My Photographic Journey

My Blog Has Moved - check out the new stuff!

2009-04-16T20:04:00.002+10:00

Hi Folks

I have moved my blog over to Wordpress for a variety of reasons. Please update your RSS feeds to my new site as I will no longer be posting to this site.

So mosey on across to my new site and check out some of the latest posts including a video photoshop tutorial on intensifying water.

My new site is at http:brentbat.wordpress.com

A wonderful evening of photography - Forresters & Central Coast

2009-04-12T19:17:00.004+10:00

Well last Friday was the full moon and I was keen to get out. I went up to Central Coast with Kajo and we had a fantastic evening shooting 3 Central coast locations in ideal conditions.

Check out this video which will give you a taste of our evening (you can see of our light painting at the end.)

Forresters and Central Coast Night Shoot from Brent Pearson on Vimeo.

I thought I'd talk about one of my light painting shots and explain how it was captured.

This shot is called "Light Painting Some Unusual Rocks"... (pretty creative title eh?)

From a light painting perspective this is a pretty straight forward affair. First frame I laid down my "stage" or base shot. I used a 4 min exposure to capture the clouds wooshing past.

Second shot was a 30 second exposure where I was painting with my fluoro light.

In photoshop I combined the two images into the final.

If you want more information on how I did this, then I suggest you check out my eBook.

More later

Brent

Body & Form - My first studio lighting project

2009-04-08T07:53:00.008+10:00

I just finished a project that I call “Body & Form”. It is a huge departure for me from my usual landscape and night photography, but it was a lot of fun. Here’s what the project was all about.

Aim of project: I wanted to push my photography into new areas. So far I have quite deliberately stayed away from shooting people or wildlife because quite frankly neither of them interest me from a photographic perspective. However I felt like I was ready for a new challenge, so I came up with the idea of doing a dramatic studio shoot of a ballet dancer’s body. My major objectives were:
1) Start getting an understanding of studio lighting
2) Learn how to work with a model
3) Get familiar with portrait and retouching workflow in Photoshop

Now I’m pretty lucky here, my Mother has a school for full-time dancers who are training to become professional, so I had my choice of dancer and also a great space to shoot in. My local camera club had the lighting gear that I could borrow.

I had done a fair bit of research, I approached the dancer (Emma) and she was keen to be part of the project. We planned two sessions:

Session 1: was to be totally experimental, I wanted to achieve the following:
• For me to get comfortable working with Emma
• For Emma to get comfortable working with me
• For me to experiment with different lighting setups to see what works
• For Emma to get comfortable with the lights and camera
• For me to work out the sort of poses I wanted to shoot.

Session 2: was “The shoot” and was taken about 4 days later. It gave me time to process the test shots from session 1 and make adjustments etc. Emma and I spent about an hour reviewing the session 1 photos and talking about what worked and what didn’t, so when we started the next session we were pretty focused on what we each needed to do.

AV Presentation Movie from Brent Pearson on Vimeo.

This video is a little 2 min video that I made up for a presentation I was doing at my local camera club on the convergence of video and stills and how video can give your stills photos context rather than the traditional stills slide show. If you are interested in the lighting and the setup I used, this video will show you which lights I used and how I positioned them.

What’s Next?
Well the first thing that surprised me was I enjoyed this shoot very much and found every aspect of it a lot of fun (planning, execution, post production etc.). I’ve already talked to Emma about doing some more modelling with me out on landscape location and she has eagerly agreed. I am now about to do an Off Camera Flash course (strobist stuff) and get some portable gear that will allow me to take the studio with me on location. I have 3 very specific ideas in my mind that will introduce Emma to some of the more interesting landscape and urbanscape locations that I have photographed. I’m planning on shooting this project in May.

I find that picking some specific projects is a great way of pushing my photography further. I hope this inspires some of you to pick a project that pushes you further. It was a lot of fun for me.

My eBook is now available - Night Photography & Light Painting

2009-03-30T07:47:00.004+11:00

Well I have spent the past month working hard on my first eBook. It's called
Night Photography & Light Painting
Tips, Tricks and Secrets.

This eBook has more than 80 pages and in it I have documented in great detail all of my experiments, and methods for capturing night landscapes. I've also documented all my experiments with light painting sources as well as a series of step-by-step guides that cover:

Capturing night landscapes
Building a light painting wand
Light painting landscapes
Post processing light painted images

For anyone that wants to get into night photography or light painting, I'm sure this eBook will accelerate their learning considerably.

You can find out more about the book at http://www.nightphotographyguide.com

I hope you enjoy it

Brent

Light Painting An Old fort

2009-02-12T21:28:00.004+11:00

On Sunday night Kajo, Michelle, Gavin and I took advantage of the full moon and gorgeous Summer evening to head out to Middle Head Fort to do a bit of light painting.

It was a fun night, some of the others hadn't done any light painting before, so we kind of hung out as a group and mainly used my light to paint up a few different structures. It was interesting to see the different interpretation by the others of the same subject.

The Old Bunker
This old part of the fort was an interesting one for light painting because of all the angles and also the fact that it was raised up against the sky (most of the rest of the fort is recessed). I loved the steps leading up to the structure and when you lit these up from a low angle the light cast some cool shadows on the stairs.

So we all set up next to eachother and exposed our base image and then we started painting.

First we lit the stairs up from the bottom left
Then we lit the building from the top left
Then we shined the light out from inside
Then we fired some flashes with pink gel over them
Finally we painted the roof overhang with a surefire torch.

This was my first "building" that I have painted..... I think I'm going to do some more.

BP

Night Photography & Light Painting Presentation

2009-02-07T07:23:00.004+11:00

Last night I gave a presentation on night photography and light painting to a bunch of folk from some of the North Shore camera clubs. I certainly enjoyed the evening and there seemed to be a lot of photographers very interested to learn more about nocturnal photography.

For those that attended last night, thanks for giving up your Friday night, I hope you found it of value. Here's some links to some of the resources I mentioned in my talk last night.

My primer on night photography

My primer on Light Painting

Light Painting Forresters Rocks

Calculating night exposures

In fact I suggest you read all of the posts that I did in Feb 08, they document my experiments, journey and research into night photography... there are some useful tidbits there (like how to identify the South Celestial pole if you are doing startrails etc.)

Other resources I referred to;

Toby Kellers Burnblue site (fantastic light painting where you see the light source)

Tim Simmons site (Tim inspired me to develop the light tools that I now use)

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the evening, I look forward to seeing you out on a rocky outcrop one night ;-)

Good luck, have fun... and don't forget the wine and cheese!

Brent

Pre-flight checklist

2008-11-09T16:58:00.004+11:00

Ever been or near the cockpit when a pilot is ready to take off or land? Doesn't matter whether they are a professional or amateur pilot, they all do the same thing... their pre-takeoff or pre-landing checklist. Doesn't matter whether they have flown thousands of flights, they still do it to make sure they don't forget something silly.

So have any of you hot-shots done any of the following by accident?

Shot on high ISO
Shot JPEG instead of RAW
Left your exposure compensation with a bias from your last shoot
Left your light metering on the wrong setting (like spot meter)
Forgot to clean your lens (and found later a big fingerprint or dirt splodge on it)

Yeah... made all of these mistakes, so I have developed a "pre-flight check" that I now do relegiously at the start of every shoot. I recommend that you do something similar and it will helpfully stop you making silly mistakes. Here's how my pre-flight check works.

Step 1) Set the camera shooting modes and custom mode first (I have settings for "Normal" and "Landscape Mode"). You must do this first because otherwise all your settings will change if you do it later.... ie. You could do your pre-flight check, and then change your shoot mode and everyhing could be mis-set.

Step 2) I go across the top of my Nikon in sequence

Quality = RAW
WB = Auto (not that impotant if you are shooting RAW)
ISO = 200 (my starting point)
Mode = Aperture priority
Exposure compensation = 0

Step 3) Then I do the back of my camera

Light metering = matrix
Focus= centre spot

Step 4) Finally I do the front of my camera

Bracketing= off
Focus= manual (most of my landscape work is manual focus)
Lens = clean and clear of dust.

So I highly recommend that find something that works for you.... and develop your own pre-flight check....I can guarantee that you will have less unpleasant surprises if you make this part of your routine... It only takes 15sec to do.

BP

Photoshop Technique - Improving your water

2008-11-05T22:05:00.005+11:00

I've written about intensifying your water before, but I have found a better technique that I thought I would share. This really makes your water a lot more dynamic. To show you a before an after effect, have a look at one of my recent shots called "At Last".

On the left you can see the effect of intensifying the water, and on the right you can see the image with all of the post processing except for the water intensifying technique (click on the image above to see the detail)... or you can view the original image at Flickr here.

So how do you do it..... It's actually pretty simple and involves 3 steps

1) Create a new layer with a relatively high contrast B&W version of your image... you can do this using a B&W adjustment layer or your favorite B&W converter... I LOVE Nik Silver Effex.

2) Experiment with the Blend mode... you will want to look at typically overlay, softlight or hardlight blend modes.

3) Once you find one that gives you the "oommph" that you are afterwith the water, Add a layer mask and invert it (cntrl+I on PC) and then paint the effect just over the water.

Thats it... Often on water I will also add a colour balance adjustment layer and add a touch of blue and green to the mid tones and shadows.

I hope you find this useful

Brent

Getting some Traction With Freephotoguides

2008-11-05T21:56:00.004+11:00

Well in between family, work, taking photos, processing photos, building light painting rigs, in my spare time I am pretty passionate about the Free photoguides project.

The project is beginning to gain momentum. We now have 16 stunning guides written for NSW alone, and quite a few more being written for other states in Australia.

On top of that UK is is publishing some stunning guides and we are just launching the Swedish site.

I'm pretty proud of the project because if it is successful it will be a great asset to photographers all over the world... The one thing I am not overly impressed with is how much work it is taking to get people to contribute. I have spoken at a number of camera clubs but don't seem to get too many volunteers.. but then there are some weird dynamics about the camera clubs that I don't think are overly healthy.

So if you stumble across my blog and find that a any of the tips, tricks, photoshop techniques are useful for you. The one way you can say thank you to me for my time and effort is to volunteer to write a photo guide for one of your local areas..... 30 min of your time max... and it's a lot of fun.

To find out more about this project go to http://freephotoguides.com

Contributing is easy... come on and support this project.

Brent

Persistence Definitely Pays Off

2008-10-22T08:49:00.003+11:00

Last weekend was Sculpture By the Sea at Bondi. I shot it once at sunrise and once at night.

The sunrise shooting turned into a zoo as 3 camera clubs of photographers decended over the hill and started battling and jockying for position. I packed up my gear and left (I hate shooting in crowds).

Anyway when I compare that to my evening shoot... what a total contrast. I arrived at the exhibit just as the sun was setting, I scouted around as the crowds were starting to disperse, picked the sculpture I wanted to focus on and sat down on a near by chair and just stared at the sculpture thinking about the composition I wanted to create.

As the last light was fading in the sky I set up my gear, tested my lights and started a sequence of long exposures, 1 min, 2 min, 4 min.

Once I had my base image captured, then I reset my camera for60 second captures and started painting the sculpture from slightly different angles, distances, and with different amounts of feathering. I find that it can be hard to judge things like shadow sharpness using the camera LCD screen, so I find it easier to essentially "bracket" my light painting from harder directional light to more softer light (by waving the light around more).

I really liked the mood of this image. Going to go back this weeked and capture one more light painting.... I have a particular sculpture in mind for an awesome star trail shot.

I feel as though after a number of botched outings and lots of experiments, I am really starting to understand the technical fundamentals of good light painting..... at last!

BP

Light Painting 101

2008-09-28T21:33:00.003+10:00

Following on from my posting about Night Photography, this posting is a basic 101 guide for photographers interested in light painting. If you haven't read the primer to night photography, read that first. You really do need to be comfortable with night photography before playing around with light painting.

What is light painting? As you would expect from the name it's basically using light to paint a photographic image. There is actually several quite distinct variations of light painting.

1) Using a light to create trails or writing in the image. Some people like to write words, or trace outlines. Essentially you are exposing the image and leaving trails by moving the light source around in the frame. If you want to see an example of this, check out this link

2) Coloured strobes.
There are some incredible photographers who paint with coloured light. Essentially firing strobes with coloured gels on them to illuminate a scene in puddles of coloured light. Click here to see a good example of this technique.

3) Painting the landscape with more natural light.
This is the type of light painting that personally interests me. Essentially you are using light sources to paint parts of the landscape with man-made light. Here's an example of one of my recent images that involve light painting.

The image involved shooting a background image of the rocks and then blending in individual images of each of the rocks that were illuminated by different light sources.

So what sort of light sources should you use for light painting? Thats where the fun begins. Each light source has different qualities.... colour temperature, harshness, intensity etc.

I'm not going to spoil your fun by telling you what I use... because there is no right or wrong answer.... half the fun of light painting is thinking about what light sources you have and experimening with them... studying their qualities and working out what you like and don't like about each source. Doesn't matter whether it is a torch or a strobe..... I suggest you get ou there... lock your camera open and just start experimenting in your back yard to learn about the light sources before you get out on location.

If you have done some experimentation and want some advice, drop me an email and I'll be happy to look at what you are doing and providing some pointers if required.... but I'm not going to short circuit the experimentation process for you by telling you what light sources I use. I have been experimenting for about 3 months with different light sources.

I have built two light painting rigs and I'm just about to build a 3rd one. Each time I build one I learn a lot about what I need in a light painting source. Get out there and have some fun and see what you can paint.

Brent

2)

Night Photography 101

2008-09-24T21:25:00.003+10:00

Recently after some of my light painting episodes I have had a few people contact me about night photography and light painting. So I thought I would do a primer on night photography first to help get people into it, and then follow it up with some advice on light painting.

First of all.... Night photography is technically a lot more challenging than shooting during the day for a number of reasons;
1) Hard to focus at night
2) Hard to compose your shot at night
3) Your light meter is useless
4) You can run into some white balance issues.
5) Hard to see your camera controls

So, if you aren't taking pretty good shots during the day, then I would advise that you focus on improving your basic photography during daylight hours first (composition, exposure, understanding your camer etc.)

However if you feel you are ready for photographing at night, then this should help you get started.

What You Need For Night Photography

Tripod - Essential
Remote shutter release cable - without this you won't be able to take exposures beyond 30sec.
Headlamp torch
Powerful pocket torch (I like the surefire torches... small, bright and the colour temperature is somewhere around 5000K
Pocket exposure guide - See my blog posting on calculating night exposures

Ready to go?
First thing I would recommend reading is all of the blog postings I made in Feb 08 (they all chronicle my exploration of night photography).

Picking a good night.
I would start by choosing a night that has
1) A full moon (or somewhere closer to a full moon)
2) Some clouds in the sky

Arrive before sunset. This allows you to scout your location, setup for your first location, get your composition and focus just right and relax. Start taking a few shots and watch the exposures start to get longer and longer as dusk approaches.

Focusing in the dark
To focus I set my lens to manual, shine a bright torch at a point in the image I want to focus on and do my best to set the focus manually... live view is useless and Autofocus is more than likely not going to cut it unless the focal point is close to the camera on and you have some sort of AF assist going on.

Flip over to manual exposure mode. Your light meter won't work in low-light, so you are going to have to shoot on a manual setting.

I would recommend starting on f5.6 aperture. To work out the correct exposure, I recommend you crank up your cameras ISO to either 1600 or 3200 and start with a 30sec exposure. Check your histogram and then adjust your shutter time to get an appropriate exposure (if you don't know how to read a histogram, do some research so that you understand it... it is critical).

Once you have established a correct exposure and checked composition and focus at high ISO, you need to crank back your ISO to something that will give you images with low noise. This will depend upon your camera, but with night photography it is all about long long long shutter times, so even if your camera can handle super high ISO settings with low noise (like my D700), it is still worth dropping it back to something like 200ISO.

You will need to double your shutter duration for each time you halve the ISO. Here's an example....
Lets say you crank up your ISO and determine the exposure is fine when you are shooting at
3200 ISO @ 30sec @ f5.6

When you drop your ISO to 200, you have reduced your exposure by 4 stops
3200 to 1600 = 1 stop
1600 to 800 = 2 stops
800 to 400 = 3 stops
400 to 200 = 4 stops.

So to compensate you will need to increase your shutter speed by 4 stops
30 sec to 1min = 1 stop
1min to 2min = 2 stops
2min to 4min = 3 stops
4min to 8min = 4 stops.

So the correct exposure would be 8min @ ISO 200 @ f5.6

Set your camera shutter to bulb, and get your stop watch ready.

Lock your cable release open, and then pour yourself a glass of nice wine, grab some chips or biscuits and sit back, watch the stars and enjoy the evening. One of the joys of night photography is the pace... long exposures mean plenty of time to relax, slow down, talk to other photographers, or just relax. Don't expect to come back with cards full of great images, be happy with one or two from an evening of night photography.

I'll do a primer on Light Painting shortly.

Enjoy.... I'd love to hear your feedback.

Brent

Light Painting Forresters Rocks

2008-09-14T21:27:00.003+10:00

This is a shot that I have been planning for about 6 weeks. I have been doing a lot of research and experimentation on light painting sources.... bought some, made some.... All the while I had a very clear first image in my mind... the gorgeous rocks at Forresters by moonlight.

I had thought about the final image for weeks... literally. I had planned the shot in a fair bit of detail and could have sketched the finished image weeks before I photographed it.

While there was still a fair bit of experimentation with light sources and exposures on the night, there was no doubt about the end result. I was pretty happy with the way that it turned out.

Incidentally, for those that want to understand what this scene looks like without the light painting and post processing... Here's one of my RAW captures straight out of the camera... this should give you an appreciation for the power of light painting when it comes to night photography.

Brent

Is there such a thing as a Photogasm?

2008-08-17T17:50:00.003+10:00

A few days ago I picked up my new camera and lenses... I have made the plunge from a DX sensor to a full frame FX sensor. This meant it was time to say goodbye to my trusty D200 and Old Faithful Tokina lens. They have done me well and I have enjoyed shooting with both of them.

However, it seriously can't compare to my new kit. The D700 and two new "Pro" lenses - 24-70 f2.8 and 17-35 f2.8. If there is such a thing as as a Photogasm... I reckon I experienced it when I started shooting with this gorgeous combination.

The camera itself is a dream, from the bright large viewfinder, to the fantastic liveview screen (with electronic horizon and everything).... It's just fantastic. And the clarity of the lenses is just breathtaking.

I absolutely love this new camera.... let the fun begin.

Another Open Source Photo Guide

2008-08-12T08:06:00.001+10:00

I had some very positive feedback on the Open Source Guide concept... I've just created another one for Forresters beach which is by far the most comprehensive one yet.

Check out The Photographer's guide to Forresters Beach

Let me know what you think.

Brent

Open Source Free Photographic Guides

2008-07-27T19:50:00.006+10:00

Today I was exploring a new location for a landscape shoot. I hadn't seen any decent shots from this location, and in fact I'd never heard of it. I just happened to be cruising around on Google Earth and looking at a few of the Flickr photos that had been geocoded around this particular area. A few happy snaps, but no serious photos.

So today it was a lovely Sunday afternoon, so I took my son and we went exploring to recce this location. Turns out it is a very good location with a lot of potential... I'm going to shoot some dawn shots there next weekend. But on the way back I was thinking to myself... Wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of central registry where photographers could share their favorite locations with other photographers.

Some sort of Virtual Open Source Photographic Guide... A Wikipedia of Photo Guides.... Guides so rich in great photographic info, that it would help any photographer find great new locations to shoot, and improve their chances of getting great shots the first time by knowing when and where to shoot.

As I was hiking out with my son I was thinking about what it would take to create some sort of tool that others could use.... What would it need?

A simple authoring tool (know HTML or any of that stuff)
Free hosting (I didn't want to pay for it)
A place to upload pictures or link to existing pictures on Flickr
A way of allowing others to post comments
A search engine so people can find your guides
A Comments capability that would allow others to comment (or ideally suggest updates) to guides that you post
A Rating system so readers could rate your guides.

That was my initial list. When I got home and reached for my blogging site, I saw an interesting little posting about Google's new capability called Knols (chunks of knowledge)... and guess what... it pretty much perfectly met my criteria.

So I have started an experiment and written two Knols on photographic sites in Sydney that I know pretty well. I'd love to hear what you guys think.
1) A Photographer's guide to Turimetta Beach
2) A Photographer's guide to Mona Vale Pool

Take a moment to have a look at these guides and let me know if they contain the sort of information that you would like to see if you were going to visit a new site.

Imagine if we could get thousands of photogrphers to start documenting their favorite locations and becoming the "local expert".... we would have the largest guide to photographers anywhere in the world!! What a great resource that would be!

Take care... and watch my photostream on Flikr for the cool new site I discovered on Sunday

Brent

Shutter Blending "Splash"

2008-07-14T22:20:00.003+10:00

I thought I would share another example of shutter blending. This photo is called "Splash"

When I saw this rock formation in the water, I totally pre-visualised this image.... I immediately saw three quite separate parts of the image in my mind.

1) A razor sharp foreground clearly showing the detail in the beautiful sand with the water providing lead-in lines to the rock.

2) Long exposure water to remove the distractions from the sea and focus instead on the colour and movement and allow you to concentrate on the gorgeous rocks

3) I was intrigued by the way the ocean was splashing up against the rock in the background, so I wanted to "freeze" a splash in mid air as a contrast to the long expsosed sea.

Executing this was pretty simple, 1/125 sec exposures for top and bottom images, then screw on the 10 stop ND filter for the middle exposure (about 20 sec from memory).

Blending was also pretty simple in Photoshop, couple of minutes with the Wacom tablet and I had some pretty seamless masks.

I'm enjoying the abstract possibilities of Shutter Blending. I'd love to see some examples of others experimenting with this approach

Brent

Shutter Blending

2008-06-14T10:41:00.005+10:00

OK, So most of you have probably heard about exposure blending... blending multiple images of various exposures together to manage the dynamic range in a scene.

Well for a while now I have been thinking a lot about what it is I love about long exposure photography... and it is the contrast of the movement and motion of clouds or water against static items like rocks, or pools.

I've been thinking about how to apply this to non-traditional scenes and I have come up with a technique that I call shutter blending. I'm sure others must be doing this, but I haven't found anyone using this technique.

Intead of blending images of different exposures, what I want to do is blend images of the same exposure, but with vastly different exposure times (shutter speed). I'm doing this through a set of ND filters (3 stop and 10 stop).

What I plan to do is take a series of images of a scene with a fairly high shutter speed until I get a person (or group of people) that I want to make my focal point, and then take quite a few shots of blurred people moving and clouds wizzing past and then blend them all into a composite scene... thats what I'm calling Shutter blending.

If anybody finds examples of others doing this type of photography, I would appreciate the links.

BP

My Night Work Is Starting To Click

2008-05-19T21:46:00.003+10:00

Well I have been mucking about with night photography for a few months now.... I feel like I have gone through the initial experimental phase... I now know how to optimise my camera for the conditions and I have got a pretty good feel on how to read the conditions to capture the effects that I want.

Went out last Saturday night and captured this image.

While there were still some technical aspects that I wasn't happy about with this photo, for the first time I felt that I started to capture the image that was in my head... In my mind that is a pretty big milestone.

I have shot this location before at dawn, but focused on the swirling waves.... this time I wanted the focus to be on the sky contrasting with the gorgeous pool sitting in the blur of the ocean.

I pretty much achieved my result..... at last..... shows that it does pay off to stick with it.

Got a few more images in my head that I'd like to take this full moon.... I just wish the damn clouds would play ball.... it's been crystal clear nights the last few.

Incidentally, this image was actually taken at dusk (15 min after sunset), with a 10stop ND filter on. Sure helps with the composition and focus when there is a bit of light around. I stopped down to f11 and almost 5min for this exposure.

BP

A Night Photography Excursion

2008-04-20T09:09:00.005+10:00

Last night my old man, Kajo and I went out for an evening of night photography. This was pretty bullish as it had been raining on and off all day and the forecast was pretty lousy for the evening... but then it beats TV!

We decided to head out and shoot an old abandoned plane that another Flickr member Rob Des had done a nice job of shooting.

The first little problem came when we got out of the car... the ground wasn't just wet, but it was literally a marsh... within 3 steps my shoes were totally sodden.

When we arrived the sky started clearing nicely and we thought we were going to have a great night's shooting. We started shooting this old DC3 and I grabbed this shot before the clouds closed in on us again.

Shortly after this, we had to take shelter from the rain. Luckily the airplane wing provided plenty of cover from the elements.... We killed a bit of time by playing around with some light painting in the interior of the plane.

Once it stopped raining, we went outside and continued shooting, but without any breaks in the cloud, the night shots just looked like day shots. We decided to do some more experimentation with light painting and strobes and while we were learning a lot more about how strong to make our torch light, without scattered clouds in the background the shots just didn't have the punch that we were looking at from night photography. We waited about another 30 minutes discussing everything from the merits of various noise reduction plug-ins to lens recommendations... however finally we called it a night and headed home.

Even though we only got about 20 mins of shooting in ideal conditions, the outing was a lot of fun and pretty educational.

Putting the creativity back to the camera not photoshop

2008-04-03T15:26:00.003+11:00

Lately I've been going "retro" with my photography. I bought a spot meter and a creative filter kit for me camera. It's all part of my deliberate effort to slow my photography down and shoot less shots that are higher quality.

Getting into filters again has been interesting. I decided to go with the ZPro size Cokin filter holder because it allows me to use my ultra-wide lenses without vignetting.

After a fair bit of research I decided to go with the Singh Ray Graduated ND filters which I love! I also decided to buy a Cokin 3 stop ND filter. I figured that even though Cokin are cheap filters I couldn't go too badly wrong with a simple ND filter...... Wrong!

When I started shooting I noticed a kind of candy pink colour cast coming out in my shots (you can see it clearly in the shot below.

I was perplexed by the pink sky I was getting but didn't get a chance to diagnose the source. About a week later I was shooting some sunrise shots and I clearly saw the pink cast again come up on the camera LCD, so I did a simple test... I pulled out the Cokin ND and left in the Singh Ray filter. Here's the results...

Now whether you like the pink sky or not... the fact is that it SHOULD be neutral (the colour on the right). If I want a coloured sky then I would add a tobacco filter or colour it in post production. But I didn't.

I have taken my Cokin ND back to the shop I bought it from and I am trying to get a refund. I am paying the extra money for Lee ND filters which have come highly recommended.

Moral of the story... You get what you pay for... filters aint filters.

BP

Finding The North and South Celestial Pole

2008-02-27T17:20:00.002+11:00

I'm sure all of you have seen those cool star trails photos of the stars spinning around a circle. Well that circle is either the North or South Celestial pole.

Now I don't know about you, but my astronomy is not that flash, and when I was out doing some photography the other night, I couldn't work out the axis that the stars rotated around so I could frame my shots.

I decided to do a bit of research to work out how to locate them, and here's the answer.

Enjoy
Brent

Night Shoot Number 3 - The Old Blast Furnace

2008-02-24T21:07:00.002+11:00

Last Saturday my Old Man and I threw our swags into the 4WD and headed up to the mountains for a planned evening of night photography. It was a full moon so we figured the old Blast Furnace at Lithgow would be a great location for some long exposure work.

Got some interesting images.

This first one was a 12 minute exposure... my longest yet. I jumped down into the basement of the old gas works and camped out there in the dark to get this image.

We were lucky in the fact that a bunch of clouds finally came overhead to create some drama to this image of the ruins.

Starting to feel like I am getting the night photography sussed out... I've got a routine going to calculate exposures and to compose my shots and I seem to be making the captures correctly (hardly any noise and the amp glow hasn't posed a major problem).

I love the pace of night photography... lots of time to think and plan while the shutter is open. My new torch seems to work well, so I'll have to start doing more painting with light.

Brent

How Do You Calculate Night Exposures?

2008-02-21T13:44:00.003+11:00

One of the most frustrating aspects of jumping into night photography was the exposure metering. Forget your handy-dandy in-camera meters, mine will only meter to 30sec and I expect thats pretty much standard.

So how do you work out your exposures? Hand held light meter? I don't think so...

Most hand-held light meters are only sensitive to about -2ev, so thats not going to help you work out your exposures.

Trial and Error - Yup, that works... but here's a way to get close to the right exposure out of the gate.

I came across an interesting article by Fred Parker called "The Ultimate Exposure Computer". If you haven't seen this, it's worth a read. Fred has published some exposure tables that allows you to calculate exposures under any lighting conditions, using any combination of shutter speed, ISO and Aperture.

What I have done is to distill the relevant information into a handy pocket card that allows you to get a pretty good starting point for your exposures. This is what it looks like.

You will see that it "hard-coded" to 200 ISO (because thats what the speed that I'm going to shoot all my night work) and the aperture ranges from f4 to f16 (because I'm unlikely to shoot outside that range).

So just look at what sort of moon you have, and then read off how many minutes you need to expose for at the various f-stops.

If anybody wants this chart in PDF format, just drop me an email, otherwise you can just print this article and cut it out.

Enjoy

Brent

Now I'm getting ready for a serious shoot

2008-02-20T22:48:00.004+11:00

OK, I've done two weekends of test shoots at Turrimetta and learned some useful techniques. I feel I'm ready for a more serious night shoot.

I just bought a neat little torch from Surefire, these things are very cool. Very small, very bright, rechargable and have a 5000 degree colour temperature, so I shouldn't get any colour casts when I do some light painting.

This weekend The Old Man and I are headed up to an interesting location, we are going to up to the Old Blast Furnace in Lithgow. I went there about a year ago and took some shots like this one.

The conditions look good. Full moon rising 30min after dusk, fine weather (I hope we get some clouds).

Going to shoot sunset, then dusk, then night, then sunrise.

Hopefully I will have some half-decent images to post next week.

More findings on noise and night shooting.

2008-02-17T14:34:00.009+11:00

Went out last night for my second night of night photography. The moon was mostly hidden behind heavy overcast which was frustrating, however I got this shot from the rocks looking back under the moonlight.

So a couple of important learnings from my second night out.
Moonlight helps big-time
It looks like I may have been just a tad quick off the mark about the lack of noise reduction. The Long Exposure noise reduction doesn't seem to impact the noise levels in the picture per-se, but Toby and Tim nailed with their comments. It seems the Long Exposure noise reduction doesn't significantly help with overall noise levels, but what it looks like it helps with is "Amp glow".

Check out this shot (you may need to click on it to view it large).

Check out the purple amp glow in the bottom right (very bad) and also in the bottom left.

This shot was a 10min exposure. I went back and looked at my earlier shots to see where it seemed to kick in, and it looks like it kicks in around the 5-6 min mark. Anything under that and I couldn't really notice it, but definitely on the 6 min exposures and 8 min exposures I could see it.

Very Cool Sun & Moon calculator

2008-02-14T08:23:00.004+11:00

Now that I'm a night photography "Newbie" I have to assemble some new tools to properly research when and where I am going to shoot. A new dimension that doesn't exist in day photography is the moon.

What time does it rise?
Which direction will it be in?
What altitude will it be?
What phase will it be (crescent, half, full etc.)

I'm sure that the moon will dramatically impact the quality of my night shots. I have come across a pretty cool calculator for both sun and moon. Check out Jeff Conrad's Sun and Moon calculator.

Now Jeff is obviously a minimilast judging by the user interface in his web page, but his calculator rocks!!! It's not the most inuitive interface, but read the tutorial and you'll quickly get the hang of it.

My favorite feature.... I love the way I can dial in a set of conditions and it will show me the dates and times that these conditions exist. For example I can say to the calculator "Show me all dates and times in the next 3 months where a crescent moon will be between 30 degrees and 40 degrees high in the East 1 hour after sunset." Like magic, if those conditions are possible, the dates and times will be listed.

In my book... thats a very handy and very cool calculator. Thanks Jeff Conrad.

My Geeky Analysis of Noise and Night Photography

2008-02-12T21:50:00.000+11:00

OK, If you are the creative type looking for some creative tips... skip this blog entry. If you like the technical aspects of photography, then you might find this interesting.
Warning.. this is pretty nerdy stuff.

After my first outing of night photography I was pretty happy with the results but concerned about the noise levels I was seeing in my captures. So I wanted to get a clear understanding of how noise impacts night photography. The specific questions I wanted to answer were...

Does noise increase with exposure time?
Is there a point where it increases dramatically?
Does the Long Exposure Noise Reduction help a lot here?
How bad is the noise really?

At first I was going to do a subjective evaluation of some test shots, and then as I started hunting around for a suitable test chart to shoot, I came across an ISO Standard test chart for evaluating noise (for the geeks it's called ISO15739).

I thought this looked promising, and then I came across a free plug-in for Photoshop that automatically performed the noise measurements from the standard test chart.

Click on any of the images to see the full-size image

Well that was pretty cool... all of a sudden my qualitative measurements could now become quantitative. Now if there are any ISO standards people out there who are going to have a go at me for my lack of controls blah blah blah.. for the record... I don't give a rats! It's good enough for me so don't waste your breath.

Doing a first pass to get used to it - The impact of ISO on Noise.
I thought I would start with something simple to get the hang of the process, so I shot a series of test shots of the chart at different ISO ratings. From 100 - 3200 with my D200. Here's the results of that test.

Nothing overly surprising to me... Just so you understand the chart, across the bottom (x-axis), it shows you the different luminance levels (there were 12 patches on the chart), so you can see the shadows on the left and the highlights on the right. The Y axis is the average noise that was read by the tool (I averaged the horizontal noise readings and the vertical noise readings to create one AVERAGE noise reading for each patch). It was interesting to see how the noise really goes out of control over ISO 400, and how @ ISO100 and ISO200 the noise is for all intensive purposes the same.

Test2 - Impact of Exposure time on Noise
Next test was to understand two things... the impact of exposure time on noise and also whether the Long Exposure Noise Reduction does much (except piss me off when I'm taking the photos and waiting for it to process). I took 2 exposures at 15sec, 30sec, 1min, 2min, 4min & 8min. One exposure with NR on, and one exposure with NR off. Now this wasn't a totally controlled environment (the sun was setting and light was changing, but I tried to get the histograms roughtly the same for each set. Here's the results.

I didn't graph all the results because the graph would be too confusing. The pink & yellow lines are the 15sec exposures, and the cyan and purple are the 8 min exposures. OK... so you are probably thinking "What gives" How come the 15sec exposures have more noise than the 8 min ones.... Basically that is because I exposed the 8min exposures with +1.5ev and the 15sec exposures were + 1ev.... So the 8 min exposures were "exposed to the right" of the histogram more and required less exposure boost in the RAW conversion to get the patch densities to the correct level. So two key takeouts here from this graph.
1) Exposure time doesn't appear to impact noise levels (at least up to 8min duration)
2) Long Exposure noise reduction does bugger all (it did stop a couple of red pixels, but thats it).

Test 3 - Impact of Under and Over Exposure on Noise
So I did one final test. I wanted to understand the impact of exposing to the right on noise. I shot 4 exposures at the same shutter speed - The first @ -1ev, then 0ev, then +1 ev, and finally +1.5ev. Note: Even at +1.5ev the histogram was not clipping, so this was definitely "exposing to the right" without clipping. Here's the results.

So my key learnings from two days of Geeky stuff.

Super long exposures don't create noise in my D200
Long Exposure Noise Reduction is not worth it (at least for exposures up to 8 min)
Under exposing (even slightly will give you the biggest noise hit)

Some of you experienced guys are probably reading that thinking "No shit sherlock"! Yeah I know I know... but at least I fully understand the dynamics of noise now on my camera.

Brent

My Journey into Night Photography Begins

2008-02-10T15:29:00.000+11:00

OK, I have pretty much completed my last project (to shoot all the tidal pools on the Northern Beaches). Now I'm onto my next Project.... Night Photography!

Last night I went out with Haggis for a night shoot. It was a blast. Here's two of my images from the first outing.

Here's the key takeways from that shoot.

1) Night shooting is a hell of a lot more social. Lots of time to talk and chat while the camera is exposing.

2) Incredible possibilities with night photography and many new elements involved.

You have got light painting options (what sort of light source, what temperature, how often, which angles, how direct etc.)
The moon comes into play (how bright, what angle etc.)
You have the clouds and wind... how big of a cloud streak do you want
Ambient light
New technical challenges (metering in super low levels, noise issues)
You have composition challenges (can't see what you are shooting)

3) Need to get a grip on some new technical challenge, primarily around noise reduction and management.

Tonight I'm going to start a series of experiments to try to minimise the noise from super long exposure images. I'm going to try making some custom Noise Ninja profiles and also test out just how well the Long Exposure Noise Reduction works.

I will post my results here.

Best thing about night photography is the pace.... It can sometimes take an hour or more to get one shot right, so you might as well take a bottle of red wine and a chair, and just slow down and enjoy the evening.

A Cool Recipe for Better Skin Tone Colours

2007-12-31T16:18:00.000+11:00

Several people emailed me after my previous post enquiring about the skin tone recipe, so here it is. I learnt this in a Lynda.com tutorial by Chris Orwig. It sure has helped me get my skin tones much more accurate.

It sounds like many of you are like me... have a tough time getting good skin tones right. It's amazing how your eye adapts and you pretty easily think that you have good skin tones when in fact you don't.

This recipe is not a silver bullet, but it is a great starting point. So here's the image I am going to work on. This image was taken with fill-in flash while standing on a tennis court, so the colours are definitely not right, although at first glance they are not too bad.

As with all the blogs, click on the thumbnails to see full-size images).

Before I start colour correcting, I am going to just do a simple level correction by adding a levels adjustment layer and bringing back the white level.

OK, Now this is where we set up to do the measuring for the skin tone recipe. What you want to do is put a "Colour Sampler Measurement" on a diffuse highlight of the skin. See the image below, you can select this tool from the eye dropper menu on the left (choose the middle tool)

then click on a diffuse highlight of the skin. You should also make sure your sampling size is around 5X5 pixels (see the tool option menu) to make sure it is sampling and averaging a reasonable number of pixels.

Once you click on a diffuse highlight, you will see the colour sample reading in your info palette.
It normally reads out RGB values by default. However this recipe uses CMYK, so we are going to change the readout to show us CMYK values (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black). To change from RGB to CMYK, click on the little eye-dropper next to your sample readout in the info palette.

If you have done this correctly, your info palette should look something like this. It is these percentages that we will be focusing on.

OK, So here's the recipe that I was given for white Caucasian skin... you will need to adapt this as necessary, but it is a good starting point. Write this down.

Cyan Should be a third to a fifth of Magenta

Magenta and Yellow should be almost equal

Yellow should be a little higher than Magenta

blacK should be zero.

Thats it... thats the recipe... now if you look at the readings in our sample they are
C=23%
M=33%
Y=37%
K=0%

So working through the recipe... Cyan should be around one third the value of Magenta, so we need to lower the Cyan as a starting point.

To do this Add a Curves Adjustment layer (we will use curves for adjusting the skin tones). Normally I will do a black and then white balance first using curves (this often does most of the skin tone corrections for me, but to demo this, I am only going to correct the skin tones).

Now that we have the Curves adjustment layer, we need to remove Cyan. Our curves adjustment works with Red, Green & Blue. However fundamtentally
Red also adjusts Cyan
Green also adjust Magenta
Blue also Adjusts Yellow.

So to remove Cyan, I am going to boost the red channel.
From the Curves adjustment layer I am going to change the curve from "RGB" to "Red Channel" (shortcut for this is Cntrl+1). You will see the red histogram appear. Now we are going to put a control point on the red curve that corresponds to the value of the skin tone we are adjusting. To do this automatically, hold down Cntrl and click on the colour sample marker. You will see that Photoshop automatically puts a control point on the red curve that corresponds to the skin luminance level.

Now if you use your "Up Arrow"key, you will start lifting the red curve (and hence lowering the Cyan values).... Keep moving the curve up until the Cyan values drop to about a third of the Magenta values. Then go to the blue channel, repeat the process (and in this case I had to lower the curve) until my Yellow values were slightly higher than my Magenta (as per the recipe).

So if you look at the finished adjustments, they now read
C=15%
M=46%
Y=47%
K=0%

So now if you apply the recipe, you will see it fits....

Cyan should be a third to a fifth of magenta (15% is around a third of 46%)
Magenta and Yellow should be almost equal (46% is almost equal to 47%)
Yellow should be a little higher than Magenta (47% is a little higher than 46%)
Black Should be Zero (which it is).

The image below shows you a before (left) and after (right) shot. What I always find amazing after correcting the colour is how bad the original actually looked (but i wasn't aware of it). Your eyes have something called local colour adaptation (from memory) which means if you brain knows what the colours are (like skin tones or white), then the your brain will will "see" those colours (even if they are not right).

I have found this "recipe" really helps me get my skin tones in the right ballpark... and then it is pretty easy to fine tune it from here.

Happy New Year.

Xmas Portraits

2007-12-28T15:33:00.001+11:00

OK... Wife wanted pictures of the kids this Xmas... about time I stopped taking pictures of the sea and took some of the family.... OK OK... I guess I better have a go at turning out some half-decent portraits.

I decided to stay away from the typical Xmas portrait and instead take some more radical shots of the kids doing what kids do best... playing.

Here's the first in a series of 3 portraits. Middle son Tim who got a skateboard for Xmas.

Here's how I shot this.

The Capture:

Put him in the sun which was lighting him from the back (see shadows on the ground in background).

I sat on the ground with my 12-24mm lens... set at 12mm. My other son held my Nikon SB600 flash that was connected by a cable... He was about 1 foot to my left (almost opposite the sun).

Tim did a few jumps and it wasn't too hard to capture him in mid flight. I wanted the flash to punch in very hard and very low... I wasn't after a soft portrait.

The Processing:

I did a dual conversion (one for clouds and one for Tim)

and then blended the two images together (in much the same way as I did the Martian rock processing described in detail earlier.

I colour corrected for the blue of the flash using curves (I found a really cool "recipe" for colour balancing skin tones... works like a treat). If anyone is interested, drop me a note and maybe I'll post the recipe here.

Then I merged the visible layers into a new composite layer (create new layer) then highlight this layer and "Merge Visible" Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E

Then I did a Bleach bypass effect to create the edgy look. To create this effect, the first step is to do a black and white conversion and put this b&w image on the top of layer stack. Use whatever B&W conversion method you prefer. I used Alien Skin Exposure.

Then change the blend mode of this B&W layer to overlay.... It will make the image look very edgy. You can then use the opacity slider to reduce the amount of this effect. I also used a bit of masking to reduce the effect from some of the corners (it was darkening them too much).

After that I duplicated the layer and blurred it using Gaussian Blur and then used a mask to only apply the blur to the background. I used a Gaussian Blur setting of 5 pixels. This blurring of the background further separates Tim from the background.

Final step was to apply a concrete texture to the blurred background. I went to this very cool free texture site and chose a concrete texture that I liked. Added the texture in as a new layer and then used the free transform function to stretch it to fit my picture (they are a bit small in their original form).

Once the texture is added I just changed the layer blend mode to "overlay", apply a mask and paint with a black brush to reduce the texture on his face, arms and legs and then reduced the opacity slider on the concrete layer until the effect is not too strong.

I then created some dramatic vignetting by adding a levels adjustment layer and dragging the mid-point slider to the right (so that it read a value of 50).

This makes your whole image look like crap, so to fix this invert your mask (Ctrl+I) now your mask is all black and you can just paint with white on your mask where you would like your vignette effects to appear.

Final step was to apply some sharpening (I use Nik Sharpener).

Stay tuned for portrait number 2... Eldest son Ben playing Guitar Hero III.

Post Processing The Martian Rocks

2007-12-16T09:36:00.001+11:00

I had a number of people send thank you emails regarding some of my earlier tutorials on how I processed my images. The funny thing is that when I created this blog, to be honest I didn't even think anybody else would find it or be interested in it, it was more of an online diary of how my own techniques have evolved over time. However I am glad that others find some of these tutorials useful.

I thought I would do another end-to-end tutorial showing in detial how I produced my Martian Rocks image Below (click on any of the thumbnails below to see the full sized originals).

This image was not a composite, but produced from one RAW capture. Here's the original RAW capture (my starting point).

While doing the original RAW conversion I was focusing on the foreground only, trying to get as much detail and quality out of the rocks. When I looked at the image above, while happy with the foreground, the sky was nowhere near as overcast or foreboding as I remember it, so I did a second RAW conversion of the same image where I focused on the sky and tried to re-create what it felt like when I shot the image.

Here's the second conversion of the original capture.

After bringing both of these images into Photoshop, I applied RAW pre-sharpening (using Nik Sharpener... the reason I use Nik Sharpener is because I don't want to muck about with Unsharp mask and learn the arcane art of sharpening, in my opinion Nik does a fantastic job of input sharpening and a kick-arse job of output sharpening).

I blended these images together using a simple mask that I created with my wacom tablet in about 20sec (if you don't use a tablet... get one now if you are doing ANY selective processing work at all).

Once I had my blended image, I made a composite layer which was essentially my new background layer (to do this, click the "new layer" icon in the bottom right of the layers pallete, and then press CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E (don't know the Mac equivalent)

The image above shows the two original layers at the bottom, and then the new compositie layer sitting on top of the stack. Next step I run one of my favorite plug ins Called Alien Skin Exposure. If you haven't played with this plug in, I suggest you check it out and download the 30 day evaluation. It saves me so much time in playing with levels, curves etc.

The image below shows the Alien Skin interface, On the left I have selected the Provia film stock that I like to emulate with my seascape shots. In the main pane you can see my original in the bottom left and the subtle processing that has occured on the image in the top right (I suggest you click on the thumbnail below to view the image large).

The processing that Alien Skin does is pretty subtle, but none-the-less quite nice. The image below shows my image so far (after the Alien Skin processing). You can see that Alien Skin generates a new layer in my layers stack... If I want to tone it down a bit I can simply reduce the opacity of that layer.

Next I did a bit of selective processing to intensify the water. One of the things that really struck me when I was standing at Spoon Bay looking at this scene was the fury and intensity of the water in this little cove. It wasn't coming through in the image, so I used the technique that I described earlier in my blog to make the water a bit more intense. Basically I duplicated the colour film layer (by dragging to the layer icon in the bottom right of the pallette), and then I changed the blend mode of this layer to "multiply". This will impact the entire image, so then added a layer mask (click on the "add layer mask" icon at the bottom of the pallette menu. Once the layer mask has been added it will be all white and you won't see a difference, so I invert the mask (cntrl+ I) now it goes totally black and you lose all the effect. From here just grab a paintbrush (B) and paint on the mask with white wherever you want to intensify the ocean.

I then did a very minor levels tweak because the histogram showed my whites were down a bit.

I also did a slight curves adjustment to brighten my mid-tones slightly

The final effect is to put some vignetting on the image. I will use one of two methods for this depending on the image, either a curve that darkens the image, or in this case I used levels.

I added a levels adjustment layer and then pulled the mid-tone slider to value of about 50. This makes your image look awful, so I applied a layer mask and inverted it in exactly the same manner as when I intensified the water and then used my tablet to lightly paint white around the edges to create the vignetting.

Final step to output is to duplicate, flatten, convert to sRGB profile, re-size where necessary and then I use Nik Sharpener for my output sharpening.

I hope you found this useful. Here again is the finished image.

Improving my Photoshop processing of water

2007-11-11T11:05:00.000+11:00

I have found a technique through experimentation that I quite like for giving shots of moving water some extra "oompph".

I used it to create the above photo.

Here's what the water looked like before I applied the effect

... and here's what it looked like after the effect.

Here's how I did the effect.

1) Add a colour balance adjustment layer
2) Add some blue and green into the midtones of the colour balance adjustment
3) Change the blend mode of the colour balance adjustment layer to "multiply"
4) Invert your mask so it is all black
5) Use a white brush to pain on the mask where you want to add drama to the water
6) Reduce opacity if required.

One Of My Best Shots Yet..Sculpture By The Sea

2007-11-04T15:49:00.000+11:00

This morning I picked up the Old Man at 4:45am and we drove down to Bondi for sunrise shoot at Sculpture by the sea. Last year we were lucky and had a glorious red sunrise, so we weren't as optimistic for this year... especially as the weather forecast was for rain.

It would have been easy to ignore the alarm clock at 4:15AM, but I really wanted to get up and out. After picking up Dad it rained all the way to Bondi, but there were some patches of clear sky, so I was optimistic. Anyway... our persistence paid off and the rain stopped the moment we arrived and we were greeted by an incredibly dramatic sky.

This incredible stormy sky proved to be a great backdrop for some lovely images.

This is one of my favorite shots that I have shot... I love the mood of this image and the subtle tones of the sculpture against the dramatic backlit sky. I processed this as an HDR image using Photomatix (0ev, +2ev, -3ev). Then ran it through Photoshop, Alienskin Exposure and some final curves and dodge & burn. Very happy with the way this turned out.... I have a 16"X20" print in my hallway now.

I also like this image because of the simplicity of the subject and colours against the stormy sky.

My third shot from the outing was of the sculpture at the top of the headland.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable morning of photography. Very happy with the results.

Coming Out of The Closet

2007-10-30T21:46:00.001+11:00

OK.... I have a confession to make... I bought a macro lens and made my first macro image. Now I'm not sure why I have this mental stigma about macro photographers. I think it's because I've always considered myself a serious landscape photographer and shooting pictures of flowers and butterflies seems like "sissy photography".

It's so opposite to landscape work...

Landscape is all about the location
Macro is all about the subject
Landscape is all about foreground interest and leading lines into the picture
Macro is about putting the subject on a very narrow focal plane
Landscape is about dramatic low angle light
Macro is about diffuse even light to pick up detail.
Landscape often has infinite depth of field.
Macro often has infinitesimal depth of field.
Landscape is about exposure bracketing
Macro is about focus bracketing

I could go on and on, but I think we all get it... This is different. So why am I drawn to macro?

Because I think it will be fun to have total control over your shooting... Kind of like a minature studio where I have full control over composition, lighting... everything. I don't have to hope for a great sunrise.... I create my own through colour backgrounds.

So here's my first crack at a macro shot.

I was very happy with the way it came out and it has really energised me to do more quickly. I can't say the concept was original, I came across some incredible photos from Lord V and Steve Took It on Flickr with lots of links to great tutorials on how they created the refracted images of flowers.

So where to from here.... I want to see if I can bring some drama and landscape principles to the Macro world.... Should be quite challenging when I can't even get a bloody leaf totally in focus... but we'll see.

Stay tuned.

Right Place... Right Time.

2007-10-13T18:15:00.001+10:00

Had some interesting photographic outings recently. Went away with the family to Surfers Paradise so the kids could do the theme park thing. I have forgotten how much I hate Surfers Paradise!!!

Decided to do a few sunrises to keep my sanity and get out of the built up area. While doing some research on Flickr I came across some great photos by a guy called Garry. He had some great photos from around QLD, so I dropped him a note to see if he had any recommendations.

Well as fate would have it, he was heading out that weekend to a location not far from where I was staying, so I joined him and his buddy. We went to Fingal Head which was fantastic. I got a couple of good shots.

Enjoyed meeting Garry and his buddy Rafski. Really shows to me the power of the Flickr community in enhancing your photographic outings. I would never have found this headland without Garry.

The second interesting outing was last Friday.... I just returned from vacation and Oat (aka Hangingpixels) invited me along for a shoot on Friday morning with Tom Hide. I decided to go along as I had been getting up early for sunrise shooting anyway. I checked the weather and the forecast was for a thunderstorm on Friday AM, so I thought that sounded promising.

I got there at 4:15am and it was still dark, but I could see a big cloud mass coming in from the ocean rapidly. I thought I was going to get dumped on big time. After taking a few shots, I thought that the day was going to be a waste because the clouds came in as one big overcast mass which made shooting pretty boring.

I actually packed up my gear and started walking back to the car when I ran into Tom arriving late. So I thought I better be social and I turned around and did some more shooting. Almost immediately the skies started changing and clearing and I witnessed one of the most dramatic sunrise skies I have ever seen. Here's a couple of shots from the morning.... I have not enhanced the sky much at all, but check it out.

This is Tom shooting at Turimetta beach with the dramatic sky.

Here's a shot that Tom took of me a moment later (note the different approach to processing)

Unfortunately Oat must have slept in.... Really goes to show that you have to be out there shooting and sooner or later you get the great light and the great skies. You won't get any great shots being in bed.

On a different note, have decided to spring for a macro lens. I've got some ideas on a new style of macro photography that I want to experiment with.

Watch this space.

Painting with Waves... An Experiment

2007-09-22T09:24:00.000+10:00

I had a brainwave during the week about a new technique I thought of. A while ago I read with interest about a technique called painting with light. Basically if you have a partially cloudy day, you take a picture of an image under cloud, then without moving the camera you take another image in full sunlight. Then later in photoshop you can use masks to "Paint in the sunlight" in the areas you want.

Anyway... I thought "Why not do that with waves"! So here's my first crack at it. Step by Step. Here's the finished that I will be building.

How Did I Do This?
The sequence below shows you the detailed steps to complete the final image. If you click on the small images, you will be see the full-size screen capture.

The finished image is actually a composite of 3 images. First I selected my base image. I looked for one that had a pretty good ocean texture all over.

Then I looked through some of the other shots that I took from the same camera position and I found the shot below quite interesting. I really loved the foreground wave blurring and motion, but I didn't like the big wave that was distracting in the background.

The third image in my composite was a bracketed image taken at -2ev which correctly exposed the sky.

So I did a RAW conversion on all three images, and opened them in Photoshop, applied a RAW pre-sharpen to the images (using Nik Sharpener's raw pre-sharpen setting).

The first thing I set about working on was to blend in the new sky. I layered it on top of the base image and used my tablet to paint over the sky.... I must prefer making masks with a tablet because you don't have to be overly precise and with the pressure sensitivity of a tablet you can blend the images pretty seamlessly. Before I bought the tablet I used to spend hours trying to get masks right.. now it's literally a couple of minutes.

The next step (below) shows the "Painting with water), I overlayed the lovely blurred water image and created a new mask... and inverted it so that it was totally black... then I used my tablet to paint in the new blurred water... If I go to far I just paint with black on the mask to hide it again.

The next step is some dodging and burning. I like to use the soft-light method for doding and burning because it is non-destructive. Simply add a new layer, change the blend mode to soft light and then paint with black to burn and white to dodge..... pretty simple.

After that I applied a very subtle colour balance to the water (using a tablet-created mask) to make the water slightly aqua in appearance.

I then applied a vignette... I do this different ways depending on the image, but for this one I used the levels.... I applied a level adjustment layer and then grabbed the grey slider and moved it over to the right until the value was 50. Then I invert the mask (so that it is black) and use my table to paint in the vignette effect... if it is too strong I use opacity slider to back it off.

I wanted the rocks to have a bit more punch, so I used Alien Skin Exposure and did a Provia conversion (if you haven't used Alien Skin, check out the free eval... I love this product) and just applied it to the rocks to give them a bit more kick (I wanted to leave the ocean to be very subtle and not work it too much).

A small final level adjustment to bring up the white levels.

Finally I do a standard preparation for the web...
Duplicate & Flatten
Resize (to about 12oo px wide)
Convert to 8 bit
Convert to sRGB profile
Apply final sharpenting (I use Nik Sharpener - display mode).
Save as JPG.

Happy painting with waves!!!!

New Project - Ghost Series

2007-09-09T15:10:00.001+10:00

I had a great long weekend of photography. Got out every morning... Friday to North Narrabeen pool, Saturday to Turimetta at high tide and this morning to Mona Vale pool.

During my pre-dawn session yesterday at Turimetta I captured a couple of very interesting long exposure images of the ocean breaking against the rocks. I found the images quite intriguing due to their ghostly appearance, however whenever I tried to create an image, it just wasn't working for me.

I finally decided to have one more go and this time to convert to black and white or a subtle toned print. This has led me to create the first two images of what I hope will be a portfolio of "ghost images".

Ghost Cove

Ghost Cove # 2

I am enjoying the long exposure photography, I hope this will be the start of some entirely new and interesting images.

Processing North Narrabeen Pool

2007-09-07T09:16:00.000+10:00

In this post, I am going to describe my post processing to create this image

The two starting images. I chose two exposures of the scene. One of them was reasonably exposed for the path and water (highlights did blow out a bit on the poles). The second image was a much longer 3 min exposure for the sky (click on thumbnails for closeup of screen shots).

Colour balancing these in RAW was interesting. I knew that the camera wouldn't get this right because there are some pretty funky sodium lights illuminating the pool. When combined with the pre-dawn blue hour, it was always going to be tricky. This is what I love about shooting RAW, I can sort out white balance later and not worry about camera settings.

This is the image as it appeared originally in ACR (Colour balance settings left to default)

Here's how it looked when I corrected the colour (pretty different eh?)

Once I got it into Photoshop, I applied pre-sharpening (courtesy of Nik Sharpener Pro 2.0) I then cropped and extended canvas to create black background for panoramic format.

Next I did a colour balance to get the water colour to be a bit more blue/green in colour. I wasn't worried about the sky because I was going to replace it with the long exposure sky anyway. I was sampling colours from the white posts to ensure colour neutrality in the shade of the white posts. Here's what it looked like as I colour balanced.

Once I colour balanced it, I then did a simple levels adjustment. To bring in the sky from my other exposure I just laid it on top and used my tablet to create a pretty quick and simple mask. Here's what the composite image was looking like.

Next I ran my image through Alien Skin Exposure (I love this program, it emulates the look of film, if you haven't tried it, there is a free 30 day eval.)... I chose Fuji Provia 100 as my desired film look. You can see the original on the left part of the screen, and then the preview of the film effect on the right. With the provia setting it is pretty subtle, but it does give the image some pop..... If you choose something like Fuji Velvia then it is much more dramatic.

Final step was to do a bit of dodge and burn and then darken corners using curves, then resize, convert to sRGB, output sharpen via Nik Sharpener.

Turrimetta

2007-09-05T07:30:00.001+10:00

Last weekend I had a wonderful shoot down at Turrimetta. What a gorgeous place. It's funny to think that I grew up in Sydney on the North Shore but never visited this jewel.

Dad and I went out to Long Reef on Saturday for a dawn shoot, but in true Long Reef style, the sky was very boring. On the way back we stopped at Turimetta to check it out. It was gorgeous and I just had to go back the next day.

Got there really early and shot this photo

This was actually shot about 30 min before sunrise, it was pretty dark and I was wrestling with the correct exposure. This one was about a 2min exposure and I then blended in another exposure of the sky @ -2ev. Didn't use HDR on this photo as besides the sky, the rest of the image had a moderate dynamic range and I didn't want to compress it.

With some of the other shots from Turimetta I have been modifying my processing technique a bit. I usually start with an HDR composite that gives me my base image, and then I start overlaying individual exposures over the top to try to re-capture more of the original tonal ranges...

In the above image I used an HDR base layer, then I replaced the sky with an exposure captured at -1ev and the I replaced some detail in the foreground rock and some of the rock shelf from an exposure taken at +2ev.

Here's a couple more shots from the same morning.

I might head back out to Turimetta this weekend to check it out at high tide.

Oh.... and the funny thing is that Dad was supposed to join me on Sunday for this shoot but he decided to sleep in instead. It seems that I get my best sunrise shots when he sleeps in....

Life after Southwest USA

2007-09-03T16:25:00.000+10:00

After returning from the USA, I didn't pick up my camera for over a month. This was for a couple of reasons.
1) I had 2 intense weeks of incredible shooting in some of the best landscape locations in the world.
2) I wanted to spend time with my family after being away for a couple of weeks
3) I had a lot of images to process
4) I thought that I would be stuck for subjects in Sydney

Well, I'm back into it again, and the last couple of weeks I have taken some photos that I have been really happy with.

Check out these three photos from my shoot at Mona Vale pool last week.

This one is a simple composition, but I decided to really try for a more stylistic look through my photoshop processing.

This second one used some pretty aggressive HDR processing, but I really wanted a creative and stylistic (almost surreal) look to this photo.

This last one is an interesting one... I almost didn't bother to process it at all, but it has gotten some very interesting feedback and comments on Flickr and has probably turned into one of my most popular photos.

I'm loving the crazy perspective of my 12mm lens. I love getting right in amongst the scene and creating crazy conversion lines with the ultra-wide lens. Nice and dramatic.

The trip is nearly over!!!

2007-06-30T13:44:00.000+10:00

Well this is my last night in the USA on my photographic trip with Dad.

We just finished up a trip to Monument Valley and Canyon De Chally. To be honest I was a bit dissapointed with both of these locations compared to the wonderful places we went before.

Part of my dissapointment lies in the Navajo guides that we were reliant upon to take us to places in both parks. In Monument Valley they were charging us a fortune for a private photographic tour. Before booking we absolutely confirmed that our guide was experienced at taking landscape photographers around Monument Valley and new how to chase the light etc.

Well, our guide was supposed to be Carol.... she didn't turn up, so we got Larry.

We gave Larry the third degree and he assured us that he was a photographic expert.... then all of a sudden he was busy, so we got Patsy.... I was skeptical but Patsy assured us (as did her boss) that she was skilled at guiding serious photographers.

Guess what!!! They lied to us! I don't think Patsy knew that the sun set in the West much less the ideal locations for various shots. I was so dissapointed. My advice to any other photographers looking to shoot in Monument Valley or Canyon De Chally (where you need guides to take you through)..... Do your own research, and assume that your guides are just drivers.

Tomorrow morning I am going back to upper Antelope Canyon for one more quick shoot before racing for the airport. I feel I have not done this spectacular location justice.

What a fantastic week so far!!!

2007-06-27T01:05:00.000+10:00

I'm about half way through my photographic trip and all I can say is "wow". I have seen some incredible locations and captured some wonderful images. Talk about photography overload. So far the trip has been

Mono Lake
Bodie Ghost Town
Bryce National Park
Escalante National Park
Antelope Canyon
Glen Canyon Recreation Area

Here are a couple of my favorite images so far. I loved the abstract shapes of Antelope Canyon.

Tonight I drive back to Page, AZ where I meet back up with Dad. Then we are heading out to Monument Valley and Canyon De Challey.

While I haven't been taking many black and white photos, I did manage to grab two black and white photos that I was pretty happy with. Funnily enough both of them had Dad in them as the focal point.

I am going to have a lot of processing to do when I get back to Sydney, but so far I am pretty happy with the images that I have been getting.

More soon.

My USA trip is finally here... I'm off!

2007-06-16T12:37:00.000+10:00

Sitting at the airport waiting to board the plane. Can't think of anything I have forgotten.

The next two weeks are going to be fun, exciting, tiring, probably a bit overwhelming.... It will be interesting to see whether I get into photographic overload by the end of it.

Beach and Pool During Storm

2007-06-13T07:22:00.001+10:00

Beach and Pool During Storm, originally uploaded by brentbat.

This weekend was an awful one from a weather perspective... 3 Days of storms. However as they say every cloud has a silver lining. I got out on Sunday morning and shot some interesting photos at Mona Vale pool. The sky was very dramatic and moody, and the sun peeped out from the clouds for a just a few minutes, I ventured out on to the rocks and sand and shot some pictures before the heavens opened again. Lucky I had my umbrella close by or my camera would have got a drenching.

Port Botany

2007-06-04T10:17:00.000+10:00

I have been thinking about photographing Port Botany for a while now. In fact I had a go a couple of months back, but didn't research the location very well and suffered from a corrupt CF card, so ended up getting no usable pictures from that shoot.

This time things were a bit different, I conducted a recce of the location on my way back from the airport last Monday. Found a perfect location that had some great old piers that would work well as foreground.

On Sunday I morning I went out, didn't run around snapping away like a headless chook, instead I already decided on two different compositions and just set up to capture them when the lighting was right. Here's the results of the shoot.

I like this one because it is quite dramatic. It was still dark when I snapped this and the light mist in the air higlighted the alien-like lights of the port.

The second one below was shot about 30 minutes later when there was more ambient light around. I used 7 frames @ f4 with exposures ranging from 0.5 of a second to 28 seconds. The lens was the Tokina 12-24mm @ 18mm.

Another "Before Work" Adventure

2007-05-28T22:08:00.000+10:00

Today I was due to fly out to Brisbane on the 8AM flight. I figured I might have time to sneak in a quick sunrise shoot somewhere near the airport. After last weeks success with the Homebush Shipwreck photos, I figured it was worth it, and it certainly puts me in a great mood for the day.

So I went out to La Perouse and started shooting some shots of the pier out to Bare Island.

When I came to shoot this shot

I set my tripod up down near the water, and I was standing about 6 inches above water height and framing up my picture. I wasn't too concerned as I was in Botany Bay and not out on an ocean facing headland. The next thing I feel is water washing over my feet at about ankle level. I grabbed my camera and bolted for higher ground.

I couldn't believe it!!! Two outings in a row! I got some strange looks at Sydney airport as I squelched my way up the Jetway to get onto the plane. Luckily my socks pretty much dried out before I got the client meeting in Brisbane @ 11AM.

Note to self: Buy gum boots and keep in car for these occasions.

My Photographic Locations Map

2007-05-25T12:25:00.000+10:00

Google Maps now has a very cool bit of functionality that allows anybody to create their own custom maps.

I have started building my own map which is a guide to photographic locations that I have been to, or a list of photographic locations that I want to go to. Hopefully this map will be useful to visiting photographers coming to Sydney. I can just shoot them off the link and they can browse the photos by geography.

Click Here to go visit the map now.

Lovely Morning... But Still No Sunrise!

2007-05-20T17:42:00.000+10:00

Well, it's been 4 in a row... that is 4 lousy sunrises for one reason or another.... Don't get me wrong, yesterday and today were beautifully warm mornings, but from a photographic perspective there was very little colour in the sky.

I decided to go to Narrabeen Lakes and shoot this morning. Despite the lack of cloud cover, I got three images that were worth while.

Tomorrow morning I am going to go out and shoot some sunrise shots before my client meeting out at Homebush... I might take a crack at the old shipwrecks in Homebush Bay. Not sure if I can get a good shot at them from the banks though. Tonight it was a pretty good sky for sunset... great clouds... great colour.... now I just need that one morning and I'm sure I'll get some great pictures.

Better Than Last Week...

2007-05-19T15:41:00.000+10:00

Well this week I went out for another trip to try and get a decent sunrise over Long Reef.

The Good News was that I didn't screw up the tides this time and there was plenty of the reef exposed.

The Bad News was that the sunrise was pretty boring. Not a cloud in the sky! One of these days I have to get a half decent sky when I am down at Long Reef.... However it continues to elude me thus far.

I took a few photos that still came out OK. This photo was taken with my D200 and Tokina 12-24mm lens @ 12mm and f11. I created an HDR composite from 7 frames that ranged from 1/2sec up to 1/125sec.

Regarding my workflow, for this print I did the following.

Create HDR Composite and Tone Map in Photomatix
Save as 16bit TIFF
Open TIFF image in Photoshop CS2
Apply RAW Presharpening @ 50% (using Nik Sharpener 2.0)
Apply Velvia settings through Alien Skin Exposure (@ about 70% opacity)
Apply local contrast Enhancement through Unsharp Mask (50%, 1pixel, 0 threshold)
Brighten cliff shadows a bit with some selective curves
Apply vignette using levels and masks
Duplicate to new image and flatten
Re-size to about 1200pixels wide for Flickr
Prepare for web (convert to sRGB profile, 8 bit image)
Apply output sharpening via Nik Sharpener (Display sharpening @ 27%)
Save as JPEG

Got a couple of other similar looking images. Here's one more.

Lets hope that tomorrow the sky is a bit more interesting. I think I might venture down to Narrabeen Lake tomorrow and try my luck with some lake shots.

Preparation.... Preparation... Preparation - NOT!

2007-05-16T08:59:00.000+10:00

Well last weekend I reminded myself of an important lesson about preparing properly for a photo shoot.

Saturday - Went down to Long Reef to try grab a half-decent sunrise over the reef. Every time I have gone down to Long Reef to try to grab this picture I have been foiled by clear skies or totally overcast skies and I have not captured the image that I know is possible at this stunning location. This was my best effort so far.

Now this isn't a bad image, but the sky is barren and pretty bland.... I just KNOW that I can get a stunning image if the sunrise gods are with me.

Anyway, Saturday morning I turn up and I had two problems
1) The tides were just a wee bit too high and
2) A totally colourless sky.

So I thought I would try again on Sunday morning. However this is where I learned my lesson. I didn't bother to check the tide tables for Sunday. I just assumed that the tide would be lower on the Sunday (not sure how I reached that conclusion). Anyway as I was hiking down to Long Reef in the pre-dawn darkness I was looking up at the sky and looked like it had great potential.... high whispy clouds and already an hint of colour on the horizon.

Then my heart sunk as I looked at the reef and discovered that it was high tide... That means:
No reef walking
No spectacular water pools or formations
No images!!!

So the lesson learned was - Do your homework... check sunrise times, tides, weather forecast, make sure your gear is all ready to (batteries charged, lenses cleaned etc.)

If I had have checked the tides, I would have changed my location to Narrabeen Lake and probably got some good images instead of returning empty handed.

Lesson Learned!

First trip away with my new camera - Blue Mtns

2007-05-08T22:04:00.000+10:00

Well I just got back from my first trip away with my new Nikon D200. What a lovely camera! I went up to the Blue Mountains for a trip with Ben & Tim's school and ended up camping out each night and getting up early for some sunrise photography.

I went out on Saturday morning to Wentworth Falls lake for some sunrise shots. However conditions weren't the best... there was a reasonable wind blowing which created a lot of wind on the lake, and the sunrise was a bit dissapointing.

That evening however I went to shoot a sunset shot of the Old Blast Furnace in Lithgow. Unfortunately I got there a bit late and just missed the golden sunlight (there was a big hill to my West which meant the sun disssapeared 15 min early!) However I scouted the location and decided to drive back in the morning. Boy am I ever glad that I did. I probably had the best morning's photography I have ever had.... It started out with the pre-dawn shots... the sunrise was glorious. I shot the follwing two shots before the sun peeked over the horizon.

Then once the sun came up it cast a lovely difuse yellow light on the ruins and the sky was absolutely perfect (beautiful clouds that didn't dominate the scene). I shot the following two shots just after sunrise.

I finished up my weekend going to Leura Cascades and enjoyed a lovely hike in the mountains. When I arrived at the lake the light wasn't right, however with no kids tailing me, I sat down, had a picnic and waited for the sun to get higher in the sky. I recorded this image.

All in all, it was an absolutely beautiful weekend away with my new camera.

First Shoot with the D200

2007-04-28T21:24:00.001+10:00

Fort Room in BW, originally uploaded by brentbat.

Today was my first shoot with the new camera. The camera itself performed flawlessly. I love so much about the camera compared to my Nikon D70 that it is hard to know where to begin. Fundamentally though it is just the pure quality of the images that impress me.

I did make one mistake though on bracketing for HDR work. I didn't realise that the camera was maxing out the exposures at 30sec, so when I shot a 7 frame bracket, it was not over-exposing enough which creates more noise in the lowlights when you produce your HDR image.

Found some new angles and places to shoot, but it was still hard to really concentrate with Michael there.

I discovered the "Blue Room" this time. I am definitely going to go back and shoot this room some more with my new lens. Here's what I am planning...
1) Smoke to highlight the beams of light weaving through the room
2) I want to make a feature of the incredible dust and stones sitting at the base of the shuttered windows.

I might need to bring something to elevate my tripod by another 12".

All-in-all though I was very happy with the shots that I got out of my D200. A promising start to a new photographic chapter.

My New Camera Arrived!

2007-04-27T14:33:00.000+10:00

Yesterday my new camera arrived!

I am the proud owner of a bouncing Nikon D200. Taken a few experimental images to see how the camera feels, but hope to go out tonight down to the Rocks for some night photography.

I also just ordered the Tokina 12-24mm zoom lens which I am also excited about. Should get that on Sunday. Absolutely no excuses now for great images!

Day 4 The Old Fort in Middle Harbour

2007-04-14T12:47:00.001+10:00

Old Fort Tunnel, originally uploaded by brentbat.

Went up with the family today to Middle Harbour Fort for a walk. The fort was a lovely place to shoot some photos... could have stayed there for hours but the family started getting impatient.

Shot a few photos that I was happy with. The tunnel was a challenging one to shoot, could not have captured this image without HDR approach.

HDR Project Day 3 - Dawn over Long Reef

2007-04-14T12:36:00.001+10:00

Dawn over Long Reef
Originally uploaded by brentbat.

Day 3 of my HDR project and I went out with Dad to shoot sunrise over Long Reef. While the sunrise itself was less than spectacular, it gave me a chance to work on my bracketing technique. This shot was comprised of about 7 images and I was very happy the reduced level of noise.

Opera hose sunrise day 2

2007-04-10T11:56:00.001+10:00

Opera hose sunrise day 2
Originally uploaded by brentbat.

While the sky wasn't as good as yesterday, I think I did a better job with the processing. Also my bracketing was better which resulted in much less noise in the low-lights. I discovered that the trick is to make sure you really over expose the picture enough (so that you correctly expose the shadows). If you don't do that, you seem to get tons of noise in your HDR image.

My First HDR photo

2007-04-10T10:25:00.001+10:00

opera house at dawn hdr, originally uploaded by brentbat.

I was lucky with the sky, but I have realised that Photomatix is a bit heavier on the saturation that I realised.

My Photographic Journey

2007-04-10T10:14:00.000+10:00

I have started this blog to chronicle my journey as a photographer. While I have been involved in photographer for almost 30 years (that is scary in it's own right), it is becoming clear to me that my learning and development as a photographer is accelerating. I think this is primarily due to the digital evolution and tools like Flickr that are making it so much easier to learn, share, publish etc.

Not sure how active I will be with this blog, but we'll see in time.