[schnee]

Um… you’re welcome. And, put your pants back on.

[schnee]

3. As to those trick filters I mentioned (Star filters, etc). She has those already for her old camera with a 52mm lense. Can they be used on the 77mm lenses with an adapter? Or would that be like cropping the image again?

4. I am a little vague on the understanding between the f/4 and f/2.8. Sounds like it is the speed of the shutter? Schnee mentioned getting the bigger flash to assist with the f/4 lenses. Am I understanding that right? Another $100 to upgrade that flash, but the prices on the same lense at f/2.8 is about 3 times f/4. For what she is going to be doing, does she need the faster lense or just the better flash?

3. Not cropping as much as “stopping down”, but 77 to 52 seems pretty extreme – you may get vignetting.

4. Not shutter speed, but how much the aperture opens. f/2.8 is bigger than f/4, which means that for the same shutter speed (e.g. 1/125s), more light would hit the sensor with f/2.8. That means you may be able to get a photo that you would not have been able to before (maybe there’s enough light for f/2.8 but not f/4). There’s also a Depth of Field thing to worry about with aperture – the small the aperture, the greater the DOF.

My comment re: flash was not really related to the f-stop. The 580 EXII can throw more light farther than the other one – that may be a consideration for weddings.

[schnee]

Looks like I forgot the period in the theme title headline, and that messed it up in the FSM. Oopsie–sorry about that schnee

Great job on Four Seasons Deta everyone 😉

It is actually b/c you have different quote types surrounding “Four Seasons”. In the Fark HTML, it looks like

 “Four Seasons" 

and I haven’t figured out the correct regular expression to handle all possible quote-delimiters.

The fallback mechanism worked “OK”, so great jorb everyone on the Deta part.

[schnee]

I still havn’t figured out the entire point of HDR… but it seems like in order to use the benefits of it, one must be taking a picture where it is needed. If you’re taking a shot of something that can be properly exposed in one shot, then the HDR isn’t necessary… it’s needed for the ‘impossible’ shots where you physically cannot properly expose the shot without having blown highlights, or huge shadows…

That’s the point, right???

I think so, but it turns out that “nature” almost always has more dynamic range than what our imaging technology can capture. I put down some words on HDR. Less of a “how-to” and more of a “how-come”.

[schnee]

Questions or comments? Should be a good start?

Where do you live? I want to mug you before staplermofo does.

don’t really answer that question

That is a bit more than a “starter kit” – it is pretty darn nice. For weddings / parties, you may want to think about a more powerful flash (580 EX II) and/or faster lenses (of course, the costs just sky-rocketed).

Camera bag and a tripod (for portraits). If you get the tripod, get a remote shutter release.

ah, San Antonio – that’s just down I-35…skulks away…

[schnee]

qtfpsgui….mantiuk…..fattal….beta operator….

Tone Mapping, via Wikipedia. Footnote 2 is the Fattal algorithm and Footnote 3 is Mantiuk.

[schnee]

Thanks U-Man. The ubiquitous qtfpsgui provides lots of tonemap operators. I’ve found that a layered combination of the outputs of two operators give me the best approach.

Generally, I like the default output of the “Mantiuk” operator for the base layer. I look at Fattal as a “saturation” operator and, in Photoshop, use a Fattal layer as a 70% overlay on top of the Mantiuk base layer.

Fattal is a bit hard to work with – it changes based on the output pixel size. That is, settings that “look good” for a 400×600 image will not look the same as for a 1200×1600 (using the same source image). As I increase the output pixel dimensions, I need to increase Fattal’s beta operator. That’s about all I know.

I do like tonemapping – I’m not a Photoshop guru and find that tonemapping can give me interesting results without having to muck with a lot of layer masks in the digital image editor.

[schnee]

My big confusion with HDR is how to actually demo “high dynamic range”. Detail in the shadows and highlights. The stuff that I’ve done doesn’t seem to reveal the HDR-ness. For example, this image:

is HDR, but it is also “meh”.

Same image, with better tone mapping:

not quite so “meh”, but that’s because of the tonemapping, not the inherent HDR. I’m thinking that I need more than three exposures to really get the HDR-ness into the image.

(my Flickr stream will get you to larger versions of the images)

[schnee]

Wow, that’s an awesome story. Heal well.

[schnee]

my biggest dilemma is those superb shots whose primary focus is not the vent/exhaust/smokestack itself

I’m with Uranus (did I really just type that?).

For example, I took this (pops):

but didn’t enter it. I think that there’s a kernel of good-image in there, the smokestacks are centered (making them an obvious subject (I don’t typically center the subject)) and the steam is (reaching here) “venting” off of the water, but it just didn’t do it for me (or for this theme).

I originally wanted to photograph the now-defunct power plant to which those stacks are attached, but never got the time. It is a really interesting building and if we ever do an “art-deco” theme, well…

[schnee]

The 5D …[p]air[ed] … with a 50mm f/1.4 … [is a fun little walk-around kit]

By schnee, shot with Canon EOS 5D f1.4 1/25s ISO1600

By schnee, shot with Canon EOS 5D f1.4 1/25s ISO1600

Dig that shallow DOF.

[schnee]

That’s really nice, schnee.Would doing an overlay like that really DQ for the HDR theme? Obviously it’s verboten for our usual rules, but the HDR theme kinda relaxes those, right?

I suppose that is “our” call. The last HDR contest had this in the rules:

Please keep your entries closer the[sic] the side of farktography rather than complete photoshopping when possible.

So it seems like we got a bit looser in general, which we sort-of had to do.

I’d like to blend some layers, but that’s just b/c I’m a one-trick pony.

[schnee]

By schnee at 2007-11-20
HDR composed in Photoshop, tonemap (Fattal and Drago operators) in qtpfsgui, layer comped back in Photoshop (Drago background, 70% overlayed Fattal). Oversharpened.

[schnee]

Wow, you have a ton of ghosting in the clouds there. One advantage to doing it in Gimp is that you can paint out the layer mask in areas like that to make it all one of the layers. That is pretty cool, though, in an more abstract-art kind of way. Probably took about 1 min in qtpfsgui, though.

OK, that qtpfsgui is pretty nifty:
[img]

You are right, there is pretty massive ghosting. I used the Fattal the Drago operators in the tonemap and then hopped over to Photoshop, used the Drago-output as the background and the Fattal-output as a 70% “overlay” layer (*). I think you are right – I do need to reduce the ghosting in the clouds a bit.

(*) Right there, that DQs this image from Farktography.

[schnee]

OK, that qtpfsgui is pretty nifty:

By schnee at 2007-11-19

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