March 16, 2010 at 2:03 pm (Black & White, Landscape & Outdoors, March, night & long exposure, photoblog)
Tags: 365, black and white, GIMP, landscape, long exposure, monochrome, outdoor, photo, photography, project 365, ufraw, urban landscape
I got my fancy new wireless remote shutter release gizmo today! So i tried it out. My husband is away for a few days, so I couldn’t go anywhere more exotic than my own backyard to try my first really long exposure of the night sky.
Unfortunately, I had the ISO a little too high on this shot, but it still works, I think. It was a windy night, and in the shot you can see the trees going everywhere, my clothesline zipping around in circles, and the clouds moving along in the sky.
In UFRaw I had a tricky decisions for the WB, in the end I chose auto WB. In GIMP I added a second layer after auto-levels and desaturating the base layer. I made the top layer grain merge to help darken the sky and let the stars shine through. This also made what was a VERY bright wall become darker too.
I’m looking forward to trying a few more of these types of shots out. This shot was a 754 second exposure 
1 Comment
March 13, 2010 at 1:32 pm (Black & White, March, night & long exposure)
Tags: 365, black and white, camera phone, GIMP, night, outdoor, photo, photography, project 365, urban landscape
Went to my first book club meeting tonight – had a ball, but in the process, forgot to take a photo today. With my Canon anyway. On the way to book club I had a feeling I might forget, so snapped a few shots with my awful mobile phone camera.
All I did was desaturate the image (aka make it black and white) in GIMP and I was done. The photo is awfully grainy and horrible, but I thought this was the best way to have it for today.
Leave a Comment
March 5, 2010 at 4:23 pm (Black & White, Landscape & Outdoors, March, night & long exposure, photoblog)
Tags: black and white, GIMP, landscape, long exposure, night, ocean, outdoor, photo, project 365, water
I really really wanted to do a long exposure shot over some water as inspired by flickr member rossipenburg. There are some terrific long exposure, black and white landscapes on that photostream!
So here was me, all inspire, and I gathered by gear and trudged off to the local marina. Here I encountered a few problems, one major!! Firstly, it was terribly windy, my tripod was being knocked about. Second, my tripod really isn’t of great quality and is rather ricketty and the head piece wobbles like crazy. These two issues I could probably live with as I was able to block out the wind, however, my third, and rather detrimental issue, was my lack of a remote shutter trigger for my camera. I really needed to use the bulb exposure, but I am far from being steady enough to stand there in the wind with a ricketty tripod trying to calmly hold down the shutter button. As such, I really didn’t capture what I wanted and settled with my measly 30second exposure instead.
Now, I did some tricky stuff with my photo today to try and get the kind of shot I was after. After doing minimal processing through UFRaw, I added 2 layers on top of the base layer in GIMP. I obviously desaturated the base layer as I keep to my monochrome theme for March.
The first layer I decided to set at overlay and also, in the Color menu, I inverted it. This really helped bring out some lost detail and a TON of grain!! It looked interesting to say the least. I added a filter to this layer too, a Gaussian blur set at 8.0. You’ll find this option under Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur…
The top layer I set at soft light and adjusted the Value curve (Color>Curves…) to increase the brightness. I still didn’t like the grain after this layer and decided to Gaussian blur it as well, only at a greater level of 46!
A couple of notes:
- The starring of the lights happens when you choose a high (small) aperture, in this case it was 16.
- When processing this image, I came across the terrible realisation that I had dust all over my sensor! I noticed this in the RAW processing of the almost black picture, little specks of red, green and blue appeared here and there….yikes! Not sure what I’m going to do about this yet…still thinking….
- I never got around the grain….it’s still there in all it’s glory!!
2 Comments
February 9, 2010 at 2:30 pm (Black & White, bokeh, February, night & long exposure)
Tags: 365, B&W, black and white, photography, project 365, silhouette, summer daze
Long day, little chance to photograph, played sport that night, came home, and proceeded to panic because I hadn’t taken a photo! So, 1030pm I was crazily running about the house snapping things. I ended up with a couple that were ok. The silhouette trolley (a toy) was the winner.
Due to my scrambling efforts last night, I definitely needed post-processing. This image was very boring as a colour shot. In B&W, it became interesting.
I processed in GIMP today. Through UFRaw (my RAW processer), I selected Camera WB and the Auto Exposure button. Once in gimp, I desaturated the picture using the Colorize option in the Colors menu. I chose to do this instead of using the Desaturate selection in the same menu. Adjusting the Levels using auto levels, I duplicated the layer and made the top layer ‘soft light’ at 75% opacity. Done.
Oh, I must mention, the image is grainy because of the higher ISO (400) I used.
Leave a Comment
February 2, 2010 at 8:13 pm (bokeh, February, night & long exposure)
Tags: 365, bokeh, long exposure, night, photography, project 365, summer daze
I decided to try a bokeh shot tonight with a star shaped bokeh card I had. Basically, this means a shape is cut out into a piece of black card and attached to the front of the lens. In this case, the sides of the card wrapped over the lens and I held it there with a rubber band. Easy! Bokeh, in the VERY limited experience I have with it, works best with a shallow depth of field (DoF). The DoF I used in this shot was f1.8. The in-focus object was close to the camera, with the lights about 2-3m behind it.
I edited this one in digikam, playing with curves and white balance. Did a little cropping too, as the image was a little tilted.
This shot is not my greatest effort – it was a big day, and this was all I had energy for in the end. I can’t help but improve for tomorrow
Leave a Comment
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!
1 Comment
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.
Leave a Comment
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!!
Leave a Comment
January 16, 2010 at 8:16 pm (January, night & long exposure, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, long exposure, night, photography, project 365, summer daze, urban
Ok, today was one of those days where inspiration went on a holiday, leaving me with a shell devoid of creativity. How depressing!! I guess these days will happen….especially because I ran around a the last minute trying to find a worthy shot. Forward planning seems to be one of those things I fail to recognise! Oops.
Lesson – stop running around like a nutty chook and think before dashing off to take a photo.
Oh, about the image. It’s an image of a half-abandoned building. One side has some lovely shops in it, the other, a hollow shell of boarded windows out front, and broken ones around the back. Funny thing is, this building is in the CBD of my relatively bustling town – I find that bizarre!
Ok, I’m adding the processing recipe today. I utilised Digikam, UFRaw and the GIMP – all open-source software choices.
I use Digikam to import the photos into an album on my computer. In UFRaw (which sensibly enough, handles RAW images), I decided to automate a bunch of stuff, including Contrast Curve, Exposure and White Balance. From there, into GIMP I go. All I did here was an Auto Levels adjustment and voila! Image done.
3 Comments
January 13, 2010 at 1:44 pm (January, night & long exposure)
Tags: 365, fairy lights, long exposure, night, photography, project 365, summer daze
Played around with some christmas lights outside in the mozzie swarms. Took a lot of photos, and was bitten many times. In the end, I went with a motion blur image which, I must say, may be lovely and colourful, but could’ve been a tad more interesting. I had an image in mind to try and capture, but ended up doing something a bit different. To be honest, I rushed a bit so I could get out of the bugs.
Managed to drop my camera AGAIN! Sheesh – you’d think I’d learn from yesterday. At least it bounced off of nice soft grass instead of jagged rocks this time.
Lesson – I always end up with something you didn’t start out to do. I’m a spontaneous photographer it seems.
Processing – I played with white balance, black points and saturation in Digikam Image Editor.
Leave a Comment
« Older entries
