Light – Caught In Pixels

Tip: Pseudo HDR

Jacob Surland — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:37:13 +0000

Pantheon Reflecting the Sun Setting

Pantheon is one of the most beautiful buildings I have seen and I was even rewarded with the most beautiful sunset.

The photo is an old one, shot with my ancient Canon 400D. How to salvage an old photo? I took this photo as a single RAW on my old Canon 400D using a Sigma 10-20mm lens. I didn’t have a tripod, but the light was so gorgeous I just had to shoot the scene. What I did was to stand as still as I could and just fire away 20 shots hoping one would be sharp enough. The ISO I had turned up to 400, which is the highest acceptable ISO on that camera, and I the raised the f-stop to the highest value the lens allowed (lowest number). That gave me a shutter speed of 1/13 seconds, which requires a very steady hand. But I managed.

Tip: Try making Pseudo HDR photos from single exposure RAWs
In the processing had to major issues. I had to get a better balance between light and shadows and to increase the sharpness. To get better balance between the shadows and the light areas, I made a Pseudo HDR photo. To do that I made in Lightroom two artificial exposures by making virtual copies. One I made a -2 and the other I made +2. These to exposures I gave some strong noise reduction, and then I exported all three to Photomatix and tone mapped them. The result was awesome. Not as good as if I had shot three proper bracketed shots, but good enough.

The sharpness I achieved by duplicating the layer in Photoshop and then applying a fairly strong Unsharp Mask (really a bad name for a sharpening rool). That did some really good things to the roof of the Pantheon. I blended in the good parts of the sharpened image – the rest I didn’t use.

Harbour Bridge Roskilde

Jacob Surland — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 11:26:09 +0000

Not exactly a big great harbour bridge, but nevertheless I do like it. It connects the Museum Island, part of the Viking Museum here in Roskilde.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR shot before sunrise.

EXIF: 21mm, f/10, 5.0 sec. It was my aim to get the longest exposure to be a maximum of 30 seconds (which is the limit of the camera on automatic). I had to raise the ISO to 400, to keep the f/10 at a reasonable small value (higher number). I want the keep the f-stop low, to keep the foreground sharp as well.

Cathedral in Amsterdam

Jacob Surland — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:48:49 +0000

On a day as hot as a summer, during one of the first days of september I caught this in a Cathedral in Amsterdam. A nice american lady said, that it looked like a nice camera I had there, but that she would precious her pictures just as much I would mine, even though her camera was much smaller.
I had been in the church many years before and knew it was beautiful, so I wanted to go back and get this shot.
The photo is 7 photo HDR. I did the tonemapping in Photomatix, and then took all 7 exposures + tonemapped into photoshop as layers and masked through. I tuned the colors a little and did some final sharpening.