[nitewalk] Beauty of Our (Lion) City

[nitewalk]

#91

I admit my concept about HDR and DRI is still quite fuzzy, with my impression that the former converts to a 32 bit file before blending action is carried out. I have been searching about DRI and it seems to give me an impression that exposure blend is considered to be DRI.

Terminologies aside. I used an old series of shots to try this tutorial out (Digital Blending) and used "The Layer Mask" method. "The Painted Mask" sounded very similar to what I had learned and not really grasped well method of brushing. Decided to try this easier method.

I hope anyone who sees this, and have used this method, please give some comment. I'm blindly applying what I'm told, so I will be playing a bit more over the week to see what kind of results the variation in the Gaussian Blur will give. Also, I will try on three source images and see how it result in. Anyone with experience on this technique, please feel free to leave your comment or PM me! Anyone without experience also feel free to comment on any area for improvement (comparison with #84) pls!

Current image: 2 exposures (one for sky, one for building, have another for water but did not chose to include that as I am learning to do this with 2 exposures first).

Original single exposure image: #84.

 

[canonmono]

#35

NDP Rehearsal yesterday. My heart went out to the poor NSFs on duty. :sweat:

Dont forget the Regulars too =)

 

[Tianmi]

Cool, these photos are so amazing. May I know where is the #83

 

[nitewalk]

#92

Single exposure with Tianya 3 stop GND filter. Camera set to aperture priority at +1.0EV to allow foreground to be overexpose by 1 stop and the sky to underexpose by a maximum of about 2 stops.

After a lot of experimenting with different techniques and within each technique, different ways of recording an exposure, I suddenly thought of doing this. Decided to try it out as the sky looked to be rather interesting at 5 plus. However as 7pm approaches, it turned dull. I could not really tell the effect on the sky. Before the sun went down, I experimented and found that this seemed to give me quite sufficient dynamic range with the shadow (mainly trees) area had enough details for my preference. However, at blue hour this seemed to be barely sufficient.

 

[nitewalk]

#93

 

[5454541]

Hey, nice photos.

I am interested in photography but not sure how to take different kinds of photos.

How do you take reflections photo? What settings do you use?

 

[nitewalk]

#94

Maintenance

Used the layer mask method plus gaussian blur to blend 2 exposures.

 

[nitewalk]

#95

Revisit of an old photo using different blending technique.

 

[nitewalk]

#96

Was recee-ing for the shoot this Saturday morning and testing out LEE GND0.9 and Hitech 3 stop ND. As with the ND filters, be it 3, 6 or 10 stops, it always takes me awhile to get used to the cast and eventually find ways to overcome or situations which favours the particular filter. Will continue to try and experiment. Today skies wasn't that good, but the intent was really to learn about the new stuff. The pro stop posed a bit more of a problem to me though.

 

[nitewalk]

#97

Last Glow

Quite frankly I was very lost when I tried to PP this shot. Whatever I tried, it didn't give me what I wanted. I ended up using a bit of brushing and a bit of Gaussian blur to help. The glow was quite intense actually, somehow the contrast was killed. I will go back to blending using brush for this, but not now. Too tired for that. Not even have the energy to PP the shots from the sunrise shoot this morning.

Will revisit this shot.

 

[nitewalk]

#99

Leading to Nothing

Wanted to explore ECP but ended up with little time, so grabbed this shot and went off. Did not know what to do with the very ugly cluster of ships in the horizon, so decided to play around. Replaced the horizon with the sky.

In the coloured original, the sky is dark blue due to colour cast from stacking a Hitech Pro Stop with a Hitech 3 stop ND with the 3 stop ND inserted halfway to cover only the sky (don't have a hard grad ND filter).

Just a cheeky interpretation.

 

[nitewalk]

#100

Tiny

Organised a small outing on Saturday morning (1st September) to the Promontory, despite the vastness of the place, I still kept the group size small. The sky wasn't great, wasn't much of red (as I would like for a sunrise/sunset) and we couldn't even see the sun (although the sunset later in the day was intense).

After the shoot, the group went for breakfast at MacDonald at Boat Quay where we also shared with each other our shots and invited some feedback among us. Hopefully, I can find time to organise more outings. From there, I hope fellow enthusiasts will end up as shooting buddies with one another.

Thank you to those who had expressed their interest and especially to those who attended!

Here is what I shot. I only remember using a GND0.9 to increase the tonality of the sky. I don't think I had used any ND filters. 3 exposures blended using Gaussian blur.

 

[MGohzxc]

#99 - Nice to see you trying out this. Only the sky could be a little more interesting with some cloud motion and prefer the subject in the foreground do not touch the horizon. Highlights a little blown out.
#97 - It looks ok to me and the contrast are fine. Maybe you are too work out on the processing and with multi-exposure, it takes quite awhile to get use to blending and so on...
#98 - for this one, it look a little strange. the buildings look much brighter than the whole scene or the sky at that hour. If you are blending a brighter exposure of the buildings into this darker exposure and for that layer mask, you can adjust or lower the opacity on the brightness of those buildings to blend the whole image too.

Just my two cents .........

 

[nitewalk]

#101

Stacked one GND0.6 and GND0.9 each. Initially when the sky was brighter, I used GND0.9 to blur the moving cloud and inverted the GND0.6 to control the highlights of the light trails. As it grew darker, I reversed the set up and letting the 3 stop GND do the job of controlling the highlights. The idea was to accomplish a single exposure image with light trails that is not blown and to blur the cloud.

While I could invert a GND0.3 and that would be approximately equivalent, I would not be able to go up to 15 sec. End result was a single exposure image with very minor PP.

 

[Kit]

#91

I admit my concept about HDR and DRI is still quite fuzzy, with my impression that the former converts to a 32 bit file before blending action is carried out. I have been searching about DRI and it seems to give me an impression that exposure blend is considered to be DRI.

Terminologies aside. I used an old series of shots to try this tutorial out (Digital Blending) and used "The Layer Mask" method. "The Painted Mask" sounded very similar to what I had learned and not really grasped well method of brushing. Decided to try this easier method.

I hope anyone who sees this, and have used this method, please give some comment. I'm blindly applying what I'm told, so I will be playing a bit more over the week to see what kind of results the variation in the Gaussian Blur will give. Also, I will try on three source images and see how it result in. Anyone with experience on this technique, please feel free to leave your comment or PM me! Anyone without experience also feel free to comment on any area for improvement (comparison with #84) pls!

Current image: 2 exposures (one for sky, one for building, have another for water but did not chose to include that as I am learning to do this with 2 exposures first).

Original single exposure image: #84.

#94

Maintenance

Used the layer mask method plus gaussian blur to blend 2 exposures.

#97

Last Glow

Quite frankly I was very lost when I tried to PP this shot. Whatever I tried, it didn't give me what I wanted. I ended up using a bit of brushing and a bit of Gaussian blur to help. The glow was quite intense actually, somehow the contrast was killed. I will go back to blending using brush for this, but not now. Too tired for that. Not even have the energy to PP the shots from the sunrise shoot this morning.

Will revisit this shot.

I am seeing halos around the buildings. That's one way to tell if you have applied too much HDR to a photo. My advise to you is the same. If you can read the ambient lighting and work with it, you will get much better results without spending too much time behind the computer.

Buildings in the last photo are backlit. When you attempt to increase the dynamic range, you lose contrast. In essence, the photo appears flat and bland. Maybe its the HDR technique you used. I'd rather photograph the scene at another time.

 

[nitewalk]

#102

Knifed

Damn difficult to align just one vertical line without a tripod. The guards don't even allow people to take photo without tripods, much less to set up tripod and remote then align. It was more like discretely shoot a few and then go off quickly. Had planned for sometime to take from this angle at 4 pm as the light will only be casted on the left and leaving the right to be darker. Had to shoot earlier as I was planning to go elsewhere to recee before the sun goes down.

The pair of buildings here have quite a few possible ways to be shot, but I doubt I would be able to set tripod to shoot anyway.

 

[nitewalk]

#103

Sharing a shot made during today morning sunrise outing at the Merlion.

We could not even see the sun but the only consolation was that the water was still enough (but not dead still) to get some reflection.

 

[divingnemo]

the halos in#97 might also have been caused by pushing the shadows sliders too much. going past +3 might give u that, though i'm not too sure if thats the case for that photo or simply just becos of the hdr effect.

anyway love the abstract architectural shots u have of the hdb at taman jurong some time back which block is it, may i ask?

 

[nitewalk]

#104

Jagged

Another shot which I waited till late afternoon, when the sun is not directly above but rather it is angled.

 

[nitewalk]

#105