Water Front

Victors grandparents own property on the west side of the island, and so we went out there tonight for some pictures. They have an amazing house, and quite the collection of art! We ended up getting a tour for about an hour before we shot, which was okay because the collection was really awesome. But we were there for photos, so we eventually braved the cold and went outside.

To escape from the icy wind, we went into this little nook at the end of the beach where a stream flowed from the island into the bay. Perfect place to avoid freezing, perfect to get a picture too!

I shot with the18-135, at 30s, f/3.5 and ISO1600. Not the greatest settings for image quality, but you do what you gotta do. With the quarter moon lighting up the foreground, and the stars shining brightly, the exposure worked out really well. Being so cold, there wasn't as much as there could have  been, and in post I could push the image further.

Starting with a simple panorama of the bay and the stream, Victor and I came up with a plan. We'd brought along a really cool light globe thing, and Victor wanted to use it. He put his flashlight in it, hung it with a whisk and cable, and then followed the contour of the stream and then the beach. In camera it didn't look like it worked, but once I started editing I saw it worked perfectly! He did a run on both sides of the beach, and then I light painted the stream to get the green water. The stream was going to be the focus of the photo, so it needed to be lit well. My plan for these type of shots is to light everything I possibly can, and if I need to use all of those parts I'm glad I got them. If I only need a few, then at least it's good practice and I've covered my bases.

To composite, I just use layer masks in Ps. Really, really simple stuff. Watch any 5 min video on YouTube and it's explained. Just paint black where you don't want, and paint white where you do!

Since it was a panorama, I opened all the layers in Ps, the made the canvas 200% taller than the individual photo. This gave me room to stack the photos appropriately, and then I just cropped down again once they were good. I think this one is 4 photos high. Not that hard to blend this, since the water and stars mix really well. Just a couple of soft layer masks and that's all it takes. Blend with the lest detailed parts of images, it makes it so much easier. That, or parts that are a texture or something. Most people won't notice if there's a slight discrepancy in a texture where you blended, especially if it's something like rock or water.

In Lr, I first adjusted the sky and the colors. I cooled things down a bit, and then added more magenta. That just gives a beautiful blue/purple tint to it, which I really love. I also increased the clarity and contrast a bit with the stars, to make them pop more.

Next, I brought out some more detail in the shadows with selective adjustments. Nothing complicated there. Finally, I lowered the highlights in the rocks, as they were just a tad over exposed.

To finish off the photo, I did some chromatic aberration correction, sharpening, and noise reduction.

See you tomorrow!

Water Breaker

I partook in picture taking a heck of a lot today. Probably filled up a card and a half. In the morning, I went to this cool little inlet that I found the other day. The sun was just rising, and the colors were amazing. I haven't edited those yet though. Later in the day, we went back to Botany Bay and Botanical beach. I walked on the beach, getting a bunch of pictures of tide pools and a very docile heron. During the last part of the day, we went to Sombrero Beach (I think it's called?), and I thought I might be shooting the sunset. However, those plans changed.

Apparently, that beach is very, very popular for surfing. There were tons of guys out on the water, so I basically just sat there for two hours and made surfing pictures.

Figuring out settings was a constant battle. At first, the sun was at full bast as backlighting the surfers. I needed to stop the action, but still get a decent depth of field and get detail in the dark wet suits. I also needed to keep an aperture of at least f/8 to get rid of aberrations in the lens.  I shot at 1/500, f/8 and ISO400 for that lighting.

Then, set sun dipped below some clouds and epic light rays started. As that progressed, the lighting got more and more dramatic, but also darker and darker. The contrast between the light rays and the water/surfers got more and more. I decided that I need to preserve as much detail as possible in the light rays, since it's easier to get detail back in the shadows than highlights. At least for digital.

I shot at the same settings, since I was including the sky in the exposure more. The shadows and highlights both lost a bit of detail, but that's all I could do in the conditions. The surfers were moving too fast to use bracketing, maybe if I used a tripod and preset the framing it could work. In the future I might try that, but this method worked well enough.

For framing, I tried to get the sky in the exposure as much as possible. Next was obviously getting the surfers in there. This was kind of a hit and miss, since I did not know where they would go or the waves would take them. Basically, I tried to use looking space (put more room in the frame in the direction that the subject is facing or looking), but in the end it was just chance and bit of skill.

With the shot I got, the colors weren't really working for me. The sky was amazing, but water, no no. Didn't work for me. However, I loved it in b/w. For the rest of the editing, I lightened up the spot where the surfer was a bit. Then I raised the clarity a bit to get even more drama in, especially in the sky. That's about it though, mainly it was brightening up the water where the surfers were.

See you tomorrow!

Forest Light

My family and I went for a walk today in the Avatar Grove. It's an old growth section of forest near Port Renfrew. Apparently, it's home to Canada's Gnarliest Tree (which is up for debate still).

When we started walking, it was pouring rain and very cloudy. I doubted that there'd be any good pictures to be had in the wet and flat lighting. There's not many situations were that flat light is good for photos...

But luckily, the sun came out! It wall still "raining" since drops were still falling from the trees. Even better, I was at a point in the trail were there was a little stream right next to me. I started shooting right away, trying to get the light rays that were streaming through the trees.

However, with the bright sun and the dark forest there was a lot of contrast in the scene. I didn't shoot directly into the sun, but it was pretty close. That's the direction the light rays were, so that's the way I needed to generally shoot.

To try to capture the whole tonal range of the scene, I bracketed by +-1 EV. From the last couple times trying to blend exposures, doing more than that is really  hard to blend in Ps. Even with luminosity masks, it's difficult and I haven't mastered the whole process yet.

ButI figures doing the bracketing would give me a better chance at making an accurate image, so I went with it.

With the stream, I wanted a long exposure to get some good water blending going on. My base exposure was f/11 at ISO100 and 1.6s. I based this one getting a "correct" exposure. To double check this, I looked at my histogram for the darker and brighter exposure to make sure I was getting the exposure information I wanted. For the brighter one, I wanted most of the data in the middle and upper parts of the histogram. This would mean I was getting the shadows as the midtones, and thus getting more information about the darker parts of the scene. In the darker exposure, I wanted most of the info to me on the left or lower parts so that I was getting more information into the highlights. When I composited this all in Ps, I would squish all the information into the one photo, and so there would be information everywhere in the exposure.

First thing I did in Ps was make luminosity masks for the darker layer. My plan was to add the shadow details to the darker exposure. I selected the dark areas of the dark image, and then painted them in very slowly with the mid exposure. I used a soft brush at a 10% flow to really be soft about it.  However, there was too much roll over into the highlights, and weird halos were being made everywhere. To fix this, I selected the highlights and painted them back into the darker layer. This worked really well, and the tonal range of the scene came together! I'll probably do some videos about this process more, and explain it a bit better.

Next, made a levels layer that brightened up the shadows a bit, and then a green photo filter to get the richness of the forest back. Both of these I used luminosity masks to apply only to the midtones and shadows. The filter I applied a bit to the highlights, but not too much. This was about the extent of the whole photo editing. Like I said, I'll do a video or two about it when I get back to good internet. Uploading something is out of the question right now...haha

See you tomorrow!

Ferry Cam

For Christmas, I got a Lens Baby Spark. It's a specialty lens, designed to be incredibly soft and have weird focusing effects. It's a cheap lens, with cheap construction, but that's kind of the point of it. You have a manual move the front of the lens to focus, it even tilts and all that so you can do very interesting focus effects with it. It's really really soft on the sides, with a lot of vignetting. Not all pictures work really well with it, but some look amazing.

Today, my family went to Canada. We're staying on the west shore of Vancouver Island for the next couple days, hopefully seeing some awesome beaches and weather here. However, today was mostly just travel. The Spark is an awesome travel lens. Just set the camera to Av mode and about ISO800 and shoot away. There's no auto features on the lens, not even an adjustable aperture.

We ate in some Canadian equivalent of Olive Garden or something for lunch, and they had the coolest lamps. For pictures I mean... The shades had a really cool marble patten on them, with thick bands of black moving in waves around them. I had to use live view and hold the camera way up to get the shot I wanted. The shade was small, so I wanted to shoot strait on and get the bands as a 2D shape. All about form and texture on this one.

As I said, I shot in Av mode at ISO800. I think the Spark is set to f/8, and the shutter was 1/400 for this one. I could have shot at a lower ISO, but whatever.

Editing was simple. Convert to b/w, up the whites, lower the highlights. This brought more detail into the highlights, but also increased the contrast up. I also touched the clarity up just a little bit. Not much. That's all.

See you tomorrow!

The End is Near

Of the year I mean...not the world or anything. Seemed like a fitting title though, since this post is about burning things!

Christmas Eve was last night, and my family has a tradition of opening presents from the family that night, then doing Santa presents in the morning. Victor has been a close friend for some time now, and so of course he got quite a few presents under the tree too. One of which happened to be a bag of steel wool. My parents know we like to use it for pictures, and that we are constantly running out.

That bag turned out to be the present of the  night for us.

After presents, we went down to Maclin's and watched Ninja Turtles. Speaking of which, I think that one might come close to the sin count of the most recent transformers. The "everything wrong with _____" Youtube channel is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what they do with this movie. Let's just  say it isn't the best made movie ever...

As we were watching, Victor was hanging long strands of steel wool from Maclin's bed, and then lighting them on fire. If you've never done that, you really really need to. It's epic. In light of this awesome epicness, after the movie was over we went into the shop and started burning the rest of the bag into the wee hours of the morning.

So many different ideas were tried, but the one I liked the most was just taking simple pictures of the burning wool. We tried for quite a while to get the right pictures, but with a macro lens it was incredibly difficult.

I'll put it into perspective. Imagine you're looking through binoculars at a sparrow. That sparrow is flying at about 60mph and randomly changing directions. There's also a lightning storm so you eyes have to keep adjusting to keep track of the bird. On top of this, the focus on the binoculars is terrible, so you have to keep readjusting it to keep the bird sharp. AND the binoculars are as big as your face and you can't hold them up, so they are on a tripod that you control by moving your body.

That's was it was like. No wonder no pictures worth keeping were had. There are a few semi decent ones, but most were bleh. I had to control the camera by pinching the tripod handle between my arm and body, then hit the shutter with one hand and focus on the other. With the macro lens, the sparks in the wool travel really freaking fast when looking through the lens, so it's really hard to track.

After an hour or so of that nonsense, (which was still awesome to watch) we wised up a bit. Instead of making a big pile of wool, we flattened it out and made it as 2D as possible. This made focusing much easier, because I only had to focus once between the burning started! Everything about the camera as pre-set, exposure, framing, focus, etc. Everything got set up, then the burning started and I used a remote shutter.

This set up allowed two things. Firstly, it eliminated a lot of variables that could ruin the photo. If it didn't turn out, it was the sparks being in the wrong spot or something like that. Secondly, since all the photos of a burn session were framed the same, they could be composited in Ps!

I shot at f/22 (the sparks are really bright) ISO100, and 1s. This longer exposure gave the necessary trails to capture the sparks. As the metal heats and cools it changes colors, which you can capture in a longer exposure. Not too long, then it blurs together, but just enough and you can get some awesome effects.

In Ps, I took the most promising looking series, and composted them together with the lighten blend mode. This only let the bright areas of all the layers combined show through. In other words, in any particular spot on the photo, only one layer that is the brightest there shows through. Pretty great way to composite light trails. However, just doing that doesn't always look good, so I went back in a made some layer masks over over exposed parts or other such pieces that I didn't like.

Nothing done in Lr, this is pretty much right out of the camera. Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!

Too Busy Exploring

Victor and I went out to South Beach tonight for the sunset. There were a few clouds on the horizon, so I thought it might be an okay sunset. Usually, the best sunsets are with low cloud cover. The sun reflects up onto the clouds, and color goes evvverrryywherrreeeee.

Unfortunately, the sunset was one of those mediocre ones. Very yellow and the clouds obscured the sun too early for the good colors. The water didn't get very much color either, so it was kind of meh.

However, Victor and I were busy exploring the beach. The rocks down there are just amazing. The tide was really high, and with a slight onshore wind the waves were pretty good sized. There were tons of log bridges between different rock out cropping, and we quite enjoyed playing on those while the waves crashed underneath us.

When I actually did get around to shooting, the couple scenes I tried weren't all that great in the colors or lighting. With the sun down, the water was pretty flat, and the exposures had to be fairly long. Long exposures aren't bad for water though, I bracketed them starting at f/22, ISO100 and .8s. The other two were at 1/5s and 3.2s, I bracketed at + or -2 stops.

Editing was a little tricky, I used a combination or luminosity masks and layer masks to blend the exposures. The the sky, I first made a luminosity mask of the bright areas of the sky (this included the clouds) and then painted in the darker exposure. This replace the blown out sky with a darker, richer one. However, the blending wasn't too great. I went back and created a looser mask, and then painted that one in again over the first. This gave a softer blend. I think shooting at +-2EV was a little extreme, so blending the exposures was difficult. In the end, the sky doesn't look half bad, but it's not quite what I hoped.

Next came the water, I had my middle exposure combined with the darker sky so far. I added in the lighter exposure of the water with a black layer mask, then painted in (with a very soft brush) the areas I wanted the water to show up. This was mainly the rocks and around them. I did not paint out into the more open water, because this area was very over exposed and not very natural to blend with the sky. It took quite a few attempts to get the position right of the mask.

Next, I made two clipped adjustment masks for the sky. Clipping masks only affect the layer under them, which was the sky layer. I added more saturation, and darkened it a little bit. Nothing fancy.

I the set my black and white points using a threshold adjustment. This is a pretty simple concept, just ensuring there is a full range of contrast in the photo. I set the curves adjustment to luminosity, so that it wouldn't effect the colors.

However then I duplicated it and applied the color changes to the sky and some of the open water. Finally, I added a curves to lighten up the rocks a little bit.

In Lr, I added lens correction and sharpening. Nothing I haven't written about before.

See you tomorrow!

Water Gives you Wings

Drink water. Also, puddles are fun and I wish I could fly.

Living in the north west, it rains quite a bit. On San Juan, it's not as bad as some places like Seattle, but there's still quite a lot of moisture. This week has been one of the wettest in  a while. It rained pretty much the whole day, and so the puddles were, well...how should I phrase this..


SIZE: EPIC

Basically, they were a small pond size. Not that deep, but enough to really have some volume in them. More importantly, more than enough to really create some epic water splashes. Victor, Maclin and I went down to the secret puddle location, and made some photos happen.

I took the ol' p.bike, which I haven't ridden in almost a year now. It needs a good rebuild anyway, so I figured it'd be fine to give it a nice bath....

The lighting set up was pretty simple really, just two strobes on either side set to a high power. The strobes side/back lit the water, and really made it stand out. The background and foreground was left black, with only the reflection in the water. Not the most flattering light for portraits, but for action shots it's one of my favorites. Really brings out drama in things.

I shot at f/8 to get a decent depth of field since I wasn't quite sure where the picture would be taken. I was moving pretty fast on the bike, so the focus could fall in and out pretty quickly. In fact, the final photo isn't actually sharp, but it's really close.

I also shot at ISO500, to help the strobes out little bit. They were pretty far away from me, and with the higher aperture they didn't have a lot of power.

Victor was the one who pushed the shutter, so it was up to him to decide when. I've shot with him a lot, so he could time a photo like this pretty well.

Editing started by just doing basic contrast and exposure correction. The exposure needed to go up a little bit, actually a lot. The LCD really does not tell the truth...Next, I switched to b/w, and then I was done.

I also cropped things down a little bit, but to tighten it up. Not too much, but cropping can make a world of difference.

See you tomorrow!