Category: Journal

My personal journal of the Photographer as an Artist

Canon 1Ds Mark III

Well, there’s not a whole lot new to report tonight.  I took a couple of shots out the back today and really like the RGB histogram.  Have you ever had a shot that didn’t look like it was clipped but ended up clipped in one of the channels?  Well, now you’ll know and can do something about it while you still have a chance.

I also played around some with exposure bracketing.  In addition to planning on doing HDR I also plan to try out Uwe Steinmueller’s High Speed HDR technique.  That’s where you do HDR hand held.  At 5 frames per second it’s a good bet the 1Ds Mark III will be fast enough to do hand held HDR (although it’s only half as fast as it’s little brother the 1D Mark III which Uwe shoots).  Well, it turns out that to do High Speed HDR you need to turn off High ISO Speed Noise Reduction.  It turns out it cuts the buffer to about 1/4 its size.

No photographs uploaded to the computer yet but we’re making some progress.  So,…

Stay tuned.

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Canon 1Ds Mark III

It arrived yesterday, my new Canon 1Ds Mark III.  Graduating up from a 10D is like graduating from a slide rule to a computer (does anyone still remember slide rules or have I limited the people who will understand that analogy to pre-baby boomers?)  I spent about two and a half hours last night going through the instruction manual.  Yes, there are people who still read the manual, at least in some situations and this was one.

There are so many things that amaze me just from first impressions.  The first thing I noticed was that it was actually much lighter than I expected.  But my first impressions were made before the battery was installed.  😉  But even with the battery installed it was lighter than I expected.  Then I put my 24-70 f/2.8L on it and it got heavy.

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Welcome Roger Nordstrom

My brother, Roger, just launched his own blog yesterday.  I added his site to the Glogroll and will be adding an RSS feed.  I encourage you to check it out at RogerNordstromPhoto.blogspot.com.  He also has a very nice website with some of his amazing work.  You’ll want to check that out also at RogerNordstromPhoto.com.  You’ll love his work.

 Welcome Roger.

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Experiences with CIE Lab Processing – Follow-up

I worked more on the CIE Lab photo from the previous post and have some thoughts on what I’d do differently.

 First, I didn’t do a whole lot of value and contrast adjustments the first time.  I just created one Curve to adjust luminance.  Next time around I’ll add curves for brightening/darkening and for contrast enhancement/reduction.  All of these will operate on the L channel.

What I won’t do is get into Hue/Saturation or Selective Color.  If that’s needed I’ll do that once I get back into RGB mode.  Hopefully not much will be needed as we’re back with the old problems of RGB.

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Experiences with CIE Lab Processing

Last night I tried processing an image in Lab color space for the first time.  If you’re not familiar with Lab, it is the most accurate color space and has a gamut that covers the entire human visual spectrum.  There’s an interesting article written by Jeremy McCleary that describes how human vision works and compares it to the Lab color space which is as close of a match as you can come – Human Vision and Digital Imaging.

Basically, Lab separates luminance (think black and white) from color.  Similar to RGB, there are three channels.  However, with RGB the channels are Red, Green and Blue.  With Lab the channels are L for luminance (brightness and darkness), a for magenta green opposition and b for yellow blue opposition.

The advantage of Lab over RBG (or CMYK) is that the luminance can be adjusted without affecting color and vise versa.  In RGB changing luminance will affect color saturation; in Lab it doesn’t.

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Welcome Jack Graham

In photography one of the most powerful means of growing is through interactions with the other photographers we meet, be they in workshops or in the field.  Not only do you learn from artists who create amazing photographs but you also build friendships.

One such chance meeting of an outstanding photographer and friend is Jack Graham.  We met on the banks of Mono Lake in October of 2006.  I was there by myself; he was leading a workshop.  We were shooting the South Tufa at sunrise under the harvest moon setting in the west above the imposing Sierra Nevada range.

I added the address to Jack’s blog in the blogroll.  You can also click here.

You’ll also want to be sure to check out his work.  You can click here.

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DxO Impressions 1

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was using DxO now.  I was introduced to the product in November at the Digital Summit workshop in Zion National Park.  It looked pretty interesting and besides I got a deal I couldn’t refuse.  I waited for the release of DxO Optics Pro 5 before jumping in.  There were a lot of improvements made to version 5 that corrected some of the more serious shortcomings of version 4.

First of all, DxO works with RAW images.  And given the sorts of corrections it applies, it makes sense to use DxO before any other RAW converter like LR, ACR or Capture One.  So that’s where it comes in my workflow.  Actually, I generally import RAW images into LR first, review and rank them in LR.  When I determine the images I want to work on I then bring them into DxO and work on them there before returning to LR.

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More Surprises

The First Surprises 

The recovery after the burn holds one surprise after another.  The first surprise was how quickly the thistles started growing back.  They didn’t even wait for rain.  It only took a few weeks and they were sprouting.

 The second surprise was how quickly the grasses came up with just a couple of inches of rain.  And they’ve been nurtured with additional rain and are growing rapidly and spreading.

With the grasses growing the color combination of the hills was rapidly becoming green and black, not a combination of colors that I found particularly appealing.  The colors looked harsh.  I longed for the more familiar greens and browns typical of Southern California hillsides in spring (at least when we’re not in the midst of a drought year).

Well, as they say, be careful of what you wish (or long) for.  You just might get it.

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Photoshop Discoveries 1

I stumbled across a very effective technique tonight.  But first a little background.  The image I was working on was a 4 photo HDR shot.  I processed each of the four first in DXO, then LR and finally Photomatix.  The first pass resulted in a sky that was very strange.  The word that best describes it is ‘posterization.’  No other area of the image had this problem, just the sky.  Where it transitioned from a darker blue to a lighter hue the transition was splotchy and pixelated. 

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