Scott Davis Photography

Early Morning HDR

2010-11-03T21:37:00.001-07:00

There’s often a good layer of fog outside when I wake up early for work. I usually don’t get outside to take any photos, but this morning I decided to pop out onto the porch and take the following HDR shot. Click on the photo for a larger version.

Tractor HDR

2010-10-26T19:20:00.001-07:00

Went to the local pumpkin patch a week or two ago, and at this farm they had some old abandoned tractor equipment. I tell ya, rusted metal makes for great HDR. I really liked how these turned out. All hand-held, 3-exposure bracketing, tone mapped together with Photomatix.

This Beautiful Earth!

2010-08-30T21:41:00.001-07:00

For the first week of August I spent a week in Alberta hiking in the Kananaskis Country. That area has quite a bit of significance to my family, and we’ve spent a lot of time in the area over the years. We hiked from Upper Kananaskis Lake Parking Lot (see the Google Earth image below) up to Forks campground, then the next day up to Turbine Canyon Campground, just past Lawson Lake on the way up to Maude Lake.

View My Saved Places in a larger map

I hauled up my 7D and my 24-105mm L lens, my external flash, as well as my cheap and heavy tri-pod; all-in-all, about 8-10 lbs weight added to my already 40+ lb pack. But it was worth it, for I was able to get some awesome photos. I did a lot of HDR, including some long-exposure HDR, made possible only with the tri-pod. Man I love that place! Check out my flickr set for lots more from the area.

My wife planted some sunflowers this spring, and they’ve been growing like crazy. The first one to show its yellow petals appeared a couple days ago, and I took some pictures this afternoon. The first few I took were ok, but nothing special. Then I brought out my flash with my on-flash diffuser, went to Manual mode on the camera, and got some wicked shots that I just love. These should brighten up your day!

Vancouver Aquarium

2010-07-23T21:41:00.001-07:00

There are many things to take pictures of at the Aquarium, but it’s difficult to get at some of the good ones with an 18month old little girl in tow. I did however manage to get a few shots of the jellyfish they had on display – displays which had very cool lighting. Taking advantage of higher ISO speeds and the incredible noise reduction in Lightroom 3, I got these cool shots:

Mountain Biking

2010-06-27T22:24:00.001-07:00

I made my return to mountain biking this weekend, though not exactly a triumphant return, as I totally bailed off the first jump I tried, bruising my rear-end and lower back. Brought my camera with me, and was the only one taking pictures, so unfortunately didn’t get any in of myself. I set my camera into Shutter speed priority mode, as I wanted to make sure that they were fast enough to capture the high-speed action of the bikers. The first few shots I took turned out too dark without the flash, so I used my Speedlight in High-Sync mode. This was my first attempt at taking this kind of picture, but I think that with the Lightroom work I did to them, they turned out pretty well. Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to try again soon. Hover over the photos for the exposure info. Click on them to see larger versions.

HDR, or not to HDR?

2010-05-06T09:31:00.001-07:00

High Dynamic Range photography is very cool, and you can produce some incredible images using the technique. However, there are certain situations in which it might not be the best option. Take these three images of the LDS Temple in Langley, BC. Two of them are HDR, and the third is not HDR; all of them have had additional post-processing done on them. Which one do you like better? Personally, I prefer the non-HDR image on the bottom right. Click on the images to see them larger.

Vancouver Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

2010-04-20T12:17:00.001-07:00

You may or may not be aware that I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Like most other religions we have meetinghouses, or chapels, scattered across the world where we meet each week for Sunday worship, and for other social activities. On top of these chapels, we also have Temples. These Temples are different than chapels, in that they are more sacred. I’m not going to go into detail on the significance of these Temples, nor the differences between them and regular chapels. For information on that, I refer you to the Church’s website.

The first Temple to be built here in British Columbia, Canada, was recently completed, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to take some photos of this building. I will take more as the season progresses, to try to get some better skies, and to wait for the foliage to grow out some more, but for now, this is what I have so far. I hope you enjoy them. Click on each image to see it larger.

For more of my photography, check out my Facebook page.

Creating an HDR scene

2010-04-09T11:18:00.001-07:00

In my limited time experimenting with HDR photography, I’ve noticed that every image you work on is different in enough ways that the way you processed your last HDR image will not work on your next one. This is probably why you won’t find too many detailed step-by-step processing How-to’s on creating HDR images. You’ll find tutorials on the mechanics of it, on how it works and what software to use. What I’d like to show you here is what I did for this particular image. This particular workflow obviously won’t work for all images, but it can at least show you what’s possible.

I set out to make an HDR composite of 6 images with my new Canon 7D. Set in Aperture Priority Mode at f/13.0, I set the ISO to 100, my 24-105mm L IS lens to 28mm, and using two sets of Auto Exposure Bracketing, I took exposures at 1/30, 1/10, 1/5, 1/6, 1/3, 0.8 seconds:

I opened up the RAW images in Photomatix without any adjustments in Lightroom. There are so many sliders of settings in the Tone Mapping in Photomatix that it’s very difficult to know what will best suit your image. I’ve saved presets for what I’ve used for other photos, but because the nature of this photo is so different than previous ones, those presents looked horrible. I finally settled with this HDR image saved out of Photomatix:

I wasn’t really satisfied with this, as the colors looked a little dull, the contrast wasn’t very nice, and in general it just looked a little boring. Using Lightroom, I straightened the image, sharpened it, did some noise reduction, and played just a little bit with the Fill Light, Clarity, Vibrance, Highlight Recovery, and Exposure sliders, to produce this slightly better image:

This still wasn’t enough, so I opened the image up in Corel’s Paint Shop Pro (my poor man’s version of Photoshop). I fiddled with the Saturation levels, warmed it up a bit, and I applied the Orton effect. I’ve shown that on the blog before, here, where you duplicate the layer, add a super strong Gaussian blur, and blend the blurred layer with the original layer using the Soft Light (or Hard Light, depending) blend mode.

I’ve been wanting to buy a Neutral Density filter for my lens that would allow me to take super long exposures, i.e. in the 5-10 minutes range, as you can get some amazing cloud streaking effects. However, since I don’t have one yet, and I’m not sure how you could combine that technique with the HDR technique, I needed to fake it. I selected the clouds in the picture, and applied a motion blur, aimed to the left. I had to re-apply the effect several times to get the desired amount of blur. This helped turn the sky into a pretty blend of pleasing color, but lacking in detail, which gave it a bit of a dreamy, timeless quality. After this, I was done. Here’s the final result. Click to view larger:

A very similar process was used to create the following image. I cropped out some of the sky at my wife’s suggestion, and I think it definitely makes this photo look better:

Cycling in Motion

2010-04-05T22:21:00.001-07:00

I went on a long bike ride with my Dad and Brothers-in-Law today, but before we went out, I had them ride past me a few times to get some moving photos of them. These were all taken at 1/40th of a second shutter speed (shutter speed priority mode), a range of apertures from F/11 to F/14, ISO speed of 100. Below the images I”ll include a couple of before/after images showing them right out of the camera compared to after being post-processed.

Here are some Before/After comparisons:

Before/After

2010-04-05T11:16:00.001-07:00

I’ve decided to try to post more Before/After shots here, showing more images that come right out of the camera compared to the final image once I’m done with it in Lightroom. Here’s the first one, an image I posted not too long ago:

Every change made to this image was done non-destructively in Lightroom, no further edits required in any external image editing program. Sliders in Lightroom that were modified include:

Edge Masking
Noise reduction
Color Temperature
Fill Light
Contrast
Vibrance
Clarity
Sharpening
Vignetting
Grain
Exposure
Highlight Recovery

When I printed this out 12”x18” on Kodak’s Metallic paper, the dark, coppery earthy tones in the image really stood out. The original image out of the camera is dull, cold, and lifeless. Warm it up a bit, darken the dark areas while brighten the bright areas, make the edges stand out, and you’ve got something there.

2010 Vancouver Olympic Games

2010-03-30T08:26:00.001-07:00

NOTE: I did NOT take any of these photos. Credit goes to the various professional photographers employed at the recent Winter games here in Vancouver. I was forwarded these images in a PowerPoint presentation, and they were too interesting to not share. Enjoy:

Photoshop Lightroom 3 BETA

2010-03-29T22:37:00.001-07:00

I don’t think that I’ve yet written anything here about Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, except maybe a few brief mentions here or there. For those unfamiliar with it, Lightroom is a product from Adobe, the same guys who do Photoshop, that is specifically designed for digital photographers. It is not meant to replace Photoshop as an image editing program, though it does indeed have many Photoshop-like features. Instead, Lightroom is a complete workflow solution, meant to replace the piecemeal methods used by photographers to take their photos from the camera through to end result. Lightroom thus is the place to be to:

Import your photos, organize, tag, browse, and store your photos;
‘develop’ your photos, i.e. do your computerized post-processing work (this is where the name comes from, a digital Lightroom as a 21st century version of the classic photographic Darkroom);
show your photos, using powerful slideshow creation tools;
print your photos, using the built in Print processing section, and lastly,
to upload your photos to the internet, using the Web page creation tools.

No longer do you need to import your photos by copying the folders in Windows Explorer, or even by using Windows’ built-in photo import tool, let alone using one of the myriad of 3rd party tools available (which often get installed on your computer against your will along with other software). No longer do you need Photoshop, Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, or whatever other photo-editing program you’re familiar with to improve the look of most of your photos and to get out of your pictures what you imagined. Lightroom takes features from all these programs, and puts them all in one place with a remarkably simple, easy to use interface.

No longer do you need to worry about making edits to a photo, hitting the Save button, and realizing that you just compressed your JPEG beyond recognition and don’t have a backup. Lightroom is a non-destructive program. What that means is that instead of opening an image, working on it, and then saving it, all of your photos are open all the time, and whenever you make changes to an image, you’re not actually changing it. For example, say you increase the brightness level of the image by 10%. Well you didn’t actually change the pixels. Lightroom just ‘remembers’ that you increased the brightness of that image by 10%, and each time you look at it, it applies that change. This means that you can make whatever and however many changes you want, and you can always revert to a point in the past, with zero consequences. No image quality lost. When you want to send the modified image via email or to the internet or to get printed at a shop, you can export and create a copy of the original, a copy that includes your modifications.

Lightroom has changed the way I work with my digital photos, and has helped me become a better photographer. I jumped on the Lightroom bandwagon with version 1, and since upgraded to the current version, 2.6. I swear by it now. I Would never use any other solution for my photography (though I do have other programs installed, for the occasional feature that Lightroom doesn’t have – it’s not all-powerful!). If you have a Mac, Aperture 3 is apparently pretty good, but I don’t have a Mac, so haven’t used it.

This past week, Adobe released the 2nd beta for Lightroom version 3, the final version of which is due for release probably this summer. This latest beta version includes updated algorithms for sharpening and noise reduction that make a significant difference. I’m not a professional writer, nor an experienced reviewer, so I won’t pretend to write a full review of Lightroom or of the Beta, but I will say this. If you’re a digital photographer who likes taking pictures, but have neglected the computer part of the process, and want to get serious about it, invest in Lightroom. It is THE program of photography programs. Photoshop will always be there alongside it as the industry standard for image manipulation & graphic design, but Lightroom is there for your photographic workflow.

Click on the Lightroom logo above to go to Adobe’s website to download, for free, the Beta2 for Lightroom 3.

Olympic Torch on Kingsway in Burnaby

2010-02-11T17:24:00.001-08:00

The Olympic Torch made it’s way past my workplace today, so I went outside and snapped a few shots:

High Dynamic Range = HDR

2010-01-24T10:33:00.001-08:00

I’ve totally been on an HDR kick recently. Yesterday we went out to Fort Langley where they’ve got an old train station on display with an old train you can climb on. Perfect for HDR, I thought. For those who don’t know, HDR is when you blend multiple exposures together on the computer to compensate for the fact that a camera can’t see as much as the eye can, in terms of details of dark areas and details in light areas. As such HDR images have a distinct look about them that cannot really be achieved with a single picture. There’s a special program called Photomatix that does the blending on the computer, and as you can see from the images below, I haven’t paid for it yet, as there are Photomatix watermarks on the image. Here they are:

DIY Budget Softbox

2009-11-19T21:17:00.001-08:00

I was asked not too long ago to take some pictures at a fundraising event; they wanted me to be at a station, sortof like a booth, and take portraits of people. I don’t have a lot of lighting equipment, all I have is my budget wireless flash transmitter (I say budget since I got it cheap off eBay, and with my cheap Speedlight flash I can’t change the brightness of the flash – every exposure is full power). So I decided to make my own little softbox. I did a quick and dirty job; if you have more time and patience, you could make a similar one and have it look a lot nicer.

Making one of these is very easy. Take four sheets (one for each side of the Softbox) of standard cardstock paper, 8.5”x11” size. The thicker it is, the stronger your softbox will be.

With your Speedlight handy, use a ruler and draw out a shape like this:

This drawing doesn’t have correct dimensions, you’ll want to make the skinny part at the bottom just wide enough to cover the width of the top of your Speedlight, and deep enough to give your softbox enough purchase on your Speedlight so it doesn’t slip off. Cut along the solid lines, including the little snips at the vertices.

The dashed lines are there just for reference – this is where you’ll be folding the paper from slit to slit to make tabs that you can fold over to the adjacent panel. Two of the four panels you’ll fold over, the other two you won’t need to. It can be a little tricky, you might need someone to help you hold it, then you just tape it to the other panel, as you can see in the pictures.

The next step is to find a suitable diffusing material. I used the fabric from one of my wife’s white nighty’s that she never wore. The trick to a good Softbox is to diffuse the light as much as possible. In my softbox I put two layers of the fabric. One piece about 3” x 5” down in the through of the softbox, and another layer covering the large opening. Just cut out the fabric to the appropriate sizes and tape it in. Masking tape works fine. Use more tape to cover up all the corners, and you’re done!

It still works best to have the light pointed up and bouncing the light off the ceiling, since when you want soft light, the larger the light source the better. You can still use this softbox pointed straight at your subject if you want, even though it’ll hang out past your lens. All that’s left is for you to experiment with your camera and flash power settings to get the best results for your situation!

Langley Car Show

2009-09-13T09:42:00.001-07:00

On my way out to Langley yesterday I got caught up in the car show they had going on, where anybody with a nice car could come and show it off. I stopped just for a few minutes, and managed to take a few pictures. Some of them were a little dull right out of the camera, but with a little tweaking, some of them make for some striking images:

OK Picture to Great Picture in 2 minutes.

2009-08-02T23:49:00.001-07:00

Today I took a few pictures of my little girl. In this post I’ll show how I took the picture from the camera, which was a little dark and wasn’t super pleasing, and turned it into a great shot that I really enjoy. All the pictures are below the text of this post, so you can easily see the progression. Picture 1 shows the shot right right out of the camera. ISO 100 – F/4.0 – 1/60th second – 45mm – Flash did fire.

I was sitting on the couch that she’s standing up against, and I had my Canon Speedlight hotshoed to my camera, with the flash head pointed to my left and slightly behind me, right at the wall that was 2 feet from me. The wall thus became the giant light source, improving the picture greatly compared to no flash (would’ve been way too dark given the amount of ambient light in the room), or compared to direct flash, which would’ve been very harsh light, no feeling, no softness, in other words, a bad picture. However, the lighting of the shot still isn’t the greatest, I should have brightened my flash exposure a bit. In this case, you’ll see how a little bit of Lightroom magic can fix things right up. No Photoshop required.

The first step in Lightroom, was to apply the proper profile for my Camera. I used a Canon Rebel XTi, and I’ve downloaded the proper Lightroom profiles from Adobe’s website. They give you a few preset options, including Standard, Faithful, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, and a few others:

I find that Camera Landscape works the best for most of my pictures, but you’ll have different results depending on the type of camera you use, and the nature of your picture. These profiles are designed to mimic the processing that the camera does internally on the JPEG preview. Since we’re working with RAW images (here converted to Adobe DNG format), we can change that processing however we like. Personally, I prefer the Camera Landscape profile. This gives us Picture 2. As you can see, this warms things up again, and softens it just a bit.

Next, we brighten things up a bit. I Increased the Exposure slider, and added a bit of Fill Light to fill in some of the slight shadows. I also sharpened the shot quite a bit in this step. See Picture 3.

Last, we use Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush, to make some changes just to her face:

As you can see, I Brightened it just a tad, reduced Contrast, reduced Clarity (this gives it that soft, glowy look), and increased sharpness again, as we want her face to be nice and sharp. I also applied another brush just to her eyes, to brighten them up a bit. You can play with these sliders as much as you want to get the desired look. You can see the final image again in Picture 4.

This whole process took all of about 30-60 seconds to complete, since Lightroom makes it so easy, and you get quick at it after awhile. Also, if you have a whole bunch of pictures that all have the same look&feel, then you can make the changes to one picture, and in one shot you can apply those same changes to all of the pictures in your series, all at once!

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

Lions Gate Fire (well, not really fire)

2009-07-31T15:15:00.001-07:00

I had the opportunity of taking a picture of the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver coming off of Stanley Park from the unique vantage point of a boat. As we were heading around the Park to get to English Bay for the Fireworks, it was nearing Sunset, and I managed to get this shot.

ISO 100 – F/6.3 – 1/320th Second – 105mm

Shot out of the camera:

Shot after some post-processing in Adobe Lightroom:

F-16 Bride, by Joe McNally

2009-07-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

Joe McNally posted a photo on his blog about a bride of an F-16 pilot who wanted to surprise her groom with a photo of her with his plane. How cool is this picture?

Photo by Joe McNally

Coal Harbor by Stanley Park

2009-07-30T13:08:00.001-07:00

Spent some time in the blazing Vancouver heat yesterday near Stanley Park, right by the Harbor there. Produced this shot, which is an HDR shot from 3 images, with some post processing done on top.

If you have the Google Earth browser plug-in installed, you should be able to see where in Vancouver I took this photo below. If that doesn’t work for you, then if you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can see where I took this picture by opening this file in Google Earth.

This picture is a 3-photo HDR (High Dynamic Range) Merge, meaning I took three pictures at different exposure settings, and combined them on the computer. Here are the three original images:

These were taken in full sunlight, a very bright day. All at ISO 100, all at F/4.5 Aperture, with shutter speeds ranging from 1/1250th for the dark one, 1/400th second for the middle one, and 1/125th second for the bright one. Then, using Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, I opened the three images as an HDR photo merge:

Paint Shop Pro lets you align the images, which I needed to do since these three shots were taken hand held, so they weren’t perfectly aligned. The only other two options PSP gives you is brightness and clarify, which you can easily play with until you’re happy with the results. This finishes the HDR part of the image.

Next, I apply what I believe is called the Orton Effect to the image. This involves creating a duplicate layer:

And applying a Gaussian Blur of value ‘30’ to the duplicate layer:

Then you combine the blurred layer with the original layer using either Soft or Hard Light, depending on how strong you want the effect:

Then you play with the opacity slider for the top layer until you’re happy with the results, and voila, you get the finished image: