January 30, 2010 at 8:27 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors, night & long exposure, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, beach, coast, landscape, long exposure, photography, project 365, seascape, summer daze, urban landscape
What a disaster!! Almost in any case, at least I got a worthy image. I went in search of a reflection shot, choosing to take one off a beach that faces our main beach/CBD. It was raining. I remembered the umbrella! The only thing that went right. Once I got onto the beach, the umbrella was hard to control because of the gale force wind (slight exaggeration…I admit). I started to set up my shot, when I realised a VITAL component of my tripod had been removed by my VERY PESKY 2 year old. I didn’t even notice it was gone. I also admit to much muttering under my breath at this point. Somehow I managed to ‘dangle’ the camera off to one side of the tripod where it remained faithfully still and free of wet sand. Due to all the distractions, I completely forgot checking white balance settings and DoF. But at least a shot worked. I’m surprised at how good it actually was. Considering all the chaos, and the lovely smudge that ended up on the lens because of rain.
No post-processing again today.
Lesson – CHECK YOUR GEAR!
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January 30, 2010 at 8:19 pm (January)
Tags: 365, bokeh, desk, summer daze
I was determined to do an image from around home today, however, nothing really grabbed my attention. In the end, I took a shot of my desk…bits of it anyway. Here you can see my dusty keyboard, my mangled reading glasses (courtesy of a 2 year old) and our external hard drive shining brightly in the background, dutifully storing my thousands of photos.
I edited the image entirely within the Digikam world today. I adjusted the sliders in the white balance menu choice. Within the white balance menu, I adjusted the colour temperature, black point and saturation. Done.
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January 29, 2010 at 2:22 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors)
Tags: 365, landscape, photography, project 365, silhouette, sunset, WB shift
Another sun shot! Sorry about the repetitiveness of the past couple of days, but I couldn’t help it. I purposely set out to get a sunrise landscape yesterday, but today, a glorious sunset just begged to be captured. Dutifully, I did exactly that.
I tried my best to try and find a silhouette shot to make the 2D sunset a little more interesting. It was pretty breezy, so my silhouette is a little furry. Also, I didn’t have time to set up an interesting foreground, all I managed was a part of a tree in my backyard. Note to self – make a list of good silhoutte objects or places to use on nights such as this.
Again I played with the White Balance Shift to bring out the reds. As seen in my post yesterday, this basically means I’m manually setting the temperature setting of the sensor. Most cameras (if not all!) have standard choices like daylight, cloudy, shade etc. I’m not sure if I’m simply replicating one of these, or actually generating my own WB temperature. I will endeavour to test this out and do a post on it some day (as a stand-alone post outside the 365 theme).
This image was Straight-Out-Of-the-Camera (SOOC). YAY!
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January 28, 2010 at 7:37 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors)
Tags: 365, beach, coast, landscape, photography, project 365, seascape, summer daze, sunrise, WB shift
Woke up at sparrows today (445am!) to go take a sunrise photo at one of the many beaches along my coastal strip. I almost didn’t go, as it had been cloudy recently and I didn’t expect much to happen. In the end, I’m glad I went!
I tried something tricky with my camera today, setting the WB Shift. Now, I would be thoroughly surprised if you understood what this meant, I only found out about it a couple of days ago and understand it in the most vague way. Basically, the WB shift is an in-camera setting of the light temperature (in Kelvin) – which you can use to fool your camera into thinking a scene is a different termpature that it is, or use it to set the actual scene temperature. The WB shift is in effect when you use the Daylight, Cloudy, Shady etc WB settings in your camera. (I’m pretty sure that’s right…I’m new at this, so I haven’t got a great grasp on it all yet. But this blog entry represents my current interpretation of it. I’ll correct it in future if I’m off track).
The WB SHIFT/BKT option is where I set the temperature level. This was in a Canon, so I’m not sure what it would be called in other cameras. On my camera, it gives me a graph where I can set temperature settings (in a language known only to aliens and professional photographers). I have no idea! But I will find out 
Anyway! The output is great. I setting I used helps the camera sensor increase the appearance of reds. Thus, my shot of the day I left as a Straight-Out-Of-the-Camera (SOOC) shot. No processing what-so-ever.
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January 27, 2010 at 6:13 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors)
Tags: 365, coast, landscape, photography, project 365, seascape, summer daze
Happy Australia Day! (26th January).
Tried unsuccessfully to take a picture of the frivolity of the Australia Day Events at the Main Beach. Unfortunately my zoom capability is lacklustre. I only have an 18-55mm zoom lens. I hope to add greater zoom capabilities in the future….when I win lotto or something!
So, the shot I chose for today was taken in the middle of the afternoon with terribly high contrast. I didn’t get an opportunity to go back and try for a closer shot of the beach party on the beach, nor a better landscape image.
As such, today’s shot was post-processed to make it look more attractive. I used lightroom today (I chop and change a lot huh?). I added a Graduated Filter effect to the sky removing 1-2 stops of light. I also selected a strong contrast and increased vibrance by 21.
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January 26, 2010 at 7:34 pm (January)
Tags: 365, GIMP, project 365, summer daze, texture
Time for some painting fun. Today’s image is a picture of my daughters little hands as she did some finger painting. I might add, that finger painting turned into hand painting, which in turn ended up as arm, face, tummy and hair painting. How creative!
I thought it might be worth spreading my wings in GIMP today, making a artistic, yet hopefully interesting image of these little hands.
I added quite a number of layers, and my computer ground to a halt because of it! It frustrated me something terrible. I was going to do a big write up on the procedure I used, but I’ve run out of time now, so here’s a quick summary.
I used 4 layers (this was culled down from 7)
The background (bottom) layer I used the curves adjustment to brighten it
I added a soft light layer at 50% opacity
Another layer was just black, with a layer mask and gaussian blur to lighten and focus the hands. This layer was set at soft light at 50% opacity.
The final (top) layer was a texture layer called Snowy II by pareeerica. This also had a layer mask to remove the ‘stars’ over the hands. It was set at screen at 100% opacity.
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January 26, 2010 at 6:12 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors, night & long exposure)
Tags: 365, long exposure, night, photo, photography, project 365, summer daze
Well, inspiration was at a loss for me today. I really wasn’t in a creative mood as I had used up all my creative fairy dust on a different project. I decided to go out for a drive to blow some wind through my hair and ended up making my way up to a lookout/hill near my house. I took a few long exposure shots over my town, desperately trying to get a crisp shot. I used a tripod, but it was VERY VERY windy and there was no where to hide or brace the tripod. I tried holding it to reduce the wind vibration.
Instead of using histograms or exposure readouts for this shot. I went with exposure times that I thought would be good enough. As a result, I ended up with a few dark and a few bright images. Both have their advantages and disadvantages though. For the overexposed scenes, you could see the light reflection off the clouds and you could easily see the coast line. However, the streetlights were a little overexposed for my liking. The underexposed images showed the night lights that I was happy with, but none of the other details.The image of the day was an image with an exposure in the middle of the two extremes.
I processed the image through UFRaw and selected the auto exposure button, which is what gave the image such a surreal look. I liked it in this instance. I chose cloudy as the WB because I got a nice orange glow. The image is grainy due to the higher ISO of 400. I moved the black point to 0.055 to get more depth in the shadow areas.
In GIMP, I moved the left slider in the levels window up to about 25, as I knew there wasn’t enough detail in the dark shadows, nor did I really want to keep the detail. The dark areas I wanted black! I added a duplicate layer, setting it at soft light at 50% opacity. This really darkened everything up a bit which, in my opinion, helped a lot.
In the end, I don’t think the image is that great, it’s too grainy, and I got stuck at whether to crop out the foreground or not. Guess the lesson for today is when inspiration fails me, keep it simple.
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January 23, 2010 at 2:29 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors)
Tags: 365, fence, landscape, photography, salt pan, summer daze
I went on a photograph scouting mission today, and managed to come home with some great images. I can only chose one for this blog though…usually that’s easy, but today, the choice was difficult. The ones that didn’t make it can be found on my flickr photostream.
I took notes today – finally! The note-taking was for my future benefit to help me make the next shot in that location 110% better than today’s shot. For instance, at the salt pan location, I noted that the scene was too high-key (too much contrast), and I should be there either earlier or later to take photos. Also, I didn’t do any WB adjustments and some of the shots had crooked horizons.
Getting on to the salt pan today was an interesting experience. I had to cross through about 20m of long grass. Being summer in Australia, snakes are a definite concern. I stomped and shuffled about a lot hoping that any snakes in the vicinity would fear for their lives and take off before I stomped on them. I’m assuming this was successful as I saw nothing that slithered. YAY!
I was using Windoze…sorry, windows, when I processed these images today. As a result, I used Lightroom2 (under trial) to tweak the image a little. Here’s a list of what I did:
Used the auto button initially
Blacks @ 5
Clarity +29
Vibrance +33
Highlights +45
Hue – Green +15
Saturation – Red, Orange, Blue +20
Saturation – Yellow, Green +30
I do like using Lightroom, it makes it easy to get a great end result. However, it’s expensive! I can’t afford it, plus I’m a fan of open-source programs or cross-platform programs. I use linux about 99% of the time, so cross-platform is a biggy for me. Lightroom doesn’t fit that criteria…however, I haven’t ruled out the possibility of trialling it under VMWare (basically a virtual Windows program within Linux). For interests sake, in Linux I use UFRaw for RAW files, and am currently giving Bibble5 and Raw Therapee a shot.
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January 23, 2010 at 2:25 pm (January, night & long exposure)
Tags: 365, fish tank, long exposure, night, photography, project 365, summer daze
Had a brief encounter with another long exposure shot of traffic, but it didn’t work that great unfortunately. I would’ve posted one of those photos, but was inspired at 1030pm by a ‘moon’ light we have in our fish tank instead. The light shines on bubbles generated by an aerator.
To capture this shot, I really should have used a tripod. Instead I bumped up the ISO as far as it could go…in this case, 1600, then leaned against the glass of the tank and clicked.
There is no post-processing on this image. Which I’m really proud of. I like the shot a lot and think it’s really effective. That’s my humble opinion anyway.
The only lesson I have today, is to watch out for fishy shadows! It was dark in the house when I decided to take the shot, and one of the fish swam across the light, which in turn, made a moving shadow on the floor. It scared me half to death! Darn angel fish!!
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January 21, 2010 at 7:47 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors)
Tags: 365, beach, challenge, digikam, histogram, landscape, photography, project 365, RGB, summer daze, urban landscape
Got to get out of the house 2 days in a row to photograph stuff…bonus!
I had a different picture in mind when I left the house today, however, while I got to get out, time was limited. Instead I headed for the trusty tourist attraction at my Main Beach and took a happy-snap. The place was remarkably quiet considering it’s still school holidays at the moment. I’m not sure what the sculpture is supposed to represent. I know there’s a few unflattering guesses about what it looks like though. I should probably stop being ignorant and look it up…I’ll get back to you some time with another photo of it and a little blurb on it’s meaning.
I failed to do the grey card custom white balance thing I mentioned from yesterday…bummer. But! I did remember my Circular Polarising filter and to get good DoF settings. I’m currently using the RGB histogram as my guide for exposure, and it works brilliantly! I’d recommend it to all. Here’s a quick blurb on what that is…
The RGB histogram is a display function you’ll find in most DSLR cameras (I assume). I guess it’ll be in point-and-shoots also, however I’m not full-bottle on those so I don’t know. Check your camera manual. Anyway, I digress. From the histograms that show data for the Red, Green and Blue channels, you can see whether any channels are being clipped on the right of the graph…this indicates the data is being “blown-out”. Avoid that (unless spectacular highlights such as the sun are causing it). But mostly, try and adjust your exposure so the channels are only juuuust touching the right of the graph. It’s ok if you’re adjusting the exposure for just one channel, I guess you should just avoid having ANY of them clipping to the right.
This method may not work for everyone, but I’m finding it very useful. Thank you to a bunch of books (esp. Digital Landscape Photography by John and Barbara Gerlach), forums and RSS feeds that brought this to my attention…while I noticed the blow-out in the luminosity graph and adjusted for it, I didn’t realise until recently that looking at the colour channels as well was a nifty trick to know.
Lesson – keep reading! It’s help me improve my photography.
Today’s image was adjusted in Digikam again. I had to rotate and crop the photo because I must have had a rock in my shoe which tilted my photo. Oops. I did an auto-levels adjustment and added a touch of saturation.
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