Category Archives: technique

Experimenting With Enhance Levels in Lightroom

In one of the bigger updates of Lightroom and Photoshop, Adobe introduced the Enhance functions adding either resolution or noise reduction.  The noise reduction has been very effective for some of the shots I have taken with very high ISO levels.  I decided to edit a shot with varying levels of noise reduction to see how things look.  Since I had a bunch of cheetah shots taken in low light, I figured that would be a good subject.

You can vary the noise reduction level from 1-100.  I made five edits with one unchanged and the remainder at 25, 50, 75 and 100.  I then layered them in to one file to show the comparison.  The unchanged edit is on the right while the 100 noise reduction is one the left.  I felt like my previous experience had been that a level around 50 was a good outcome for much of what I had shot.  When I looked at these results, I again concluded that the middle level was the best compromise.  The 100 was just too much and 75 looked like things were a bit smudged.  You can judge what you think.  I shall experiment with levels each time I use it but it does give me a good idea of what to start with.

iPhone RAW Image Exposures

When RAW capture first became available on my phone, I started to use it.  Initially, I had to use a third party camera app which was fine but it did have some quirks about it and some things that just didn’t work right, despite some extensive communication with the developer.  Then the camera app of the phone got updated to allow RAW capture and I have been using that ever since.  There is something very strange about it, though.  When I import the images in to Lightroom, they are always about one stop overexposed.  I am curious whether this is a function of the raw format for Apple in order to preserve details in the shadows or whether it is a weirdness with my phone.  Included are two images – one with the base settings after import and one edited.  This is representative of what I get.  It doesn’t hurt the end result but it is rather strange.  Anyone have similar results?

Playing With an Old CRJ Moon Shot

For some reason, I recently came back to an old photo I took of a Delta Connection CRJ900 as it climbed out of O’Hare.  It had climbed right by the moon as it was rising in the eastern sky towards the end of the day.  I had liked the photo at the time but now I was thinking about how to do a better job of editing it.  Now I have been using the masking tools in Lightroom a lot more, I figured I could take different approaches for the jet and the background.  The results were a lot better than my original efforts and I quite like how it now looks.

Time Lapse Experiments With Ice

I used to play with time lapses a fair bit.  I would shoot a series of images and use LRTimelapse to process them. However, that software had a license agreement that meant, when they upgraded the software, they required you to update your license and the old version was deactivated.  This was very annoying.  I figured I would be able to keep using the old version but apparently not.  I don’t do it that much to justify the cost and was disinclined to use that software after this experience.

My latest cameras have a time lapse function built into them which I had been meaning to try out.  I had done this on my little M6 but not with the latest bodies.  What to use them on, though.  I figured an experiment doesn’t require me to be original in the subject.  Just try it out and see how it works.  Consequently, I thought melting ice would be good enough.  My first effort was not successful.  I hadn’t given it enough time to record the melting fully.  Second was better but, while the timing was okay, I had focused on the ice cube when it started melting and it slid across the plate as it melted and out of frame.  The mode on the camera sets focus and exposure on the first shot so this meant everything was well out of focus.

This is why you experiment with things.  The last try worked pretty much as intended.  (I should note that I did all of these in the evening, so the lighting didn’t change during the shoot.) I had a long enough time for the ice cube to almost fully melt, it didn’t move, and the lighting was fine.  Watching the ice disappear and the cube gradually sink into the water that is progressively growing was rather fun.  This isn’t some epic revelation of the nature of melting ice, but it did teach me about some functionality of the camera.

Which Do You Prefer and Do You Care?

As mentioned in other posts, I have been playing around with lower shutter speeds when photographing planes at Boeing Field.  Getting a blurry background to emphasize the speed of the plane is the goal and it also removes some of the annoying distractions that a cluttered airfield can provide.  I use filters to reduce the light in order to get the shutter speed down without having ridiculous apertures.  Naturally, I end up with a bunch of blurred photos which get deleted but the selection process for the keepers is what this post is about.

I have some photography friends that don’t like the effect that the differential speeds of the parts of the airframe have on sharpness.  A sharp nose might mean a pretty blurry tail since the relative motions as I pan are different.  When I am filtering through the shots, I often “focus” on how the nose looks since it is like having the sharp eyes on a wildlife shot.  I care less about the tail unless it looks terrible.  However, getting the middle of the airframe sharp might result in a sharper overall shot even if the nose is a little blurry.

These are the things I was thinking about with these shots of a 777X landing at Boeing Field.  The reason for the post is to see what matters to other people.  These shots are a mix of which part of the airframe is sharp and which bits are more blurred.  I may spend a fair bit of time deciding on which is best, but I wonder whether anyone looking at them is going to like the same things as me or will even care about it.  Maybe the composition of the image is all that they care about, and the pixel peeping is irrelevant.  I would really appreciate feedback if you have an opinion.

Focus Stacking the Lily Pond

A walk in Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle took us by one of the ponds that is covered in lilies.  Unlike when I was in Juanita Bay, this pond allowed me to get down to water level.  This provided a far more interesting perspective across the pond to the trees behind.  It did put me very close to the foreground elements so I focused stacked some shots to provide a deeper focused range across the shot.  I far prefer the lower angle as it really emphasizes the foreground elements in a way that isn’t possible when higher up.

Almost Directly Under the Approach

Photographing airliners can be a little “samey” since there are lots of very similar jets and getting a shot of them from the side looks much like any other shot unless the aircraft is specially painted or the lighting is particularly unusual.  Consequently, every once in a while, it is fun to try and shoot from a different angle.  The approach to SEA when the planes are on a southerly flow brings them in over a part of Burien where you can get yourself pretty much under the flightpath.

It won’t take too long before you are again getting a sequence of repetitive images, so it isn’t going to be useful for much time, but it is a chance to do something a little different.  Head on shots from a distance are possible.  Then you can get the shot looking up from the underside.  This might be a tight shot of a part of the airframe, or a wide angle shot of the whole thing.  An opportunity to do something a little different when you are photographing aircraft that are not ones where you care about missing the shot as you might when something special is coming in.

Playing With the Bizjets to Experiment

I have been messing around with low shutter speeds for traffic at Boeing Field a lot this year.  Some of those shots have made their way into posts on here.  One sunny afternoon, I was at the field and there was a lot of business jet traffic but nothing terribly special.  This provides a good opportunity to try different things.  I had the polarizer and a neutral density filter.  The polarizer is good on sunny days for taking down the glare and it also cuts the light.  However, the neutral density can really pull the shutter speed down.

Since I didn’t care if the shots were a failure, I was willing to just keep bringing the shutter speed down and down.  I compensated by cranking up the frame rate in order to increase the probability of getting a sharp one.  This is an interesting challenge.  Normally I spend a bit of time culling out shots that just aren’t sharp but, when playing with silly shutter speeds, you need to re-calibrate just how sharp things should be.  What is a little off when zoomed in might be of no concern when looking at the full image.  That is not an excuse to let plainly bad shots through though.

Here are some of the results that weren’t too bad.  Even an average Challenger can look a little more interesting with a very blurry background!

Re-Editing a B-2 Shot

Periodically, when I am looking through my image catalog for a specific subject for one project or another, I come across some images from a while back that look okay but might benefit from some of the more recent approaches to processing that I have adopted.  This doesn’t always help but it can be fun to start from scratch on a raw file and then see whether the final version is any better than the previous attempt.  I created a new virtual copy in Lightroom and zero out all of the sliders, upgrade to the latest processing version and give it a go.

I did this a little while ago on a shot of a Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit.  I shot this jet at Palmdale many years ago on a visit with my friend, Paul.  The shots were okay, and I was happy with them at the time.  Here I shall show you the current version first and then the next one down is the previous result of my processing from when it was shot.  Do you think it is a significant change?

Spider on My Car Means Macro Time

I was waiting for a friend to arrive at SEA and was parked up in Burien.  I noticed a couple of small jumping spiders on the car and, since I had the macro lens in the trunk, decided to try and get a few shots of them.  The problem with spiders and mirrorless cameras is that the focusing logic hasn’t been trained to deal with their multiple eyes.  The body tends to be what the camera focuses on.  Still, I was able to get a few reasonable shots as they scurried across my car.