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Painting with light at its best

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

It was about time I got around to processing the following shot. It’s been in my database for several months and on my mind for just as long, so one quiet evening I got to work. Layer-blending 13 different exposures takes time. Esp. when you only use little details from every image.

The whole shoot took about 2 hours, just to take one single image. If you don’t like the composition, that’s too bad because there is only one chance. Once you have decided on a location, angle, lens,… there is no changing. No going back. It’s what it is.

Every lighting technique you see in this image has been captured in a separate exposure with the help of either Brent or Gavin.

The image is called ghost. The ghost (being me) to the right of the image – trapped in some psychedelic prison made of light.
Hope you like it!

Posted in Geek Talk | 1 Comment »

Sync your Photos with ChronoSync

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

I am using a lot of hard drives. Lots of Terra Bytes. Usually when I upload my images from my camera to the Macbook, I back them up at the same time to two additional hard drives. Those drives are two 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives with FireWire 800 connections. They are lightning fast and can be daisy-chained so you really only need one FW 800 plug at your computer. It is really amazing and the transfer speed of FW800 makes USB 2.0 look very bad. I am really looking forward to the new USB 3.0 to be released. It is supposed to be 10x as fast as USB 2.0 (in theory).

But I digress… what I wanted to tell you about is how I keep track of all those files on several hard drives. It sometimes happens that I forget to backup my photos automatically when I upload them, or I only have one of the two additional hard drives handy. Also due to disk space issues, I only temporarily upload those photos to my main hard drive inside the Macbook Pro. Shooting RAW, you will notice sooner or later that your drive is full of photos, so that’s when I sync all my hard drives to make sure I do not miss any photo, then delete them from my main hard drive as well as from the two Mercury’s. I do this every time those 500 GB have filled up. I then sync them with my two 1 TB drives for permanent storage.
When I go on holidays I also take one of those 1TB drives containing all my photos off site and give it to a person I trust.

Ok this was the short story of my backup plan. Without syncing, you can quickly lose control over all your photos on all those drives. This is where Chronosync comes in. It simply checks two folders against each other and copies left to right, right to left, or both ways.
After several days of research and testing multiple syncing software products, this is the most sophisticated one that I found. After all it is an important task and you would not want to lose any photos, which may happen all too quickly without a good piece of software. It also allows you to analyze the folders and files before giving the go.

Make sure you have a sound system figured out for yourself. This is the one I use and I am very happy with it. Simply using the finder and keeping on top of all those files and folders on multiple hard drives is an almost impossible feat and prone to errors which may result in accidentally deleting photos, you had not yet archived.

Don’t let disaster hit you – use software like ChronoSync and always have at least 2 copies of every photo that you take.

Posted in Geek Talk, Software | No Comments »

New tool: Fluidr

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

If you are anything like me and you can not fall asleep occasionally, what I do is turn on the laptop and browse the flickr galleries of my friends, always looking to push my photography and get some inspiration.
However everyone who uses flickr knows, that it can be quite a bright expierence – the white background is not particularly contributing to viewing images well. Especially at night when you are half asleep.

Here is the solution: www.fluidr.com turns flickr’s lights off.
It is a lot of fun to browse flickr via fluidr. It’s free and easy to use. Just let it allow to access your flickr account by loggin in and you’re set.

Give it a try, you may just like it even more than the original flickr

If you click on the link below you will jump straight to my photostream on fluidr.

Posted in Geek Talk | 1 Comment »

How Photoshop helps with what you saw

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Sometimes you take photos and get excited what you captured, but then you return home and instantly get disappointed once you look at them on your (calibrated) screen.

One of those moments I had just recently upon returning from a 4WD trip through the Outback of Australia.
We went up north to Northern Queensland to shoot the rainforest.
I waited for the sun to shine through a whole in the canopy of the rainforest and was rewarded with some really nice sun rays (caused by the 100% humidity up there).

However back home these rays were almost invisible when looking at my raw files in Lightroom.

In those instances I need to recreate what I saw. This is when photoshop is really handy.
Some call it cheating – I call it recreating what you saw – or what you felt.
The camera with it’s 5-6 stops of dynamic range is a pretty primitive tool compared to the capabilities of your eyes which have a dynamic range of about 25 stops.

So I have no problem to utilize photoshop in those cases. Maybe eventually photoshop will become obsolete for me, however as long as we deal with cameras which have very little dynamic range, it is a necessary tool for me.

The below photo has been run through photoshop using the following steps:

• copy background layer
• Filter > Blur > Radial Blur
• Amount: 100, Select Zoom, Select Best
• Move centre point into the appropriate place where the gap in the canopy is
• Recreate the same effect one more time by pressing CMD/CTRL + F
• Set Layer Blending mode to Screen
• Create Layer Mask and take out the effect where you think it is overdone

I am quite happy with the end result and it reflects very closely what I saw when I was in this special place far away from civilization.

Posted in Geek Talk, Software | 1 Comment »

Bracketing shots for HDR

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Bracketing exposures is important for all of us who do not want to bother, trying to expose the image correctly at the point of shooting (the lazy ones) or for the ones who are really into HDR.
HDR is becoming more and more popular amongst photographers young and old.
Taking several exposures all with at least 1 EV difference, can be tedious on consumer-style cameras, who do not have a bracket button.
However all pro-sumer and professional cameras have a bracketing button. I may be lazy, but I simply could not live without mine although – as you will find out in a minute – even I have to dial in three different exposures sometimes. I am talking about shooting in Manual mode.

When the sun has set and light begins to fade, you may still be inclined to take HDR photos. There is only one problem, your half-automatic program setting (Shutter priority or Aperture priority) displays a Lo sign in your viewfinder. Meaning: There is so little light, that the camera can not figure out the exposure time anymore.
The only way out is shooting Manual Mode. At those times an exposure time of over 30 seconds is usually necessary.
In these cases even I have to resort to manual bracketing, since you can not use the bracketing button in Manual Mode. It does not make sense.

Now you will find yourself looking at your watch and starting the countdown at say 30 seconds, 15 seconds and 1 minute (0 EV, -1 EV, +1 EV).
A tedious job.
I am always on the look for more efficient ways of doing things, and so I came up with the following solution to the bracketing problem:
Rather than having to use your stop watch (or for some of us, their more sophisticated remote releases), we can simply change the aperture or the ISO for that matter and just double it for one shot, half it for the next, and leave it as it was for the third ( e.g. ISO 400, ISO 100, ISO 200) or f/16, f/ 8 and f/11 as an example.

It is easily dialed in and saves you a lot of time too. You may say that this changes the noise or the DOF, true, but from my personal experience – the resulting HDR image has significantly degraded in quality anyway. You will not notice this minor issue, promised

The below shot has been taken from 3 exposures at different ISO’s (the ones mentioned above: ISO 400, 100, 200)