blue & beautiful

The eyes of my girlfriend. I love them (and her) so much.

I took this portrait on our trip in Prague, somewhere on a terrace. I used my 100mm macro for it, which is actually a great lens for taking portraits.

Read the rest of this entry »

jet

Shot this jet/plane during a small exhibition a couple of weeks ago at the Antwerp Airport. Public was allowed so close to this jet, my 17mm wasn’t almost enough to get the entire plane in the frame. Shot it with the camera all the way down to the ground without being able to look through the viewfinder. After a couple of times trying aiming, this composition came out, sort of what I had in mind. PP-wise this shot has seen a single frame HDR tonemapping in Photomatix together with a serious desaturation. Original image can be found here.

Balancing sky and foreground: HDR, exposure blending and exposure fusing

Trying to make a nice landscape photo involves one big challenge: the sky is much brighter than the foreground. The best solution to tackle this problem is to use graduated neutral density filters, but these babies are expensive. Another solution is to take different exposures of the scene and put them together afterwards in some way or another. You can do this manually in Photoshop (like this photo), but there are other more automated techniques.

The first one and the most well-known technique to put different exposures of a scene together is HDR. For the following photo of the sun rising behind a small farm I used Photomatix to assemble a sequence of 8 shots with a 1 stop difference.

As you see, HDR creates a lot of halos. There is an ugly halo around the left bush and the sky in the branches of the right bushes is brighter than in the middle. On the positive side, there is a lot of detail in the foreground.

In Photomatix there is another option to put your images together: exposure blending. I don’t know exactly what it does, but on the positive side, there are only three sliders to play with. That saves a lot of time compared to tonemapping an HDR photo. I put the same sequence together with Exposure blending and got the following result.

The photo looks much more natural than its HDR version. There are no halos, but there is much less detail in the foreground.

A week ago, I found in this post on Digital Photography School another option to put together a series of shost: exposure fusing. To do a proper exposure enfusion, you need three things: the enfuse software, the image_align_stack.exe file included in the Hugin software (copy the file to the enfuse directory) and the Lightroom plugin LR/ENFUSE. The last one is optional but is very handy. You have to pay for it, but you can give as much as you want. I use the default settings of Enfuse and got the following result.

As you can see, there is a halo around the left bush. On the other side, there are very nice details in the shadows. More then the blended photo and less then the unrealistic HDR image.

For the future, I am not sure yet what I would use. Both enfusing and blending have their benefits and are much more appealing than HDR.