Photography; I shoot what I like, and sometimes people like what I shoot. All photos are copyright to Michael C. Lam unless explicitly stated otherwise.
I was about to title this post “The Monkey and The Camera”, because Nikhil might have been right about that day at La Bonne Intention, a monkey with a camera may well have managed to take a good photograph.
In hindsight, I really should have switch to my ultra-wide lens earlier that day, but even with the Tamron 18-270 mounted on the camera, I still got wide enough to capture the truly “awesome” sky that was prevalent at the time.
I’ll let this photo speak for itself. (Click to see larger)
The sky that day was a photographer’s dream, nice variety of clouds, a slowly setting sun, as Nikhil mentioned once “even a monkey could have gotten good photos that day”. I’m not entirely sure about the monkey, but I know we came away with some good ones.
For me, I liked this one because of the clouds, and then there’s the lone man walking along the wall, and the lone bird soaring in the sky.
For anyone who has followed my through my blogging, you’ll have seen Nikhil’s name popping up with some regularity, we’re friends, and he’s also my photo-buddy. In September of last year he came out with a spectacular image which has since been used by Kriti in their publication of the 2011 Scotiabank (Guyana) Calendar, it’s an amazing image, he titled it Resting Drama (if you click on the name you’ll see it on his site).
I was left stunned with his image and had not processed any of my images from that day, they will all pale in comparison. Today I decided to process one, (I’ll get to the others eventually) this one was a three image HDR, whilst he faced north, I faced east, into the slowly setting sun.
I want to explain a few things; firstly, it’s a three image HDR (High Dynamic Range) trying to get the most detail out of the scene. Secondly, it’s about the scene as it is depicted, I tried as much as possible to keep the image as “natural” as possible, sometimes HDRs can go overboard and look over-processed or even cartoonish.
The sky was cloudy, so we were in a shadowed setting with some cloud coverage overhead, heavier as you looked eastward,but far towards the east the sun was setting, and fewer clouds were in the sky that far east giving the sunlight entrance to the scene. The sunlight bathed the seawall mildly or gently, You can see the wetness towards the sea reflecting the light, even the grass shoreward was lit to a degree.
I think I may be using too many words, I should just let the photo speak for itself.
Recently I have taken to “not” reviewing my images until Friday morning, when I would choose my photograph for the 2010 Deck collection on the main site. But this week I broke from the norm to attempt another HDR (High Dynamic Range) image. I went with Nikhil out to get his daily photograph, and we turned down the dividing road between the villages of Better Hope and Vryheid’s Lust, I wasn’t much inspired by the things I saw, but the sky was very nice, and I thought that a wide-angle HDR would turn out nicely. I had also just downloaded my trial version of Nik HDR Efex Pro and I wanted to try it out.
I have blogged about how I normally process my HDR images before, so this post is more about showing the results of trying the new software from Nik. I was impressed with the similarity it has to the other Nik software I’ve tried (like the Nik SIlver Efex) and it is easy and intuitive to use. I did not try to learn too much on this first try, just played with the basic settings to see how it stacked up against Dynamic HDR from Mediachance.
I think the resulting image speaks for itself, both Nik HDR Efex Pro and Dynamic HDR were able to help me to portray the variety of tones that I saw, in this case I was facing the slate afternoon sun, so the image has a lot more detail than a standard shot of the sky which rendered the buildings in the foreground as mostly silhouettes.
Take a look and let me know what you think 🙂 If you click on the image the site has it a bit larger.
This week was fairly good as photography goes, I took a lot of photographs, 311 of which I’ve downloaded, the remainder were from a wedding that I was helping my bother Andre out at.
Choosing an image for this week’s deck proved more difficult than I would have thought, but that is mainly because the image I wanted to use, I decided to relegate to another blog-post for tomorrow. The image I eventually decided upon was chose for the unusual perspective, at least for me, I am usually more of an angular person when it comes to the direction from which I generally point the camera, Nikhil is usually the one who goes for “head-on” views.
I had the Sigma 10-20mm Wide angle lens on my camera, and I thought that the image would look good from a head-on view facing the horizon, unfortunately the shoreline and the horizon were not exactly parallel at this point, but I think I got the image to where I wanted it 🙂
This was taken along the seawall somewhere between Montrose and Le Resouvenir on the East Coast of Demerara.
I had just decided to upload this, and then I gave it a title… Giving it a title brought forth a torrent of emotion. Yesterday I said farewell to my sister-in-law and niece, Areza and Ariel, and in a few months I will be saying the same to my brother André. They have lived at Ogle for all of Ariel’s life and as soon as I titled that image “Sunset at Ogle” I realized that their family is having their sunset at ogle all too soon.
Ariel is my first niece, Areza is my first sister-in-law, André is my first brother, it is strange how those things happen. My parental family may not be the perfect family, but we grew up together, had and have our differences, but at day’s end we are family. I count myself fortunate, in that my brothers and sisters are not just my siblings, they have grown to be my friends, André and Nicholas are the closest of these, but that’s because we grew up like the Three Musketeers, inseparable, always fighting, always in mischief.
If you click on the image and see it at the site slightly larger, you’ll see three figures walking towards the sunset, two adults and a child. Serendipity. This photograph is not of them, but I dedicate it to them, as the sun sets on Ogle.
This particular HDR image needs an explanation, so here it is (well, maybe it doesn’t need one, but you’re going to get it anyway. I went up to Good Hope on the East Coast of Demerara to pick up my family who were visiting with my in-laws for the day, after saying my hellos and pleasantries, I wandered back to the front of the yard and saw this amazing sky, I wanted to capture it as soon as I could.
A few things contributed to this being almost impossible, it was already getting dark and I did not have my tripod with me, and I wanted to get this in HDR, a standard shot just wouldn’t convey the sky that I was seeing, from ground level it was great, but the view of the sky with just the houses in front of me wasn’t appealing, so I ran upstairs with my camera. I quickly set the camera for my multiple exposures and proceeded to snap the shots, but the first thing I noticed was that the place was so dark I ended up with longer exposures than I intended. MY “normal shot was a half second, the underexposed one was one-eight of a second and the over-exposed shot was two seconds, all hand-held. and then when I reviewed the images I notices a “fogginess” in the image, when I checked the lens there was a lot of condensation on it, I figured this was disastrous, the images would be totally spoiled under that combination of conditions.
When I downloaded the images I thought that I couldn’t get anything useful out of them, they were all blue, exposure was “iffy” and I wasn’t even sure that it was worth trying. But I thought, I went to all that trouble (and exercise, running up those stairs was serious cardiovascular for a desk-jockey) I should see what the HDR software could make of it. My first combination wasn’t too promising, but after adjusting some settings, I liked the resulting image, the colour was terrible though, so I though that even though it was not what I intended, this could very well work out to be my second Black and White HDR, I had done one before that actually made it into The Editor’s Collection – Best of HDRs at Webshots.com, if you can’t spot my image its Orinduik Falls Black and White, I am rather proud of that achievement, small though it may be.
All that being said, after I used Nik Silver Effects to do my Black and White conversion using some high structure, I liked the outcome and decided that I liked it enough to share it. 🙂
Click on the image to go to the site.
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