I always seem to take wide angle shots of landscapes or general openness / so today I decided for something different. Ivy grows in abundance around my campus but if you don’t look down once in a while you wold never see it. I’m terrible for overlooking the macro shots in nature - here’s some of my few attempts. Not close enough?
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
This is me again trying to be creative in how I capture a scene. In every picture there are lines but I never really noticed until recently. Here I’ve lined up the horizon diagonal with the picture frame and the pathway bo be aligned vertically with the frame.
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My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
I remember taking a shot of this scene once before but was never happy with it (check it out here). So I took another stab at it with my Nikon this time, hoping for something a bit different. I threw in the angle because I was a little bored just shooting straight ahead as per usual. You have to experiment if you’re going to grow as a person. So what do you think? An improvement over the last? Or do you prefer the ultra high temperatures of the original?
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
For the past few days I’ve walked pasted this row of bikes covered in leaves, and everyday I’ve said to myself; “I have to get a shot of this scene before the leaves are blown away”. Eventually my luck would have run out though and I’d find my procrastination would cost me so I finally got around to it today. I set my equipment on autofocus since I was using a Gorillapod and couldn’t look through the viewfinder as the camera was almost on the ground, but I’m happy enough how it turned out.
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
Technorati Tags: Gorillapod
The sky was looking particularly cloudy today so I grabbed my D300 and snapped this shot. It turned out rather darker than I expected when I opened it in Photoshop (I’m still experimenting with the camera), so I decided the best thing to do wold be to do away with most of the colour and leave it as a B&W shot. I added the blue swirls in the sky by saturating some highlights because I think they look great. Disagree?
Click for larger resolution image.My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
I’m home for the bank holiday weekend (in Ireland the last Monday of October is a bank holiday, giving everyone a long weekend, WOOHOO!) and I don’t have my S9600 or D300 with me so instead I’ve spent some time changing the site format to make it a little more user friendly.
Is this a big improvement or was everything OK before? Do full / summary feeds decide whether you would subscribe in general?
I’ll write a little about this photo in a few hours - right now I’m in the middle of making Guinness Stew… well that was nice, now on with the show. There’s one rather unique spot on my campus near its library where lights have been installed along rows of plants and on overhead balcony connecting the library to another building. I had to try out my D300 here so I brought it over alog with my gorrilla pod and took a metered shot along with two under- and two overexposed shots (±2EV). Like my first post on using the D300, I did nothing to optimise the settings (excepts setting aperture priority). I’m slowly reading through the D300 manual so over time I should become more familiar with all it’s wonderful abilities but for the immediate future I will continue taking shots in its default settings (or near enough to default) and post them here daily.
Click for larger resolution image.Yesterday I bought a Nikon D300 with the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens for a rather hefty €2000. Being a bit overwhelmed by the plethora of settings available on it I decided the best thing to do was head out and take some shots with the camera in its default settings. This was just to see how it shoots. I wanted to create some High Dynamic Range pictures so I looked a little into the D300’s auto-bracketing features. Equipped with my new knowledge I headed out this morning at 7am (It was freezing and still pitch dark) to wander around my campus grounds. Below is the one shot I took - five exposures using the D300’s interval timer functions. For this shot I left absolutely everything the way it way when I took it out of the box - I didn’t set any aperture, shutter speed, manual focus, white balance, I didn’t check any histogram, I just wanted to see what the camera would do on the fly. I also left the lens to swirl about and choose its own focal length. I’m currently at a loss as to how the lens aperture is set; the body aperture setting ranges from F3.5 to F22 but the lens is only for F3.5 - F5.6 so I’m not sure what’s going on there yet. Maybe setting the aperture on the body will set the lens aperture also?
Click on image for 1200×797 pixel resolution
I’m pretty happy the way this photo came out - it was very dark when I took these exposures yet the tone mapping is applied quite evenly. I had set the camera to take 14bit uncompressed NEF files, I’ll be experimenting with 12bit uncompressed and 12bit lossless compressed etc to see what difference each one gives. If you want to buy a camera I suggest right now that the D300 should be top of your list!
I’ve just picked up my new Nikon D300 (I’m rather chuffed) and thought I would give some very briefs thoughts on it. I haven’t taken any proper shots so what follows is simply opinions based on the camera itself, not the pictures it can take. First of all, the box it comes in is very nicely designed - huge “D300″ lettering is in raised printing across the side, and is very imposing. Opening the box I found everything nicely partitioned; body, cables, battery, charger, manuals etc. I found the manual before I actually found the D300 body; all 421 pages of it! It’s so large that Nikon include a smaller “Quick Guide” if you want to get started quickly. OK so enough with enough with the superfluous stuff, lets get to the camera. Taking it out, you immediately notice how heavy this beast is! I thought my S9600 was heavy when I first got it - the D300 is easily 50% heavier. The ergonomics feels well designed, the camera is covered in soft grippy rubber in all the right places and the viewfinder it huge! It’s also protected by a transparent plastic cover, a nice touch. As for the lens, I got the NIKKOR 18-200mm VR and it appears very sturdy. There is a bit of zoom creep in it but only if you hold the camera nearly vertically up or down.
Looking quickly through the in camera options, they seem to be endless - this camera is definitely not for the casual snapshots. I’ve been playing a little with the auto-bracketing options, especially the timer settings that allow you to set the camera up to take multiple bracketed exposures on a timer so you don’t have to touch the camera to initiate the shots.
I can’t really say anymore until I do some proper shooting, but the D300 looks and feels fantastic, it has tons of options and from first impressions it is definitely worth considering if you are looking for a pro-level camera at not so insane prices.
Technorati Tags: Nikon, D300, DSLR, NIKKOR, VR, 18-200mm, auto-bracketing
I’ll say this right out. There are no best settings. It’s personal preference. Right, post over, goodbye.
You’re still here? OK maybe I should elaborate on my first statement. I’m not going to talk about the theory behind HDR, nearly everyone has an idea of what is meant by it - greater tonal range is my interpretation. To complicate the matter slightly though, there are two main HDR opinion camps. Camp 1 interprets HDR as photos that realistically recreate what the eye saw when the picture was taken, and I would agree that this is technically what HDR is, or was originally about. There is a Camp 2 however, who say that HDR is all about creating photos with blown out colours, imposing skies and acid fuelled backgrounds. Personally I prefer a little towards the over the top surreal side of things and so it is in that respect I will talk about what I think are the best settings for Photomatix.
1. Strength.
I usually use the Strength slider in conjunction with Colour Saturation as by itself it seems to do little, at least for my purposes. With Strength at 100% a Colour Saturation of 0% will give you a black & white image and the histogram will shift far to the left. As a personal rule I would leave the Strength between 70% and 90%. It works in most situations.
2. Colour Saturation.
This is an obvious one; if you want your pictures to jump with vibrancy then crank this up near 100%. At 100% saturation vibrancy can be increasesd more by dropping the Strength slider down to 50% - 60% if you wish.
3. Light Smoothing.
If you want over the top halos in your images then you should set this very low. Personally I would set it to either Medium or High - it gives a more gradual change in the lighting across boundaries e.g. tree lines, horizons etc. So, Low = More Halos and darker colours, High = Less Halos, more realistic colour tones and shadows.
4. Tone - Luminosity.
Increasing the Luminosity will, unsurprisingly, increase the brightness of your image, but will also highlight any noise that may be present, especially in skies or any other large single colour area. One tip to overcome this problem, and something I do often, is to reduce the Luminosity incrementally while increasing the Gamma levels by the same increment until you are happy with the light levels. The Gamma will mask the noise better while still giving plenty of lighting.
5. Tone - White / Black Point.
I almost never even touch these but you can bump them up to the right if you want some extra contrast in your super HDR’s.
6. Tone - Gamma.
I’ve mentioned Gamma before, if noise isn’t a problem then decreasing the Gamma will darken your image and bring out more shadows, giving the whole scene are much darker mood. Don’t go too high with this though - all the colour will become washed out and will actually look quite sickening. DON’T DO IT!
7. Colour - Temperature.
Another obvious one - increasing the temperature will overlay hotter colours like yellows, oranges and reds through your image, giving it a warm feel. Conversely decreasing the temperature will add more blues to your image. I usually leave it at about +2 or +3 unless I’m looking to express a particular mood in a picture.
8. Colour - Saturation Highlights.
I leave this at default 99% or the time - it seems to do very little for me.
9. Colour - Saturation Shadows.
Again, 99% of the time I just leave it at default. I might play with it to see if it improves anything but it generally does very little.
10. Micro - Microcontrast.
I like the colour of every little feature (e.g the cobbles on roads, leaves, bricks, crevices in doorways) to contrast against one another so I almost always crank the microcontrast all the way up to +10. Lets face it; a HDR should jump out at you and scream “WOW!” Setting the Microcontrast too low will just reduce the relative intensity in your colours and wash out the while scene.
11. Micro - Mocrosmoothing.
It you like Microcontrast you’ll hate Microsmoothing - I set this one to its minimum value. I don’t want anything to be smoothed out when I’m making a HDR.
12. S/H - Hightlights Smoothing.
Leave it at minimum. (Again, this is my preference, just because it smooths out highlights). If you prefer to smooth highlights out, by all means find your preferred setting.
13. S/H - Hightlights Smoothing.
More smoothing?! Minimise it!
14. S/H - Shadows Clipping.
Increasing the Shadow Clipping will give more prominence to any shadowing that is already in your image and can increase it visual impact. e.g. if you want to exaggerate the level of shadowing that is within a landscape shot. If you set it too high though then everything will become a shadow!
So they are all the settings in Photomatix. I’ve intentionally not included any images to illustrate these settings for this post as the settings are not independent of each other. So for example if I showed two images highlight the difference between high and low strength, this difference would itself be different, depending on what level colour saturation, microcontrast, temperature etc was set at. I think it’s better if you have your own photo open in Photomatix; you can then go through this post changing the settings you feel it will help get your picture the way you want it. I should be buying the Nikon D300 tomorrow (and I can not wait to use its auto-bracketing since the S9600 has none in RAW mode, and DSLR sounds so much cooler than bridge camera), so I’m sure I’ll do a detailed post on these settings specifically with the D300 and auto-bracketing in mind. Ciao.
Technorati Tags: HDR, Photomatix, Nikon, D300, S9600, RAW, DSLR, tone mapping, high dynamic range
I was walking through Stephen’s Green in Dublin one Saturday morning, probably on my way to do some meaningless errand, when I saw an unusually large gaggle (is that the right word) of ducks and em seagulls lets say. I had no tripod with me unfortuantly and the S9600 has no Image Stabilisation or Vibration Reduction with it (please correct me if I’m wrong on this, I would love to be wrong on this!), but it is possible to steady your camera quite effectively by wrapping its strap tightly around your forearm and pulling it taut. There were plenty of people about getting the most use out of their cameras and as you can tell frombelow there was plenty to photograph. I only took the one image - I get distracted from what I’m doing very easily. C’mom focus!
Technorati Tags: Stephen’s Green, Dublin, Image Stabilisation, Vibration Reduction
I found a few old pictures (see Ireland Greatest Tree - Gone) on my harddrive in an obscure folder a couple of days ago. Here is one that I quite like. As far as I remember it was taken in the evening, again on my college grounds; it feels like every picture I post is in and around my college. A little side note: you can expect a lot more photos from my college over the next few weeks - I’m getting a brand spanking new Nikon D300 with a 18-200mm VR lens and I’m about to burst with anticipation! Until then I’ll continue using my trusty S9600. But I digress, back to today’s post. I’m afraid I can’t remember what setting I used when I took this photo, and I have no exif data for it, but I did run it through GIMP more recently for a touch of post post-processing. I applied a Gaussian Blur with a blur radius of 2px to soften the details in the shadows. Also, saturating the sky 40% and tweaking the curves a little has really brought out some vibrancy. Or maybe you think I cooked it a little too long? As with 99% of photos on projectVISUAL clicking on one will bring you to a higher resolution version.
Just outside my accommodation in college is a rather fantastic old tree. Perhaps not Ireland’s greatest but pretty close in my opinion. See the picture above? Have you ever seen such a magnificent specimen before? Unlikely I would say. It stands head and shoulders above all other wood plants in the area. It was one of the few pleasant sights that graced my eyes before heading into another frustrating day of college labour. Until today that is.
Before I get to the crime, here’s one more picture I found on my hard drive that I took a long time ago. There is a bit of halo-ing in the shots but I had taken them when I first started experimenting with Photomatix and would too often set the light smoothing too low, but that’s another story…
Below is the current state of the tree - a travesty in my opinion. I don’t care what reasons were given to prune with such savagery (dead branches? - no way, tree was too big? - the bigger the better I say, tree shaping? - are you kidding? I can shape better craps.)
It will probably take decades for this tree to grow back to it’s former glory and I see no benefit from its mutilation - just one of the many things in life to irk my senses.
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