HDR
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‘Twas a cold and windy night. No really, it was. I didn’t think it was that cold or that windy when I was home in little Rhody, there were light clouds and the sky was clear so I decided that I’d drive to Boston and go to a place called Piers Park in East Boston and see what there was to see. I’d been in the mood to do some city shots for a while but as luck had it every day I had off the weather did not cooperate until this past Monday, or so I thought. I’d heard of Piers Park from some flickr friends most especially I’d been inspired by Briburt’s work. I was a bit surprised 40 minutes later when I got there to find it was 10 degrees cooler (50F) and the wind was coming out of the west at 20 knots. Not ideal for photography but I stuck it out taking a few images before retreating to my car to wait for sunset. This is an HDR of the last 3 shots of the night, 45 minutes after the sun went down and I stopped being able to feel my nose. I had been packing things up when I noticed that the clock was lit up on the face of the Custom House Tower so I had to take a few more, since what is a night shot of Boston without it!
Canon 5DMII, Canon 24-105L f/28, HDR Processed and Tonemapped in Photomatix, Finished with Nik Plugins and Tony Kuyper’s actions in Photoshop
Tags: Boston, Canon 24-105L f/4, Canon 5DMII, HDR, Images, MA, Night, Nik Plugins, Photography, Sunset, Tony Kuyper Actions
I was working on some images today and feeling cold but instead of pushing up the heat I looked back at some images that I took when Mike and I made a not so triumphant attempt at hiking to the summit of Mount Jefferson on the Caps Ridge Trail. Mike and I got married on the “first cap” of the Caps Ridge Trail twelve and a half years ago with two very good friends as attendants and for the first few years we would go up, stay at the ever wonderful Notchland Inn and hike the trail. We did this until I tore my (replacement) ACL (I’ve now had 4 surgeries on that knee – but that’s a different type of post for a different type of blog) and moved onto to less arduous hikes. But this summer we wanted to give it a try again, and although we didn’t summit we got over 3/4 the way there and it wasn’t my knee that made me ask to turn back, which is a good step (groan).
We got a fairly early start, we thought until we saw the dozens of cars in the tiny parking lot at the trailhead. This summer was very wet and the first weekend in August was the first dry weekend that we had in New England and it seemed like everyone was out for a hike. But it was a beautiful morning, the greens were unbelievably green from all the rain and there was a mist rising off the ground. As we came around a corner of the trail I saw this:
I wanted to make an HDR of the image because the tonal range was just too great for a single shot and I’m not overly fond of tonemapped single images, they never look natural to me. I’d brought the 50D with me because I wanted to keep the weight in my pack down and at that moment regretted it dearly. The 50D is not a bad camera as long as you keep your ISO low, once you go above 400 ISO the noise is very noticeable and the process of making an hdr enhances that. Of course since I was keeping the weight down I had no tripod so I did the best I could I got 6 images taken before the light shafts disappeared but the last 2 in each series (+2 exposure) were very blurry – no way I’m holding anything still at 1/6 sec. (f/4.0 ISO 400). So this was a 2 exposure hdr combined in photomatix, adjusted with Nik Software in LR2 and then adjusted and sharpened with Tony Kuypers actions in PSCS4
Happy Holidays to everyone and I hope next year is as full of love and happiness and fun as can be!
Tags: Anniversary, Canon 50D, Caps Ridge Trail, HDR, Hike, Mike, NH, Nik Software, Photomatix, Tony Kuyper
I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from all aspects of photography, the number of unread blogs I subscribe to is well over 1000 and I haven’t even picked up my camera since going down to watch Mike and Jas surf at the begining of November. We even went hiking up falling waters trail in NH and I only brought my little point and shoot and took 3 pictures that I haven’t looked at yet. Part of it is ennui, part of it is Dragon Age, part of it is that I’ve been reading vociferously but I seem to be reviving. I took another look the images I took with Terry when he was up that first weekend of November and started working on a few of them. This is probably my favorite of the series. The wrought iron sculptures of the sailing ships worked nicely to camouflage the yacht that was moored in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel which stood out like a sore thumb. I don’t like the slight haloing around the buildings but it’s there in each of the raw images to some extent, it’s where the light was the strongest I guess. I didn’t feel like spending hours in photoshop to make it go away so I didn’t.
Taken with a Canon 5DMII, 24-105L f/4.5 lens. Merged to HDR with Photomatix and finished in Photoshop with Nik plug-ins and Tony Kuyper luminosity and sharpening actions
Tags: Boston, HDR, Moakley Courthouse, Nik Software, Photography, Photomatix, Photoshop, Skyline, TKR photo, Tony Kuyper Actions, Twilight
Taken while standing in the ocean in front of the Hilton Kaua’i where we stayed all 4 nights on Kaua’i. It wasn’t good for my tripod, I know that but it was hard to resist wading into the incredibly clear water in the warm pre-dawn hour instead of shooting from the beach. And the angle was so much better. I’m paying for it now, I should replace all the hardware on the tripod since it’s begining to rust.
This is a Pano HDR composed of 4 HDR images each of which was composed of 5 images taken at 1EV. The HDR was done in Photomatix and the pano was stiched in Photoshop CS4 (which rocks!). Adjustments were made with Nik plugins and Luminosity painting with Tony Kuypers luminosity mask actions. Canon 5DMII, Canon 16-35L f/2.8.
Tags: Canon 16-35L f/2.8, Canon 5DMII, Hawai'i, HDR, Hilton Kaua'i, Kaua'i, Panoramic, Sunrise, Vacation
Coming off of rt302 headed down onto I93 we caught sight of the fog boiling up and over the ridge. The day was stormy but the sun was breaking out behind us lighting up the fog and the nearer mountaintops.
A three image HDR combined in photoshop then exported to photomatix then taken back to photoshop for additional blending and adjustments.
Tags: Fog, Franconia Notch, HDR, Mt. Lafyette, NH, Skies, Storm
I know the brush at the corners is a bit distracting but this was a first try at HDR with some new techniques I’ve learned and it is one of my favorite places. There were exposures were -1.3, 0, +1.3 and the development was done in Photomatix and then transported back into Photoshop CS4 where the ghosting of the swans was removed with masking. The colors were adjusted with Viveza and noise reduction with Noise Ninja. Thanks To Trey Radcliff for his excellent HDR tutorial And a big thanks to the fact that spring is slowly coming our way!
Tags: ASRI, Caratunk, HDR, Landscape, Photomatix, Photoshop, Swans, Viveza
I processed this image a few ways, 3 ways with Photomatix, two with details enhancer- one with the light smoothing set to high, the other set to the middle and one in tone compressor. I’m usually not a fan of the highly stylized look of the details enhancer and I try to minimize it whenever possible but this time the sky just needed to pop and the only way I saw to do that was setting the light smoothing to medium. It’s not overly realistic looking, but I like the effect and the way it really brought out the glow of the setting sun on the rocks. I just wish I could get rid of the halo around the rocks without affecting anything else.
Late afternoon light on rocks, Arches National Park
Tags: Arches, HDR
