Donating for Japan

We bought three fine art prints of my photos a while ago to decorate our home with them. Then Japan was struck by the devastating events that we're all still very aware of, and I saw a fellow hobby photographer selling one of his prints through ebay's "Giving Works" program, donating the final sales price to a charity that aids Japan. What a wonderful idea!

The prints we're selling are three photos from my Top 10 of 2010 collection and they are printed on wonderful, 285g/m² heavy Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl paper. The size is 11" x 11" (about 28cm by 28cm), they are unframed and will be shipped worldwide.

Here's the link to the auction. Please help to spread the word, pass on the link to this blogpost, the auction, or take part in ebay's "Giving Works" program yourself.


Blades (NIKON D700, 1/125s @ ISO 200; f/3.3, 105 mm (in 35mm)


Little Pier (NIKON D700, 1/200s @ ISO 1800; f/8, 180 mm (in 35mm)


Fog in the forest) (NIKON D700, 1/80s @ ISO 3600; f/11, 35 mm (in 35mm)

Again, here's the link to the auction. Please help to spread the word, pass on the link to this blogpost, the auction, or take part in ebay's "Giving Works" program yourself.

On my way home

In the past couple of days and weeks, I often made bracketed exposures of "difficult" scenes because I wanted to see if I could get pleasing results with Photomatix. While I wasn't really able to do that, I was very often able to get a natural looking result from a single raw file - and most often, this was the shot with -1 EV (out of five frames in total, from -2EV to +2EV).

I thought I might as well break the process down into the most important steps and publish them here.

The final image shown directly below is entitled "On my way home" - it was made, guess what, on my way home (or rather, back to the trailhead, but that wouldn't have been such a nice title) from the Three Sisters waterfalls in San Diego's back country which are, just like most waterfalls, flowing nicely since the creeks and rivers are carrying a lot of water after the spring rainfalls (and snow in higher regions) at the moment. (The single steps follow after the jump break.)


"On my way home" (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 200; f/8, 32 mm (in 35mm)

Flowerheart

Here's the after/before comparison of the photo of the Yellow Daylight Lily that recently made it into my gallery at SeenBy. As usual, the mouseover image will show the unedited photo.

The raw data has been interpreted with Lightroom's "Camera Standard v3" profile and I clicked on "Auto" for a white balance of 2850/+28. I altered the final image's white balance to 3379/-5 (so it's just a little bit warmer.) Daylight white balance would've been waaaay to warm and not a somewhat authentic reproduction of the colors.

The little additions

Most landscape/outdoor photography books and blogs feature a list of the essential equipment for that type of photography. There's a two parted blogpost "The Landscape Photographer's Arsenal" (Part 1, Part 2) to which I of course mostly agree. (even though I'm not really a tripod person; I only use it when the shot makes it absolutely necessary.)

What's often overlooked are the little additions that make life so much easier, and I want to throw in some recent additions to my equipment that, now that I have them, make me wonder: "Why didn't I get that stuff earlier?!"

• A Photo Vest. Yes, this sounds pretty geeky/nerdy - in fact, the thought about it gave me a similar feeling to using a tripod in public at first. :) But during my hikes, as I was putting my backpack on and off and on and off (and on and off) to retrieve, or stow away, a lens, a filter, the cable release, the lenspen, and whatnot, that piece of clothing with lots and lots of both big and small pockets became more and more attractive. Now I always have my most needed lenses, filters and other accessories at hand that way.
• A Filter Pouch. When you buy a filter, it comes in a protective plastic case, and as the filter collection grows (mine currently consists of a polarizer, an ND8x and most recently an ND64x) these little plastic cases become quite annoying. A filter pouch has enough room for my most often used filters and the whole thing requires a lot less space.
• GPS. It makes sense to geo-tag your photos (to show the location on Flickr and Picasa Web Albums, to show your photos in Google Earth through Panoramio, etc. etc.). I've been using the MyTracks app for Android for that for a while now, and while it works (most of the time) I most recently bought a separate, stand-alone GPS logger. (more on that later in a separate post.) Either way I end up with a simple track log that I can match my photos against, and it's really a piece of cake with most software.

These things also work great as presents to a friend who's a hobby photographer and perhaps missed these little helpers. Like, when you hear him or her cursing about putting a backpack on and off. (a big thanks at this point to my dear Shuwen.) :P

If I missed something and there's more, and other little gems and additions to your outdoor photo equipment, please let me know in the comments.

Reasons to shoot raw III: shadow recovery

This is the last post of my little mini series in which I try to show what can be done with raw data for the most common issues of (digital) photography. Part I was about black & white conversions, Part II about highlight recovery, and what's left now is obviously the shadows.

The most fundamental difference between film and digital photography is the difference between shadows and highlights. Film has a shoulder on which the highlights gently roll into overexposure, while the digital limit is just a brickwall. (the similarities to the audio domain with either analogue, warm and fuzzy tape distortion or digital brickwall clipping are quite striking, aren't they?) The quote "expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights" is often attributed to Ansel Adams (I don't know if that's correct), and what's meant with that is: as a film photographer, you try to get a good exposure of the shadows when you make the photo - because of the headroom film has for the highlights, they would be taken care of when developing the film.

It's quite different with digital. (the exception is the Fuji S5pro, as I've already mentioned numerous times here, ahem.) You can't let the highlights "take care of themselves" and expose for the shadows. If the highlights are digitally overexposed, they are gone, there's nothing more to salvage - raw data of course offers some extra headroom as I've already shown, but still, you're better off exposing for the highlights and then later develop the raw data for the shadows. Raw data has a lot of information in the shadows that can be utilized!

I actually posted example photos illustrating the shadow recovery from raw data in the past already, so I'll just reuse them here with the usual mouseover feature to quickly compare before and after and close that chapter. :)

500px

A recent blog entry on the German photography blog "kwerfeldein" reminded me of a photo sharing site that I had already visited in the past, but never really used: 500px.

Since my last visit, quite a few nice features have been added - a free and very stylish "Portfolio" page as a presentation frontend for your artwork, a voting system that allows you to (anonymously) show that you like a photo (it also has a "dislike" feature), a non-anonymous favorite feature (here are mine so far), and so on.

And most recently, I'm becoming more and more unhappy with the path that Google seems to have chosen for Picasa Web Albums as they finally seem to realize the "social" potential of their photo sharing service* ...and Flickr? Well, it is just too big a photo community, completely over-saturated, you just get drowned in content. For me, an alternative was overdue. And 500px looks like an excellent alternative indeed.

The most important thing about 500px is the quality of the photos. When you click on the "Upload" button a small box with rules appears and rule #1 is: "Upload only your best photos." - I like that! There's a very wise limit of 20 uploads per week for free accounts which makes it completely clear: this is not the site to share the snapshots of your last family vacation.

The site also offers RSS feeds - instead of following a person on the site, you can subscribe to their feed. What I really like are their two special RSS feeds for "Editor's choice" and "Popular" photos. (something I greatly miss on SeenBy, for example.) Subscribe to these two feeds, and you'll be surprised by the amazing amount of inspiring quality photography you'll find in your feed reader every day.

Instead of listing more features and/or differences to existing services, I can only recommend trying it. The basic membership is free. Shuwen and I are there already (Shuwen, Alex) and we really like it. If you read this and join the site (or are already there), let's connect!

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*) cluttering the album view with more and more content from it's various "social last minute panic" convulsions; forcing users to have Google Profiles, then removing that requirement again after a storm of protest in their help forums; and most recently forcing us to have public "Profile Photos" and "Scrapbook" albums, etc. etc. - all in all, that's too much force and arbitrariness, and too little choice for me. As a consequence, I pulled the plug on the Google Profile and Buzz.

IMHO: AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm f/4G ED VR

Some personal insights after evaluating Nikon's not-so-new-anymore 24-120/4VR lens for a couple of days during walks around the neighborhood, flower shots with Shuwen, and hikes with Toni. :) Short summary: I really like it so far.

The review on photozone.de and the conclusion/verdict as well as their rating might be misleading for three reasons: 1. They are testing FX lenses on a D3X (and the lens doesn't seem to deliver the necessary sharpness for a resolution that high), 2. the lens does have obvious flaws, and 3. these flaws show very much in the lab testing environment of photozone.de and thus influence the final rating - but may be not so much of a problem in real world usage.

Below are some example photos, but in short: in my opinion, Nikon made a good trade-off between the strength's and the weaknesses. The flaws that the 24-120/4VR has (vignetting, distortion, CA) can all be corrected in post processing. (where it's necessary.) In return, the lens offers those technical features that can not be fixed after the fact: good sharpness (on the D700 with it's 12mpx FX sensor, not on the D3X though), vibrant colors, good contrast, and no or very little flare in backlight situations. At least as far as I can tell so far from my real-world experiences.

The new 24-120/4 also delivers sufficient sharpness in the corners at the short end beginning at f/8 (unlike the old 24-120/3.5-5.6 - my specimen was really horrible.)

Working with a constant aperture of f/4 throughout the entire zoom range is new to me, I've always been using zoom lenses with a variable aperture so far. It does make a difference having f/4 at the long end and I already enjoy that a lot for close-ups and abstractions of flowers and plants with minimal depth of field.

The example photos follow after the jump break.

San Diego River Canyon after sunset.

San Diego River Canyon after sunset // Nikon D700, 1/50s @ ISO 6400; f/11, 24 mm (in 35mm)

I have a new lens - the AF-S 24-120/4VR Nikkor. It replaces my Tamron 24-135mm "hiking lens" for exactly the same purpose (a very versatile zoom range in one single lens) and so far, I'm very happy with it, even though it does have some flaws (obviously - more on that later in a separate post.)

The reason to switch to this lens is, amongst other aspects, the stabilization of course. But I'm still not used to having VR again in that focal range. :) I chose a "safe" exposure time of 1/50s for the photo above, while it should have been possible to go down to 1/10s easily with VR. Which would have meant ISO 1600 instead of 6400. :P

The photo was made during yesterday's hike to Cedar Creek Falls. After the recent heavy rain and lots of snow in higher regions, Cedar Creak Falls are roaring and extremely impressive (compared to our visit in October last year.) I continued a little bit on Eagle Peak Road towards Saddleback in order to get a view of Mildred Falls too, and this ephemeral fall is very much alive and extremely beautiful at the moment, too:

Mildred Falls // Nikon D700, 15s @ ISO 100; f/22, 300 mm (in 35mm)

For this photo, I waited until the entire fall was in the shade to get this 15s exposure (stacking a Polarizer and an ND8 filter, and stopping down the lens beyond reason.) Unfortunately, it was quite windy at the point from which I made the photo, and at 300mm focal length, it shows in the photo - but quite obviously, not in the web version you're seeing. :)

It required a bit of... erm... dedication to get these photos: after descending the hills from the trailhead at Ramona Country Estates down into the San Diego river canyon, I had to pass the river itself - and well, if waterfalls are impressive because they carry a lot of water... so do the rivers, of course. :P And what used to be a small creek in Autumn last year (that could be crossed by hopping over some 2 or 3 stones) was not quite so easy to pass this time...

I zipped off the legs of my hiking pants but decided to keep my shoes on because the submerged stones looked somewhat slippery, and I really didn't want to take a dip in the river with my photo backpack. Toni the little coward of course didn't dare to get into the water so I had to carry her too. And some minutes after crossing San Diego river I had to additionally cross Cedar creek twice before getting to the falls.