As most of you know, I’ve been working a lot in HDR these last few months and Trey Ratcliff’s site Stuck in Customs has been a huge source of inspiration for me for over two years now. His photos are all HDRs and are very artistic without going into the extreme HDR area - he even has a paragraph in his HDR tutorial about how „Friends don’t let friends do HDR on drugs“.
A few months ago, he started talking about publishing a book with the best of his pictures - and I was really excited, because I enjoy his photos so much, so when the book was available for pre-order I ordered my copy. I got it in early January and it blew away my expectations! It includes the best of his photos from the past few years with his descriptions of the photos. His descriptions often include a little story about how the photo came to be but also valuable tips & tricks on how to take a great photo and how to process it. To top it of, he has included his HDR tutorial, which shows his whole workflow for a typical HDR as well as some other reviews of useful apps for photographers. It’s really a great book and you should definitely check it out - even though it maybe sold out in your country’s amazon.

Since Trey publishes his photos under a creative commons license, I will show you my favorites by Trey (all links will lead to the photos on Flickr):


A Farewell to India - The Taj Mahal


Swallowing the Ruins


The Magic of Disney


Notre Dame of Lyon

Tags: HDR, stuck in customs, Photo, Book, Review

I just wanted to add a quick post telling you about the results of Jim Goldstein’s „Best of 2009“ Blog project. It got 123 entries, which is a crazy amount - and includes some very great photos (and I’m only at entry 10, really need to get through the list ).

So here is the link to the list at Jim’s blog

Tags: Project, Blog, Best of 2009, Photo

It’s the time of the year again to look back at the photos I have taken this last year and choose the best ones and present them to you again. Like the last two years, Jim Goldstein is making a photo blog project out of it, collecting entries from all over the globe from photographers.

Last year, I made a Top 10 list and added some honorable mentions. This year I’ll give it a different spin and divide the photos by subject: Flowers, Animals & Insects, Architecture, Panoramas, and Miscellaneous things. Since I don’t want to tax your internet connecting with tons of high resolution images, you can click on any image to see a larger version.

Flowers

Like most years I spent a lot of time doing flower macro shots. Since I spent part of the year in Atlanta, GA, and part in Frankfurt, Germany, I have tons of photos both from the Atlanta Botanical Garden and the Palmengarten in Frankfurt. Both are very much worth a visit and beautiful places to forget that you are in a big, metropolitan city. My favorite of the year is the single rose shot, which is a pretty wide shot for my usual macro photography but I absolutely love the bokeh in the background and the processing that makes it look like an old, maybe hand-colored, photo. The slight blur, by the way, is due to the Lensbaby with which I took this photo.

Animals & Insects

I always love to go to the zoo and photograph animals, their beauty and behavior always fascinate me. Insects can also be very fascinating because you can see much more details with a photo lens than you could with the naked eye but they are a pain to photograph. This year I was only able to fit in thre trips to the zoo, one to the Zoo in Atlanta, one to the Opelzoo near Frankfurt and one to a small zoo specialising in reptiles called Reptilium. Oh, and the jellyfish is from the Georgia Aquarium, of course.
My favorite is the photo of the fly because I think it’s pretty unusual to have the fly looking directly at you while taking a photo - plus the traces of bright yellow pollen.

Architecture

I’ve only really started to get my feet with with architectual photography this year and I am still learning a ton. Most of the time I am drawn to unusual details or unusual perspectives but then I will also have a ton of pure tourist shots. Most of my city photos have been HDRs, I think that a subtle HDR is closer to reality than a single exposure shot of the same scene most of the time.
My favorite of the year has to be this powder tower in Prague. Like the ghosting suggests, it started out as an HDR and then I converted it to a black & white with a lot of contrast. I love how ominous it looks this way - you keep thinking about the evil power of it.

Panoramas

Sometimes you really need a panoramic shot to give a true depiction of the scene before your eyes. I think these panoramas really highlight that. The first shows a small percentage of the graves in the Oakland Cementary in Atlanta and its beautiful old trees. The second is the skyling in Frankfurt during a festival, third is one in Prague and the fourth one is again Frankfurt as seen from one of the skyscrapers (it’s the second skyscraper on the upper panorama - the round one with the antenna on top - the direction of the photo is the same area, too). I love all of them because they are so immersive when you look at them in high resolution. Most were done with 6 or more photos.

Miscellaneous

These photos do not really fit in a category - but I love them nonetheless, especially the photos I took of the fire artists. The light given of by the fire is so super interesting, I think. Those photos are some of which I am most proud of this year, too, since I did not have a tripod or monopod with me, it was the middle of the night and the available light changed suddenly, depending on the tricks they were doing. Two years ago I would have been unable to get any got shots but now I have the knowledge to get photos I like. That’s probably my biggest take-way from photographing this year.

Which one is your favorite? Are you also participating in Jim’s project?

Tags: Project, Photo, Best of 2009

i swear, I'll try to increase my update schedule to more than once a month! I really need to try harder, I've been slacking

Today, I have several small things for you:

Some weeks/months ago I spent a day playing tourist guide to friends in Frankfurt. It was also my first chance to test the Sigma 10-20mm lens I bought two days earlier (yes that trip made me buy sooner). I shared one photo with you but never the whole gallery.

While we are on the topic of Frankfurt, I also spent a day in the local botanical garden in September and took lots of flower macros *yay*. Due to the number of photos, there are two galleries: Flowers and a separate one for Dahlias.

I live in a fairly old town with a real castle ruin and each year we have a fair there, which is always great fun but most years it conflicts with another engagement. But not so this year I got two galleries for you from that: Some photos from the fair using my Lensbaby and at night they had a Keltic Fire Show, which I got some great photos from (if i may say so myself ).

On we go: I spent a long weekend in Prague, Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) and Marianske Lanske (Marienbad) in September. Truly spectacular cities with tons to see & do and just a dream for photographers. Almost all of the photos in the three galleries I have put online are HDRs from three exposures. I'm in a total HDR phase right now. The galleries are divided by location: Prague, Karlovy Vary, and Marianske Lankse. We spent three days in Prague and then an afternoon in Karlovy Vary and a morning in Mariankse Lankse and i mainly used my new Sigma Wideangle Lens.

Last but not least, I spent a Saturday at a small zoo that specialises in reptiles - you know how much me and my Macro lens love reptiles Here are my best shots in a gallery.

Sorry for dumping so many photos on you - I definitely need to update the blog way more often...

As a last side note (to german readers): Ich "darf" jetzt auch für die Arbeit bloggen und habe nach einer Diskussion über die Qualitätsunterschiede in den Aufnahmen mit einem iPhone und einem Blackberry einen Blogeintrag über das Thema geschrieben auf der Basis der grundlegenden Technik, die solche Unterschiede ausmacht. Für viele Leser hier sicherlich nichts neues, ich wollte es aber trotzdem erwähnen (Die Webseite selbst wird übrigens bald im neuen Design erscheinen).

Tags: Photo, Gallery, Trips, Prague, Frankfurt, Macro, Reptiles

One of my favorite bloggers, Brian Auer, is doing another Photo Project. He asked users to send him photos they would be willing to share for another "Edit my Photo" contest. I wanted to participate in this part of the project - but of course, I forgot about it... But I did remember to vote on which photo should be used for the editing part of the project (You can find all entries here).


The winning entry by John Huson

I really liked the photo that got chosen, because I was drawn to the structure in the wall. I really wanted to focus on the wall for my entry for the project because I think it has a higher draw to it than the person pictured. Brian supplied me with the RAW version of the photo so I had a whole range of options at my disposal to play with the photo.

I started out by opening the photo in Photoshop CS3 and the Camera RAW editior. Next I tried the different outputs for changing the white balance. I decided to go with the results from the tungsten light, which gave the whole photo a nice blue tint.


The photo with white balance set to tungsten light

Next I decided to use a Lomo action for Photoshop I had downloaded some time ago and had gotten really great results from in the past (You can find this photoshop action here).


The photo with the Lomo action applied

I really liked the direction this was going and also how that yellow thingy on the ground was standing out of the photo but the guy in the photo had become too dark and the texture in the wall did not jump out at you, either. Due to this, I decided to keep playing with the photo.
My next idea was to make a new layer with the original photo on top of the lomo-rized version and try different blending modes. The one I decided on was "overlay"

The guy in the photo is looking even worse but the wall had gotten a really nice texture. Now that I liked the wall, I decided to see what I could do to bring the guy in the picture back to a look where you can see his face. For this I made two additional layers on top with the original photo. In the lower one I used the masking tool and only left his face visible and used the blending mode "Lighten", which brought back the details in his face but he still did not have enough contrast in comparison to the rest of the photo, so I selected the whole of him in the next layer and masked this and used Overlay again. This increase the contrasts in his clothes and his skin a lot. Lastly, I decided to use a curves adjustment layer and played around with it until I was satisfied. The result of this I liked to much, that I decided to enter it as my entry into the project:

My final edit

If you want to partcipate in the project, you can do so until October 16th

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Project, Entry

As you might know, I really like to work with HDR files from time to time and I always prefer to keep them pretty close to natural looking (just with a higher dynamic range). Some time ago I spent a day playing tourist guide to friends in Frankfurt, which was kinda fun since you never look at cities you consider your home the same way as tourists would (in fact, this was the first time I had my camera with me in Frankfurt). During that photo shoot, I took almost exclusively three RAW files of every file to be able to make HDRs since the sky was super blue and I didn’t have an ND filter with me.

One subject was especially suited to HDR: a dark gate under an overhanging on which the sun was shining.

This is how it would have looked as a normal photo (totally unprocessed)


It’s really not too bad but the gate does not really pop and you can’t really see all the details in the structure. Therefore I took three shots with the AEB automation with exposure of +/- 2 to get extreme differences in exposure.


As I said, I had taken a lot of shots for HDR processing that day, so I decided to do a batch processing in Photomatix, which is pretty great, even though I can’t do much more with my Mac while this is running. I always let it do three versions of the photo (the two options you find under tonemapping and the fusion option with automatic lighting). The best version was this one:

As you can see, it is pretty close to the originall, just the gate itself is a lot lighter and the reflections in the glass are more pronounced. There is also more contrast in the stones. But I wasn’t totally satisfied with it, so I tried a few more ideas:
The first was a version for which I made the HDR in Photoshop CS3 and then used the tonemapping plugin of Photomatix in Photoshop. The result can be seen below and while I liked this version, the details in the gate do not come out at all, in fact, I have a lot of artifacts in the darker areas (remember, click any photo to see a large version).


Then I decided to try Hydra, a HDR app for Macs (I am still using the first version, though), which has pretty good results sometimes, too. This was the result from Hydra:

I didn’t really like this result because it did none of the things I wanted to accomplish, so I decided to fire up Photomatix once again and do a manual processing with it of the photo. I also decided to play a bit more with the levers in Photomatix than I usually do to get a bit more extreme results than usually. This is the version I finally decided on:


As you can see, its a much more moody picture than any of the other versions and the details look like they are supposed to look! It’s really amazing how different you can process an HDR and how different the results can look.

What do you think, did I decide on the right version?

Tags: HDR, Photo, Processing