New York Photography Blog

My plan is to go out tomorrow morning (pre-dawn) if I can wake up at that hour, and redo these shots with the 40D and more serious bracketing.  I’d like to see if I can get this done without too much bridge shaking.  I’ve never shot the bridge (also the Triborough) at sunrise, so that alone should be interesting, though if it’s enough to get me going in this cold weather, we’ll see.

I also have the IS lens this time, so that will at least take care of any camera shake that I had last time even though it was on the tripod.  Time to charge the batteries.  I’ve cleaned out the espresso maker and loaded it with grinds so all I have to do is turn the thing on, and that should be about as much charging as I need.  If I really had patience, I’d wait for the Roosevelt Island tram so that I could get it in three different positions, but that’s really asking a lot.

What I can say, is that that I’ve already seen how to make those hyper-real HDR shots (which right now I’m not very interested in), and that there’s enough of a learning curve (as there was with my infrared phase which lasted pretty much forever) to keep me going.  And frankly, some of my bridge moving issues would be solved with a camera (5d II / 7D) where I could use higher ISO and hence faster shutter speeds; not to mention DOF.  Anyway – let me set the blackberry alarm clock and see how early I can fall asleep.

This needs more fine-tuning, it’s just an HDR with two (I almost called them negatives) Raw files that have a 1/2 stop difference.  But I can tell you, it has promise, and many of the files I’m choosing to work with are not particularly dramatic in b&w.  In other words, it’s the pinks and blues of the sky that I like. But the next version won’t have so much red chroma or glow around the lights.   I also expect to “open up” parts of the bridge more and may tone down the saturation.  But this is an example of how close you can get with just a straight HDR import even with two files that aren’t properly bracketed.

Of course maybe I should only post finished stuff — but I think it’ll be interesting to see the next version(s).  The Queensboro bridge is particularly hard to shoot at night since it sways a lot and exposures tend to be in the 1/5th of a second range.  I don’t really want to go over 800 ASA if this is the type of thing that will be blown up…  on the other hand, if you use Image Fusion rather than  HDR you get rid of a lot of noise, even at 800.

Searching for images for J. I come across tons of stuff that I would like to try some of these new HDR and Exposure Fusion techniques on – though this isn’t one of them.

I really seem to have taken a detour down the HDR hole.  Especially the Photomatix tool which I absolutely do not fully understand yet.  This is one of those times that I think I should open the online manual.  I happened to have a number of night images from years back where I would do maybe one bracketed shot.  I still haven’t actually gone out with a full understanding of what I’m doing… and I think that’s part of the enticement.  Something new.

I could kick myself because when I first started shooting digital, I didn’t know the purpose of shooting raw, and I spent a few months doing some pretty tricky night stuff as jpgs.  They can be salvaged – but nothing like what I can get from a two raw shots (see below): one underexposed by a stop and a half, and the other a bit over exposed.  Besides the greater dynamic range (hence the name) – when you do Image Fusing you greatly cut down on the noise.  But even if you weren’t doing HDR, the tonemapping feature gives an immense amount of control over the Tonal Mapping (yeah, that’s why they call it tonal mapping).

But there’s another tab, Tone Compressor, which I don’t understand at all.  I understand what it does, but the preview in Tone Compressor doesn’t make sense to me (yet).  Ah – learning again.  I love it.  Oh – and just to repeat — the Photomatix Lightroom plugin is excellent – well integrated with Lightroom.

Began as an infrared shot, and then processed with the tonemapping tool in Photomatix.

Two images used.  1600 ASA.  Both with same EV (so this is really a faux sort of HDR) but with the Image Fusion and  ToneMapping tool in PhotoMatix (I keep wanting to call it PhotoMatrix). But I was able to pull very specific areas from the RAW 40D file.  I never saw those windows with their mosaic-like prints on them when looking at the image in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Can’t wait for the weather to warm up a bit so that I can do more night shots.  In other words, if I knew ahead of time that this was going to be an HDR type shot I would have bracketed it.  And frankly, these shots look better in color than b&w.

I was answering questions for an interview this morning, and remembered a phase I went through when I was 16, where I would take negatives and while they were on a lightbox, I would scratch lines in them with a needle, or sometimes just punch holes in them before printing.  In other words, I’m still the same guy – but the tools have become more sophisticated.

Last weekend, I annoyed the family (as usual) playing around with HDR.  I didn’t have a tripod with me, and the shots that follow were hand-held and auto-bracketed (AEB) with one stop over and one under.  Most of the light was from the window on the right.

Now, on top of being hand-held, what I did was ask the unwilling participants to pretend that this was a hundred years ago, and to hold their breath while I took the three shots.  The three images were then put into PhotoMatix with the Exposure Fusion option and alignment by Matching Feature.  After that they went through Tone-mapping corrections.

As you can see, this method did an incredible job of aligning the three images.  My dad must have been moving his tongue (in the second shot there’s that glint of saliva) – and that’s something that can be fixed in post processing.

These shots (more to come) were simply imported into lightroom and no adjustments were made (other than the crop of the first shot), though I can see a few things that could be easily corrected.  But the point of it all – was that I ended up with images with incredible detail and no noise (shot at 800 ASA) and hand-held.  That was pretty astounding.

Apologies to the family for being such a pain, but the results were worth it.  (Dad, by the way, is 82, and frankly still the easiest subject to photograph).

I also have tons of tripod night shots where I’d do bracketing that have been just sitting in the catalog for a long time because of dynamic range issues.  So there’s a lot for me to experiment with.

This is a shot from Halloween in Union Square – 2004 – that I just had all sorts of problems with in terms of dynamic range, and noise.  I just processed this by making three virtual files in Lightroom, one under, one normal and one over (from the same raw file) and then ran through image fusion and image mapping in PhotoMatix Pro (which I just bought for $99).

No adjustments after that in Lightroom, though I can see a few things that I would change.  The point being that it’s quite plausible to work from one raw file with their tonemapping process and achieve better results than I was ever able to get through photoshop.  It gives you control over things like specular highlights – smoothing them out, or sharpening them as needed, and similar options for detail in the darker areas.  I am using the Lightroom plugin, which is included with the Pro version.

You select your files and use File/Plugin Extras and export to Photomatix.  From there you have two basic ways to go, HDR or Image Fusion.  You’ll have to read through their documentation which is very good to see the differences, but so far Image Fusion has worked well for me, especially with shots where there is movement.  I have a bunch of shots that I wasn’t able to get acceptable results from that I’m going to try this method on.

HDR Church (53rd street) pre-dawn.

I became interested in HDR a few weeks ago when I used it for a client project. Yesterday, before dawn, I set out to 57th street (by cab) with tripod, and camera set to AEB (auto bracketing) in steps of 1 stop, and wandered around midtown until it started to snow and I was getting snow on the lens. I did quite a few that morning, and am just starting to go through them now. It is a very intriguing technique, and one of the few times where the colors are pleasing to me and the shots look better in color than b&w. At least at this early stage.

There is another program that Brent recommended for HDR (http://www.hdrsoft.com/) that I’m going to download to try. The one thing that doesn’t work well with Photoshop HDR are things like shooting directly into headlights, even if they’re still I get a strange chroma mismatch when Photoshop merges the three images. But I returned with a lot to play with. This is with the 40d and the 30mm sigma, 800 ASA, f5.6, middle shot at 4 seconds.

There was no reason to shoot at asa 800 other than that I was half asleep, and didn’t check the asa settings. Being able to use auto bracketing, which I never used before, was a nice touch and one the reasons I’m drawn to the slr camera type – there’s always some feature that I never touched that comes in handy down the line. One other note: there is not a touch of noise in the hdr merged shot and I have added a lot of contrast. In other words, the original shot picked up every bit of the darker areas to the point where I had to bring them down, and all but the specular highlights are caught as well. The histogram looks like you were shooting a gray card. This was shot at 6:29 a.m. – which is to say just before dawn.

P.S. If you go to leave a comment, the title is going to be Tango something or other and I don’t know why.  So just pretend it’s the right title and go ahead.

I just added a new section to the store – ROMANCE and added this shot (infrared film with modified infrared flash).  I had originally thought I could do it in time for Valentine’s Day but frankly I don’t think I could get prints out in time for Valentine’s Day – at least not this year.  Yes, I continue to have about all the work I can handle right now.  But maybe someone will like it for an anniversary gift or just as a gift for any old reason. The ROMANCE CATEGORY.

At any rate, it is certainly rare in terms of how it was done – i.e. using a flash that was modified to only emit infrared light, with HIE film (which I don’t think is made any longer).

And speaking of selling stuff — one thing that’s been on my mind is that I should of course have a newsletter like everyone else.  I’ve found that not everyone uses or understands RSS feeds and so it could be setup (if the user wants it) to drop an email off when new prints are added to the store; or when I have a sale or some wonderful thing has happened that people might like to know about.

On the other hand – I have the blog setup so that it tweets new blog posts and maybe that’s enough.