630 - Oooh, What A Lucky Man I Was

Yesterday's food is from the can. I was short on time in the morning, and when I left for the train, the light was utterly flat and uninspiring. I could have delayed photographing to the evening, but on the other hand I had plenty of time for post-processing while on the train.

I always carry a bunch of files with me in a folder "TODO", and for lack of anything better to do, I began processing some of them.

The decaying house front is not far from where I live. When I am late and take the way to work via the Underground, I always pass by, but this particular image was taken about a year ago, in the afternoon. I used my Nikon 50/1.2 and was on the way to a concert where I wanted to use this fast lens.

The next image, a garbage can in Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna, was taken last August with the then new Sigma 20/1.8. It was early morning on a bright day with blinding sunlight, and I liked the contrast between the modern design and the traces of ... uhmm ... neglect.

The final image, the Image of the Day, is from that Sunday morning in Florence/Italy when I was photographing with my friend Ted Byrne. This image was taken while Ted was on the other side, making the first image that he posted from Florence.

This is one of those images that I always wanted to process. I tried it one time and did not particularly like the result, so it went back into the "TODO" folder. Much to Ted's annoyance I took all my images that morning from the tripod and I really took my time. Just as I was satisfied with the framing, a white car drove by to park in front of these poles, right in my image. I pressed the shutter only a second before. The sidelight is from the car's head lights. While the original would have been nothing but a failed attempt, this side light makes the image, and that's also what was so hard to bring out in post-processing. I was just a lucky man :)

The Song of the Day is "Lucky Man" from ELP's 1970 debut album "Emerson Lake & Palmer". See something like a video on YouTube.

616 - The Water

This morning I have fooled around for more than an hour with the only image of yesterday that could have been usable, but finally I decided to drop it. A dead horse is a dead horse, no need trying to ride it. Instead I present you another SoFoBoMo image, and this is the image that determined the style of my book. I had already processed more than fifteen images when I tried this one, and the result changed it all. This is one of the reasons why post-processing took me so long: after this image I had to re-work everything that came before.

The Song of the Day is "The Water" from the 2007 Feist album "The Reminder". See her live at YouTube.

611 - SoFoBoMo - Late But Done

Here we are, that's what I hinted at in my two earlier posts of today: The book is finished. Over the course of the last two days I have made the final touches to the images, finished some text that I had begun last Sunday on the train, produced the book in InDesign, created a PDF and uploaded it to ISSUU. I've also submitted it to sofobomo.org - let's see if it gets accepted. No way to deny it, the book was finished two weeks after the official end of SoFoBoMo '08, but at least it was done in less than a month, and that's what it was all about.

Paul Butzi recently posted some questions about the whole experience, so here are my answers:

• Was it fun? - Well, sure, of course. Actually I had expected it to be much more tedious and less fun than it was.


• What sort of things did you learn? - Oh, many. For instance that when you participate in a project, it is a good idea to start on time. Or that when you embark on a journey, you have to do it with all your heart. Or that thinking about a problem tends to diminish it greatly. Hmm ... all things that I would have known if it had been an IT project :)


• Was your experience pretty much what you expected, or it did turn out that doing the book was wildly different from what you’d pictured when you signed up? - I wouldn't say wildly different, but I have greatly underestimated the time that it would take to harmonize the images. In such a series of images, small differences in light are enough to make successive images different in the overall look. What the camera saw, can only be taken as an approximation. I have worked on all these images in Lab mode, and I am glad that I did so. It greatly simplified color corrections late in the process.


• What aspects of the whole thing were frustrating? - Only the time before I began, but that is only because I did not even really think about it. I presumed, a project would naturally spring into existence and was angry that it didn't.


• What aspects were most rewarding? - Browsing the finished book on ISSUU. Apart from that, well, I think mostly that I learned so many things, and that nothing turned out hard at all.


• Having participated this year (regardless of whether you finished it or not), would you ever want to do it again? - Yes, absolutely. The next time I will know how to approach the hardest part, i.e. finding a project, and I will have no problem starting when everybody else does. In fact I can't wait until next year, I will do at least one other book this year. Maybe it will be the "Naschmarkt" project that I have written about in the book, that means staying in a place, the biggest market place in Vienna, for a whole day and taking photographs from the time people arrive and get their deliveries, through the whole day, until at night the place gets cleaned up. We'll see. Maybe I'll do a "Best of 2007" and a "Best of 2008" as well. With the templates that I have, making a book that's structurally similar to this one, should not take more than two hours, at least for the PDF.


• Do you have suggestions about ways to change things to make it more successful/fun/educational/rewarding for participants in future SoFoBoMo events? - Not really. Thanks to you all and to your efforts this was as painless as it could be.


• What resources did you find helpful? - Paul Lester's "book in an hour", Some of Gordon's links, the hints pointing to ISSUU, and of course the free Blurbs templates on The Art of Engineering. I still had no more than cursory looks into the InDesign training DVD that I've bought.


• What aspects of SoFoBoMo were positive surprises? What aspects were disappointments? - Positive: I had no idea that it would be so simple to make a book. Master pages and the "place gun" in InDesign, these are real time savers. I had an incredibly simple layout though.


• How about that fuzzy month thing? Did that work for you, or not? - Obviously not, but that's nobody's but my fault. Starting so late completely disconnected me from most of the social experience, and I won't do that again. Still, even if it was a very solitary job, it was great to do it. Would I change the rules for next year? Well, probably we could reduce the fuzziness to 2 weeks, like Paul Lester suggested, but on the other hand, it seems to have worked for most participants. No, I'd keep it. It's a nice quirk :)

Here we are. And now? Was that it??

Not really. I have a PDF and a publication on ISSUU, thus the formal requirements for SoFoBoMo (apart from the time frame obviously) are fulfilled, but of course I want to get this beast printed on real paper. Many people seem to have gone the Blurb route, so that's probably what I'll do as well. I guess that's a job for the next weekend.

And then, of course I'll put my template up for download and maybe write a tutorial about what I've learned. This may not be much, but I think I have quite a good process now, at least for this narrow application. After all, when I looked at my book this morning, I found it too small for my taste. It took me about an hour to completely re-create it from scratch at a bigger size.

That's it for today. Here is the book. Enjoy!

The Song of the Day is "Late Show" from the 1986 Laurie Anderson album "Home Of The Brave". See the video on YouTube.

589 - The Vanishing Act

This is the result of another day off of SoFoBoMo. We were in Slovenia, about 90 minutes from home, and we came to see a fascinating phenomenon, a lake that's only there in winter and spring. In summer it completely dries up, only to re-appear half a year later.

Phenomena like this are not uncommon in Slovenia. Geologically this is a karst landscape, porous limestone full of caves and underground rivers, rivers that come out of a cave, only to vanish in a canyon some miles down, coming back to the light of day somewhere else.

We plan to come back some time in August for the other side of the story. It must be interesting to see the boats lying on the ground when there is no lake at all.

Or maybe that's not completely true. Some parts of the lake seemingly don't vanish completely, or if they do, they do it so late, that no grass grows where the water leaves. These parts are covered by a thick layer of dead reeds, an ideal place for small spiders. Wherever you tread, there are hundreds of them.

We finished the day with a trip to the peak of a nearby mountain. There, at 1114 meters above sea level, is a restaurant with a fantastic view on the lake below. This last image was taken from the forest road up the mountain.

The Song of the Day is "Vanishing Act" from the 2003 Lou Reed album "The Raven".

587 - The Tower

Yesterday I took a short break from SoFoBoMo editing. I went to a local park and tried to realize a concept that had been in my head for some time: Wide angle landscape images with tarot cards in them. The idea was to bring in a surreal element via the juxtaposition of reality and the symbols of the Major Arcana.

I failed miserably. I cannot remember a session that produced so much unusable rubbish in years. This image, although sub-par, is the only that I could even think of using. Well, let's forget about it :)

The Song of the Day is "I May Be Wrong, But I Won't Be Wrong Always" from the 1968 Ten Years After release "Undead".

582 - SoFoBoMo - The First Attack

Yesterday, after my first SoFoBoMo shooting trip, I was too tired to do much with the images at all, much less posting a blog entry. I had tried to realize concept #3, a real trip along a route, and I did it in a gorge in the southern mountains of Carinthia, the so called "Tscheppaschlucht".

The idea was, to simply follow the trail along the creek. I ended up with a five hour walk and 140 images taken. Enough for a book? Probably, but I will return anyway. Almost all images were shot with the Sigma 10-20, mostly at or around 10mm. In hindsight I'd like to have more with other lenses. You know, any lens brings with it a certain way of seeing, and I'd like to explore some different angles before I call it a book.

Processing will be done in Lab mode, using a "Man from Mars" for color correction. The images were originally shot at "Cloudy" white balance. I did not trust the automatics with all that yellow/green foliage. Conversion in Camera RAW was done to 5000 Kelvin / +10. That's a nice base for the Lab manipulations afterwards. Overall I try to keep processing conservative.

The Song of the Day is "The First Attack" from the 1987 Proclaimers album "This Is the Story". No sound samples but what Amazon has. Sorry.

575 - A Ray Of Light

It's Sunday night now and I write the entry for Saturday. Saturday afternoon I was out photographing for an hour, nothing special, only some wide-angle landscapes, but the really spectacular thing was, what I saw when I returned home.

Situations like these are really impossible to photograph. The dynamic range exceeds everything that sensors or film can record, yes, it exceeds even the range of the human eye. I had made two exposures, one with a completely burned out sky and a second with most of the sky intact, but everything else pretty lost in darkness.

The two exposures were from slightly different points of view and impossible to combine. I've decided to use the second one, the dark one. This is a 14 layer job with 8 distinct masks, but ultimately I think I made it. It's pretty amazing what enormous reserves the RAW files of Nikon's D300 have.

The Song of the Day is "Ray Of Light" from Madonna's 1998 album of the same title. See the original video on YouTube.

571 - Them There Eyes II

This is an image that I shot on Tuesday. I couldn't post it that day, because my ISP had severe DNS problems. I could resolve most websites, but www.blogger.com was not one of them. Bad luck. The next two days I had no time at all, now it's Friday afternoon, I sit on the train again and try to catch up.

While post-processing this image of an old Volvo, I thought that the method is very simple, takes hardly any time and is so versatile, that I should probably make another tutorial. Here we go:

This time we look at the incredible power of a frequently underused feature - blending modes. What is a blending mode anyway? Well, that's basically the method Photoshop uses when displaying a layer that is on top of other layers. The most frequently used blending mode (and the default) is "Normal". Basically that means that the top layer hides the layers below. Pretty as you would expect it. Think of it as a stack of playing cards. You can see the top card, but nothing below.

Even in "Normal" mode we can make some interesting things. We can attach a mask to the top layer, and by painting on the mask with black, we can hide the layer partially (mask it). It's a bit like cutting away parts of the top card in the stack. We can also lower the opacity of the top layer from 100% to, say, 50%. Now you can see through the top layer like through a colored plastic foil.

Both of these techniques, masking and opacity, will be used, but we will use it on layers of more exotic blending modes.

Let's first begin with a look at the original Volvo as the camera has recorded it. I always shoot "Large RAW + JPEG Fine", which on my D300 means to use the full 12 megapixel, record the sensor data as a RAW file and to additionally produce a JPEG file of the same size and the best possible quality.

This image, the JPEG from the camera, is obviously meant to be about the headlight. I have used my Sigma 10-20 at f4, went very near and focused on the glass. With a lens this wide and with a maximum aperture of f4 (note: maximum aperture = minimum f-number), you have always a big depth of field, but when you focus near enough, you'll still get some background blur. That's what I was after.

As regards exposure, the camera has done what cameras set to matrix metering tend to do. The exposure is pretty leveled out. There is clearly detail almost everywhere in the car, only the reflexes in the headlight are partially burnt out, but that still looks pretty good to me. The house in the background is perfectly exposed but ugly, and although the sky is much too light, it seems to hold detail as well.

I want this to be about the light. As the image originally was, the light was in an awkward position, neither centered nor on a third. I wouldn't want to center it anyway, so let's put it on a third. The Rule of Thirds is no hard rule at all, but here it does well. In Camera RAW I crop in from the left and a little from below, a tiny bit from the right, and at the same time I make the image boring and flat. I do this by using a linear tone curve (medium contrast is the default) and letting the automatics set exposure, contrast, etc.

I don't always crop in Camera RAW. Normally I do it in Photoshop, and sometimes even at the very end of processing. In Photoshop I also choose the option to hide the cropped area instead of deleting it. Then I can always go back with "Image / Reveal All", and that without reverting the other steps made in between. Here cropping in Camera RAW is OK, as I exactly know what I want.

For the next steps I want to have another layer, basically the same, but with even less overall contrast and instead much increased local contrast. This is the layer that I want to use for blending. In order to get such a thing, I duplicate the background layer and use the PhotoLift plugin on it. See "492 - Roughly About Sundown" for more about that. Alternatively you could also use a curves layer to lower the contrast, and then unsharp mask with a high radius and a low amount (well, to get this effect you'd need more of a medium amount). This is not as convenient as PhotoLift and takes some experimenting, but it works quite well. See how we get detail in the sky now. The look of this layer is almost like many HDR images are, unnatural and comic-like. As it is, this layer is still in "Normal" blending mode.

Next we set the blending mode (that's at the top of the "Layers" palette, left of "Opacity") to "Multiply". Eeek! That's much too dark! On the other hand, the sky is nice, the ugly house is mercifully lost in the shadows, and maybe the darkness would do nicely as a vignette.

Let's add a mask now, and then let's paint with a big, soft brush and the color black on the mask. Where it's black, the layer with the mask is hidden. Let's do that on and around the headlight. Ahhh! Much better. The problem is only, that what we have revealed, is still the boringly flat original background.

What do we need now? Basically we want our contrast back, and along the way we want some more colors as well. We don't want it everywhere, we only want it on the headlight, or in other words, we want it where we have painted with black on the mask. I simply duplicate the top layer, change the blending mode to "Soft Light", and then invert the mask. Voilà! A little sharpening with an edge mask, and that's the Image of the Day. Here is a shot of the layers palette.

What have we done? We have set a strong focus in the image. This is now really about the headlight, nothing else.

Of course the same result could have been reached in a number of ways. There is always more than one way to do things in Photoshop, but I think two layers, that's not too shabby. The point is, that it really pays to know about blending modes and what you can do with them.

This is the image that inspired me to write about blending modes, but compared to the original image, the effects are still subtle. Let's look at something really dramatically bad, and let's try to change it into something usable.

Today I've asked my friend Erich to sit for a really bad portrait. I wanted something terribly lit, an image with a light background (a window), the face looking into the room, being fully in shadow. This is a worst case scenario, something that I would normally avoid under all circumstances, and if I couldn't avoid it, I would use a flash. Still, sometimes such an image is all that we get. It has either been taken by someone else who didn't care, or we had the choice to take it or get no image at all. The first image is straight from the camera. We have extremely harsh contrasts, the background is partially gone and we still don't see details in the face.

The first step is again to convert it in Camera RAW into something flat. The real reason behind this is to incorporate all detail that we can get. The result is even less attractive. Now let's do some blending.

We begin with "Multiply" again. But, wait, what do we blend? For the last image we have used a pixel bearing layer with increased local contrast, but this is not always necessary. You can blend any layer, even adjustment layers. Thus we add a curves adjustment layer, don't bend the curve at all, and only set the blending mode to "Multiply". This has the same effect as duplicating the background and setting the result to "Multiply", only the curves layer takes much less space in the resulting file. But this is not only more efficient, we could even manipulate the curve to fine-tune the effect. No need to do it here, but it's good to know that we can. The effect on the background is OK, but of course we want to paint in the mask to reveal the face. This is what the image to the right shows.

Let's add another curves layer to lighten up the face. I duplicate the "Multiply" layer, change the blending mode to "Screen" (which strongly lightens up) and again invert the mask. Now that's dramatic! For the first time we see the face.

That's positively the right direction, but I want more light. One way would be to duplicate the screen layer, but doing so still does not give enough light, and even worse, the contrast in the face is deteriorating. Let's try another blending mode.

Basically there are three groups of blending modes that work well in such situations. One group darkens the image. "Multiply" is the most frequently used mode of them, "Color Burn" and "Linear Burn" are also useful. A white layer in one of these modes is neutral and does not change the image.

The second group lightens the image. We have already seen "Screen", "Color Dodge" and "Linear Dodge" are others. A black layer in one of these modes is neutral and does not change the image.

Finally there are modes that increase contrast. Light portions of the upper layer lighten the image, dark portions darken it. "Soft Light", "Overlay" and "Hard Light" are the most useful modes in this kind of post-processing. A mid-gray layer in one of these modes is neutral.

What we need here is first some more light, and trying the lightening group shows that "Linear Dodge" does quite well, although we need to dial back opacity to 80%. The first attempt at a mask was a copy of the mask for the screen layer, but then I decided to use a strongly blurred version of that. Furthermore I have painted in the mask to tone down some highlights that would otherwise have burned out. "Linear Dodge" preserves more contrast than "Screen", but it also tends to be aggressive to extreme highlights, so be careful.

The next step is to increase contrast. We don't need much, but some contrast we do need. The most gentle mode to increase contrast is "Soft Light". "Overlay" and "Hard Light" would be next, but for this particular case, "Soft Light" at an opacity of 50% is OK.

Originally the face was in complete shadow and we had no clue what a correct white balance would be. Now though we see that the face is too yellow. The camera was on automatic white balance, and in that insane mix of background daylight and muted interior neon light it actually did quite well. Still, it's too yellow and we'll need to correct that.

There are many ways to correct color, and while I have extensively used Lab color mode last year, my current tool is the "Photo Filter" adjustment layer. We need some cooling here, and the cooling filter of choice for this image is "Cooling (LBB)" at the default strength of 25% and an opacity of 30%. Of the three cooling filters, LBB is the one that has a slightly reddish cast, and that looks good here.

Now that colors and tones are about right, it is a good time to clone out some blemishes of the skin. Remember, this is not about altering the image, it is about removing distractions that are not part of the personality of your model. Everybody has some red spots at times, but nobody considers those spots essential for recognizing the person. They are alway in different positions, it's only the photographic image that would lock them in place. By removing them, we only reveal the archetype the sits below. Good riddance.

We could stop here, but a little beauty blur is always nice in a portrait, and even more so when the image quality is already stressed by an attempt to pull detail out of deep shadows. I call this my "neutral blur", and I have an action for that. Basically it goes like this:

Select the whole image, "Copy merged" and paste into a new layer. Duplicate this layer. Set the first one to "Screen" mode and Gaussian blur it with a radius of 30 pixels. Let Opacity at 100%. Then set the other one to "Multiply", blur it with a radius of 5 and set the opacity to 60%. Group the two layers and set the opacity of the group to what looks good. Here I have used 70%.

For women we would probably leave it at that, but Erich is a man and here we want a tad more definition. I could have used a PhotoLift layer, but instead I "Copy Merged" again and use unsharp mask with an amount of 60 and a radius of 60 pixels on the result. An opacity of 50% is ideal in this case.

Impressive? Certainly. It's not that I did this in zero time, not at all. Especially the mask of the "Linear Light" layer took me some time, but I guess the result clearly recommends having a look at blending modes.

One note though: Don't expect such extreme manipulations to work with JPEGs taken with a point-and-shoot camera. Photoshop can't do wonders. Noise and JPEG artifacts will frequently restrict how far you can go. For maximum malleability you need RAW files and a DSLR.

The Song of the Day is again "Them There Eyes", but this time it's not Louis Armstrong, this time it's Anita O'Day and her 1957 collaboration with the Oscar Peterson Trio "Anita Sings the Most".

570 - At The Corner

This is the image for yesterday. I still had the Sigma 10-20 mounted and I said to myself, heck, why not try using that lens in the streets again? I haven't done that in a long time, and it sure felt ... alien?

Well, you must know that I use the 10-20mm zoom mostly like a 10mm prime. Normally I zoom this lens only if I absolutely must. I simply love the wild abundance of lines, the distortions, the unreal effects that you get.

Only that it didn't work that way yesterday. In fact, this is the only image that I feel confident of releasing. I like the split-toned B&W version better than the original. It has a more old-fashioned look, something that contrasts nicely with the rather not so conventional distortions. All in all I think it's a nice result for a day that saw me completely at odds with my lens and uninspired as well.

The Song of the Day is "Coles Corner", the title song of Richard Hawley's 2005 album of the same name. See the video on YouTube.

569 - My Book

The inspiration to this image came from Ted's post "Pigeon". There he presented three times four ways to have fun with a lighthouse. All of the images are gorgeous wide angle shots, and one of them has a whale's jaw in the foreground, lying in the grass.

Gosh, I thought, it's a long long time since I last did wide angle. Of the three processing variants that Ted presented, the third - his choice, he called it "heavy metal" - did not really ring with me, but it sparked an idea. In that particular series of images I would have liked a softer variant, but contrasted with an object. Something like the whale's jaw in composition, but an object that would be clearly out of place. A surreal element.

The other thing that led to today's image is, small wonder, the image of yesterday, "In Children's Stories".

It was clear now that I'd do a wide angle shot, it was clear that I would do it from the tripod, using HDR if necessary (which it was not), and the idea of the forest, of green filtered light, still kept me.

That was the concept. An image in the forest, and in the foreground an out-of-place object. Now I needed only two things, an object and a place. Thinking of yesterday, I first thought about a children's toy, ideally an old, damaged doll. This would have given an element of danger, but unfortunately I had no doll. Hmm ... must remember to find one.

From there it was not far to the book. It would have to be bound in red, preferably a big old book, if at all possible something that would survive lying on the ground, and so I finally selected the Collected Works of Shakespeare, that I had once bought very cheaply.

The first place that came to my mind was the gorge where I have shot a series of images about 16 months ago (see "Quake in a Gorgeous Gorge", "Down Again", "Probing Deeper" and "Substitutions"). Forest, water, book. Looked good to me. The only problem is, that I have recently seen wood workers around that place. I wanted to avoid any traces of human presence, thus I decided to simply try my luck with a new place.

The first choice was another gorge, but that one was completely inaccessible, at least from the side that I tried. I gave it up for today and instead drove to another place that I know. I have shot "Logging Again" there and almost a year later "Happy Birthday". There is no water, but the logs would do as well.

On my way there, about two curves before, I found what you see here. Water. Not waterfalls, not even much water, but I absolutely loved how the water repeated yesterday's metaphor of the way. Here we are now.

The Song of the Day is "My Book" from the 1990 Beautiful South album "Choke". See Paul Heaton perform it in the original video on YouTube.

Oh, by the way, it's "Richard III" where the book came to rest. Whatever that means.

516 - Early Mornin' Rain

This is a personal picture. Not because it shows anything about me (yesterday's image did that, he he), but because there is something in these views that fascinates me. In fact I take them over and over again, and that regardless of the lens.

Sigma 10-20 at 11.5mm, f8, 1/50s and ISO 1600.

The Song of the Day is "Early Mornin' Rain", Bob Dylan's cover of a Gordon Lightfoot song; to be found on his much disdained 1970 album "Self Portrait", a "truly perverse collection", as the editorial review on Amazon tries to make me believe :)

515 - Down Here Below

Yesterday morning I found Niels Henriksen's blog entry "Photo Creativity Experiment - A Walking Stick Camera". Niels describes how he used his monopod and a remote shutter release to get a very low view point. He let the camera dangle down to his feet or knees and remotely triggered it, without looking through the viewfinder, only approximately pointing in the right direction.

Hmm ... I've bought a monopod last summer, even though I have never really used it, I have a cable release, thus I decided to give it a try. I used low perspectives as well as very high, and I really would like to know what people thought when they saw me :)

The lowdown? Success rates are not stellar, not at all. Be prepared to try the same shot more than once. Set your camera to continuous mode and always fire bursts, slowly moving the camera left and right, up and down, changing the angle. You really have to work hard to get a certain perspective. A Zigview with its remote option would help greatly.

Is it fun? You bet! This image was shot while walking and continuously shooting backwards. Probably the most random way to take a photograph, short of camera tossing :)

The Song of the Day is "Down Here Below" from Steve Earle's 2007 album "Washington Square Serenade". Fellow blogger Bill Birtch, photographer and Photoshop artist extraordinaire, used a song from this album on his blog. Thanks Bill.

See a live performance of this song on YouTube.

514 - Let's Push Things Forward

This is the image for yesterday, Monday. I had not much time for photographing at all, and just as I was trying to make something out of the last sunlight and the shadows of the cars on these walls, two young men came along on their skateboards.

Sigma 10-20 at 20mm, f7.1 and 1/125s.

The Song of the Day is "Let's Push Things Forward" from The Streets' 2002 album "Original Pirate Material". See the video on YouTube.

496 - Watching You

This image is from Thursday evening. It is complex, or at least the distortions of the 1mm lens suggest complexity. For me this is a lurker's perspective. Someone is watching someone else, but why? Is there a story to be told?

Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, f4.5, ISO 1600 and 1/8s. Post-processing in Photoshop.

The Song of the Day is "Watching You" from Melissa Etheridge's 1988 debut album. As regards her music, I am a late-comer, but better late than never, right?

495 - Time Marches On

It's Friday night now, past 2am, and I sit here, back in Carinthia, after four hours on the train, working on my backlog. Well, at least the images are done and already uploaded to SmugMug, the titles are found, the Songs selected, only the actual writing is left. Let's go:

These images are from Wednesday, and the first is a morning image. I took it near work, using the Sigma 70/2.8 at f13. Nothing spectacular, but I like the compression.

The next one is from the evening. Before leaving work, I had switched to the Sigma 10-20. 10mm and f4 at ISO 360 and 1/8s. We had images like that before, although that does not necessarily stop me doing variations again. Anyway, nothing really new here.

Most of the other images were shot from out of different doorways, with very slow shutter speeds, focused at one wall of the doorway. I had taken lots of these images. Some had people walking by, some not, and from those that had, I liked the one that became Image of the Day best.

The Song of the Day is once again from Dr. John, "Time Marches On", and again it is from "N'Awlinz: Dis Dat or d'Udda".

492 - Roughly About Sundown

It's Tuesday morning now and I'm finally back again with the long-overdue entry for Sunday. This is an odd assortment of images, and most of them have not even been taken on Sunday at all. The reason is ...

I have a new tool. It's Pixel Vistas PhotoLift, a Photoshop filter costing 40 US dollars. I found it by chance, browsing ads on The Online Photographer. PhotoLift is a tool to manipulate local contrast in an image. Using Photoshop's "Unsharp Mask" filter with a high radius and a low amount (termed HIRALOAM by Dan Margulis, see also here) can be used to achieve a similar effect, but with much less direct control and not with the same accuracy as PhotoLift. PhotoLift is available on Windows for Photoshop up from CS, and on the Mac for CS3 on Intel processors only.

Let's begin with this image of a house in a small village in Carinthia. It is about the balance of two windows, a piece of roof and a piece of ground, but it is also about texture. In this first image I have used a layer created with PhotoLift, set it to blending mode "Multiply" and a reduced opacity of 50%, this way burning the texture into the wall. The original was not overexposed, but the wall was very light, thus the mode "Multiply".

The user interface of PhotoLift is rather simple and lacks finesse. You can set the strength of the effect with a "Local Contrast" slider and the type of effect with a drop-down "Texture". Texture can be set between "Coarse" and "Very Fine", basically determining the "locality" of the effect.

Applying this effect can clip highlights and/or shadows, therefore you have the usual red and blue clipping indicators. They can be switched on/off with two buttons at the bottom, but you really want them on. If you see clipping, you can decrease global contrast with the "Global Contrast" slider, and in case the clipping is only on one side (highlight or shadow), you can shift brightness, to bring the image back into the middle of the tonal range.

The effect can be applied with two "Tools", a paint bucket that fills the whole image, and a brush that you can use to paint the effect into the image. There is an eraser as well, and finally you can set an opacity for the effect.

In practice I found the brush much too slow. I always use the paint bucket, and instead of applying the effect partially inside of the plugin, I use a Photoshop mask on the resulting layer. That's much easier.

Here we can see the dramatic difference between the image with and without the effect. It's striking.

There are two more issues with the plugin, the first being only a slight annoyance: It lacks a "Reset" button but it remembers values between invocations. I hate that. This effect has to be set individually for each image, and without a "Reset" button, I have to manually reset everything upon startup.

The other issue is due to the interactive nature of the plugin, i.e. due to the ability to use a brush and an eraser, and that are more or less unusable anyway. As it is, this plugin can't be a parametric filter, and therefore it can't be used as "Smart Filter", and in actions it will always pop up. This is an unfortunate design decision that I would strongly suggest to reconsider. I would drop the concept of "Tools" at all, make the filter parametric and of course add a "Reset" button :)

Now the question is: is this filter for you? When would you apply it and for what types of images? Let's look at some examples.

The first one is rather obvious again. This is the promised image of the way that I went up the mountain Dobratsch late afternoon on Saturday. I was on the shadow side of the mountain, the tonal range goes from very light sky near the horizon over dark sky in the zenith to almost black patches of ground coming through the snow. In the final image, reduced to 8 bits, there is not much tonal range left for the texture in the snow. It looks flat.

And now the same image, but with PhotoLift applied to the snow area. What a difference again! Suddenly we can see texture.

I have not tried to apply this effect to 8 bit images and, frankly, I wouldn't, because although there is enough tonal reserve in the RAW file, that is hardly true for a JPEG. On the other hand, I always shoot RAW+JPEG and never manipulate JPEGs at all, so that's not a problem.

I leave you with three more subtle applications of the effect. This image of a farm house in our village in Carinthia was flat in the concrete areas to the left. I have partially applied the effect to those areas, in "Normal" blending mode and with decreased opacity. That's a pattern in general: I tend to make the effect rather strong, and then reduce opacity. This often leads to more control, and I can always revise my decisions later.

This image of a damaged mural on a church in Carinthia had the effect applied to the damaged areas only. I would do that to put emphasis on the fact that it's damaged.

The final image is a B&W image of a bridge, and here I have subtly increased local contrast on the underside, making the concrete texture and the shimmering light from the reflections of the water more tangible.

And what about the Image of the Day? The only image beside the mural, that was actually shot on Sunday? It has the effect as well. Here I have used it in "Screen" mode with reduced opacity on the wall of the church. It brightens the main subject and at the same time makes it rough. This image is of course an HDR image made from multiple exposures, tone mapped in Photomatix Pro and brought to life in Photoshop.

The Image of the Day and the way up the mountain were shot with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, all others with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, as usual on my Nikon D300.

The Song of the Day is the Gershwin standard "Treat Me Rough", interpreted by Ella Fitzgerald. If you don't have them, why not get all of the "Song Books"?

491 - Just In Time

Dobratsch is a mountain that we had quite often now and I won't bother you again with the story of the catastrophe of 1348 (no, not the plague). If you have not read it yet, just have a look at these past entries.

Today when I was ready for photographing, it was already mid-afternoon. I could have gone out again to shoot power lines or farm houses but, knowing that it would be my last opportunity for a week, I decided to drive to Villach and up the mountain Dobratsch again. At about 4pm I parked the car, changed to winter boots, mounted the Sigma 10-20, took the Lowepro slingshot with my gear, shouldered the tripod, and then I began climbing the mountain.

Well, climbing is a big word. Actually there is a well prepared way up the mountain, but there was still snow, the summit is 300 meters above the parking area and several kilometers away. Sundown was predicted for 5:30pm, thus I had plenty of time. At least that's what I thought.

I'll show an image of the way up there tomorrow when I'll be writing about a new tool I have. The whole way is on the shadow side (well, at least in the evening), and when you finally think that now you've got it, the summit must be very near, you realize that you have reached only a platform, and there it is, the summit, far away, impressively looming in a distance.



It took me 90 minutes to reach the big broadcast station (mercifully omitted here) and the ridge between the two churches. Yes, there are two churches up there, and I happily admit that I cowardly refused to follow the ridge past the cross and to the western church. This last image may give you an impression why :)

The way down was comparatively fast. The moon cast strong light, and even without my headlamp I would have had no trouble getting down, merely the wind was a tad chilly. Afterwards I heard on TV that the temperatures on Dobratsch had been at around -12 degrees Celsius, and that together with the wind this would correspond to -26 degrees. Oh well, so that's why it felt cold :)

All images were shot with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm and as sequences of seven bracketed shots. The merging to HDR and the tone mapping were made in Photomatix Pro, the final touches in Photoshop.

Oh yes, one more word about the temperatures. Most of the time I carried the camera in the slingshot, and when I had it out for a longer period of time without actually shooting, I had the battery removed and wore it near to my body. Batteries discharge much faster when in the cold. I simply did not want to take a risk. During actual use everything worked completely normal.

The Song of the Day is Nina Simone's "Just In Time". I have it on the "Tomato Collection", a double CD compilation with somewhat mixed acoustic quality, that nevertheless is absolutely recommendable. Hear another, equally good version on YouTube.