David Griffin Photography » Lightroom

River Abstracts

Dave — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:45:04 +0000

OK, maybe not true abstracts, but bending in that direction. I spent a bit of time this afternoon looking to do some long-exposure work with the river – in broad daylight…

My goal is to continue to explore the boundary between the surface and what lies below and that requires some interesting lighting conditions and ways of visually working into the water column without getting too wet in the process.

The really cool part of these images, for me, only appears in good-size prints. The water’s surface is inscribed with patterns of light so as you pull back you see what is below but upon closer inspection you can tell that there is a layer of water above (see zoomed inset below).

Technical stuff: Canon 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm f/2.8L, exposure times vary but generally around 10 seconds, f/18 to f/22, ISO 100, 3 stop ND filter stacked with 2 polarizers. I believe the first image was done with the ND filter, polarizer and a 3-stop graduated ND filter running left to right. Lightroom processing varies slightly between images but generally fill +10, black +9, vibrance +5-+15, strong contrast curve. Some of the images pulled down the saturation of the red and orange channels to remove some color casting caused, no doubt, by the mass of filters piled up in front of the lens. (That these photos work in color at all was pretty amazing. I was expecting a lot more skewing of colors.)

November 2011 Wallpaper

Dave — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:59:08 +0000

Caught this scene a day or so before the very unusual October snowstorm slammed into New England. I was hoping for some great color and snow photos, but nothing about how the snow came and destroyed a lot of trees was particularly photogenic in my area. One side of our Japanese maple was particularly brilliant and I was trying to capture the melting morning frost on the leaves.

If you like the above image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop or tablet wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here. (Perfect for your iPad)

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Technical stuff:

Canon 5D Mark 2, 100mm 2.8 Macro, 1/40 second at f/5, ISO 800.
Lightroom processing: Tweaked the black point, lots of clarity, smidge of vibrance, default sharpening (in haste — I should have done some masking and slightly more edge sharpening). That’s it!

October 2011 Wallpaper

Dave — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:06:27 +0000

My favorite season is nearly upon us and I thought this backyard scene from last year would set the mood…

If you like the above image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop or tablet wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here. (Perfect for your iPad)

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Technical stuff:

Canon 7D,500mm f/4L, 1/25 second at f/4.5, ISO 400. (the branch was still but the flying insect under it was not…)
Lightroom processing: Tweaked the black point, bit of clarity, smidge of vibrance, sharpening. That’s it!

SMAC Barn Burner with Dennis Brennan

Dave — Tue, 31 May 2011 00:14:24 +0000

It has been a while since I did some concert photography for the fun of it. We were up at our favorite place for live music, the Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine, for the second in their “Barn Burner” series of music there. Held in their lobby barn instead of the main hall and it’s a lot closer to a club feel. Pizza, beer, and dancing are the order of the day. The Iodine Brothers, one of Dennis Brennan‘s ongoing bands, rocked the hall with ballads across several genres and, of course, the amazing backing of Duke Levine and Kevin Barry on guitar, Billy Beard on drums and Richard Gates on bass.

If you’d like to see a short series of photographs from the evening head on over to my SMAC gallery. If you’d like to read a bit about how the photographs were made, read on.

After a rousing first set I thought it would be fun to capture the feel of the barn burner shows and the image above is what I was after. The band said it was OK to take a few shots so I grabbed my 5D Mark II, cranked it up to ISO 3200, opened the iris and hoped for the best (there is NO stage lighting — just the dimmed overhead lights and some christmas tree lights). I headed to the back the room, grabbed a bar stool and, while co-ower Jeff Flagg spotted me, I climbed up and grabbed a few shots with a 16mm lens. This is more or less a straight shot, not much Lightroom tweaking to speak of. (Not so for the rest of these.)

The hands of Duke Levine on guitar.

That’s Richard Gates on bass and Billy Beard on drums.

Dennis Brennan is well-known in the roots rock-and-roll circuits around Boston with a solo career stretching back to the early 90′s. His band used to play all the time here in Maynard at the Sit ‘N Bull (which I walked by every day for years on my way to work but, sadly, didn’t head in because while I like great music I hate cigarette smoke even more… sigh)

With no stage lighting the only source of light were the colored christmas lights ringing the stage (I think they were six inches from his head). I like color but for this photograph of Dennis they were competing, so I went with a black and white version. Frankly, Dennis feels more like a black&white photograph kind of guy anyway.

Duke Levine. Another great example of using black and white to extract a decent photograph from an otherwise useless file: the process of pulling detail out of the shadows, coupled with the saturated lighting looks horrific in color but attenuates nicely once you throw that out…) Like the other black and white images here I added grain with Lightroom to give it a bit more “grittier” feel.

Kevin Barry (seen recently on television with Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs). Go Kevin!

I’m shooting at 1/30th of a second so motion blur is a constant factor with musicians doing their thing. The 5DMk2′s auto focus is nearly useless in low light — making this especially challenging. If this was something more than a casual shoot I would have attached my viewfinder and used the electronic viewer to manually focus.

This was subtly tweaked in Photoshop. The primary lighting are the hanging fixtures along the ceiling. To create more emphasis on the stage I added a neutral density filter just above the beam, darkening the upper half of the image by a half stop.

All images were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II at ISO 3200, 16-35mm f/2.8L or 70-200mm f/2.8L IS. All handheld. All wide open. Between 1/25 and 1/40 second — and that was underexposing a 1/3 stop. At ISO 3200 you really can’t under expose much more or the resulting image will have too much noise. It’s still a frickin’ miracle.

My thanks to Dennis Brennan and his band for allowing me to photograph them, and to Carol Noonan and Jeff Flagg for their support and bringing great live music to everyone. If you haven’t been to Stone Mountain Arts Center you are missing something special.

In case you were wondering why there haven’t been as many photos coming from Stone Mountain LIVE shos the past year, I’m working on a video project with SMAC and that has seriously cut into the still shooting. But we’re not filming the June show so I’m looking forward to finding those moments while behind the shutter again.

Take time to enjoy your rivers

Dave — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:45:23 +0000

A quick reminder (to myself as much as anybody) that warmer weather is nature’s way of saying “c’mon outside!”. Whether you are a paddler, angler, or just like to walk along the shoreline, go visit a nearby river or stream and take in the lifeblood of your neighborhood ecosystem.

Photograph of folks enjoying the Concord River at the Old North Bridge crossing, just downstream from the confluence of the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers.

Technical details: Canon 7D, handheld in the kayak, 70-200mm f/2.8L at 200mm. 1/1250, f/2.8, ISO2500. Lightroom 3, black and white processing, lots of tweaking in the B&W mix panel (de-emphasize greens, brighten up the yellows). By choosing B&W over color and mixing the luminosities of the colors I was able to remove a lot of the distraction of the background trees and make the foreground bridge and people pop out much more. Sometimes color is a distraction.

Blue and Gold

Dave — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:49:07 +0000

A scene from the Concord River in Billerica a couple of years ago (you can tell it’s not this year because there’s not 5 feet of snow on the shoreline). I have to admit that I was a bit let down by how this renders in the browser’s colorspace — the blues are much more vibrant on my monitor in Lightroom. That single leaf trapped in the ice also appealed to me a bit.

Technical: Canon 1D Mark II, 24-70mm f/2.8L at 28mm, 1/125 second, f/13, ISO 200. Filter configuration unrecorded.
Lightroom 3: Lens correction applied, exposure +1/4 stop, fill 48, blacks 35, clarity +37, vibrance +7, sharpened to taste. White balance was set to 6300K – which probably isn’t far off from “reality” (such as it was). This was one of those images where the white balance dramatically affected the intent of the image. Keeping it around 6000K balanced the warmth of the setting sun with the cool ice reflecting the sky.

Winter Stream Study

Dave — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:58:30 +0000

A little study of a winter stream in Effingham, NH. Each of these photographs has various flaws that keep them from being really great, but they still manage to capture a bit of the dynamics of water in a winter environment.

All captured with a Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, ISO 200. Various shutter speeds and f/stops.

Fairly heavily processed with Lightroom 3. Just about every setting used in some way to compress the whites of the snow with the darks of the water and subtle glow of the rocks below the surface. Mostly fill light and black point for the latter and recovery/tone-curve for the former.

River Abstract 2

Dave — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 03:48:40 +0000

Another abstract with a solid chunk of reality acting as an anchor.

Technical: Canon 1D Mark 2, 70-200mm f/2.8L + 1.4x teleconverter at 200mm, 1 second, f/22, ISO 100.
Lightroom 3, exposure -1/3, recovery 38, fill 39, blacks 53 (“poor man’s HDR”), clarity +30, vibrance +20, highlights -50. The goal of the processing was to take an image intentionally exposed right to the edge of the camera’s dynamic range and then bring the bright white ice down far enough that the eye (and screen) can handle the details there. Compressing the dynamic range on the other end accentuated what was happening under the water’s surface.

Maynard Fest 2010

Dave — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 01:03:02 +0000

Probably the biggest annual event here in town happens the first Saturday of October. The morning starts with Maynard Fest. Organized by the Assabet Valley Chamber of Commerce it celebrates commerce, community and culture. They close down Main and Nason Streets and the downtown becomes one big fair from 9am to 3:30pm: vendors selling crafts, toys, and various trinkets, numerous food stands, a wide variety of civic groups from in and around Maynard, a number of local music groups performing in Memorial Park and, of course, rides, bouncy castles, and other activities for kids.

After Maynard Fest the Octoberfest starts down the street with lots of food and music — and the evening ends with fireworks. It’s a full day of fun if you’re up for it. (I wasn’t so I didn’t photograph either evening event…)

If you would like to see more images from the day, I have two albums set up. One is rather complete (some might say exhausting), with over 200 photographs from the day — the other contains 40 of my personal favorites — a handful of those are in this article.

Maynard Fest 2010 (full set)
Maynard Fest 2010 Highlights

Here are a few more of my favorite photographs from Maynard Fest with a bit of commentary.

While editing 400+ images from the day I was struck with how hard it is to catch kids smiling. Thrills and new experiences doesn’t always equal a constant grin. This fellow here was caught at the right moment:

I endeavor to make one photograph of every part of the event, but not every one is going to be a winner. So in addition to “coverage” I also try to find “iconic” images of a small town fair. For a number of reasons this one said “Maynard” to me…

The artists at Earth Changes Pottery were demonstrating their skill right on the sidewalk. I could photograph potters all day…

Springbrook Farm, just over the border in Stow, had a corner of Memorial Park with a few of their Alpacas and various goods made from their wool. These shy animals were doing pretty well considering they are normally on a tranquil farm and they spent the day next to a busy street and had hundreds of people stopping by. They are also too cute for words…

I normally seek candid images, but when I tried to take a photograph of these Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School students they just struck a pose. I’m not complaining.

We had the remnants of a tropical storm dump a couple of inches of rain on us yesterday but today was clear blue skies. Great for the crowds but really lousy for photography — the light was quite harsh and I spent a bit of time in Lightroom tweaking a lot of the images taken in full sun.

While I “made” this photograph, I didn’t take it. After a couple of minutes at this bouncy castle I knew that one of the tunnels would probably be well lit by the sun — but there was no way for me to get there without climbing on the ride. I could barely reach the bottom of the tunnel so I stuck my camera in there and fired a shot to check my exposure. I locked that in, set my focus and opened the 16-35mm to 16mm wide. I then handed the camera to the young lady in the upper left of the previous photo and asked if she would just point and shoot it at the next kid who came along. She was pretty nervous about doing this but she did it 3 times and 2 of images were exactly as I visualized them. Here’s one of them:

Fire trucks and ice cream — that’s the life!

Lots of live music all day…

… and, apparently, free hugs:

And every once in a while, another smile…

Technical stuff:

I carried two cameras with me all day: Canon 40D with 70-200mm f/2.8 L and a Canon 7D with a 24-70mm f/2.8L (for 1/2 of the day) and a 16-35mm f/2.8L (for the 2nd half of the day). Both cameras were in Auto ISO mode most of the time and either in aperture or shutter priority mode as needed. As noted the light conditions were very harsh and I was moving between full-on sun and shade/shadow constantly. In retrospect I probably should have had a -1/3 stop or so exposure compensation dialed in more than I did to take the edge off the bright sun. I had a fair number of images compromised by the wide dynamic range and I should have cheated under a bit. Metering was evaluative and center-weighted, depending on the subject and conditions.

Post processing done in Lightroom 3. I took about 450 images and tossed about 20 right away (half of them were shots of the sidewalk — I guess the release button hit my leg or something). I then did a pass for white balance — first everything at around 5700K and then I use the “spray” tool to “paint” a 7000K setting on images taken in shade or shadow. Everything got a +20 clarity and +20 vibrance — my standard tweak for raw images.

After working one image that had particularly harsh light I realized that the settings would probably work for a lot of other similar images. I dropped the exposure by 0.8EV, set Recovery to 38, set Fill to 38, and the black point to 28. This provided a base that worked surprisingly well across a wide variety of images: the EV drop and Recovery softened the harsh highlights, while the fill brought back what would normally be midtones and the black point restored the contrast.

There are always special cases and I tweaked those images as needed, but the great majority were handled with the above workflow settings.

I happened to turn on Lens Profile Correction for one image and liked what it did so much that I applied it to all of the images. A spot check of the set indicated that this was the correct decision. I may now make this part of my standard Lightroom workflow. What a frickin’ cool feature.

A Short Vacation on Umbagog Lake

Dave — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:03:30 +0000

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.

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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!