Andrew Kelley Photography » Reviews

Star Trails

Andrew — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:27:50 +0000

Star trails from a one-hour-long exposure. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

I captured image on a very dark night in Yellowstone National Park, just after I made the Milky Way image that I posted a few days ago. I like this image for a couple of reasons. First, it demonstrates just how many stars you can see on a clear dark night without light pollution. Nothing like shooting a hundred miles from the nearest town.¹ Second, this is a great illustration that stars are many different colors. One can observe star colors with the naked eye, but this is a much more graphic way of seeing. Finally, I found it interesting that even the North Start (the center of the swirl of stars) moves ever so slightly. Be sure to click on the image for a better view of these details.

This is effectively a one-hour exposure. I say “effectively” because I made this image by combining approximately 120 30-second exposures. Digital camera sensors don’t react well to hour-long exposures: lots of noise, “hot” pixels, etc. Instead, the preferred technique is to make a series of short exposures, then merge them in post production. Capturing the images is easy. However, the tools to combine the images are still in their infancy. One of the standard image stacking programs, the “Startrails” application, doesn’t work very well. It generates star trails as dotted lines.² I obtained much better results by using Chris and Dawn Schurs free Photoshop action. On a fast computer with lots of ram, it took me only about five minutes to stack ~120 images. However, setting up the action could be bit tricky if you’re not familiar with Photoshop.

There are some downsides though: It is a bit nerve wracking to stand alone in a very dark place — one frequented by bears — waiting to complete the hour-long exposure. ↩
The cause of this problem is beyond the scope of this entry. There is a very helpful article on NaturePhotographers.net that explains the phenomena and offers a complex solution. In defense of Startrails, it is both free and easy to use. ↩

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| 0 comments | Post tags: Astrophotography, Night Photography, silhouette, Star Trails, Yellowstone, Yellowstone National Park |
© Andrew Kelley Photography, all rights reserved

New Images from Bosque

Andrew — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 04:39:01 +0000

Finally. It took way, way longer than it should have. But I’ve finally culled more than 5,000 images from Bosque del Apache down to a handful of selects. Fortunately (given how long it took) I’m pleased with the final product. These are by far my strongest Bosque images. Indeed, I created a couple of images that rank among the best in my portfolio.

As a sort of celebration of having finished, I created the video that headlines this post. I’ve been looking for a new, non-boring way to highlight my work. Looks like Animoto may be just the ticket. It’s easy. It looks great. Slideshows are usually so boring, but this keeps things interesting. There are only two real downsides: (1) Animoto gives no control over the way it assembles the final product. You click, wait, and hope. Mostly, this works fine. However, the software occasionally insists on cropping some images to a 4×3 aspect ratio. I couldn’t find any work around, no matter how many times I clicked the “remix video” button. (2) even though I’m using a paid version of Animoto, it insists on branding of embedded video.

Please watch the video (it’s short) and let me know what you think in the comments.

Below is a gallery of the images from the slideshow, in their full, un-Animoto’ed glory. Click on a thumbnail for a larger version and for links to purchase a print or greeting card, or license an image. (If you’re reading this through an RSS reader, the gallery will look much better if you click through to my website.)

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| One comment | Post tags: Animoto, Bosque del Apache, Sandhill Crane, silhouette, Snow Goose, Sunrise, Sunset, Video |
© Andrew Kelley Photography, all rights reserved

Variations on a Theme

Andrew — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:09:09 +0000

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The Crystal Club

I captured this image of the Crystal Club in Crystal City, Colorado, earlier this summer. Crystal City is a effectively a ghost town (the “residents” occupy a handful of cabins during the summer). Though the road to Crystal City is a bit rough (read: do not attempt to visit in your two-wheel drive) it’s worth the drive. The scenery is spectacular, and the townspeople friendly. (My favorite detail: if you purchases a soda in from the general store, you must walk across the street and retrieve it from the creek). One word of advice if you visit Crystal: a few doors down from the now-abandoned Crystal club is the Crystal bookstore. Since the bookstore is one of only two businesses in the town, you’ll doubtless go in. Resist the urge to buy “Crystal . . . What Really Happened” from the store. Though the idea of buying a book about the history of Crystal, from a Crystal Resident, in Crystal, might sound appealing, save your money. I like badly-written history books more than most, but the quality of the writing is astonishingly bad and the content mostly dull minutia. (The blurb on the linked website will give you an idea of the quality of the prose.) Pass.

Probably because of the many different, saturated colors and the broad range of tones, this image lends itself to a variety of different interpretations. Here are are some of the variations that I tried before settling on the image above. Click on a thumbnail for a larger version:

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| 0 comments | Post tags: Crystal City, Ghost Town, Monochrome |
© Andrew Kelley Photography, all rights reserved

Between Light and Shadow

Andrew — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 05:00:27 +0000

A few months ago I was killing some time between the sweet morning and evening light browsing the Monte Vista Crane Festival. (The festival is really a big fair/craft show/small town event — both charming and odd at the same time). I stumbled across “Between Light and Shadow” by John Weller as I was leafing through books at the Great Sand Dunes National Park table. It stopped me in my tracks.

I can sum up this book by saying that it is easily the best book of outdoor photography that I’ve seen in the last five years. (And I’ve read, and purchased, many such photography in that time). Weller’s book has three virtues that set it apart from most of the outdoor photography books in my collection. First, he has a unique style. Rather than employing the contrasty and highly saturated only-in-sweet-light style that dominates landscape and wildlife photography, his photos are under-saturated, low contrast, even a little dark. He doesn’t rely on the “sweet light” but uses all sorts of different lighting — including, in particular, storm lighting — to great effect. Second, he lived in the dunes for several months over the space of a year. This manifests itself both in the quality of the images (you don’t get very many images this good on a week-long trip) and more importantly on Waller’s eye for the place. Finally unlike the prose in many photography books, Weller’s prose is engaging and well written.

If you like landscape photography even a little, and you don’t have this book in your library, you’re missing out.

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| 0 comments | Post tags: Book Review, Books, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Landscape Photography, Sand Dunes, Weller |
© Andrew Kelley Photography, all rights reserved

Tonehacker and Toning Photographs in Photoshop

Andrew — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:47:51 +0000

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Langdell Hall, Havard Law School

I really like the look of a good split-tone (or even better, quad-tone photograph). The only problem is that the traditional way of making duotones/tritones/quadtones in Photosohp (using the Mode > Dutone command) is fiddly, not very interactive, and destructive. (It requires converting your image to eight bit monochrome first.)

Lately, following the suggestions of Paul Butzi, I’ve started using curves to tone my images rather than Photoshop quadtones. Paul has a great tutorial, so I won’t repeat the steps here. Be sure to grab his sample curves files if you try this technique.

But here’s the important thing that Paul doesn’t mention: you can use Photoshop tone curves to duplicate the toning applied by any scheme, be it Photoshop quad tones, your favorite proprietary toning software, fill layers, etc. That would be a huge pain to do manually. Fortunately, Guillermo Luijk has written a free utility to “extract” a tone curve from an image and save it in a tone curve file that can be imported into Photoshop. See some toned photos you like? Fire up Tonehacker and you can extract the curve from the photos and appy it to your own images. You can also use the technique to duplicate your favorite Photoshop dutotones/tritones/quadtones. You can download the utility at Guillermo’s website, just look for the “Descargar Tone Hacker 1.2″ link (much of the website is in Spanish). More info about using the software at the Luminious Landscape Forums.

Hat tip to Guillermo for a WONDERFUL program.

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| 0 comments | Post tags: Black & White, Curves, Guillermo Luijk, Havard Law School, Langdell Hall, Monochrome, Paul Butzi, Photoshop, Software, Tonehacker, Toning, Tutorial |
© Andrew Kelley Photography, all rights reserved

A surprising geotagging tool from Microsoft

Andrew — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:32:37 +0000

Every once in a while, even Microsoft can surprise you. I’ve just started using Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 to geotag my photographs. The program has three surprising attributes: its free, its standards compliant, and it does one thing (geocoding) and does it quite well.

Free. In the fairly recent past I paid something like $100 for geotagging software (which shall remain nameless). It was slow, a little buggy, and insisted on writing GPS information into the raw file itself, rather than into the sidecar .xmp file where it belongs (more on that below). I abandoned the software when Downloader Pro added basic geotagging support. Downloader Pro is a fantastic program, but it does not (and is not intended) to match the features of a stand-alone geotagging program. Color me surprised* that Microsoft has a more capable program than my $100 misinvestment. And they’re giving it away.

Standards Complaint. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pro Photo Tools writes to the open-standards .xmp sidecar files, rather than to my raw files themselves. (Surprised given Microsoft’s seeming aversion to open standards). If you shoot raw files (and if you’re serious about photography you should), then you probably know that its a bad idea to write to the proprietary raw files created by your camera. (.NEF, .CR2, etc.) There is a risk that the file will be corrupted, the internal structure of these files is not formally documented, etc. etc. Surprisingly, Pro Photo Tools even works with Adobe’s DNG format, though the DNG add-on (codec) costs $30.

Does One Thing Well. I appreciate that the software does not try to replace my entire workflow, but instead focuses on one task — geotagging — and does it well. Pro Photo Tools permits the user to geotag photos from a GPS tracklog file, and also by dragging and dropping them onto a map. The map feature works quite well. Its easy to search, zoom, and move around on the map, and the map is very responsive. One surprising bonus is that the software will look up place names (including city, town, and street address) based on the GPS coordinates of the file. Very handy.

One note: in addition to downloading the program itself, you’ll probably need to download the raw codec for your particuar camera. The Canon codec download pages says that the codec is for Windows Vista, but it has worked fine for me so far on Windows XP. Get the codecs here.

* In fairness to Microsoft, I should note that they also give away the excellent Synch Toy, which I have used for several years.

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Heavenly-Opportunity

Andrew — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:07:24 +0000

It sounds a little like the subject line of a religious spam, but it’s not. Instead, Heavenly-Opportunity is software that solves two common photographic problems: (1) figuring out when the sun and moon will rise and set; and (2) figuring out when the sun or moon will rise or set at a particular spot on the horizon (or, for really sophisticated uses, like shooting through a window or natural arch, when they will be at a certain elevation above the horizon).

The first problem is merely figuring out when the sun (or moon) will rise and set so that one can shoot during the sweet light. Pretty mundane, since rise/set information is available from many sources. Still, its nice to be able to generate this information with a couple of mouse clicks.

The second problem is more interesting. Take this image for example: I would love to capture this scene (of Longs Peak, north of Denver) with the sun or moon setting directly behind the twin peaks at the left of this frame:

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Sunset at Macintosh Lake, Longs Peak in Background

It’s moderately more difficult to figure out the right time of year to show up for that image. But the real challenge is capturing the full moon in the same place, since that involves two variables: the phase of the moon and the azimuth (place on the horizon) where it sets. That is the killer feature of Heavenly-Opportunity. Input a location, tell the software what variables you would like to search for, e.g. 3/4 or greater moon phase, setting within 1/2 hour of sunrise (so the sky will have some color) between an azimuth of 180 degrees and 190 degrees. Voila:

Heavenly-Opportunity (V3.3.0) search performed on 11/28/2008 for:
Selected place name = CO Longmont
   Latitude =  40.16666
   Longitude = -105.1
   Time Zone = Mountain (-105°)
   Height above horizon =  4941 ft.
   Azimuth adjusted for a Magnetic Declination of 9.8°

Search Criteria:
   Dates between 11/28/2008 to 11/28/2009
   Moonset between 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after sunrise

               -------------Moon---------------
Day   Date      Rise  Az°    Set   Az°   Phase%
--- --------   ------ ---   ------ ---   ------
Fri 12/12/08   04:31p  44   07:27a 296   100.0
Sat 01/10/09   04:33p  48   07:08a 294    99.8
Sun 02/08/09   04:43p  58   06:24a 285    99.1
Mon 02/09/09   06:00p  66   06:58a 278   100.0
Tue 03/10/09   07:02p  79   06:51a 265    99.9
Wed 03/11/09   08:12p  88   07:17a 257    99.4
Thu 04/09/09   08:09p 100   06:08a 245   100.0
Fri 04/10/09   09:16p 106   06:36a 238    98.5
Sat 05/09/09   09:11p 113   05:41a 229    99.6
Sun 06/07/09   08:57p 116   05:03a 225   100.0
Tue 07/07/09   09:01p 109   05:42a 228    99.9
Wed 08/05/09   08:03p 101   05:37a 236    99.9
Fri 09/04/09   07:18p  82   06:32a 254   100.0
Sat 10/03/09   06:07p  70   06:25a 266    99.8
Mon 11/02/09   04:36p  53   06:30a 285   100.0

    15 days match all search criteria.

As an added bonus, the software automatically adjusts for local magnetic declination, which means that you don’t need to adjust your compass to use the software. Fantastic!