NIght Photography Made Easy

Have you ever gotten the urge to grab your camera and go out and shoot in the middle of the night?  Photography at night is an adventure.  You stumble around, set up your tripod, guess at a starting exposure (not really), stumble around some more, probably freeze your butt off, take forty two shots of the moon, stumble around again and on and on.  You'd thing that Hollywood, making big time epics, would avoid all that stumbling at all costs.  Actually, they usually do.  Next time you're watching a movie where the hero (heroine) is out wandering around in the dark, take a closer look.  Chances are you'll see shadows cast by things like trees, street lights, buildings, anything that sticks up from the ground.  Wow, they must have been shooting that scene under a full moon. Not!  Movies have been using a trick for as long as movies have been made.  Still photographers used to use the same trick, but it either has been forgotten or today's "new" shooters have never learned it.  "Back in the day" photographers ran around with a stack of filters to fit various lenses and conditions.  If you had daylight film in the camera and you had to shoot an inside shot, you'd check on the lights and put on either a tungsten to daylight filter (an 85A) or a fluorescent to daylight filter (an FLD).  Same in reverse.  It you had tungsten light balanced film and had to run outside into the sunlight you'd slap on a daylight to whatever light you were coming from filter (an 80A for tungsten light).  To find out how this relates to today's image, hit the "Read More".

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A Friend Has That Currier & Ives Look Down Pat

I never begrudge anything anyone can do in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  I'm always either trying to learn new things or figure out how someone did something.  I recently saw a couple images by a friend and frequent reader of these posts (Hi Ed).  He's come up with an old timey, Currier & Ives type look to some of his landscapes.  Very, very interesting look.  He asked me for some pointers on how to extract objects from images.  I think we need to trade tips.  Today's image is an attempt to take a shot at going for the old time feeling.  It works, just not as good as Ed's.  Couple of things.  It is an HDR image with quite a bit of post processing in both PS and LR/ACR (Adobe Camera Raw).  With the Creative Cloud version of PS (PSCC) you can use ACR as a filter.  As long as you make the Layer a Smart Object you can pop back and forth into and out of ACR as often as you'd like.  Great for tweaking things as you go.  You doing something "straight" to an image, jump over to ACR.  Doing anything that needs a Mask, bounce back to PS.  Compositing images, use PS.  Just remember where your base image came from, 'cause that's where it'll go back to when you eventually do a Save and Close.  (Notice I said Save and not Save As.)  If you use LR as a DAM tool (Digital Asset Management) and you go to PS to do something that requires PS you should probably use "Copy With Lightroom Adjustments" (CTRL E to get to the dialog box and then use the top option).  That eliminates the need to do the old fashioned "make a copy of your Background Layer just in case" thing.  People used to do that to protect their original image.  If you "use a copy" you're not touching the original, so you don't need that copy of the Background Layer.  When it's time to Save your creation it'll be put back right beside the original images (or set of images in the case of HDR or panoramas.  But, what's up with today's image.  To find out, hit the "Read More".

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Wednesday Q&A: A Tip For Shooting Sports

 

What!  The title says “A Tip For Shooting Sports” and today’s image is a couple of flowers.  Trust me, it’s only there to illustrate a point.  Doris has her pet orchid.  She tends that little plant zealously.  She has a special place it has to sit.  It’s sort of like Sheldon (The Big Bang Theory – US television) explaining why he has a designated place to sit on the couch.  Just the right amount of sunlight (we’re back to discussing the orchid), not so much as to overheat the plant but enough so it can thrive.  At the right height and distance from the window to maximize the rays.  A slight breeze from walking into and out of the bedroom.  A reasonably constant temperature in all seasons.  Just the ideal (or as close as you can get in our house) spot for its needs.  I stole the sucker.  I wanted to play with an 85mm macro.  Only problem was the tripod was in the trunk of Doris’ car.  Oops!  Oh well.  Shoot hand held and see what happens.  One thing that comes to mind is that the depth of field is going to be severely limited due to the large aperture needed to let in enough light.  To see how these flowers relate to sports photography, hit the “Read More”.

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HDR in Photoshop or Good Lighting In Camera?

There’s a difference in the two shots that make up today’s image.  One is right out of the camera and the other is a five shot HDR image.  The one out of the camera is a RAW image with nothing (nothing) done to it.  The other, like I said, is a fully developed HDR image.  Can you see the difference?  Sure.  With a little work, can I make the OOC (out of Camera) shot look just like the HDR image?  Yep!  A couple of slider moves in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Beta (or LR 4 or LR3) and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two.  Does the OOC RAW image have some special lighting applied that the HDR image doesn’t have?  Nope.  The RAW shot is one of the brackets used to make the HDR image, so the lighting is exactly the same.  The images are of a steam locomotive at Steamtown in Scranton Pennsylvania.  It’s on the shadow side, on a bright sunny afternoon.  So where’d the light come from?  To find out, hit the “Read More”.

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Testing Topaz Labs' New Clarity Pull-in

It’s new, it’s on sale (until 5/30/2013), the demos look good, but is it all it’s cracked up to be?  Today’s image is of one of the twenty-two named waterfalls in Ricketts Glen State Park in Pennsylvania.  We went there over the Memorial Day weekend specifically to shoot some of the falls.  As you may have guessed from the color of the reflections in the water, today’s image isn’t from that trip.  The falls in today’s image is probably as close to the road as you can find.  When we first “discovered” Ricketts Glen we had the place to ourselves.  Over this past weekend, we didn’t.  The parking lot for this falls was full, full, full.  The parking place for the next set was also chock-a-block full of cars, vans, SVUs, pickup trucks and campers.  We drove to what we thought were the undiscovered gems that were basically pull-offs on the side of the road, that gave access to a couple of interesting spots.  Nope, jammed packed.  That’s why I pulled up a shot from a fall trip we took in 2011.  Had to try something to test Topaz Labs’ Clarity.  To see what I found, hit the “Read More”.

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Using Lightroom 5 Beta Radial Filter All Over The Place

How do you get two weeks ahead in three plus hours?  You drive back from Cooperstown New York to Connecticut.  The foliage was two weeks behind up there.  We had snow (just a little) on the car as we were leaving Sunday morning and the temperature was just above freezing.  Brrr, for April 20^th.  We went to Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.  You’d think that was the reason for our visit.  Nope.  Cooperstown is also the home of the Farmer’s Museum.  We’re not farmers by any stretch of the imagine.  In fact, we don’t even like doing yard work, let alone farm something.  Today’s image was taken in the blacksmith’s shop at the museum.  Needless to say, it was pretty dark in there.  You can see the building next door through the window.  You can also see there’s another window off to the left.  Today’s image “could have been done” without Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Beta, but it would have been harder to control.  The Adjustment Brush could have been used.  The nice thing about the Radial Filter in LR5B is the control it offers.  Once you get to the second paragraph of today’s post you’ll see how many times the Radial Filter was used on today’s image.  Go ahead, hit the “Read More” and check it out.

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Wednesday Q&A Adobe Lightroom 5 Best Guesses

A friend just bought Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 less than a month ago.  When the public Beta of Lightroom 5 was announced the other day I sent him an email with a link to a sneak preview and a review.  I was on the fence as to if I was going to download the Beta or wait for the RTM (release to manufacturing) version.  It took me two days to decide I needed/wanted the features of LR5.  Today’s image doesn’t look like it would have much to do with LR5, but it wouldn’t be possible without it.  At least not easily.  It’s not that today’s image didn’t take a couple trips over to Adobe Photoshop CS6, it certainly did.  It’s a partial digital painting.  I been slightly fixated on making photographic images look like painting/photograph hybrid.  Today it was taken to a wee bit of an extreme.  To find out was due to LR5 and what was because of CS6, Hit the “Read More”

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