timeimmortal

This will be the last picture from the set I took at Kate & John’s wedding. This shot is actually from the gift opening the following day, and I really like the way Kate has that cloth seeming to levitate in front of her.

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Read the rest of this entry »

Time for another picture of ducks, I think. Just before they all flew away, the number of ducks floating near the dock grew to…quite a large number, and I managed to capture three of them in one frame.

I applied almost exactly the same edits to this photo as I did to the previous duck picture, right down to the use of the Vivid preset.

However, unlike in that picture, I didn’t ratchet the Clarity all the way to +100 — in fact, I did exactly the opposite, dropping it back to -100 and giving the image a more diffuse feel. I don’t know what possessed me to try that, but it worked out; the picture looks just that much better for it (and the diffusion, mercifully, didn’t obscure some of the finer details of the ducks’ feathers). I’m really beginning to love how that feature of Lightroom 2 works.

A bit of highlight recovery rounded out the edits, along with some work to reduce chromatic aberrations.

I like the formation these three fellows are in, as though they all departed a common point at different angles.

I’m trying something new with this post; I’ve tweaked the site a bit so that the most recent Pic of the Day is always the top post. Since it’s the only more-or-less assuredly regular feature of the site, I figured it should take prominence.

But hey, I don’t want to leave the good Reader hanging either. At the top of this post, there is a link to the main content, which begins just below.

This is a shot of the underside supports of…I guess it would be an observation platform near the dock we were at for the birthday party. That’s not really important; it was mostly empty, and we didn’t exactly go up there. But the support struts on the underside of the dock, partially backlit by the Sun and with more water in the illuminated area beyond the shadow, did make for an interesting picture.

Edit-wise, this shot got a fairly standard battery of adjustments, including the calibration/Punch preset and some massive highlight recovery adjustments; the background was rather over-exposed. I also applied some fill light, to bring out a few details in the columns.

Here’s one more shot of the fishing trawlers in Steveston.

I kind of violated what I am trying to make into a rule for myself: where possible, and except in case of sunrise or sunset photos, do not shoot into the Sun. And while technically the Sun is off to the right in this picture, I still had a lot of highlight recovery to do to get this image back into the “acceptable” category.

That said, the edits did work out rather well, enough so that I decided to post the picture on the ol’ blog here. There’s lots of details in this shot — riggings, divots and pits on the hulls of the ships, and so forth — that really give the eye lots to wander over.

Edit-wise, in addition to the aforementioned highlight recovery and a host of saturation adjustments to get rid of some harsh chromatic aberration (and to restore colour lost in the highlight reduction process), I applied a fair bit of sharpening to firm up some of the fine detail. I thought, briefly, about messing with the Clarity as well, but chose, in the end, to leave it at the preset’s default value of 50.

How about another picture of Grace?

Every so often, on walks like this, Grace and I will just goof off with the camera for a few minutes; it’s fun to play, and every so often a few good images will result from the time we take to do so. This is one example of what I mean by that; another picture of my wife that I really quite like, despite my stated dislike of most deliberately posed pictures.

Grace just seems really happy and relaxed in this shot, which I like.

Edit-wise, after applying the calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction to correct for the fact that I had the camera’s ISO set at 1600, and a lot of highlight recovery to adjust for the fact that much of the background was overexposed, I re-thought the Punch preset’s Clarity setting and set the Clarity to -75, giving the picture a fairly diffuse look that I think works well for pictures of people. It’s not quite soft focus, but it’s still a touch hazy, and it really looks good.

Especially when the subject of the portrait happens to be the beautiful young woman I’m married to!

Yet another picture from Grace’s grandparents’ yard. I wasn’t outside for all that long when I went picture-taking the first day we were there, but in that time I managed to grab several shots I’m fairly pleased with. Here’s another of them.

The only negative I really find in this image is that it once again underscores just how desperately I need to get my hands on a graduated neutral density filter — the sky behind the trees is, unfortunately, rather washed out. On the other hand, Lightroom 2 did an exceptional job of reducing the chromatic aberration along the highlight edges, and highlight recovery managed to bring some additional fine detail out of the wash.

This birdbath was situated in the (unused and somewhat grown-in) front yard of the house, and was flanked by several tall trees which wouldn’t surprise if they turned out to be a century old (if not older). Actually, the front yard was pretty dark overall (cast into shadow by said trees), and I found that I had to dial up the ISO a fair bit to get steady shots.

Edit-wise, apart from what I mentioned above, I applied the calibration/Punch preset that I favour, and also switched from ACR 3.1 to ACR 4.4 (ACR stands for Adobe Camera Raw, the technology Adobe applications use to interpret RAW-format photographs). A few shadow adjustments brought out some nice contrast in the shot, and a bit of noise reduction smoothed out the grain from the higher ISO setting.

Let’s have one last picture from the Alberta Provincial Legislature grounds, again taken with the Lensbaby.

At the bottom of the steps leading down a shallow hill on the south side of the Legislature, one finds this eternal flame burning in commemoration of Canada’s centennary in 1967 (or so I seem to recall). At night, with the Legislature partially illuminated by the ground lighting, and with the flame bright and resplendent in the foreground, it makes for a pretty exciting picture.

As the Reader can probably notice, I had the focal point of the Lensbaby’s frame shifted off to the right rather pronouncedly, so the Legislature in the background is quite heavily blurred. The flame, on the other hand, is quite sharp, if a bit overexposed. But then, one has to expect that sort of thing in a “dead of night” sort of picture, I suppose.

Edit-wise, this shot needed some noise reduction and a bit of highlight recovery.

Back toward the end of December (2007), I helped my dad and brother move my sister Katie down to the house she’d be renting in Calgary for the duration of her workterm there. She’s still a student at the — this is an eight-month workterm that forms a component of her education.

We were also helping one of her friends move, who lived in an apartment in downtown Edmonton. Needless to say, my brother — an inventive kid — couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a paper airplane and test its flight from a 12th-floor balcony.

Actually, the plane flew pretty well both times he threw it, and was also successfully recovered both times.

It was a cloudy day, so the colours in the shot aren’t all that exciting (although there’s some nice light/dark interplay, and lots of contrast), but I still like how it turned out. The angular framing is becoming something of a personal signature. Simon’s stance is also pretty good.

Edit-wise, the biggest thing I had to do was some highlight recovery in Lightroom (cloudy skies tend to wash out in shots like this), although I did boost the green and orange saturations a bit.

Just outside the Roman Agora, Grace and I stopped for a bit of a rest (we’d been walking non-stop since just after breakfast, and it was mid-afternoon by then). I noticed the ruins of a building across the road, and decided to grab a picture of them.

I don’t know what this building was before it…er…fell into disrepair (in truth, it looks like it got bombed and was never repaired), but something about it suggests that it might have been a church. Regardless, it’s a husk now, but it’s interesting that the doorway has survived while the walls have all toppled. You see ruined buildings in the oddest places in Athens, but none of the others that Grace and I noticed had parts of them in such relatively undisturbed condition as the doorway here.

Edit-wise, I tried to do some highlight recovery, but there wasn’t much I could do against the sunlight washing out in the clouds. A bit of fringe reduction was also necessary, as there are some fairly high-contrast areas in this picture.

Looking out over the Ancient Agora from in front of the Temple of Hephaestus, I felt moved to take another panoramic image. Unfortunately, it was a very cloudy day in Athens, but I think that the resulting image, despite the lack of blue sky, is nonetheless quite impressive.

There are quite a number of images comprising this shot (if memory serves, it’s a matrix of images, at least five across and two high). As has become my usual practice for panoramic images, I began by matching exposures between shots in Lightroom, and then cleaning up things like chromatic aberration and doing some highlight recovery. With that out of the way, the images were imported into Hugin, and if memory serves I defined an absurd number of control points (as many as 30 between just two images!) in order to get some of the details (like the Stoa of Attalos, over there on the left) to line up neatly.

The render took a while as well, although it’s less painful using Hugin on my work computer (with its Core 2 Duo processor) than on my Powerbook G4.

And the result? Well, you can see for yourself, O Reader. It’s a commanding view of the Agora, and also gives just a hint of an impression of what ancient Athens must have been like.

Moving through the Ancient Agora, Grace and I came next to the Temple of Hephaestus, another temple of a similar design to the Parthenon, only on a somewhat smaller scale. I say “somewhat” because, as can be seen here, it’s still a very large building in spite of how old it is.

The temple itself sits atop a hill on the western side of the agora, and the path leading up to it winds around a stand of bushes and trees. I took this photo just below the final staircase one has to ascend to reach the temple, and I think it provided a very good framing for the image to have that one tree on the right.

The similarities and differences in design between this temple and the Parthenon can be noted at a glance, and I won’t remark too much on them. Suffice to say that the Temple of Hephaestus is somewhat more intact than the Parthenon (it was even used as a museum back in the 1930s), although it is in need of some restoration work as well.

Edit-wise, I didn’t do much to this image apart from fringe reduction and some highlight recovery.

The Ancient Agora used to be the marketplace of old Athens, more or less. There were any number of residences there as well, and quite probably temples, but the majority seems to have been taken up by shops and plazas concerned with the sale of various things. It’s also a fairly large area, covering a substantial majority of the area of the park in the middle of Athens wherein the Acropolis, Areopagus, and Temple of Hephaestus can also be found.

Another bit of Hugin magic, this panoramic of the Agora is comprised of four or five images, arranged horizontally. These are unusually quick to compose in Hugin, and render very quickly as well. As usual, there aren’t many (any?) visible join seams.

Edit-wise, I did some chromatic aberration reduction on each image prior to exporting it for use in Hugin, and also did some highlight recovery and exposure balancing between shots. My typical Hugin usage is six to eight control points between two pictures, and I forget which rendering view I employed when I finally accepted the output. Not that it matters, I suppose. I had to crop the image a bit, but fortunately there was no need to scale it — the image was not wider than the maximum 10,000 pixels that Lightroom tolerates.

Grace noticed this tree as we were walking through the Ancient Agora. From the leaves, it looks to be some kind of maple…although I’m not particularly gifted when it comes to horticulture and botany, so I’ve no idea if that is in fact the case. As I say, it does look like maple.

A fairly straightforward shot, this is one case where the overexposed background actually works in favour of the image quality, since there is nothing behind the leaves to detract from them or distract the attention of the viewer (and, in fact, the contrast actually increases how eye-catching some of the leaves really are). Edit-wise, my only concerns were a bit of highlight recovery and some fringe reduction (mostly fringe reduction) — sharpness and saturation were handled nicely in-camera.