Category Archives: technique

Recovering a Fence Shot

In an earlier post, I had shared some images of and A340-600 operated by European Cargo that I saw at Bournemouth. What I didn’t include in that post was any images close to the rotation point, despite me having been well positioned for that. When I say well positioned, I omit one key element which is that there was a fence between me and the plane, and I wasn’t able to photograph above the fence. Shooting through it was the only option.

I tried a couple of things to mitigate the issue with the fence. First, I was as close to it as possible to take the fence wires as far out of focus as possible. I was also shooting wide open – again to try and throw the wires out of focus. The last thing I tried was to go with a low shutter speed to smear the wires as I panned. With this combination, I was hopeful that I wouldn’t really have the wires in the shots. I was wrong.

When I took a look at the shots, the fence was very obvious. I did start to wonder whether it would have been better to have the wires well defined as maybe that would be easier to remove. However, too late for that as the shots were done. Now to see if there was anything I could do to recover them to something usable (and by usable, I mean that might be shareable but nothing that was going to be a great publishable image).

I tried some of the healing tools in Lightroom to see if that would work. I was getting nowhere fast – possibly a sign of how little I understand the capabilities of the tools or maybe they are just not the right thing. Then I decided to try something else. Because of the way I had shot the image, none of the airframe was obscured. There was just the grey overlay from the fence. That made me think that it was more like a darker area of the shot. I decided to use the brush tool in the masking panel and draw some lines that were heavily feathered across the lines that the fence wire created. Having made a grid of these, I then bumped up the exposure for the mask.

The result was surprisingly effective. However, I then ended up with some overly bright areas at the edge of the mask. A rework of the mask to change the size and the feather amount and this time the result was pretty good. There were a few areas that were still a touch dark and I used a large, soft brush to address those parts. If you know what the original image looked like, you will probably spot the remnants of the work. If you had never known before, it’s possible that you might not notice how much work had been done on this.

Time Lapse into National

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This is some older footage I took a while back when I was making a work trip to DC. I have done a bunch of these over the years. The phone allows you to get a good time lapse video (or I should say hyperlapse since it is a bit different) of the approach to landing. The countryside zips by in this type of video and you get the rapid changes in aircraft configuration along with the taxi in and shut down at the end of the flight. For those of you familiar with the northern Virginia area, you might well recognise some places. I did the same on the return leg into SEA as the day was ending.

Inside the Spacious Vulcan Cockpit

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I remember reading a piece about the cockpit of the Vulcan a long time ago that focused on just how cramped a space it was. The B-52 cockpit was a spacious place while the Vulcan was incredibly tight and had very limited glazing. Despite this, the jet was flown at low level and would be thrown around at air shows.

The two pilots up front are sitting on ejection seats while the three crew behind them are not so, if things go south (and they did sometimes), those three were out of luck. However, until I went to the Bournemouth Aviation Museum, I had never been in to the cockpit in person. They have the cockpit section of a Vulcan that looks out over the approach road to the museum. You can climb the ladder into the cockpit and stand right behind the two ejection seats. It is unbelievably cramped in there. Looking back at the three fixed seats, I was struck by how claustrophobic it could feel and wondered what manoeuvring in the jet would feel like back there. Might be a touch nauseating!

Comparison of a Couple of Edits

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Every once in a while, while I am searching for something specific in the Lightroom catalog, I will come across a previous shot that catches my eye for some reason. This might be because it was something interesting, something I had forgotten about or just something that I think might benefit from a re-edit. Sometimes I have changed the way in which I approach edits and in others there is a new tool that has been added which I think will benefit the edit. This image was exactly that. I thought that the masking tools now in Lightroom would make for a more flexible approach to balancing the different parts of the image. I played around with it for a while. Because Lightroom allows you endless virtual copies, you can try something new out without having to lose what was there before. I then created a combination of the two edits to show how differently the same raw file can end up.

Longer Angle on Alfred

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There is a statue of King Alfred in the centre of Winchester. When we had previously visited, I had taken some shots of it. However, because it is quite high up, you got a distorted look at him with the sky behind. I figured I would try a longer lens shot from further away to get a more normal look at the statue and have a darker background with the hill behind. This was the result!

Taking Out Reflections – Photoshop Experimental Features

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I have been using Lightroom since the initial version was released. It used to be quite a simple application and anything complex was undertaken in Photoshop. As Lightroom has got more and more capable, the number of times I go into Photoshop has reduced. What I didn’t realize until recently was that Adobe uses Photoshop as the proving ground for some of the features that will ultimately make their way into Lightroom. I thought that Camera Raw and Lightroom’s Develop module were identical and they almost are. However, not quite.

In Photoshop, they have a check box to allow you try experimental features. I found out about this related to a feature designed to remove reflections. Anyone who has taken a photo through a window will know that you can get reflections off the glass of things your side of the window and these can ruin an otherwise usable image. (Photographing through a window is not a great option but sometimes it is all you have to work with.)

This feature analyses the image to see what it thinks might be artifacts from inside the window and allows you to remove them. Interestingly, the slider that comes with it can be moved either way. You can fully remove the reflection or can fully remove the rest of the image and leave only the reflection. This can be rather fun to play around with.

I was interested in what this would do for some shots I had got while inside the airport at Narita a few years ago. It was a dark and rainy day and I did try to avoid reflections but was not always successful. Some of the shots I liked most from an action point of view were the ones with light from inside intruding into the shot. These were the ones I worked with. You can judge the results. As I have the before and after versions here. It isn’t perfect but it does work rather well for an experimental feature. I hope it gets productionised soon and finds its way into the Lightroom Develop module too.

Pano Experiment with a Fisheye

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I will freely admit this is not my idea. It is something that I read about recently on an astrophotography post that caught my attention. I was about to make a visit to a museum where I thought I might end up taking some interior images in confined space. My 16-35mm lens was probably going to do the trick but I wondered whether the fisheye might be a better bet if things were really tight. My only concern with that is the distortion is such a feature of that lens that it might not be worthwhile.

Then I came across the aforementioned article and it talked about shooting panos with a fisheye. The article was concerned with wide sky shots for astrophotography, but I thought it might work for me too. Supposedly, stitching together multiple fisheye shots takes out a lot of the distortion while still giving you the wide reach. I decided to experiment with this in advance to see if it worked.

I played with this indoors but taking a sequence of shots with good overlap between them making sure to catch as wide an image as possible. I was using the fisheye with full frame coverage rather than the circular version of the image. In Lightroom, I had to turn off the profile correction since that plays with the shots a lot and then set the pano function to work. It combined the images very easily and, sure enough, the verticals across the shot were not all vertical and not distorted at all. This could be something I now use a lot in the future when working in confined spaces. I will need to test it for closer subjects first since I suspect that will be a lot more testing for the alignment issues in pano stitching.

Generative Remove in Lightroom

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As with all software tools, Lightroom has been constantly evolving since the initial release. If I were to see the original version of the software, I would probably be shocked at how limited it was. I do come across old edits and, when I convert it to the latest develop presets I have created, it is shocking how much of a change can result. One area that has gone through various updates over time is the tools for healing or cloning. They have been okay but definitely had limitations – not least pulling in odd artifacts from other areas.

A recent addition to the tools has been Generative Remove. This is an AI driven method for selecting and removing elements of the image. I try to do any of this before any cropping because I have previously found cropping to confuse the healing tools by leaving stuff out of sight that it tries to reincorporate. I don’t know whether this matters for Generative Remove or not, but I have stuck with the same sequence just in case.

The selection process is really simple. Brush around an area and it will fill it in. You can refine the selection with brushes to add or remove areas. I have used it a lot to remove power lines where a click at one end and shift click at the other gives you a quick straight line. Then let it do its thing. It will provide three options for the solution, and you can decide if one of them works or make it try again. Generally, I have found the results to be very good and no obvious artifacts as a result of the healing. No doubt they will continue to refine the process, but I think it is a big step forward in cleaning up elements of images that you don’t want and is now something I will consider for images that I would otherwise have cast aside.

Low shutter speed SEA shots

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A recent post was focused on some shots from BFI when I was dropping the shutter speed. I had also been playing with this one gloomy morning at Seattle Tacoma International a while back. I was waiting for a specific movement but was passing time with some of the more regular movements. Since they weren’t the most exciting subjects, I tried dropping the shutter speed down to make the motion more apparent. They were really dramatic shutter speeds, but it made a slightly more interesting shot than would other have been the case.

Super Fast Frame Rate

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One of the features that was added to the Canon EOS R3 via a firmware update was a ridiculously high frame rate mode. The fastest frame rate in normal shooting is 30fps (which is clearly ridiculous itself for anyone that has been photographing for a long time). The extra mode comes with limitations. Once you start shooting, autofocus and exposure monitoring are suspended so you get a lot of shots with the same settings. However, this does allow you to get 194fps!!! Yes, that is not a typo. It will only do this for a maximum of 50 frames but that is raw capture – not a jpeg. You get to select how many frames are taken which I have to admit I didn’t realize until recently. I was shooting with a limit of 10 frames for quite a while and wondering why. I’ve fixed that now.

There are relatively few times when this mode is actually useful. The viewfinder does black out when you use it so, if you are tracking something, a little bit of predictive guesswork is in order. If you were shooting a baseball pitch being hit, this could be pretty handy. I decided to use it on the Blue Angels pair crossing during Seafair to see how things work out. The answer is pretty good. I include a sequence of shots so you can see what even this frame rate gives you for two fast jets head on to each other. A limited tool but one that could be utilized. I have also been using it for very lower shutter speed experimentation but that will be another post.