Can’t Miss February

My wife is here in Nebraska with me now and I have been busy finding a house to purchase while finishing up my job training and thus kicking photography to the curb for the time being. For some reason I didn’t want my archives on this site to skip the month of February, so I will quick upload a shot I worked on a while back that I thought was only so so before I jump into bed for my midnight shift. This shot is looking off into the Cappadocia horizon with little rock churches strewn about with Mt. Erciyes looming in the background. I believe this stitch is from about three or four shots as well.

Gotemba Project

Last May we took a quick trip over to the Hakone area to go to this crazy onsen that has everything from a coffee bath, a wine bath, sake bath, and a pool you dip your feet into and let little fish nibble off your top layer of skin. We also were able to see another side of Fuji I had not seen before once we reached the Gotemba area. The city of Gotemba has got one hell of a view! I took these shots from their shrine, which was also nearby an awesome camp spot we found that was cheap and had a pretty amazing view of Fuji as well. I think I actually enjoyed the Gotemba area a bit more than Hakone, which is probably blasphemous to even say as so many people love Hakone, but that is the problem.. So many people in Hakone!

Of course, every time I go through my shots of Japan I miss it quite a bit, but it is easy to forget that during the spring time when I took these shots I had the worst allergies of my life! I could barely sleep at night for over a month during our last year there. I guess that is the price exacted by Mother Japan for so much amazing photography potential.

Bradley Lake

Our first stop on our road trip from Idaho to Georgia was Teton National Park. We quick pitched our tent to secure a camping spot then took off down the road for a hike to Bradley Lake. We didn’t know it at the time, but this blue sky during the hike was the last we would see until we were almost in Georgia. The rain began a couple of minutes before we reached the car and then it turned into what felt like a full on monsoon. Breaking the tent down in the morning was fun using the break-down-the-tent-while-still-inside-of-it-leaving-the-rain-fly-for-last technique. This place is definitely needing further attention from me in the future.

Eight Shot Pano. Full size can be found HERE in all of its glory.

Spiderer

I am pretty sure this is in no way a unique shot as about 5 million people have probably stood beneath this sculpture with camera pointed towards the sky, but this is my take. I used a 7 shot DRI for the sky and HDR for the sculpture and building. I cheated a little bit and cloned out a small amount of some random building on the bottom left side of the shot.

Crowd Sourcing

More, more, and even more shots from the photography goldmine known as Shibuya Crossing. It is quite entertaining to browse through my shots from this location. A lot of them are not fit for posting, but the expressions on random strangers faces will keep me from ever discarding the files into the bit shredder. When I am shooting, I never realize how many people glance at me with my camera then become extremely shy or timid and look down towards the ground or towards their side  with a big awkward smile. Sometimes I come across a pair of fashionistas that are eager to get themselves into a shot to hopefully one day be acknowledged for their chic taste in seasonal wardrobe.

 

So first you have the lineup between each succession of lights. This is were I begin my offensive planning and the other team begins their defensive posturing. I plot my victims and they plot their evasive actions, strategic placement behind others to block my view, and funny faces to be made.

 

My coach usually pulls up on his bike beside me and gives me some helpful advice, like pretending to take a picture of the street light above me, then quickly moving in for the capture kill when they least expect it. Thanks coach!

 

Some of them are tricky and can generally work strategic placement to their advantage. This is when you have to bump up the ISO, open up that aperture, and “snipe the gaps” as coach likes to call it.

 

Here is a perfect implementation of the photographer distracted by the street ligh.. not! technique. She never had a chance, caught out in the open.

 

Yes, I see you back there running with ear muffs.. You have bested me with strategic placement behind random stranger, but random stranger has wind blowing through long flowing hair. I win this time!

My Congregation

This post leads into the last shot I posted of the city. I took a couple of steps back and snapped off some shots of the other people enjoying the observation deck. There are usually quite a few people with DSLR’s pressed up against the glass, trying to find the right angle to eliminate glare from the sun and building lights while avoiding the atrocity I call window smudges! I messed around a bit in Lightroom to convert it to black and white, then just exported the unaltered shot into Nik Softwares Silver Efex Pro. This program is just amazing for black and white conversions. I don’t think any other software is quite a match for it! I thought my Lightroom version was looking pretty good, but Silver Efex Pro just seems to know something I do not and bested me and my Lightroom sliders.

Sleight of Tutorial

Alright, this tutorial may not be all that helpful for anyone, but here goes anyways! I tried to find a picture that wasn’t necessarily one of my personal favorites, but one that would benefit from my method of processing the shot twice and then overlaying the two shots to mask the best parts of the shot together. Usually HDR will slaughter the sky and do great on object texture while DRI will do great on the sky while leaving a contrast to be desired on the main subjects. I also chose this shot because it demonstrates that I am not one of those photographers that is averse to editing crap out of the image that would detract from the scene. When I go out to take shots, I want to capture a scene in a way that is at least a little better than what the human eye is used to seeing. This means I have no qualms about editing out random objects that are out of place such as a branch or someones big head that you could just not find a way out of your composition.

This is the end result and it was taken on the observation deck of the Roppongi Tower, so there are quite a few smudges on the glass that are visible in the RAW shots and shooting through glass really amplified the drab pollution in the sky. Rather than bring my own bottle of Windex with me into the tower and waiting for 280 days when the weather finally blows all of the air pollution away and the sun comes out, I will use technology and be done with it! Again, I am not all that impressed with this shot at all, but maybe it will be at least helpful to see how I work on a real problem shot so 90% of your other shots will be a lot easier to process.

 

So if anyone ever wondered how the bracketed shots look before sending them to Photomatix, here are my original shots.. Very drab. If you were to spice them up with color and sharpening before exporting them to Photomatix, you will probably end up with a very strong HDR/DRI that may burn out your retina if you make direct eye contact with the shot. So about the only thing I ever chance would be the white balance if I didn’t nail it in camera, everything else can wait for Photoshop.

 

So first things first, the sky is the worst.. So I go straight to processing an HDRI shot since it tends to produce a much more natural looking sky than an HDR with its extreme propensity to halo the sky wherever it meets an object. Now the sliders will be different with every shot I process, but you can see the final settings I had set before processing with the sky as pretty much the only thing I was looking at since the rest of the shot will not be used almost at all.

 

Now I re-import my bracketed shots and start adjusting the HDR sliders until the city looks the way I want it and not caring at all how the sky looks since I will not be using any part of the HDR sky in the final shot. These sliders do stay more constant. Strength is always below 25%, Light Mode is always either Med or High, Microcontrast is set as high as I possibly can since this setting is what really gives you sharp looking textures. The Miscellaneous sliders almost always stay on 0% unless I am high on Skittles, which hardly ever happens..

 

So here we see a side by side of the processed HDR and DRI shots. You can see the city looks pretty bad in the DRI, but the sky looks a lot cleaner (at least on my monitor when I was processing it!) The HDR has the city buildings and roads looking a lot more how I would like them, but the sky looks like dirt. Let’s fire up Photoshop and open both shots.

 

Now you are going to bone up on your PS shortcut chops as I tell you how I create the layers. Go ahead and select the Move Tool and go to the photo that you want to be on the top of your layer. This should be the shot with the highest percentage of shot that is what you want in the final shot to save you some time masking out the bad parts. I will place the HDR on top since the city is the keeper part and it makes up about 80% of the shot. So I go to that shot and then hit Ctrl+a to highlight the entire shot. Now hold Ctrl+Alt and use your Left mouse button to drag a copy of the shot to the tab with the DRI. After you hover the mouse over the DRI tab, PS should now display the DRI shot. Now keep the Left mouse button selected and let go of Ctr+Alt. Now hit the Shift key and then you can finally let go of the the Left mouse button. I apologize for you Mac users, I do not know the shortcuts you need to use, but you should probably first ask Steve Jobs if he feels like allowing the use of shortcuts and hope he is feeling good that day.

The last step insured that the HDR will be placed directly over the center of the DRI shot. Sometimes Photomatix will crop each shot a bit differently, so you may have to go to the Layer Palette and drop the opacity of the top layer down to about 18% and use the Ctrl key and the Left mouse button to drag the shot around until it is perfectly lined up.

Next you will go over to your Layer Palette and select the little icon I have highlighted in the above shot, which is called Add Vector Mask. You will now see a white rectangle appear to the left of your top layer, if not, then you are fired.

 

If your are wondering what in the hell a vector mask is, well, we are going to process this photo like a boss the way Adobe engineers intended. We are going to get set up to start masking since the eraser tool is totally for artards.

So first go to the Foreground and Background boxes I highlighted on the bottom of my toolbar. These need to be black and white. You simply click on whichever box you want to change and select the color and hit okay. Now once we select the paint brush, we are set up to start masking, or what I like to call painting parts of the picture through. When you have the black color in front and your paintbrush set to 100% Opacity and Flow, you will erase 100% of the top part of the picture with your paint brush. Now when you hit the X button, white will now be the foreground color and every time you use the paintbrush you will paint back the top layer. So if you still have 100% opacity and Flow select and go over the spot you just erased, it will bring the part of the top lay back as if it was never erased.

Do you see how helpful this is for photography? If I make a mistake painting parts of a picture through, I simply hit X to bring white to the foreground, select about 20% opacity and bring back the spot that I erased too much of and I can then hit X again to select black and go back on my merry way painting through parts of the bottom layer. I usually work with low opacities to paint through slowly since it looks more natural rather than painting the bottom picture through 100%.

 

So on this shot, the two bottom boxes I highlighted are where you can see the abrupt transition where I painted through 100% of the bottom DRI layer to bring out the good sky. Now I need to drop my paint bursh opacity down to about 15% and make sure the Hardness of the brush is set to 0% and work on the transition of the sky into the city where the HDR portion begins. Dropping the hardness can be done by right clicking anywhere on the shot with the Paint Brush selected; you can also adjust the size of your brush with this little menu.

The top right box is where I highlighted the dirty glass with reflections. For this I will use my clone tool to completely erase evidence of such atrocities.

 

Now the hard part is over and we can start on the process of color correction and sharpening. If you are certain you are done masking, you will now want to right click a thumbnail in the Layer Palette and merge both layers together. Now I will hit Ctrl+M to bring up the curves tool. Adjusting RGB will change the contrast and selecting Red, Green, and Blue will of course help remove color casts or add one if you so desire. I removed a bit of a red and green cast and added a blue to help clean up the sky a bit more. The Tokyo sky can be a real bastard with the thick humidity in the air!

 

Next is my secret weapon, the Nik Software Suite. I feel that they currently make the best tools for sharpening a shot, removing noise, and converting to black and white. I will use Lightroom to sharpen a shot if I do not need to do anything else in Photoshop, but any shot that goes into PS will see the business end of the Nik Output Sharpener tool. I mostly leave everything set to default and just hit okay. Once it is done, it actually creates a layer and applies the changes to the top layer. Now you can select your eraser tool and desired opacity and erase any parts of the sharpening that you are not keen on. The program does such a good job that you rarely have to erase anything.

Now I would perform some noise removal with the Nik Software Dfine tool and erase parts you do not want to be softened. For this shot I erased all of the city from the top layer and let the sky be the only part of the shot with noise reduction. Now you will need to go to the Layer Palette again and merge all of these shot together. Next go to Image>Mode and select 8 Bits/Channel to be able to save your shot as a JPEG.

Wind Chill

Yesterday was quite a blizzard here in Alliance. I think it is the most snow I have had at any place I have lived since I left Utah. I definitely enjoy the hell out of it too, I wish I had a snow mobile, a snow cat, or skis and a mountain, but it was fun enough driving around the last two days busting on through drifts in my truck. I headed out east for about 35 miles to explore a little bit and look for some shots. It was really, really, really cold with the wind chill! It was actually painful on exposed skin within seconds in the area I took the shot of the do not pass sign. Also got a better shot of the trains. They were parked up and down the tracks today with no one in them. I think they picked up everyone and sent them back home in a van for New Years.

Anyways, in the next day or two I have a haphazard tutorial on my HDR/DRI process that I should be able to post. I was going to post a write up on these shots as well, but my HDR and DRI versions sucked pretty bad. These are just regular shots. *Edit, figured out why my bracketed shots sucked.. Was shooting at 800 ISO all day.. Nikon needs to make an option that resets the ISO to 200 after cycling the camera on and off for tards like myself!