Daily Archives: February 10, 2012

Day 91

Posted by Mike on

Working from home today afforded me some extra time at the end of my day.  I didn’t have the drive home eating into my fading sunlight, although by the time I went outside the sporadic sun was behind a sky full of clouds.  I hadn’t planned any great adventure so I decided to go for another walk through the fields across the road from me.  There usually is something of interest to be found.

I realize it is only the top of goldenrod but today it was out shining the sun.  I have numerous pictures with the hazy sun in different positions in relation to my subject but I liked this one the best.  With the sun only providing weak ambient light I didn’t have to worry about hard shadows on the flower of the goldenrod and allowed me to still show the detail in the flower.

Better or Worse?

Posted by Mike on

A couple of days ago I posted a picture of some ice in the creek.  At the time I really liked the picture and used it as my 365 project picture for the day.  This picture was another of my attempts at HDR processing using the Photomatix software.  I basically let the software do its thing and added a few small tweaks in Elements when it was done.

After staring at this picture for a day or two I feel that I went too far with the processing and ruined the actual look of the ice.  I checked out a few online guides/tutorials to basic HDR processing and didn’t see where I might have gone wrong on that end other than a tendency for the HDR software to produce grey looking whites.  Which is basically what I felt happened to this picture.  I found where most HDR processing brings the finished picture into Photoshop or Elements to ‘correct’ the problem areas.  Some of those problems being the grey whites, the addition of noise, etc.

I couldn’t help trying to improve my original picture so I opened Elements, brought the first picture back in as well as the 0 EV exposure picture.  I added the 0 EV picture as another layer in the original HDR picture.  I set the blending to Hard Light and the Opacity to 75%.  I think this dramatically changed the picture and for me brought it back to what I saw in the creek the day I took the picture.  This picture is the non-cropped version.

I would appreciate any constructive criticism on how to better process the picture.  I realize a lot of the choices we make as we process are to achieve a picture that matches either our memory of the scene or a vision we had when we captured the picture.  Still, any tips for processing multiple exposures would be appreciated.  Thanks.

Day 90

Posted by Mike on

Even though it is a lesson I am sure I will forget again it was important for me to suffer through it.  On Wednesday I was playing with the camera in the creek down the road from my house.  The last pictures I took where a three exposure bracket but I never changed the settings prior to putting the camera away.

Move forward one day and I spot a flock of turkeys coming through a field on their way to cross the road (insert joke here).  I perform a quick u-turn in the road so I can grab a few pictures.  In the excitement to capture them I just turned on the camera, pointed it at the turkeys and clicked the shutter.  At the same time they made their dash and then short flight across the road.  That is when I realized the camera took three pictures, two of which where incorrectly exposed.  The turkeys were running so all three pictures had them in different stages across the field.  They were also too far away in the shadows of the woods to get any more pictures.  Lesson learned!

I was able to salvage one of the pictures.  The truly disappointing aspect of this lesson is I was unable to take any other pictures yesterday and when I spotted the turkeys I thought my day was saved.  Not a bad picture, but I would have loved to have clicked off a few more as the took flight and flew over the road.  Next time I should be better prepared.