Nikon D700's Best Friend

The photo above says it all.  Jamming that 85mm onto my D700x (just kidding, it’s still a D700) is a dream.  First off, I feel the D700 is the strongest camera in the Nikon lineup, yes, even over the D3x. Paired with the Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 lens – a fraction of the price of the f/1.4 – you get tack-sharp images across the entire focal range, a bokeh to die for, and a photo that needs very little post work.  I thought this was the ultimate set-up.

But wait, there’s more! After adding CS5 into the mix – well, now it’s just now heaven.

As I said in my previous post, CS5 offers a ton over CS4. Now that I have begun to dig into it, I am finding that I no longer need the quick tools for editing photos.  I used to used Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 3 and Silver Efex Pro within Photoshop to help me curve and balance my shots, tone map, or slam into B&W.  But the controls are so much better in Cs5 that I no longer have the need to use these quick little plugins.  I am able to generate any one of the effects they offered (for $300) very easily with the CS5 tools.  Yes, even tone mapping through the pseudo HDR tools built into CS5.

It doesn’t get better than this.  I could live a happy and full rest of my life with just these three items.  Well, of course I need my Mac Pro to do my edits, but that’s a given.

Color corrected in CS5

Wether you are shooting with a bottom of the rack Canon EOS Rebel (and by no means is it a slouch), a phantom D700s / D700x / D800 or a top of the line Caddy of Cameras, the Nikon D3x, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is looking more and more like your weapon of choice.

When I first began test-driving this program last week, I was under-impressed.  It seemed to have the same old stuff – be it jumbled around a bit – with no real flare to it.  But that’s because I wasn’t looking at it’s potential.  I was merely line curving and stamping my photos with my signature.  That’s not even scratching the surface of CS5.

What’s Better?

I found that as I dug deeper, there seems to be a much better control of RAW images and color correcting (as in the tulips above).  Also, though it wasn’t used in this image above, the selection tool is much more accurate then in previous editions of Photoshop.  Clicking on the center tulip above, the tool seemed to have no trouble differentiating it from the background.  Much better.

The content-aware fill is freaking witchcraft.  And yes, that’s a good thing.  I could punch a hole in one of the tulips above and CS5 will fill it in with how it believes it should look.  I didn’t think it would work that well, but gaddamnit, it’s amazing.

I also played with lens correction (not in this shot) and it does a much better job at correction distortion and vignetting. Pretty much how the old one worked, but better.  It’s nice that it just pulls the EXIF off the image and does the rest for you.

Another enhanced feature I like is the B&W conversions.  There is a new B&W Lab that will give you a ton of more options when converting, even, get this, HDR B&W Conversion.  Yes, create an HDR image while converting to B&W.  Cool!  There is also some new HDR creation tools built right in (for color shots)!

My favorite things have to be the better 64-bit support for my Quad Core Mac Pro and the impressive RAW file management.

This shit is the bees knees.

St Patrick's Cathedral - New York City

Had a wonderful 3-day weekend in New York City with my best friend and fellow photo-nut, Dori.  Lucky for me, she lives just off Central Park on Broadway.  We spent the weekend walk, talking, drinking and shooting.  Not necessarily in that order.

I was really hoping to have my D700 for this trip, but I still do not have the money – so I made the best of it with my D80.

One of our photowalks was to St Patrick’s Cathedral.  It was a hike-and-a-half from her place on Broadway, but so worth it.  Especially after walking through an exceptionally snowy Central Park.

Anyhow, at St Patrick’s, I knew I wanted to do some fisheye and some 10mm shots with my Sigma.  Posted here is an example of my 10mm Sigma shot. It was simply amazing in here.  I took over 100 photos of the walls and ceiling and am slowly going through them to clean em up.

I really expected to do all these in HDR as well, but know what, I am not.  The HDR on these looks way to fake.  The details you see here are a combination of white-balance and contrasting.  I’ll tell you how.

Tonal Contrasting

Tonal contrast is what some call “pseudo-HDR” – but it is really about brining out the details of a single RAW image.  No blending, no multiple exposures.  Just a single image.

To do this, I first off-loaded my RAW file in Lightroom.  There was no need for adjusting the crop – this is where it sat – propped up against Dori’s Canon.  (As one friend on Flickr said, now we know what Canon’s are good for!)  Anyhow, in Lightroom, I set the white-balance to daylight to give the room a golden glow.  Then sent it off to Photoshop for the touches.

Color Efex 3 Settings

In Photoshop, I opened up NIK Software’s Color Efex Pro 3 to contrast the lights and darks. You can see the settings I used just to the right. It was very subtle.  I did not touch the Highlights, nudged the Shadows and gave the most contrast to the Midtones.  But as you can see, just barely.

After that, I did a line & curve adjustment for balance and added a highpass filter to make up for the limited sharpness of my D80.  Again, it was a very minimal pass.

That was it.

The above image is the result of slightly less than one minute of processing from camera to export.  And without any HDR.

I do really like the look and feel of tonemapping over HDR in many instances.  Especially in architecture.  But for things like nature, I prefer the use of HDR to bring out the light as seen by the naked eye.

I have a ton more shots to see on my pro page (Raymond Larose Photography) and will be posting a new image daily on my fun page (Flickr).

Subtlety in HDR

As I learn the process of HDR in a more pure form, I am learning that keeping it simple works much better for me than going over the top.  There is a time and place for going over the top in HDR and I have really attacked it to some massive extremes in the past – where the image does not resemble the original in the least.  But like I said in my last post, I am now headed down a road of realism in HDR – something new for me this week.  So, as I grow with this, I will continue to share my experiences with you.

Like I explained in my previous post, controlling the light is a very important part of getting three good exposures of one scene.    You really need to choose a time of day with soft light.  Yes, you know the magic times of dusk and dawn.  But the rule of thumb is there for a reason.

Having the sun low in the horizon is the trick for me right now.  Like my friend D_A_N told me, you don’t need filters to get a perfect sunset.  Just patience and the right lighting.  The shot was taken at 4:21pm, just 6 minutes past sunset.  So I wouldn’t have to worry about exposure times, I set the camera to AP and I went with a -1 1/3, 0 and +1 1/3 exposures at f/11 to grab some different shades in my blend.  Also, I chose an angle nice and close to the ground having the wind-swept snow taking the lower 2/3 of the frame while the pastel sky took the remaining real estate.

I also was striving to have the wind-swept snow take up a wide swath (that’s a word, right?) of the lower frame – leading your eyes into the sunset.  I feel it came out pretty balanced!  There wasn’t much I needed to do to the three exposures.  Did the blending in Photomatix Pro, then a touch of sharpening to crisp up the lines in Photoshop CS4.

With that touch of work, I was quite pleased with the light in this shot – and I feel it isn’t an obvious HDR image.  The light was magical – unlike tonights…

I went down to the lake tonight with a much different sky – hoping to get some dramatically different shots with the moody hanging clouds.  Granted, they were puffy, but not exciting.  The sunset yielded no pinks and the sky gave off a dull gray.  Even with the HDR, it’s not sexy.  Like they say, you can put lipstick on a pig… ugh.  I may post them later on so you can see what I mean.  But it wasn’t the right lighting conditions – even though I loved the reflections off the lake ice.