I’m sure that many of you suffer from the same photographers’ malady that I have: tons of images that you have forgotten about! Now, that is not all bad, because I have taken some bad photos in the past (and will take more in the future), which are best forgotten.
Bay of Fundy at Low Tide
On the other hand, my photo editing/processing skills have expanded and improved over the years, so some of those not-so-great photos might benefit from a bit of this new skill level. As I went looking for the source file for a reasonably nice landscape of Peggy’s Cove that I took in 2007, I stumbled across an image at the Bay of Fundy that just never pleased me. If I would take it nowadays, it would be as an HDR sequence, so that I could really get everything I wanted in the image.
However, thanks to the wonderful folks at HDRsoft and the fact that I have played with Photomatix Pro for years, there was the possibility to come up with something new in this image. It is no longer a pure photo, as I went rather painterly on this image, but I really enjoy the mood that is captured here.
Let me know how you like it and about the photos you have resurrected from the past!
On August 13th, we had just finished a very nice dinner at one of our favorite Worcester, MA, restaurants: Bocado (highly recommended). As we were leaving, I had this gnawing thought that something was missing…
What Lies Between Buildings.
Of course! I hadn’t captured my image yet that day!! As we walked out the door at Bocado’s, I noticed that there was a small hole in the wooden fence between the two buildings and took a peek!
What I saw, intrigued me for the lines that were formed by the various surfaces, pipes, bricks, and the buildings, only to be broken by the pure organic texture of nature coming in to play. Luckily, a small hole is enough for an iPhone’s lens, so we get to see the result here.
I still enjoy looking into this image and wondering what lies beyond the fence and who will use the plywood, or what is in the blue container…
I hope you enjoyed visiting page 21 and feel free to take a look at the entire book at the following link for the softcover versionInstant Grammar 2013 by Frank Jansen.
On page 4, we find ourselves in the cold of Winter with Thoughts of Spring.
Thoughts of Spring
Of course, one may think that those thoughts are a bit premature, given that the image was captured on January 7th and plenty of cold and snow could reasonably be expected… While that is certainly the case, seeing the farm tractor catching glorious sunlight got me thinking of Spring well before its arrival!
In an instant, I knew that the farmer was prepared for the next season to arrive and take on the tasks to get his fields ready for whatever their purpose was to be. It was almost as if Winter allowed me to peek into a diorama of things to come…
The image on page 6 was shot on September 5, while I was waiting for my car to be serviced. It had just rained and I sauntered over to the Panera close to the dealership to get a bit of breakfast.
A Sunny Flower on a Rainy Day
After a (somewhat) healthy power breakfast with a cup of hot green tea, I was walking back and rather liked the sky that presented itself, so was looking for an opportunity to photograph it in some fashion.
As it happened, the dealership had planted a nice row of sunflowers along the edge of their lot to dress things up a bit. I liked the idea of juxtaposing the sunflower against the doughnut shop and the sky; a bit of a 3-way contrast between sun and rain, as well as healthy sunflower seeds vs killer doughnuts. A bit of finding the position to line up flower, shop and sky, and you see the result here.
Page 8 displays an image that was captured on April 7 in East Haddam, Connecticut. The location is in Devil’s Hopyard State Park, which is a great spot for hiking and interacting with nature; the small cascade is called Chapman Falls.
Chapman Falls in Devil’s Hopyard State Park, East Haddam, CT.
I was visiting friends in East Haddam for the weekend to explore some photography opportunities, help with a web-site and do some off-roading with my newly acquired FJ Cruiser. On this beautiful Sunday, a bit of exploration along a tricky bit of trails (great boulders and such) led us to the vicinity of Devil’s Hopyard State Park.
As we were all ready to stretch our legs a bit and new there would be a bit of scenery, I parked and we started following trails. The trail that took us down to Chapman Falls provided access to a bit of clambering over a couple of rocks to get a seat right across from the falls. The falls feature potholes that have been created by stones that were caught in eddies and spun to wear holes into the rock; as these holes formed, larger stones would get stuck in them and continue the process by carving a deeper hole.
The origin of the name ‘Devil’s Hopyard’ is not entirely clear, but there is folklore surrounding it. One of the more believable accounts is that hops were grown in the area by a man named Dibble; maybe not as fun as a supernatural dance location, possibly.
This image is a bit unique in the collection resulting from the 365 Day Instagram project: shots of trash are pretty rare among my images, unless I see something unusual about the particular trash item. On July 22nd, something caught my eye about this little tableau, as I was driving along my morning commute.
A Couch Alone.
It is not every day, that I see a red couch, albeit dilapidated, framed by a bit of greenery next to the road. The couch looked a bit forlorn and disheveled, as if it was having a rough morning following a long night of rowdy partying at the local fraternity. To add insult to injury, trash was stuffed under the cushions in a futile attempt to make the most of this act of brazen dumping.
What adds a little bit of irony to this situation is the fact that just to the left is the entrance to the local town transfer station (aka dump); the couch almost made it, but was left in clear violation of local rules: the transfer station fence bears a sign that expressly forbids dumping!
The first image in my book ‘Instant Grammar 2013’ was captured on January 1, 2013; a very nice day with snow left on the ground from a weather system that came through earlier in the week.
Janurary 1, 2013 – House at the Squannacook River Dam in Groton, MA.
My good friend and fellow photographer, George, was visiting from Connecticut, so we planned to do a bit of wandering around on New Years Day and explore the area for some photo opportunities.
I had some locations in mind from my daily commute to the high-tech part of my life. This commute used to take me through various small towns with lots of interesting older architecture and locations. The Squannacook River Dam in this image was one of the locations on my list, as I enjoy water in my images and I knew there was potential for a good image.
It took a bit of clambering down the embankment to get the angle and framing of the image that is shown here. I wanted the house to rise above the dam and falls and use the sky and snow to complement one another, so as to provide a combination of the majesty of nature and structure, along with a sense of peaceful coexistence.
Hope you like this one! More can be found in the book at
During this past week I spent a good amount of time going through all the images from last year’s 365 Project that I described in a previous post (365 Projects – What’s Next? ). After gathering all the images, the task of culling them to a number that would produce a reasonably priced book was harder than I expected, but nonetheless gratifying even in some unexpected ways.
The Cows are Hamming it Up!
There may be some good reasons for all of us to go through a process like this once in a while. It’s healthy to go back through a body of work and make decisions about what we’re going to include for publication in print (I gently put forth the concept that having photography in print is a different level of visceral connection to a work than on a computer screen; I may have to write a blog post about that concept). It certainly felt like a cleansing to me with a much more positive outlook on my work as a result.
Fingall’s Cave on the Island of Staffa.
First to describe the process that I used. I took the 365+ candidate images (there were some days, where I had several interesting images, so I included these for this process rather than prejudging). I assigned rating stars to all of the potentially publishable images, which wound up ranging from 3 to 5 stars. Including all the extra images, this resulted in 229 images at 3+ stars: too many! At this point, I did a quick re-scan to ensure that non of the 3-star images should have a change in rating and set the cut-off at 4+ stars: 164 images! Still way too many, as my target was slight less than 60, so that I could publish it in a 60 page book.
Dunkin’ Donuts and the Weather
Another quick scan allowed me to get the number of potential images down to about 130, which was moving in the right direction.
Rather than continuing to pare down the number of images through this methodology, I decided to start formatting the book, which gave me the opportunity to get a sense of how the various images would work together on facing pages. As I did this, a sense of flow and story was developing, which resulted in a very satisfying end product (I’m still writing the afterword, but that’s a matter of another 30 minutes max) that will go out later today for production. I’m psyched!
Oh, almost forgot: go out and do something likes this for one of your projects and you’ll appreciate your own work a lot more!
A week or so back, I wrote about this year’s 365 Instagram project, which focuses on capturing skies on a daily basis; it is still going strong, as I captured Sky #42 today for the year. In that blog post I also mentioned that I completed a 365 Instagram project in 2013.
The big question after completing a project is what to do with that completion? My decision around the end of 2013 was to pull together a book of the images and publish it (at least electronically, and possibly, if there is enough interest, in print format).
Farm Landscape
With a wealth of new images, albeit in Instagram format and size, I figured there would at least be some among them that are worth sharing with the general public. Therefore, I have started the process of pulling all the images together in LightRoom and picking my favorites from among them.
Looking Down the Old Railroad
Of course, it is easier said than done to cull the entire year’s worth of images to the top 60 or so that will fit nicely in an 8×8 Blurb book and provide a reasonable representation of the year’s catch.
As I also mentioned in the prior post, there was clearly a bit of development in my Instagram skills, as the year progressed, which, when coupled with an increasing amount of inspiration resulted in some very acceptable images (acceptable is a high level of self-praise among photographers 🙂 ).
There were also some themes that evolved, some of which shouldn’t be a surprise to me, if I took the time to listen to my own skills: lots of rather cool landscapes and the odd bit of dramatic sky. A new area of interest that snuck in somewhat unanticipated was that of graveyards; there are lots of interesting graveyards in the New England area and some were clearly worth capturing on days that I passed them during my commute or other travels.
Yogic Tree
More than anything else, last year’s project taught me to keep my eyes open at all times and be aware of my environment with a keen sense of curiosity. It is rewarding to see a subject, such as a tree, on different days with varying light and atmospheric conditions and capture some of this variety during the year. Trees have always had a lot of power for me, as they remind me of endurance and perseverance despite the best efforts of the elements and time. Some of their shapes can be nothing short of spectacular, such as the ‘Yogic Tree’ in this post (expect more about this tree, as I have visited her many times).
Work on the book is progressing nicely and will complete within the next week or two; I will provide an update with a link to the electronic version when complete. I know that finishing the book will give me a sense of accomplishment and closure on last year’s endeavor.
Over the past number of years a tremendous amount has been written about HDR imaging and the state of the art has evolved at a rapid pace. This blog contains some of my thoughts about this topic, some of the work that I have done in HDR and a tip or two.
First off, what is HDR? High Dynamic Range photography is a combination of photographic and editing techniques for extending the dynamic range of luminosity of an image. What this means in real-world terms is that some of the darker parts of a scene can be treated with more light and some of the brighter parts can receive a bit less light, so that the overall effect results in a more complete viewing experience of the scene when processed.
A view over the Connecticut River at Turner’s Falls.
The concept of extending the dynamic range covered in an image is not as new, as you might think: in the 1850s, French photographer Gustave LeGray combined multiple negatives of sea and sky to create seascapes that are stunning to behold with dramatic skies. Significant additional developments were made in the 1930s and 1940s through manual dodging and burning (increasing and decreasing of exposure) of areas in a negative to create a more dramatic print; Ansel Adams was a true artist in this process, as can be seen in many of his famous landscapes.
The advent of massive processing power in desktop computers combined with Digital Photography has created a new level of interest, which has allowed many photographers to capitalize on some of the algorithmic advances that have been made in the 1980s and 1990s in image processing.
Cape Neddick, ME, is the location of Nubble Light an oft-photographed landmark.
At this point in time, there are also numerous cameras available, which do the HDR processing on-the-fly, taking multiple images and combining them into a single HDR image with preset processing settings.
As touched on earlier, the HDR process extends the dynamic range of luminosity in an image; this enables us to bring the range of image capture somewhat closer to that available in the human eye. Camera sensors have gotten better over the past years, so that the range of the camera’s sensor starts to rival that of the human eye, which may lead one to think that the need for HDR is diminishing. This definitely is true from the perspective of being able to ‘see’ as much as the human eye with the camera.
The fair bathroom is a piece of Americana that looks best in the early morning hours.
From my point of view, there is no diminished reason to use HDR imaging, as there are several benefits to working with HDR that cannot be achieved easily through other means, such as:
The setting of very specific moods within the image.
Creating that dramatic sky, which Gustave LeGray was after
Surreal, hyper-realism
There definitely are other great reasons for HDR, but these are some of my personal favorites. I have included a couple of samples from my work with HDR in this post to give a bit of flavor.
I mentioned tips in the beginning of this post, so here are a couple from my experience with HDR:
Bring a tripod! It will make your processing work that much easier later – the Cape Neddick image was shot free-hand with the camera on HDR, so it is possible)
If possible, meter the light, so that you can set your bracketing up correctly for a good range. As a rule of thumb, I use -2, -1, 0, +1 and +2 for my exposure values in a range of 5 shots; more or less will work, depending on the scene.
Have a vision of what you want to achieve with your shot, before you process it. Aimless HDR processing is never very fruitful, regardless of the quality of the software; with a vision in mind, you will know when you have arrived at the sweet spot of your endeavor.
Experiment! Not every image will make a great HDR image, which can only be found out through experimentation.
And, of course, most importantly, have fun when working your images. You’re not going to convince everyone that you did the right thing when processing your ‘killer’ image, but, if you’re happy with the end result, you can smile despite what someone else says about it.
