Tag: ECD

Late Afternoon @ Better Hope

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography23 Comments

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.

 

 

3 Image HDR, processed using Nik HDR Efex Pro

 

The Deck – Week 41

On By themichaellamcollectionIn 2010 Deck, Photography19 Comments

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.

 

Moored at Montrose
Moored at Montrose

 

Sunset at Ogle

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography1 Comment
Sunset at Ogle

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.

Black and White HDR – Good Hope July 2010

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography4 Comments

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.

Black and White HDR - Good Hope, ECD, Guyana