David Griffin Photography

Images, videos, tips and news from David Griffin Photography

Category Archives: Lightroom

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Abstract Kayaker Followup

March 10, 2010 – 9:24 pm

In the previous post on exploring the power of water I discussed an encounter with a kayaker where I decided to use long exposures rather than try to freeze the action with the intent of having some abstract images.   My brother, Pete, noted that I didn’t include any traditional visual “anchor points” in the images.  This was intentional on my part, but I thought it would be interesting to look at the images that did have some reference to solid ground in them.

If I had planned this encounter I would have taken steps to make the background even more stable – providing a more distinct visual contrast between the trees and ground and the chaos of the water.  The sequence here moves from moderately discernible backgrounds to where the they become almost as fluid and abstract as the water.  Feel free to compare and contrast with the initial set.




Technical details:

Canon 40D, 100-400mm f/4.5L IS at f/16, ISO 200 with polarizer and 3-stop ND filter.  Shutter speed 0.6 seconds for the first image and 0.8 seconds for the others.  Camera stabilized on a Gitzo tripod and RRS BH-55 ballhead.

Lightroom post-processing: White balance set to 6000K, exposure unchanged, fill 53, black point 33, clarity 80, and vibrance 25.  Default Lightroom sharpening.

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

Exploring the Power of Water 3

March 8, 2010 – 6:07 pm

We had a beautiful sunny day here over the weekend (actually two sunny days, but I was traveling to/from Maine for most of one of them) and I wanted to continue working on a set of river abstracts that I started before the heavens opened up and flooded the river.  The waters are working their way back to normal, but still have a lot of punch.   I was working on long exposures like this:

when I spotted a kayaker playing in the rapids upstream of a nearby bridge.  He (or she) would be passing by within a few minutes so what to do?   I was shooting with the 40D and the 100-400 f/5.6L  because I needed a lot of reach for some subjects.  It would only take a few seconds to reconfigure the camera to shoot action shots (crank the shutter, raise the ISO, and set the lens wide open).  I started to do this and stopped.  I’m shooting abstracts.  Can’t I make the kayaker an abstract subject too (if a fleeting one)?   What the heck…

And so as he shot the rapids and played with the eddys I framed up and fired away at 0.6 and 0.8 seconds.  I really didn’t have much time to see if this would work — the whole encounter only lasted 20 seconds.  The results were interesting and, for me, added another dimension to this exploration of water’s power.  In retrospect I should have varied the shutter a bit more as I think there would be some cool images below 0.5 seconds.



Technical: Canon 40D, 100-400 f/4.5L  (at focal lengths through the entire range), f/16, ISO 200.  Polarizer and a 3-stop ND filter.  Shot from a Gitzo tripod and a Really Right Stuff RH-55 ballhead for stability.

Lightroom processing: strong fill, blackpoint, and clarity.  Bit of vibrance.  Removed one nasty dust spot.

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Exploring the Power of Water 2

February 27, 2010 – 10:58 pm

The Assabet River has crested and now will slowly work its way back to its normal lazy ways, but for now it still is packing a punch.

I did two and a half studies of different exposures of the river, ranging from 1/1000 second to 8 seconds.  The result is a rough guide for matching how the exposure times translate to particular moods that we might want to express from this rapidly churning water.

The first study is of a submerged island with water flowing around trees, starting at 1/1000 second and slowing down 1 stop at a time (essentially doubling the exposure time):

[qt:/video/water-seq-1.mp4 640 480]

From 1/1000 to 1/60 we see the river abstracted in a “frozen” form.  At 1/30 second the image changes to a different abstraction — one that implies fluidity.  1/15 through 1/2 second really appeal to me as a way of implying rapidly moving, turbulent water.  Starting at 1 second the image of the river’s turbulence is slowly transformed into something that might be considered almost tranquil (as astutely noted in a comment by Rich Rosenbaum in my initial article)

The second study was of a rock in the middle of the river which is creating a very dynamic bit of turbulence.  Because the situation around the rock varies so much, the first sequence shows two images at each exposure time starting at 1/1000 second down to several seconds.  We then zoom into the rock and work our way back to 1/1000 second.

[qt:/video/water-seq-2.mp4 640 480]

Despite being a very different subject I get more or less the same impressions from the same ranges of exposure times.  So I’m becoming confident that I now have reasonable set of exposure guidelines I can apply to fast moving water to produce certain effects.

All of the images were captured on a Canon 5D Mark 2, 70-200mm f/2.8L lens, and processed with Lightroom.  Some of the images were created using polarizing and neutral density filters. Fairly aggressive contrast tweaks were applied, plus a bit of vibrance, but they are otherwise unchanged.   The videos were created with Lightroom 3 Beta, which has a great new feature that allows exporting slideshows as MPEG-4 movies (although I did have to transcode it to H.264).

The image at the top of the page was captured with a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens (at 16mm) with a polarizing filter. It had the same post-processing as the images in the video, but a localized adjustment was made to increase the exposure on the oak tree trunk.

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

Winter Workshops and Exhibits

February 11, 2010 – 12:26 pm

Shawn Carey is a great nature photographer and has been a fantastic resource for photographers in our area.  He works closely with Massachusetts Audubon and was a key consultant to getting a top-notch photo blind constructed at the Daniel Webster Sanctuary in Marshfield.  He also hosts an ongoing (though occasional) “photo and video sharing” session that mixes the top bird and nature photographers with photographers of all levels to help improve our craft and get a chance to socialize over pizza and a beer.

Shawn is teaching a 3-day workshop at the Mass Audubon Visual Arts Center.  The first session is tonight (Feb 11), and second and third parts of the workshop are Feb 18 and 25th respectively.  If you are interested, I’m sure you will be in good hands and will learn great techniques.    For more information visit Shawn’s workshop page.

While I’m happy to help teach anyone how to use Lightroom, Bob DiNatale is one of the best instructors in the area and he will be teaching a Lightroom Workflow Seminar on Saturday, Feb 20th from 10:30am to 3pm in Concord.  The cost is $75 ($60 if you sign up before 15-Feb).  Visit Bob’s seminar website for more information.  Bob is a Adobe Certified Expert for Lightroom (and probably Photoshop too) and a great guy.

Last, and not least, the there are only a few more days left to see John Borchard’s “Magical Mist” exhibit at Gallery Seven in Maynard.   John has captured some beautiful images of Ireland and from right here in New England. Fog never looked so good.

Coming up at the end of the month at Gallery Seven is an exhibit of floral abstracts by Vera Kaufman and Robert Moll.   They will be on display from Feb 20th to March 27th.  I’m looking forward to seeing these photos on the wall.

By Dave | Also posted in Photography | Comments (0)

Harmony Halloween Horse Show – A Different View

November 7, 2009 – 9:31 am

wpid1320-2009A-385-3050.jpg

When I do an event shoot I take a LOT of pictures – (often) hundreds to (occasionally) thousands of them.  When I post galleries I edit them down to to a small fraction of the day’s captures and then I whittle it down to a handful of personal favorites for a blog posting.  My editing process involves several passes of the photographs: the first pass involves deleting bad frames (badly blown or out-of-focus exposures, test shots of the ground) — you know, utter garbage.  And I really delete them.   The subsequent phases involve various forms of rating and have a lot to do with the particular event and why I was there and what kind of story I’m trying to tell with the images.

The bottom line is that a LOT of photos end up on the proverbial cutting room floor.   Wouldn’t it be nice if I could use them all without inducing eye-clawing boredom on the viewer’s part?   Well, here’s my quick attempt at such a thing — let me know what you think.   758 images in 100 seconds…

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/7483048[/vimeo]

(Also available on YouTube HD)

Technical stuff:

I originally approached this using a new feature of Lightroom 3 (Beta) that allows exporting of slideshows in H.264 video.   This is a really cool feature and I will certainly make use of it for certain projects.  (It is also a slick way to easily produce more traditional time-lapse videos directly from Lightroom.)   As with most things there are tradeoffs and the drawback of this direct-from-Lightroom technique is one of performance and flexibility.  It takes a LONG time for Lightroom to generate the video and when you are done you may find that you wanted a different pacing — and then you’ll end up generating it again.

The bulk of the time was spent tuning the images in Lightroom.  In a normal edit I only spend time fine-tuning the looks of the selected images, but in this case all of them needed some level of processing.   Fortunately I shoot in manual mode so the input exposures are pretty consistent.  This means that I can apply the same corrections to large sets of images at a time using the Synchronize tools in Lightroom.  I even created a few Develop Presets along the way to make this even easier for the shoot.  The emphasis was on creating groups of similarly exposed images so that the video levels wouldn’t be jumping too far out of whack. There are a couple of ways of approaching this, but in my case I created a separate Lightroom catalog with just this shoot in it — so the edits of my selects didn’t affect the edits for the video.   I could have also achieved the same result with a collection of virtual copies and may well do this in the future because it allows me to keep both end-products in the same catalog.

I used the same Slideshow capability in Lightroom, but opted to generate JPEG images instead.   (This output option is plain to see Lightroom 2, but you have to press the Option (Alt on PC’s) key in the new Lightroom 3 interface.)  For this video I selected the output size 1280×720 to match the 720p HD frame size.  Lightroom took almost an hour to generate the 758 frames on my 4-processor MacPro.  From there I open the images as an Image Sequence in Quicktime Pro and  select a frame rate.  10 frames per second happens to be close to the burst rate of my Canon 1DMk2 camera so the jump sequences almost play in “real time” and the pacing for the rest of the images is pleasingly frenetic.   The important part here is that if I didn’t like the frame rate choosing a different one and previewing it takes a few seconds rather than hours.

It is important to note that the use of Lightroom’s Slideshow feature is important to the success of this workflow.  If you chose to simply export the images they would end up being different sizes (unless you used identical cropping on every single one of them) and they also would not be sized for a video frame.   If the generated images are not identical in terms of aspect and resolution they will not be included in the Quicktime image sequence.  Using the Slideshow option allows you to generate consistently sized image frames with whatever background you want to use.

After generating the frames in Lightroom and rendering them as an image sequence with Quicktime Pro, I imported the video file as a clip into Final Cut Pro where I added the titles and credits and then added the soundtrack (thank you Duke!).  Once I had the music there I realized it might be fun to break up the video a bit to correspond to the music.   This is a creative process where you can absolutely go overboard.  Since this video was meant to be just a fun use of “excess” images I tried to keep it simple.  I then added the titles and credits and then uploaded it to the YouTubes…

I did some basic color grading in Final Cut, keeping the images coming out of Lightroom pretty basic.  I edit video in a different gamma than photographs (1.8 versus 2.2) so it is better to send Final Cut “flat” images and work the final result from within the video editing suite.

I thought the result was pretty cool and tells the story of the event in a unique and entertaining way.  I’ll likely alter my shooting slightly to enhance the results of future videos.  What I would normally consider gratuitous shots can now form the basis of short stop-action sequences.  Yet another tool in the story-telling kit.

—–

My thanks to Duke Levine for his permission to use his music in my blog videos.  If you like what you hear, visit Duke Levine’s MySpace page and pick up one of his albums.

Photos from the Harmony Halloween Horse Show can be found at: events.dmg-photography.com

By Dave | Also posted in Events, Horses, Photography, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

2009 Harmony Horse Stables Halloween Show

October 27, 2009 – 6:50 pm

That’s Glenda the Good Witch (Cathy Cosgrove) enjoying the events at the annual Halloween Horse Show at Harmony Horse Stables in Littleton, MA.  The show is a mix of skill and downright silliness/fun including a equitation challenge that requires you to hold an apple under your chin while the riding tasks get more and more complex, and, of course, there are the costume competitions (everybody is a winner…)

Highlights from the show are on the events page and images are available for sale (download or prints).  Visit events.dmg-photography.com

Technical stuff after some of my favorites from the day:




Technical stuff: Shooting without flash in this environment is extremely challenging (I wrote about this last year.) The backlighting, dust, variable light temperatures, and fast motion make for some interesting technical tradeoffs.   I shot mostly with the 1D Mark 2 coupled with the 70-200mm f/2.8L lens at ISO 1600.    I also had the 5D Mark 2 with the 24-70 f/2.8L for wider candids and a bit of jumping.

Exposure management in these conditions is just plain tough. Next year I think I may try using spot exposure for a bit to see what happens – evaluative doesn’t know what the heck is going on.  The widely ranging lighting coupled with the need to freeze action causes me to pick a manual setting (around 1/300) and vary only occasionally.  Later in the afternoon the sun moves around to the end of the barn and I can shoot from there at 1/500 without too much problem, but even that has limitations.

Many of the images require shooting into the light coming from windows along the side of the barn.  This washes all contrast out of the image and makes teasing out a photo rather difficult.  I pushed the Lightroom processing even harder than last year (see aforementioned article) and the result was an interesting stylized look to many of the images (see the girl with the butterfly wings as an example).  After a few tries I found a generally good starting point and created a development preset for it.  I would fine-tune the exposure and black point as needed for the individual image if the preset was off the mark.  Below are two sample “out of the camera” images to compare with the processed/stylized versions above:

wpid1275-2009A-385-3062.jpg wpid1273-2009A-385-2934.jpg

As you can see it is possible to create two very different looks from some low-contrast initial images by attacking the exposure and clarity rather aggressively.

In the jumper image the starting point was very washed out and the result was fairly “natural”.  LR changes were: exposure 0, recovery 23, black point 73(!), clarity +83, and vibrance was +20 (pretty standard there).

For the butterfly rider I went with a more stylized look.  LR changes were: exposure +2/3 stop, black point 27, clarity +65, and vibrance +40.

My thanks to Harmony Horse Stables letting me get in the center of the ring for a little while and try out that vantage point.  It’s a great place to be, but you have to pay attention for the safety of the riders and yourself.  I look forward to returning next year with a few more technique twists to try to capture even more of this holiday event.

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

Lightroom-enhanced time-lapse video

October 12, 2009 – 9:12 pm

[video filename=http://dmg-photography.com/video/bsd2-24fps.mp4 title=Autumn-Mist-Timelapse /]

I’m in the process of putting together a short video highlighting some of the fall foliage and other seasonal changes happening here in central Massachusetts.  I hope to have it ready for viewing next week.    I wanted to include a couple of time-lapse sequences in it.   On Sunday I shot a test sequence on the Assabet River just upstream of the Ben Smith Dam.  Happy with the results, I headed out this morning hoping to catch the sunrise on the water along with the mist.

I happened to be using the Canon 5D Mark 2 because it was handy.  Normally I use either my old 10D or the 40D for timelapse captures.  I set the 5D to “SRAW2″ because I only need HD resolution. SRAW2 exceeds that and leaves plenty of breathing room on the flash card.   The camera was attached to the 24-70mm f/2.8L lens, with polarizing filter, set at 34mm.   I set the exposure at 1/60 second, f/8.0, ISO 200.   I could have, and you might argue, should have, slowed the shutter down a bit more — but motion blur with slow-moving mist and clouds isn’t that noticeable.

The interval timer was set for 2 seconds.  I captured 450 frames.  That’s just 18 seconds at 24fps and 14 seconds at 30fps.   (Remember it is just a clip for a larger work.)  I could have captured longer but, quite frankly, the “show” was mostly over.    (I need to see if the 5D can sustain out 1 frame/second of SRAW2 files.)

The choice of a polarizing filter was problematic.  It provided me with the saturated colors I wanted in the foliage, but the wide angle of the shot means that the polarizing effect would drop off across the image … and this happened.  Here’s a sample source frame:

wpid1210-2009A-263-3195.jpg

Because of the combination of both the polarizer and the sheer brightness of the sun, the right side of the frame got “hot” as the sequence went along.  Not overexposed or anything, but definitely much brighter.  I used Lightroom to create a 1/2 stop graduated filter across the right 1/3rd of the image – providing a bit more room for details in the clouds.  The color still changes (adding blue to the filter is an option, but it colors the mist as well so I kept it neutral).  This change, coupled with some other minor exposure and contrast tweaks, coupled with a 16×9 crop, was then synched across all 450 frames.

I have to admit that this is probably just my first attempt at editing this sequence.  I may well try other edit configurations.  The ability to try them out with Lightroom and then easily apply the changes to hundreds of images is really a joy.

—-

This post is actually two tests in one.  I’m also trying out a WordPress plugin that uses the JW video player to directly play H.264 files and I want to see if it is worth purchasing a license for.  Drop me a line (or comment) if you like or dislike it (vs. YouTube HD or Vimeo hosted files).

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

Sunapee Lake Region Panorama

October 8, 2009 – 9:33 pm

While up in New Hampshire I visited with my friends Peter and Marty Hurley who have a place in the Lake Sunapee area.  It was a pretty dreary evening but Peter offered me a tour of some local viewing spots and I was happy to accept.  Sadly no bursts of light onto the landscape, but the autumn colors were beginning to show.

This is a 9 segment panorama looking towards Lake Sunapee. That’s Sunapee Mountain on the left – you can see the ski trails.  I placed the leftmost tree so that it lined up with the radio tower on the mountain directly behind it.  I understand that if you have $600,000 burning a hole in your pocket, you could own this view (there’s a well in one of the foreground bushes).

Peter and Marty have a wonderful Japan-inspired garden, complete with bridges designed and built by Peter.  They have a little online tour if you are interested.

Technical Stuff….

Captures: Canon 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm f/2.8L lens set at 32mm, exposure: 1/13 sec at f/16, ISO 200.  Expose to the right technique was used — not all that hard considering how flat the light was.

Processing: Lightroom used to set consistent white balance for the segments and then exported to 16-bit TIFF / ProPhoto colorspace.   Stitched with the Photoshop merge automation gizmo.  (I used to be able to do this directly from Lightroom, but for some reason that stopped working recently.  Not sure what’s going on there.)  Resulting stitched image imported into Lightroom where a variety of tweaks were applied:

Because the original files were intentionally exposed slightly higher than you normally would, the exposure was dropped by 2/3rds of a stop to bring the overall brightness back to “reality”.

Dust spot removal was particularly fun because 1 dust spot on the sensor = 9 in the panorama — and I had 4 or 5 spots to clean up…  Ugh!

A 1/4 stop graduated filter was added to darken the sky slightly and, since Lightroom can do multiple things in those filters, I also lowered the contrast (-52) – which, somewhat counterintuitively, provides more definition to the clouds.

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Scenes from Wabasso – 1

October 4, 2009 – 9:30 pm

Just finished a 4-day excursion to New Hampshire (the Lake Sunapee region) and have a few images to share.

On Saturday I taught a workshop, “Exploring Nature Through Photography”, at the Girl Scouts Great Escape at Camp Wabasso. The Great Escape is a retreat for Girl Scout Leaders – a combination of workshops, social activities, and a bit of relaxation. Much to everyone’s chagrin, it rained buckets on Saturday. But the rain departed by Sunday morning and in between cleanup and packing activities I tried to capture a bit of the environment around the camp.

All of these images were captured with a Canon 5D Mark 2, 70-200mm f/2.8L lens w/polarizing filter, all except the canoe image had the rig firmly mounted on a tripod.  The images were captured using “expose to the right” methodology and then shifted to the desired exposure values with Lightroom.

Images all had different levels of black adjustment and varying amounts of clarity.  A bit of vibrance was added as normal (the polarizer does most of the heavy lifting for the saturated colors — well, that and 20 hours of rain the day before).   The final image (road) used a local adjustment to lower the foreground  path and grass by 1/4 stop.  I used the local adjustment brush adding 1/3 stop of exposure to Pat and Paula in the canoe, making it possible to maintain the contrast for the rest of the scene.

I’ll be posting a few more images from Wabasso over the next couple of days.

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

Another Lightroom Tip: Out Damn Spot!

September 30, 2009 – 1:30 pm

I’ve been staying up much too late watching Ken Burn’s “National Parks” film and so I was rather annoyed to find that I slept in a bit late on a rare foggy morning. While wading around in the river looking for visual moments in the rapidly decreasing fog I found a nice splash of color and proceeded to shoot there for the next 20 minutes.

Unlike the grand, sweeping landscape shots of mountains or lakes, these intimate landscapes require a very high aperture setting to obtain any significant depth of field. Here I’m shooting at f/13 and the scene really called for even more, but tradeoffs start building up quickly after f/11 (diffraction, exposure time, etc.)

The physics of light giveth and they also taketh away. With a digital SLR cameras, high f-stop PLUS high contrast = dust spots. The increased aperture alone emphasizes spots on the sensor, but if  you start raising the black point of your images to increase the contrast during post-processing, you can expect to see dust spots popping out of the woodwork — especially in areas of smooth tonality – skies and water, for example.

Getting rid of dust spots used to mean heading over to Photoshop for a session with the cloning tool, but both Lightroom and Aperture (and other photo software) have recognized the ubiquity of the DSLR dust spot problem and provide tools to help clean up your images. Here are a couple of tips for Lightroom:

1. Since all of the image changes in Lightroom are non-destructive, jack up the black point to over-emphasize contrast difference. The spots will make themselves much easier to find. You can do your spot cleanup and then just return the black point to the setting you want for creative purposes.

2. If you zoom in 1:1 on the image, you can use the PageUp and PageDown keys to quickly cycle through each segment of the image. This is far easier and more methodical than dragging the image around.

3. However, dragging the image around at 1:1 zoom has advantages that should not be overlooked. After you have paged through, use the drag tool to “jiggle” the image. There are two reasons for this — while the paging method is complete you will tend to not notice spots along the edges, so a quick dash around with the dragging tool takes care of the “seams”. The second reason is that the human vision system has special processing for movement and edge detection. By jiggling the image you will see spots that you might otherwise overlook. If you’re not using those neurons to stay alive on the savannah anymore, you can at least put them to use making nice photographs. :-)

4. As with the black point control, you can also find spots using another Lightroom tool in a way it wasn’t designed for: the sharpening tool’s masking setting. Zoom in 1:1. Then hold down the Option key (Alt on PC) and click down on the masking control. The display will change to a black and white contrast map of the image — essentially it is displaying all of the edges for you. By raising and lowering the masking you will find that at a certain level (it varies with the image) the dust spots will jump out at you. As a matter of fact it’ll probably find far more than you want to know about!   Just as with the black point control, remember to reset the masking to your desired creative setting after you’ve hijacked it for this particular bit of problem solving.

5. Don’t forget that dust spot removal can be applied (synched) across images! Within a short span of time the spots are unlikely to increase/decrease/move on the sensor so once you’ve done the hard work of finding them, you can reapply them to multiple images. HOWEVER, unless the scene is completely static, you will want to review the fixes at 1:1. The dust spot tool is an intelligent clone tool, but you will probably find that you need to tweak the source of the fix from image to image.

How many dust spots do you see?

Here’s the Masking tool’s view:

lr-screengrab

You can avoid, or at least reduce, all of this work by keeping your digital SLR’s sensor clean.  The Cleaning Digital Camera’s website is a great reference. If you are squeamish about cleaning the sensor you can often send your camera back to the manufacturer for a tune-up.

In my experience dust spots tend to be more visible in prints than on the screen.  So before  you commit ink and paper on an image, spend some time looking for dust spots.  Your piggybank and the environment will thank you.

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