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!