Bruce | In The Photo Zone! Digital Photography & Learning

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Escalator to Heaven

January 9, 2012 / Bruce posted in Impressions, Thoughts / No Comments

Sometimes I get lucky when taking pictures, and this I think is one of those times. I had just got on the escalator and my camera was still on, so I just placed the camera just below my knees, angled it up a bit, allowed it to focus and then fired off a shot. Since I only got one chance at it I think I got pretty lucky with the outcome. With just a little minor editing in Lightroom I was able to get this result.

I should tell you though, I had no idea what kind of image I was going to get. I was not looking through the view finder, just holding the camera in the approximate position and hoping I had it right. In fact on this image, I didn’t even think about the f/stop or shutter speed, I just took the shot.

One day my luck will run out, but in the mean time, I will enjoy the shots I get. It seems however, that my better shots are when I don’t look through the view finder – go figure!

A New Look

October 27, 2011 / Bruce posted in Announcements / No Comments

I’ve made some changes to the look of my site so it provides consistency between the blog site (this site) and the portfolio (my photo galleries). The backgrounds are the same in both sites and I’ve made some other exciting changes here as well…

I’ve added a new menu item “Store” where you’ll find some cool stuff that I’m selling here on this site. There could be any number of things available, including photography equipment.

One of the newest items to the store is the Fatso’s Cruise’n 2012 Car Show Calendar! This is a calendar I’ve published with photos of classic cars taken at Fatso’s Diner. There is a limited number of calendars available so you’ll want to get your order in now before they are gone. Once they are gone, there won’t be any more. These calendars make the perfect gift for the car lover(s) in your family, so get ‘em now in time for the holidays! You can find them here

Also available in the store are some custom one of a kind digital backgrounds that I’ve created. I found that the license agreements were a little too restrictive when attempting to use backgrounds downloaded from stock agencies, so I created my own and thought I would make them available to you with a fairly liberal license agreement for dirt cheap! Check them out here

Coming soon – Nikon SB800 Flash unit! Watch for it!

Hope you enjoy the changes and the new look! Let me know what you would like to see, or the kinds of things you would like information on, and I’ll do my best to see you get it!

Downloadable Background Images

October 26, 2011 / Bruce posted in For Sale / Comments Off

Have you ever needed to use a graphical image as a background to an image your working on with the intent of selling it later? Well, I have and I found the license agreements would not allow me to resell my image if I used their background. So, I ended up creating my own backgrounds of which I am selling here (cheap) and licensing them so you can resell your images with my backgrounds. Pretty sweet deal. So here’s the first two that I’ve created: (oh, these display images are only 72dpi and limited to 1200pixels on the long edge which is not suitable for anything but display, the purchased images are 3000+pixels on the long edge at 300dpi. Yup they’re big and worth the for cheap price of $2.50)

“Bursting Forth” – purchase the full size high res (300dpi) for just $2.50!
[wp_cart:Bursting Forth Digital Background:price:2.50:shipping:0:digital_dl:150:end]

“New Beginnings” – purchase the full size high res (300dpi) for just $2.50!
[wp_cart:New Beginnings Digital Background:price:2.50:shipping:0:digital_dl:153:end]

If you have any trouble with the checkout, use the contact form to contact me and I’ll make sure you get your image(s). Remember to return to this site after making your payment to get the download links.

HDR Workflow – Should you convert to Jpegs before processing

September 19, 2011 / Bruce posted in Announcements, Learning, Photomatix / No Comments

I’ve heard it said a number of times, but I just don’t understand it. Why would you do this? What I’m referring to is converting your images to jpegs before processing them for HDR in Photomatix. I’ve had a number of people tell me that you should convert to jpegs prior to merging to HDR in Photomatix because you’ll get a better result and because the software converts to jpeg before processing anyway! Let me tell you here and now – this is hogwash!! The answer is “NO”! You should not convert from RAW or Tiffs to jpegs prior to processing the HDR, regardless of what you may have read or been told, you should not do this!

In a recent conversation with an individual from Canada I was told I should try the above because that is what “Trey Ratcliff” recommends and he has been doing HDR for years, therefore he should know what he is talking about. My response was simply “that doesn’t make sense. Why would you ever convert to a format that throws away a significant amount of data before making use of the data? I’ve always used the Tiff file format and have gotten great results in my HDR images (see the image above).”

Well my friend from Canada posed the question to the makers of Photomatix (HDRSoft) and received a definitive answer from Geraldine of the Photomatix Engineering Team that should put an end to this nonsense:

“Photomatix does NOT convert the images you are importing to JPEG for internal processing, and never did it. It would not make any sense to do this…

The only moment Photomatix converts to JPEG is when you want to save the image created by Photomatix and choose to save it as JPEG. This applies to an image created by Photomatix, not to an image you imported.

Regarding whether it is better to convert RAWs in Photoshop before processing in Photomatix, you will find a detailed discussion on this on the FAQ here:
www.hdrsoft.com/support/faq_photomatix.html#process_raw

However, converting TIFF files to JPEGs in Photoshop before processing in Photomatix is a bad idea, given the loss of quality due to the conversion to JPEG.”

Please take note of that last sentence again “converting TIFF files to JPEGs in Photoshop before processing in Photomatix is a BAD (emphasis added) idea…”.

Thanks Geraldine!

If you shot your image sequence as jpeg files, then you should process them as jpeg files because you’ve already thrown away 1/3 to 1/2 of the available data by shooting in jpeg format. However, if you shot your image sequence in RAW or Tiff, then it is recommended that you process the HDR sequence as a series of Tiff files. Why not RAW files, please refer to the link above for information on RAW processing in photomatix. In short, yes you can and Photomatix does support it, however you might get better results if you convert the RAW files to Tiffs using Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, or other more sophisticated RAW processor.

With that said, I would ask that you share this post with everyone you know – tweet it, retweet it, share it on facebook, and any other social media site you might participate in, and let’s put an end to the myth that “you should convert to jpegs prior to HDR processing”!

Photographing Fireworks

July 3, 2011 / Bruce posted in Tips / 3 Comments

If you follow me on Twitter, you will have been receiving a number of tips on how to photograph fireworks. In this post, I will re-post and expand on those tips for everyone. The goal here is to see lots of really great fireworks shots on the internet in the next few days!

Fireworks Tips

1. Use a tripod and a cable release to prevent motion blur, i.e. don’t touch the camera! If you don’t have a tripod, you might be able to use a shoe, bean bag, or something else to hold the camera still. For best results, use a tripod.

2. Set your aperture for a good balance between not enough or too much time on the shutter. f/11 seems to work best for me.

3. Use ISO 200. If you use 400 your shutter will be to short for the capture, 100 your shutter may be too long. You may need to adjust this. For example, in last years fireworks show I was fairly close to the fireworks and fireworks are bright. ISO 200 kept overexposing the images before I was able to capture the entire firework, so I changed the ISO to 100 which allowed more time on the shutter without over exposing the images. Just remember, ISO 200 is not a hard and fast rule, but it is a good starting point and may do just fine for the show.

4. Shutter speed, if your camera has a “bulb” setting use it. This allows you to hold the shutter open for as long as you want. If not, then set the shutter speed to some where between 3 to 8 seconds. You will need to check your first shot and adjust longer if under exposed, and shorter if over exposed. The shutter is also your creative control for getting the artistic shots. In the example images below, the shutter speed is anywhere between 4 and 14 seconds.

5. If you are far away, use a telephoto lens, if you are close, use a wide angle lens. Try to anticipate the area where the fireworks will be. As seen in my images below, I needed a wider angle lens as some of the fireworks got cut off. Set your focus to infinity as indicated on the lens.

6. Combining multiple fireworks into one shot – hold the shutter open and use a black card or something like it to block the lens between fireworks, just don’t touch the lens. This isn’t required at the Loveland fireworks show as there are multiple fireworks going off all the time.

7. Vary your shutter speed for artistic effects.

That’s it! Don’t forget to enjoy the show!

Coming out of the Frame

June 20, 2011 / Bruce posted in Uncategorized / No Comments

In this post, I will show you how to create a border or frame around your image but allow parts of your image to be on top of, or coming out of the border or frame. The following image shows an example of this, and in the remainder of this post, I will show you how easy this technique is to apply.

Step-1 The first step is to load your image into Photoshop. I’m using CS5 for this example on a PC, so where I refer to commands like Ctrl-X, this is a PC command and the equivalent on a Mac would be Cmd-X (I think – I’m not a Mac person).

Step-2 Now I use the selection tool and brush across the flower until all parts of the flower are selected. Doing this will sometimes select more than the flower and to deselect these unwanted areas, just hold down the Alt key and brush over the unwanted areas to refine the selection to just what is wanted. In this case, the flower.

Step-3 Now we need to add to the selection what will be inside the frame. To do this, I used the Markee tool and while holding down the shift key, I started in the upper left at about 3/8 of an inch inside and dragged the selection to the bottom right to about 3/8 of an inch inside. After making this selection, I selected “select” from the menu and clicked on “inverse” to get the selection seen in the following image.

Step-4 Since I don’t want the bottom part of the flower to be “coming out of the frame”, I added this to the selection by again using the Markee tool and holding down the shift key to select the frame area at the bottom of the image as shown.

Step-5 Now with the selection made, I unlocked the background layer and then pressed Ctrl-X to cut the selection from the image, then pressed Ctrl-V to paste the cut selection to a new layer as shown. This will allow me to control the opacity of the border area without affecting the rest of the image.

Step-6 Now I add a new layer (layer 2) and place it below my image (layer 0) and filled it with white. Then select the border layer (layer 1) and set the opacity of this layer to about 60% to achieve the following effect. At this point you can see that we have our flower coming out of the frame, but we are not done yet. We want to add a white border around the inside of our border or frame.

Step-7 Once again I use the Markee selection tool and selected around the inside edge of the border. Then I select “select” from the menu and click on “modify”, then “border” and entered a value of 10 pixels. If you want a larger border, enter a larger number. This modify will change the selection into a border centered on the selection.

Step-8 With my border selection made, I added a new layer (layer 3) so I would be painting this border on it’s own layer. This will make it easy to mask it at the parts of the flower that should be over the top of this painted border. On the new layer, I selected my brush tool and made sure the foreground color was set to white and the brush opacity was at 100% and the brush had a relatively hard edge. Then I simply painted over the border selection. This selection will only allow the painting to occur inside the selection so you don’t have to be accurate and can use a fairly large brush.

Step-9 Now that we have the white border painted in, we need to mask out the parts of this white border that should be behind the flower (top and right sides of the image). So press Ctrl-D to deselect the border then add a mask to this layer (layer 3) and with a black brush, paint on the mask over the parts of the white border where the flower is supposed to be coming out of the frame.