Sometimes, these collections slowly grow over a very long time. Keywording your photos properly helps a lot to find them one day. Lightroom's Smart Collection feature is really handy for that. My smart collections are rather simple - most of the time just one or two keywords (or just the process flag "grayscale" to collect all monochrome photos). The collections that I publish on my web site are still hand-picked from the smart collections in Lightroom.
2009-12-16
Branches album
Labels:
lightroom
I already announced it in my Picasa Web Album in a caption a few days ago - I've published a small album on my website which contains a collection of my favorite branches. :-)
2009-12-13
I know it all
Something that upsets me time and time again is the "I know it all" attitude of certain people in photography forums. The internet certainly supplied the dillettantes with additional self confidence (one could also say that their lack of decency is countered by a boasted self-esteem).
Recently, someone claimed that mirror lock up would not make much of a difference "as long as you're using a good tripod" - while the benefits of mirror lock up have been described adequatly and readily available on the internet, by Bob Atkins (beware, lots of ads...) and the late Fritz Pölking (article in german) for example.
Other people claim knowledge over all tripods because they know what a "real" tripod is (and cheap travel tripods are "fake", I assume - we'll never know...). It doesn't occur to them that the knowledge they gained might only be true for their experience and their photography (but to their great surprise, not everyone is carrying a 4kg telezoom and a full frame body with battery grip around all the time).
Other people claim knowledge over all tripods because they know what a "real" tripod is (and cheap travel tripods are "fake", I assume - we'll never know...). It doesn't occur to them that the knowledge they gained might only be true for their experience and their photography (but to their great surprise, not everyone is carrying a 4kg telezoom and a full frame body with battery grip around all the time).
And then there's the hords of pixel-peeping lens evaluators that apparently spend their nights in front of the screen, gazing at 1:1 views or 100% crops, to come up with something like "oh yeah, the xyz lens is a little bit soft at 300mm". Good on you, mate!
But please don't get me wrong. It's important to know your stuff. If you know where your lenses have their peak performance, you can utilize it. If you know how your camera behaves and how it's metering will betray you in this-and-that situation, you can counteract and get the best shot. It's great if people share that knowledge - but it's one hell of an annoying disservice to assume that this what you found out equally applies to all the people in the world!
I think winter is no good for me. I should be out and make photos instead of hanging around in forums.
Upside down graduated filter in LR
Labels:
exposure,
filters,
lightroom,
post processing
Graduated filters are a classic tool in photography - be it for taming a big dynamic range or adding a cheesy tint to a sunset sky. They've made their way into software as well - Picasa had a feature to simulate them for a very long time and I showed one possible usage here. Lightroom has them since version 2 (and in a much more versatile way than Picasa - you can adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, clarity, saturation, sharpness and tone the whole thing - wow! the only thing missing for me is to have a spline instead of a straight line as a border for the effect).
Graduated filters have become a tool that I regularly use - very often in the very classic way to bring down a too bright sky, which makes especially sense when you're shooting raw because you have a lot more headroom in the highlights (and again especially with the S5pro and it's remarkable dynamic range, of course;-).
However, there is one interesting "new" use of graduated filters, and that is using it upside down - adding the filter to not bring down the highlights, but lift the shadows.
About 10 days ago on my way to work I stopped at one of Burghausen's vista points opposite of the famous castle to capture this scene:
"Castle Morning" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/230s @ ISO 100; f/11, 80 mm DX, handheld)
It was particularly beautiful how the details below the main castle (which is at the left side of the frame), namely the Pulverturm (gunpowder tower) appeared as schemes in the early morning fog of that December day - but in the original photo above, not much of it is visible... and here's what it looks like after applying a graduated filter in Lightroom to bring up the shadows by 0.80EV:
"Castle" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/230s @ ISO 100; f/11, 80 mm DX, handheld)
That's much more like what I was actually seeing (and yes, I toned the sky a little bit with Split Toning in LR instead of adjusting the white balance). The details in the shadows are a bit noisy of course (more so in this web version, the original has none of those artifacts), but since this particular scene is more about these structures in the fog, to just give a little hint that they are there, and not so much about their details, it's not much of a problem.
Now wait... why didn't I use the Fill Light feature instead? Because of the sharp transition of the dark tree silhouettes at the edge of the rim in front of the morning sky. Using Fill Light, I would have lifted up the brightness of these tree silhouettes too, which introduces sometimes more, sometimes less visible halo-like artifacts that reduce clarity and sharpness. In this scene, a rather unwanted effect.
Graduated filters have become a tool that I regularly use - very often in the very classic way to bring down a too bright sky, which makes especially sense when you're shooting raw because you have a lot more headroom in the highlights (and again especially with the S5pro and it's remarkable dynamic range, of course;-).
However, there is one interesting "new" use of graduated filters, and that is using it upside down - adding the filter to not bring down the highlights, but lift the shadows.
About 10 days ago on my way to work I stopped at one of Burghausen's vista points opposite of the famous castle to capture this scene:
"Castle Morning" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/230s @ ISO 100; f/11, 80 mm DX, handheld)
It was particularly beautiful how the details below the main castle (which is at the left side of the frame), namely the Pulverturm (gunpowder tower) appeared as schemes in the early morning fog of that December day - but in the original photo above, not much of it is visible... and here's what it looks like after applying a graduated filter in Lightroom to bring up the shadows by 0.80EV:
"Castle" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/230s @ ISO 100; f/11, 80 mm DX, handheld)
That's much more like what I was actually seeing (and yes, I toned the sky a little bit with Split Toning in LR instead of adjusting the white balance). The details in the shadows are a bit noisy of course (more so in this web version, the original has none of those artifacts), but since this particular scene is more about these structures in the fog, to just give a little hint that they are there, and not so much about their details, it's not much of a problem.
Now wait... why didn't I use the Fill Light feature instead? Because of the sharp transition of the dark tree silhouettes at the edge of the rim in front of the morning sky. Using Fill Light, I would have lifted up the brightness of these tree silhouettes too, which introduces sometimes more, sometimes less visible halo-like artifacts that reduce clarity and sharpness. In this scene, a rather unwanted effect.
PS: once more, for this scene with the shadows being lifted just so much that the detail becomes somewhat visible, a properly calibrated display is an absolutely must. If you're serious about your post processing - calibrate!
2009-12-11
Have a break
Labels:
personal,
post processing
There is an old lesson from my days of composing music that I should have transported into the realms of photography, and especially post processing, and that is: have a break. Take it easy. Put things to the side, and do something else.
When making music, it happened to me all too often that at a certain point, I was getting into a real rush, and everything just seemed to work and everything just seemed to be perfect and super and cool and whatnot. It was not a big problem when composing for me, because I seldom, if ever, finished a track in one evening and published it right away. I always saved my work, turned off the computer, went to bed, shopping, whatever...
And guess what - when I came back and continued working on the music, suddenly things weren't that superduper cool anymore; instead, I found a lot of flaws that I didn't notice before... and the same goes for post-processing photos.
This is version 2 of a photo that I made last Saturday in the late afternoon at the Huckinger See (one of my favorite locations, no doubt) in Austria as the sun was setting and the fog moved in very quietly and calm:
"Disappearing in the Mist (v2) (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 100; f/8, 12 mm DX)
However... when I first saw the scene at home on the screen I thought "oh yes, that's gorgeous" (because I slowly arrived at this almost very last photo of that session of course and saw how things developed, on screen, in the previous shots that I already processed) - and this is what I initially published to my Picasa Web Album a couple of days ago:
"Disappearing in the Mist (v1) (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 100; f/8, 12 mm DX)
The longer I looked at it, the more obvious it became that this amount of blue just can't possibly have been there. It was already pretty dark and colours were somewhat muted; I couldn't really tell how much blue there might have been. But in that first version... gee, it's simply way too much!
In version 2, I adjusted the white balance and reduced the vibrance and also decreased the blue saturation. It looks much more natural to me now. Lightroom should have a timer for me that would pop up a requester "take a break!" after using it for one hour, or something. :-)
When making music, it happened to me all too often that at a certain point, I was getting into a real rush, and everything just seemed to work and everything just seemed to be perfect and super and cool and whatnot. It was not a big problem when composing for me, because I seldom, if ever, finished a track in one evening and published it right away. I always saved my work, turned off the computer, went to bed, shopping, whatever...
And guess what - when I came back and continued working on the music, suddenly things weren't that superduper cool anymore; instead, I found a lot of flaws that I didn't notice before... and the same goes for post-processing photos.
This is version 2 of a photo that I made last Saturday in the late afternoon at the Huckinger See (one of my favorite locations, no doubt) in Austria as the sun was setting and the fog moved in very quietly and calm:
"Disappearing in the Mist (v2) (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 100; f/8, 12 mm DX)
However... when I first saw the scene at home on the screen I thought "oh yes, that's gorgeous" (because I slowly arrived at this almost very last photo of that session of course and saw how things developed, on screen, in the previous shots that I already processed) - and this is what I initially published to my Picasa Web Album a couple of days ago:
"Disappearing in the Mist (v1) (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 100; f/8, 12 mm DX)
The longer I looked at it, the more obvious it became that this amount of blue just can't possibly have been there. It was already pretty dark and colours were somewhat muted; I couldn't really tell how much blue there might have been. But in that first version... gee, it's simply way too much!
In version 2, I adjusted the white balance and reduced the vibrance and also decreased the blue saturation. It looks much more natural to me now. Lightroom should have a timer for me that would pop up a requester "take a break!" after using it for one hour, or something. :-)
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