David Griffin Photography

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Category Archives: Lightroom

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A Short Vacation on Umbagog Lake

August 27, 2010 – 1:03 pm

Betsy and I snuck out of town for a few days to catch our breath and meet up with some friends at Umbagog Lake in New Hampshire.

We had camped on the lake a last year and this time we decided we would try camping at one of the remote sites, in our case site 1 on the “Big Island” located about 2 miles from the main grounds.  Our son Jay joined us and he had arrived there a few hours beforehand.  Our friends were to arrive the next day and set up at site 7, which was about a half-mile around the island.

We arrived with good weather but do to timing and weight limits of our kayaks my camera equipment stayed in the car until I could retrieve it the next day – by which time the weather was beginning to play some games.  I’ve included a bit about the tradeoffs made for this trip in the technical section at the end of the article.

The island was nice — kind of a northern rainforest feel to it…



On Saturday our little flotilla paddled around the island with the goal of getting to the Androscoggin River inlet.  After a few hours paddling we stopped for lunch and, by then, I had decided to turn back as my tendonitis was sending some warning signs.  Because we were camping I was piloting our 16-foot tandem kayak which weighs quite a bit more than my normal boat.  Coupled with very little paddling this year, the miles were beginning to take a toll on the arms.   Sigh!

Shortly after we turned back it started to rain (lightly), so perhaps it all worked out well anyways.  The nice thing is that the light turned soft and we were getting a bit of saturation in the vegetation.   Forests always seem so peaceful, but I’m reminded that they are really battlegrounds for plants.  Conifers versus deciduous, leaf vs needle vs moss…


Umbagog is also home to a number of Loon families and at least one of them dwells near the island.  The calls at night are simply delightful.   We paddled fairly close to this mother/youngster pair.  It was this moment that I felt REALLY annoyed about leaving the 500mm f/4 in the car (logistics, once again, rearing its ugly head).



The fast-changing weather may have destroyed the opportunity for glorious sunrises and sunsets, but it did provide an opportunity for some soft light within the woods and the opportunity to record some time-lapse sequences.   I had one and a half tripods with me.  The Gitzo was set up to record the time-lapse movies while I padded around the woods with the Gorillapod.   Here’s the 40D rigged for the inevitable inclement weather.

Doing macro photography with a Gorillapod turned out to be somewhere between surprisingly good and quite challenging, but the wind was the real spoiler for getting good macro shots.   Faced with incessant winds I decided to make lemonade.  If I couldn’t get things to sit still then I’d take advantage of the movement.  I switched the 5D to video.

Here’s a little short that incorporates video captured with the 5D/Gorillapod (mostly) along with the time-lapse sequences.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tswx1kRRbsE[/youtube]

The rain was getting a bit more persistent and this 30-second exposure turned out the be the last image for the trip.

Technical background:

First a bit about equipment choice.   We were camping on an island that was a 40 minute paddle from power and something solid over your head.  Whenever I travel into the unknown my camera bag of choice is the Lowepro DryZone.  I’ve had this bag for probably 9 years now and it only comes out when things might get hairy.  The DryZone bag is a regular camera bag that is surrounded with a reasonably watertight shell.  (And no, I haven’t tested it recently.)   If the kayak is swamped or our tent site is inundated by a thunderstorm (which, by the way, happened) I like to keep the sensitive electronic gizmos reasonably dry.  Much less stress when you don’t have to worry about that.

I packed the Canon 40D and the 5D Mark II cameras.  You might ask why I didn’t bring the 7D as it would be better than the 40D – and you would be correct.  The 7D stayed home nice and dry because I had a business filming assignment the day after I returned and, although I don’t use the 7D for video shoots it is my backup camera.  In heading out for a vacation I decided to only risk half of my revenue-generating equipment.  If the worst happened I had everything I needed to meet my obligations to my client when I returned.

The trusty 70-200mm f/2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8, 16-35mm f/2.8, and the 100mm f/2.8 macro rounded out the lens choices.  The 1.4x teleconverter came along for the ride along with a wide set of filters, Zacuto Z-Finder, spare batteries, plastic bags, clips, rubber bands, and CF cards.  A separate utility bag, which remained in the car, held the chargers and other non-critical items.  I also brought along the 500mm f/4 – but that doesn’t fit in the DryZone bag.  Sadly, considering the less than ideal weather along with the amount of cargo we had to ferry out to the site, I decided to not bring the 500mm to the island.  For the most part this was a good decision.  For stabilization I brought along the Gitzo tripod with the H38 video head and a Jobi Gorillapod.   I didn’t end up doing much in the way of tilt/pans with the video so the H38 head turned out to be a lot of weight and bulk I could have done without — but frankly that had more to do with the weather.

I’m beginning to wish I had purchased a Vari-ND filter.  My 5-stop setup just isn’t up to the task for really long exposures when light levels are even moderate.  This turned out to be a limiter on some creative ideas I wanted to explore (e.g., blurring the clouds).   The other reason for wanting more stops is that I was forced to use apertures like f/16 and higher for some of the images and the dust spots just come out of woodwork when you do that.   You can probably see a more than a few in the time-lapse sequences.

While the 40D was cranking out time-lapse sequences I screwed the Gorillapod to the base of the 5D and it did a pretty decent job.  I used a cable release to keep the vibration to a minimum — although as I noted the wind eventually got the best of the situation.  I will definitely try that again under different conditions — the Gorillapod works naturally near the ground — unlike my tripod.

The first two timelapse sequences were captured using S-Raw files, then processed by Lightroom for exposure/contrast/cropping.  I really like using S-RAW for time-lapses — the file format provides decent storage utilization while preserving the ability to fully tune the images in Lightroom prior to rendering it as a video file.  Due to card constraints the 3rd timelapse in the video was captured via JPEG.  This turned out to especially annoying because the sky lightened more than my 1-stop safety and blew out badly for the first 200 frames (of nearly 1000).  Rats.  If it had been S-RAW I might have been able to recover the sky a bit and extend the sequence a bit more.

All images (including time-lapse sequences) processed by Lightroom 3.  Techniques varied widely for the images so I won’t bother trying to spout off settings.

The 5D clips were converted to ProRes LT by MPEG Streamclip and the video was edited and graded with Final Cut Pro.  A shout out to my friend Duke Levine for granting me permission to use his great music on these personal video projects.  I thought the tone of the song matched the dreary weather just great.   But, as we all know, bad weather makes for great photographs — so I’m not complaining in the slightest!

By Dave | Also posted in Photography, Video | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Two guys and a bunch of guitars

July 13, 2010 – 9:01 pm

I’m not a studio photographer.  I prefer to get out into the field (or crawl around a stage) and find great photographs.  Studio photography is about having the control of lighting and the subjects to create compelling images.  I’m envious of those with that talent and I consider myself a dabbler at best.

That said, if someone asks I tell them the truth and we get on with business.   Ricky Berger asked me to take some photographs of him and his long-time musical partner, Mick Fridley,  for some promotional materials they are putting together.     I converted our living room into a studio (which is utterly not up to the job), added some lights, and the guys came over and we had a blast for a couple of hours.

What follows are a few selects from the evening with what I would consider to be “lite” post-processing.  Just some minor exposure tweaks for the most part.   The final images will clean up the clutter in and tone of the backgrounds and there will be all of the usual final tweaking that portraiture tends to require.

They brought a bunch of great guitars and we tried to include them in a few of the setups.  Here I took the photo at 24mm and then used Lightroom 3′s new lens correction capabilities to clean up the perspective and vignetting.  Way cool.


After the posed shots were out of the way I just had them play and I began to search for more images.  Like I said, I’m envious of those talented photographers that can direct a person into creating a feeling of energy or emotion — for me, I prefer to have the person do what they do and then get myself into a position to capture the moment.

From a customer perspective capturing both is important to me.  The posed pictures will end up as the features at the top of a web site or on a poster.  But the candids can be sprinkled liberally in copy, articles, and just decorations on web pages and other promotional material, and lend their power in subtle ways.

I had the camera connected to my MacBook Pro running Lightroom 3 and enabled tethered shooting.   What this did was provide a running preview of the shots for both myself and Ricky and Mick.  They could see if they liked the pose and think about other variations.  Giving your subjects that kind of instant feedback, and control, can cut both ways.  In this case, with these great guys, it worked very well.

When Ricky and Mick make their final selections and I finish the processing of them, I’ll be sure to post that here as well — but I thought it might be fun to document the beginning of the process as well.

I had a great time and while I’m certainly no Zack Arias, the results were pretty satisfying for an ad hoc “studio” setup.





Technical details:

All photographs taken with a Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70mm f/2.8L and 70-200mm f/2.8L lenses.  ISO 400, 1/125 second, f/stop varies between 2.8 and 5.6.

Lighting/Strobist: 550EX strobe into a 40 inch umbrella set at just above eye level to image right.  1/8 to 1/16 power most of the time.  Wireless trigger (Cactus PovertyWizard) – which worked most of the time. DIY Spiderlight (18×18) set at just above eye level on image right, feathered.   This was there mostly for fill of the duo shots — I turned it off for the single person portraits.  Two CFL lights in cans on floor illuminating the lower backdrop.   I also used a LitePanels Micro for a fill light (but only for a set of shots not shown here).

Lightroom: exposure tweaks, white balance set to 5300K, bit of clarity and vibrance.  Some B&W conversion (tinkering).  More to come.  Client review is via web (TTG Highslide Gallery Pro 2.0).

By Dave | Also posted in Musicians, Photography | Comments (2)

Stone Mountain LIVE – July 2010

July 8, 2010 – 5:08 pm

It is always a privilege to photograph the Stone Mountain LIVE shows.  Over the years I’ve come to know many of the talented musicians and behind-the-scenes staff and see the dedication and passion they bring to each show.  Within the confines of not getting in the way and being as invisible as possible to the audience, I try to capture that passion.

July’s show took place on a warm Saturday evening.  Special guest performers Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas performed some vivacious Scottish tunes on the fiddle and cello.  The regular Stone Mountain crew, along with guest pianist Consuelo Candelaria-Barry, provided a wide variety of folk, R&B, and roots music.  The evening began with a short film I produced for the show.  I produced a 3-minute “music video” of the barn raising that took place on Memorial Day.  Sonny Barbato provided a live piano soundtrack for the film.  The film closes with some lyrics of a Carol Noonan song about the barn, which was the first song of the evening.  Pretty classy.   I hope to have a slightly longer version of the film published soon — we’re kicking around ideas for the music.

A complete gallery of the evening’s photographs can be found at: [url]http://smac.dmg-photography.com/SML-Jul-2010[/url]

Here are a few of my favorites from the evening along with a bit of “technical” commentary.

Summer shows at Stone Mountain start well before the sun goes down and so the floor to sky windows behind the performers create a very strong back/side light that competes with (and almost overwhelms) the stage lighting.  So for the first hour there’s a lot of decisions to be made regarding exposure and composition.  One of the more annoying aspects of this is that the color of the light coming from outside is very cool versus the very warm stage lighting.  I decided to render the photograph above of Carol Noonan (which you can find in the gallery in color) in black&white and I think it is a stronger photograph because the contrasting colors are eliminated.  That still leaves a lack of tonal balance, but I didn’t have any control over that.

It’s hard enough getting good photographs of individual performers when there is a strong backlight, but add in the complexity of two or more performers and there’s just not a lot of options left.

For the second set I changed location to backstage.  While this location provides very few angles, I enjoy the vantage point it provides and affords me opportunities for images that are sometimes stronger than the normal front-stage view.   When I get lucky, I get to photograph glances and postures of the performers that provides a more intimate view.  It’s not quite the “musicians point of view”, but just shy of that.



Technical stuff:

All photographs were taken with a Canon 7D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens, handheld.  ISO ranged from 1600 to 5000.  Shutter speeds varied from 1/60 to 1/100 second depending on stage and background lighting, angle, etc.  Aperture was typically wide-open (f/2.8).

Lightroom 3 was used to process the images.  All of them had exposure tweaking as I typically underexpose the images slightly to gain a some shutter speed (the stage lighting is relatively dim and you lose another 2-3 stops when shooting from side-stage).  I took advantage of the noise reduction in Lightroom 3, particularly for the ISO 5000 images.   Very pleasing results.

For more information about Stone Mountain LIVE, visit the Stone Mountain Arts Center website or check out these videos I produced for the center:

By Dave | Also posted in Photography, SMAC | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Shooting in the Dark – River Solstice

July 1, 2010 – 5:13 pm

For the past eight years or so we’ve had this fun little event on our local rivers, River Solstice, that celebrates the longest day of the year.  We’ve had our share of washouts, but most of the time Mother Nature cooperates.  The location and the nature of the event make this a definite challenge to capture photographically.  After a nice picnic on the lawn of the Old Manse (where the music performers typically have the sun setting almost directly behind them) a large number of paddlers descend on the Concord River at sunset to begin a flotilla of boats, most with lanterns, up to the Old Calf Pasture where a bonfire and drumming occurs.  My goal was to photograph the paddlers making their way up the river.

So let’s be clear about the challenge:  1) subjects are gliding by on the river, 2) I’m in a kayak on the same river, 3) the sun has set and it is rapidly getting quite dark.  Perfect! Let’s make some portraits!

The full set of images is available on my community gallery.  In there you will see the progression of the evening’s light disappearing and I was left to find whatever candle or other light was nearby.  There was a near full moon rising, but it really didn’t have much of an impact when I was shooting.

Here’s the link to the evening’s pictures: [url]http://community.dmg-photography.com/2010-river-solstice[/url]

What follows are a few highlights of the evening plus some technical details for those that are interested.  I encourage you to look at the full gallery mostly because it clearly shows that the current generation of DSLR cameras are capable of some pretty amazing photographs in some relatively challenging conditions.

The evening starts with a picnic and music on the lawn of The Old Manse in Concord which overlooks the Old North Bridge.  I tried to have some fun with the strong back and rim lighting the setting sun provided.

The kayak and canoe “parking lot” was pretty full…

Some folks were watching the moon rise in style…

The sun has set, the singers are making their way along the river to the Old Calf Pasture for some pagan fun, and the flotilla of boats begins working its way up the Concord River…

My friend Julia Blatt, who heads the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance, was paddling with her hubby…

Night quickly overtakes the river…   I think a number of people were kind of shocked that I was taking photographs — and probably assumed that everything I was doing would be a blurry mess.  (I knew otherwise…)

Here we are at the Old Calf Pasture where a bonfire is ringed with torches.  The sound of ceremonial drums pierces the darkness.   (And drowns out the sound of mosquitos, which are pummeling everyone — or at least me…)   For reasons that I won’t go into here, I don’t hop on land and photograph the fire circle despite it being an obvious target of opportunity for great images…


Technical notes:

All photographs were shot with a Canon 7D.   Nearly all were taken with the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, although there are a handful (which I hope are obvious) that were taken with the 24-70mm f/2.8L.  All shots are handheld, all but the picnic shots are from a kayak.  Due to the rapidly changing light I opted for aperture priority exposure.  (If you need me to tell you what aperture I was using most of the evening you probably shouldn’t bother reading the rest of this…)

As the sun sets the camera is set to ISO 1250, then 2500.   If you aren’t familiar with shooting on a small New England river, you should be aware that it is similar to being in a hole.   The shoreline is typically lined with trees and long before the sun sets you are in shadow.  A few minutes after it sets, it just gets plain dark – especially if there are no clouds to reflect light straight down.   So it was a matter of a minute or two before I cranked the camera to ISO 6400.

Exposures vary from 1/100 (if there’s a bright lantern) to 1/20th of a second.   Image stabilization and years of practice shooting from a kayak kept my throw-aways amazingly low.   And a quick shout out to the 7D’s autofocus!  I used center-point focus because I know that is typically the most sensitive part of the AF array.  Half the time I was hunting for a subject in the viewfinder.  If the camera found anything at all, it did a great job of holding focus while I did the final composition and shooting. (This is the primary reason why I didn’t bring the 5DMk2 to this project — it’s low-light AF is, um, “sub par”…)

In the case of these photographs however, the camera only did half the work.   A significant portion of the image quality comes from Lightroom 3′s new image processing and noise reduction capabilities.   As I cranked up the ISO on the camera in the field, I had a commensurate increase in the luminance noise reduction in Lightroom.  Quite frankly, tack sharp images were not my goal.  Moving subjects in a dimly lit area don’t feel sharp to our eyes, so I didn’t feel any need to try to bring any particular sharpness out — the default sharpening of Lightroom fit the bill most of the time.   Most of the night images had the Luminance noise set to 45.  A few, including the young lady at the beginning of this article, were bumped to 64.   I knew from reports and the beta testing that the noise reduction was going to be impressive, and it served me well for this assignment.

The processing of these images varies significantly depending on the lighting conditions.  The look for the photographs taken after the sun set was achieved by adding fill light and then raising the black point to restore some contrast.   I really didn’t want to raise the exposure of the whole image as the scene was, in reality, quite dark — but rather mimic what the human eye does by selectively increasing the luminance of the subjects.   A bit of vibrance and a dash of clarity round out the Lightroom processing.

There you have it, a new branch of photography: action portraits in the dark.

By Dave | Also posted in Community, Environment, Events, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

Harmony Spring Horse Show

April 12, 2010 – 10:32 pm

Sunday was a beautiful Spring day here in Massachusetts.  I spent a good chunk of the day at Harmony Horse Stables in Littleton, where my daughter teaches horseback riding and was running the show for the day.

There are a lot of classes and I covered all of them.  Visit my Events gallery to see the highlights…

[url] http://events.dmg-photography.com[/url]

Here are a few highlights from the day:

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

One of the classes featured participants in Harmony’s “Life in the Barn” program, which introduces young children to farm life.  One of the kids was a bit reluctant to get on her horse.  My daughter (along with the girl’s mom) coaxed her up…

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

… while this young rider pretty much grinned the entire time …

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

“Spot” made his ride exhilarating…

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

… and his canter is a bit over the top too  (note the airborne feet):

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

And the show wraps up…

Harmony Horse Stables Spring Horse Show 2010

Technical stuff:

Canon 1D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS. Indoors shot at ISO 1600, usually wide-open, shutter speeds varied greatly depending on where the subject was in the arena (the lighting conditions there are pretty awful, um, “varied”).   Outside shot at ISO 200, f/4, with shutter speeds around 1/2500 (varies slightly with lighting conditions).    I normally shoot in manual mode, but that’s annoying in the arena, so I tried using spot metering with aperture priority.   That didn’t work well at all, probably because of the lens flare  – so I got the hint pretty quickly and shot the rest of the day with a memorized set of shutter speeds.

Lightroom:  All photos white-balanced for indoor and outdoor conditions, clarity +25, vibrance +25 by default.  Indoor photos are rather heavily processed relative to the outdoor shots, which occasionally have a bit of fill.   Indoor shots are often backlit and have significant lens flare, greatly reducing contrast.   (I wrote about this in an article probably a year ago.)   I refined the “Haze Cutter” preset a bit this time around to make the resulting photograph maintain the exposure while handling moderate haze  (Recovery 22, Fill 24, Blacks 23, Brightness +28, Clarity +44, Vibrance +15).    This worked pretty well for a majority of the back-lit images.

I shot over 1600 images.  There are a lot of bursts, so the numbers add up quickly. A quick review on the laptop to get rid of the obvious junk brought that down to 1525 pretty quickly. Another 35 would bite the dust in subsequent reviews.  So I have a total of 1495 reasonably well-exposed and not blurry images to work with.  I worked through those getting the images reasonably well-tuned.  I selected 500 or so as good candidates and tweaked them a bit further.   I was happy enough with my framing that I think I only cropped 2 images.

By Dave | Also posted in Horses, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Exploring the Power of Water will continue

April 7, 2010 – 3:40 pm

I’ve been working on a number of projects lately and I hope to catch up on my water series here in a few days.  We had some pretty dynamic weather here for a couple of weeks and that produced a lot of raw material — I hope you will find it worth the wait.

Technical: Above taken with a Canon 5D Mark 2, 100-400mm f/4.5L lens with a 1.4x teleconverter (effective focal length of 530mm) and a polarizing filter, f/16, ISO 100, and 1/8 second exposure — all mounted on a tripod, but I don’t remember which one (now that I have two, I’ll have to start making notes).  Processed with Lightroom 2, exposure 0, recovery 18, fill 49, blacks 44, clarity +33, vibrance +21.

By Dave | Also posted in Environment, Photography | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Lightroom Kung-Fu for Tone-mapped RAW Images

March 28, 2010 – 10:29 pm

Last year I had the privilege of speaking at Baypath College about authenticity of photographic images, particularly in relation to nature / conservation photography.   Part of the talk was devoted to showing how any photograph is an interpretation of the photographer — the image has an intent: informational, documentary, pictorial, and equivalent  (the latter coined by Minor White).  The challenge for the photographer is to use composition and tonalities to express one of those intents.  The primary technical hurdle of the photographer is dealing with different dynamic ranges of the steps along the way to the viewer’s eye: nature, camera sensor/film, editing, and finally the print (or screen).   One of the more interesting tools that digital photography has made simpler to use is “high dynamic range” (HDR) photography, where one extends the dynamic range of the camera’s sensor by capturing multiple images at different exposures and then combining them into a single image.   Whether or not you do this at the capture side, there remains the problem of showing this image to the viewer – typically on media that has a much smaller dynamic range — so the photographer must “compress” this wider image into a smaller space.  This process is generally known as “tone mapping” –  you old-schoolers can think of it as “dodging and burning on steroids”.

While visiting the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge (outside of Savannah Georgia) last year I came upon a scene that I knew would work well with HDR photography, so I did some exposures with that intent. I also took a few standard exposures looking to maximize the dynamic range of my camera. The multiple-exposure nature of HDR photography today has an inherent weakness whenever there is motion in the image you wish to not record. In this case there was a slight breeze and the leaves on the trees were moving between frames enough to really destroy the feeling I was looking for. This left me with a carefully exposed single RAW image to work with:

I processed it with Lightroom in my typical fashion: lowered the exposure slightly to bring in the highlights, raised the black point to 27 to get the contrast, bumped up clarity and vibrance for midtone punch and this was the result:

OK, but not great. The “feel” of the road and the foliage isn’t there. Oh well…

One of the blogs I follow (and highly recommend) is the Digital Photography School, particularly the “Tips and Tutorials” RSS feed.  There is a constant flow of ideas there and a few weeks ago there was an article on creating a particular very stylized look to portraits using Lightroom.  The results, for me, enters that slippery space between photographic and painting and way outside the comfort zone of what I consider my style of photography.  But I understood what Lightroom was being coerced into doing for the artist.

The great thing about this technique is that it simply uses standard Lightroom development settings, but in an extreme way — creating portraits like the one to the right of my grandson. (Sorry Damien, I needed an example.)

Using Lightroom to push images to the edge like this has its pitfalls.  The nature of the changes means that you can create some nasty artifacts and color shifts that detract from the final image (you might note some pretty ugly halos along the right side of Damien’s head and sweatshirt).  But it certainly is easy enough to try once in a while on images that you think might work.

Here’s the essence of the technique: push recovery,  fill, clarity, and vibrance very high, bring black point up to restore contrast, adjust exposure as needed, and then lower saturation to bring things closer to reality.  The settings are highly dependent on the starting image so there’s really no way to make a good develop preset for this.  On the other hand it only takes 10 seconds to get the sliders into the approximate positions to assess the image.

The settings on the right are the ones I used to transform the RAW Savannah NWR file (the second image in this posting) to the (near) final form you see at the top of the post.  (That final image includes a Lightroom local adjustment to the road to increase lower brightness and increase contrast just a bit.)

What I realized is that this technique ramps up Lightroom’s normally subtle tone-mapping skills so that it can be used to create images that have that “HDR” feel to them by deeply compressing the dark and light tones closer to the midtones.  When you start with a well-exposed RAW image, and the content of that image cooperates, the results can be quite interesting.

I’ve been using a more subtle version of this technique in a number of the “power of water” images I’ve posted here recently.  The ability to tease out the subtle glows that I see when I’m actually there taking the image has been quite gratifying.

Yesterday I started wandering through my Lightroom catalog looking for other candidate images where this technique might work well. (I admit it: once you have new hammer, you start looking around for nails.) The Savannah NWR image was one of my first “victims”.  That I was able to produce a final image from a single RAW file that rivaled the multiple-exposure HDR image I created was inspiring.   This portrait of True West and a Maynard Christmas Parade photos show the technique’s results pretty well.   If you place your mouse cursor over the image it should show you the “traditional” interpretation of the images:

Lightroom develop settings for the True West photo: recovery 85, fill 67, black 36, clarity +85, vibrance +69, saturation -46.  For the fire truck: recovery 81, fill 80, black 48, clarity +20, vibrance +60, saturation -35.

Another set of images called out for this technique – my LRRS motorcycle racing images taken last spring and summer.  Once again this experience of shooting these racing machines has opened up another set of skills for me as a photographer.  To be able to take these straight documentary photographs and, with the right combination of exposure and tone-mapping, transform them into something that has a different emotional feel to it is great and I’m looking forward to sharing them with my racing friends.  Here’s an example of applying this technique to some race images (again, the mouseover trick works with this image too):

Lightroom settings: exposure -1/4 stop, recovery 64, fill 92, black 68, clarity +85, vibrance +50, saturation -17.

I liked it so much that I created a small gallery of LRRS images using this technique: [url]http://events.dmg-photography.com/2009-lrrs-reloaded[/url]

Only a fraction of the images will respond positively to this technique.  I’m sure if you purchase Photomatix or play with Photoshop all day, it is possible to produce similar and, likely, better images.  But the immediacy of doing this in Lightroom inside of 30 seconds and knowing if there’s likely to be a new great image buried inside that existing photograph is just too cool for words.  All done without changing the essential content of the images.  Art meets authenticity.  I love it.

By Dave | Also posted in Photography, Technology | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Where Water Turns To Air

March 24, 2010 – 9:00 pm

The inspiration for this image was the following scene:

[qt:/video/20103-263-6202.mov 800 450]

I’m not sure the video does the scene justice.  I wanted to try to capture the feeling of the explosion of water and air that was continually forming at the base of the waterfall.   I exposed the scene at a number of shutter speeds, but this one seemed, to me, to capture the dynamic nature of this event the best (so far) — where we see water transformed into something completely different.

Technical mumbo-jumbo:

Image capture was with a Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L at 135mm, 1/1000, f/9.0, ISO 1600, polarizer on Gitzo tripod and Manfrotto 701HDV fluid head.   Video capture used the same camera, lens, tripod, with unrecorded settings, 24p.

Lightroom post-processing: No exposure change, recovery 78 (to pull lots of detail from the foam), fill 39, black point 36 (to enhance the glow in the water), clarity +78, vibrance +19, relatively strong sharpening with masking set to keep the smooth areas artifact-free.

Video clip is just transcoded for web distribution – no editing.

By Dave | Also posted in Environment, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Working the high water

March 19, 2010 – 7:30 am

The past few days have been pretty interesting here in eastern and central Massachusetts.  We picked up close to 7 inches of rain in our backyard, and this on top of a similar storm that passed through just a few weeks ago.  Consequently the rivers and streams in the area have been jumping their banks.

I’ve been trying to take advantage of this situation, although other commitments plus the occasional emergency has made this difficult.  Fortunately, for me, even though the damaging flood waters have mostly receded around here, it’ll be several days before things return to anything resembling normal stream flow.

The photo above was taken at the Powder Mill Dam in Acton where there is a small run-of-the-river hydropower plant in operation.  That’s the dam’s powerhouse reflected in water.  I suspect they are at peak production right now — Concord (who purchases the power) is a bit greener because of this.

This evening I’m off to Nashoba Brook in Acton to do some filming and I’m desperately hoping for some nice evening light.   My Canon 5D Mark 2 recently received its firmware upgrade allowing me to film at 24 frames/second which is what traditional film cameras do.  The difference is subtle but having spent our lives watching moving pictures at different rates there seems to be an almost subliminal change in how people perceive the two and for the little film I have in mind I want the smoother look of 24 fps.

Technical stuff: Photo taken with a Canon 5D Mark 2, 70-200mm f/2.8 @ f/20, 1/8 second, ISO 100, polarizer and 3-stop ND filter, cable release, sitting on a Gitzo tripod and Manfrotto 701HD fluid head (I was shooting video too).  Lightroom: played with fill and black point, removed one big dust spot but not a bunch of smaller ones (yet).  Bit of vibrance and clarity. Slight crop on the right to remove — I was shooting through a fence and it intruded on the right hand side creating a vignette-like appearance.

If you are interested in the river flooding saga here I shot a short YouTube video showing what it was happening here in Maynard near the peak flow:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4b2nNoTFw4[/youtube]

By Dave | Also posted in Environment, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Here we go again – another roaring river week

March 14, 2010 – 6:19 pm

Another week, another 50-year rain storm…

I’m partly joking, I don’t know the recurrence level of this current storm but it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Here’s the flow gauge of the river for the past 30 days.  We’re in for another fun few days with the current forecast having the river rise potentially 2 feet above where it is right now, but they said the last storm would reach 7 feet as well, and it didn’t quite hit that mark.

On the other hand we’re starting from a significantly higher point.

All this water means that I’ll have a chance to visit a few more of the local streams and capture some, um, “rigorous” flow conditions.

These two events back to back have me hankering to build a time-lapse movie of the river’s rise.   Today it rose rather dramatically and did so during the daylight hours.  The only problem is that it was pouring rain and we had non-trivial winds as well.  I think I’m going to poke around and see if I can build a watertight box with a plexiglas viewport, perhaps lockable so I can chain it to a tree or something if needed.  This would let me set it up for a 12 hour run and try to bring this dynamic event to life.

As evening drew near I decided the 5D needed a bath, so I headed out into the backyard to take a few images.  I nearly froze my hands off in 15 minutes — the rain must be at 33 degrees (F). Here’s a bit of video from this evening:

[qt:/video/assabet-river-14mar2010.m4v 640 360]

Technical:

Images and video captured with a well-soaked Canon 5D Mark II, 16-35mm f/2.8L.  Image was at ISO 400, 1.6 seconds, f/5.6.  Video was at ISO 3200, 1/60, f/2.8.  Both were taken from Gitzo sticks and a Manfrotto fluid head.

Image processed with Lightroom, bit of fill and black point, moderate clarity.   Video was transcoded to ProRes LT by MPEG Streamclip, which was an unnecessary step because I then imported it into iMovie to trim, add the titles, and adjusted exposure +35%. Exported directly from iMovie to Quicktime H.264.

By Dave | Also posted in Environment, Photography, Staring, Video | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
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