Grand Teton at dawn reflecting in the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
Photographing the Grand Teton is hard, because it’s difficult to capture just how big, steep, and utterly impressive it is. I’m not quite sure whether this picture overcomes that difficulty. But it does demonstrate the beauty of the peak reflecting in the Snake River at dawn. Watching the sun break through a bank of clouds to paint the mountains was sublime.
On a photo tech note, I’ve become a big fan of Tony Kuyper’s luminosity masks for making tonal adjustments in images like this one. When used judiciously, they are a great tool to balance the tones in the image to make it appear more as they did to the naked eye. They’re old-school Photoshop, but if you’re familiar with that program, you may find them useful.
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. ↩
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.)
I haven’t taken many photos with my iPhone. I’m a bit of a control freak – I like to set the exposure just so. Control the aperature for depth of field. Set the ISO. You can’t do any of that with the iPhone. I’m also an image quality freak. The iPhone image quality is poor, at least by “real” camera standards. But — I found a solution. Rather than futzing with fine-grained control, I’ve been using the (free) Polarize app to give up even more control. Instead of tinkering with the settings, I find an interesting subject, point, and shoot. Polarize crops on its own. It adds a vintage, retro color cast. Throws in a heavy vignette. Turns the contrast to eleven. And of course, adds the trademark Polaroid border (that can be cropped to suit). But being out of control is great for creativity, and the heavy processing hides (or maybe compliments) the iPhone’s image-quality shortcomings.
Here’s a gallery of my initial efforts – mostly abstracts around the office. (The gallery may look a little funny if you’re reading by e-mail or using an RSS reader. Long story.) Click on a thumbnail for a larger view.
I really should be editing my 3000+ images from recent photo shoots in Monte Vista, Colorado and La Jolla, California. Instead, I’m watching photoshop videos. This video is almost as impressive as the one I blogged about last week. The stuff with the most relevance to outdoor photographers starts at the five minute mark.
I confess to uttering (several) explitives when I saw this, both out of shock, and, perhaps, from contemplating how much time this tool would have saved me on past retouching jobs.
Guess I’ll be buying Photoshop CS5 when it comes out next month.
(Note: I realize that many people are troubled by heavy manipulation of what they perceive as documentary images. I don’t disagree. This tool certainly could (will) be abused by some. But it also has a huge potential as a tool to ensure that the image matches the photographer’s creative vision. And in any event, I am not a documentary photographer).
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.
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.
Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Busy editing images from Bosque (and, unfortunately, working. Gotta pay for gear somehow). As a time filler until I post some more Bosque images, here is a series of informative and funny, but also sophmoric, crude, and probably offensive and NSFW Photoshop tutorials entitled “You Suck at Photoshop. Here’s the first one, with links to others below:
This is the first selection from Season 1; Season 2 is also available.
If you use Lightroom and need to throw together a gallery quickly, or if you’d like to create a photography website without learning HTML or hacking Gallery to do your bidding, you should check out the great set of Lightroom web gallery templates from Matthew at The Turning Gate.
Matt’s (donationware) templates provide everything you need to assemble a professional-looking photo gallery or a whole website. Check out his demonstration gallery to see all of the various templates in action, including the “meta templates” that draw various light-room generated galleries together into a coherent website.
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:
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!
