Buffalo Landscape, Serengeti, Tanzania
I never thought I’d be shooting landscapes with my 500mm reflector lens, but with Serengeti National Park’s huge, open expanses, it seemed a great way to isolate tiny details. To add to the fun, the lens produces very low contrast, which is great for experimentation with soft treatments. So that’s what I’m doing here.
Impressionist Sunrise, Serengeti, Tanzania
I got back from a safari in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania about a week. I’ve spent that time whittling down my photos from 5100 files to about 250. This was one of those that when I shot it, my first thought was, ‘Crap! I forgot to turn autofocus back on.’ So I refocused and got a technically better photograph.
However, this is beautiful. It shows that sometimes “correct” focus is wrong for the photo. The softness of the trees compliments the softness of the colors very well. It’s also part of a new direction I’m heading with at least some of my work. I’ve become enamored of Pictorialism, and am trying to bring some of the ideas and looks of the older methods to my digital work.
How about a post about processing? What you may not know about photography is that all photos are processed. In analog photography, you choose your film, your exposure, your film processing method, your paper, your printing method and your paper processing method. Most people just choose the film, the exposure (or whatever the camera tells them) and the lab for processing, whereas artists or professional photographers get a lot more detailed about it.
Digitally, you choose the camera, exposure, software for processing, processing method, compression method, (and if you print) file size, paper and printing method. Again, most people choose their camera and let all the automatic processes run for exposure, processing, compression and so on. Artists and professional photographers very quickly get deep into software and methods. This post is about such methods, and how I made the photographic experience of viewing a rose more like the real-life experience of viewing a rose.
Pink Rose, base exposure
This is the base exposure. It’s nice, but since everything is lit with the same light, the rose doesn’t pop off the screen. I decided to a high dynamic range (HDR) version of it. To do that, you need 3-9 shots, some underexposed, some overexposed.
Pink Rose, dark exposure
I shot 5, but only used 3 in making the image – I took my 2 stops underexposed photo – this very, very dark one – to get a lot of depth in the shadows.
Pink Rose, light exposure
Pink Rose, HDR base
And this very, very light one to get a lot of brightness in the highlights.
And I combined them using HDR Express to get this pretty decent image. You can already see how the photo is a little warmer than the original, and the rose itself stands out a bit more. The problem is that the surroundings are still too noticeable.
So for this final image, I masked off the rose and darkened the surroundings, first by reducing the brightness, then by using Levels to increase the base darkness level. Then I ever so slightly desaturated the colors. After that, I masked off the surrounding area, and made the rose itself a little more intense by brightening it slightly, and then using a Levels layer to increase the base brightness level.
After that, I opened it in AlienSkin’s Bokeh program and slightly blurred and vignetted the area around the rose to make the rose jump off the screen. That’s something I can do manually, but it takes a bunch of steps, with each step having variables that affect the other steps, sometimes in difficult-to-control ways, so AlienSkin saves me a bunch of time and frustration by providing slider interfaces. A quick word about the word “bokeh…” it’s an English adaptation of a Japanese word that means blur. I don’t particularly love the word, but it has become the standard.
So there you have it, from rose as recorded by my camera in the garden, to rose as seen in my mind’s eye.
Pink Rose, Kabul, Afghanistan
Snow! Kabul, Afghanistan
How about a nice abstract shot of snow?
Winter Tree, Kabul, Afghanistan
One of my favorite lenses that I almost never use is Nikon’s 500mm f/8 reflector lens. Why do I almost never use it? How often do you really need to shoot with a telescope? I’m taking it on safari next week, though, so I’ve been looking for excuses to get comfortable with it again. A beautiful snow storm has given me an excuse. I can shoot from inside my apartment without the hassle of getting permission (’cause we have to have permission to shoot on the compound, and when you’re walking around with a giant lens, it’s pretty challenging to shoot surreptitiously, as my friends with P&S cameras do, sssshhhh).
So it’s snowing like crazy and there’s a tree a pretty good distance away that looks good through the viewfinder. A little processing, and it becomes a beautiful, abstract piece.
Angkor Thom, Siem Reap, Cambodia
Before I get to the serious part of the post, I’d just like to say that it’s absolutely impossible to write the word “Cambodia,” without immediately singing, “It’s a holiday in Cambodia/That’s tough kid but it’s life/It’s a holiday in Cambodia/Don’t forget to pack your wife.”
Now, for the real business. Wow! Look at that temple! Every tower is made of faces! Beautiful, weather-stained, lichen-covered faces. I could go back to Siem Reap just to visit Angkor Thom (and Ta Prohm and Banteay Sri) again, and again, and again. I was going for a Picasso-inspired face-from-two-angles look, but I could tell that wouldn’t work in this setting, so I went for a much more direct look.
Noseless Statue, Angkor Wat, Cambodia
There are a lot of statues at the temple complexes outside of Siem Reap, Cambodia. There is at least one temple, the towers of which are made up of huge carved faces (that’ll be tomorrow’s post). This one captures the attention, though, because its expression is exactly what you might expect of someone whose nose has been lopped off – a mixture of surprise and indignation.
The White Tree of Minas Tirith, Middle Earth
This is an outtake from a shoot I did in support of my Places We Live project. As I was shooting it, there was something very familiar about it, and as someone who sees Middle Earth in everything, my first thought was that it was somehow connected to Lothlorien. That’s clearly not it though, it’s small, definitely not elvish. Then, while working on it a little more, I realized that it’s the White Tree. Now we just have to wait for the true king to arrive.
Darulaman Palace, Kabul, Afghanistan
I had a meeting at the National Museum of Afghanistan, on the south edge of town, across the street from the Darulaman Palace. As I left the museum and crossed the street to my car, I took the opportunity to get a couple shots of the palace, along with one of the surveillance blimps that hover continuously over the city.
The palace was built in a period of modernization by King Amanullah Khan and had been intended to be the seat of parliament. He was forced out by conservatives who stopped the modernizing efforts (and the circle rolls on). It sat empty for several decades, has been gutted by fire twice, used as a defense ministry, bombed out in the civil war, and now is under reconstruction again.
End of the Road, Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia
During the dry season, there’s a road that runs across the middle of Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia. During the monsoon season, which ended the week before we went, the road floods out.
On a tangential note, the fishermen of the village at the end of the road store their cod in coolers or boxes filled with ice. When it’s always 85F (29C), ice melts rapidly, forming puddles of mud that smell foul beyond reasonable description. Our driver was deeply offended that I asked him to stop and open the door so I could get out. One friend on the trip lost her shoe to the mud. The shoe remained on her foot, but became essentially unwearable due to the smell emanating from it.
