Surprise!

To this day hardly a photo shoot goes by without revealing some surprises. Sometimes good surprises, sometimes not. Today's image was a good surprise. On the one hand it's a nice cute kid photo, but on the other I believe it goes a bit further.

I dunno, there is something about her expression, her interaction with the balloon, the turn of her right hand... for me it all comes together to create one of those images that take it a step further than the typical cute kid photo. One that not only the child's parents and relatives may enjoy, but one that just looks cool.

The original was shot in RAW at iso400 and rescued from a 1.5 stop underexposure. And while I try to get exposure right whenever possible, the benefits of adjustment for exposure and white balance during the conversion process make getting the nice surprises from RAW a lot more likely than with JPEG. Thank goodness for RAW.

Mayapple

Some years ago I started taking photos of things in our local wood for the purpose of identification. Especially things of color or unusual texture: flowers, trees, shrubs, vines, fungi, whatever.... I wanted to learn more about the natural world I was photographing and it always irritated me to be asked "what kind of "x" is that?" and not have the answer. And later, when I started submitting a few images to stock agencies I thought I would include some the better ones despite their limited commercial appeal.

So, as boring as they may be, I take them. In fact, I cannot seem to get through a spring season without taking a goodly number of these "woodsy"photos. I usually only hang onto those images that represent new items to my collection or that show an item in a way that I have not managed before.

This spring I happened to get today's image, which I believe does a fair job of representing the Mayapple. All of my previous Mayapple images focused on the flower and gave no sense at all of the unusual shape of the plant. This one at least gives you a clue.

Experiments in HDR

The topic of today's post revolves around "high dynamic range photography" or "HDR." I'm a fan of HDR in principle, though I was initially quite disappointed in most folks use of the technique. In short, I don't care for HDR imagery that looks like HDR imagery!

To my eyes any HDR image that looks at first glance like an HDR image is just wrong; a veritable crime against nature, a form of visual heresy where the photos take on a decidedly alien aura that is simply not natural. Much of this is due to heavy-handed technique and can be avoided, but like so many of the PS tools where there is ample room for interpretation, I suppose there will always be those that insist on pushing things to the edge, and over, in search of their own personal brand of photographic enlightenment. Which is fine, I suppose. Nobody said I had to like it.

Still, I do hope this overindulgence will prove to be nothing more that a passing fad and that these otherwise excellent photographers will eventually come to their senses and begin using the software in a more sensible manner. One only needs to look through the HDR offerings on photo sharing sites such as "pbase" and "flikr" to see what I mean. You'll find some nice images that are tastefully rendered, true, but you will also find the bizarre aura that accompanies those that aren't as well managed. Gack! To my eyes, anyways, many of these are decidedly overworked.

This alien aura made me very leery of the process at first. For a time it was so prevalent in HDR images that I thought it was an unavoidable by-product of the process, like so much manure in the stockyard. Eventually, though, I saw enough good of the technique to spring for the software. (Of course, if you use CS2 you get this built in, but I am still using CS.)

I quickly found that using the software to blend the images is not hard, but learning how to get images that looked sensible takes time. Several interesting things happen in the image merging and tone mapping process that I don't begin to understand, and I will probably have to tinker with the technique for while before I am truly comfortable, but it is fun.

The image presented here represents one of my more worthwhile attempts. I still find the saturation a bit garish, but otherwise it looks too flat. Colors seem to get heated up and overcook really fast, especially the reds and greens, and keeping these looking more or less natural is a real concern.

In The Garden

One of the highlights of some recent time away from my usual work-a-day life was a visit this past Sunday to Garvan Gardens. It was my first trip to a botanical garden and it made for a wonderful afternoon in the outdoors.

The camera came along for the trip but the cloudless, bolt-on blue skies made photography in the shady woodlands of the garden a bit challenging. (Whenever possible I prefer at least partially cloudy skies for flowers, but sometimes you just don't have that option.) Still, I felt lucky enough to get what I thought were a few good shots by the time we left the gardens. Many of these "good shots" turned out to be botched by spotty exposures, and so once again I was reminded that exposure should never be taken for granted in harsh lighting. If you change lenses (I did) and don't take into account that it will gather light differently than the one that was on the camera before (it did) you may get some surprises when you review the images at home (I did).

Now that I'm all energized and back to work I hope to get my posts back onto a more regular schedule. At least once a week is what I initially planned to shoot for, and I have missed about 3 at this point. Oops!

'Round and 'round

I guess I'm just an easily excitable guy. Doesn't take much to fire my imagination and get me spinning and dreaming and bobbling ideas about in my head like a pinball in a loose machine. It keeps me entertained, but I find myself on constant watch for the specters in the shadows. Those ideas and thoughts whose basis is fundamentally flawed before the spinning even starts. Chasing these can lead to some pretty ugly stuff.

To combat this tendency I have tried to make note of this fact (over and over again) so that I might better learn to check myself before the fall. Then, perhaps, I might have a fighting chance to get a hand-up or turn away before I wind up face down in the pavement. Sometimes it works, othertimes, well... I end up spitting blood and licking broken teeth, knowing full well that it was probably my own damn fault.

To be honest, most of the time my twisted ideas never get so far, I'll toss them up long before they have a chance to fester. But every once in a while, I seem to average about one a year, an idea will come along that keeps me spinning until I have either had enough, or understand the process clearly enough to file it away into my "gee, that's a neat thingy... wonder what better use could be made of it" closet.

Which brings me to "Howstuffworks." It's not a site I visit everyday, but it's always there to shine a bit of light into the darkness of how our physical world works. If I get a wacky notion, or want to get the skinny on how something works, I'll check here first. Their authors usually present the material with a no nonsense approach that is just what I'm looking for.

Now, four paragraphs deep, we finally come to today's starting point, Refrigeration. It all started like this: The local electric company announced a rather severe rate hike in our area, and with summer coming on strong I'm thinking it's high time to get that extra insulation into the attic that I have been putting off for years. This led me to how our aging air conditioner system is overdue for a checkup, and then to how a good friend of mine recently finished building a house with a geothermal heating/cooling system built into the design from the ground up.

Basic refrigeration is interesting stuff, as I had never really understood quite what was taking place. I knew there gasses and pumps and all that, but I had never considered how the system as a whole worked. All in all, it wasn't too hard get a handle on. Then I came across the bit about the Peltier/Thomson/Seebeck effects, which are basically different spins on the same electrically charged principle that describes the heating and cooling properties induced when electricity is applied to various metals and combinations of metals. Now that's cool!

The math is way over my head, but the basic principles are simple enough. I'm still absorbing all this new information and hopefully I'll go ahead and get the insulation in the attic before trying to take out loan for a whole new heating/cooling system.

Abducting Color

My work with B&W over the past year has led me to new revelations about the subtleties of color and tone and how these can play any number of complementary or even destructive roles within an image. Today's image, for example, was not working for me in B&W in the way I intended it too. The color version worked better, but I didn't like it either. Neither conveyed the sense of reaching into the forest that I felt was essential for this image.

I tried various desaturation techniques and in the end I decided to try switching to lab mode and abducting the a channel with a fill of 50% grey. This gave me a range of color that was much more in keeping with what I was looking for in the final image. Specifically, it altered the role of the tufted green grasses and converted them to shades of yellow and gold, which more closely matches the leaf litter present on the forest floor. This makes the forest floor more homogeneous, and I believe it helps lead the viewer through the image with less distraction. Also, it preserved much of the blue that I enjoyed in the full color version.

This image was shot with the mini-view setup, of course, and it represents to a "T" the kinds of focal plane voodoo I plan to explore in the future. I know it's gimmicky, and I know it will not be everyones cup of tea. That's ok. I like the effect and am hoping to capture some unique images.

Love over Gold

I have been reading a little book titled "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland. I'm only about halfway through at this point but it has provided some interesting insight into the process of making (or not making) art.

Much of it is nothing new. If you have been involved with creating art on any level, for any amount of time, their dissemination of the process will come as no surprise. Seems the modern road map to art is the same for everyone, and it makes for a most introspective read. Thanks for the suggestion, Ted.

Today's piece is brand new. I shot it less than an hour ago. It's one of about 30-40 frames that played around with using the mini-view setup. I wasn't very concerned about the settings I put the lens, I just knew I wanted to bend it around a bit. So I did, and pointed it at an old copper pitcher that I keep laying around. Like my previous image, its nothing special, but I like it. (I decided to keep the tilted framing when it just "came out that way" as I was trying to find the angle I liked in PS. Now, I know both Ted and Andreas have used this kind of framing, and I don't mean to copy, so I'm stealing :)

When my mini shoot was over I was surprised to find that there were a half-dozen or more images that I rather liked. (highly unusual for such a small number of frames) This is no doubt due to my ongoing fascination with this new toy and it may well dwindle in time. Until then, I'm enjoying it as I can.