World of Stone (after/before)

Here's a photo of our recent visit to the "Valley of the Moon" in the Jacumba Mountains Wilderness of the Sierra Juarez mountains near the Mexican border. I want to write a little more about that place in another post and just show this photo as an after/before comparison now because I'm beginning to really love what can be done with black & white conversions.

Sorry! This image has been sold exclusively and is no longer available online.

Besides tweaking the black & white mix a lot (the four sliders that have the most impact for landscape photos seem to be orange, yellow, green and blue) I used a lot of local adjustments: burning the sky in the background, dodging the mountain in the foreground and selectively applying Clarity to accent the rocks.

I can recommend "The Power of Black & White", an inexpensive ebook that describes black & white processing in the digital domain. It costs only $5 and if you're a Lightroom/Photoshop user, it's really worth the money. There are numerous set screws for black & white conversions in these programs, and while the book confirmed that I already had found a good many of them ;) it contains great tricks and techniques that I really put to use for a black & white conversion in the above photo.

Color Noise Reduction eats details in Lightroom

For a while now I notice that Lightroom's Color Noise Reduction, at the default setting of "25", unnecessarily eats some details, especially at lower ISO. For my D700, I changed the default to something like "3" for that reason. I adjust it manually only for higher ISO and when doing extreme black/white edits (where it does make a huge difference). The defaults for my Fuji S5pro were still at "25", I just didn't think about it.

So yesterday I made some tele photos of Western Grebes at nearby Lake Hodges - the birds are interesting: they're making cute noises and have a very funny mating dance where they more or less run across the water surface at a rather high speed. (the video shows Clark's Grebe which are very very similar and have the same behaviour, it's the best footage I could find on YT.)

Needless to say, I'm unable to capture anything like that with our 70-300VR lens: it's not long enough, it's slow, and the sharpness at the long end stinks (the professional term for that would be that "it is a bit soft".) Overall, I'm not too happy with that lens, and I actually think it might be defective. But on the other hand, it's very lightweight for a telezoom that extends all the way to 300mm, and it's stabilized. *)


Western Grebe (FinePix S5Pro, 1/250s @ ISO 200; f/7.1, 390 mm (in 35mm)

As you can see (maybe not so clearly in this small web version, sorry) the birds also have really wicked RED eyes, and when I was looking at the preview in Lightroom I could clearly see them - but when I zoomed in for a 1:1 inspection of the sharpness (I also suspect that our 70-300VR has a focusing problem) the red eyes became much less visible - what the... ?!

Here's a 1:1 crop of the above photo with the default Color Noise Reduction "25" - you can compare to a value of "0" when you move your mouse over the photo.

Yes, that is a very soft crop - it's made with a bad lens, but for the most part this is the Fuji S5pro, it can't be sharp in a 1:1 crop, I've explained that somewhere here in my blog too.

So the reason for the unwanted red-eye reduction here is the color noise reduction - but still, I'm somewhat surprised that it affects the eye of the bird so much.

*) I'm also mostly unable to get sharp photos at the long end in the range of 1/125s to 1/200s even with VR and I think the rather hefty mirror flap of the S5pro and D700 is the culprit - I get more sharp photos at 1/60s @ 300mm than at 1/125s and 1/160s, go figure... needless to say, this only happens handheld. ;)

Should I work for free?

I know, I know... there's a lot of talk going on all the time whether aspiring hobby photographers (err, that would be me) should offer their images for free (via some form of a Creative Commons license) just to get their name out, get publicity, and whatnot... and my take is: no, I'm not doing that. This infographic is not exactly new, but it illustrates my point exactly.

Why do I write this? I received an email from a company in the Ukraine that organizes outdoor events. They are interested in one of my photos and want to use it for a flyer. (Ha, I can simply recycle the photo, I used it in my previous post.:)


Selby Rocks (NIKON D700, 1/125s @ ISO 200; f/11, 58 mm (in 35mm)

There's no word in that email whether they want to license the image. They simply ask if I allow them to use it, and if so, where they could download the full resolution file. That's it. Not a word about any kind of compensation. Honestly, it's quite irritating for me to receive a request like this from people who apparently run a business. Do they offer their outdoor tours for free? I guess not.

Anything that is on Flickr can be licensed through Getty Images - which is where I friendly redirected the Ukrainian company. I do not really expect that they will license the image. Instead, they will simply move on and try their luck with the next hobby photographer.

Carrizo Plain

Saturday April 15th we visited the Carrizo Plain National Monument in San Luis Obispo County. We drove up there Friday afternoon (taking a wonderful dose of the LA traffic), stayed overnight in a dog-friendly motel and headed to the monument Saturday morning. Thankfully, the monument is managed by the Bureau of Land Management so pets are allowed (unlike most of the State Parks in California). In the evening we went back to the motel, stayed over night again and made our way back home on Sunday (with a short detour to Los Padres National Forest).

Carrizo Plain is the largest remaining undeveloped grassland in California, and it's somewhat famous for it's wonderful display of wildflowers in Spring - which is why we wanted to go there. :) This year was pretty wet so we thought that mid April would be a good time for the wildflowers, but it was not such a good year according to the lady at the Visitor Center, and we were somewhat late, too. The best time to go there seems to be mid to end of March, maybe early April (though the weekend before we visited they even had some inches of snow!) - so next year we'll be there in March. :)

Entering from the north, our first stop was Overlook Hill before we proceeded to the Visitor Center to pick up a map (which turned out to be just the same rough overlook that can also be found on the website I linked above). There's a funny story about the stuffed Condor displayed in the Visitor Center: it was one of the first Condors released into the wild in California, but it died because it hit a power pole... ouch. :P

We drove a little farther south and then up onto Caliente Ridge - it was dry, so it was possible to drive on the dirt road up there with our normal car - otherwise, a 4x4 with high clearance would've been absolutely necessary. On the way up, it's impossible to miss Selby Rocks, a rock formation that sticks out of the soil. The much more famous "Painted Rock" area is closed from March through June to protect the wildlife - so is access to Selby Rocks, but it's still pretty easy to get a nice photo from the dirt road:


Selby Rocks (NIKON D700, 1/125s @ ISO 200; f/11, 58 mm (in 35mm)

Hitting the area in bright daylight for photography is good for the wildflowers because they really GLOW in the bright sun (though I think it would be best for the colors when it's actually overcast), but the haze made it not so easy otherwise. Lightroom's HSL panel was quite a big helper to enhance the sky for the above photo - I reduced the blue luminance and adjusted the hue a little bit.

Caliente Ridge is the western border of Carrizo Plain and the views are quite nice - but the hike there was rather boring, cold, and windy. We headed back down to the plain and drove further south for our picnic at KCL campground (and we fled to the car from a ton of small blue-greenish bugs - some of them survived in our car all the way home to San Diego), then drove back north towards Soda Lake and Simmler Road, were the biggest remaining display of wildflowers was. On the way we passed some nice and idyllic sights with cows grazing on the huge plain:


Cows, Temblor Range (NIKON D700, 1/200s @ ISO 200; f/4, 120 mm (in 35mm)

I opened the aperture of my 24-120 lens all the way to f/4 and focussed on the cows to get the blurry foreground (actually, the focus is a little bit in front of the cows, but it's not visible in the web version).

The mountain range behind these cows is called the "Temblor Range" and it is the eastern boundary of Carrizo Plain. You can see some nice patches of wildflowers there too. I think it will be worth to drive up there via the Hurrican Crocker Spring Road, either from Highway 33 on the other side of the range (where the road is paved according to the map), or from the Elkhorn Road inside the monument (which more or less goes along the San Andreas fault line), but the latter is a pretty long drive on a dirt road.

The good thing is that it's allowed practically everywhere to stop and just head out into the fields of grass and flowers, so of course we had to put Toni into one of the huge patches of flowers for a photo:


Flowerpower Toni (NIKON D700, 1/2000s @ ISO 200; f/4.5, 35 mm (in 35mm)

Toni's fur is amongst the trickiest things to make a photo of because it's sooooo bright in the sun. I situations like these I always use bracketing and make three exposures of 0, -1EV and +1EV to be on the safe side. Above is the -1 exposure with exposure correction in post after using Lightroom's Recovery feature to tame the brightest parts. The flowers are called "Tidy Tips", the one magenta spot in the middle is Owl's Clover.

Here's a somewhat artistic approach of displaying some wildflowers (Goldfields) with Soda Lake in the background. This photo was made near the aforementioned Simmler Road:


Goldfields and Soda Lake (NIKON D700, 1/320s @ ISO 200; f/4, 70 mm (in 35mm)

With the lens at f/4, I focussed on the rim of the grass (it's actually a hill that goes gently down to the white shoreline of Soda Lake) to get the nice and blurry foreground again, and acceptable sharpness luckily extends all the way to the range of hills in the background.

Needless to say, both Shuwen and I have TONS of photos from the trip, here's my webalbum with a more complete set of photos (I still might add one or the other photo later).

I have the feeling that we only explored a tiny bit of the monument because we only drove about halfway in (unto KCL campground) from the north, but for the record and the planned visit next year here's a little summary:

• Caliente Ridge: it's quite safe to say that this can be skipped if you're not absolutely hot for the 8 mile (one way!) hike up to the summit of Caliente Mountain. The views towards the soft rolling hills are nice, but it's not necessary to do anything more than drive up there. :P
• Painted Rock: well, it's a set of rocks with stone mortars and paintings by Native Americans. Not really that high on my list of things to see.
• Wallace Creek: we missed that one, it's the spot were you can see the San Andreas fault line "at work", to say so. This could maybe be combined with...
• The drive across Temblor Range on Hurrican Crocker Spring Road: I definitely want to try that next year.
• Overlook Hill: well, it's just that. A nice starting point, but we didn't spend more than maybe 10 minutes there. :)
• Soda Lake Boardwalk: it just across the street from Overlook Hill, and I'm tempted to say that it is one of the things that can safely be skipped (unless you're a recycling fan and want to admire the planks of the boardwalk made from recycled milk canisters). And Soda Lake has the same thrilling smell as Salton Sea, minus the weirdness factor.

See you next year, Carrizo Plain!

The search goes on

Green Valley Truck Trail (FinePix S5Pro, 1/115s @ ISO 200; f/5.6, 53 mm (in 35mm)

For a while now, I'm searching for a way to better present my photos and offer to sell prints. I upgraded my account at 500px to "Awesome" :) as they allow you to create a nice looking portfolio with just a few mouse clicks, using templates that are simplistic and not overloaded.

Personally, I think a tight "portfolio" selection that consists of only very few "best of" photos is more appealing to visitors. When I visit a photographers website and have to click through a nested structure of albums and sub-albums that in turn contain 20 or more images each, I get a) the feeling of being lost in an invisible folder structure and b) bored and move on rather quickly. I think that Flickr and PicasaWeb are the places to collect multiple photos, while a personal website with a portfolio should be a showcase of just the best shots.

So here's what mine looks like: http://www.alex-kunz.com (unfortunately, I registered that domain with Godaddy only two weeks before that shameful "CEO kills elephant, calls himself philanthropist" incident with all the pathetic explanations and attempts of censorship, and I'm still in the "block" period for newly registered domains - I do intend to take the domain away from that company eventually.)

However, what's missing is the option to offer prints on that site. 500px has teamed up with Fotomoto, but the print sale options are only available when viewing photos on the normal profile page at 500px, not through the portfolio page. Duh. I'm hoping that this will be added in the near future.

I also tried SmugMug (because there's an export plugin for Lightroom), but while the pages that SmugMug presents in their video look awesome, the templates that they offer "out of the box" are not really useful for what I had in mind. Basically, I wanted to duplicate the setup that I have on Blogger, but it's quite a long way of customisations to get there.

I've been expecting an easier way to just combine some building blocks for a nice looking site (the emphasis is nice looking). I've been in touch with their support during the trial phase and they pointed me to some tutorials... but boy... my knowledge of HTML/CSS is limited, I'm a hobby photographer. And I don't think that it should be necessary to manually fiddle around with style sheets and HTML code when all I want is a rather basic web page to present my photos and offer prints.

So for the moment, I stick with Blogger, and I've added the Fotomoto script back to the blog. It's possible to buy prints and greeting cards that way, and there's also a share option and an ecard option. Their support was super friendly and helpful in solving a small riddle that I had during setup, and while I do not expect great photo sales, it's a good feeling that it's at least possible. :)

UPDATE: the "no toolbar" option for Fotomoto is missing at the moment. It's not possible to entirely disable the Fotomoto toolbar for certain images. That's crap, as it interferes with the mouseover image-swap script that I'm using. I disabled the Fotomoto toolbar again for the moment until that option is back.

After the storm... sort of...

Can you believe it? After I went on my personal/philosophical rant in my last post how the most obvious "landscape porn" attracts the most attention I go back to the folder with the pictures from that day and notice that I uploaded the wrong image. How embarrassing!

The two photos are rather similar, the main difference is the framing and crop. The morale question is of course how to deal with that. I decided to replace the photo with the correct one because they are so similar. I'm not a friend of showing sets of similar scenes and leave it to the beholder to make a pick which is his or her favorite. I make the pick. I am the artist.

Anyway. There were some interesting comments on Buzz after the last post, and I want to share the essence of that here.

My friend Ping is of the opinion that luck plays a major rule in photography - can't argue with that, though I think that if we are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, we should give our very best and explore the photographic possibilities to the fullest - which is what I did NOT do for that photo... (but I have to admit that I am much more happy with the correct photo, composition-wise:P)

The interesting bit from Ethan Anderson's follow-up comment on Ping was (at least for me) that the audience doesn't know that there could have been a better photo of that scene, and if you get praise and attention, it means that it's still a good photo. Very true... but I have to admit that my personal challenge goes beyond that. ;)

Joe Kuo made a point that I found really important: at some point, you have to decide whether you want to be a marketer, or an artist.

I think that as hobby photographers, we should strive to be artists, and really show what we want to show, and leave the "popularity" aspect out of our focus. It's not why we make and show photos - though getting attention is very nice, of course. ;)

Anyway. Below is the photo that I really wanted to show. I added a after/before comparison just as usual to show the post processing. The post processing steps are explained below the photo.

This is just routine

This is a photo of Flat Rock, a prominent piece of rocky debris that fell down from the cliffs at Torrey Pines in San Diego. In the past couple of days since I uploaded this photo to the three photo sharing sites that I'm using (500px, Flickr, Picasa) it received more attention than I thought it was worth it. And since I know how I made that photo, I want to try and explain why I think this is more a piece of an eye-catcher than actual photographic art.

First about the "success" of the photo: it went into the "Popular" section on 500px for a while when it crossed the 85 points mark; on Flickr it was in the Explore selection and as a result got more views than any other photo I have on Flickr so far :P ...and on Picasa, a good number of my followers left a comment and some even clicked the "Like" button. (which is still anonymous. I'm just saying.)


"Before the Storm" // Nikon D700 with 16-35mm lens @ 17mm, f/11, 13s @ ISO200, ND64x filter

Let me first explain the technical side of it. I hope it's not too confusing when I go rather quickly through all that. I just want to illustrate the photographic routine that is involved.

This is a wide angle shot at 17mm (with the distortion and tilt correction what's left might be some18 or 19mm - still pretty wide). Now, it's somewhat common knowledge that you better include a foreground feature with wide angle shots. I picked the surface of the rock (smoothed by thousands of people who climbed and walked on it) for that because obviously, I didn't have much choice. :) Where I was with my tripod was about the only spot I could choose as I wanted to have both Flat Rock and the storm cloud with the falling rain in the frame.

Here's a "making of" shot taken by Shuwen (from her album). I'm that tiny spot on the cliff to the right:



(in case you're wondering about the very different appearance: her photo is with a standard daylight white balance; I chose to use warmer tones and the ND filter - see below - also causes a slight color shift.)

Next, it's a long exposure with milky water. Oh yeah. I'm a sucker for that, I admit it. To get the long exposure times necessary for that effect, I use a neutral density filter. After framing the scene, I picked a reasonable focus point and set the camera to fully manual mode. Because I was mainly looking at the darker foreground, I set the exposure 1 stop shorter than what the camera suggested (that's simply some experience everyone will gain at some point, I assume). Then I closed the viewfinder - one of the benefits of the D700 - and attached my ND64 filter to the lens. I added the necessary 6 stops to the exposure time. I released the shutter with a cable and manual mirror pre-release to minimize camera shake caused by the mirror.

The reason for attaching the filter only as the last step before making the actual photo is that an ND64 is already pretty dark: it's impossible to properly choose a framing with the filter attached.

The photo was made around sunset (the sun is outside of the frame, on the right) and thus has the benefit of nice light and color. I would say that everyone realizes at some point that dawn and dusk are the best time for most colored landscape photos. If you want these colors and this light, you have to be on location at the right time. And I admit that for the above photo, it wasn't really planned.

And yes, the weather added a nice bonus with the rain coming down from the stormclouds over the sea in the background. As I mentioned at least twice here on my blog: bad weather - good photos. :) For the above photo, the weather was pure luck.

It was even more luck that we made it to the car all dry before it started to rain. :) And with the approaching rain, I didn't allow myself the time to explore the scene any further and try different angles, viewpoints, and so on.

So... now that I explained the technical aspects and the background, I hope it's understandable why I'm a little perplexed about the attention the photo got. I was just doing what can be done in that situation. And of course it requires practice. Know your stuff, know your gear. You can't play the piano if you can't play the piano. It requires routine, and it's important to be able to execute that program when the opportunity for a great photo strikes. But besides that, let's be honest: there's nothing very artistic involved in making a photo like this.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've also been thinking about the hundreds of photos that I show online on which I definitely spent much more consideration on framing and composition, where I explored a scene from all kinds of different angles, with different camera settings and whatnot, to really really get the best out of it. But still, the above combination of some luck and exercising a routine gets the most attention. I must admit: that's a bit depressing.

So here is the basic formula for the eye-catching razzmatazz landscape photos that will be popularity-wise successful if you practice a little: be on location at dusk or dawn; bring your wide angle lens and filters; get down low and find a nice foreground feature; if there's water, make a long exposure of it; if there's color, crank up the saturation. Hey presto!

Don't get me wrong: I'm not blaming the audience that makes these photos popular. But despite the fear of sounding arrogant: I'm blaming the photographers that practice this routine all the time, and set standards like this. The internet is full of these eye-catchers.

There's got to be more than this, right?

Another fad that lasts too long

Coffeetime (Android Retrocam, Xolaroid)

Textures, faked "aged film" with defects, fading and false colors, Polaroid frames... been there, done that. But I can't help it, after the initial excitement of the sometimes quite beautiful and interesting effects and appearance, I got bored by it pretty soon. All that razzmatazz can't replace a carefully chosen subject, beautiful light, good composition. Most of these retro-style photos look so... interchangeable. I'm just saying. It's just my opinion.

And for the sake of completeness, let me list the other things that wear out just as quickly, and are still practiced all the time: overcooked HDR, color key, vignetting, fake tilt-shift miniature, time lapse movies. Or any combination thereof. It's nice to look at once or twice - but when I see it every day, it's a sure warrant that I won't click through to the actual photo from the thumbnail.

Maybe it's difficult to see "through" all the effects to the actual photo? Or is it just me?

PS: 24-120/4 VR on DX cameras

A short addition to my notes about Nikon's AF-S 24-120/4 VR Nikkor: on a DX camera with 1.5x crop factor, the 35mm-equivalent angle of view you get with this lens is 36-180mm (yeah... no kidding.) - that's moderate wide angle to a quite nice amount of telephoto. It is a very versatile range - so versatile that I hardly get to use the lens on our hikes because Shuwen likes it so much. ;)

The thing is... it's sharper than the 16-85mm VR DX Nikkor, it has a constant aperture of f/4. (that's a whole stop faster than the 16-85mm at the long end), and thanks to the crop factor, you have the "sweet spot" benefit and simply don't see most of the quite nasty vignetting at all when you use it wide open.

And with the closest distance to focus being just 0.45m (somewhat typical for superzooms) it can be used for some really nice close-up works of flowers and such at the long end! I just went outside and made a photo of this beautiful lily at our front door:


Lily (FinePix S5Pro, 1/1600s @ ISO 100; f/4, 180 mm (in 35mm)

Naturally, the 24-120mm is quite heavy and looks somewhat oversized on a DX body, and what's missing is the wide angle. But combined with any of the super wide angle zooms in the range of something like 10-24mm (Sigma, Tokina, Nikon) this is a really convenient setup of only two lenses. IMHO, if you really want the wide angle effect, then 24mm - or 16mm DX - is not really enough, anyway. Therefore, I think it's really worth considering the 24-120/4 VR as an alternative "standard zoom" for DX sensor cameras.

[sidenote: just don't EVER make the mistake and mount Nikon's 24-70/2.8 on your camera and compare it with that.]

PS: allow me a friendly reminder that my fine art print auction with 100% of the final sales prices going to the Japan Tsunami And Earthquake Relief Fund is still running.