Peoples Photography Dublin 2010 is once again just around the corner. This will be my third year attending the event and once again I’ll be with Dermot and his family.

During lasts years event, Dermot and I got to talking about doing something with a space between the two of us as well as the usual individual displays.

We’ve no rules, hell we’re not even sure of the game, but the theme for this space is “Red”

Which leaves me in a pickle.

Anyway, while at the Games Fair today I took this.

I’m taking it as an omen.

Been a while since I posted something just because it’s Friday…

If you hate HDR, look away now…

 

 

(I kind of expect this to turn up on one of those 50 images that prove HDR is evil sites….)

One of my favourite hobbies these days is reviewing pictures I took a few weeks earlier to see if anything jumps out or if some new technique I learned about suddenly gives me a way to improve on something.

This photograph, taken a week or two ago at the tall ships didn’t really say much to me then, though I do quite like the fact it shows the modern shipyards through the rigging of the older boats bow.

I was just playing with some HDR stuff and suddenly it seems to get a nice life to it.

I know a lot of people curse HDR and I’ve had a bit of a love hate relationship with it over the last two years myself. But sometimes the photo cries out for it and sometimes, like this, you kind of half expect it when you’re shooting.

The apples are sitting on a piece of black Perspex (which I finally got round to picking up, thanks for the tip Paulo) and lighting is just natural window light.

Camera was on F/16 and shutter speeds were 0.3sec, 0.5sec and 0.8sec. HDR was performed in Photomatix Pro and then a bit of curves and shadow adjustments in Photoshop (yeah, I now at some point its not a photograph anymore…)

At some point in the process it’s lost the sharpness of the original images which is a little annoying. It was all shot on a tripod, but I’m not sure if that was enough, my three year old was bouncing about at the time!

OH, one question. Does anyone have good tips for getting dust particles of Perspex? It was a nightmare to get this shot without little flecks of dust!

Yesterdays picture caused a bit of discussion over breakfast with some friends.

It all centred around when is a photograph no longer a photograph. Now, this is something I’ve spoken about here and I’m still pretty undecided myself. My current thinking is, it’s a photograph for as long as the photographer wants to call it one. There may be a better definition of it out there.

The question arose if the HDR was better than the original, or if its artificial adjustments made it something different but that it lost the appeal of the original.

I thought it might be interesting to share the three original images and let people make their own mind up. These are as imported from the camera.

I might come back to this at some point myself and see if I can produce something I like more using only one of these images.

I’ve been sitting on this picture for a while now. I knew I wanted to try and process it through HDR – even when taking it I took three exposures to give me the capacity.

I find shooting into a sunset like this incredibly difficult. The last rays of the sun either cause the shot to under-expose or leave the sky a horrid washed out white mess. Taking this as three exposures allowed me to find the best of each world, and whilst I normally wouldn’t go this extreme with HDR, I do like the finished result quite a bit.

The last three pictures I’ve posted have been processed in HDR and I think this is my favourite. It does give images a nice feel, although I’ll be the first to admit they do drift away from “what the eye saw”.

It’s typical that now the competition season is over in the club, I start producing pictures I’d like to use. Still, there’s always next year.

I feel I should confess my problem.

No. Not that I can’t take photographs – you know this already.

I feel I should confess my love for cheese.

Not the yellow, made from milk, type cheese, but the big hair retro “Disco Stu” cheese.

Which is why, even though this should have been consigned to the recycle bin as a drunken mistake, I decided to let you all see it.

I can’t help but feel it should be stitched or stencilled onto a T-Shirt or the back of a motorcycle jacket and sent back in time to the 1980’s.

I really need to try harder to manage my depth of field issues.

This is just a little shallow for me. Though I love the effect pushing it through an HDR process has had on it.

Original image was parsed through Dynamic-Photo HDR then had some small curves adjustments and a little sharpening applied to it.

The original image was shot at f/5.6 1/250 at 250mm. The wide aperture at such a zoom has left it a little too shallow. On review, it’s an issue I have with a few birds of prey pictures I took over the weekend.

I swear, I will not start randomly posting images on a Friday for no reason. I just liked the gold colours of the sunset…

Built from three exposures using HDR and then some additional tweaks, it lost all semblance of “natural picture” a while back, but I took a shine to the gold colours.

It’s absolutely amazing the difference 10 minutes can make. 10 minutes earlier and the sun would have been much nicer.

Mind you 10 minutes before that it was chucking it down.

And 10 minutes after I took this it was pitch black and chucking it down.

The Irish Marine Institute, Galway Bay.

I've a confession to make. When I'm using the tripod I always take three images, bracketing my chosen picture by +1/-1 Ev using the auto exposure bracketing in the camera.

There's a couple of reasons for this.

1. It allows me to play in HDR land with pictures. (I've stopped posting a lot of those as they can feel over processed and 'samey')

2. It allows me to see what a modification to the settings might have got me - I'm still learning here, so this is useful.

If memory is cheap for you, I'd suggest you do the same. It really isn't as much of a waste of card space as you think.

 

On other matters, with the number of club competitions I've been entering, I've taken to buying mounts pre-cut and in bulk. This has left me in even more of a 3*2mode than before - If all my mounts are already cut to 12*8 apertures (maximum entry is 16*12 including mount), then I tend to only see a 3*2 ratio picture as a potential entry.

So much so, that a digital entry I submitted this week was in that aspect ration as well. Even though in a slightly different ratio it might have been much nicer.

Well, tonight I'm breaking my 3*2 habit.

And posting an HDR picture.

So there.

 

I guess I'm going to have to cut my own boards.

 

I fought with this picture for an hour after making it HDR. I'm still not happy with the colours, but I thought I'd share and see if some kind soul (soul, church - geddit?) would help me out and suggest where it all went wrong.

"My name is Paul, it's been one month since my last HDR photo."

I swear HDR is like crack cocaine. It all starts innocently enough. Sure, you're just compensating for the lack of range in the photo. what harm can it do? Then, next thing you know you're seeing improvements in the picture, maybe saving an image that might not have been great otherwise. And then, before you know it, you're back looking at psychedelic skies and crazy moonscape beaches...

Well, I tried to be good. I tried to stay away from the evil addiction of HDR.

But, dammit. I love those skies man. I love those skies...

 

Original Image. (Some minor tweaks to curves)

(f/13, 1/80sec, 22mm, ISO-200, 19/07/08)

 

HDR - Image 1. Simple balance here to keep it close to natural colours but to remove some of the shadows and generally balance the thing out.

 

HDR - Image 2. High contrast drugs ahoy.

 

 

I know it's wrong. But why oh why do I still love 'HDR - Image 2' so much?

 

Ah well back to cold turkey.

 

 

Oh, in case you're interested, the boat here is an old trawler that's been beached on the channel between Donegal and Cruit Island. During low tide you can walk out to it from either side.

I follow a number of different photoblogs and one thing amazes me in all of them is colour. I've no idea whether they're using post processing techniques to tweak curves and saturation or whether they're using filters on the camera, but whatever they do it always looks amazing.

A couple of great examples of this are Oswegan and ReallyJapan blogs. Whether its abstract stuff or cityscapes, these guys seem to always make the photo stand out.

Given the amount I've spent on camera gear in the last year, I'm not really in a position to buy a lot of filters, so I think my summers work will be learning how to make small tweaks in Lightroom/Photoshop/GIMP to improve the colours in the picture.

That's right, as well as having to live with my blurred and poorly composed shots, you'll now need to bear with me while I mess up the colour balance and intensity as well.

 

Seemed appropriate to look to higher powers for inspiration.

(f/7.1, 1/30sec, 55mm, ISO-200, 20/06/2008)

 

What I wanted was to make the sign feel vibrant against the leaves and tree. To make it draw your eye in whilst still being legible. What I ended up with, well the dirt on the sign looks like noise and the blue looks a little too electric, but I do quite like it.

I was out again on Sunday trying to take a photo of model cars racing. Yet again the wee blighters stumped me by being too small and moving too fast.

In no particular order I tried

• Pre-focusing on the track
• Using a really fast shutter speed
• Using continuous shoot mode on the camera
• Demanding my brother throw himself onto the track to make the drivers slow down

The first three had marginal successes. the last one, well let's just say the tire tracks on his head look well.

One shot I did get that I kind of liked was this. A little HDR to make it "gritty".

(f/8, 1/60sec, 55mm, ISO-200, 15/06/2008)

 

And yes, the car was stationary at the time....

Another HDR shot from a week or so ago.

Nothing major to say about this, except that trying to keep orange life rings from glowing when making an HDR image is a pain in the...

Long exposures can give some interesting and completely unexpected results.

On Saturday night I was on one of the beaches in Cloughglass and to be honest should probably have packed up and gone home instead of trying to take one more picture (final image count for the weekend was 290 pictures by the way).

By the time I took the following, it was well into dark and the nice red twilight was pretty much gone. In an effort to get some light into the camera, a 5 second shutter speed was required. The side effect of this was that the waves and the boat have a nice ethereal blur about them.

At least, I think so.

 

(f/14, 5secs, 22mm, ISO-100, 03/05/2008)

 

To my mind it gets even nicer when you see the resultant HDR - Yes I had auto exposure bracketing on and couldn't help myself.

Oh, it's been cropped a little as the horizon wasn't in a great spot in the original.

I like the intensity of the colours more here. Yeah it's probably lost some of its natural hues, but the sky and the colours just seem more.... well more.

I tried a third version of this. Just because I was messing and could.

This time I used the overexposed image in the exposure bracket and let the HDR software work from there. Just using a single image.

I'm not keen on the burned out white in the sky and if I didn't have 300 images to play with I might spend a little time trying to clean it up. but I really do like the sand and the boat motion so thought I would share.

I've done some playing around with HDR over the past few months, but if you want to see it done well, try looking at "Stuck in Customs" a photoblog by Trey Ratcliff.

Some of the pictures border on obscene they are so beautiful.

There is also a nice tutorial on HDR that's worth a read.

I'd been saying to Dermot for ages about coming up north for a day so I could return the favour from those times when he took me out round Dublin. Well, since he's gone and got a job in Holland, the some time quickly became a time and that time was yesterday.

We met around 10 in Belfast and headed off in search of the Antrim Coast Road and the Giants Causeway. Being a native of the North, I off course knew exactly where the coast road was - beside the sea, somewhere to the right of the country. I'm not sure I impressed Dermot with my geographical ability, but trusty steed and I found it eventually while I regaled my Dublin friend with tales and folklore about the land we passed through.

Tales like...

"These houses are really expensive!"

"That's our power station" (I may have got the name wrong though...)

"This is Carrickfergus, it has a castle. Look that old building, that must be it"

"The Causeway coast is most of the best coastal roads in the world" - I may have made this up. But I was sure I heard this on TV somewhere....

And so continued a day to the North. A day that promised rain and wind, but brought only sun and warmth. I'll start posting photographs over the next while. But for now...

 

A typical view from just off the Causeway Coastal Route.

(F20, 1/30sec, 10mm, ISO-100, HDR - +1/-1ev*) - Some levels adjustments.

 

 

Hopefully Dermot enjoyed the day. I know I enjoyed it right up until 10 minutes after he left for Dublin when my attempt to get a burger was rudely interrupted by someone driving into the car while I was parked. They didn't even have the decency to hit the same side as my neighbour a few weeks earlier. My mechanic is going to love me...

 

 

 

* I've added a little bit more information to my usual image settings line. The HDR numbers here refer to the exposure differences used to create the HDR base for the finished image - typically the camera seems to change the shutter speed, but that may be just because I'm shooting in Aperture mode.

Last picture of the pier in Dungloe for the time being. It's yet another thing on my list of "to try again" shots. Next time, hopefully with the classic sunset (and just a little bit warmer please).

I've been using a product called Dynamic Photo HDR for all these shots. Whilst possibly not as complete as Photomatix, it's pretty simple to use, gives good results and isn't out of the question at $39. Both products have demo versions available, so give them a go.

Having played a fair bit with HDR over the past week, it's another of those techniques that generates tripe and treacle. I'm not overly happy with some of the pictures I've ended up with, but the taste is there and I'll be back for more.

This is another composite image, created from an HDR tone map.  It's also had some level alterations made to the pier itself to make it a little brighter.

 

Oh and Darrell, you're right. There is crud on my lens. It was in this picture as well, before I cloned it out. I'll look into cleaning the camera and kit over the weekend. Good spot!

 

Waiting...

... for his ship to come in?

Actually, just waiting to see if the clouds will clear and give me some sort of sunset or if the storms will get that little bit prettier before the rain starts to fall again.

This is another of those tone mapped images using the HDR tool that I found. To be honest, it's pretty much what I would have tried to do manually anyway as the original pictures were either to dark or had the sky blown out.

And yes. This is the first time a 'person' appears in a photo on this blog. It's also the first time 'I' appear on the blog (told you there was a self portrait coming Dermot).

The power of the shutter timer is a glorious thing.

Yes, I is giant. I also wear very baggy jeans for some reason...

Like I said yesterday, I went out over Easter with the attitude that I would try some new things and experiment with some stuff I'd heard of over the past few months.

One of the things I did was to set my camera to do some auto exposure bracketing (AEB)*. For those that don't know, or got bored before that part of the manual (and who can blame you), AEB on your camera sets it up to take three photographs. The first is at the exposure you select, the second is under exposed and the third is over exposed. The amount of over and under exposure is up to you.

It's a useful facility for shooting landscapes and other static scenes and allows you to do things in post processing like tweak some levels or replace an over exposed sky (kind of the same way you might use an ND filter I guess). Whilst not a great example, the picture I took of the Rock of Cashel used the effect - basically the sky was cloned from an under-exposed version of the shot.

Anyhow, I took a range of pictures of a life buoy on Dungloe pier as I really liked the colour against the stormy sky.

The image I got was OK.

(1/15, F/4.5, 22mm, ISO - 100, 23/03/2008)

In itself, I guess the image isn't bad. It's probably better than stuff I took 6 months ago, and I'm happy enough with it. But as usual, I got to playing around and remembered a technique a bluegrass loving bloke I work with told me about called HDR.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a process which allows more tones in an image than would be usual. Essentially shadows are reduced and highlights less blown out... or something like that... Essentially it takes a range of exposures of the same image and mixes them up to produce an interesting composite. Here, let wikipedia explain....

Well, I pushed my three exposures of the life buoy through an HDR engine and got what I think is an interesting result. I'm actually kind of taken with it, so expect more HDR type images soon!

 

 

*For those of you with Canon 400D's and who can't be bothered reading the manual, the AEB setting is on the second menu tab. It's worth noting it resets every time you power off the camera, change a lens, etc etc etc... Also, it behaves differently when using remote or timed release of the shutter. It is worth playing with though...

 

Oh, and the astute will notice that the HDR image is number 1 and the original number 2. Nothing sneaky, just the sequence number that was added when I exported the pictures for upload..... Honest!