Common Sense and Whiskey

Ten Places of Worship - Wednesday HDRs

Enjoy these HDRs of churches in Ethiopia, Italy, Lithuania, Panama, Cuba, Latvia and on St. Helena Island. Click any of them to make them much bigger. There are almost 400 more HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The first two are from St. James Church, the oldest Anglican church in the southern hemisphere, St. Helena Island, South Atlantic Ocean:

These next two are from the Riga Cathedral, Riga, Latvia:

Here is the Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada de La Habana, Havana, Cuba:

Unexpected Opera House - Wednesday HDRs

The Sydney Opera House from vantage points you don't usually see. Both shots taken across the harbour at the Taronga Zoo in the suburb of Mosman.

All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here, and more from Sydney and the zoo (koalas and stuff) in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Churches - Wednesday HDRs

It's gotten to be a little project lately. Anytime we're visiting somewhere new I try to pop into a local church and get enough shots to put together an HDR photo. Since churches aren't places to be big and brash and American, coming in, taking over and spreading out with a tripod, these usually have to be hand held brackets and some are more successful than others. They all seem to require substantial processing.

Here are some from a few of our last trips. Click them all to make them bigger. They're from Havana, Cuba, St. Helena Island, Panama City, Panama and Riga, Latvia.

See them all, along with 380 other HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And if any of them catches your fancy you can see more photos in the Cuba, St. Helena, Panama and Latvia galleries. All these were shot with Nikon cameras, processed in Photomatix with various Nik plug-ins and finished in Photoshop.

 

Textures: A Simple Example

In yesterday's Wednesday HDR post of Mt. Cotopaxi, Ecuador with an added texture, I suggested you go out and shoot your own textures and experiment with them in Photoshop. Thought I'd show you an example. This is a photo of the docks at Windhoek, Namibia:

This is just some random, ordinary wall I shot in Riga, Latvia:

Here they are, combined in Photoshop:

This was one of my early efforts with textures and it surely will never win any awards, but it also didn't cost $100 - $400, and I learned a whole lot in the process. Just get out there and try it for yourself.

Fine Photo Link

Check these guys out: The Photo Society. From their site, "We are a group of contributing photographers for National Geographic Magazine, committed to telling the world’s stories through pictures."

Outstanding, quality photography you'd expect, and there's a bit about the "Most Dangerous Countries for Journalists," which includes a link to the Committee to Protect Journalists' creepy "Impunity Index."

 

Seeking to Photograph the Aurora

A month from today we'll arrive inside the Arctic Circle, in Finnish Lapland.

Maps suggest our chosen village of Saariselka is a little more than 200 kilometers from the Arctic Sea at the Norwegian coast and maybe about 300 k from Murmansk, Russia.

The little village calls itself the northernmost ski resort in the world, but in Lapland, beware the use of the term "ski resort," at least in the sense of Alpine or Rockies destinations. Lapland is a land of much more gentle topography, and it appears the highest point around Saariselka is Kaunispaa hill, at 437 meters.

We'll be up that way just days after the winter solstice to experience the Arctic night (At 67.333 degrees north latitude, Saariselka sits about a degree above the Arctic Circle) and to try to photograph the aurora borealis, so I've been doing my diligence, and to tell the truth, I can't find much in the way of aurora tutorials that tell much beyond the obvious: Dress warmly, use a tripod, try longer exposures, watch your histogram, bring extra batteries.

We'll have much more in a month or so.

Here are a few pertinent photography sites:

On Luminous Landscape

From Niebrugge Images

From Gadling

And here's an the aurora forecaster.

New Camera Technology News

The Lytro "focus later" camera we first spotted back in June is now in production. I clicked the "buy" button and learned delivery is expected in March or April. Not just in time for Christmas.

I'm a little more skeptical after reading this piece about the science behind the camera, and after seeing the thing. They may be marketing it as revolutionary ("the only camera that captures life in living pictures"), but they've designed it to look like a silly little throw-away mass consumer item - albeit one that starts at $400.

Still, I'm in. I wish them well and we'll see.

•••••

Then there's this, the throwable panoramic ball camera. Ever want to see what's behind you without having to bother turning around? Okay, that's flip, if you'll pardon the pun. Actually, the thing's kind of neat:

Northern Lights in Southern Skies

Fairly insanely jealous of those who saw the aurora borealis down here in the southeastern U.S. last night. Don't suppose the Aurora Forecaster predicted it.

Click through to some pics: Here's a collection of photos from last night, and here's one said to be from just a couple of counties away from us in Georgia.

Here's NOAA's map from about noon eastern today, Tuesday, 25 October, 2011:

Ironically, just yesterday we booked travel to see the aurora in December. Instead of walking outside the studio here, we'll just have to travel 4568.44 miles to see it.

New Most Popular Photo at EarthPhotos.com

Visitors to EarthPhotos.com have voted in a new most popular photo - it's one of the tree-climbing lions in the Ishasha Wilderness, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. This photo was also published in a feature on Uganda in a recent edition of Afar Magazine.

You can vote on any photo on EarthPhotos.com. Just mouse over the photo and click thumbs up. See all the photos voted most popular in the Most Popular Gallery.

Since this wasn't the type of photo for which you have leisure time enough to set up a tripod and walk around composing the best angle, it's an HDR from a single RAW. There's a before and after comparison here.

 

Wednesday HDRs: Lack-of-Travel Fatigue

Haven't been out on the road nearly enough lately. A not entirely satisfying substitute is to go back to a few bracketed shots that you never got around to converting to HDRs. Here are two from a 2009 trip to Rome. Click 'em to make 'em much bigger.

It's the Vatican on top and just a generic apartment block below. Compare the processed image in the bottom photo with the lackluster original.

 

Game Changing Camera?

This would appear to be a must have (more about it). I've reserved one. I'll let you know.

Hard to Beat This Photographic Effort

Just an outstanding effort and a pleasure to watch. Time lapse photography from Dominic Boudreault.

Timelapse - The City Limits from Dominic on Vimeo.

Masters of the Universe: Wednesday HDR

Currently the second-highest ranked HDR as voted by viewers of EarthPhotos.com, and my personal favorite:

Click the photo to make it much, much bigger.

Walking along Oxford Street in London about dusk in January 2010, we came upon this office building, and it looked promising enough that I ran to get my tripod from our hotel room and came back in time to catch these guys about to leave for the day. Several exposures from a single RAW, tonemapped in Photomatix & finished in Photoshop.

See over 800 photos from cities all over the world in the Cities Gallery and (at the moment) 220 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

No Comment. Or Rather, Hard to Comment.

From a post called 50 Hard-to-Explain Photos at The Online Photographer.

Any similarity to the previous post is purely coincidental.

Wednesday HDR from Hoi An, Vietnam

Currently the second most popular photo as voted by visitors to EarthPhotos.com, this is an HDR from Hoi An, Vietnam. It's the incredibly photogenic morning fish market.

Spend a little while on EarthPhotos.com and vote for your favorites. Put any photo - anywhere on the site - in the main viewing box, mouse over, and give it a thumbs up (or down). Results show up in the Most Popular Gallery.

There are almost 400 photos from Hoi An and all over Vietnam in the Vietnam Gallery, and 321 HDR photos in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Weekend Fun

Enjoy a few photos for the weekend from the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Morning Fish Market, Hoi An, Vietnam - Wednesday HDR

The formerly quiet fishing village of Hoi An, Vietnam is increasingly a hot tourist destination. It's near Da Nang and Hue, roughly halfway between Hanoi and Saigon. Hoi An's old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and down by the docks, it's home to an utterly foreign, thrilling morning market (photos: 1, 2, 3). This week's Wednesday HDR photo was taken there.

This photo was featured on HDRSpotting a couple of weeks ago. It's been viewed 5743 times there since then, and the resulting traffic to EarthPhotos.com has made this photo the current #2 in the EarthPhotos Most Popular Gallery. (Please vote for your favorites.)

It's from a single photo, re-exposed +2, 0 & -2, recombined and tonemapped in PhotoMatix and finished in Photoshop. Click in the photo or here to see a much bigger version. See 383 photos in the Vietnam Gallery, and 315 photos in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Briefly: Apples, Chad & Night Photography

Turns out apples ARE from Kazakhstan.

*****

Amazon to the Sahara: "Thanks, Chad."

*****

Tech geek triumph: Flash-free photography at night.

Wednesday HDR: Cathedral Photo Comparison

The subject this week is the interior of the Riga Cathedral, the largest medieval church in the Baltics. Both our HDR photos below are derived from the same three bracketed photos; They've just been processed differently. First, the unpromising-looking bracketed photos I took from the back of the church:

 

And now, the combined HDR versions:

Simple difference in the two HDRs: In the bottom version, we gave the top version its own layer in Photoshop CS5, duplicated it, used Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges to define lines, then blended the two layers together.

Whichever you prefer, both are easily much more vivid representations of the interior of the Rigas Doms than that single properly-exposed snapshot at the top.The HDR software is Photomatix, still a $99 download.

Examine much bigger versions of the two HDRs side by side (Photo 1/Photo 2) on EarthPhotos.com.

New Photo Blog Link

Linking CS&W to another photo blog, in the links called "Travel Photography: Resources." It's a blog by Jeff Bartlett called PhotoJBartlett. You might remember we linked to Jeff's separate site The Camping Cook a couple of weeks back. On PhotoJBartlett, Jeff combines travel writing with travel photo tips.  It's worth spending some time with. Check it out. I've subscribed to it's feed.