Sporadic updates

Hi everyone (ok, all 2 people who read this),

Sorry there haven't been many posts lately - I've been sick and crazy-busy, so I haven't had much creative juice left. As I'm recovering, I'm hoping to get back on track, and start posting non-picture-of-the-day things, too. Since I'll be moving in a month, I hope to have some new craft projects underway for the new apartment! Until then, however, updates may be more sporadic.

-Val

Days 22-28: Exploring close-up photography

I've been sick for awhile, so my pictures of the day for the past week haven't been taken one-a-day. Because of that, however, I've found myself being fascinated by close-up photography.

Monday 4/16 - Thread

Being sick, I didn't really feel up to running around outside in the cold rain, looking for inspiration. I tried to find some inspiration with some spools of colorful thread and my lightbox, but the only thing I discovered was that I really was in need of a macro lens. Unfortunately, a macro lens really isn't in my budget right now, but close-up filters were. When I felt well enough to go out and about for a little bit on Friday, I picked up a set.

Friday 4/20 - Oliver's eye

I wanted to try out my new close-up filters, so I decided to use Oliver as a semi-willing subject. Getting him to stay still while I stuck a camera in his face was rather difficult.

Fortunately, I was feeling well enough (and the weather was cooperating enough) to go outside on Saturday and start taking pictures of spring using the new filters.

Saturday 4/21 - WPI in the spring

I loved the fiery red color against the clear blue sky.


I liked the way the flowers and buds on the in-focus branch mirrored the positions of the out-of-focus windows behind them, and the lighting made the flowers look dreamy.


I liked the way the light shone through the petals - though I wish I hadn't cut off part of the bottom petals.


This crocus reminds me of a painting, with the focus on the stamen(?) and the lens blur softening the rest of it.


This is my obligatory "greeting card" picture.

Every picture was taken hand-held. I think I might need to look into getting a low-to-the-ground tripod, a tarp (so I don't get as filthy as I did, crawling around on the not-quite-dry ground), and a whole lot more time and patience. Luckily, spring has just barely sprung, so there are a lot more warm, sunny, flowery days coming!

Days 19, 20 and 21: Farm Pond Park

I had the bad luck on Friday the 13th to be too busy/sick to go running around taking pictures, and on Sunday, it was raining entirely too hard to risk going outside with my K100D (which was a shame, I was planning on taking some pictures of the Boston skyline), so those 3 pics of the day are from Saturday. Hey, at least I did all the post-processing on the one I'm counting for Sunday on Sunday...

Neck and neck - 4/13/07

Ah, the joys of the 70-210mm zoom lens. On Farm Pond in Framingham, MA, there was a plethora of swans, lazily swimming around. They weren't spooked at all by Kevin or me; they must be used to people coming around. Every so often, for no apparent reason, they'd all just take off run-flying across the pond and settle down about 100 yards away. I managed to snap this picture while one of these mass migrations was occurring, panning as I took the picture.

Across the field - 4/14/07

Yes, this photo is boring. It was so darn cloudy on Saturday, but I noticed some neat patterns in the clouds. I knew, however, that just taking one photo of the scene wouldn't have captured all the cloud detail, so I:

• Auto-bracketed -2.0, 0.0 and +2.0 EV shots, trying to stay as still as possible
• Merged the 3 shots to HDR in Photoshop CS2
• Played around with the Photomatix tone-mapping plugin until I got something I liked
• Converted to an 8-bit image; using the Exposure and Gamma method, I bumped up the exposure because it was too dark
• Rotated the picture to level the horizon
  

Lo and behold, from the ashes, emerged the true picture of the day:



Across the field: Lomo - 4/15/07

The HDR version of the field was much more pleasing, but I wondered if I could make it even more interesting. Since the colors were already were leaning towards the yellowy, slightly faded tones of Lomo photography, I followed the DPS blog's Lomo tutorial pretty much to the letter, using the HDR photo as the base.

I'm still not sure which of the post-processing effects for this picture I like better. The HDR rendering is more realistic, but the Lomo version is more eye-catching. I want to print it out and see how it looks.

Day 18: Remembering the end of an era

Averi: discarded and broken

Usually I don't find the picture of the day first thing in the morning, but as I was walking to work, I did a double-take of this fire alarm in Harvard Square, and pulled out my camera.

Averi was one of the best, if not the best, up and coming band in the Boston area. They'd played at WPI a few times, though my first time seeing them was at the Paradise in early 2005.

They headlined a Saturday night show at the Avalon in November of 2005, a big event for a local act. Shortly thereafter, however, it was announced that Chad Perrone, lead singer/songwriter, was leaving the band. He was replaced a few short weeks thereafter.

Chad was the voice and soul of Averi. Even a year and a half later, I still can't bring myself to hear the new lead singer singing Chad's songs - songs he wrote, songs he connected with. From what I hear, Averi's still looking for bigger and better things, but it's just not the same. A piece of Averi is missing forever.

Day 17: OOB

Oliver's comin' out the box, yo!

I tried a new technique I'd read about on the DPS Forums - Out of boundary photos. To make it vaguely picture-of-the-day-ish, I used the picture of Oliver from day 10.

I followed Serrator's excellent OOB Tutorial. Every step was clearly illustrated and described.

Why this picture wasn't a great choice for OOB

• In the original pic, Oliver's left ear was cut off at the top of the frame, so out of necessity, I needed to keep it within the frame of the OOB, which makes the OOB look unfinished.
  
• The whiskers... I will never use a subject with fine-grained details like that again. Masking around them was impossible because they were thin, tapered to fur-color at the end, and slightly blurred. To compensate, I had to:
  
  • Create a whisker shape with the pen tool and make a selection out of it
  • Position it so it looked like it was continuing where a whisker were on his face
  • Mask out the "whisker"
  • Resize and rotate the selection and repeat with all the bigger whiskers coming off his face
  • After all the whiskers I could handle were masked out, I painted on the layer underneath with the paintbrush, opacity set to 20%, to hide the fact that a lot of the "whiskers" I'd created were actually on his fur
• The picture was slightly blurred from camera shake, which made the contrast between Oliver's face and the very sharp "frame" even more pronounced.
  
• Between the fur, the blur, and my ineptitude at trying to trace freehand around the face with a mouse, the OOB portions ended up looking somewhat sloppy.
  
• My eye isn't quite good enough to adjust the "frame" correctly for the angle of the original subject.

Lessons learned for next time

• Use a picture with better focus/sharpness
• Use a picture with a more straightforward shape to mask out, or at least a picture with good edge contrast
• Do not use a picture with lots of fine-grained but important details to be masked out, unless I have lots of time or patience
  
• Train myself to recognize the proper frame shape and angle for a given subject
• Possibly drop-shadowing the OOB portion of the picture may be useful in hiding sloppy masking work

Look for me to revisit this on another no-inspiration day.

Day 16: The pros and cons of HDR

Spurred on from my HDR experiment from the previous day, I wanted to make another attempt to get a dramatic, highly detailed picture. However, I discovered that there are some times where the HDR rendering of a scene isn't necessarily better than a simply contrast-masked picture of the same scene, it's just different.

Bridging the Charles River - Watertown, MA

Contrast-masked

This photo was processed using the properly exposed photo and this contrast masking tutorial.

Pros:

• Deeper shadows
• Reflections in the water are sharper
• Waves in the river are sharper
• Sky looks more realistic

Cons:

• Bridge detail is lost
• Sun reflection is pretty flat
• Sun breaking through the clouds is lost

HDR

The HDR rendering of the photo was created using 13 (I think) different exposures, Photoshop CS2's "Merge to HDR" command, and and Photomatix tone mapping filter plugin.

Pros:

• Slightly dreamy effect
• Bridge gains detail
• Light reflection in the water has more color on the outside
• Sun is shown breaking through the clouds in places
• The color of the bridge is shown

Cons:

• Moving water is blurred
• Reflections are more blurred
• Instead of revealing detail, some detail was actually lost in the bright spots of the reflections
• Some sky detail is lost

Which one is a better picture? It all depends on taste, and the photo you were trying to achieve. I keep looking at both pictures side by side, and I can't even decide on my own. HDR is a great technique to expand your photo processing repetoire, but shouldn't be looked at as the only way to make a scene look great.

Day 15: HDR in the courtyard

Today's picture of the day isn't particularly well-composed or interesting, but I wanted to play with HDR.

Looking out from the Charles Hotel courtyard

I just wanted to get a picture of something with a huge amount of contrast so I could try out the Merge to HDR functionality that Photoshop CS2 has built in. I was further limited by the fact that I was using my point and shoot without a tripod, so I needed to have a flat surface where I could adjust the exposure compensation for every shot, but keep the camera as steady as I could.

I took 13(!) pictures with different exposure compensation values - 0, +/-0.3, +/-0.7, +/-1.0, +/-1.3, +/-1.7, and +/-2.0. The following image shows some of the bracketed pictures for comparison - click on it to view larger sizes in Flickr.


I know there's a lot of misuse of HDR out there - obvious halos, crappy tone mapping. I'm not characterizing all over-processing as bad though, because while some HDR photos don't look realistic, there's still something really neat about the more surreal photos. I'm looking forward to playing with this more in the future, though I won't make this into a primary technique. It's going to be really useful for photos where contrast masking just isn't enough to balance out the picture. I also can't wait to make some dramatic night pictures.