Sunrise Over The Lake

 landscape, sunrises  No Responses »
Jul 062010
 

Sunrise Over The Lake, Cossington South Lakes

One of the most boring and time consuming tasks that comes with any serious amount of photography seems to be dealing with the large amount of files (and the amount of disc space that they take up). I try to keep two backups of all my images – at the moment I’m finally archiving them all to DVD, chronologically, but I’m also taking the opportunity to get rid of some rubbish and duplicates.

Often I’ll take a couple of shots of something and then notice a distraction in the frame, or I’ll increase the exposure time to get a little more light into a scene. At about 15MB a time all these extra shots add up and despite going against the “never delete your raws” mantra, hanging on to all these extra versions doesn’t really serve any great purpose, other than helping Western Digital stay in business.

The above image is from January 2010 (I’m about 6 months behind with my tidy up at the moment and my progress is constantly hampered by the arrival of new images which I’ll briefly scan for favourites and then ignore for a few months) and was taken on a frosty morning out with John Houghton

This was one of the last shots that I took with my Canon 450D and despite having been back since with my other camera, this was my favourite sunrise shot from this location – mainly due to the good fortune of the cloud picking up the pink glow of the rising sun, which is then also reflected in the ice.

Technical info: ISO100, f/16, 11mm, 1.3s, Cokin ND4 soft grad

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Scorhill Under A Stormy Sky

 b&w, landscape  No Responses »
May 112010
 

Scorhill Under A Stormy Sky

Not the first image I’ve published from the this location and almost certainly not the last.

Stone Circles can be very hard to photograph with pleasing results, possibly because they look very plain, but also because often they don’t stand out well from their surroundings. What looks fantastic in an isolated location can end up looking like just a few rocks stuck in a field when photographed.

The day of our visit to Scorhill though things were very different – the light was great thanks to bright sunlight occasionally breaking through thick black cloud, the ground was wet with puddles forming and the grass was dry, giving the stones chance to show up against the background.

All I had to do then was try to get the composition I wanted and keep the kids out of the frame :)

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Cossington South Lakes

 landscape, sunsets  2 Responses »
Sep 262009
 

Cossington South Lakes, Leicestershire

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The day before I took this I noticed just how red the clouds were as the sun disappeared beyond the horizon. Keeping an eye on the weather over the course of the next day I thought it looked like there was a good chance conditions might be the same so I popped out an hour before sunset to explore some local lakes that I’ve ridden and driven past many times but never walked around.

The major challenge when attempting shots like this (for me at least) is getting the exposure just right. Even though the sun has disappeared below the horizon the sky is still bright enough to completely overpower the rest of the scene. I’m sure the camera could have dealt with this in one of its automatic modes in conjunction with evaluative metering and auto white balance, but from experience I doubt I would have been that happy with the results. The shot would either have contained a properly exposed sky and little else, or more light in the rest of the shot with blown highlights in the sky.

In order to maintain an even level of light in the sky and in the reflection on the water I used my trusty Cokin ND8 (P121) grad *. It’s ideal for shots of this type where there is a nice straight, dark line across the image where the start of the graduation can be placed. Using this filter allows a longer exposure time so that we can pick up more of the light elsewhere in the shot, such as the faint light on the reeds in the foregound. Once the grad is in place it’s always a good idea to double check its positioning with the DOF preview button if you’re using a small aperture as fine adjustments can make all the difference.

Before I put the grad in I’ll usually spot meter what I think is the brightest part of the scene and set it so that it exposes at just below +2EV – I do this manually by adjusting the shutter speed (but if you are using AV you can just used the exposure compensation control to achieve the same results). Once the grad is in place I’ll then adjust the shutter speed to compensate for change in light – so if I’d settled on 1/100s before the grad I’ll change it to 1/25s (even though the ND8 makes a 3 stop difference I won’t usually adjust by 3 stops initially).

Then it’s just a case of taking a test shot and checking the composition and the histogram (and keeping an eye out for blinkies). If there are blown highlights (blinkies) then the shutter speed needs to be faster – if the histogram doesn’t look right (usually not containing data in the right-hand 5th) then the shutter speed needs to be slower **.

* It’s worth noting that the Cokin P121 does give a pink/purple colour cast so it’s not really ideal for use during the day, unless you are prepared to attempt to correct the problem either by using Auto White Balance or by fixing it later in post-production. It is however great for shooting towards the sun at this time of day

** If the shutter speed can’t be slower – because there is too much movement in the shot – then compromises will have to be made with aperture size or ISO setting. A brief explanation of exposure control and stops can be found here – http://www.andystafford.co.uk/exposure-control-stops/

Winter Tree Redone

 hdr, trees  No Responses »
May 092009
 

Winter Tree

“Winter Tree” was my first real attempt at creative processing, rather than just using Photomatix to make a shot look extravagantly real (I was going to put “hyperreal” here but I couldn’t bring myself to do it). The initial version was an accident – one of those rare “I wonder what happens if I…” experiments that gives a pleasing result. Unfortunately though my inexperience at the time though led me to overlooking some serious flaws with the original image – the contrast was all wrong and the image was noisy.

The poor contrast in the original version was due to my monitor being poorly set up – it was far too dark – and whilst the noise level isn’t that obvious in the version elsewhere on this site (http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree/) it is painfully apparent on the large version available on Flickr (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3340/3194854394_305882a0a9_o.jpg).

Why was the image noisy? Because my Microsmoothing setting in Photomatix was too low (0). It made the clouds look more dramatic but I didn’t see how badly it was affecting the quality of the image as I neglected to look at it at full size.

If I was ever going to make this image available as a print I knew I was going to have to go back to the original raw files and reprocess it. Details of this process can be found here http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree-and-photomatix/

Visit http://www.hdrsoftwaretutorial.co.uk/ for tutorials and a discount code which will give you 15% off the purchase of Photomatix.

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Spring Afternoon

 textures  No Responses »
May 022009
 

Spring Afternoon

Earlier in the year I set myself a challenge in order to improve my photography and broaden my horizons a bit – I’d seen this concept mentioned in some old magazines that were passed on to me. I find it can get terribly difficult to think of things to photograph so I decided to combine two of my favourite past times, cycling and photography.

The idea was that I would attempt to find something to take pictures of each time I went out – it didn’t matter what – just anything that took my fancy.

On this occasion I was taking a short cut across some fields. It was early spring and despite the sunshine the ground was a little too wet for cycling, let alone lying on, so I got pretty soaked getting this shot.

Spring Afternoon

Despite having the features I wanted, the shot didn’t capture my feelings at the time – the warmth of the first sunny day of the year, the freedom of being out doing what I wanted to do. It needed to be more fluffy and dreamlike and fortunately I knew exactly what I was going to do.

A friend on Flickr produces some fine textures for layering and I already had one in mind that would add the tone I was looking for to the picture.

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Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

 landscape  1 Response »
Apr 262009
 

Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

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In a number of previous posts I’ve mentioned just how much difference a few minutes can make to a scene. The above shot was taken on the first day of a recent holiday in Cornwall whilst we waited for our accommodation to become available.

I’ve become more interested in black and white than colour photography just recently and it seemed the perfect style to capture the old harbour. The sunlight was patchy at the time and I got the shot I was looking for, looking out to sea through the railings (see below), however just as I was preparing to move on the sun broke through the clouds and lit the scene perfectly. It was impossible to ignore the combination of colours in front of me so out came the red filter I’d been using and in went the ND grad to improve the sky.

Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

Winter Tree and Photomatix

 hdr, tutorials  4 Responses »
Apr 022009
 

The Winter Tree shot was created using 3 bracketed exposures, shown below. Most DSLRs can be set up to take exposures like this – the camera will take 3 shots (or more depending on the camera) each at different exposures. In this instance they were taken at 0, -2EV and +2EV so that I end up with 3 shots that are all 2 stops apart.

I found the idea of “stops” the most complicated part of getting to grips with photography, but basically a stop is the doubling or halving of the amount of light hitting the sensor – so if we had a 1 second exposure, the next stop down from that would be 1/2s and the next stop up would be 2s. ISO and aperture settings also affect the amount of light hitting the sensor and therefore their adjustment can also be measured in stops, however when taking bracketed exposures these two remain constant – only the shutter speed changes. (A more detailed explanation can be found here – http://www.andystafford.co.uk/exposure-control-stops/)

Having set the camera up to take my 3 shots, I pressed the shutter release and this is what I got…


1/125s
1/500s
1/30s

The numbers underneath each shot are the exposure times – see how the second is 4 times the first, and the third is 1/4 of the first (give or take some rounding). This is due to the 2 stops difference between each shot.

You’ll notice that the shots (apart from the final one) look quite dark. There are three reasons for this:-

  • I wanted to keep as much cloud detail as possible so I metered off the brightest part of the sky to make sure I didn’t get any blown highlights.
  • It was slightly windy and I didn’t want too much tree movement in the shot so I tried to keep the shutter speeds as fast as possible. (1/30s is still quite slow really considering there was moving foliage but I got lucky in this instance). Photomatix can align movement but better to try to limit the problems at source.
  • Accident. I would also have taken a brighter set but I was running out of time.

Once home I loaded the images into Photomatix as follows (Note: if you want to try this there is a link to the source images at the bottom of this article):-

These aren’t the default settings – I find that different combinations of alignment methods work better for different shots. I left Align Source Images set to “By correcting horizontal and vertical shifts” just in case the wind blew the tripod at all and turned off “Attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts”. Movement, especially clouds and running water, can cause problems in Photomatix and I’ll often try different options in these instances.

Once Photomatix had finished its initial processing I pressed the Tone Mapping button and tweaked the settings until I got something that I was happy with.

If you’ve not used Photomatix before don’t be alarmed by how the image looks at the moment – what’s on the screen is only a rough guide. The finished product will look much better :)

The settings that made the major difference to the image were those to do with saturation. With the main Colour Saturation slider set to 0 the image was black & white but changing the Saturation Highlights slider re-introduced colour in the the brighter elements of the shot – the clouds.

If you want to have a go yourself, the source images are available – Source images (3.2MB).

I’m afraid they are jpegs rather than the original raw files, due to space and bandwidth considerations, but they are good enough quality for trying out this example.

Visit http://www.hdrsoftwaretutorial.co.uk/ for tutorials and a discount code which will give you 15% off the purchase of Photomatix.

Winter Tree

 hdr  No Responses »
Mar 312009
 

Winter Tree

At the start of year, after a couple of months of not going out on my bike due to cold weather I decided I should start again. Unfortunately though, now that I have a camera I find it hard to actually get any amount of cycling done as I’m constantly stopping to take pictures of things. In this instance I got almost as far as the next village before deciding to get a few shots of this tree.

The tree actually looked like this…

Winter Tree (Original)

The brown and green at the base of the tree were why I stopped originally – but the image just left me a bit cold, for obvious reasons really as whilst the tree looked interesting there is nothing special about the composition.

So I set to work, trying to make the most of the interesting clouds and the slightly nightmarish tree.

The actual effect was achieved in Photomatix by increasing the highlight saturation and decreasing the shadow saturation. A more detailed description of this process, along with source files to try it yourself can be found here

http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree-and-photomatix/

Visit http://www.hdrsoftwaretutorial.co.uk/ for tutorials and a discount code which will give you 15% off the purchase of Photomatix.