Look up and enjoy the view, of the atrium at the Hotel Hampton by Hilton in Swinoujscie in Poland, and you will get a holy view, if standing in the right position. Swinoujscie was a pleasant surprise by the way – a real beach vacation kind of place. Apparently they have the best beach on the Baltic Sea.

About the photo

It is a single shot. I could have shot a bracketed set for HDR, but the atrium itself, is not that interesting. But the way, the light comes in and forms a cross is interesting. And by having a much contrast, almost silhouetted the cross makes its appearance.

It’s been a little quiet for a while on my blog. I have been busy preparing an HDR course for a photo club. It was a friend of mine, who asked if I could do a course on HDR in his local photo club, which I agreed to do. It has been really exciting to prepare such a course. I knew that people had very different skill levels, which makes it really hard to make a course. I decided on a beginners level, rather than a more advanced level and had to find out what my primary objectives should be.

Teaching is a good way of honing your skills, because you have to understand what you do more precisely, to be able to explain it. But it also requires the skill to transform what you know to understandable words and examples. Not all has this skill.

Primary objectives when learning HDR

I decided to concentrate on the true basics that form the foundation. These include:

• How to setup the camera to take bracketing shots.
• How to merge your photos in Photomatix Pro to get the basic
• How to improve your photo in Photoshop (or GIMP – the free alternative).

You have to understand how to set up the camera to do the Auto Exposure Bracketing, otherwise it will be hard to do the bracketing. The most important thing is, to remember to use Aperture mode on the camera. If you use Shutter mode, you will end up with exposures with various depth of field, and therefore not identical and unusable for HDR processing.

The HDR software Photomatix Pro is a new tool for most people and luckily it’s not too complex to learn – some of the sliders are difficult to explain what they actually do, but what makes it fairly easy, is that you can just move the sliders back and forth and see what they do. This helps a lot.

What’s important to learn from Photomatix, is to bring contrast into the photo and use the ‘Lightning adjusts’. The naked merged HDR photo is flat and dull. By introducing contrast the photo starts to pop. And the lightning adjustments is a part of the Tone Mapping algorithm, which changes the light in the photo. This can change the mood of your photo quite dramatically, but you have to be careful not to make something really nasty, which certainly is possible. The goal is to make something pretty. What’s ‘pretty’ is subjective and is something you learn over time.

The difficult part is to understand the overall workflow and how to work with layers in Photoshop. What comes out of Photomatix Pro, does not really qualify as a final images. You have to make the last 20%-30% by mixing parts of the original images into the output image from Photomatix. You do that by using Layer Masks in Photoshop: Layers is, if not a strange concept, at least something that you have to learn how to work with and how to master. A number of shortcut keys, ways of working with opacity, pen of different sizes, white and black masks. It’s something you have to learn, but when you master it, you do “get it” you can use the same principles for many things.

I have learned a new way of working with layers. It’s kind of inverted. Instead of working on “white” masks, I have started to work on “black” masks. The huge advantage is that I don’t have to merge layers all of the time and this allows me to backtrack or change what I have done. This I can’t do, if I merge the layers. I will revise my HDR and Blending tutorials for this type of merging soon.

Using this inverted mode of working with Photoshop Layer Masks I find much easier to explain, which is a good thing, as I like to teach.

What would be the next steps

What 2½ hours let you do, is to run through the basics of an HDR work flow, but not really touch the more advanced topics, like double tone mapping etc. This would require more time.

I hope to get to do more of these HDR classes. It’s really something that I both learn a lot from but also find to be great fun!

About the photo

The photo is taken in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. A place that my friend who invited me the photo club also visited, just 25 years earlier. Photography takes you to many different paths, in different times, yet places stay the same, more or less.

Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 17-40mm, ISO 400, 20mm, f/13, 5.0 sec

This is one of my early photos. It’s an HDR photo made of 5 images in Photomatix Pro and afterwards merged in Photoshop.

I have just updated my article on composition. I have updated the photos and added the missing photos and then I have added a 13th rule, which I use a lot when I take my photos these days.

Have a look at it here.

Nikon D800, Nikkor 16-35mm, ISO 50, 16mm, f/22, 0.8 sec

It’s been an exciting week last week. We had the most fantastic workshop with Duncan Macarthur in the alps in southern France, an area called Queyras that I had never heard about. A true hidden gem in Europe to many people.

Duncan is a fantastic photographer and has got an incredible amount of experience, ranging from wedding photographer, to more cultural photography, to hotel room photography and of course landscape and wild life photography. The latter is where he makes most of his money today.

Not only does Duncan know all of this great stuff, but he also knows how to teach it to others. A skill not everybody has, but within the first day, everybody on the workshop knew exactly what a histogram was, and what the result was if you blew the histogram in either end and more important, why the histogram is important. It was amazing to see the transformation of everybody on a workshop like this. People with very different skill levels attended the workshop, ranging from novice to more experienced, and everybody saw the same scenes with different eyes. Something that everybody learns a lot from.

I of course have brought back a ton of photos, a lot of which are experimenting photos. But I’m quite sure, that there are a some good ones among them and hopefully a few fantastic shots. The photo above was some of what I hoped for. We don’t have streams like that in Denmark and finally I got to photograph one.

We were on a great photo team, with fantastic people (thanks for a great vacation and workshop Anne, Orlando, Frank, Kate and of course Duncan and his lovely wife Fanny). We had a lot of fun and a great time together. It’s fantastic to get to know people in such an intense way around a specific topic that you share the same passion for.

Duncan’s approach to photography is quite different from where I have been moving around for the last year or so, but he is exactly where I initially wanted to be. I finally got the chance really to learn how to use my Lee filter kit and work with the different aspects of landscape photography. How to work with a subject that you have found interesting and keep working on the composition and improving it until you finally nail it.

In the post-processing class I also learned a lot and I believe that I will change the way I work in many ways. The photo above is a single exposure and Duncan will probably think, it’s a bit over the top. Duncan’s approach is to get something that looks absolutely natural, where I often go more artistic ways. I will definitely try to do a few photos with Duncan’s approach and put out my tutorials on the photos that I make. Maybe I will even try to post-process the same photos with a realistic approach and a more artistic approach and see what comes out of it.

The photo above is shot with a 0.6 (2 stop) neutral density gradient Lee filter. The filter darkens the sky, to avoid blowing out the sky and getting an all white sky.

I’m sitting on the left hand side in the white t-shirt and Duncan Macarthur on the right hand side. In the background you can see Orlando.

The post-processing is done in first in Lightroom. First I brought in a little contrast by adjusting Highlights, Shadows, Whites and blacks. As you can see the original looks too flat:

The values I used are:

Exposure: +0.36 – The image is slightly too dark.

Hightlights: -50

Shadows: +50

These two even out the shadows and the highlights, and makes it even more flat.

Whites: +31

Blacks: -10

Blacks and white brings the contrast into the photo. Careful not to go to extreme.

In Photoshop I added more light to the water and added more contrast to the stones, to make them pop out of the water. I also corrected the perspective. Later I will post a tutorial on the the Photoshop process, because it’s quite different from what I normally do.

Compared to many of the other photos I have done, this is a fairly light post-processing.

You can also visit Duncans website: www.duncanmacarthur.com.

Do you know the feeling too?
Within the last year, I have started to take photography more seriously. I have started to seek out locations that I like to take photo graphs of. But sometimes I feel that I am suffering some kind of Scaffolding pest or Photographers Plague.

I took a month leave in december 2012 to have a lot of time to work on photographer, both the post-processing as well as time to take photographs. In the one month there were two sunsets that wasn’t overcast. It seems almost impossible. And other things like Mont Saint Michel I travelled far to see, and I ended up seing it on a clear blue sky day, which isn’t good for photography. The four previous days had been totally overcast, which is not any better. And not to make it any better, a large part of was covered in scaffolding and a huge construction site sat in front of the island. Maybe it’s just because I have turned into a photographer I start noticing how many scaffolds and restoration projects are being executed.

I have just returned from a business trip to London and I came past the National Gallery at Trafalgars Square, just as I did last time I was in London. Last time I wasn’t hit by the plague, but this time I was. There is a scaffolding on the building. But notice the blue chicken or cock! Last time there was a big bronze statue of a man on a horse on that pillar, but now a huge blue cock on it… Great with funny solutions!

It may be small, but it’s a wonderfull small church with the most beautiful view possible. I find it hard to imagine a more beautiful view than this small church has. The Church of the Good Shepard overlooks the odd turquoise blue lake of Lake Tekapo in New Zealand.

The photos is a 3 shot HDR photo post-processed in Photomatix Pro and I then blended layers in Photoshop. To extract the details in the clouds, I used Tonal Contrast in NIK Efex Pro. You can learn to make photos like this too, if you read my HDR tutorial here.

Learn to give critique to your own work

One of the things that I found most important is skill to learn to criticize my own work. Not only for the bad things, also for the good things. What works and what doesn’t work. I have a lot more bad than good photos. Someone said that the first 10.000 photos are bad. I still have too many bad photos, but not as many as I used to. I just deleted 4000 photos that was no good at all and never would be. 6 months ago I probably wouldn’t have been able to decide that.

The process of making a great photo requires that

• You know your camera and can use it right.
• You can compose a photo
• You know when to take a photo – the opportune moment.
• You can process the photo later in the post-processing software.

Each of these disciplines requires skills and training. People are different and some find composing a photo easier than others do, and others find the technical details of the camera super easy, while others don’t. You always have some strengths and weaknesses and your weaknesses you have to work harder to get good at.

A fifth bullet is the

• You have to learn to criticize your own work.

This is far more difficult than it sounds. Start by looking at photos you see posted around the web on Flickr, Google+ or even Facebook. You will find some you like, but a lot more you don’t like. Why is it that you don’t like them? What’s wrong with them? Is it taste or is just not great photos? Try to figure out what problem you have with the photos – and then avoid doing it yourself.

Personally I like colors a lot and for that reason I rarely make black and white photos and I don’t spend much time looking at them either, though I respect black and white photographers. I really love the richly saturated photos and therefore I make richly saturated photos. Some would probably say over saturated, but that’s really up to me to decide.

Learning to criticize your own work is about learning what you like and what you don’t like and learn to scrutinize your photos for the presence or absence of either one. Sometimes I can process a photo and publish it instantly because I like it so much. Later, perhaps even within the hour of publishing it, I start to see errors or problems in the photo and I regret that I published it. Big mistakes I will have to fix and replace in my Smugmug portfolio, but I can’t do that with the photos I posted in Google+ or Flickr. This will have the errors forever.

There are probably many ways of learning how to give critique to your own photos. I will tell how I do it.

I usually let my photos lie around for some time, before publishing them. Currently I have 35 unpublished and completely ready and meta tagged photos. I then have around 30 more which are some that I think has got the potential and I’m in progress with – either as post-processing or just evaluating. And then I have a back log of 15.000 photos or so that I have taken over the last 12-15 months. Some of those photos are crap, while others have potential. Some have great potential, but I still just haven’t got around to select them.

The 35 ready-to-publish photos I will look at in turn regularly and in some of them I find things I don’t like about them as time passes by. Sometimes I start to dislike a photo, because a photo has a major flaw. Sometimes I can’t pin point the flaw for a while, until I suddenly realize it. It’s about finding what the weakest point of your photo is. And remember:

A photo isn’t stronger that it’s weakest point.

Sometimes it can be very hard to spot what makes a photo weak. Is it something about the technical quality like lack of sharpness, or is it the composition, maybe something about the light or is it the post-processing? If it’s one the three first, it can be very difficult to fix and you will probably have to discard the photo and if at all possible re-shoot it at a later time (I have a Collection in my Lightroom called Re-shoot, for photos I know I will get a second chance to shoot). But sometimes I might find a way to solve the problem. Like I did in this photo:

The problem with this photo (from Sydney Australia) was that I had taken it very quickly and had not made sure to get everything sharp. The wooden pillars wasn’t sharp close to the edges. After a while I got the idea of making this radial blur on the photo and blending it with the sharp part of the photo and then get this moving effect. That works and it saved my photo. But many times I have given up. Like I did on this photo below (it’s one of the photos I have been spending most time on, without any result):

I do like the composition on this one, but for some reason it keeps not ending up where I want it. First of all I have shot it with my 28-300mm Nikon lens, which really has some sharpness issues. So the quality of the photo is not as good as I would like it to be – it’s not sharp enough. Second – the light is not very great. I have tried all sorts of things to compensate for that. I have used a number of more advanced filters, but nothing really works. The conclusion I have made is that while the composition works fine, the light fails and there fore the whole photo fails. I would love to go back and re-shoot, but I’m not sure if that is ever going to happen.

If it’s “only” the post-processing that has problems I will try to process it again. Sometimes it’s because a photo is difficult to process and then I just have to wait (or re-process later) until I have the skills. These photos stay in a ‘work in progress’ collection in my Lightroom.

By letting the photos sit around I slowly but surely figure out what I like and don’t like about my photos. I learn how to criticize my own work and my loop hole for acceptable photos keeps shrinking everyday on different parameters. Sometimes I like a specific photo for one thing, while another part fails and I have a hard time discarding the photo. But I’m getting better at discarding.

A great side effect of this process is, that I get better I get at shooting the photos. One of the most important lessons I have learned is about the light. Light is everything. If the light is not present, forget about taking photos! At least the kind of photos that I like to take. I have learned that it is much better to take 500 photos around sunrise or sunset than at noon, because the light is much better. And the photo above from Arthurs Pass in New Zealand is a great example of this. This makes me relax during the middle of the day and not keenly look for a photo opportunities everywhere.