Winter Landscapes

Earlier this week, I was in Madison, South Dakota doing some commercial photography for J-Gable.  The client was driving, so I was a passenger for this trip.  On the way home that afternoon (about 60 miles) I was blown away by the light and the blowing snow creating a very moody look.

As soon as I made it back to Watertown, I turned my truck back south chasing that great light.  The blowing snow had disappeared, but I still found several good shots as the sun was starting to go down.

Taking photos with snow is always a challenge.  Getting the exposure right can be tricky.  I’ve been shooting a lot of auto bracketed photos lately so that I can combine certain images into HDR shots.  Being it was REALLY cold and windy, I thought I’d just continue to shoot that way to make sure I got the shot.  So, I composed my shot, made my best choice on exposure and bracketed by 2 stops.  This gave me one at the exposure I selected and two underexposed and two overexposed.

With the sun setting I had very bright highlights (sun and snow) and some dark shadows (tree line and farm).  Turned out this was one of those great opportunities to use HDR pro in Photoshop CS5 to merge these different exposures.

I tweaked the final product using onOne’s Phototools and I think this image really reflects what it felt like on that day on a lakeshore beside the old Meridian Highway (US 81)!

 

ISO 200, 1/50 sec, f/13 – Nikon D300

Happy New Year (and stay warm!)

Remembering summer days with HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5

I spent some time today putting up Christmas lights on the house today.  The temperature wasn’t bad, but there was a pretty good wind out there.  We are also looking at a winter storm tomorrow!

When I decided to review an HDR (high dynamic range) training on the National Association of Photoshop Professionals website this afternoon, all the photos that I pulled up to play with were from our summer vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  The holidays are a nice time of the year, but spring and summer is when I thrive!

Very pleasant memories as I practiced this methodology.  I’ve done several posts on HDR, so if you are unfamiliar with it, you might want to look back (primarily at the old blog – link on the right!)

The process began with my original photos five photos auto-bracketed in my Nikon.  The original photo and then an underexposed by 2 stops and 1 stop.  Overexposed by 1 stop and 2 stops.

After importing all photos into Adobe Lightroom, I selected all five frames, right clicked to select Edit > Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop.  In the Merge to HDR settings, I increased the detail and then the strength and the radius to dial in the look I wanted.

I saved the result from Photoshop (returning the photo to Lightoom) and then fine tuned the image in Lightroom.  Note: For those not using Lightroom, you can accomplish this in Adobe Camera Raw as well.

Here’s the final result and my warm memories of Sylvan Lake:

Below is the original correctly exposed base photo:

ISO 250, 1/13 second, f/16 – Nikon D300

Lightroom Publishing the Sequel

I just discovered one additional tidbit on the Publish to Flickr tool in Adobe Lightroom 3.2.

Because this publishing is an on-going relationship between Lightroom and Flickr, when someone makes a comment on a photograph on Flickr, that information comes back into Lightroom.

Here’s a screen shot.  Thank you to Lisa for making comments and thus making this discovery possible!

Closer:

I’ll have to see how this plays out over time to determine how valuable this is.  For now, it is just “cool!”

New Publish Feature in Lightroom

I’ve been putting off creating a presence on Flickr for a VERY long time.  With a rainy Labor Day keeping me inside and working, I started to look into it again.

The timing is pretty good as the newest release of Adobe Lightroom has a “publish” feature that allows me to post photos directly to Flickr (and Facebook, SmugMug and other sites.  A plugin is also available to do the same thing on Zenfolio – one of the sites I use).

Thought I’d just walk through an example and post a photo out to Flickr.  For a more detailed explanation/demo, you might want to check out this video from Julianne Kost at Adobe TV. 

I do more and more of my work in Lightroom and this feature makes it so easy for me to get my working photos off my computer to the web without first having to do a bunch of file handling (sizing, naming, metadata entry, etc.)  All these items are set up in my publish settings.  This means, all I do is drag my photo for the Library Module in Lightroom to the appropriate site to publish to and essentially say “go”!  Sweet.

Here is a screen shot of some variations on a photo I talked about in the last post.  If I want to quickly post the photo with my logo to Flickr – here is what it looks like.

1.  With my photo selected in the Library Module, I just drag the selected photo to the Flickr section under Publish Services.

2.  Next, clicking on the Photostream section, I can see the photos that have been published and those needing to be published.  Clicking on Publish is all I need to do.

3.  With my publish settings in place, you can see all my metadata is also uploaded with the photo! 

I guess I have all the tools in place.  Now it is just a matter of getting the appropriate photos posted to Flickr!

Hope everyone had a great Labor Day Weekend.

Adobe Lightroom and Presets

 

I don’t think there is a more valuable tool in my digital darkroom than Adobe Lightroom.  I’m using release 3.2 these days.

A couple of weeks ago I had serious problems with my laptop.  A corrupt user profile – if you’ve ever had to deal with that issue, you know how frustrated I was with that!  However, to try to find a positive slant to this, it did require me to reload a few things.  I guess once you get things set the way you want, it is easy to forget that there are other settings or opportunities available.

Today I reloaded some free presets for Lightroom developed by Photoshop Guru Jack Davis.  I was fortunate to see him speak a couple of years ago at Photoshop World in Orlando.  Anyways, what a great pack of tools  AND you can’t beat the price.   I downloaded the presets from the onOne software site (one of my favorite Photoshop add-on’s.)  If you use Lightroom and want to try these yourself, click here.

The photo at the top was achieved by applying three presets called Wow-Antique 1, Wow Antique 2 and Wow-f_Vignette_Lt_07.  Finished with a thin black ‘Edge Treatment’ in onOne’s Phototools.

Here is the original and a two additional pre-sets.

     

Original, c_HSL-Only Brown (Jack Davis preset) and Creamtone (LR preset).

This photo was taken in Custer State Park in South Dakota with a Nikon D300.   ISO 200, 1/1600 sec, f/4.0, 55 mm.

Photoshop CS5 and HDR

One of the features I was excited to try in the new release of Photoshop was the upgraded High Dynamic Range (HDR) functionality.   In the past, HDR required additional plugin products or a lot of labor intensive work.

After doing a photo assignment today, I had the opportunity to photograph a couple of South Dakota landscapes with some dramatic clouds in the sky.   I shot three rapid fire photos with a bracketing setting on my Nikon D300 as I often do these days to open up options in post production.

When I arrived at home, I was thinking I wish I had CS5 already as it would make some of my editing go easier (referring to other features – perhaps a future blog post.)  I decided I’d download the trial software as I will probably be upgrading in the next month.  Of course, the FIRST thing I needed to try was the HDR! 

I started in Lightroom and identified the set of photos I wanted to work with.  Here is the landscape in the photo exposed at the level I decided was “correct”.

Right from Lightroom, I selected “merge to HDR in Photoshop”. 

There are many presets and much more control in the new release.  I selected a preset for “surreal” and then played with sliders to more closely match what I saw with my own eyes a few hours ago.

And along with a frame from onOne Photoframes, here is the finished product!

 

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Through the Viewfinder (TTV)

I discovered a photography technique that piqued my curiosity on PhotoJoJo some time ago.   Their posting described how some photographers have been shooting a photo of their subject through the viewfinder of an old TTL camera for an interesting effect.  Here is the original posting:  Photojojo

I decided to give it a try and so I found an old vintage Voigtlander Brilliant on eBay for the right price.  I didn’t want to spend a ton of money at first – at least until I saw some results.  The Brilliant is a pseudo twin lens reflex camera (TLR) that was manufactured in Austria in the 1930’s.  You can read more details about this camera (and many others) here: Camerapedia. 

My first chance to really try was last week while I was doing a photo shoot with Taylor Kearns, Miss ND USA 2010.  We had found a wall that had a great shade of red on it.  The setting sun was shining on the wall with a relatively intense light.  I figured that would be a perfect time to try.  Taylor and the wall would be well lit and I could block the sun on the viewfinder of the Brilliant with my body.  I’m sure holding the vintage camera at waist level with my left hand and trying to focus and compose a shot with my pro DSLR had to look ridiculous, but I was excited about the results.  In this first photo, I’ve cropped a bit, but still included my hand and the camera in the shot.   Did a little work in Photoshop to remove the color in all except what is in the viewfinder.  I also added a border from onOne’s PhotoFrame tool.

 

I went on to finish the “real” shoot with Taylor – you can see some of that series on my Facebook page here: Taylor.   As we were packing up, I happened to notice a bicycle leaning up against a fire escape on the next building.  Now THAT was exactly the sort of subject I had been looking for.  I grabbed the Brilliant and fired off another shot.  In this one, I cropped the photo down to just what was seen in the viewfinder.  

I can see this is going to take a bit of practice and maybe some trial and error.  Even still, I think this is going to be a creative way to produce some interesting photographs!   Hopefully, there will be more to share in the future.

PJ