Aug 162012
Aug 162012
This began as a single shot of broken blue china that was on the sidewalk. I then used that single image to build up this abstraction. As usual I used NIK, Photomatix and Photoshop software. Camera: Canon EOS t4i with Sigma 30 mm f1.4.
Aug 152012
Even has a hint of the river Hades… for mythology freaks. I was standing on the stoop, up a step or two, after finding the three fallen leaves… and had a feeling that someone interesting would walk by… I recognized the idea of duplicating the three (two legs and the cane) immediately and just pre-focused and waited. Not sure that anyone would like this for decoration – but I like it a lot.
Aug 142012
Aug 142012
with reflection of sun from opposing window…
Aug 142012
Aug 142012
Gas Spill
Aug 142012
You might find this interesting. I basically turned off all the lights except one last night (in the house) and with the f1.4 Sigma lens shot at 26,000 ASA. I’ll be honest with you: I’m not actually sure what this thing goes up to. I set it at high, turned off Highlight Priority – and put it in AV mode and the most I could squeeze out of it was 26,000 (as if that’s not enough).
My normal shooting speed, going back to the days of film, was / is 400 ASA. So let’s see how many stops I’ve added: 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 12800, 25,600. That’s an extra 6 stops! (Yeah, that needs an exclamation point).
Now you probably want to know if it’s usable at that speed. Sure it is. In the examples below, the first shot straight from the camera, though I had High ISO Noise Reduction set to Standard. There are five levels there… from turned off to super-duper NR. That’s something to fool with.
Anyway – as far as my workflow goes: I took the RAW file into Lightroom (4.x) and using NIK Dfine I did my best to get rid of noise while still holding on to sharpness. I would say that you can get somewhere that resembles 400 film pushed to 1600. It’s not the same, and I can’t say that it’s better or worse. Just different.
Then I went into NIK Color Effex and later Silver Effex – and played around as if I were going to try and make an actual image with the processing.
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- 100 Percent (screen grab)
Aug 132012
One of the things – technique-wise – that I like about the swivel live view (once I saw how the Quick Focus worked) was that I could stand in the middle of a block, swing the LCD out, look down, and for the most part be about as close to invisible as I could get. In other words, it makes a very big difference whether the camera is going to your eye, or whether you’re looking down and seem to just be fiddling around with the playback. In this shot, I was already pre-focused and just waiting for the scene to develop.
Aug 122012
Two HDR shots stitched together (top and bottom). A neighbor sees me shooting the bench which is across the street from me and wonders why I’m wasting my time with it.
Hard to explain what’s going through my head. But I try to answer, that it just interests me. But I see it as an interesting subject for the photo stitching I’ve been doing combined with HDR.
Aug 122012
At some point, I’ll have a pretty good set of shots of the digging of this part of the Second Avenue Subway.
Aug 102012
Original source is a 4 x 5 black and white negative (large format camera). I added the color with NIK software and Photoshop.
