Lake Panorama West G.C. - Fall Color

In the middle of October, the autumn colors on the local trees were at their peak so I headed over to the Lake Panorama West Golf Course with my camera bag and tripod.

I fitted the D90 with the 24-120mm lense and put it on my Slik tripod. To add even more color to the leaves, I put a warming filter on the lense. I was in aperture priority mode at f11 or f13. ISO was 200 – 400 and then I adjusted the exposure compensation from -0.3. to +0.3 depending on the scene. Shooting in RAW would allow me to post process the images once on the computer as well.

Using View NX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight or let the program calculate the white balance automatically. The picture control was changed to landscape. To process these images later using EasyHDR, I copied the files and adjusted them to -1.0, 0, +1.0 using exposure compensation. These different exposed images were than outputted into 16 bit TIFF files to use in EasyHDR.

After getting the image done in EasyHDR, I finished them up in PSE 11. One of the main adjustments I had to make was to the color of the grass. Because I had used the warming filter to enhance the leaves, it also threw off the color of the grass. To correct this, I used a saturation layer mask and adjusted the sliders. I than reduced the opacity of this layer down until I thought the green color of the grass was correct. I used the clone brush tool to get rid of unwanted objects and then used a high pass filter to sharpen the images.

Shortly after the day I took these photographs, the wind blew and blew taking the majority of the leaves out of the trees. This put a damper on the rest of the fall scenes I was hoping to capture.

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Lake Panorama National Golf Course - 2014 Edition

Throughout the 2014 golf season at Lake Panorama National Golf Course, I was able to capture the beauty of the course at different times with my camera. Even with a F2 tornado doing damage on Mother’s Day, the LPN employees along with help from many volunteers had the course back to superb shape in no time.

This collection was took with the Nikon D90 and D7100 using either the 24 – 120mm or 12-24 mm lense. I shot in aperture priority using an aperture of f9 – f13 at a base ISO of 100 or 200 on the cameras. Exposure compensation was set between – 1 to + 0.3 depending on the scene I wanted to capture. As always, I shot in RAW and used a tripod if I needed too.

Once in View NX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and the picture control to standard or landscape. I created multiply files of the same image so I could adjust the exposure compensation to -1, 0, +1 to transfer 16 bit TIFF files into Easy HDR.  Over the past few years, I’ve started too really like what an HDR program can do to a golf course scene because they do have a wide dynamic range. Easy HDR has a number of default tone mapping settings and I usually go with Natural 2.

To finish up the images, I opened them up in PSE 11 to do further enhancements. The first step was using the clone and healing brush to get unwanted objects out of the image such as water hazard stakes and divots. The next step was to straighten and crop the image if it needed adjustment. With bright blue skies and puffy white clouds, I enhanced them on the top of the image by using a level layers adjustment tied to a layer mask and gradient. Lastly, I sharpened the image with a high pass filter layer with an opacity adjusted to around 15%.

It’s hard to believe the leaves have blown off the trees on the golf course and Mother Nature is about to turn cold. But this summer, the golf course was bright green from edge to edge.

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Panorama Day's - Fireworks on Lake Panorama's Jetty

On the Saturday of Panorama Day’s, fireworks were shot off the south shore of Lake Panorama at dusk so I headed out on the jetty with my D90, tripod, bug spray and lawn chair to capture the explosions of bright colors over the main basin.

My D90 had returned from getting worked on so I was back to normal with my set up to see the playback screen and use my Hahnel remote control to trigger the shutter. I used both the 24-120mm and 12-24mm lense to get the field of view I wanted and had the camera on my Slik tripod. As always when shooting fireworks, I had VR off, shutter set to Bulb and base ISO of 200. Aperture was set at f9 and manual focus was used as well. Exposures ranged from 2 to 26 seconds to try to time the explosions of the fireworks correctly. To help expose the lighthouse, I light painted the structure using a small LED flashlight while the camera was recording the firework burst.

Once in ViewNX, I did one minor adjustment as I changed the picture control to standard. However, I did use ViewNX to make exposure comp. adjustments on the images because I created HDR images out of all the scenes. By going with a 3 stop adjustment (+1, 0, -1) I was able to expose the wide range of highlights and shadows. I combined the 3 images in EasyHDR and used the Natural setting preset for HDR processing.

To finish the images, I used PSE 11 to put the final touches on the firework scenes. First I used the clone brush to get rid of unwanted objects such as the power box on the side of the lighthouse. The next adjustment was using level and layer masks to fine tune the exposure of the lighthouse while keeping the rest of the scene exposed correctly. I then used the noise reduction filter to reduce the noise in the image and sharpened the image with the high pass filter. The straighten and crop tool were the final steps done on the images.

Another tool I used in PSE 11 on images #15 and #16 allowed me to merge the firework burst with the lighthouse and background of image #17.  I aligned the two image layers together and under blending mode, changed one of the layers to lighter color. This allowed the brighter color of the two different images to come forward resulting in a very cool image.

The last firework photographs of the year turned out well once again and I look forward to future outings of shooting fireworks as it’s all about hitting and releasing the shutter at the right time.

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