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Great Blue Heron doing some early evening grooming before flying off to roost. I loved the way the warm last rays of light illuminated it.
Canon 50D, Canon 100-400L f/4.5-5.6, finished in LR2 and CS4 with Nik plugins and Tony Kuyper’s actions.
Tags: Avian, Birds, Canon 100-400L f/4.5-5.6, Canon 50D, Great Blue Heron, Nik Plugins, Photography, Tony Kuyper Actions
‘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’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
I was going through the incredible backlog of images I’ve amassed this summer for two reasons – the first being…well I’ve got this terrible backlog of images I took, uploaded with LR2 (including renaming and a gross keywording) and never looked at because of the photography class I took, and second because I just received a set of tutorials and actions from Tony Kuyper based on luminosity masks. (Which in turn I learned about from a post on Naturephotographers.net a wonderful group of people and fantastic place to learn and be awed by other photographers) I read through the tutorial on handblending HDR images with luminosity masks, tried to do it a few times myself and then decided to heck with it, this guy is amazing, I’m lazy and I want the actions he’s made so I don’t have to do it myself so I used the handy link and for a minimum donation of $25.00 (which is SUCH a bargain) he’ll send you a collection of his ebooks as pdf’s as well as actions. And he’s an awesome guy, he got the zip’s to me in less than 20 minutes and even bothered to look at some of the images in Mike’s and my travel link and say nice things to me! So I had to give it a try.
So after a good dinner out I went looking for a good image to try it on, and instead of one in those 15 folders I haven’t weeded out yet I decided to look at one of the ones from my RISD class and found this…
Now looking at the image it nearly made my heart seize…a fall leaf in the middle of August…but it was dull, lacked contrast and over all wasn’t nearly as traumatic as say, going to see District 9 this afternoon (which I walked out of). So it needed some help and now I had this Joe Jackson song running through my head and I began to play with the luminosity layer actions and doing some luminosity painting and finished up with using the smart glow action at 25. And whew…
Much better. not my best image but it allowed me to play around with some gross changes to all the different masks as well as some finer painting and give me a pretty striking result. I am still in denial that fall is on its way, especially with the wet, mostly cold summer we had but at least it will be pretty…
Tags: Actions, Fall, LR2, Photography, Photoshop
So it was freezing, literally, Saturday morning but I felt inspired for the first time this year to get out and shoot. Got up and started to bundle up, looked at the thermometer and it was -1F so I added a bit more clothing, grabbed my 30D, 24-105 and a polarizer and headed out. I went to a small stream and dam behind a house off a main road near me. The trick with this was that it there is no shoulder there to start with and with the piles of snow there’s even less place to stand, at Mikes suggestion I wore my orange hunting season vest to be visible, which got me a thumbs up from a passing officer.
It was COLD! After about 10 minutes I forgot I had toes but it was alright. I was right up on the guard rail and wishing I could go over and down towards the stream bed but that is (I think) private property and I didn’t want to take a swim. The sun was just getting high enough to light the little dam and the rime ice that had formed on it during this week of relentless cold. My eye was drawn to the corner of the dam and the way the ice and water were mixing. I’m a huge Moose Petersen fan and he’s been really enthused lately about the D3X he tried and how he could get fabulous image subsets from the huge files it gave him (and it doesn’t hurt he’s a totally awesome photographer). Now I use a Canon 30D and it’s not got the oomph that a D3X does and since I only took my 24-105 (no way I was changing lenses in the cold and on the side of the road, and ditto for carrying an extra body and lens) I had this to work with:
I played around with a few crops, this was one I liked but it still didn’t do it for me:
Then I played some more and finally ended up with this:
Maybe not quite the intricate detail of a tiny portion of a huge file but still, it’s seeing the small detail in a scene and it’s still pretty sharp. Almost as sharp as the pain in my toes that took about an hour and a hot shower later to finish thawing out.
Tags: Ice, Photography, RI, Stream
I’ve talked with quite a few photographers about their work. When do they consider an image “done” and most of them feel when they’ve watermarked the image, posted it or printed it they’re done with it. Unless they learn something new they pretty much leave it hang, so to speak. I find it hard to do that unless I’m working on a new project and even when I’m doing that and I’ve finished a number of images I still review the ones I’ve finished as I pick a new one to go forward with.
Case in point:
One of the first images I worked on when we got back from Antigua was one of a pair of Royal Terns fighting for a spot on a piling. When I finished the image, reduced and sharpened it I went to save it as a .jpeg and it was pretty large-over 290mb. We try to keep images for our website under 150mb so I took the easy way out and did a “save for web” function in photoshop. I didn’t look at it again for a few days but when I did I didn’t like what I saw:
Royal Terns fighting for position
A second look showed it was oversharpened, some of the whites were blown out and the image just wasn’t as exciting as it had seemed. So I did a bit more work, I’d saved both the original .dng that I had exported the image from Lightroom as and the .psd that I created after I worked on it in Photoshop. Back in Lightroom I cropped about 20% of the image, used the adjustment brush to reduce the brightness and the exposure on the blown out feathers (bringing out some feathers that were actually standing away from the bottom Terns’ body). I actually did exactly the same sharpening I had done originally (highpass only on the terns and the piling and adjusting the opacity) but this time I just saved it as a jpeg at the same resolution but did not use “save for web” the results were, in my mind, much more pleasing.
Back in the begining of Decemeber I try to think about what New Years resolutions I wanted to start implementing before the New Year rolled around. The first was that I wasn’t going to be so self critical. I guess I broke that one before it got a chance and I don’t feel so bad about it.
Tags: Photography
I did have one good sunrise image, although not of the sun rising over the ocean but of the overflow down from Mud Pond. This is an HDR of 4 images ranging from -2 to +1EV. The image at +2EV was just too washed out to be of use. 
Tags: Photography
One of my favorite songs is an old Moody blues song called “And the Tide Rushes In” and the song was playing in my head all yesterday morning. It was with a smile I read Moose Peterson’s blog post May the Sun Rise to Greet You last night since even without his urging that’s what I did, though I didn’t have nearly the sunrise to photograph as he did. I got up at 5 to drive to Moonstone Beach for sunrise thinking that it should be a spectacular sunrise since the front blew through overnight and the wind was from the north west so there should be some clouds sprinkling the sky to reflect the sun as it rose. It certainly seemed that way where I live, about 50 miles north but as I took the southward turn down route 4 I could see a large bank of clouds on the horizon that didn’t disperse as I got closer. Sunrise itself was a bust but the beach in predawn light was beautiful as the tide was coming in. I wanted to blur the water a bit but didn’t want to let the exposure be too long so that the rocks that were being covered by the water would show. I liked this one the best because to me it gives the feeling of the water reaching out to grab the rocks but not quite getting there.
The tide rushes in
The only thing was that it didn’t really grab me so I started again and in LR2 converted it to B&W and then worked on it Photoshop (Since for some reason LR2 is so slow I just do everything again in photoshop) and got this:
And the tide rushes in B&W
I’m still not sure which one I like best so comments and criticism is appreciated
Tags: Photography
My favorite birds hands down are Accipitrids better known as Raptors-Hawks, Eagles, and Kites. There’s something about these magnificient birds of prey that get me to stop and keep me mesmerized as I watch them soar and hunt. So when ever I go out shooting I always hope for a sighting and gnash my teeth when they fly just above my head or past my car when I don’t have a camera at hand. Not to say I don’t like the gentler ones, they’re beautiful and I enjoy photographing them, it’s just the Raptors really get me excited to shoot.
I was lucky enough to get a day off two weeks ago that was just perfect. Went out shooting before dawn and got some nice foliage shots (that still need to be keyworded and picked over) and when I got to Diamond Hill Reservoir in the early afternoon I was treated to a Red Tail Hawk circling above the pond on the east side of the reservoir and calling out:
Red Tail Hawk calling
It was joined soon after by another:
A Pair of Red Tail Hawks
The hawk on the left is an eastern adult and the one on the left is a rufous-morph adult both are red tail hawks.
Another view of the pair:
Red Tail Hawks
And one last one of the Eastern morph adult:
Red Tail Hawk-Eastern Adult
All in all an excellent hawk day for me.
Tags: Photography, Red Tail Hawks