I was working my way through old RAW files. I found the portrait of my youngest one, applied a very soft polaroid effect after elaborating a monochrome version of the picture.
Monthly Archives: October 2011
Don’t look back in anger
I wanted to try a different self portrait.
Different shades of green
This is another picture made with HDR Efex and Magic Lantern. The shots were older but HDR technique helped her to bring out the different greens.
Taking and making of pictures
There have been a lot of posts around on the new consumer lightfield camera from Lytro - which is impressive: 8X optical zoom with a f/2 aperture and it is a lightfield camera for under USD 400!
Waves within an ocean of glass
And there has been a lot of talk on the new era of photography. Hmmmm… I wouldn’t see it like that. The question is if you take and/or make a picture. If you just take pictures it is simple. That’s a camera for you. Light, best for travel, no more deletable pictures because of a wrong focus. But wait: the specs say the output is comparable with a HD picture, so at best 1080×1080 (Full HD squared) and needs a player.
With the Lytro the act of taking the picture is still with the photographer but the act of making it goes to the beholder. This is new. This is a highly competitive feature against point and shoots. I wonder what the macro features of this camera are. How near can you be to the object? Wouldn’t this be a wonderful method to get pin sharp macros without focus stacking?
This is just the beginning. I remember my first digital camera: 1.4 Megapixel and 2x opical zoom. A great camera. But I still took my 500N with me on holidays because the technology wasn’t there…
So what do you think on taking and making pictures?
Small print, now big
I tried some monochrome work and experimented with lighting. In the end there was this one shot I loved. Not only because the structures work so good – also because there is this piece of paper with black attached …
Before the laser printer – Retro adapter lighting tip
Good ideas like the pencil are things which will live nearly forever. So I decided to show my children how the sharp tip of a pencil looks like.
The problem with Macros is always the lighting. But there is a simple solution to that: With a retro adapter the DOF is limited to a 1 or 2 centimeters, so you can put smaller objects on the small softboxes you get for speedlights. The nearly have the right height and they are perfect: translucent and easy to move (to get the focus right).
In the picture above you can see how the different lights (ambient from the box below and spot from above) change the way you see the structure in the lead of the pencil. You can even see how the lead was glued into the wood…
Thinking about a project…
I was stuck in work lately and there were not too many moments to do some photography. But I used the time in the evenings and mornings to learn things on
- Panoramas
- Macros
- Lighting
It is interesting to see how these 3 points come up on a regular basis. The panorama thing is something which is kind of a Forbes 100 topic of photography. But without a nodal point adapter it is simply limited. What I learned in the past weeks is, that it is easier to come up with a usable result if the scene is far away and you use a standard to light zoom lens. The following one was made using a 50mm lens and I swept the scene – like the people with Sony cameras do.
I learned something about the limits of my hard- and software when processing this 14 pictures panorama. So I ended up processing the pictures before stitching, like I do with HDR panoramas.
The second topic which I love at the moment is Macros. I think I will save for a Canon 100mm macro. It is already on my wishlist at Amazon. I tried to find out if there are good macro panoramas out there. I could not find any tipps, so I guess I have to find these things out myself and write a blog post (Now I know that you will read that).
Recently I bought Light Science and Magic by Fil Hunter. And I love it. Yes you are right: We are in the middle of point 3 of my list. It is sweet mixture of things you already know, things you will remember, things you understand and also a lot of new things – the last point is depending on prior knowledge and what you already tried. What I love on this book is that it is very good to read and there are examples you can try at home.
I think that the next few projects will have something to do with all the 3 things. Nearly middle of Octobre, the coloured leaves season ahead, cold long winter evenings with plenty of time to read and experiment. Great times!
What will your next projects be? Leave a message after the beep!
Medieval alley
What really fascinated me in this picture was that the method HDR could capture all the colors facets and texture and preserve them. That was not quite easy due to the different artificial light colors, varying from blue to orange.
Again the tipp by RC Concepcion I use often, is to use a Glamour Glow effect on HDR. It takes the unnatural sharpness out of the picture and gives it some nice appeal.
I started using the glamour glow (which was created for portraits) on some architecture pictures – not specifically HDR. It works just fine…
And again this shot was brought to you by Canon running Magic Lantern with 9 exposures, creation with HDR Efex by Nik Software and postprocessing with Color Efex (also by Nik Software).
If you are looking for a book specifically for the creation of HDR with HDR Efex and get some real nice postprocessing tips for HDR, read the HDR book by RC. There is great stuff inside.
