Thursday, September 23, 2010

Sunflower Countryside

Driving by the local marsh that I duck hunt on, I discovered sunflower plants alongside the road. With the sun shining on them as it was going down at night, I stopped a couple of different times to use my camera.

Since some of the sunflowers were down in the ditch by the water, I used either my Slik tripod or Manfrotto monopod to steady the camera. To control the depth of field and what was in focus, I put the Nikon D90 in AV mode and adjusted the aperture from f5.6 to f13 on different shots. As usually, I shot in RAW to allow me to adjust white balance and other important settings on the computer. I also used the bracketing feature on the D90 which made me want to shut off the autofocus and VR on the lenses that I used. I switched between the Nikon 18-105mm and the Sigma 50-150 mm lense to get these images.

The images were processed in ViewNX or Adobe RAW (PSE8) by adjusting the white balance, picture control and sharpness if needed. This was the first time I processed RAW images in Adobe Camera RAW which allowed me to get a different looking image then ViewNX. The feature I like about Adobe Camera RAW was the fill light adjustment which helped me lighten up some dark spots in the image without affecting other areas too much.
Final post processing was done in PSE8 and EasyHDR. I created a few HDR images by combining different exposed shots in EasyHDR and adjusting the saturation and tone curve settings. Using PSE8 and the plug in VirtualPhotographer, I processed some of the sunflower images into b/w backgrounds, poster edges, nightscope b/w, etc. to create different looking images. In order to use those, I had to use layer masks and the paint brush to delete the parts of the image that I wanted to be left alone.

Finally, the finished image was copied into the gallery frame that I created in PSE8 to show off the photograph in a more professional manner. This gallery frame will be used for my photography from now on this website and in other areas where I post such as facebook and hunting forums.

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Old Countryside Barn

During the last week, I have been doing some scouting for the upcoming duck and goose season which allowed me to see the sunset at different locations. Driving by the below homestead with the barn and hay bales along with the cattails I knew I had a great image if I could capture the sunset in it.
Wanting to use the bracketing feature on the Nikon D90 and having different exposed images, I used the Slik tripod to get a solid base. Like most of my landscape photography, I put the camera to AV mode and shot in RAW. Needing a wide angle, I used the Nikon 18-105mm lense and because I was on a tripod and using the bracketing feature, I turned off the autofocus and VR. Turning off both of these in this situation helped to create a sharper image. I also used the self timer to get my hands off the camera and allowed the camera to fire off the bracketed images.

I processed these as RAW files in ViewNX and changed the white balance to direct sunlight. Needing to combine the multiply images into one, I used EasyHDR to create the below images. EasyHDR allowed me to combine the five different exposed images into one. To finalize the image, I adjusted the saturation level and also the tone curve to get the look I wanted to get.

The first two images were from one night of capturing the scene and then after reviewing them, I realized I needed to get the barn and hay bales more into the image so I went back for another chance.

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Saturday, September 4, 2010

Crop Dusting Chopper

Late in July, crop dusting planes and choppers were flying the corn fields spraying for bugs and I was lucky to catch this chopper close to home. Last year I photographed a plane so I was excited to have something new to snap some images on. I didn't realize that the choppers tanker was just up the road from the house either so that offered some good images too.

Needing to zoom in on the chopper, I used my 70-300mm lense on the Nikon D90 and most of the time for these images had it above 200mm. To get sharp images, I used AV Mode and quick ISO adjustments to keep the shutter speed high to freeze the movement of the chopper. I also used selected focus point because sometimes I had the chopper in the left or right side of the image so I wanted to control were the camera was focusing in on. I do wish the sky and sun would of been more favorable but a photographer cannot control that.

These images are actually jpeg's out of the camera instead of my usual RAW files so I had less amount of post processing involved. I did adjust them in ViewNX and added some sharpness and contrast too them. I then opened up the jpeg's in PSE8 and used Action Curves with Layer Marks, Levels and a few other adjustments to adjust the final color to my liking. I also cropped the images if needed to get rid of unwanted things in the image.

Hopefully for my next update I will be starting to have images from hunting, harvest, antumn and the golf course as we are entering the favorite time of the year for me, Fall. Recently I went over 10,000 clicks on my Nikon D90 so I hope to continue to improve and capture what I get to see in the great outdoors.

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