Monthly Archives: December 2012

Road to Hana

One of the more famous things to do on Maui is drive the road to Hana.  We were advised that an early start was a good idea before the road got filled with tourists and you stopped seeing the sights and instead watched the rear of the car in front of you.  I don’t know how busy it got later since we followed the advice but we certainly had a quiet road to drive.

The terrain is undulating so the road twists and turns as it makes its way around the coast.  You never go very fast and the odd straight sections feel very unusual when you come upon one.  There are plenty of spots along the route to take note of and lots of waterfalls to see.  Some are more impressive than others and our guidebook was very effective at making sure we saw the best of the bunch but didn’t lose too much time at those that were less worthwhile.

It was certainly a nice drive and quite pretty.  Whether I would agree that it is one of the most beautiful drives in the world is a very different story.  Worth doing if you have the time but not unmissable.  I am glad to have done it but won’t feel compelled to do it again if we should return.  There certainly isn’t too much in Hana to do once you get there!  However, it does provide access to some of the nice features of the south side of the island which I actually found more appealing.

Playing with Noise Reduction

One of the biggest developments that there has been in digital imaging in recent years has been the improvement of performance in low light.  A few years ago, it was hard to get a decent image at above ISO400 and much post processing work was required to try and make the images workable.  Plug-ins for noise reduction were very popular.  However, the camera manufacturers have been very aggressive in developing chips and processors that allow shooting at ISO levels that would have been unthinkable a while back.  You hear of cameras being perfectly acceptable at ISO6400 and above.

My cameras are not the newest on the market but there are certainly not slouches in low light.  However, I have never been terribly happy with the performance at high ISO settings with the image breaking up a bit when viewed up close.  This is where I have to admit that I can be a complete idiot sometimes.

I shoot RAW all of the time and then process the images in Lightroom.  I have created some presets of development settings that I apply each time I import an image and which then acts as the starting point for any additional editing.  This is where my problem lies and why it has taken me so long to realize it I can’t imagine.  Anyway, enough of the self-flagellation and on with the topic.

The problem lies in the Detail section of the Develop module.  This is where sharpening and noise reduction are applied.  I have some basic settings I start with here and, when I was importing shots taken at high ISO settings, I was not changing them.  I would play with the noise reduction but things still didn’t look right.  The problem was, of course, the sharpening.  The basic setting I had entered was sharpening far too much for the ISO setting and was causing some odd breakup of the image.  I finally realized this one morning while lying in bed – I have no idea why I was thinking of this but it suddenly came to me.

I got up and opened some high ISO images and went to the detail area.  I zeroed out the sharpening and the noise reduction.  Everything looked awful.  Then I brought back the noise reduction and things suddenly started looking a lot better.  When I was happy with the noise, it was time to bring back some sharpening.  Things were a little soft after the noise was taken out so the sharpening brought back a bit of punch to the image.  A tweak on the amount and opening up the radius a bit made things look good.  Then a more aggressive level of masking of the sharpening and suddenly the image was looking way better than before.

When I was happy with things, I saved a new preset that was just sharpening and noise reduction and labeled it as High ISO Detail.  Now I can apply it to any images that need it and be in a far better starting position for further processing.  Each image will require its own approach if I am going to make more effort on post processing but I will now be starting from a far cleaner place.  The samples above are comparison of approximately 100% crops with my original settings and the revised approach.  Hopefully you can see the difference.  It might be annoying to realize you have been missing something for so long but at least I finally worked it out!

Restoring Lower Wacker

One of the parts of the city that most tourists never get to see is Lower Wacker Drive. Wacker Drive is the road that runs around the Loop along the line of the river. It is on two levels with Upper Wacker being normal street level and Lower Wacker sits directly beneath it. Half of Lower Wacker was rebuilt before we moved to the city but the other half was in an unrestored state for many years. If you watched the first of the Christian Bale Batman movies, you will have seen Lower Wacker in all of its darkness. (Go further back and the Blues Brothers movie also provided a tour of this area in the final car chase.)

I like Lower Wacker as it provides a bypass to get to the Eisenhower Expressway while avoiding the worst of the traffic – at least it did. Then they closed it for a progressive rebuilding program. This has been going on for a couple of years and is now about to be concluded. I have not been paying a lot of attention to the rebuild but I have taken a look whenever I have been passing by. The work has been a rolling program gradually moving down the length of the road. A section has been closed off while everything was diverted around it. Then the whole process would shift a few blocks further south. When I was up on the top of the Sears, I had a great view of the bottom of the drive from above. It was clear that everything was nearly done. Now I get to wait until I first can drive the new road. I have heard they have calmed the traffic flow down there which is probably a good idea but a little disappointing!

Pano 360

There is an app I have had on my phone for a while called 360 which is for taking panoramic photographs.  I have had it for quite a while and have mentioned it before here but they have progressively introduced new features over that time.  While the new operating system has a pano function built into the camera (if your phone isn’t too old), it is rather basic and nowhere near as good as this one.

Taking images requires a little planning since you are able to take a full spherical image.  Doing this without having the whole thing look strange in close requires you to keep the camera point itself unchanged as you turn around.  This is harder than you think.  The software can compensate a bit but you need to try and get it right in camera as much as possible.

It shows you a grid of the total shot and so you can see which bits you have shot and what is needed to fill it all in.  It gives you a live preview as you shoot including looking straight up and down when required.  Once the image is complete (or as much of it as you want), it processes it and then you can upload it to a website to view later.  The links here are from that site.  It is a great app and fun in some situations and valuable in others when showing off a wide view is hard to do any other way.

When checking this examples out, don’t miss out on a cool feature.  At the top of the viewer are three buttons.  It starts on the middle setting which allows you to pan around.  If you click on the left button, it creates a view from the ground up.  The right button creates a view looking straight down.  (This only works properly if I have shot a full 360 image.)  This looks like the work that Gerry Holtz has done and I blogged about here although his is far superior.

Muscle Cars

My friend Joel recently suggested a trip out to a car show near O’Hare at the Rosemont convention center. It was a display of muscle cars. While this is a generation of vehicles that I know nothing about since American cars of the 60s and 70s were not something that meant anything to me in the UK, the chance to see some great restoration work and to see something different to my normal interests meant I was keen to go along.

The show was very well attended and there were plenty of cars on display. The quality of restoration work was generally very good. Some great looking cars and some proud owners willing to talk about what they had done to get their cars to the condition that they were in. I was seeing a whole bunch of cars that I had never seen before so that was interesting. For those who grew up with these cars, it would have been a far more interesting time since seeing these old cars would trigger lots of memories. However, I still had a good time and will certainly go again if the chance arises.  If you want to see more, I do have a gallery of images here.

Windsurfing and Kiteboarding

Being on the north side of the island of Maui, we were also able to see a bit of the watersport activity that people can get up to.  The north shore is famous for surfing of course with Jaws being the most well known of the surfing locations.  That is a little inaccessible and the surf is not huge at the time of year we were there.  However, there are plenty of other ways to have fun.

With the steady, strong breeze, this is a great spot for windsurfing or kiteboarding.  As we wandered along the shore near our lunch location, we could see plenty of people out having some fun.  They were making great progress as a result of the strong winds and were great to watch.  It is always fun to see someone who is good at something doing it well.  I grabbed a few shots before we went on our (far more leisurely) way.