Might tunnel vision give us just a glimpse of the larger world?
Just looking helps a lot.
Tag Archives: high dynamic range
Looking for the light
Composition in photography requires a compelling subject shown in ‘good’ light. Good light for one subject might not be the same as good light for another. But in any event the light is hugely important and photographers work at finding the right combinations of light and subject. Some photographers would even argue that the light is the subject.
Sometimes the light comes from the side.
And sometimes from the back.
Obviously it can come from the front as well. Yesterday I stumbled onto a different kind of light, at least different from that I am accustomed to using. I was walking along Fall Creek (that walk is where all these images came from) and I walked under the bridge supporting I465 to get to some small waterfalls I like. There are drains in the bridge to prevent puddles of water from building up and there is a course of rock under the bridge to catch the dripping water and carry it to Fall Creek. The bridge here is more than eleven lanes wide so the area under it is something like a wide tunnel. It is quite shaded under there and as I was crossing the course of rocks, I noticed some leaves down among them. Since I had my tripod I could work in the dim light and I was curious to see what images of leaves against rocks would look like. I was impressed.
The exposures on these shots range from a half second to a second in duration. The light is mostly diffuse but somewhat directional and I spent a few minutes shooting.
This next one is an HDR shot (a sandwich of three shots – overexposed, underexposed and metered shot) which allows a wider range of exposures to be compressed into a range that can be shown on a screen.
I’m impressed and I will be going back there.
Morning light
The morning light was good today and who was I to waste it?
There is a bit of a ‘once upon a time’ element to this image. It is a composite of five images taken at different exposures (high dynamic range or HDR). I like to use that technique with good light in the autumn.
I’m still working with leaves caught in the chain link fence that keeps our dogs in the backyard and not wandering the neighborhood.
It says something to me about the light of God shining through us even in difficult circumstances. Or I just like back-lighting. Take your pick.
The morning light caught just a little of the flowering whatever-it-is.
A few more minutes and it just looked like weeds.
It can be rewarding to look up sometimes.
These few precious days, these few precious days.
Indiana Transportation Museum
Our camera club went to Noblesville, IN last weekend to photograph at the Indiana Transportation Museum. There were a lot of old train cars on sidings and there were many opportunities for photographers.
Lots of opportunities for simple, graphic and vivid shots.
This image is a combination of three shots, one overexposed, one underexposed and another at the recommended setting. It was processed with high dynamic range software. Yes, the colors were that vivid. The dynamic range of a single shot would not have been sufficient to capture the detail in the lighter and darker areas.
It is well worth visiting the Indiana Transportation Museum.
Just a good day to shoot
Some days are a gift. It was nicely cloudy this morning when I had the dogs at the bark park. In between throwing tennis balls for Prince and Tuck I was able to get in a few shots.
The clouds largely disappeared and later in the morning I was on the Fall Creek Trail at Fort Harrison State Park. It’s hard to beat an autumn day, a good day for smelling the leaves and kicking through them. Inside every six year old boy there is a six year old boy. Inside every 70 year old man, there is a six year old boy. We were having a warm spell and a lot of people were enjoying it.
It being toward the middle of the day, lighting was more harsh than it was in the morning but shooting high dynamic range eased that. The camera was on the tripod and shots were bracketed plus and minus two stops. I later combined the resulting three images in Photomatix Pro and was quite pleased with the result. There are times when I want some of what has come to be called the ‘HDR effect’, an effect that can push colors to the cartoonish side while the range of illumination is taken from, say, 13 stops down to eight or nine stops. That cartoonish effect can be effective in some situations but not here. All I wanted to do was compress the range of captured light into the range that can be displayed and keep the colors pretty much as they were. Here is the result:
One effect of compressing a wide dynamic range into a narrower dynamic range is that tonal transitions become more smooth and gradual. Compare the above with this image, the one the camera recommended and was included as part of the HDR work:
This is very nice too but the brightness on the right side of the tree to the right of the path suggests why it isn’t a good idea to shoot at this time of day if it can be avoided. All in all, a good result with new technology and better yet, a good day to be outside.
Shooting with an agenda?
Our little congregation was putting together a cookbook and they needed a picture of the church for it. Since the book was going to press on Wednesday, I went up early on Monday hoping to get a nice picture of the sunbathed front of the church. Good idea. The sky was clear and promising. I set up and got shot after shot over a period of several minutes but it became clear that the right image was not going to be there. And the patched parking lot in front wasn’t helping either. Nothing much of interest as far as the light was concerned and the shot was poorly positioned and composed.
Not very interesting view of Church of the Saviour
I’m a fan of Dewitt Jones and one of his dicta at this point would have been “turn around Barry, turn around”! So I did and that’s when I saw this.
God beam
The church is situated on eight acres of ground and I’m sure I’ve looked back in this area before but there was never anything of interest or, better, anything interesting I was prepared to see. It would have been difficult to pass up this shot in any case but there was another reason it was important to me. In a few weeks I would be preaching while our minister was on vacation and I planned a sermon built around the idea of spirit and seeing. I was looking for shots that I could use.
Religious language is very symbolic since it deals with the transcendent and unimaginable. It is interesting to a photographer to see how often light is part of the description of the transcendent – ‘Light of the world’, ‘your word is a lamp unto my feet’, etc. I had thought early on that a picture of a God beam would be a nice addition to the sermon. And there it was.
We humans always have an agenda. My ‘front of the head’ agenda that morning had been to get a good shot of the church. One item in my ‘back of the head’ agenda, that vast pool of hopes, interests, and yearnings we all carry around, was to get a shot of a God beam. I’m not going to argue that God gave me a present with that shot, the real gifts to me in the present context are the continued existence of Barry Lively and a growing appreciation of what there is to see.
Christians often quote Matthew 3:2 – ‘Repent for the kingdom of God is near.’ For some that can take on an ominous tone; it is time to straighten out our lives for the end is coming. A Bible scholar I know said that a better translation than ‘repent’ would have been ‘turn around.’ ‘Turn around for the kingdom of God is near.’ Indeed it was. And is.
After working the God beam shot I still had to get a picture of the church. I moved up the parking lot about 200 feet and shot from the other direction. It was a better composition but the light was still not what I would want so I used a technique called high dynamic range (HDR) where I did the same shot (on a tripod) three times, overexposing, underexposing and exposing as suggested by the auto exposure feature of the camera. The shots were combined in software to produce this image.
A better picture of Church of the Saviour
The light is still not great but the glow that came from the HDR treatment was nice. And as it turned out the publisher changed the image from color to black and white. If I had known that was what they wanted, I might have settled for one of the first shots I took at the original position and converted it to black and white myself. I’m glad I didn’t know that. Otherwise there would have been no God beam picture and I might have settled for a poorly composed picture of the church. If ignorance isn’t really bliss, at least sometimes it is blissful.
Spirit and Seeing 