Bacon Lettuce Photo

by Joe

The photo was on my “short list” of things I needed to photograph here in Seattle. I’ve gone a couple of times, but decided to wait until I had a super wide angle lens to take the shot. I finally got the Tokina 11-16mm for my Nikon D90 so I went down to the tunnel to try it out. The tricky part is getting the correct perspective. If you’re slightly off, the photo won’t work, especially with the vanishing points. I had to try a couple different aperture settings to get the result I was looking for as well. I then shot a few sets of bracketed images (-2, 0, +2) and then went home to post-process. My workflow is pretty standard. I tonemapped the bracketed shots using the Details Enhancer mode in Photomatix to pull out detail and color in the marbled floor and then made basic adjustments (levels, curves, and color) in Photoshop. The final step was to apply Noiseware noise reduction to the image. Pretty simple. Feel free to contact me via flickr if you have any questions.

Info about the shot: Nikon D90, Tokina 11-16mm @ 11mm, f11, ISO 100 - 3 bracketed shots (-2, 0, +2), Photomatix Details Enhancer. (HDR)

Peter is a photographer living in Seattle, Washington.

- - - -
Brought to you by iLovePhotos

by Joe

“Photography saved my life, when I moved from Russia to America and felt completely alone, camera became my best friend. From that moment I carried camera anywhere I go, no matter how heavy it is. This was taking in SF. Best part about SF is fog, which creates great overcast with no shadows! My whole idea was to take a shot from a different perspective, make old subject like Golden Gate Bridge look new and interesting. After about 50 pictures I found my winner. Image taking by Nikon D80 and processed in Photoshop, no HDR. I Use different processing plug in’s (check www.deviantart.com and www.topazlabs.com for plug-ins!) Then I apply multiple amounts of textures. (Most textures created by me) It’s all about love to photography, patience and hard work!

You can visit Arina’s photography site for more inspiration. Her photos are a great way to display the use of textures to add a new dimension of quality to your images.
–
Brought to you by iLovePhotos

by Joe

This is the picture of a wall of polaroids inside an old abandoned house out in the middle of nowhere located in Southern California. It was started by a group of people that began throwing old polaroids inside the old house. Now the polaroids are slightly maintained and nailed onto walls by another member. There is a flickr group whose subject is the house.

This is an HDR of one of the walls. I loved the way the one photo was crooked, so I took a couple of shots (with my film camera), had them developed and put on CD, and used PhotomatixPro 6 to turn them into and HDR. A lot more work than a digital camera, but I still get the same effect. All my photos are taken with film so far. I love it, but I can’t wait to get my digital camera.

Awesome find Bethany! You can see more of Bethany’s work on her website and you can friend her on twitter too! By the way, she only shoots film.

by Joe

+

+

=

I called this HDR’s made easy because really they are. People are often dumbfounded by them and fall in love with their beauty. What they don’t know is that they’re pretty easy to do. Everyone has a little variation or different technique but this is just to show you how you can get started.

Here are some other HDR’s that I’ve done before:

and many more.

by Joe

It was a dark and stormy day in rural Pennsylvania… hazy in more ways than one as we returned from the Roy Pitz Brewing Company in Chambersburg. My girlfriend and I have both been shooting digital for a few years now and whenever we travel it ends up taking twice as long because we shoot everything (30,000 photos in the last 18 months).

Cut to the chase: Over the hills in the distance we caught sight of clouds rushing down the side of a mountain.

Me: “Get off at the next exit!”
Girlfriend: “Are you sure? You don’t even know where we are?”
Me: “Just get off and go north.”

After a series of U turns and backtracking we end up coming over the crest of this hill and knew I was in the right spot.

Truth be told, I’m not 100% happy with the outcome of this shot, but I love the mood and the texture. Its an HDR (5 exposures - blended with photomatix) shot with a sigma 10-20. I love shooting from the hip or setting the camera down with this lens.

Note: Its important to have a spotter when laying down in the road

Thanks Marty, this is a great example of an HDR. Very well done with nice perspective, angle, and point of view.

The best program for creating HDR’s is photomatix. It is payware but definitely worth it.

by Joe

I think what made me take this photo, was the influence of having seen so many inside shots of old passenger trains, and old busses. Stepping inside this vintage car, my camera automatically lifted for the shot. I did have a vision of using HDR, but I was too lazy to set for multiple images. Since I was shooting in RAW format, I knew I could produce a descent HDR anyway; at least in the style that I enjoy creating.
The image was processed with Photomatix single RAW HDR conversion, with somewhat exaggerated settings. Then processed in Adobe Photoshop CS3, where Neatimage was used to reduce noise, and a texture layer was added to enhance the feel of depth and color.

Canon EOS 40D
Canon EF 24-70mm 1:2.8 USM lens
1/64s
f2.8
ISO 400

Allen has definitely shown how someone can use HDR’s to make photos look like paintings or masterpiece works of art. Here’s another image of his that caught my eye.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Thank you for reading our blog.  We want to make our blog even better for you.

Your valuable feedback will help us shape Bacon Lettuce Photo to be better and more useful.

Please fill out this short anonymous survey and tell us about your experience.

Thank you!

Click Here to take survey

by Joe

A simple sunset on the Chesil Beach at Portland, part of the World Heritage Jurassic Coast on the south coast of Dorset, UK.

This pebble beach is one of my favourite places for photography, the beach stretches 18 miles from West Bay nr Bridport in the west to my home on the ‘Isle’ of Portland in the east.

This picture was taken one early evening last week, that evening I had already taken some pictures of the boats and other things that I had seen on the beach. I was mainly using a Nikon D90 and a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens (love this lens for landscape images) taking bracketed images, 3 exposures of the same image at -2, 0, +2 exposure values for compositing as HDR images, however because the different exposures are captured over a period of time, any movement in a scene (on this occasion moving water) can interfere with the hdr effect by ghosting the edges of moving objects.

It was getting very dark and the sun was just hitting the horizon, the water was quite calm so I grabbed several sets of bracketed images with the remaining available light, hoping that the slow movement of the water would have little effect when compositing the images in my hdr software (primarily Photomatix or HDR Soft by Artizen).

When I did get home and started to look at the images, I found that because of the low light and fairly long exposures (1/30th for handheld) there was substantial water movement between exposures and I abandoned hope of making any hdr images. Nevertheless I opened one set of exposures as a multi layered image in Photoshop and looked at the possibility of using areas from each exposure to combine as one image using layer masks, the attached picture is the result of this.

For the sky I used the shortest exposure - as this was the brightest area (masking out the sea and foreground), the middle sea area was taken from the normal exposure (masking out the sky, breaking wave and foreground) and the foreground beach and breaking wave was taken from the longest exposure - as this was the darkest area (masking out the sky and middle sea areas).

I was quite surprised to see how well the different exposures combined together and with a little adjustment to curves, colour and contrast, I was very happy with the result.

The image does lack any subject content, but the idea was to create an image of restful peace, I hope you like it.

See more photos by Peter.