angels air show performance.
Coming north across the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog was still blowing through and under the bridge and created this lovely view toward the skyline of San Francisco. I shot this using my tiny Canon PowerShot S95 – handheld – from the View Point on the north side of the bridge.
When I noticed the sailboat in the image, I decided to post-process it a bit – using curves and masks in Photoshop CS5 to isolate adjustments in the sky/skyline, the fog, and the water/sailboat at the bottom of the image. A final curves layer added the toning – tweaking the blue and green colors just a bit.
Here’s another of my experiments in adding textures to an image. This image is a texturized version of this original shot below taken on January 1, 2010 at Baker Beach in San Francisco using my tiny Canon PowerShot S90.
I also tweaked the image a bit to make the bridge towers more vertical – and then applied the Purple Prose texture from French Kiss Textures. This particular texture has script elements on the left side of the image – and I thought those elements worked well into the sky and mountain area on the left side of the bridge itself.
I love how the texture adds dimension to the image – making it much more interesting to my eye as I want to explore it for longer than just the original image. For me, that’s the power of adding textures – making the image much more interesting and something you want to spend time exploring – similar to how a great painting captures your eye and mind.
If you’re interested in textures, here are some resources I’ve found very helpful:
I first became interested in textures after beginning to follow Trey Ratcliff’s HDR photography work. His Ultimate texture tutorial (aff. link) was a great learning experience for me.
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!
A friend has asked how I’ve been setting up my Canon PowerShot S90 to take the HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos I’ve been sharing.
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
Put the S90 into Aperture Priority mode by setting the mode dial to Av. By shooting in Av, you ensure that the camera isn’t adjusting the aperture (which could cause focus issues) but, rather, only shutter speed.
Select a fixed (not Auto) ISO (see p. 76 in the S90 manual). In daylight, choose 80 or 100. You want a fixed ISO so that the camera isn’t trying to adjust ISO between shots.
Select Large format JPEG or RAW (see p. 72 in the S90 manual). (I find the Large JPEGs are the easiest to post-process while purists say to shoot in RAW. The S90 does a superb job of processing in-camera, so just choose Large JPEG when you’re getting started.)
Turn on Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB mode – see p. 93 in the S90 manual). Chose the middle option – “Takes 3 different shots at different exposures”. While still in that setting, press the DISP button and turn the dial to select +/- 2 stops. This ensures that the camera takes 3 shots: one properly exposed, one underexposed by 2 stops, and one overexposed by 2 stops. These three photos are what Photomatix Pro then uses to create the HDR image.
Now, the S90 is ready to go.
For best results, mount the S90 on a tripod to prevent any movement as the three shots are being taken. If you don’t have a tripod, you can try handheld HDR – just try to brace your arm against a support to minimize any camera movement. When you hit the shutter button, the camera will take the 3 shots – about a shot per second. After 3 seconds or so, it’s done.
I post-process in Lightroom – using it to import the photos from the S90. I then use Photomatix Pro and just point it to the 3 shots in the file folder to begin generating the HDR image. Once the image has been generated and tone mapped, I save it back into the same folder and then import that image also into Lightroom – telling Lightroom to just add it to the catalog but not to copy it as the image is already in the folder.
So, yesterday we went off to our family’s Thanksgiving celebration. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday – it’s just about getting together, sharing, and enjoying our company. No obligations, no gifts, just us.
Anyway, with my right (camera!) arm still in a sling, I headed off without my trusty Canon 5D Mark II and glass. No way was I ever going to be able to shoot any pictures of Thanksgiving with the big DSLR!
Anticipating this, last week I picked up a new Canon PowerShot S90 – and headed off to Thanksgiving dinner with this delightful new (think left hand!) point and shoot camera! We had a wonderful dinner with family – and I took lots of shots along the way.
Some 150 shots later, I came home and began uploading the photos from the S90 to Lightroom. Somewhere along the way I decided the upload had completed (it hadn’t) and I pulled out the USB cable to the camera and – then – proceeded to format the SD card in the S90. Oh my goodness – why did I do that? Beats me – but I did.
and, I believe, to the 
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