Clouds

The Tip of the Peninsula

The tip of the peninsula

This one I’m quite anxious about. I have really worked this photo hard and don’t know if I went over the edge and over processed it. The sky was dramatic and had wonderful colors, but I have really extracted them quite brutally, but I do like the result. I think it’s nice.

About processing

It’s an 5 exposure HDR. Just by processing it as an HDR I really get a lot of nice texture both from the rocks and the sky. That’s one thing that HDR and tone mapping is good for. I then used OnOne photo filters to emphasize the sky even more. This I could have done in Photoshop as well, but it’s just easier to use a filter, which is a kind of a template.

The water I have left as the HDR version, which gives this ghosted water, which I sometimes like and other times don’t like. In this case I like it. However, in the lower right hand side corner I merged in the water from the brightest exposure. The brightest exposure has got the longest exposure time and has this wonderful smokey water as you can see.

Before and after

So far so good – but I had a problem. The composition of the original photo had failed, but I did like the sky so much, so what to do? Let’s look at the original:

The tip of the peninsula - before

As you can see quite different from the final photo and much more flat and boring. But look at the stones. The sky is more or less the same, but the stones I have changed … a lot!

#1 The sky is really flat and is nowhere near what it looked like for real. What I have created is not what it looked like, either, but that wasn’t my purpose. Sometimes I make a portrait of reality, and at other times it’s more like a painting I make. This is a painting.

#2 I clean up the photo. There are dust on my sensor – these must be removed. The ship in the horizon; gone too. And the other thing in the water I also removed. I prefer to use Photoshop’s spot removal or the content aware fill to clean up in my photos. The spot removal is good for small spots, and thin lines. Content aware fill is used to remove a larger areas, but I did not use content aware fill in this particular photo. I only used the the spot removal tool.

#3 The stones I stretched a lot. What I did was that I selected the square going from the horizon and down to the bottom. It is easy in this case, because the horizon is straight, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I then used used the Edit->Tranform->Scale feature of Photoshop, and extended the lower part of the photo, until the large boulder in the left hand side of the photo was completely out of the picture. And that helped on the composition. Of cause it would have been much easier to get it right ‘in the camera’ when I shot it, but I failed to do that in this case, and I didn’t want to let go of the sky.

No Moeraki Boulders in Kings Garden

No Moeraki Boulders in Kings Garden

There are no Moeraki boulders in Kings Garden in Copenhagen. They are round stones however only half the size of a real Moeraki boulder. Everyday for the last 7 years I have walked through Kings Garden to get to work. Until a year ago the stones were just round stones to me, but then I started to prepare a long vacation in New Zealand. Along with that, came the knowledge of the Moeraki Boulders. Ever since I have been to the Moeraki beach, these round stones, though only half size, reminds me with great joy of New Zealand. Oh what a wonderful place – I want to go there once more!

About the photo

This is a 5 shot HDR from -2 to +2. The sun I have placed in the leaves, to take some of the strength out of it and then I used a 5 inch tall tripod to get close to the ground. That makes the boulder look quite large and gives the viewer a feeling of 3D in the photo.

About the processing

I processed this in Photomatix and then blended the layers in Photoshop to get rid of nasty halos in the sky (see my too tutorial on blending layers). I wasn’t quite satisfied with the result and have had the photo lying around for some months, without a fixed solution. But then the other day I picked it up again. I added a shadow to the stone, adjusted the light about in the leaves, in particular in the right hand corner. For some reason they kept coming out too black. What I have found out in the mean time, is to use the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop. The Dodge tools makes things brighter, where ever you paint, and the Burn tool makes things darker. In this case I used the Dodge tool to brighten the leaves. What’s cool is that, I specify to make the shadows brighter, and then it will leave the bright sky untouched, and that really worked, and I got green leaves instead of black.

The Frozen Setting Sun

The Frozen Setting Sun

The sun right into the camera? 9 exposures with 1 EV step between each. I was just on a small business trip to New York. I managed to get time to go to B&H and get myself a Promote control. For some reason I can’t buy that in Denmark. The Promote control should be a tool in every HDR photographers backpack.

The Promote control allows (through a cabel) to take as many HDR photos you like. I can then take 9 HDR photos automatically with my Nikon D600 (which is normally limited to 3 shots), just as I can with my Nikon D800. But I can also increase the EV step between each shot. The D800 is locked to 1 EV step, which means that if I really wan’t to cover some dynamic range, with the Sun within the frame and dark shadows too, I have to switch to manual. Another nasty side effect of taken 9 bracketed shots with the D800 is the 675 Mb impact on the memory card (ouch!).

With the Promote control I can take what ever number of photos I like with whatever EV step. Now that is cool, and I can’t wait to get it in use for real.

For this shot I didn’t have the Promote Control yet and took all 9 shots of 75 Mb each.

About the processing
I used Photomatix to tone map the image. Afterwards I have spend quite some time in Photoshop blending layers. The sky kept coming out dull and gray from Photomatix, so I had to mix in another sky from one of the original photos, but it was still too flat. So I made a duplicate layer and started playing around with the Red, Green and Blue channels individually in the Hue/Saturation dialog (CTRL + U) untill I got what I wanted. However, that ruined the lower part of the image completely, but that was not problem, I just mixed in the sky with the rest of the image.

Finally I spend quite a lot of time cleaning up small peckles on the ice and the bridge.

Christiansborg – house of the goverment

Christiansborg - house of the goverment

The previous photo ‘The Royal Stables’ I posted, I shot over at the right hand side of this image. The photos are shot within a few minutes, but as you can see, they are very different in nature.

About the processing
This photo is a single exposure, processed in Lightroom 4. What I have basically done, is to raise the Shadows to 100 and then lower the Highlights to -100. This move made the ‘mood’ of the photo. The next steps I did was fine tuning (using curves), raised clarity a little.

The last steps I did was cleaning up in the photo, like removing the shadow from the tripod, removing a nasty green color cast from a lamp.

As you can see, the mood is very different from ‘The Royal Stables’ and I like both, they are just different.

About the composition
My idea with composition was both to have a lead in line, using the edge of the bassing, and the second was using the lamp as a kind lamp like the tower on the the building. The lamp seems very large and has much the same shape as the tower.

Icy Sunset at Veddelev

Icy Sunset at Veddelev

I was a bit surprised still to find the fiord covered with ice at Veddelev, but I took the advantage of it, and got some close up ice shots. This is from the blue hour after sunset.

About the processing
It is 7 exposure HDR, that I merged and tone mapped using HDR Efex Pro 2. I just got a new laptop and didn’t get Photomatix installed, before going on a business trip to the states, which has forced me into using HDR Efex Pro 2 more intensively. I’m quite satisfied with the results I have been getting, though I feel that it is a little less flexible, compared to Photomatix. While doing realistic HDR photos, it does give quite nice results.

Afterwards I did some Photoshopping. This time I didn’t blend the tone mapped image with the original images. The result from HDR Efex Pro 2 was satisfactory enough. I used a filter in Topaz, just to nudge and pop the colors and details tiny bit. I then used a soft light layer to accentuate various parts to lighten and darken various parts of the photo, by hand painting. FinallyI did some cleanup in the photo.

Amsterdam Maritime History Museum at Dawn

Amsterdam Maritime History Museum at Dawn

After walking through Amsterdam taking nightscapes I finally arrived to the harbor, to see the sun rise behind the Amsterdam Maritime History Museum. A beautiful place, that I returned to in the evening, to attend to a cocktail party. That I didn’t know, when I took this photo.

About the processing
The photo is a 5 shot HDR. I did the tone mapping with HDR Efex Pro 2. Not a bad tone mapping tool, though I find it more detailed in Photomatix. Afterwards I did a little blending layers. Primarily to remove ghosting in the water, on the masts of the ship.

Kings Square Metro

After a barbeque evening at work, I walked slowly through the center of Copenhagen towards the Central Station. At Kings Square, next to the Danish Royal Theatre (the building on the left) is entrance to the Metro. The Copenhagen Metro is a new one, only about 10 years old. It has driverless trains and a very futuristic look. I may go down at shoot some there aswell.

About the composition

I rested the camera on the rails going down into the metro. This gives strong lead in lines from the rails. The edge of the stairwell also works as lead in lines. Above ground the buildings also works as lead in lines. There’s a lot of lead in lines in this photo.

About the processing

This is a 5 shot HDR photo, ranging from -2 to +2, with one EV step between each. Actually this is the second time I processed this photo. The first time I missed the fact that my camera had moved slightly between two shots. This was visible only in some parts of the photo if viewed at a 100%. This time I made sure, that auto-align was selected in Photomatix. This is a photo with mixed light. Electrical underground and natural evening light above ground. This gives two different white ballances. This gave me a very bluish color to everything outside of the metro. I removed a lot of the blue and cyan colors by duplicating the layer in Photoshop, pressing CTRL+U and then select the blue color. I then turned down the saturation. And then I did the same for cyan. Then I closed the dialog, added a layer mask, and then painted on the layer mask so that I mixed in what I liked from each layer. You can see details about how to blend layers in Photoshop here.

How to handle moving things

There was a lot of trafic of people going up and down the stairs, the guy with bicycle and cars and busses going by. I had fairly long exposures, so everything was kind of blurry, which looks cool with the cars. I waited until there were fewer people and then I was able to combine a complete staircase with no people, by mixing in 3 of the 5 shots. Being an HDR photos I had to adjust the exposure and look and feel of each of the photos before blending it in. If I hadn’t done that I would had light and dark patches of staircase, depending on which photo I used to blend in.

On The Road Again

On The Road Again

Our last real drive after a month in New Zealand went from Oamaru to Lake Tekapo. This is from the road to Twizel and suddenly we saw these amazing clouds. I have never seen clouds like that in Denmark. We saw them a couple of times down there.

This photo is 95% Lightroom processed. I have placed a gradient on the sky, enhancing the contrast and clarity, as well as bringen the exposure down a bit down.

Then I have on a global basis turned up the contrast to maximum, and set the clarity to +29. Shadows I have raised to the maximum, and the highlights I have lowered to the minimum. The Curves I have on the minus side (-13, -9, -22 and -44).

This is a very strong manipulation, but it is what gives the photo its look and feel.

Sunrise in the Doubtful Sound

Sunrise in the Doubtful Sound

Doubtful Sound, South Island, New Zealand – bigger and much much more desolate than Milford Sound. Less dramatic though, but very very beautiful.

This is first edited in Lightroom, then exported to Photoshop, where I did a Topaz Filter and then some more adjustmens, a little noise reduction, and then back to Lightroom for the final adjustments.

EXIF: 28mm (28-300mm lens), ISO 400, f/3.5, 1/125 sec.
I used ISO 400 to keep the shutter speed fast, because is was on a moving boat and tripods was not possible. Therefore also f/3.5, which is to high normally for landscapes.

Lake Wakatipu in the Morning

After two nights in gorgeous Queenstown in New Zealand, we continued on our way. It was a clear blue and a little cold morning in November 2012. Just at the out skirts of Queenstown we pulled over the campervan and I shot a few shots, including this one.

It is a 5 shot HDR photo shot with my 28-300mm lens at 28mm. Processing wise this is fairly standard processing, first processed in Photomatix and then I blended layers in Photoshop CS6. Only the spiky grass thingie in the lower right hand corner have received a very special treatment. It’s in the shade and turned out too dark, so I had to ‘lighten it up’.

EXIF: 28mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/50 sec.
Why? At a wide angle as 28mm you can get almost anything sharp, but not what’s absolutely closest. It is shot hand held, so I had to use a fast shutter speed on all 5 shots. By using ISO 200 instead of ISO 100 I made the shutter speed twice as fast. I didn’t dare to go higher on the f-stop (that is a lower number – remember, that they work counter intuitive), because the foreground had to be sharp too. Most of my shots in this spot failed, because the foreground was not sharp enough. I should have used a tripod and lowered the f-stop to perhaps f/16.