Before and After

Preparation for Art Monaco 2014

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I am going to Art Monaco 2014 to exhibit two of my photos. Art Monaco receives about 10.000 visitors from all over the world, in just 4 days. That’s an incredible lot of people in a very short time. This is going to be very exciting.

It is the International Fine Art Realist Painter and gallerist Mona Youssef, who has invited me, and I am very proud and I am looking very much forward to work with her. Mona does realistic landscape paintings, while I do a lot photos that looks like paintings. Have a look at some of paintings, they are absolutely beautiful. You can find them on her web-site www.mona-gallery.com.

Booking my hotel in Monaco, proved to be more difficult, than first anticipated. The first couple I wanted to look at, had no vacancy at all, but I managed to find one, a bit further away, than I had hoped – but at least within walking distance! The prices in Monaco, really can really go over the top!

While I do like the prints I have made so far, I would like to go a notch higher in quality, if possible at all. I have been searching and searching, and asking people where to get the best quality. It really is the framing, I am only 98% satisfied with. In a couple of weeks I am going to a showroom, to see various print types.

About this photo

I shot this photo in Saint Mont Michel in France. Saint Mont Michel is one of the biggest tourist attractions in France with more than 1.2 million visitors a year. Disneyland Paris has got 14,5 million. And Disneyland is probably 5-10 times larger than Mont Saint Michel. That put’s it into perspective, how many people come to visit Mont Saint Michel.

However, if you venture of the main street after you have had your traditional omelet (in the old days travelers had an omelet, when they arrived to Mont Saint Michel) for dinner, you can find empty streets and alleys like this one.

The making of this photo

This photo is one the photos I have pushed furthest away from the original photo. This is the original:

As you can see, quite a different image. What I did, was to add a lot of artificial light sources. Things that are not present in the photo at all, and then I added some warmth to the photo as well. I also made it darker, to simulate night time.

But what really pushed the image home, towards the final look, is putting it through Photomatix Pro. Photomatix does wonderful stuff to artificial light sources, this I have shown in detail in this post. It’s the same method I have applied here. The result has to be fixed, because it goes over the top, but that is the same you have to do with everything you put through Photomatix Pro – it is only 2/3 of the final photo.

If you too want to experiment with Photomatix, either for doing HDR photos or more painterly like photos, you can try it for free, but you can also buy it with a 15% discount, by using “caughtinpixels” coupon code. You find Photomatix Pro here.

Split toning doing the magic … again

Canon 400D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, ISO 100, 30mm, f/10, 1/1600 sec

Once more I have been digging around in my old photos, and found this one from Røsnæs in Denmark. A rowning boat coming by in the mist, and a motorboat slightly further out. Once again it’s the split toning in Lightroom that does the magic.

From this original JPEG photo (still hadn’t switched to RAW):

I could get to this result:

I added (using split toning) a lot of yellow to the highlights and then a little bit of purple to the shadows. I tuned the colors a little bit more, later in Photoshop. But this was my starting point and I could see, that I was on to something.

I also added a radial filter, to punch the yellow even more, in the center and I also brightened the center up, like the sun was out there. In fact the Sun was a little to the right of the scene, and not within the frame. But hey – who’s counting?

This is not the final photo, but it’s 80% of the photo. I took it into Photoshop and did some noise reduction and removed some JPEG artifacts (grainy spots).

Finally I cropped the stones out. I do like the stones, but I liked it better without the stones in the foreground. They are slightly too dominating and breaks the peace.

Run Forrest RUN! And I ran…

Nikon D800, Nikkor 16-35mm, ISO 50, 30mm, F/22, 1/5 sec

On Duncan McArthurs autumn workshop in the French alps, we went to the valley of Lac Miroir near Ceillac. It was quite a steep walk to get the the valley located approx 2500 meters above the sea level. The view up there was just amazing. We sat on a hill in the middle of the valley, with a view to Lac Miroir it self and had lunch. A mountain range surrounded us, all the way around.

On our way back, Duncan said we had to hurry up to get photos of the stream, while the sun was still up. And I started going real fast with my camera. Took one maybe two shots, then I moved in a fast pace down the stream. And when I was a bit further down than this photo was taken, Anne, a French Lady from the group, came running with her camera and tripod, to get a shot too, while the sun was out. We were committed to take photos! Thanks Anne for the nice post card, by the way!

This photo is an HDR – not the most obvious HDR I have made, nevertheless an HDR. The HDR process was the standard HDR process you find in my HDR tutorial.

I had a patch of stream that had was a little too blue to my taste. I fixed that in Lightroom, using the pen tool. I then changed the temperature towards the warmer yellow. This removed the blue and added yellow instead.

And then I added some Contrast and added some Clarity, to make the water more transparent.

Zenith at Cutty Sark – The making of…

The old Sail Ship Cutty Sark, is placed in a dock in Greenwich Village, London. The old ship sailed with tea and was build in 1869. A few years a ago a fire destroyed some of it, but not more, than it could be repeared. I happened to pass the ship at 12 o’clock and the Sun stood just at the top of the masts.

The making of this photo

I shot 7 hand held shots (-4 to +2), at ISO 200. It is very bright, and the shutter speeds range from 1/8000 to 1/160. This is the 0-exposure:

As you no doubt can see, it is quite different, from my final photo. What I did was to make a split toned image in Adobe Lightroom. I have some presets that I have made, some of which uses split toning of the colors. This can sometimes be a great way, to punch some interesting coloring into a mid-day photo.

I often use my Lightroom presets, to get an idea, in particular with a shot like this. The problem with this shot, is that it’s taken in the middle of the day, and the light really isn’t great. I got a composition that I liked, with the sun right on top of the mast. Clearly Cutty Sark is placed North South, otherwise the symmetry wouldn’t have worked.

Anyway, one of my presets give this yellow coloring to the highlights and some purple to darker tones.

This gives the overall look and feel of the photo. And this makes an otherwise a little bit boring daylight photo, more interesting. I then synchronized the processing to 3 of the other exposures photos:

I did a little individual processing on the lower part of the photo. I wanted to mix these four photos in Photo, into a final photo.

I then used the Lightroom feature to open the four photos as layers Photoshop:

And then I blended the layers to my liking.

Cutty Sark blue layers in photoshop

I used the four images to get the right mixture on the sky. The brighter one for the people on the ground. When I was happy with the result, I re-imported the 16-bit TIFF file into Lightroom and did the last things there.

The glass building in front of Cutty Sark I wanted to pop a bit more. Blue and yellow goes really well together, so I wanted to pop the blue color. To do that, I added an elliptic gradient (remember to inverse it!). I increased the exposure, to make it bright, and started playing with the color toning of that.

And the values I used:

I did several things. I lowered the temperature to -35. This moves the area away from Yellow towards blue. Then I increased the exposure slightly, but also the shadows. But I also added some color, a blue/purple color. What I do when I use this color map, is to drag the pointer slowly around, and use a “better worse” strategy.

For sharpness I used both the Clarity and the Sharpness.

The photo was now roughly done. I thought it was maybe a tiny bit too orange, and made a little adjustment in the Hue section in Lightroom. I pushed the Yellow a bit towards Green, and that took the top of the orange.

And now I only needed to do the final touches:

Reduce noise
Remove sensor spots and paper on the ground.

And that was it.

I have a lot of other photos, that I have described “The making of…”. You can find them here.

This is 12mm on Full Frame – Personal review of Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG ASP HSM II

Nikon D800, Sigma 12-24mm, ISO 400, f/8.0, 0.8 sec (0-exposure)

This photo is from the small church in Mont Saint Michel, France, just outside the huge monastery.

In my review of Canon 5D Mark III, Nikon D800 and Nikon D600/D610 (you might want to read it here), I described my considerations on ultra wide angled lenses, and how it eventually made me switch from Canon to Nikon. A switch that first was more or less cost free, because I focused on fewer lenses, but as I have bought the lenses again, has become a very expensive switch.

For reasons I can’t explain clearly, I missed the fact, that Sigma does an extremely ultra wide angled 12-24mm zoom lens, for full frame cameras. I think the reason I missed it, might be that both Nikon and Canon does a 12-24mm for cropped sensors, and I just put the Sigma lens in the same basket, and that was a mistake!

Had I noticed this Sigma lens much earlier, I would probably never have changed from Canon to Nikon, because it is the ultra wide angle that I wanted. I do not regret the move from Canon to Nikon today, after having come to know and love the Nikons.

Why is it that you want to have an extremely wide angled lens? For me, it is to be able to include everything in a tight spot, like this very small church on Mont Saint Michel in France.

This is shot at 12mm on a Full frame camera. Even at 14mm I wouldn’t have been able to capture both arches, and include the alter in the near one, at the same time. I would have had to make a compromise on the composition and lose something.

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Long exposure HDR

This photo is taken 35 minutes later than the last ones I published from Nyhavn, Copenhagen. This is the Opera House of Copenhagen, Denmark, and I have been down there a few mornings to try to get a good shot, but the sunrise has always turned into … a grey one. But this time I was rewarded with a grand ‘almost’ sunrise. I never actually saw the sun, it went behind the clouds before it got up. I saw the sunshine on the buildings behind me, but I never saw the sun. But I did get a wonderful display of colors!

I do like Long Exposure photography. It really fascinates me, what the long exposure does to both water and clouds. And on a morning like this, when the water wasn’t particular smooth, and the Opera house didn’t make a good reflection in the water, a long exposure is a perfect solution. I took out my 10 stop B+W screw on filter and placed that on my 16-35mm lens. A lens I have purchased for this sole purpose, to be able to attach filters on it.

What I did was to first shoot the 7 HDR shots, and then I screwed the filter on the lens, and did a 58 seconds exposure (using a cable release). My plan was to use the water, and maybe the clouds from the long exposure, and mix it with the HDR shot. As it turned out, I must have moved the camera ever so slightly when I put on the filter, because the images doesn’t fit on top of each other. That is a risk.

Then I thought of something I learned from another photographer ‘Photography is always a compromise‘! I looked at the long exposure. It really was an almost perfectly exposed photo. Only a few blown outs in the darks and lights, and some of it even in the corner, which I knew I would crop away anyway:

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Happy New Year!

This will be my last post of 2013 and I wish everybody a Happy New Year. It’s been quite a year. I started out from absolutely nothing, with this blog. I didn’t have an exact purpose yet, but as people started asking questions, the purpose became more clear. I have focused on delivering high quality photos and sharing ‘the making of…’, that is explaining what I did in particular with each photo. And this has turned into quite a success – I now have thousands of readers every month – much more than I expected, when I started out.

I also did a rather popular review of the D800, D600/D610 and Canon 5D Mark III, based on my real life experiences (you can read here if you missed it). For unplanned reasons I ended up having three high end cameras at the same time, and had them for more than 6 months, allowing me to review them from a different perspective, compared to the traditional reviewers around the world.

About this photo

This is Nyhavn (New Port) in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s a 7 shot HDR, which I processed in Photomatix Pro and Photoshop. I took this just before sunrise. The clouds already had begun turning purple and it looked quite crazy in this photo. In particular when I had run it through the Photomatix Pro.

This is the original 0 exposure:

I ended up, taking the much of the colors out of the sky, to get a better color balance photo. Colors are very important to photos and getting a good color balance, is important. If something is to extreme, try to dial it down. If you can…

At the other end of this canal, I took this photo only 10 minutes earlier. This one certainly has got crazy colors. The rain reflects the light and the sunrise is about to begin in the far end and things went very colorful later. I gave up fixing the colors in this one, but as an quite extreme one, I do like it:

Chicago Theater on Sct Patricks Day – And the white balance

Nikon D800, Nikkor 14-24, ISO 400, 14mm, f/4.5, 1/25 sec

By pure random coincidence I arrived in Chicago on Sct Patricks day. I went for a walk and saw one of the landmarks: Chicago Theater. I would have loved to go inside, but on a short business trip, you’re not always allowed that luxury.

This photo is processed in Lightroom. The main things I have done to this photo is correct perspective and then change the White balance, and then do a little dodge and burn.

Some photos work absolutely best when the colors are as close to natural as possible, while others are quite different. In particular shots around sunrise and sunset really can change mood quite a lot, if you change the white balance.

Have a look at the before photo:

As you can see a much colder and less interesting photo. Reality is probably somewhere in between my final photo and this one. The camera is trying to deal with both natural light in the sky and electric light and chooses something in the middle, not really working.

I changed the color temperature from 3200 to 5800 in Lightroom. That added the nice and warm colors. Chicago in March, however, is a cold experience and I learned that Chicago is not named the Windy City for nothing. It was freezing cold and my colleague had to buy a winter coat! The warmth of the photo does not reflect the actual temperature, but then again, I’m not in business of portraying reality exactly, but rather in the business of making photos that I like.

When you have these golden hour or blue hour photos, always try to make the photo a little warmer and see if you get something nice. This is another example from just after sunset, in this case I made it colder and that also changed the photo dramatically.

Stars above the London Tower Bridge

I used to live in London back in 1991-92. London has changed a lot since then. Many new modern buildings have replaced old ones and I must admit, that they are doing a really good job of doing this. Magnificent architecture and daring shapes takes London into the new millennium, as the true world metro-pol city it is.

The London City Hall looks like a … space helmet or a twisted egg, and there’s this amphi theater right in front of it. And it is built just next to the old London Tower Bridge and it stands beautiful in the night. And behind my is the alley that leads to another of Londons new buildings, the Shard.

The making of this photo

The photo is a 7 shot HDR ranging from -4 to +2. I often shoot with an exposure compensation of -1 or -2 in night conditions like this, with really really bright parts (lamps) and really dark shadows. I only use -2 if I shoot 9 shots. Why do I do that? Because the lamps really are bright in the night and the camera really is struggling trying to capture all light, so my -4 shots are aimed at the light sources only.

The 7 shots I tone mapped in Photomatix Pro. I have worked a long time with this photo afterwards both in Lightroom and in Photoshop, without really finding what I wanted. This is the original untouched photo (the 0 exposure):

While this is in many ways is a nice photo I wanted more of it, and there are things I don’t like about it. As it turned out, it proved to be quite a problem to hit the right node, and the major problem really was the sky. It was far too orange to my taste, mind you it was kind of orange when I was there, but it just didn’t really work.

I tried a lot of different things. The HDR process only made the orange sky even worse. I tried working with the white balance and the helped a bit. In the end I ended up using very cold colors on is photo, to take out the orange colors,

While working the image I realized, that the light beams on the Tower Bridge shone up in the air, while not very easy to see I decided to exaggerate them and that helped quite a bit. I did that using dodge and burn tools, by raising the exposure in an area like a beam going up from the sky.

To emphasize the light beams even more, I increased the contrast on the clouds. What happened then, was that the upper left corner went black.

It was dark, but the increased contrast made it black and it looked like a hole in the clouds existed, and that gave me the idea of putting stars there.

I have this great photo of the Milky way I shot in Sweden some time ago, that lacks a good scene, but the stars really are nice.

I decided to merge the stars into the left hand corner like this and I made the light beams even more visible using a curved layer. Now things started work for me!

Here you can see that I add layers with a channel mixer. I do that to work with the colors and take out the orange. Things go a bit too blue and in Lightroom I ended up de-saturating a lot of the clouds and adding some yellow to the bridge, to make it work nicely.

I also removed the orange two flags. This required some detailed work with the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. My son said – wow it’s just like “Tron” – and his Daddy was happy! Even though it is “only” London.

The Main Entrance of Tivoli at Christmas

Last year just before Christmas I took a late walk in the streets of Copenhagen with my tripod and my camera. For a long time I stood in front the entrance of the worlds second oldest amusement park: Tivoli.

It’s always incredible busy in in front of Tivoli and I really wanted a shot not too crowded with people, so I had to wait. I think I stood for 20 minutes waiting for the shots with the fewest people and allowing a long peek into the old garden. And this was what I got and I’m pretty happy with it.

However, it’s not perfect. One of the good things about taking several shots as you do in HDR, is that you get several options to merge from. In this case I had 7 different exposures ranging from –3 to +3. The longest exposure is 10 seconds, which is enough to make fast moving people disappear.

Let’s look at the untouched 0-exposureand, and see what immediate problems there is with this image:

Tivoli gates analasis

#1: They forgot to turn on one torch (or it had blown out, it was quite windy). Fortunately this photo is symmetric, and I can just mirror it to get a torch for the right hand side, and because I have 7 images, I will be able to get a torch that is not an exact mirror of the first one.

#2: The photo is taken on a 14 mm lens, which is extremely wide angled. Things in the corners of a wide angle lens does get warped, and this drum doesn’t look good. I can’t really fix it, without some kind of compromise.

#3: The stars hanging from the roof of the main gate is swinging in the strong wind. By using one of the images with a faster shutter speed, it might be good enough for a fairly sharp star. I did try to take the photos while the wind was less intense.

#4: It’s a busy area and people are moving around. Some blurry people can look quite cool, but others looks bad in the image. The goal is to get leave the cool ones and remove the ugly ones.

#5: Because this shot is shot with a wide angled lens that is tipped slightly upwards, the buildings leans. Sometimes this looks cool, but in this photo it’s not particular flattering. However, I will be in trouble when I start fixing it, because of the drum on the soldier. But more about that later.

Making the tone mapped image

First I merged the 7 shots in Photomatix Pro (by the way I just found out that there is a Photomatix Essentials. As far as I can see this gives you less artistic options, which I really can’t recommend if you want to do more artistic HDR photos).

There is a lot of dynamic light in this photo, because of all of the lights and the really dark sky and shadows. It’s difficult to capture all light, for that reason I shot from –3 to +3.

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Caught In Pixels

Caught In Pixels

Before and After

Preparation for Art Monaco 2014

About this photo

The making of this photo

Split toning doing the magic … again

Run Forrest RUN! And I ran…

Zenith at Cutty Sark – The making of…

The making of this photo

This is 12mm on Full Frame – Personal review of Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG ASP HSM II

Long exposure HDR

Happy New Year!

About this photo

Chicago Theater on Sct Patricks Day – And the white balance

Stars above the London Tower Bridge

The making of this photo

The Main Entrance of Tivoli at Christmas

Making the tone mapped image