Maryland Renaissance Festival (HDR)

It was my mother's birthday last saturday and she wanted nothing more than to go to the Maryland Renaissance Festival in Crownsville. Now it rained for most of saturday afternoon, but this actually made for some awesome HDR clouds. Between showers we managed to catch some jousting... here are the results:

Bottom Road

My mother lives just north of Loch Raven Reservoir where there are some incredible country roads with trails, bridges and breathtaking scenery. I took my camera up there this week to see what HDR could do with nature:

The Neighborhood @ Night

The shutter release I ordered last week arrived and I have been experimenting with long exposures and night photography. This was entirely new to me. I set up the tripod on my front porch and started shooting. Now, what you see in the images is not what the neighborhood looked like to the naked eye. It was almost midnight and extremely dark... these images have so much more detail than what the eye could see.

Across the Street

ISO 200 F/3.5 73 Seconds WB3650k

Our House

ISO 200 F/5.6 9 Minutes WB3150k

In the full version of the image of our house you can start to see the rotation of the earth as the stars start to streak. I This has inspired me to try an even longer exposure... maybe a few hours... where you can really see the rotation. I doubt that I will be able to do this in my neighborhood though because of the light pollution...

Jeremy Standing on the Sidewalk.

ISO 200 F/3.5 29 Seconds WB3550k

In order to get this image I shined a flashlight on him for about 5 seconds.

I know that this technique has been done, but I really wanted to try light-writing. We used the gas lighter we have for our citronella candle to burn writing in the sky.

This would have been easier with a constant light - it was challenging to keep the flame lit as we moved it through the air.

Once you got used to writing backwards this light writing was really fun... I'd like to do a project using a technique like this one day. Any ideas?

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The following night we had a power outage in the neighborhood. I was curious about how the neighborhood would look without all of the light pollution. I had a hard time getting any detail with the exposure times from the night before so I tried an even longer exposure. The results were crazy. Although the neighborhood was pitch black, the images looked as though they were taken at dusk/dawn.

Midnight Sky.

ISO 100 F/5.6 181 Seconds WB2650k

During the exposure of the second image the poswer came back on for the last ten seconds of the exposure. It ended up working out well - you were able to see the window lights and front porch lights without them being blown out (like the night before).

The Neighborhood at Midnight.

ISO 100 F/5.6 454 Seconds WB2950k

Sunflowers

I was driving this past weekend out near the MD line exit of I-83 when I saw this ridiculously awesome sunflower field on the side of the road. I came back the next day with my camera (and some friends). It was unbelievable! I've never seen so many sunflowers in one place in my life...

While we were taking pictures a local farmer pulled up in a golf cart and started telling us about how the field is owned by a company that makes sunflower oil. Apparently most of the company's fields are down near Gettysburg but they recently bought some land in MD/PA. This is the second year the sunflowers have bloomed here.

Lighting:

The light was pretty harsh at the time of day we were visiting and as it happened most of the sunflower heads were facing away from the sun... meaning I would need to shoot into the sun to photograph them. I came up with an idea to try and overpower the sun with my Speedlight off camera. I set my onboard flash and Speedlight to synchronizing channels and activated the Speedlight as a slave in TTL mode, then held the Speedlight right up to the Sunflower. So here's the first image I took:

As you can see I was still getting a fair amount of flair (but I thought the image itself exposed nicely). After some fine tuning I was able to avoid the blotchy glare and get a nice sunburst from the sun. In order to get the sky exactly how I wanted it though I was having to underexpose the foreground (even with the fill flash). Even though my HDR book had not yet arrived I had read enough online tutorials to set up my camera for auto bracketing... and with that I attempted my very first HDR image:

Obviously the results are far better than the first image I took. I was able to get far more tones and the result is a softer, more evenly balanced image. This HDR process was not problem-free, however. I did run into a few of the quirks of HDR. The sunflowers, for example, were moving in the wind. Although I had shot using auto bracketing I had not changed my settings to continuous shooting mode. There was a small lag between shots. You can see with the flowers on the left that when Photomatix merged the images together it ghosted the outline of where the flowers had been in the other images. The effect is kind of neat in it's own way but not ideal for what I was trying to achieve. The flower in the foreground had the least amount of ghosting issues. I'm not sure if that had to do with it having less movement or being on the same plane as the lens... or whether it's to do with it getting more light being closer to the flash. Either way, I'm relatively pleased with it as my first attempt at HDR.

Light Painting:

Since there were such awesome colors and textures, I figured I'd play around with some slow shutter speeds and take a stab at light painting. I wasn't sure whether it would work since it was still daylight but I found that as long as I was shooting towards the ground the images weren't getting blown out. I took a few where parts of the image were still recognizable:

And then some that are a little more abstract:

HDR Portrait:

Our friend and her little girl came on the 45 minute drive up I-83 with me to take these pictures. I took a few photos of them but when I got back I realized that the shadows on some of the pics were pretty harsh... After processing that first HDR I wondered how Photomatix would do with a portrait. I didn't have multiple files for these portraits but I had read about generating HDR images from one RAW file so I gave it a try. I processed the original raw at three different exposures, saved them as TIFF files and imported them into Photomatix. After a little over an hour of fiddling with the slider bars in the tone-mapping stage I got the image looking semi-decent then brought it into photoshop for finishing touches. You can clearly see the difference between the original and the final image: