Zis iz zee castle of my master, Guy de Lombard!

Well, not really, but this is photograph a friend of mine made while he was skiving rather than being at the conference he was supposed to be at. He'd posted it on a private board after doing some tinkering and I thought to myself: "Hang on, I think we can get a bit more out of the image than that." He kindly posted the RAW file for me to play with. The image was made by a Samsung NX30, 1/2500 @ f/6.3, ISO 200.

When I first looked at the RAW file in Lightroom, I was surprised at just how much detail was still available in the shadows given bright sky and the dark castle walls.

Original Image

In LR, I did the following adjustments:

Lightroom Adjustments

The original exposure was OK but I really hit the Highlights and Shadows settings (I also cloned the bird on the left out. Bloody seagull) I found the RAW file to be remarkably robust to this sort of heavy handed tweaking. The only disconcerting thing was the two pure green spots on the castle wall. I think that this is a hot or dead pixel. I did end up cloning them out after I had run the file through Viveza. After this LR jiggery-pokery I ended up with this:

Lightroom Adjustments

I wanted to lighten up the Welsh flag a bit as I found it a bit dark. I opened the image in NIK Viveza 2.0 (Hey Google, if you're going to abandon the NIK suite, at least have the decency to open source it!) After tweeking the overall brightness, warmth, structure and shadows, using a Control Point set on the flag green of the flag I tweeked the brightness and saturation giving me this:

After Viveza 2.0

Not bad, not bad at all. Now, NIK has a tone mapping HDR application so, since I was going all McGyver on this image anyway, why not try that. There's lots of pre-built settings, ranging from neutral to "OMFG the acid has just kicked in!" Here's the three that I tried:

NIK HDR Pro Tone Map "Neutral" Setting

NIK HDR Pro Tone Map "Balanced" Setting

NIK HDR Pro Tone Map "Artistic B/W" Setting

I think I prefer my handbombed colour processing using LR and Viveza over any of the HDR colour presets.

I do like the B/W except for the burnt out sun, so back to the original image and this time I loaded it up in Viveza and set a control point on the burnt out sun and reduced the brightness until I got it to blend in to the cloud bank. Next I ran it through NIK HDR tone mapping, selecting the "Natural" preset. Finally into the ab fab NIK SilverFX. I selected the Ilford HP5 profile and worked with the fine structure, brightness, dynamic brightness and soft contrast sliders until I got this:

NIK SilverFX

This I think is the image I felt was hiding inside the image (except for the bright pixels and the bloody seagull)

For my friend, who is a Linux guy, I think you can do the LR adjustments and Viveza style spot adjustments in Darktable. I've got it running on Junior but I just haven't had the time to understand the UI yet. I don't know what application you'd use to do the tone mapping HDR, but LightZone does run on Linux and it does some pretty neat tone mapping.

Oh, and if Mike from Australia is reading this, well, you know what to do...

"Facepalm" or Sometimes, you just gotta wonder: 'What was I thinking?'

There are two adages that I’ve heard over the years I’ve been photographing; there are many more, these are apropos to this post.  I remember reading in some book on technique:  

“If you’re walking forward, turn around and look backwards.”

 and hearing at a photography seminar: 

“Review your rejects. You just may have overlooked something in those contact sheets.”

I’d finished the edits of my Toronto trip and was at a bit of a loose end. It was late at night in the OCC and I had my laptop with me and noticed that I had this folder in Lightroom called “Uncataloged”.  I remember that I had done some work there, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what. Stepping through the Lightroom catalog in a kind of desultory fashion, not really looking directly at the images but seeing them out of the corner of my eye I was looking for something to jump out at me. They say that if you want to see an animal, you’d see it best by not looking straight at it, especially if it was hidden. Although this is best for detecting motion, it was late in the evening and I wanted to see what would pop out of the thickets.

About half way through, I came up on two images. The first had me doing the proverbial facepalm. I had given this image one star and for whatever reason it never progressed further. I don’t know why. Other images did rank higher and may be slightly stronger; this image is, in retrospect, strong as the others. 

It was early April when I made this image. I do recall turning and reacting to this “homme d'affaires” striding through spring sun. I had metered on the sidewalk earlier and as I turned to look back, there he was. In post, I cropped a bit and then ran the image through SilverFX.

A little later, I ran into an image made about seven month earlier. Again it was one of those where I had metered on the sidewalk and turning around and looking backwards to where I had come from, there she was on her bicycle. Those of you who know Calgary, will know that this street corner is usually quite packed with traffic and yet here she is, serenely cycling on a September afternoon.

I can understand why maybe this one ended up on the cutting room floor as the woman is slightly out of focus. I cropped and straightened things out a bit and again ran the image through SilverFX. 

Always turn and look, you never know what is going on behind you. Turn back the pages and look at what you’ve discarded. You’re a different photographer today than you were yesterday, last week, last month. Go back a year and you’ll see how your sensibilities have changed and that dog of a photo may just be the one that shouldn't have gotten away.

Backlog III - Break and a Smoke (and some mangled metaphors)

Part of my backlog is a large number of images that I've taken at one of my regular fishing holes in downtown Calgary: Stephen Avenue Mall. As I've said before the Mall is Calgary's living room (there, I've totally mixed my metaphors now) and always (let's see if I can mix it up even more) a happy hunting ground.

Some days I return empty handed, other days I return with my creel overflowing but most days, one image will be my take. I find that there about three spots that are worth setting up shop and casting for a while gives me good results.

Reviewing some of my backlog I found that I had several images that were reflective of "Break and a Smoke".

Export "A"

Early Morning Smoke

Poutine and Chop Sticks

Finally, a color image. This grabbed me as it was a perfectly good tubesteak left on a bench with a Pepsi to wash it down. I'm not sure where the diner went, it looks like they left in a hurry.

Break Over

Technical Notes

All of these images where captured using an Olympus E-P2 and the 45/1.8 lens. This is a really potent combination and while many like wide for the street, I like the portrait focal length. Processing in Lightroom and then into SilverFX 2 for the b/w images.

Backlog - Sturm und Drang

I've been on a self-enforced shooting hiatus. Looking at a backlog of almost 900 images in Lightroom I felt that I was at risk of turning into some sort photographic magpie, collecting images for the sake of collecting them. So, over the last 5 weeks I've waded through them all and over the next couple of posts I'll be sharing and commenting on them.

The first tranche is from a collection I call "Springtime in Alberta" after the Ian Tyson song.

While I was on stress leave, I had a hankering to head down to Rosebud, Alberta. The shoot in Rosebud didn't amount to much. I did have one image that I thought would work but after my 3rd pass through (I sweep through the images multiple times in LR, narrowing down my choices) it just didn't stand up. I headed on down the road to Drumheller and it just wasn't working for me so I decided to head home. 

Climbing up out of the Red Deer River valley I saw a spring storm rolling in from the north. I pulled over to the side of the road and got the cameras ready. Looking over my shoulder and out the passenger window I'd drive a few kilometers and stop. One of my first shots was of farmhouse framed in sunlight from the south with a roiling mass of cloud running out of the north looking for all the world it was sent by God to some good old fashioned Old Testament smiting.

Island in the Storm

I processed this in Lightroom and then used GoogleNik SilverFX. If you haven't bucked up for the Nik Suite, I really recommend that you do. Back when you had to spend almost the price of Photoshop for all the Nik tools I'd have thought twice, but now it's priced so well that you really can't afford not to get them.

I jumped back in the truck and headed east. That's when I saw the grain bins. The folks behind me must have thought me mad as I wheeled off the road and jumped out of the truck with my Leica (I had it around my neck as I was driving so I didn't have to fiddle around). In both colour and this black and white version I had images of of those dust bowl storms that blew the top soil across the prairies in the '30s. 

Grainaries

I've got two versions of this next image and I'm not sure which I like better. 

Maximum 80

Maximum 80

I think the black and white could use some more work. I think I used SilverFX control point tools I could open up the road a bit and create some more drama. My wife liked the colour version better right now I tend to agree. 

Technical Details

All images where taken with a Leica M-E and a Zeiss Biogon 35mm f/2.8. Inital processing was in Lightroom and then in SilverFX.

Upon closer inspection I can see I missed some dust bunnies (quite a few actually). I had been changing lenses quite a bit in Rosebud and Drumheller and I'd forgotten that unlike my Olympus gear, Leica didn't think to add a dustbuster. Of course, with the way these images are laid out, it's hard to find the dust. Every time I looked I found a few more hiding in the clouds. I've found a technique that will give me a better chance at finding them so I'll be going back into these to "kill the wabbits". It involves some jiggery pokery with the tone curve to highlight the specks.