On my way up from Drogheda to Dublin for some Christmas shopping over the holidays I thought some shots of my local train station would present some interesting photographs - unfortunately it was overcast as hell (and dark) that morning so I missed out on the classic ’sun splitting the clouds’ scene that always makes HDR photos so surreal (I don’t care much for realistic/proper HDR). Anywho, the juxtaposition of the rather depressing sky and the wall light catched my eye than, and maybe yours now?
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
So I was twittering away on Twitter, bored with my background - I wanted something personal. A collage of some of my images had been in my head for a time but I only managed to motivate myself today to do something about it. The best way I found to do it was by creating thumbnails of all the images I wanted to use (36 of them), open them in Photoshops photomerge option, arrange them in whatever way I saw fit, and let Photoshop do it’s magic. I didnt do much research on whether there is a better way but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out as a first attempt. As a plan for the future, once I have 100 images that are worthy I’m going to make a huge 10×10 collage! That’s a couple of months aways still though, for the moment enjoy this one! Oh you can also check out how it looks on my Twitter page.
Technorati Tags: collage, projectVISUAL
They’re not really endless tress but I couldnt think of any other title. Actually I wonder how anyone comes up with post titles. Are they an arbitrary decision or is an abundance of time put into each post name. Mmmm I better name some hot keywords before I go: I used my Nikon D300 and five exposures at f-stops of ±2, ±1, and metered, to make this high dynamic range (hdr) photo. I used Photomatix Pro and Gimp to postprocess the images. There, that’s enough I think.
Technorati Tags: Nikon, D300, high dynamic range, hdr, Photomatix, Gimp, glenomena, ucd, university college dublin
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
Well it’s Christmas Eve and I’m all ready for some turkey dinner tomorrow. It is time however to start posting some pictures with a Christmass feel to them. My main shopping centre in Dublin has adourned itself with a multitude of
decorations - looking at them all at the same time is a real brain scrambler! I really like the Santa Claus to the left - it’s mechanical and climbs up and down all day long! I’ve noticed from my little experience that HDR doesnt work so well indoors as outdoors where there is natural light - does anyone else feel the same way?
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
Now this is the natural stance of this tree; there was no wind blowing when I took this shot. It’s a paradox in my opinion - on one hand the trunk is leaning to the right, indicating that the wind blows from the left, but looking at the leaves and branches the situation is reversed! In any case I love the overall shape the tree has - beat that anyone!
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
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.
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
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
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’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
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