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This is a view of downtown Charlottesville Virginia on a summer day in 2011 taken from the summit of Montalto, which is adjacent to Monticello. Historic landmarks like the Rotunda at UVA are visible as well as newer landmarks like the Charlottesville Pavillion. The panorama was created by stitching together 12 overlapping images. The source images were taken with a Canon 1DsMIII and a Canon 135mm F/2.0L lens.
My sister and brother-in-law have started a small home-based beekeeping operation. For their honey jar labels, they have asked me to capture a photo of a honey bee doing his job. Not so easy! I’ll have to keep trying to get the shot I’m after but here are some of my favorites so far. These were taken using Canon EF 180mm f/3.5 L USM Macro Lens with supplemental light from 580EXII off camera.
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Architectural images often require some retouching to help focus the viewer’s attention on the structure and its architecture and away from irrelevant visual distractions. Scroll down to see what was done to take this photo from the “before” version to the “after” version.
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Extending the sky upward to alter composition.
1. The lawn hadn’t been established and was enhanced using Photoshop.
2. The black light pole on the left was cropped out of the final image.
3. Obviously it is always best to compose in the camera. But in architectural photography, it is also important to maintain a level camera to prevent distortion of lines. Because of the slope of the land, I had to place the building in the vertical center of the frame when the exposure was made. I wanted the final composition to have the building be lower in the frame, at about 1/3 from the bottom. So I extended the sky upward and cropped out some of the foreground grass to achieve the final preferred composition.
4. The pavement was darkened using a curves adjustment.
5. I “harvested” the blue Virginia State flag seen in the final image from another exposure taken moments before so that it would be flying in concert with the American flag.
6. The white plastic PVC pipes along the roadway were removed.
My daughter Ellie, who is studying design at FIT created this dress with her mentor Sherrie Hannah. She models it here for inclusion in her portfolio.
Simply put, dynamic range is the range of brightness values, from shadow to highlight, in a given scene. Cameras don’t have nearly the dynamic range of the human eye. When a scene is high in contrast, the camera can’t record all the disparate brightness levels. Either the shadows will be recorded as pure black or the highlights will be recorded as pure white, or both.
A solution is to take a series of bracketed exposures at different exposure values capturing the extremes of shadows and highlights.
Shown below is the set of source exposures that were combined to generate the final image shown at the start of this post.
The simplest way to combine the differently exposed frames is to stack the exposures in Photoshop and use layer masking to hide/reveal certain parts of each image. This is the manual approach.
Two automated approaches also exist. The first automated approach combines exposures to create an intermediate 32-bit HDR image which is then “tone-mapped” into a low dynamic range image. Tools such as Photomatix use this kind of HDR processing. These tools are quite popular for creating other-worldly, surrealistic images. But for commercial work, the results can be unrealistic or in some other way unacceptable.
A second automated approach is known as exposure fusion. The fusion software employs algorithms to analyze and select which pixels to use from each of the source images to create a fused result. The product I use for exposure fusion is called Enfuse.
I usually use a combination of exposure fusion with the manual approach. That is, first I’ll create a fused image from the series of differently exposed frames. Then I’ll select the most-correctly-exposed individual frame as a basis for the final image. Starting with this single exposure, I’ll then blend in (with layer masking) the fused image to reveal details in highlights and/or shadows that the single exposure lacks.
This usually involves trial and error, and patience.
© 2011 Virginia Hamrick Photography - Architectural Photography - Charlottesville, VA - 434.978.1730|ProPhoto4 WordPress Theme by NetRivet Sites
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