Early HDR Photos at Holy Island

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This is the first article in a occasional series I’ll be running looking at some of my early attempts at various photographic techniques. In September 2005 Kim & I were at one of our favourite photo locations, England’s north east coast (the bit between north Newcastle and the Scottish border).

The image below (Canon 300D, ISO100, 32mm, 1/6s, f29) is a shot of one of the old fishing boats on Holy Island with Lindisfarne Castle in the background. There are several in this harbour in various states of disrepair. I was quite close to the boat when I took the shot so even at f29 the immediate foreground and background are not in focus. These are aren’t the only technical failings either I’m sure you’ll agree!

Boat on Holy Island - Original

Boat on Holy Island - Original

But, even though it had plenty of technical issues I still quite liked the shot, so I decided to post-process it using an HDR technique, using Photomatix. I’d not set out with this intention so I didn’t have multiple actual exposures to play with so I created -1 and +1 stop virtual images in Lightroom and used these for the HDR image.

Boat on Holy Island - HDR

Boat on Holy Island - HDR

The processing has had a noticeable effect to:

  • deepened the blue (unrealistically) in the sky and bringing out some of the faint cloud structure
  • increase the local contrast to give certain areas more definition, eg on the water and around the flowers
  • increase brightness in the shadow areas of the boat and shaded grass

Looking back now I think I over-processed the image. It suffers from banding and quite serious halo effects. Also, it’s getting to the point of looking quite artificial, almost like painting. At the time though it did leave me impressed with the possibilities that HDR offered and what could be achieved with practise and more attention to detail.

 

Fujifilm X-Pro1

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Fujifilm-X-Pro1Earlier in the week I commented on mirrors in the current crop of professional cameras and how I see them as a connection with the past rather than the future.

Well, CES 2012 is here and the mirror-less market just seems to keep getting more interesting. Much has already been written about the previously announced Sony NEX-7 (see here if you want an overview), but the big news (for me) at CES was the Fujifilm X-Pro1.

Apart from the X-Pro1 looking great, it also has some interesting features:

  • Large (APS-C) 16MP CMOS sensor
  • No low pass filter, but a sensor structure that tries to achieve the same aim. Nett effect that it will hopefully improve image quality
  • A viewfinder that you can switch between electronic and optical modes without taking it from your eye
  • Support to be provided for (Leica) M-Mount lenses

DP Review have a preview on their site, but I’ll be looking forward to knowing what the actual image quality and shutter lag is like. If they get these right at a reasonable price I think Nikon and Canon may have to up their game a little!

Buachaille Etive Mor At Night

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For those of you that haven’t been, Rannoch Moor is a fantastic photography location; if the weather is on your side of course, this is western Scotland after all! In the east there are picturesque small lochs, in the centre an open expanse of “wilderness” and in the west the mountains that surround Glen Coe. At this edge of moor, towering over entrance to Glen Coe, is Buachaille Etive Mor.

Kim and I spent a few days based in Glen Coe in Feb of 2010. The images below are a small selection of night exposures taken in the shadow of the Bauchaille.

The first image was taken from a small lay-by at the side of the Glen Etive road, looking west towards the iconic face of Buachaille Etive Mor. It had snowed quite recently and the road was only really passible with a 4×4, which lucky we were driving. The image is a 10 second exposure at f10, taken after sunset at about 18:30, on a 5D Mk I. It was pretty cold that night with quite a bit of cloud and wind. Much of the evening was spent clearing ice off our lens and warming batteries up to get a few more minutes of life out of them!

Buachaille Etive Mor 1

Buachaille Etive Mor 1

The next image was taken a few days later, a little further down the Glen Etive road. There is a small bridge with a parking spot next to it. From there follow the river west for the best vantage points. It was taken on Kim’s infrared converted 20D and then converted to black & white. It’s a 342 second exposure at f10. As you can see from the foreground, we weren’t the first people there after the snow fall.

Buachaille Etive Mor 2

Buachaille Etive Mor 2

The third and final image in this set was taken at roughly the same spot as the second, but this time facing away from the Buachaille towards Sron na Creise. I used Kim’s 20D again for this 600 second f10 shot. It’s been quite harshly post processed to give it what I hope is an aged look. I’ve tried to add to this with a bit of toning.

Sron na Creise

Sron na Creise

Adobe Lightroom 4 (Beta)

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Lightroom 4 Beta

Adobe have just released version 4 of Lightroom for beta testing. Quoting directly from the Adobe download site, the key new features are:

  • Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.
  • Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.
  • Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.
  • White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.
  • Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.
  • Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.
  • Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.
  • Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.
  • Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

Looking down this list the major improvement for me is likely to be the ability to soft proof. I’ve been waiting years for this!

The other items I’m not so sure about. One of the key concerns I have about software products is “bloat”. ie the tendency for software companies to add more and more features, often extending the scope of the original product’s vision. On the plus side this means you get more features for your money, but it also has its downsides. As software products get more features they often:

  • are more complex for the product supplier to support
  • have more defects
  • more complex to use (eg lots of ways of doing the same thing)
  • require more computer resource

With a background in IT, I have personal experience of suffering from the above. In my view keeping products small, simple and focused is a much better way of allowing them to excel in their field. On that basis I would remove the video capabilities and stick to stills. But hey, if companies followed my lead then it would be very difficult to entice people to upgrade or buy new. After all, adding video capability gives Adobe a whole new market for Lightroom.

By the way, I suspect my views about bloatware will not stop me upgrading!