Although I was trying to take all my shots using my rather flimsy tripod (I won’t name names), this lonesome seagull was too good an opportunity to miss. I had already folded up my tripod’s legs so not to look too ridiculous dragging it about so this shot was taken by hand, with a tripod hanging out the bottom! It came out surprisingly sharp - at least around the rock where I was focusing (f/5 aperture at 75mm zoom). Alas this seagull has flown away now, maybe never to be photographed again. 
I don’t really care though - I got my photo and that’s all that matters 
OK I’ve actually no idea what this ‘thing’ is, hence the title, and I like Harry Potter. I was walking by and it looked photo worthy so I clicked away with my trusty D300, although when I look at the photo and try to think of what the subject might be, the word ‘carousel’ comes to mind. But I’m sure that’s not it.
This photo came out slightly bland so I ran it through GIMP afterwards and fiddled with the curves to give it a little extra UMPH, as you do.
So c’mon, who’s gonna tell me what this thing is? If your site is even remotely in a similar field as mine I’ll stick you on my blogroll as a reward - first come first served! (Update: Gilbert was first with the answer - he doesn’t have a photography website so here’s his Twitter page)!
02 Jan
All, Distorted Images, Dublin, High Dynamic Range, Photography, Photomatix
I find this image very soothing - I was walking over a rock bridge (part of it is the foreground), and the frame that the bridge and trees make around the lake made this shot irresistable to take. I’ve used a low aperture number, F/3.5 I think, to reduce the depth of focus as much as possible and give it a sort of fairy tale look. I hope you like it.
Ugh. I’m tired, hungry and hungover. The New Years celebrations were great but I wish I could skip the next day. Anyway, I caught this photo by chance - I was walking through Stephen’s Green in Dublin and an old lady suddenly starts throwing breadcrumbs all over the place. Within 10 seconds the ground was pigeon shaped. I stood watching, wondering if I should take out my camera and grab a shot before they had their fill. I did of course.
First post of 2009
Technorati Tags: Stephen’s Green, Dublin, pigeon
In a previous post I mentioned that I would do a comparison between Photomatix Pro and some new software called HDR Max. Here we go!
Photomatix Pro works great for me under certain lighting conditions - on clear days when the sun is out I am able to get great shots that I am really happy with (such as this one and this one). Unfortuantely I haven’t got the hang of Photomatix under cloudy conditions - my images turn out seriously bland. With that in mind I wanted to compare Photomatix against HDR Max under bad lighting i.e. ugly clouds dominating the sky. I chose a picture of a fountain that you can see in Stephen’s Green in Dublin.
For each software I tweaked the setting until I was satisfied with them - I didn’t apply the same settings to both or anything like that - I just played around until I was happy. (Playing is the best way to getting anything done I think.) The first image below is from HDR Max, the second is Photomatix. You can see I couldn’t get very good results with Photomatix, and ordinarily I wouldn’t post an image like this, but HDR Max worked wonderfully and turned out much much better: more vibrant, smoother tones, fewer halos, and more true to life. (I ran both through GIMP to fiddle with curves also.)
One major problem I had with HDR Max thougth was saving. Regardless of whether I chose jpg or TIFF, the saved image always turned out terrible - mountains of information was being lossed during saving. The image I’ve posted here for HDR Max was actually screen captured and cropped! This is not only annoying as hell but means I can’t save at full 4320×2868 resolution! Does anyone else have this problem? (Actually this may be happening because it’s the trial version I’m using.)
Anyway this has been a long post and it’s time to wrap it up - in my book HDR Max wins hands down, but then again I’ve always sucked at getting good results in bad weather condtions with Photomatix. I’ll do another comparision in the new year with an image taken under some wonderful, sun splitting through the clouds like god’s loving stare, weather conditions.
HDR Max: The clear winner!
Photomatix Pro: Grrrr, just wait ’till Round Two!
Weather in Ireland is odd. Similar conditions never occur together. It can’t be just cold and raining, or hot and sunny, conditions you would think go together. Look below. It’s sunny and the sky is clear and yet it was freezing and windy at the same time. I really need to get away from this type of weather, I need to travel more - give my Nikon some new scenery, all I seem to be photographing lately is Irish trees and houses! I’ll be heading to Paris in the new year for a week with friends though - I’m sure my D300 will enjoy that!
Technorati Tags: irish weather, projectVISUAL
26 Dec
All, Dublin, High Dynamic Range, Nature, Photography, Photomatix
Humans appear to put themselves under a massive amount of stress, all the time - some dash from point A to point B for something they think is very important, but in fact isn’t very important at all. Equally, others dash from point B to point A for something they think is as equally important, but is in fact as equally unimportant. Often they worry about getting stuck at point C while dashing from point A to point B, or point B to point A. Point C is any point in between points A and B.
My point is people should just relax more, like these ducks, which I present here. They are in the background at the side of the pond and don’t really feature heavily at all. I’m not sure what this post was even about.
Three cheers goes to whomever knows where the inspiration for the first paragraph comes from.
Technorati Tags: ucd lake, ucd, university college dublin
I travelled to Dublin to do some late Christmas shopping but got side tracked when I walked under this building. I think it was the unusual shape from my perspective that drew me in and fortunately I had my D300 with me. I took five exposures, shutter speeds below, and then ran them through Photomatix as usual. I dropped the light smoothing slider to medium in order to bump up the colors a little. Now all I have to do is get back to my Christmas shopping!
Technorati Tags: Photomatix
Usually King’s Street in Dublin is one of the more busy streets to walk through, but on this particular night is was eerily empty. The final image would have come out better had I taken a number of under- and over-exposed shots and applied a bit of HDR to them in Photomatix; some areas are seriously over-exposed! The only people I talked to was a professional homeless guy and his junkie pregnant girlfriend, who were both eyeing my D300 and looking for money - I obliged with whatever came out of my pocket (€4). Better that than my Nikon I guess!
Click for larger resolution image.
Here’s a quick shot of the river Liffey in Dublin as seen from the overhanging walkway on its northside. One big problem I had was the vibrations coming from anyone on the walkway while the camera sensor was being exposed! So many shots resulted in meaningless blurs but a couple, including this one, were taken when no one was nearby so it came out pretty sharp. I especially like the river reflections
Click for larger resolution image.
Technorati Tags: Liffey, Dublin, river reflections
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 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
Subscribe to the RSS Feed