timeimmortal

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Steveston harbour is home to a fleet of what are, for the most part, fishing boats.

The boat marked “CASH” is, I’m told, not a fishing boat per sé, but rather a boat that will meet fishers and basically buy their current catch to bring back to the harbour (so the actual fishing boats can, presumably, stay out longer).

Not a bad system, really. At least, it doesn’t sound like a bad system. If any of my readers are fishermen and would care to offer a differing opinion, I’d be happy to publish it.

Edit-wise, this picture was pretty straightforward: the calibration/Punch preset gave the image a good mix of colour and contrast, and a few adjustments to the highlights, exposure, and shadows brought out a bit more detail. I also applied a touch of noise reduction and a bit of chromatic aberration correction for good measure.

BC Ferries apparently has a new class of boat that they have purchased from a company in Germany. Grace and I got a first-hand look at one of the new ships — the Coastal Renaissance.

This is the front viewport of the ship on its top passenger deck (the open one):

Yeah, not much to see — it would have been better had the sky not been so…you know…gray. Still, I do like the lines and reflection visible in this picture, and even the silvery parts of the gray have their appeal. This was intended to be a bit of an odd shot, and it more or less delivered in that regard.

Edit-wise, it was pretty easy to process this picture; the calibration/Punch preset took care of most of the editing for me, and a bit of noise reduction (I don’t know why, but the EOS 350D always seems to have more noise — above what one would expect for a given ISO setting — in the sky and clouds than in the rest of the image; have other users of other camera systems noticed this, or am I imagining things?) rounded things out. I also tweaked the shadows a bit, in an effort to make the image a bit more contrasty.

Grace suggested that the title of this photo be “Sleeping Treebeard,” and I have to admit that there is a certain Ent-ish quality about this particular tipped-over tree stump.

I think the great joy of almost any forest in British Columbia is just how lush it all is; Alberta forests don’t seem to have quite the same sort of vibrancy to them. There is an immense amount of green in this picture, and the different hues are very intense to a shade.

Edit-wise, this picture was pretty minimally modified. I had the camera’s ISO set fairly high, so noise reduction was the order of the day. Apart from that, this image received the usual calibration/Punch preset combination, and I seem to recall adjusting the Clarity to a negative value, although not heavily so — I wanted only a slight bit of diffusion in the image.

I caught sight of this log almost in passing — we were hurrying along the path, and I just happened to turn my head to look at it as I went. What follows isn’t necessarily the best picture I’ve ever taken, but it was a chance to mess around a little bit with depth of field.

What I really liked about the log — what drew me to it as a photographic subject, I guess one could say — was the way most of its branches were broken off, leaving just a series of little stubs that ran along its length; there’s something about repeating visual patterns that I’m drawn to. The colour was nice as well — this was a fairly sunlit part of the forest, and the moss in particular did very well here — it was a vibrant, intense green.

Edit-wise, this shot was fairly simple to edit; I applied the usual calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction, and a few minor saturation adjustments to further accentuate the green and brown hues in the shot. I probably could have done better in terms of portraying DOF, but I’m not going to complain too much — the pattern of the broken branches looks better for not being quite so blurry, I think.

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!

Okay, hopefully from here on in there won’t be anymore discontinuities in terms of what time the daily picture was taken at. This shot, for example, was taken once Grace and I got to my grandparents’ place on Vancouver Island. We wanted to get out for a bit of a walk, and my grandpa was more than happy to tour us around a small forest nearby.

I don’t know for sure when this tree fell over, but the way it landed made for an interesting shot, and it was framed nicely by greenery on all sides. This was actually quite a fun shot to edit, because of how rich the colours were, and I think the picture itself captures nicely the beauty and lushness of a typical British Columbia forest.

Edit-wise, I began by applying my usual calibration/Punch preset to this shot, although I reversed my decision with regard to the Clarity setting of said preset. Clarity was instead set to -50 (from +50) to give a slightly diffuse effect to the image. I boosted the green saturation by quite a lot, and also increased the contrast substantially. Finally, because there wasn’t much ambient light in the forest and as a result I’d found it necessary to increase the ISO to 800, I did some noise reduction on the shot. All of that, coupled with a bit of on-export sharpening by Lightroom (apparently that feature has not yet been “optimized” in any way, shape or form; hard to believe given how well it works!) and the result was the image featured above.

Once again, I’m kind of jumping back and forth in time, although this time only by a matter of hours (if that much). This picture is the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay, taken perhaps thirty minutes before the ferry departed for Vancouver Island.

The reason this image took a bit longer to arrive is that it is an attempt at a high dynamic range (or simply HDR) image. The concept behind HDR is basically to present an image in which both a darker foreground and a brighter background are in detail, with neither of the two being either washed out and overexposed, or dark and underexposed.

In layman’s terms, I suppose you could say that what HDR is is an attempt to make the camera see what the human eye sees when looking at a scene.

The plain fact of the matter is that the dynamic range (the “space” between the darkest value that a camera can record and the brightest value it can record) of most cameras is substantially less than that of the human eye.

So whereas we might look at a scene with our eyes and see a bright Sun in a blue sky behind a tree on which we can see the colour of the branches and the leaves, in a photo of same we will either see the detail on the tree in front of a washed out, bright white sky, or else we will see the Sun in a blue sky behind a dark, essentially black tree.

HDR photography uses one or more of several techniques to get around this limitation. Some forms of HDR attempt to use bracketing to combine several images, each at a different exposure level, into one cohesive picture that looks “right”. Other workarounds include the use of neutral density filters of proper magnitude at appropriate angles. Lacking both good HDR software and a graduated neutral density filter, I opt for a third method: taking a mid-tone picture and using Lightroom’s surprisingly power curves tool to effectively create a pseudo-HDR image.

Edit-wise, I began by doing a lot of highlight reduction on this shot, using both Lightroom’s built-in Recovery tool and the Tone Curve tool as well; almost all the bright highlights were stripped out of the picture. This was enough to restore detail not only to the sky, but to the clouds as well (note the subtle gradiations of grey amidst the white). I also used the Fill Light tool in Lightroom, which brightens darker tones, and then darkened some of the shadows again to restore contrast detail.

Finally, I applied my calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction (always a good idea after that many level adjustments), and a bit of chromatic aberration correction to round out the edits. I toyed with the Clarity a bit, and thought briefly about doing this shot “diffusion print” style, but instead settled on a Clarity value of 50 (the default for the Punch preset).

This was a shot that I honestly didn’t think would work out; my past experiments with HDR have only occasionally ended successfully. That said, I was pleasantly surprised with how well this picture did turn out, and I’m going to have to remember everything I did that made this one turn out right, because I know I’ll want to do it again.

Okay, back to ferry pictures. Or, rather, pictures taken from the ferry.

While out on the deck, I noticed a couple of birds flying more or less in tandem with the ship — they seemed almost to sit still, hanging in the air, matching the speed of the boat as they cut through the air while the boat cut through the water.

And against the backdrop of the clouds, one soaring bird in particular made for a very cool picture.

Edit-wise, I began by applying the calibration/Punch preset, but didn’t like the look of the shot after doing so. Next, I tried the “Vivid” preset that I sometimes use, and liked that result better, although it brought out the digital noise in the clouds too much for my liking. So I applied some noise reduction and reduced every other saturation level except blue to -100, effectively turning the image into a “blue and grey” photo.

Which worked, given that the only colours of note in the image are…blue and grey (the bird, being mostly in shadow, is included in that observation).

I apologize that the pictures are getting a little disjointed; usually there is something akin to a narrative flow to the series in the Pics of the Day, but in this case things are jumping around a bit. I’ve been having trouble finding time to edit all the pictures I took in Vancouver, and this is doubly true of panoramic images, which is the reason that things are a bit out of order.

I’m very happy with this picture; I just didn’t get around to finishing it until after I’d posted a picture taken from the ferry that Grace and I caught the following day.

Anyhow, this is Coal Harbour, which is located just off of downtown Vancouver, a bit west of Stanley Park. It’s a pretty nice area, actually, and it’s easy to see why it and other parts of Vancouver get used in a variety of different television shows and movies.

As has become fairly standard for the panoramic images I compose, I took each of the six shots that comprise this image and matched the exposure levels in each, in addition to applying my usual calibration/Punch preset to each. I re-thought the Clarity setting that is a part of the Punch preset though, and set it back to 0 (from 50), because I intended to mess with the Clarity of the finished panoramic.

I also applied noise reduction and chromatic aberration correction to each image, before exporting the lot of them as TIFF files. I then loaded the images into Hugin and defined…quite a lot of control points between each image and its neighbour (on the order of 15 per image pair, which is high for me). Hugin took about ten minutes to render the finished image, which I loaded back into Lightroom for further adjustment. Specifically, I set the Clarity to -100, giving the image that “diffusion print” look again which, in the harbour setting, really worked out well (it gave a slightly misty quality to the boats and the rest of the background).

That image is what the good Reader sees here now.

I hadn’t been on a BC Ferries vessel in at least a decade, which corresponds both to the length of time it had been since I had last visited Vancouver and the length of time it had been since I had last visited my grandparents out in the town of Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.

Far too long.

I grabbed this shot not long after we left port, and just after Grace and I had grabbed a quick bite to eat in the ferry’s cafeteria. The ferry was already moving at a good clip, and the wind on the deck was pretty extreme, but it was also fairly bright out, and getting a shot off wasn’t any particular kind of challenging.

The cloudiness apparent here stuck with us for most of our time in Vancouver, but even cloudy days can make for a good picture if one is careful. This shot in particular worked out very well, although getting it to the point it was at took a fair bit of editing.

I began by applying the calibration/Punch preset, but didn’t like the look of the shot after doing so. Next, I tried the “Vivid” preset that I sometimes use, and liked that result better, although it brought out the digital noise in the clouds too much for my liking. So I applied some noise reduction and reduced every other saturation level except blue to -100, effectively turning the image into a “blue and grey” photo.

Which worked, given that the only colours of note in the image are…blue and grey.

I also applied some vignetting to darken the water and highlight the sunlight on its surface at the center of the frame. Not wanting the sky to be dark in the upper corners, I use the new retouching tool that Lightroom 2 includes to lighten those areas of the image again. A few shadow adjustments later, and I had the image you see here, O Reader.[tags]BC Ferries, Grace[/tag]

I’m not a dog person. Moreover, I am not a “small dog” person; I can count on one hand the number of small dogs I can stand to be in the presence of. Small dog owners often annoy the heck out of me as well. That said, I have remarked before — many times, in fact — that animals tend to be a favourite photographic subject of mine, and for as much as I might despise small dogs for various reasons I will concede that I don’t mind taking the occasional picture of one.

Or two, in this case.

Some of Grace’s relatives came over to her grandparents’ house for the afternoon, and brought their small dog (whose name escapes me) along. This dog proceeded to play with Penny, and I caught this picture of the two of them wrestling playfully.

At the time, I was using my Lensbaby, which accounts for the extreme “zoom”-type blur on the image borders. Equally, however, I had the ISO set to about 800 (since I was, after all, indoors) — and even then, the camera didn’t select a very high shutter speed when I went to take the picture. I managed to hold the camera stable, for the most part, but of course the dogs weren’t of a mind to pause for the picture.

Funnily, I think I prefer this result to the potential portrait I could have got. The two critters almost seem to swirl together into one blur of activity.

Edit-wise, this shot got my usual calibration/Punch preset and a fair bit of noise reduction. I also applied a rather strong vignetting preset, just for visual flair (and to focus the viewer’s attention squarely on the dogs).