Category: Sunset

Self Portrait with the Devilhog

Posted on by Nick Roberts

This self portrait was taken a couple of years ago at the entrance to the Bonneville Salt Flats International Speedway. I used Topaz Adjust bring out the details and colors in the scene.

I’m still feeling my way through this startup of the Speeddemon2 blog and trying to wrap my head around the WordPress analytics that show how many visitors the blog gets each day. There have been days where over 200 people viewed the blog and there have been days when as few as 30 people have stopped by. I’m trying to correlate those numbers with the posts from those days to better understand how I can deliver photos and information that will lead people to return each day or each week. I truly want to be a resource for photographers and ordinary folks to learn more about the work I produce and to find help, or inspiration, to further their artistic vision.

I would really appreciate hearing from you, the visitors, about what worked over the past few weeks and what didn’t. I studied fine art in a school that valued critiques as a way to grow and expand an artist’s thinking and inform his or her work. I’m asking anyone who has something constructive to say to post it in the comment section. I’m sitting here writing these word though and I’m wondering how I’ll deal with the possibility that no one will say anything. Oh well I can’t control the universe so I’ll take my chances with this post.

Louisville Waterfront at Night

Posted on by Nick Roberts

One of the difficulties inherent in shooting night scenes is the large dynamic range needed to capture the scene. The artificial light in the image is usually much brighter than the surrounding areas. When this occurs the highlights are blown out which is almost always in the street lights. This image is one such situation. I shot this image using a five shot bracket series from +2 through -2 stops. Even at that range the centers of the lights are blown out in this image.

My studies of my images at night have led me to adopt a wider range of exposures to offset this undesired effect. My current practice is to go as many as five stops underexposed if I encounter scenes that have large ares of manmade lighting such as this one. I watch my histogram very closely and underexpose until I see the right hand side move completely away from the end of the histogram. I have discovered that by doing that I can subdue the blow outs that occur in the lights themselves.

I merged the five exposures in NIK HDR Efex Pro and then used the default setting as my base to tone map it. I then tweaked the sliders until it was where I liked it and finally returned it to Photoshop CS5 to sharpen it using the unsharp mask tool.

Compositionally I framed the shot with the sunset in the right hand third of the frame in order to balance it with the waterfront on the left. The sky counterbalances the architecture and the complimentary colors of the deep blue sky and the orange waterfront create a harmonious whole.

My point in sharing this image is to show you that the conventional practice of using an automatic bracket set to shoot the scene is not always going to give you control of the entire dynamic range. By using the histogram as a tool to analyze the images in your HDR shoots you can take control and prevent blown highlights such as the street lights in this image.

 

A Storm Was Brewing on the Horizon

Posted on by Nick Roberts

When the destination for my ride requires me to be on a tight schedule the Interstate Highway System is my only choice. While I prefer to use the older US Highway system to travel across the country, the pace is different and I don’t mind slowing down as I pass through small towns, I sometimes need to cover a lot of distance in a day.

I often hear from people that the Interstate Highways are boring roads but I don’t always find them that boring. For one thing these highways often pass through beautiful country and since the right of way is so wide there are sections where the only sign of man’s hand is the highway itself.

This is a photo of one such stretch of interstate. I don’t recall where I was when I took this photo but I do remember vividly how quickly the rain moved in my direction! I saw this storm on the horizon and pulled to the side of the road to put on my rain gear. Before donning my rain gear I grabbed my camera from my saddlebag and took a few shots of the approaching rain storm. I love seeing the rain falling as a storm moves in the distance and the way the rain makes patterns uniting the clouds and the earth. In a matter of minutes the storm was on top of me and I stashed my camera back in the saddlebag.

I grabbed my rain gear and was just getting it unrolled when the wind and rain were upon me; the wind was blowing full force and the rain drops were as big as grapes. I was standing there in the middle of nowhere trying to put on my rain jacket as the wind was doing it’s best to tun it into a sail! I had only managed to get one arm in the jacket when the storm got to me. As I stood there in the pouring rain, battling the wind and trying to get the rain pants and jacket fastened I was drenched with rain. Once I finished I was almost as wet as I would have been had I simply left the rain gear in the saddlebag.

I climbed back on the bike and headed into the storm fully expecting to ride the rest of the afternoon in rain but less that five miles down the road the storm was gone and the sky was clear again. I was still wet and cold but I had another great experience to remember and savor for years to come. These types of things are among the reasons I love motorcycling and exploring America by motorcycle; if I had been in a car that afternoon I wouldn’t have tasted and felt the the forces of nature that form our world.

As for the composition, once again the highway leads the viewer’s eye into the scene, dominates the foreground and reinforces the rule of thirds as it moves into the frame.  The colors and textures of the clouds add interest to the upper part of the image while the horizon gives a sense of depth. I used Topaz Adjust on this image which accounts for the enhanced contrast of the road surface and the saturation of the colors.

 

I Love Making Panoramas

Posted on by Nick Roberts

I really like shooting panoramas. I’m President of the Louisville Photographic Society which has been in existence since 1941. One of the reasons for the club’s longevity is that each month there is a member competition which fosters a level of commitment to continual improvement by the members. Each year the board meets and decides on the categories for each year’s competition. We try to evenly split the categories between camera skills and subject matter so that our members learn new skills or explore areas that they may have never tried before.

For me the competition category of Panoramas was one of those areas that I hadn’t pursued until challenged by the club competition. I started studying how to shoot them and in so doing I fell in love with the process.

For the shots in this post I shot 5 frames at approximately 30 degrees apart. I also shot 5 frames at each position so that I could produce HDR frames before merging them in Photoshop CS5. I liked the process so much that it has become second nature to me when I see a scene that would benefit from being shot in panorama.

Though both of these final panoramas were shot on the same evening they have completely different overall feels. I shot the top one just after the sun had slipped below the horizon which captured the warmth and fantastic color of sunset. When composing this shot I wanted to get as many of the Ohio River bridges in the frame as possible.

The second image was taken a few minutes later after the sky had begun to cool down and the sun was much further below the horizon which made for a much cooler overall feel to the scene. I use a free iPhone app “Darkness” which tells me when sunset occurs as well as when dusk occurs. Since using this app I’ve learned that there is nearly a full hour after sunset when there is still enough light in the sky to produce good images.

It goes without saying that I use a tripod since I’m shooting HDR as well as Panorama but another key factor in getting these images to work is that I shoot at a low ISO. On my Nikon D90; ISO 200 is the setting I use. I always shoot in RAW because the amount of data in the image is so much larger than is possible with Jpeg.

My processing for these images was to merge them in Photoshop CS5 and save them as TIFF files. After that I took them into NIK HDR Efex Pro for Tone Mapping etc. Then they went back to Aperture 3 for final sharpening and output.