Gratuitous Cat Photo

Been quite busy lately and had little time to post, but I've been snapping photos whenever possible. Just to keep things going, here's a cat photo.

But not just any cat photo! This is little Penny, the loaf cat of Woodridge, IL, from a fun perspective. I reiterate my previous statement - there's no better subject than a static one, and few animals are so photogenic and static.

Penny in Perspective
ISO 200  20mm  f/2.0  1/25 sec

Where's Waldo quiz - can you find find the second subject in this image? Hint - he's holding a camera. Unfortunately this jpeg makes this less impressive, but I'll email you the raw file if you really care that much.

The Steel Man

Not the Man of Steel, mind you. Quite the opposite as this is the face of a veterans memorial statue from a very small park, which is basically the parking lot of a municipal storage building. You wouldn't even know it's there, but I drive by in on my way to work and I found it once when picking up some free mulch.

Without further ado, here's an photo I took this morning:

The Steel Man
ISO 200  20mm  f/2.2  1/500 sec

It was very overcast which helped some, as a bright day would have been all wrong and possibly forced me to use a smaller aperture. Still the bottom left required me to really burn back the overexposure. Next I cropped, changed to black and white and voila!

More interesting than the technical aspects are the emotive ones. The sculptor did fine work and all I can do is represent him or her well. The eyes especially. No point saying more - I hope you find it pleasing and just a little moving.

Once more into the breach!

That's about as absurd a title as I could come up with for "once again I got before 7:00 AM on a weekend and took some photos of flowers in my back yard." If I didn't amuse myself I'd probably cease to exist.

I really liked what I had the other day taking photos of back-lit daffodils, but I didn't take nearly as many as I wished. Here are a couple more takes on that idea. Exploring the theme, if you will.

ISO 200   20mm   f/5.6   1/1000 sec

ISO 200   20mm   f/2.5   1/2000 sec

 Both of these are the same flower and the sun is directly behind, which adds to the translucency. I particularly liked the triangles that are made when two petals overlap - it's not something you see unless there's a strong back light and it changes how you perceive the flower's shape.

Neither of these really did what I wanted, not that I could have clearly articulated what I was trying to do until I got back to the computer. Perhaps it was because I couldn't quite isolate the flower from the surroundings - other flowers, trees in the back, leaves. I have about 10 shots at different apertures and tried a bunch of crops, but I couldn't quite get this the way I wanted. Perhaps I should have found a way to block out everything else so that I could physically isolate the flower, but that seems like cheating. Surmountable problems? Sure - that's why I practice!

ISO 200   20mm   f/2.5   1/2000 sec

For those of you following along at home this is the same spot (maybe same flower) that I took the halo shot of a couple weeks ago. This time I made sure to obscure the sun completely behind the flower and I think it creates a neat image.

I did a fair amount of processing this photo, especially by desaturating the background colors and pumping up the yellow and orange. I tried this as black and white, and it's neat, but the color is just so nice that I like keeping it in this time. It's a give and take for aperture as I want enough to have detail on all of the flower, but I really want that bokeh in the background. Not perfect, but I like it.

I will officially put a few more items into my bag of tricks:
--Be mindful of aperture so that you get enough detail in a flower, but still have good isolation
--Pay attention to the background, especially things you can't crop out
--Sun behind a flower is really cool

Sunny day on the grass with Leah

This last weekend we spent Easter with Meg's parents, and wee Leah got to soak in the Minnesota rays on a sunny Sunday morning. Here are a few that turned out especially well (out of the 220 photos I took).

ISO 200   103mm   F/4.8   1/1250 sec

ISO 200   103mm   F/4.8   1/1600 sec

What I like about these two are how the green grass bokeh looks like a matte background in a portrait studio. There were a few others that had better smiles, but there was always a house or something that was distracting. With these two Leah's face is really nicely isolated and I think it draws you in.

Just for fun, here's an action shot of plastic Easter eggs mysteriously hovering. I'll let you guess how this came to pass, but here's a hint - look at the shutter speed :)

ISO 200   45mm   F/4.0   1/2000 sec

I found your trilling quite thrilling, my dear blackbird

The park by our house has a little marsh in it and it's already full of frogs and red-winged blackbirds - especially their chatter. Last week we went for a walk and I kicked myself for not bringing the camera, but I often don't make the same mistake twice. Fairly often.

Here's a shot of a trilling red-winged blackbird. Of course, you know what he's saying, "Baby, you know I'm the man for you! I'll be sweet and bring you breakfast in nest!"

Trilling red-winged blackbird. ISO 200, 200mm, f/5.6, 1/200 sec

Sillyness aside, he gave me a great pose and I'm really happy I caught him in his moment. I worked pretty hard to get a good background, as there are houses in several directions and mostly leafless trees. It's nothing remarkable beyond the subject, but at least it isn't distracting. I could be in the Horicon Marsh for all you could tell :)

As to the shot, this was fully zoomed at 400mm equivalent, which I needed as he flew away when I got closer. This is cropped to about 1/3 of the original size, but it would have been preferable to be closer and not have to max out the focal length as this lens has a bit of chromatic aberration at this limit (zoom way in and you can see it by his feet at tail where the white and black contrast). With that said, who cares! I love that I caught the moment and for the brilliance of his plumage on this spring evening.

Update - added a new crop based on some good advice by Sam

Crop #2

Exploring a subject - daffodils on a sunny morning

I've been trying to spend more time working with a single subject and to explore more of the possibilities; I have also been waiting for a sunny weekend morning to try taking some photos of the spring flowers in my yard. The result?  I jumped out of bed this morning, skipped the coffee for the trusty camera, and started snapping some shots.

A few of the early flowers are on the wane, but the daffodils are just hitting their stride. I'll begin here with a few of the shots I took just getting a feel for what I could produce, though I didn't have any real plan and just picked the flowers that seemed promising. None of these stand out as much, but it helped me see what I was going to get for light, depth of field, and whatnot.

I stumbled upon that last shot, as I had no intention to get the sun coming through between the tree and the deck, aside from that I was looking for flowers that were actually in the sun. Anyway, it seemed promising to get some macro shots with a really short DOF with the sun doing its magic. Here's the next round:

Cash money! That last one had something going for it. Now come inside, make coffee for me/wife and cereal for the kiddo...and during her nap I imported these into Lightroom. All I knew was that I wanted something more abstract - it doesn't need to look like light coming from behind a tree in my yard on  a spring morning - I just wanted something visually striking.

I cropped a little to start out, isolating the flower more, and then I took back a few highlights and dodged a bit in the center of the flower. Non-flower detail was mostly gone, and more so after desaturating everything but the yellow/orange. I like how the flower is floating, but still I just see "yellow," and not something more compelling...

...until I converted to black and white. It never ceases to amaze me how much more you see when you remove the distraction of color. In this case I see the texture in the translucent petal, and I pick up more of a sense of a halo. I'm biased, but I think this is a stunning image.

Final image, daffodil with a halo

 I'm pleased, but there's got to be a lot more I can do with this subject and I won't get better by blogging. Stay tuned for the next installment.

Cows on a Foggy WI Morning

I really have the best commute - 15 minutes and every day I pass by corn fields, apple orchards, a huge pumpkin patch, two kinds of cows (including a bunch of calf houses), horses, and probably the laziest pair of ponies in the world. In the morning the light is especially nice, and often there is quite a bit of fog.

Needless to say I've stopped many times to take pictures. A few days ago was a cool, slightly foggy morning and the shaggy cows on the west side of the road were grazing fairly close to the fence, so I pulled over and pulled out the trusty 45-200mm zoom. Antics ensued (see image 2).

Cow facing a foggy wood

This was probably the best shot I took. Not because of any technical coup, but there's something foreboding about the woods and how the cow is facing them alone. Interestingly, it's quite far to the woods, but the zoom lens (at a full 400mm equivalent) really smashes the subject and the background together and changes the scene a great deal.

That was one tasty hobbit!
(credit: P. S. Mueller)

This one is much sillier, and there's something about her tongue that says it all. A video would be good, too, as she was really using that horn to full effect.

You lookin' at me?

One last image, and there's not much to say that you can't see. I wasn't very interesting to the cows, being as I'm not made of grass, but I didn't go completely unnoticed.

Hitchcock presents "The Cats"

The low angle of the sun on winter afternoons casts long shadows, and there's no better subject than one that stays still about 23.5 hours a day. I snapped a couple images of my cats because of their shadows and then had some fun in Lightroom with these high contrast black and white images.

Olympus PEN PL-1, ISO 1600, 45 mm, f/4.0, 1/10 sec

I liked the grainy look here and at 1/10 sec about as sharp as you could possibly get without a tripod, but it works. I was able to pull back just the slightest amount of Nola's face by dodging it a bit. Highlight recovery allowed the floor to not be overpoweringly bright, but I left it just a little overexposed as I like the glare contrasting the black of her body and shadow. I wish I could have gotten one with her looking less cute, as some angry ears would heighten the tension.

Olympus PEN PL-1, ISO 320, 56 mm, f/4.1, 1/125 sec

Maya lurking from above. I managed to pull this off with a baby in my hands, including a lens change, so I'm pretty happy that I got anything! The crop lost a little of the sense of her being above (bird like...), but I really love the sharp lines and the soft shadows. Again, I'd have loved a more menacing expression, but they are just too well fed.

Dodge and Burn

It's astounding that dodge and burn didn't originate as first person shooter lingo for strafing with a flamethrower, much less something coined with the advent digital image editing. The truth - it's as old as photo development. In the darkroom, burning is the process of letting something get more light and thus become darker, and dodging blocks light and leaves it lighter. Simple. Logical. Powerful.

In Lightroom this is a piece of cake, and here's an example. This was an excellent photo, but Leah's head was directly under an overhead light leaving her overexposed, while I was shielded from the light and rather shaded.

I was able burn her head in (sounds terrible) and get back some of the highlights, then dodge some on my head and shoulder to get a little detail. I actually like shadows as they are away from the action, but this let me recover a great image.

For perspective, I was just reading about people who looked at negatives from some of Ansel Adam's greatest photos and found that they were relatively unimpressive if you made a straight print. What this means is that his amazing images were to a significant extent creations made in the darkroom, and dodging and burning were the techniques he used to brighten and darken parts of the landscape to create something greater than what was directly captured on film. Decades later and nothing has changed.

Lightroom

Yesterday I downloaded a 30-day trial copy of Adobe Lightroom 3. I jumped right in and started editing images and I was astounded to find that some complex tasks are trivial in Lightroom. I'm glad I started with Gimp, as it feels more hands-on and it's probably given me a better understanding of things like curves and layers, but there's really no comparison and I don't see any reason to go back (other than $$$ if I buy it for reals).

Notably, I like that Lr3 is both a library tool and an editing tool. Adding keywords and bulk adjusting photos makes sense, especially if I'm going to be taking a lot more photos in the years to come.

Here's a fun tool I played with - spot removal. This was a pic of Maya looking down at us from the balcony, but she had some serious eye goop going on. Well, that's not a problem! Sport removal works by selecting a small area and the letting you copy a different part of the image to that area. I would have thought that this would look lousy on anything other than a regular surface, but I used it on a border of fur and skin and had no problems. I used the spot removal tool at the same time I edited white balance and exposure, and here's the result (look at the left eye):

Original processed JPEG (from camera)

Processed w/Lightroom and using the spot removal tool

Exercise 3 - Applying a Process

My daughter Leah came home from the hospital on 8/14, and what better moment/subject for a portrait? This photo is her lying on the bed sound asleep and it's something I want to remember forever, so I'm motivated to make sometime worth hanging on the wall. There were several similar images, but I picked this out out because the focus was right on her eyes, it is well-framed, and the DOF seems just right (at larger apertures her hand is out of focus). Actually, the JPEG from my camera looks great already, but I want to see if I can make something stunning.

Photo data:
--Olympus PEN E-PL1 w/Panasonic 200mm pancake lens
--F/2.8, 1/15.0 sec, ISO 1600, auto WB, no flash
--Light from window behind camera with southern exposure, mid afternoon sun

Initial image from as JPEG

Just glancing at this I have a few concerns that I'll want to see if I can fix in processing
--It's a bit grainy from the ISO
--The shadows on the left side make this look like pin-hole photo
--Very little color


The Process (i.e. my plan)
(1)  Crop and correct orientation
(2)  Exposure
(3)  White balance
(4)  Input/Capture sharpen
(5)  Denoise
(6)  Vibrance and saturation
(7)  Switch to RGB
(8)  Dodge and burn
(9)  Fix distortion
(10) Output sharpen
(11) Output as JPEG

Well, not all of these applied - the crop was pretty good, I didn't input sharpen, and dodging and burning in Gimp is non-trivial for an otherwise good picture. Still, I followed this pretty closely and here's what came out:

A keeper

Exercise 2 - Purple Flower

I bit off a bunch of things with this photo. It was taken with a 20mm lens at ISO 100 and F1.7 in late afternoon light. I used auto-WB, which seems to have worked okay, and I was delighted with the image stabilization allowing me to shoot at 1/15-sec shutter speed w/o a tripod.

This is a cropped view of the entire image, perhaps showing a fifth of the total photo. Big win on the narrow depth of field and the quality of the image - this is pretty much what I was trying to do (woot!)

In processing I did the following:

• Adjusted the levels to better fit the histogram (nothing between 205 and 255, so just a little underexposed)
• Made an s-curve with the value, but didn't adjust the individual colors. The colors really popped out, but it seemed just a little cool overall
• I tried messing with individual colors to fix any white balance problem, but nothing really improved things. They were just, well, different
• Used the Warp Sharpen tool (see below of for more)
• Brightened a little more

Without further ado, here are the results:

The RAW image (cropped from original file)

The Olympus JPEG (slightly different crop)

Ta-da! Here's what I did in the digital darkroom.

Here's the full photo, post processing

As I mentioned above, Warp Sharpen is a very cool plug-in. The one downside was that it made some of the fuzziness on the flower stalks seem polygonal, but the petals themselves really benefited. Here are before and after photos that lets you see the effect:

Before

After

The verdict? Mixed. I brightened this up a little at the end (post sharpening), but it's not quite there yet. The photo also lost a little of it's impact when I cropped it, as before it had a neat floating feeling. I'll mess around some more, but that's enough for this post.

Exercise 1.1

I took another pass at fixing this image. This time I did the following in GIMP:
 (1) Fixed white balance using curves
 (2) Used the value curve and pulled the right point to the left a bit
 (3) Increased color saturation
 (4) Adjusted levels to better match the histogram
 (5) Used the Warp sharpening plug-in script (default values)

Here's the result. I think it's much better (and better than the Olympus JPEG!), but I've definitely lost contrast on between the dark fur and the shadows of the table. Gotta figure out how to bring that back.

Pretty good!

Exercise 1

I took a deliberately bad picture of the mighty Nola cat in the 6:00 AM light. I had the white tile to let me color balance, so this was an attempt to see how I could do using GIMP, benchmarked by the Olympus automatic processing.

I used a technique for removing a color cast, where I find three parts of the image that are white (paw, floor, shadow on floor) that have different amounts of light. White should be equal red, green and blue, so I raised the blue and lowered the red to match the green on each spot using a curve.

Here's the original RAW file (as JPEG but with no cleanup)

 My fix (using GIMP, normalizing RGB on three points)...

Olympus wins this round. I think it cheated, but I can learn from cheaters.

When you get down to it, though, the color on my edit is more true, but I haven't brought up the contrast or brightened the colors. It makes me think that if I can add a few other tricks to the bag that I'll be able to rock the digital darkroom.

Full credit to the lesson I found at Grokking the GIMP

I have made a blog

I'm cool now.