Perpetual Photography Thread

[Two Sheds]

Man, I need a new camera.
mine is broken

Edit: But here are some from before it was broken:


A tree, Autumn.


Ruined building, Winter.


Charles Moore's water-spitting head. Piazza d'Italia, New Orleans.



Two shots from St. Louis Cemetary No. 1, New Orleans.




Three shots of St. Patrick's Cathedral in NYC, taken last summer. I didn't have a tripod so my low-light, long-exposure shot inside ended up a little blurry but, truth be told, I quite like it.


Sunset shot of the U.S. Capitol, taken on a walk last fall.


A church down the street from my apartment.

(sorry for taking up so much space)

[Arnir]

I took this one New Year's Eve at a friend's house in the DFW area.

Nothing to write home about, but I'm learning.

[Zofog]

Here are two from my recent trips to Guatemala.

Lake Atitlan taken from the dock at Panachel with a Casio Exilim EX-Z50



This was taken in the central square in Antigua with my new Canon PowerShot S5 IS.



Zofog

[octoman]

Wire -- I love that second to last flower photograph! How did you achieve that interesting lighting effect? I enjoy doing macro photography myself, and I think that second to last photo is amazing!

[wire]

Wire -- I love that second to last flower photograph! How did you achieve that interesting lighting effect? I enjoy doing macro photography myself, and I think that second to last photo is amazing!

Thank you octoman

I used a Photoshop Lomography effect I found here.

I used the same effect with the rusty toy car and again with this flower. The pink flower and rusty car are my favorite as it really brought the colors out while the one posted in this reply gave it more of a fisheye feel.



I took this of a flower on a bush in our backyard. I was sitting on the ground pointing up with the sky as the background.

[Interloper]

Thought some of you may get a kick out of this one. My plant is, erm... horny:

[Gryndyl]

A few more from Korea...


Jinju Waterfall


Fish Fountain


RAAAAAWWRRR!


Nightlife

[JC Anejo]

This thread makes me realize I really need to use that Photoshop program I got. All my pics are taken with a plan old Kodak E740 digital camera. Here are some taken at the butterfly bush






As I was standing there waiting for the right shots I saw a blur out of the corner of my eye and heard a thud and was lucky enough to get this shot of nature at it's finest

[J]

Feeding time at National Zoo


Butterfly at Kennilworth Aquatic Gardens


Capital Columns at National Arboretum

[WSK]

I was inspired by Wire's Lomographic Photoshop technique and thought I would play with it - I like the outcome on his shots better, but I like the idea (just need to keep playing with it).

[Freezer-TPF-]

I recently got my first digital camera and have been playing around with it. What software do you folks use to edit/play with your images? The full Photoshop is obviously a bit pricey.

[WSK]

I'm using Photoshop CS2 that I've now had for a couple of years. If you can find an older version of Photoshop (CS or CS2) you can get it a lot cheaper.

Alternatively you can do 80% - 90% of the same things using Photoshop Elements (although I don't think you can process RAW formats, which may or may not be a big deal for you).

I haven't used any of the latest versions of Elements, but I've heard a lot of really positive things in terms of ease of use and ability to do stuff.

[J]

GIMP. It is free and open source with regular new releases.

[zinckiwi]

From yesterday's trip to White Island, an active volcano 30 miles out to sea:



(full set)

[wire]

I find myself really drawn towards close-up/macro photography so I'm saving up for either a 60mm or 100m f/2.8 Macro lens. I'm hoping to get my hands on both to test drive before I make my final decision.

This is an attempt at HDR

[geezer]

You guys and your HDR lust

[cheeba]

Great pics, Zinc. I think the one you posted is my favorite. Sucks that you guys had to wear hard hats though, hehe.

[Enough]

Great pics from White Island zinc, I agree. What a fascinating place to get to visit.

I figured I ought to share some of my more standard fare stuff after the portraits earlier. Here's some more early shots from my D300:

Sunset Sandhill Squadron


Snow Goose Grace Turning on a Wing


Fanning the Flames


I am amazed at the detail the D300 delivers at high ISOs, for e.g. the waxwing in the last shot was at ISO 1000 so I could handhold my 300 F4 with 1.4x Kenko converter.

[Daehawk]

I like Zinc's black and white pic of the stargate from the volcano island.

[wonderpug]

I am amazed at the detail the D300 delivers at high ISOs, for e.g. the waxwing in the last shot was at ISO 1000 so I could handhold my 300 F4 with 1.4x Kenko converter.

That really is awesome for ISO 1000. Are you using Noise Ninja or something, or is it really that noiseless?

[Enough]

I am amazed at the detail the D300 delivers at high ISOs, for e.g. the waxwing in the last shot was at ISO 1000 so I could handhold my 300 F4 with 1.4x Kenko converter.

That really is awesome for ISO 1000. Are you using Noise Ninja or something, or is it really that noiseless?

I am pretty sure I had in camera high ISO noise reduction set to low (possibly off- would have to check EXIF to be sure). And then in Capture NX I ran noise reduction but only on the chroma channel so it basically only removed color noise and left detail/grain alone. And then after I brought the file out of RAW as a 16 bit Tiff I ran Noiseware Professional on that image at a very low setting and basically masked out the bird to preserve all detail. It looked pretty damn clean prior to the NR, but I am equally pleased that the file responds well to post process, there seems to be a bunch of latitude. Not quite on the D3 level of amazing high ISO but a huge improvement for me.

[RunningMn9]

I'm admittedly biased, but this picture of RunningGirl1 that my wife took has been elevated to the status of "pictures that don't piss me off". In fact, I have a hard time not using it as my wallpaper.




And here is one more of her that I got at Niagara Falls on the day that I took the earlier shot of the Niagara River.




Enough - that shot of the Snow Goose is phenomenal. Almost good enough to get my daughter kicked off my desktop.

[Enough]

Hey all, in honor of it being Friday I thought I would share some recent stuff. As always you can find larger versions of these by clicking, and even larger sizes are available on my flickr stream linked in my sig. Feel free to use any of my images for a desktop.

Hey Two Sheds, what happened to the Creative mash-up idea?

Anyways, way back in the day we had an urban theme on O.O.P.S. and I finally managed to bring a camera on a business trip to Denver this past week.

1. North Denver Night Steam (dig on the gases coming out of the stacks acting as a lens here)


2. Rosita's On Federal


3. Denver's Skyline: More Impressive Than You Might Think


Changing gears, on a recent Friday I got half the day off and drove up Storm King Mountain Road to a great overlook of the Front Range cities of NE Colorado. I have always been fascinated by atmospheric optical effects and thoroughly and got to enjoy a strange sunset phenomena I see once in awhile. The rays such as these here are actually not in the west but are in the east as the sun goes down. And thanks to the hive mind of flickr I now know that these sort of rays are properly called anti-crepuscular rays. Who says the internet makes you stupid?

4. A Parallel Sunset in the East



On a previous Friday night I went out in severe wind and below freezing temps and went for a fools errand of trying some long-time star trail exposures. Remarkably, I got away with it and got a few keepers as a reward for freezing my butt off. I used a handheld strobe manually fired multiple times on full power to light up the foreground a bit.

5. Trails in the Laramie Foothills


Some image notes:

1. Is not hdr and looked very close to this straight out of RAW. I've only added a slight contrast curve adjustment. I am danged impressed with the D300's unprocessed files, even from long-time exposures at night. They are so clean that it's saving me lots of time in post. I don't think I even ran any noise reduction on this besides the in-camera stuff on low.

2. This one is not an HDR, but is DRI. Meaning that I manually blended various exposures together rather than use HDR/tone-mapping. At times it can yield a much more realistic looking result than an HDR and I thought the technique would work well here.

3. This is an HDR comprised of 7 exposures, and then the resultant HDR image was blended down into a non-HDR middle exposure at around 40%. I often find with HDR it's best to take your HDR tone-mapped result and then blend that into a non-HDR image to retain better details and realism. I then added a full moon shot from a previous outing, because I can.

4. This is a blend of HDR and DRI techniques. I didn't add any of the rays, but certainly chose a processing method to make sure they showed up well in the final result here.

5. Not much to this one in post, basically curves and a bit of noise reduction.

[EvilHomer3k]

Awesome, enough.

[wire]

[/url]

[geezer]

I was just going through some old files to figure out what to transfer to a new pc and I stumbled on this shot that I used for my desktop for a looong time:

[wonderpug]

All right, got some good use out of my camera over the weekend and I'm a lookin' for some advice.

I've got some other shots that I'm pretty happy with, but let's start with these two. These are completely untouched, and I'd love to learn how best to touch them up. Usually I--well maybe it's better if I leave out what I usually do and just soak up the advice of our resident experts. The more detail the better, especially regarding things like the order of operations. I welcome any advice or criticism on the shooting side as well. These were both shot with my Panasonic Lumix FZ20 at ISO 100 and f2.8, the first shot at 1/50 sec and the second shot at 1/10 sec.

[Sectoid]

Thought this would be appropriate:

Took it at the NY Aquarium in Coney Island, with my phone.

[soup]

I've been embedded in the local kiteboard scene here for a week or so.


edit: thanks enough.
heres some links to galleries if anyones interested.
http://www.scottgablephotography.com/kite3/index.html
http://www.scottgablephotography.com/kites2/index.html
incredible feeling btw. getting pulled 30mph by a kite is addicting.

[Enough]

Soup, the kiteboard series is really amazingly cool. I still like the grain silo one I commented on earlier the best, so perfect in gritty black and white.

[deadzone]

This is one I have been playing with a lot since I took it. I cropped it a bit and adjusted the contrast and sharpness some with Picasso. Taken in Landscape Mode on a Pentax K100D without the flash.

Shot of the Louisiana State Capitol

[disarm]

i just returned yesterday from a trip to Cape Town, South Africa. while i have over a thousand pictures from the trip to sort through, here are a few to start things off...

Overlooking Cape Town and the Atlantic from the top of Table Mountain

(that's my friend sitting on the ledge...i joined him right after taking this shot)

looking up the peninsula from the top of Cape Point, on the cliffs over the Cape of Good Hope...

that's the atlantic ocean on the left and the indian ocean on the right. i touched them both in under thirty minutes...very cool

and a few shots with the locals...

[wire]

I'm sure we've all taken some pictures since the Great OO Collapse of 2008.

Haven't done much wildlife so this is an early attempt.



Here's a 13x19 panoramic photo (9 pictures stitched together) for a class I took last semester. I can't decide which version I like.


click picture for a larger version

Not really a photo (other than I took the pictures of my wife). Another project for a Photoshop class I just took. While everyone else in the class was making movie posters with pictures of their kids or dogs I went a little different and went with a 70's B movie / Kung Fu movie theme.


click for larger version

[Enough]

Very cool Wire, thanks for bringing this thread back to life. I had missed disarm's posting and really like the rhinos shot!

I've already commented on the bird photo on flickr, but I will repeat you did good for a first attempt, the subject isolation is key. On the pano,
I prefer the color version here, but b&w certainly works fine too. I just like how the white birds pop in the color version.

What did your wife think of the PS project?


Here's one I just posted today that I'm pretty happy with (the links on the photos lead back to flickr where you can find larger sizes
for desktops):

Zirkel Zone Zest


And a few recent ones from this summer...

A Nice Day on the Plains


And here's a photo I took of the 56' T-Bird my dad just finished restoring to new condition:


And an HDR under the hood:

[wire]

Nice shots Enough...

I really like the HDR shot of the engine.

Heh...my wife laughed her ass off. We met in a Kung Fu class years ago

<edit> thanks for the Flickr comments...I appreciate it. One of these days I'll feel more comfortable with seeking out feedback on Flickr

[wire]

A few from a recent trip up to Seattle and the WA coast. I went out with my sister-in-laws husband and took some night pictures of Seattle. We are both new to photography so it was fun trying to figure out what settings are best used for night shots.

[wire]

Mt. St. Helens panorama



Even though I grew up near the mountain and witnessed the eruption I had never been up to any of the observation stations until this summer. This is a seven photo panorama taken from the Johnston Ridge Observatory. It can be viewed larger on my Flickr (link below).

[Enough]

Wire, I really like those rock stacking images, great depth of field! The pano obviously took bunches of work and
the extra clarity of view from the observation station is appreciated.

I thought I would feature a couple of night shots from two weekends ago showing off Jupiter's position the night sky right now:

Orbital Motion


Jupiter in Sagittarius


Both images were taken from essentially the same location, with the still stars first. The foreground
is showing up on the trails due to stacking methods and the foreground on the second is from light
painting with an LED headlamp. The star trails shot is one of my first stacked star trail images, usually
in the past I used slide film or used 15-30 min exposures on a dslr. For this image, 62 1 min 11 sec exposures
1 sec apart were combined with this free Photoshop action. Others you might want to try, especially if you
need a stand alone if you don't have PS are here and here. I would think even a point and shoot digicam
could pull off stacking if you used maybe only 30 sec exposures to keep down noise, anyone want to try?

[Mr Bubbles]

A picture taken in winter in Germany off the Ems River.


Another shot taken at the same spot

[wire]

Both images were taken from essentially the same location, with the still stars first. The foreground
is showing up on the trails due to stacking methods and the foreground on the second is from light
painting with an LED headlamp. The star trails shot is one of my first stacked star trail images, usually
in the past I used slide film or used 15-30 min exposures on a dslr. For this image, 62 1 min 11 sec exposures
1 sec apart were combined with this free Photoshop action. Others you might want to try, especially if you
need a stand alone if you don't have PS are here and here. I would think even a point and shoot digicam
could pull off stacking if you used maybe only 30 sec exposures to keep down noise, anyone want to try?

Beautiful photos as usual. I tried some star trail pictures while on vacation and discovered that keeping your shutter open for a set amount of time also meant it was going to take the same amount of time to process it once your close the shutter. Learned something new.

I need to try the stacking trick and that PS action out now...thanks for that.