Saturday, June 23, 2012

Some basic adjustments in Lightroom 4

In a previous post, I showed a before and after test shot of the canyon at Tent Rocks National Monument. The new tools in the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 [LR4] develop module made the corrections incredibly easy.

In Lightroom 3.6, the basic panel looked like this:


These controls gave a great change to making adjustments to photos from Photoshop where several adjustment layers used to be needed for most corrections.

There are new tools in LR4:


This gives even greater control over the light and dark sections of a photograph, like the one I shot to test.


I shot the frame above to test both the tonal response of the new Nikon D800, and the recently released LR4. Due to the depth of the canyon, and the bright sunlight at mid afternoon, both the highlights and shadows are nearly completely blown out, as indicated by the histogram.


This shows that almost all of the tonality is at either end of the spectrum, with almost nothing in the middle.

The first thing I did was bring up the dark areas a bit with the shadows slider.


Which yielded this:






OK, I've gotten a lot of detail back in the bottom end, but the highlights are still too much, so I naturally went for the highlights slider.


Now we're getting somewhere... the details in the rock just right of center at the top of the frame are back. Unfortunately it brought down some of the detail in the shadows... so lets hit the blacks (clipping) slider...

Which gave me the end result:


To look at the histogram, the tonality is much closer to the middle of the range (OK, it's not dead center, but it's not clipped out anymore- and heck, it WAS really dark in there!)


Total time for the adjustments was about two minutes, and no layers were needed. I absolutely love Lightroom for how much easier post-processing has become.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Desert wildlife...

The other day, I was showing a friend some of my photos from my trip to the southwest and she asked me an unexpected question... "how did you find so much wildlife in the desert?"

The easy answer is that I was looking. The longer one is that I remembered something I was taught back when I was in the boy scouts- be quiet.

The general concept is easy- the more noise you make, the more the locals will hear and be scared off.

I did explain that it wasn't so much that the animals were coming up to me as they weren't necessarily running away.

Another benefit to being quiet is you're less likely to wake up creatures that you don't want to upset.

admittedly out of focus, but I had a compelling urge to not be there



On my first hike (actually, all hikes), I was carefully checking the pockets under and between boulders for snakes, and sure enough I found one. I quickly snapped a shot and moved away; since I was miles from any assistance, I didn't want to take a chance of being bitten.

These birds really do move like the cartoon. It's really funny to watch.

When I reached the turn-around point on the same hike, my memory card was nearing full when I saw a road runner. Since the trail out went right through the center of the "canyon," I figured I wouldn't see anything else but sagebrush, so decided to top off the card with a couple shots of the bird and head out. Just as I topped off the card, I was joking to myself, "where's Wile E.?" No sooner did I think that, and turn, then I saw a coyote not 40 yards away. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my card swapped out before he ran away.

My buddy LeRoi hanging out on a boulder.
The following day, I started on the west end of Petroglyph National Monument at the Volcanoes Day Use Area. I kept hearing rattlers in the distance, but didn't see any. What I did see was a lot of lizards, like the collared lizard above that was just hanging out in the sun. I decided to move sideways and kind of around him to get a better vantage point, in case heading straight for him might freak him out- I was originally directly in front of him. I popped off a couple shots, thanked him, and went on my way.


About half an hour later, I found this guy hanging out in the shadow side of one of the volcanoes hanging on the vertical face of a boulder.


Finally, much later that afternoon, this guy and several family members were all running around apparently trying to scrounge up some food. I couldn't believe how big they are. The guy above was likely a little over two feet tall.

Being from the east coast, I never would have imagined that there was so much diversified life in the desert.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Never believe the display on the back of the camera.

I'm still going through the photos from my trip.

Before I went out there, I had several ideas for what I wanted to try to shoot that I can't do at home. One of the main ideas was to try to get a nice star field shot. At home, since I'm in the middle of what William Gibson once called the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area, it's difficult for me to get away from light pollution. If you see a night shot of the United States from orbit, the entire east coast is lit up. Once you combine that with the depth of the atmosphere and the general humidity, it's a really bad mix.

One day (actually it was the middle of the night) while I was out there, I was sitting at the desk in my hotel room, and decided to give it a shot. I pulled out my iPad and started up Sky Safari to see where the Milky Way was. I looked down at the compass that I had on the desk and got an idea, so I headed out to the Volcanos Day Use area of Petroglyph National Monument. The park closes at 7PM, but the gate closes at 5, so there's an outer parking lot to use if you're going to be there later. About 15 minutes before I got there, these clouds (truth be told, it could have been smoke from a wildfire in the SW corner of the state) started moving in. Since the park was closed, I was not going to go in, just stay in the parking lot, and try to get the Milky way trailing down onto one of the volcanoes. I popped off a couple shots, chimping the entire time, which I usually try not to do (chimping- def.: constantly looking at the LCD on your camera, saying ooh ooh ooh.). I was basically disappointed by what I saw, but know better than to believe it until the shots get loaded onto the computer and I can view them on a better display.

When I got home, I was pleasantly surprised.


On the back of the camera, the glow from the city was overwhelming. When I opened it up on my real display, I really did say ooooh. I'm glad I didn't delete it out of hand.


Saturday, June 9, 2012

Home from New Mexico

I got back two weeks ago tomorrow, and am still going through my photos.

First, I have to say that the Nikon D800 is an amazing piece of tech, and I've decided that I need to save up to get one. I was actually debating on the D800e, until I got to look at the files when I got home... even just looking at the RAW files in Lightroom, it almost looks like I've over sharpened them; the resolution is that good. I'm almost thinking that the lack of the anti-aliasing filter would possibly be too much.

I do LOVE the built-in three axis level, which can be programmed to turn on with one of the two programmable soft buttons on the front of the body right near the lens mount that are reachable with your right hand. Also, the M-UP (formerly tripod mode) availability on the mode dial is incredibly useful. No more rooting through menus. The low light response is incredible, as is the tonal response through the entire range of the sensor. I read somewhere that it's pushing 14 EV (nearing that of slide film), and I tend to believe it...

Slot Canyon at Kasha-Katuwe as shot

Just as an experiment (for both the camera and Lightroom 4), I shot this on one of my hikes with the meter set for full matrix metering, trying to get the shadows and highlights to just about start clipping out because the scene was so extreme. I wanted to see if anything would be salvageable at the high and low ends of the exposure without having to resort to HDR. After some minor tweaking with some of the new controls in Lightroom's Develop Module, I got this:

Same frame after some minor adjustments.
I then started thinking about 13 years ago when I got my first digital camera, a Nikon E950, this kind of image recovery would have been nearly impossible; but then again, this camera has nearly 20 times the resolution of the E950.

A couple posts ago, I mentioned that I was debating which camera body/lens combination I wanted to use for the eclipse- either my D300 with my 300mm lens, or the rented D800 with my 80-200. I decided on the latter for a couple reasons. First, the lens is much higher quality. The second was that while the native crop factor of the D300 makes the lens effectively 1.5 times longer, with the D800 I could crop 50% of the frame away, and still have more data in the file.

2012 Annular Eclipse
The eclipse was definitely something to see, and I'm absolutely thrilled I decided to go. The Bugger is that I filled an 8GB memory card with just this at varying stages.

Horizon at full annularity.
The part that I found amazing about the eclipse was how much light was still available. The above two photos were taken within a minute of each other.

Due to where I was, the moon's shadow was still present on the sun at sunset.

The line across the bottom of the sun is the horizon, and you can just about make out the corner of one of the volcanoes in Petroglyph (the high points in the horizon shot above).