Sunset Bark and the first signs of Spring

Photo by Stuart Forsyth.

Sunset Bark and the first signs of Spring

I have been laid up in bed the last couple of days. A cough I ignored turned into a wonderfully fully fledged dose of pneumonia which left me horizontally disposed and clutching my box of tissues feeling rather woeful. The miracle of a good dose of broad spectrum antibiotics have me back to my old self and it was with a sense of happiness that I once more took up my camera and got outdoors to take some pictures.

The bitterly cold weather of the past months has turned for the better and spring is certainly on the way. All the plants know it and there are little green buds exploding on everything. Even the birds are more chipper and appear to be extra cheeky in their disposition as they frolic under the sprinklers.

My favourite Acacia has a light tufting of new green growth and I was admiring my beautiful garden when I noticed how the sunlight caught its rough bark. I nabbed my camera, metered my midtones off the sky and then got really close to snap this one.

I do enjoy spring!

To Bee or not to Bee

Photo by Stuart Forsyth.

To Bee or not to Bee

I spent most of Saturday fixing up parts of the house for sale; lots of sanding and painting. During a break I was relaxing outside in the glorious sunshine when this really large bumble bee came ambling along and attacked our lavender with a vigour and enthusiasm that only a bee can have.

Thankfully my camera wasn’t too far out of reach and I was really surprised how difficult it is to capture a busy and surprising industrious bumble bee. I had to camp down in the lavender while I snapped away which left it a little flattened – something my wife will probably not appreciate when she returns from the coast tomorrow – I’ll have to buy her an extra big bunch of flowers.

Nikon D80, standard 18mm – 135mm Nikkor lens.
More pictures of Mr. Yellow and Black over at Flickr.

Sunset Stroll in the Park

I’d bought a remote cord for my Nikon D80 earlier in the day and I was eager to try it out on some longer exposures.  I headed out at sunset with a friend of mine to Emmerentia Park nearby; he accompanied my for an evening walk and as backup – walking around a Johannesburg park at sunset with R20,000+ worth of camera equipment is plain asking for trouble; Haydn is built like a tank and packs a 9mm so no worries there.  Thankfully apart from a couple of curious stares the stroll progressed without incident.

The remote cord has made a huge difference to these longer exposed shots.  Before I was relying on the camera’s self timer or just shooting manually – the problem is that even the slightest movement caused a tiny bit of camera shake and blurred the images.  Now, with the combination of my sturdy Manfrotto tripod and remote cord this no longer happens and the picture is crisp and sharp throughout.

I really got some lovely sunset pictures, most of these were metered off the horizon with +1 stop added via the shutter speed.  The aperture was set at f/22 and the ISO setting at 100.  The exif data for each pic is available on the picture page over at Flickr.

A tranquil shot of the dam, a few people were busy relaxing on the observation deck overlooking the water and a few very overfed ducks were bobbing nearby

Every time I see this tree it reminds me of a womping willow come down to drink at the watering hole; to much of my youth was spent playing D&D!

I loved how the sun just peeked through the branches and diffused into beautiful rays of sunlight.

Across the lake a boathouse and in the distance the spire of the Greenside mosque.  The colours were fantastic and like all of these shots you really only appreciate them taken at a larger size.

When I got home I ran a few of my bracketed exposures through photomatix and came up with the following HDR sunset pictures.

Winter Park

Winter Park

I spent some time in the park the other evening. I had spent a very frustrating day fighting with computers on a systems integration project and a really terrible accounting system called syspro. The nature of the work and the tedium of a system that returns inconsistent results left me in a foul mood and I had a veritable thunder cloud above my head by the time I got home.

I decided to break the mood by doing something I love so I grabbed my camera and tripod and headed out to the park in an attempt to shoot some nice photos of the winter trees at sunset. The wind was freezing and ate through the warmest and fleeciest layers of my jacket (it apparently snowed nearby later that night) however I was really pleased with how the pictures turned out.

There is nothing like doing something you love to change your mood and feelings, I sometimes wish that I had taken up the camera sooner in my life but photography as a hobby brings me much contentment and joy; I returned home decidedly bluer but with a huge smile on my face.

I captured this last one just before I left.

Spikes all round

Photo by Stuart Forsyth.

Spikes all round

I was able to get up close and personal with a mantid yesterday afternoon. I have it on good authority that this particular mantid was female (six segments to the abdomen as opposed to 8 for the male) and that the grey bits on her abdomen are egg masses, foamy goey stuff full of eggs that she sticks to branches. In time all the eggs in the mass will hatch into lots of baby nymphs.

She wasn’t overly charmed at having me take her picture and in the picture below where I was directly overhead she fixed me with her beady little eyes and I felt sure that if I was a little smaller I would have ended up as a nutritious snack; everyone knows that mating and pregnant female mantids are very hungry and best avoided.

I will spend a little time examining this rose bush for the egg masses and with a little luck will find some babies.

In the photo above, I really liked the contrast between the little spikes on the mantid’s front legs and the large thorns of the rose bush.

Bronze Trunks

Photo by Stuart Forsyth.

Bronze Trunks

I am not usually a fan of pushing the envelope with saturation and colour in HDR but I admit that at times is works out nicely, very nicely indeed. This is a 3 exposure HDR mixed in photomatix (detail view).

I increased the colour saturation and did a little tonal tweaking in lightroom. I was very pleased with the effect of the blue window contrasting with the pale green of the trunk.

Lightroom is light years ahead

 As anyone which a love of digital photography knows, your choice of photo management software is an important one.  Mac users have been spoiled to date with tools like Apeture; windows users have had to settle for bare-bones choices like Picasa or ACDSee.  Adobe recently released Lightroom and I have been trying it out for a while now; my verdict – I’m blown away.

Lightroom has all the usual folder and tag based photo management of Apeture but it’s develop module is where the software really shines.  With lightroom you can do away with having to have Photoshop for the large majority of the corrections and adjustments you need to make to your digital photos.  As with Apeture the adjustments you make are non-destructive and you can snapshot versions and create virtual copies to edit independently. 

The Lightroom tonal curves adjustment is way superior for a beginner and mostly prevents you doing the kind of stupid things to curves that you can in Photoshop; you know what I mean – move the little curve node a touch to the left and you’re left with a photograph to make your eyes bleed.

One of the most underlooked items in the Lightroom tone curve and hue/saturation/luminosity area is the ‘adjust the curves by clicking in the photo option’.  to be fair I didn’t even know it existed until quite recently.  It is the kind of tool that should be writ in huge bold letters on the startup splash screen of the program.  In the top left corner of the tone curve area you will see a tiny little circle, click it and move your cursor into the picture.  clicking specific areas of the picture and dragging up or down applies the adjustment. 

In my first example below I clicked the little circle which turns into a little circle with arrows above and below.   Now I click in the picture at the location of the first red arrow.  You’ll notice that the area of the photograph I am interested in adjusting falls into the highlights area (second red arrow) and that any adjustments I make will affect the highlights area as denoted by the shaded area around the dot on the line.

 

In my second example I wanted to increase the saturation of the yellowish wall to give it that fresh just been painted look.  Now I could have gone to the saturation area and just increased the yellow alone but the wall is a combination of yellow and orange and that at first glance may not be immediately apparent.  By using the ‘adjust the curves by clicking in the photo option’ you move into the photo and to the area denoted by the red arrow and clicking and dragging upwards will then auto increment the yellow and the orange saturation sliders up by their relative amounts.

There are so many more features in Lightroom that it takes some time to become familiar with them, or in my case even know that they exist.  I may in future posts go through some of them with you but it was this little click and drag feature; so seemingly obscure and unbelievably potent at the same time that I wished to share with you today.

Lightroom is one very well thought out and functional bit of software heaven, if the ease of adjustments are not worth the price for this incredible piece of software then I don’t know what it.

More information on Lightroom is available at the Adobe website.

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Lightroom, Apeture, Photography, Photos, Software

My house as an HDR project

I was out this evening with my camera and tripod just having fun.  I find it incredibly relaxing to come up with something interesting to shoot without having to travel to Tibet or some other exotic faraway in the process.

One of the photos that came out quite nicely was one taken of my house.  The sun was just setting so there was a nice range between the lights and the darks; the warm light coming from inside added to the atmosphere.

Below are the 3 exposures:

 

The first is the natural picture; 18mm f/3.5 0.8sec ISO 400.  On close up it is a lovely picture but it is missing that little something special.  The second two pictures are the underexposure and the overexposure (2ev apart).

The images were mixed with photomatix and the following are two options I could have chosen as a final tone-mapped result. 

This first option is lovely but is bordering a little on what I think of as bad HDR.  There is a a touch of artificiality in the colours and the light aura around the tree is not good form.  However for the purposes of illustration it serves quite nicely and is great for pushing the bounds of artistic expression; anything more than this would just be plain bad HDR.  Flickr is chock full of this bad HDR.

The next image is far better, also taken done in photomatix but it gives a far more realistic impression of what I saw and in my humble opinion, realism is what we’re after.  It manages to convey a feeling of warmth coming from the lit interior of the house and show that it is early evening;  The colours are not cartoony and there are no awful auras; the colours remain vibrant and very close to what my eyes saw at the time.

But each to his or her own so I’ll leave you to decide which you like best.

ps. if you’re wondering about the long brown stripe the length of the garden, we ran new water mains to the house; killed my poor lawn.