Basic Black

Good Morning!
We'll get to the topic of the day in a few minutes, but first, these other messages!

Im starting to enjoy the spring up here. There's a period of time where I don't: when it's brown and grey out, chilly and damp... but we're coming to the end of that and the world is starting to look green. Also colourful: the flowers are coming out too. I was scouting yesterday and saw a huge patch of trilliums already opened. There are some people coming up to shoot some pictures up here in about 10 days (the weekend of May 12th) so if anyone is interested in coming up for the day or tagging along, drop me a note.

Software Updates
There's all kinds of stuff going on in the photo software world right now. When Adobe released Lightroom 4, and then Photoshop CS6 (still pre-order as I write this, but supposed to deliver next week), all of the plug-in manufacturers had to scramble to catch up, to make sure their products were compatible.

Coincidentally (ya think?), HDRsoft released their updated version of Photomatix Pro 4.2. It's a free update for registered users of Pro (I think from version 3-up) and you can download it here. If you don't have Photomatix, you can go to their site and download a free trial before buying it. The bad news is, their free trial puts a watermark on the image so you can't really use it for anything until you buy it.

There are 3 commonly used programs for HDR generation/tone mapping: Photomatix, Nik HDR Efex Pro and Photoshop CSx (where "x" is "5" or "6"). I haven't seen CS6 in action yet, but I heard that Adobe has updated the already excellent HDR generating engine in CS5. Topaz Adjust 5 doesn't generate HDR's but it's right up there as a tone mapping utility!

Speaking of Adobe, they've released Adobe Camera Raw 6.7 which supports Process Version 2012 (Lightroom 4 users are tired of seeing the incompatibility warning when they try to open an image in Photoshop) and it also supports new cameras like the D4, the D800, the V1, the 5DMkIII. If you use Photoshop, all you have to do is open it, click Help→Updates and follow the bouncing ball.

The ongoing problems with Lightroom 4 haven't been resolved yet. Some users have no difficulty but some (and there's no clear correlation who: Mac or PC, high end or not...) still have issues with the software being slow. Sometimes it uses up TONS of resources. When generating previews, for instance, it uses up 100% of all four CPUs that I have in the system, plus up to 80% of my 8Gb of memory. And sometimes it doesn't. I hope they solve it soon.

Beginner's workshops and course material
Just an update on the workshops and books I'm working on. If I said I was halfway through it now, I'd probably be exaggerating. But the hard part is done: all the concepts are in place, it's just about getting words on digital paper.

The reason I'm mentioning it is: who's interested in having a preview of it when the time comes? The first thing that will be ready is the Instructor's Workbook, so if you're interested in teaching beginners to use DSLR's, you will be interested in this. Email me and I'll put your name on the list for a free copy of the workbook.

Business Cards
Do you have any idea how cheap business cards are these days? You can get 1000 full-colour business cards, printed on both sides and UV coated for about $20. I'm about to reorder some and at that price, I'll make more than one design.

I have a dealer account with BossLogo, so if anyone is interested in making up some cards, drop me a note and I'll fill you in on what's needed to make it happen.

Let's get on to some pictures, shall we?

I was at my favourite spot a couple of days ago: the Minden Wild Water Preserve. It wasn't a beautiful day, and the dam was blocked up (they insert 12" wooden ties to limit the water flow) so the white water was particularly low. Nevertheless, there were a couple of kayakers on the water.

Got him looking right at me! Notice the cold weather gear: especially the glove/grips on the paddle.

These guys were just working on their techniques. As I said, the water level was really low which made it difficult to navigate in spots.

White water Quacker. Then there was this guy. He fought the current to swim across just above where I shot the other Kayakers (see the play on words? Huh? I posted this picure on the NAPP site and someone said it "quacked him up"!). Too bad I couldn't get more white water in the shot. I looked away to adjust the camera settings for a second, and he was gone!

Multiple Exposure. Remember I mentioned Photomatix 4.2? After I installed it, I wanted to test it in Lightroom 4 so I clicked on 5 images and ran it with ghosting turned OFF. I don't know if anyone's thought about using Photomatix this way: these were all equally exposed images, not bracketed. Had he been moving across the scene it also would have been interesting. Also if I had used a tripod. I'll try this again another day, but I kind of like this image!

Basic Black

Dogwood Leaves. I brought my black cloth with me and set up this shot in the woods at the Preserve. There was too much sunlight on both the leaves and the background, so I shaded them by standing between the sun and the leaves.

Baby Trillium. This is the pièce de résistance. Again it was shot with the black background and shaded. I enhanced the textures but the colours were just as you see them, including the highly saturated green leaves!

Both of these black pictures were shot with my Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR lens. I don't have a macro lens (really should get one!). I had to do some work to get rid of stuff in the background, including making it really really black. Photoshop and Lightroom were really helpful, especially the black slider in the new Lightroom 4. And I added a black vignette.

By the way, as a technique trick: when trying to get an even, solid black background, sometimes you have to clone out stuff or use the content-aware spot healing brush. They aren't perfect. So what I do is to add a levels adjustment layer, and crank the right slider way over to the left to see anything that isn't black, then I can paint or clone it out. I delete the adjustment layer before saving the image.

More to come...

— 30 —

I Love Thunderstorms!

I said that before. About a month ago. At the time I said I remembered having a multiple-lightning-hit phot from years ago and that I'd post it here when I find it. I will: I just haven't found it yet.

But last night, there was a thunderstorm. There was a lot of lightning going on, but not right overhead. It was a really active storm, but the lightning was cloud-to-cloud, not cloud-to-ground. The storm centre had passed and it wasn't raining that hard. OK, I grabbed the camera, the tripod, an umbrella and headed out into the back yard.

Without further ado, here's what I got:

This is a 5-shot multiple exposure taken over the course of about 5 minutes. Any time the shutter was open for more than 15 seconds, I had to wait the same length of time for the noise-reduction process to complete. Frustrating, because I wanted to press the button again!

If you want to try this at home, here's what to do. This is for a nighttime shoot: all the numbers go out the window if you're shooting during the day. I think it's do-able, but you'll have to experiment to avoid light polluting your images.

The setup

• You need a tripod. Ideally you should also have a shutter release cable (mine was in the house, but I wasn't going to leave the camera out in the rain without an umbrella to go get it!).
• Find a spot where your camera isn't going to get rained on or take a chance and use an umbrella.
• Use a relatively wide angle lens. You don't know where the lightning is going to be and it's good to include something other than sky in the shot. Find a way to focus on infinity then switch to manual focus. Don't forget to turn off the VR if you have it, when you're on a tripod. I forgot.
• Set the ISO relatively low. I happened to use the minimum (ISO = 100) but that's not necessary. I also opened the lens all the way (f/3.5 in this case) but if I were doing it again, I'd use f/8 and an ISO around 250.
• Set the shutter to "M" and use the 'bulb' setting so it stays open as long as you hold down the shutter.

Shooting the pictures

OK. What we're shooting for (pardon the pun) is a single frame with a bunch of lightning bolts in it, or at least one spectacular one. Since my session was a passing storm and there were no really good cloud-to-ground bursts, what I was planning to do was to shoot several frames and then sandwich them together. That only works if you take care not to move the camera between shots.

My typical exposure time was in the 15-30 second range. I was trying to stay under 15 seconds as I mentioned above, but generally that didn't work. Since there was about 5 seconds between lightning events, I waited for one, then pressed the shutter release a few seconds later and held it down until there was some activity. Not just one hit, several, if I could get them. I seldom actually saw the lightning bolt itself, just the flash in the sky, but the sensor picked it up!

Shoot, hold for some events, release, wait for the NR process (this may be a Nikon thing. I don't know about other brands). If I didn't think there was anything going on, i tried to beat the 15 seconds or I switched the camera off and back on again to defeat the NR delay and take another shot.

I was out for about 15 or 20 minutes, until the storm had moved off to the east, out of sight. Inside, upload the images to the computer, check them out and select good frames in Lightroom.

Sidebar: since there's a thunderstorm going on, you did shut down your computers, didn't you? I actually didn't, but mine are plugged into a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) with superb surge protection. Won't help if you get a direct lightning hit, but it's pretty good otherwise. Get one. They're inexpensive. They're heavy, though — all battery — so get one at the local computer store instead of trying to ship it from somewhere else.

Post Processing

If you're using Lightroom, you can select the images of interest, right-click, choose "Edit in Photoshop" and select "open as layers". Or you can do it manually, your choice. Now unless you do something, the only layer that will be visible will be the top one, but it's a simple task to select a blending mode that works. For me, that was "Lighten". I went through all the layers and set them to this mode which made all the lightning bolts visible!

Occasionally that didn't work, so I turned off a couple of layers, or played with them by adding a layer mask and painting on it. My main concern was that the clouds had moved between shots and I wanted to see the better formations. This took a bunch of fiddling. I discovered that using a soft brush with low opacity made things blend better.

Night shots are blue. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I didn't think it conveyed the "heat" of a thunderstorm. After saving the image as a multi-layer .psd file, I flattened it, then converted it to greyscale (black and white). Just for fun, I ticked off the "tint" box and lo and behold, up came this rich golden orange colour. Save it, back to Lightroom to crop and tweak some exposure values, and we're done.

If most of what I just wrote is Greek to you, then you should join NAPP and learn a bit of Photoshop. Most of what I did would be considered "basic". If you have a good lightning bolt shot in your own portfolio, I'd love to see it, because
I Love Thunderstorms!