Red Top Lookout. Washington Cascade Mountains

My family checks out the view on Red Top Lookout.

HDR image, composite with 3 exposures +/- 2. Photomatix.

Thunderbird

Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon. Thunderbird squadron. Taken at McChord Air Expo, July 2008.

Canon 20D EF 70-200 f/4 L @ 200mm, 1/1250 sec, f/5, 100 iso (Exposure Bias +0.33)

Floating Rainier

I took this shot of an acrobatic plane at the McChord Air Base Air Expo 2008.

Shell Bokeh

My son, holding a shell over the water on Discovery Park beach, Seattle. I love the bokeh (soft blur) in the background.

Canon 20D EFS 17-55 f/2.8 IS @ 55mm, 1/3200 sec, f/2.8, 100 iso.

Golden Gardens Beach

At the beach, Golden Gardens park, Seattle, WA.

HDR image of 3 RAW exposures +/-2 stops, processed with Photomatix, fake tilt shift effect added.

Canon 20D EFS 17-55 f/2.8 IS at 50mm using f/8.0, 100iso - 3 exposures 1/125, 1/500 and 1/2000 sec.

Star at Golden Gardens

Star sailing off Golden Gardens, Seattle Washington. Converted a single RAW file with Photomatix, tonemapped and converted to B&W.

Cannon 20D EF 70-200 f/4L at iso 100 for 1/1000 sec at f/8.

Before the morning game.

Sitting around waiting for the game to begin...

#31 Butterfly

#30 Ava Maria Oratory

Ava Maria Oratory in Collier County Florida. Ava Maria University.

#29 Naples Beach Party

Camera EXIF: Canon 20D EFS 17-55 f/2.8 IS at 17mm for 6 minute 6 secs at f/5.6, iso 100.

I was down on the beach taking some long exposure night shots. You really can't see anything out there. See the picture at the bottom of this post to see what it really looked like to the naked eye. So this shot is looking north along the beach. Post #28, previous, was from the same spot looking south. Now for this shot there was a group of young kids - maybe older teens or young twenties having a little beach party about 200 yards up on the beach from me. I could not see them, I could hear them. So I thought I would try to take a shot with them in it. They had little lights that they were using to see and I was hoping for a little more dramatic light from them but they were only turning them on for a few seconds - maybe lighters? Anyway, I like the way the shot turned out.

A couple of notes:
1. The picture is straight, look at the hotel windows at the right edge of the shot. The shore curves away near the top giving the impression that the shot is not straight. Straightening for the shore makes the hotels appear to be falling.

2. Setting the focus at night on a dark beach is very hard. I actually turned on auto focus, hit the focus on the near hotel and turned it off to keep it set.

3. I did not use the noise reduction custom feature on the 20D. I really don't think the shot has that much noise.

4. As in post #28, I created two exposures from the RAW file. One set at much cooler temperature to bring out the blues of the sky and water and one warmer exposure for the sand and the clouds to the left of the shot. Shots were blended together using a mask on the warmer shot and turning the opacity down on the warmer shot.

Here is a blow up of the party, not as big as I thought. Note the star trails and the trees were moving around in the breeze for this 6 minute exposure.



Finally here is what the beach really looked like to the naked eye. As you can see I could not see the kids, I could hear them and see the little light they flicked on every so often. They probably could not see me and may not even known I was there.

#28 Night Shot: Naples Beach

This is a long exposure night shot of a beach in Naples Florida. The exposure information is: 8 minutes at f/8, iso 100. Canon 20D with EFS 17-55 IS at 17mm.

Eight minutes is just long enough to get the star trails. The earth does rotate much faster than we think.

Processing: In camera raw I made two images. One image I set the temperature down to bring out the blue in the sky and water. The other exposure was warmed up to give color to the sand. I basically just laid the cooler image on top and masked out the beach to allow the warmer color to come through.

Below is what the beach actually looked like. Actually the shot below was for 50 secs and a little over exposed. It was actually darker on the beach - such that I needed a flash light to see the sand.

#27 Church Steeple

This is the Adventure Community Church in Duvall, Washington. I took the original RAW file and ran it through the Photomatix software to tone map it. The "layer cake" was as follows, from the bottom.

1. Background layer, original shot.
2. RAW file converted to HDR and then tonemapped to a tiff file in Photomatix.
3. Curves adjustment layer.

Masked the tone mapped cross on the steeple to show the background cross - it looked better.

Photo EXIF info: Canon 20D EFS 17-55 IS in manual mode at f/7.1 for 1/250sec, iso 100 at 35mm.

Original shot...

#26 HDR House

I drove by this house over at the end of Avondale road in Woodinville WA. I thought it would make a first serious study in HDR. I learned a lot from this shot.

Important Lesson #1: I really need to use a cable release and maybe mirror lock-up. I put the camera on a tripod but using my finger to trigger the shutter moved the camera too much between the 5 exposures I took on this house - it really impacted my post processing.

Post Processing: Since my pictures did not line up real well in HDR processing within Photomatix, I was forced to transform one of the RAW images and tonemap it to help out in some of the problem parts of the HDR image. Amazingly the difference between the true HDR image and the single RAW tone mapped image were not that significant. Most of the house is the single tone mapped RAW image.

I exposed 5 frames at 1 stop exposure from -2 to +2 exposure.
Layers:

Starting from the bottom. The 0 exposure was the background layer.
Second layer was the HDR image from photomatix. Opacity at 82%. The exposures did not line up so I needed the third layer. Mostly used the sky of the HDR image.
The top or third layer was the Photomatix single RAW file tone mapped image. Most of the house was the single RAW tone mapped image. I masked the sky to show the HDR sky which was much better.

#25 Trees of Alpental

This was taken on the Edelweiss Chair looking at Gunmont run. Alpental Ski Resort, Snoqualmie Pass, Washington.

See post #16 Alpental Skier, picture taken from same place about a year apart.

Lots of Processing on this file. From the bottom.

1. Original shot, background layer.
2. Apply a pretty radical gaussian blur to the background for layer 2. Opacity at 38%
3. Over sharpen BG layer. Mask out the trees except for the foreground tree. Therefore the snow, center tree and sky show through and are super sharp.
4. Monochrome Channel Mixer adjustment layer, use gradient mask to show only bottom third of image. Makes tree trunks go black.
5. Curves adjustment layer.
6. Curves adjustment layer with mask to apply to sky only. Pop the blue in the sky.

#24 Sea Lion Cave - HDR - actually tone mapped.

Semi - HDR version: I took this at Sea Lion Cave on the Oregon coast just up from Florence OR. This my first attempt at using Photomatix on one RAW file as input. I think it is a significant improvement. Note that I layered the original under the HDR image from Photomatix. I masked the HDR water out, it looked too brown. Pulled down the opacity of the HDR layer to 78%.

Photograph EXIF info:
Canon 20D using EFS 17-55 IS at 55mm for 1/15 seconds @ f/2.8, iso=800.

Below is the original shot.