Common Sense and Whiskey

Panama City Skyline at Night

Torrential tropical rain yesterday afternoon had finally wrung itself out by last night. Here's the view from where we're staying in Panama City, Panama. We'll hold off on the larger EarthPhotos.com versions until we get a chance to work on them a little bit more.

Rwanda Gorilla: Wednesday HDR

Continuing this little run of wildlife from last week and Monday, this week's HDR is from Rwanda, where this endangered silverback mountain gorilla lives in Parc National des Volcans.

Perched on a slippery vine covered slope isn't maybe the best place to take several bracketed shots of living, breathing - and moving - wildlife, and so this HDR was produced from a single shot, re-exposed and recombined in Photomatix Pro, then finished in Photoshop CS5. Click it to make it bigger.

See related photos in the HDR Gallery, Rwanda Gallery and Animals and Wildlife Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Our silverback friend presents a good opportunity to introduce a series of posts we'll start here in a day or two. Over the course of a week or so we'll post several short vignettes from Africa, taken from previous safari trips.

Another Monday Morning. Problem?

HDR of a baboon at the Tierpark Hellabrunn, Munich. It's a single shot re-exposed +3 to -3 EV and recombined in Photomatix Pro, then desaturated and sharpened in Photoshop CS5, with effects applied from Nik Software. Click it to make it bigger.

See more HDRs, more Animals & Wildlife and more photos from Germany at EarthPhotos.com.

Wednesday HDR: Hippo Family

Hippo family in the Kazinga Channel, between Lake Edward and Lake George in the Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. Click it to make it much bigger.

See related photos in the HDR Gallery, Uganda Gallery and Animals and Wildlife Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

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.

Sydney HDR

We haven't been out on the road in far too long. Day job demands attention, so day-dreaming is in order. Here's an HDR favorite from Sydney, Australia, taken at dawn from Watson's Bay. Click it to make it much bigger.

There are 400 photos from all over the country in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Like this one from Broome, for no particular reason, except it makes you feel good. If it were one of those motivational posters it would be titled

Exuberance:

Wednesday HDR from Vilnius, Lithuania

These streets would be thronging with tourists later in the day, but at sunrise on a Saturday morning in August, the tourists must have still been at their breakfast buffets.

See more photos from Vilnius in the Lithuania Gallery, and 320 more HDR photos from all over in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

More from Morocco: Wednesday HDR

One more from our friends Carol & Bobs' recent Moroccan adventure. Bob says it's a traffic jam in Tineher. It was the Aid el-Kebir (The Grand Festival). Worshippers were leaving an outdoor morning service to head home and, as is traditional, sacrifice a sheep.

Processed from a single RAW in Photomatix Pro & finished in CS5.

Selective Use of Color: Wednesday HDRs

This week we have several HDRs that manhandle color for photographic effect. Generally we'll tonemap our HDR using Photomatix, then open it in Photoshop CS5 and use various tricks and effects to get the final image we're after. For this series, the general idea has been to select one or more areas in CS5, extract them and move them to separate layers, and then gently desaturate the rest of the photo. Click them all to see bigger versions. Here we go:

This is a café in Riga, Latvia.

A loom at a tourist shop in Hoi An, Vietnam.

The rail yard at Spietz, Switzerland.

A tourist train in Tallinn, Estonia.

Cairo, Egypt souk.

About to set sail from Windhoek, Namibia.

One More from Morocco: Wednesday HDR

One more in the recent series from our guest contributors' recent Moroccan safari (previously here and here). They ended their trip in Fez, Morocco's second largest city after Casablanca, a UNESCO World Heritage site, home to the oldest continuously functioning university in the world (since 859), the University of Al-Karaouine, and one of the world's largest and most fascinating medinas.

There are more photos in the Morocco Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, and you can read the technical details of creating this HDR photo after the jump.

Our thanks to our friends Carol and Bob for the photos this week.

Another Guest Photo from Morocco

We mentioned our friends Carol and Bob who dropped over the far rim of the Atlas mountains the other day on a five day safari. Here's an HDR of a sunrise they saw along the dunes. They've re-emerged back into the world of wi-fi. This came to us from them via Fez.

Travel Photo: Morocco

Our friends Carol & Bob have disappeared onto the far side of the Atlas mountains on a five day dash across the dunes. Before they left the wi-fi world they sent back this, from an early morning balloon ride.

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.

Street Market in Lithuania: Wednesday HDR

Like this one a lot. Continuing to post-process photos from our August swing through the Baltics, we've just put this one up as the 299th photo in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. We had a painfully short time in Vilnius, Lithuania, so on Saturday morning, waiting for an afternoon bus to Minsk, Belarus, it was up and out early for a walk around the old town.

Lately I'm finding that adding an extra under-exposed image to a group is working real well, so this is a single RAW photo, reexposed +1 & +2 and -1, -2 and -3, then combined and tonemapped in Photomatix, and finished in Photoshop CS5. It was early morning in an urban setting, and still chilly. The sun wasn't established over the cobbled streets and the buildings, the light was kind of diffuse, I felt the photo had a tiny bluish cast, so I've warmed it up just a wee bit with a CS5 warming filter.

Click it to make it much bigger, and see 298 other HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Trains Get the Treatment: Wednesday HDR

These four train photos came back from an August trip, and we put 'em through the Photomatix mill. First two are tourisy/kiddie trains, the top on the waterfront in Helsinki, where the "party boats" leave nightly for Stockholm (note the Silja Line ship in the back), and the next one (with a sleeping driver) is an irritating little train that will keep getting in your way as you walk through the old town in Tallinn, Estonia.

*****

Both ways, coming and going from the lovely little Alpine town of Mürren (pictures in the Switzerland Gallery) we had to change in Speiz, a town on the Thunersee that I know nothing about beyond its train platform. With ten minutes of dead time, why not haul out the Nikon and see what you can come up with?

The work flow is pretty much the same for all of them. First fixing obvious problems in Photoshop Bridge, then tonemapping in Photomatix, then the bottom three all involve extracting one or more objects in Photoshop CS5, desaturating the rest of the image, and then recombining. The bottom uses a Duplex filter from Nik Software, too.

These are in their respective countries' galleries (Finland, Estonia, Switzerland) at EarthPhotos.com, and in the HDR Gallery, currently home to 279 HDR photos. Click 'em to make 'em bigger.

Weight of the State - Wednesday HDR

This one's from our recent trip to Belarus. It's a monument to the revolution, or the Onward March of the Worker, or something, looming above an ordinary storefront, not far from the Old Town Square in Minsk.

The thing's so overdone it invited some post-production caricature. So I left the color in the people but desaturated everything else, blurred the sky to make it seem to encroach on the rest of the scene, and darkened and added contrast to the monument itself. It was created from a single RAW photo re-exposed at +2 & -2, the three images recombined in Photomatix, and then finished in Photoshop CS5 with Nik Software's Dfine 2.0. Click it to make it bigger.

There's no Belarus Gallery up yet on EarthPhotos.com, but we're working on it and we'll have a dozen or two photos up soon. It is, however, along with 278 others, in the EarthPhotos.com HDR Gallery.

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.

Tallinn, Estonia

HDR of an oh-so-cute tourist train around the old town. Perhaps the driver's very tired after driving all day.

 

It's from the new and as yet unfinished Estonia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Vilnius, Lithuania: Wednesday HDR

We're back on the farm after our summer trip from Finland through the Baltics and Belarus, the Alps and Munich. Everything here is, agreeably, as we left it.

Everywhere along our route except Murren, in the Swiss Alps, was unusually hot. In Finland they grumbled, but we enjoyed swimming in the lake - actually warm for once. Vilnius, Lithuania, in particular, baked in the sun. We were persuaded, as we sat under umbrellas at a terrace café there, to take a bus to Minsk rather than the train.

The train was old and Belarusian and stopped forever at the border, they said. It would take the better part of five hours, while the nice modern bus took something over three.

They were quite right about the length of the trip. Thing was, the air conditioning on the nice modern bus barely made it the 33 kilometers to the Lithuania/Belarus border. And naturally, the windows were structurally shut. Hot in there.

Builds character. Makes a good story. 

Tons of photos are coming. For today's Wednesday HDR, here's one I like from Vilnius, Lithuania. It's old town was packed with tourists like us on the afternoon we hit town, so I decided to get up early the next morning and do the same walk before the tourists. This photo looks up an alley around the corner from the Presidency building. It's a single shot re-exposed at +2 & -2, combined and tone-mapped in Photomaix, tweaked with Nik Software.

EarthPhotos.com will have new Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus Galleries soon. For now, here are some low-res photos from all the countries we visited on our August trip.

Munich Rathaus HDR

Remind me next time - Munich is full of tourists in August. Every third person is American. Not normally our preferred situation, but the weather is gorgeous, and as compared to the Baltics and Belarus it's a perfectly shoulders-down, upscale end to these past three weeks.

Culture? You name it, we've done it: The higher brow kind - art museums (both the Alte and the Neue Pinakothek, which makes for a long day of standing), and the local kind - beer, sausages and sauerkraut at the beer garden at the Chinesischer Turm in the Englischer Garten.

Count the red jerseys. Public opinion is squarely behind Bayern Munchen, the home team.

Here's an HDR of the rathaus with it's famous glockenspiel - city hall from all 306 steps up Peterskirche. Click the photo for a bigger version.