So I had multiple guess on what this mystery abstract is:

Mystery Abstract

Guesses ranged from pine cone to metallic chicken.  I can see how the sheen could lead someone to believe it’s metallic.  But leave it to one of my high school classmates (proudly raised farm girl I might add) to guess it correctly…it’s actually the “dusky brown, barred with black, with iridescent bronze sheen” feathers of a wild turkey (Meleagris gallapovo).

Juvenile Wild Turkey at Sunset

That quote was the way that the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Western Region describes the wild turkey’s appearance.  Considering that I, quite literally, have dozens upon dozens of wild turkeys that roam our neighborhood, I never noticed the iridescent nature of their feathers before.  Until last night when I noticed four Tom’s scrounging on the hillside over our back yard fence.  I quickly grabbed my camera (which had the flash unit on it from photographing Matthew), swapped lenses to my 70-200mm 2.8L zoom and walked out to our back fence.  With the flash illuminating the turkeys, the iridescence quickly became apparent.  And while these are true wild turkeys, they are so use to humans (and the bird feeder scrapes from my backyard) that they make reasonable models.

Note: The above abstract is a full sized crop of the second photo.

Wildlife Lighting Tip

When I’m out photographing nature, I always try to take along at least one flash unit.  It’s not always the piece of photographic equipment that first comes to mind when photographing a landscape or wildlife.  But it can come in very handy to help balance out the light.  There is another piece of equipment that can be just as handy to have, which I will explain in a second.

For example, these photos of the wild turkeys had them in the shade with the sun setting just around the corner of the hill.  The sunlight made for this wonderful background for these images, but the turkeys were not light up.  By using the Canon Speedlight 580 EX on my Canon 5D Mark II and playing around with the amount of flash the 580 EX provided, I was able to add just the right amount of fill light to the scene to help the turkeys stand out.

Turkey Shoot...No Flash

Turkey Shoot...with Flash

But, there still isn’t something right with the fill flash in the second photo.  The fill flash is white, while the sunset background is yellow.  This is where the second piece of photographic equipment comes in:  colored gels for the flash.  I own a few sets of HonlPhoto Filter Kits which contain multiple colored gels and use a Velcro strap to attach the gels over the front of most external flash units.

By putting a colored gel over the flash, you can alter the color of the flash light to fit the needs of your lighting situation.  In this case I put a 1/2 CTO (light orange) gel over my flash to balance out the background lighting with the fill lighting I’m artificially adding.  The result is a much more balanced looking photo:

Turkey Shoot...Properly Color Balanced Fill Flash

So, colored gel’s for your flashes are not just for portrait photographers anymore…the nice thing is that they are so light you’ll never notice them in your camera bag…on that 25 mile hike into the wilderness or exploring the wildlife in your own backyard.

These turkey photos are part of my Backyard Wildlife collection.

Gear Referenced

The following gear was referenced in this article:

• Canon 5D Mark II DSLR
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS Zoom Lens
• Canon Speedlight 580 EX
• HonlPhoto Filter Kits

If you’re interested in any of these items, purchasing them from my blog sponsor B&H Photo using the above links will help to support this site.  Thanks!

Not that lucky…  The below photo is an 11.5 minute exposure from the Altimont Wind Farm east of Livermore.

2010 Perseid Meteor Shower over Altimont Pass

At first glimpse it looks like a suitable photo.  Yes, the light pollution from Tracy (20 miles over the hill and behind the wind turbines) limits the impact of the night sky, but otherwise it looks acceptable except for the lack of any meteors.

Now, let’s zoom it to full resolution (click thru to view full size):

Full Resolution Portion of Alimont Wind Farm

See all those colored dots?  That is noise from created by the sensor of the camera becuase it was turned on for 11.5 minutes. This is the down side of digital photography.  But what the technology taketh away, the technology giveth in return.  Most DSLRs have a feature buried in the camera menus called “Long Exposure Noise Reduction”.  In a nut shell, this feature (when on) removes that digital noise from your photos when taking long exposures.

My unlucky part is that I was spooked when setting up my camera and forgot to turn on that feature.  (more on the spooked bit in a second)  So all my photos from Thursday night have pretty red, green, and blue stars!

How Does Long Exposure Noise Reduction Work?

When you turn on long exposure noise reduction, all long exposures (over 1 second on my Canon 5D Mark II) have the actual exposure capture with the shutter open followed by a second image capture with the shutter closed.  Then the camera subtracts the noise captured in the second shot, from the photo captured in the first shot and writes the cleaned up image to the memory card.  Bye Bye red, green, and blue stars…

On the Canon DSLR’s that I’ve used, when you capture a frame the card access light turns on for the duration of the second exposure.  If you don’t realize that you have this feature turned on, it can be confusing why the photo exposure is complete but you’re camera is not responding.  For this reason, I typically keep this setting to Off and turn it to On only when shooting at night with long exposures.

Remember: this feature will double all your exposures.  So my 11.5 minute exposure above would have been 23 minutes long had I turned this feature on.  Something you need to keep in mind when doing the math of how long you’ll be out and how many exposures you plan on capturing.

How Do I Turn on Long Exposure Noise Reduction?

On the Canon DSLR’s this feature is located in the mysterious land of .  On the 5D Mark II it is under Custom Function II: Image menu. Refer to your owner manual for details on where to find this on your specific camera.  (Yes, the Owner’s Manual…that little book that was also in the camera box with the camera when you first opened it…    )

Getting Spooked on Thursday

I mentioned that I got spooked and forgot to turn on this feature…it was one of those close encounter moments that makes you want to call out for Mulder from the X-Files.  I was parked on the side of the road with my car perpendicular to the road to block the wind (the wind turbines are there for a reason).  This road is isolated every night except for the few locals who know about it and use it for watching meteor showers or submarine races, so it is pitch dark and isolated. I was pulling my 5D Mark II out of the back seat of the car and turned around toward the tripod when suddenly the entire area was light up by a light streaming down from above.  I could clearly see the windmills and cows grazing in the fields as I tried to put my heart back in my chest….

At the exact moment I turned around, an airplane coming in from the east to land at the Livermore private airport had turned on their landing lights and they just happened to hit me dead on.

I think you can now understand how I forgot to turn on the long exposure noise reduction…

]]> http://www.latogaphoto.com/2010/08/long-exposure-noise-reduction/feed/ 2 http://www.latogaphoto.com/2009/12/magnetic-glow-zoom-effect/ http://www.latogaphoto.com/2009/12/magnetic-glow-zoom-effect/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:19:44 +0000 latoga http://www.latogaphoto.com/?p=1758

Over the holiday’s I discovered this rural chapel in a small unincorporated area near my parents in Central Wisconsin. Lucky for me, I was driving down a back road after sunset and noticed the chapel all lighted up just off the road. The front of the Chapel had a back lighted cross that I thought would make a great subject for a zoom effect photo.

The zoom effect is accomplished by zooming the lens while the exposure is being taken. This usually requies a steady tripod to reduce any side-to-side or up-and-down movement while zooming. Once you get the exposure for the photo set correctly, you determine what range of zooming you want, the more zooming you do, the longer the blurring effect is. For this shot, it was a 4 second exposure with the last two seconds the lens being zoomed in from 70mm to 50mm. The other key to this affect is making sure the center of your image is centered on your subject as that is the infinity point where the zoom affect will zoom into or out of.

For this particular image, I think using the zoom effect adds that interesting factor to the image.

Composition I is the widest view of the scene. This was the first photo that I composed, noticing the rower coming across the bay my instincts kicked in and I knew I would have to act fast to place him in as many of my shots as I could. In general, I think this image is a bit too busy: with the row boat in lower center, and the sailboat on the right, and power plant in the distance the photo feels out of balance to me.

Composition II is more balanced and stronger. With the seaweed floating in the water in the foreground, your eye is lead into the the scene. The row boat on the left in the lower left corner and the horizon with the power plant on the lower third, this image feels more balanced. The empty space at the top helps the image to breath. Following the golden triangles, the rower is near the cradle with the power plant landing in the second largest triangle and the wind blowing the steam toward the empty space of the largest triangle. Or flipping your golden triangles, the seaweed is in the smallest triangle leading your eye toward the rower in the second largest triangle. And the the wind is blowing the steam along the long edge of the largest triangle.

Composition III is also well balanced and stronger than I. With the rower out of frame, your eye is focusing on just the sailboat with the power plant in the background. Using a golden spiral, the spiral ends right on the sailboat with the sweeping arch passing over the power plant. Also, the fact that the wind is blowing the steam from the power plant away from the sail boat helps to reduce and conflict in the image, it flows better from foreground to background.

Composition IV is the weakest of the tighter variations of I. With just the power plant in the image, there is nothing to lead you into the photo. Using golden triangles again, the steam is still following the longest diagonal line and the the large smoke stack falls just outside the cradle. However, the single layer of depth of this image weakens it overall.

If your new to the concepts of the rule of thirds, golden triangles, and the golden spiral and your a Lightroom user there is good news. When you activate the Crop and Straighten tool in Lightroom’s Develop module, you get all of these tools to help with your composition. Under the View menu you have the Overlay Tools option…I always leave this turned on. When you activate the Crop tool, you will see a Crop Grid Overlay displayed on top of the photo, most likely the Rule of Thirds overlay. The trick is you can use the “O” key to cycle through the other overlay grids. If the overlay isn’t lining up correctly with your photo, you can hold down the shift key and press “O” again to adjust the orientation of the overlay. Great way to learn composition rules by doing.

Here are screenshots from Lightroom 2 of each composition with the grid overlay tools visible:

If your looking for more information on these composition rules, check out these other resources online:

• Advanced Composition and the Golden Ratio
• Presentation Zen’s article on the Power of Thirds
• Photo Composition’s list of articles on the Golden Mean

Hopefully this self exploring lesson in composition has opened your eyes up to a new way to look at your own work.

One of the things I was hoping to try out was doing a time lapse video of still photos taken of the night sky.  Since we were going to be far removed from the light pollution of the city, this was a good time to experiment with it.  (Of course I decide to do that in one of the places with the tallest trees on the planet!).

Click through on the above photo for a HD video that is a combination of 141 consecutive frames, each one 25 seconds long (17mm f/4 @ 1600 ISO).

When I was planning this before the trip, I thought I would need a Canon Timer Remote to be able to trigger the sutter continuously to capture this series.  While in the field it occurred to me that using my existing Canon Remote with my camera in continous shooting mode and then locking the remote would accomplish the what I needed.  Continous shooting with out continous attention.  The trees are illuminate by a camp ground building across from our site.  And the bright burst was the result of a late night camper pulling into their spot.

The trick with this type of exposure is pushing the camera to keep the exposures under 30 seconds.  More than 30 seconds and the stars will turn into streaks.  So it becomes a trade off between sharpness of stars compared to noise from the high ISO.  And using noise reduction software only makes he stars even less sharp.

Once back from the trip, I processed one photo and then synced those changes across all images using Lightroom.  I then used FotoMagico Pro to create the slide show and exported it as the HD QuickTime movie.

Note: for a more in depth review of FotoMagico, see Jim Goldstein’s FotoMagico 2.5 Review.  From my experiences using the demo version to create this movie, it is very easy to use and a great tool.  There are some usability improvements I would like to see (like a way to configure watermarking once instead of for each slide show; and a sort option for the photos).  It should also be noted that Boinx Software’s website (makers of FotoMagico) was very slow and errored on me a few times when I tried to download the demo.  And then the software crashed on me when saving the slide show not to mention might have caused my Mac to crash when I put it to sleep with FotoMagico running (not directly blamming it for that one, but it was the only new thing running at the time).

Back around the 4th of July holiday, Mark Graf had a posting about some playing with HDR he was doing. He posted an HDR variation of a previous photo of his. Mark’s goal was to collect some feedback on what people thought was the better photo (see his posting for my exact thoughts). Mark does some wonderful wildlife and landscape photography and the general consensus of the two images was that the original was better. The idea of “what is the core reason everyone thought that the original was better” has been bouncing arond my head since his posting.

When I was returning from my recent trip to Chicago, I was passing through Denver International Airport and happened to stop in a Seattle’s Best Coffee. They have this huge photo that is part of their advertising behind the counter, it’s a view of the Public Market neon sign from downtown Seattle, but it’s taken near evening and has wonderful mood due to the exposure and low dynamic range (lots of dark areas with highlights just around the neon).

This got me to thinking about HDR and how the typical response to an HDR photo done badly is “it doesn’t look natural” (especially with landscape photography). Yet, I’ve also heard this statement applied to HDR photos that were done really well. But the statement usually comes from someone who is not a photographer, so they are usually uttering their initial impression. This impression has come from years of viewing images and having been conditioned to expect a photo taken near sunset to have lots of dark areas and a low dynamic range. Yet, if they were standing next to the photographer when the image was capture, their own eyes would see much more range than the camera captures.

So, this got me to wondering about how much our expectations of photography are based on our conditioning of the technical limitations if the craft. As the technology changes and advances (something that we have been in the midst of for the past 5-10 years, like never before) are these changes happening faster than the consumers are able to accept them? In 5-10 years from now, will the same person who complained about the “un-nature looking” HDR photo, complain if it’s a LDR photo?

Interesting mind trip to think about how conditioning of the audience affects our work, our decision making process about our photography, and our industry of photography…

The technique is from Matt Kloskowski’s Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips blog: Surreal Edgy Effect.

seanmcc guessed the technique right in the comments of the original post. There were also multiple people who referred to this as the “Dave Hill” technique. While Matt doesn’t call it that specifically in his video demonstration, if you look at Dave Hill’s website, you can see that he must use some of the similar principles that are applied in this technique…but that is just the start. I have also come across a few other photographers who have a style similar to Dave Hill’s, but not exactly the same. Of course, I came across them in one of the few photography magazines I would pickup every so often while traveling…and now I can’t find it — I still wish magazines would do a better job of indexing their issues on their websites!

Here is one of the images from the remix side by side with the original:

There were a number of people who commented that this technique is “too over done”. While that is true, that is also the point. If you watch the video on how to do this, you will see how easy the basics are. Don’t rule out trying something new. I’m planning on experimenting with this on a few more photos in the near future. You never know when you will find the perfect photo to try this on…there is always next year’s zombies…

However…what if your own creative vision is based off of the subject matter captured by another? Again, the universe aligned for me with three separate signals:

1. Last night I listened to the LensWork podcast episode If the Negative Really Is the Score (which in many ways is Brooks talking about Creative Commons licensing…whether he knew it or not at the time)
2. A new stylized technique that is easily accomplished in Lightroom that I learned a few days ago
3. A recent set of images by Sam Javanrouh of the October 21st Toronto Zombie Walk that I saw on his wonderful Daily Dose of Imagery blog tonight

These three items aligned in my head and I had to act. Luckily for me, Sam licensed his images Creative Commons…and thus were born this set of images that I entitled Not For Everyone. Click through on any of the images to view the entire set of 6.

“Not For Everyone” is a phrase that was used by the instructor that taught this stylized technique. He indicated right up front, “this look is not for everyone”. But, after I saw it in action I loved it, and immediately thought of a few photos from my archive that it might work on.

But then, I saw Sam’s great Toronto Zombie Walk images. Perfect fit! Especially with Halloween just around the corner…

I’ll share the source of the technique in a few days time. If you think you know how I accomplished this leave your guess in a comment. (Oh, and also let me know what you think…)