I think I might do a daily photo kind of thing. Or a photo every few days. I take enough photos to share them more often than I do. And when I do share them, I know not many people click through to see the rest of the photos in the photo set.
Between now and the end of the year I’ll share some of my favorite images from 2009, sprinkling in some new photos as I go. Hopefully by the new year I’ll have taken enough to keep it going.
Here’s a photo of some camels I took in Lanzarote.
I’m home! Which means I can upload some photos from the last trip. They are all over at the trip’s Sosauce album but I thought I’d share the HDR photos in a separate post.
My first attempts were hand crafted using gimp, but thanks to helpful comments I downloaded various bits of software, and all the images below are made with EnfuseGUI.app.
To be honest, I’m really enjoying playing with this kind of photography, even if my efforts below are a bit bland. The software seems to render a lot of the surfaces into a single tone, which makes them seem very flat and plastic. And the saturation seems to suffer too. However, I’m not going to shell out on expensive software just yet…
Enfuse version of my previous effort:
A fountain in Haifa. I set the iso low to get a long exposure (for a blurred fountain), even with the camera pointed right into the sun.
Haifa at night. Lights shone directly into the camera, but just of shot, creating the hazy sides.
Haifa port. The bright lights, reflections and interesting shapes make for good HDR shots.
The pool deck of the Royal Princess.
The Dead Sea. The sky was a lot bluer in the normal exposed photo. Also, for those who don’t know the Dead Sea is shrinking, I took this photo at the 1994 shoreline.
The Dead Sea again. Note the shadowy people.
The Dome from the Mount of Olives. Again, he sky should be deeper blue here.
A wider view. The blurred edges to the tree look interesting, but not in a good way.
The inside of the the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I’d have framed this shot better, but people were walking through all the time. This is the only HDR photo I’ve taken indoors and the effect is quite pleasing.
I’ll post some more general travel photos later.
I had an unexpected day at sea, and I felt inspired to make this video. I demonstrate all the things that can go wrong on stage with your costume, and how to avoid such problems.
Over the past few weeks I’ve mentioned the idea of HDR photography, which stands for High Dynamic Range photography. Here’s my first try, with an image I took this evening from my hotel balcony in Kusadasi, Turkey.
The basic idea is that you lock your camera on a tripod, and take three photos in a row, very quickly, with three different exposures. Then you get special software that combines the photos into a single image, taking the optimally exposed layer for each part of the photo. Then you tweak the image in Photoshop, and spit it out the end.
I decided to give it a go, but instead of using the special programs (which I may have on my laptop somewhere, as I think some kind of utility for this came with my camera) I did the below images entirely using the Gimp, the open source Photoshop project.
In other words, please don’t examine these closely! I’m just messing about with the technique, and if I like this “look” I might purchase or find the real software to make things easier and better quality in the future.
Second, here’s a photo from the burning mountain in I visited a few weeks ago:
And a single exposure of the same scene for comparison:
The effect is really noticeable in the first image, making everything look plastic and unreal compared to normal photographs. The second image is far more subtle, probably too subtle for anyone to notice. I like the second a lot better, but it’s a lot of work to put into a single image.
I’ll see how it goes.
EDIT: I noticed the wordpress theme has been resizing the images I’ve been posting here from my gallery! I wondered why the quality sometimes looked a bit off. From now on the images will be crystal clear.
I was a away for two weeks this month, on this trip:
The trip mixed business and leisure, but even the business was quite fun. First up, I spent a week at the Sundance Nature Park for the Turkish Juggling Festival. I posted loads of photos on my blog, and daily diary too, but I I uploaded some of the more interesting photos to the sosauce.com gallery. Like these ones:
The domes at the festival site.
View from the top of Tahtali.
Awesome parrot.
Mount Chimaera
Following the festival I joined the HAL Prinsendam, a cruise ship I’ve worked on four times now. I’ll be back on the ship for another 19 days in November too!
The front of the ship looks great, but why a photo of the rear of the ship? Well, you see the two windows on the very back corner? Those are the two windows for my cabin. The view is great, as I can look back along the wake of the ship. However, awesomeness of cabins is not just down to the view. No, there’s also the issue of noise. Modern ships use pod propulsion propellers, and these create very little noise and almost no vibrations. Unfortunately the Prinsendam is not particularly modern (though only 20 years old, cruise ship design has come a long way in that time) and the whole back of the ship vibrates when the screws turn. Even worse, when the ship is moving and they throw it into reverse gear, it REALLY starts to vibrate.
But that’s not all… look closer at the images. What is below my cabin? Yes, ropes emerging from holes. As the ship approaches a port, the deck crew prepare the ropes and cables, then wind them in and… well, there are about thousand things that can make noise in the space directly under my bed, and between 5am and 7am is the usual time for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM to be used extensively.
So, I visited Albania, but didn’t do anything that exciting. I have a blog post I want to write about Saranda, but I need to sort the photos first.
Next the ship called at Dubrovnik, Croatia. I’ve been here before, so this time I re-visited some touristy sights I’ve seen before. This time I took a walk around the city walls, which was actually a lot of fun.
At one point I came across a man taking photographs of a woman. It was obviously some kind of official photo session, but they hadn’t organised it very well. Of course, it’s a busy day; not one but four cruise ships were visiting the city. The assistants kept asking people to not walk through the shot, but they were really up against it.
As I walked past I snapped a few shots of the photographer and model, and one of the assistants (or maybe the director, I don’t know) said to me “Go find your own model!” Not in a joking way either, she actually wanted to get rid of me. The thing is, I wasn’t trying to take the same photo of the model, I was taking a photo of the photographer+model pair, a much more interesting subject than the model herself. And what do they expect people to do? If you want privacy, hire a studio, or come back when the city is a little less crowded.
Thankfully I have a zoom lens, so took this photo from a distance. Yes, contrary to what it may seem like from this blog, I do use other lenses apart from my 10mm wide angle.
I found a huge flock of pigeons in the market. Someone had thrown down corn, and they were pecking at it like made. I wanted to get a shot of blurry pigeons in flight, with some interesting market scene behind. However, the pigeons were so focused on the food on the ground that I could walk right through them and they wouldn’t move.
In the end I had to stamp my feet to get them to fly up into the air. I did this five of six times, then the market traders asked me to stop. In this case I understood their objections completely, and stopped right away. I like this photo best:
Saturday was a sea day. In the afternoon I was sitting in my cabin and suddenly “BRRBRBRBBRBRNNGNGG…” the propeller kicked into reverse. The ship was stopping. Why? Turns out we had a scenic cruising stop at Stromboli volcano, which is located just north of Sicily.
Science fiction fans out there will know this as the exit point if one was ever to go on A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Like I did at Mount Chimaera, I took some triple expose photo sets, with a view to making some HDR images. Maybe one day I’ll actually get round it.
That’s the thing with my photography at the moment: I never do any post processing. Every single one of the photos on this blog are presented exactly as taken. I don’t particularly care about getting stuff perfect in photoshop, it’s the pointing and clicking that I really enjoy. Once I get to the limits of what I can do in camera, I’ll move on to balancing things out afterward. But, you know, I’m still almost completely incapable of holding the camera horizontally, and my horizons are always tilted one way or the other. When I learn how to do that I’ll buy a copy of photoshop.
The full album is over at Sosauce.com.
