The Macro has Landed

 Earlier, I had explained how I needed the old Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens to get the Canon 77D back in the game.   The lens has arrived and it seems to be working fine.

Today's Macro Monday theme on Flickr was "sports," bearing in mind that the representation of sport had to fall with a three-inch diameter.  My choice for that macro was to shoot the hub and spokes of my bicycle.  To try out the new/old lens, I set up a 20-shot stack.  From that, I picked alternating shots and stacked them that way.   This save a lot of processing time, especially since my laptop storage is teetering on "full."  Not owning any specialized photo stacking software, I performed that job in PhotoShop.  I left some blurry areas amongst where some of the spokes crossed over.  I laboriously went in and used the clone stamp and heal tool to fill in the blurred spaces.

Here's the final product:

The stacking really helped to bring out the depth of this picture.  You would have to know what to look for to even suspect that this picture had been edited.  In my defense, I wasn't putting in something that wasn't there, I was restoring some tiny blurry areas that PhotoShop had created when it processed that stack.

Ruby Sunset

It's often said that "the best camera is the one that you have on you."

Opinions differ somewhat as to the meaning of this.  For some, it means that any old camera that you have with you is better than none.  For others, myself included, it means that should a potentially good image present itself, you shouldn't be afraid to use what you have on you. Be it a phone or a point 'n shoot, don't pass up a great shot because you don't have your big fancy camera on you.

Wednesday evening was such an occasion.  I had just gotten out from an appointment, and I was struck by the most awesome sky.   "Red sky at night, sailor's delight."   What made this more delightful was the way that the setting sun illuminated a gap between two buildings -- Ruby Memorial Hospital and the WVU Health Sciences building.  The light reflected off of the windows on Ruby, creating an impressive arrangement of leading lines.

Could this shot have been better?  Certainly, if I'd had my Cannon 77D and one of my better lenses, I could have improved on the exposure.  But all I had was my iPhone Xs, and that's what I used.  And as for composition, I couldn't do anything about the white picket fence, which leads the eye away from the other lines.  It's a feature we'll all have to live with.

On a positive note, there was very little lens distortion in this shot, as you can see from the relatively straight vertical lines.  The electric lights are somewhat overexposed but not glaringly so (no pun intended).

Given the technical deficiencies of an iPhone picture, another school of thought would have me concentrate on the artistic nature of the shot.  Yes, I dare to say there is some of that.   So, not to leave well enough alone, I tried simplifying the photo using the BuzzSim filter from Topaz Studio. I saw this mainly as an attempt to smooth over the JPEG "noise" of the original.

Each shot has its merits.  I'll let you be the judge as to which you like better.

Revisiting B&W

A couple of weeks back, I visited the Gulf coast in southwestern Florida.  I took lots of pictures with my crappy old Rebel XSi, but that camera is another story.

I visited my usual favorite spots and got a few decent shots.  However, because of the nature of these shots, I experimented with Black & White processing.

I took this shot of a trail in Jelk's Preserve with my LensBaby fisheye lens.

The trees here are all overhung with various epiphytes.  Although this might be somewhat interesting from a botanical point of view, I thought I could capitalize on the artistry instead.  The overhanging branches were further enhanced from the curvature produced by the fisheye.  I enhanced the sinister, closed-in appearance further by using a "film noir" filter setting in PhotoShop.  I also lightened the vignetting a bit. The circular tunnel effect combined with the harsh B&W processing makes this look like an old illustration of Mirkwood Forest from The Lord of the Rings.

Sharkey's Pier in Venice, Florida, provided another opportunity for B&W.  This shot was taken looking out over the pier.  The sky and water colors were nice, but they weren't anything special.  I used B&W to help concentrate the eye on all of the lines instead.  

Perhaps a "meh" picture, but it's a better class of meh.

Saving the best for last, here's the same pier shot from the ground on the right side.

Once again, I wanted to emphasize the lines.  I think that the black & white toning enhanced this picture.  Coupled by the composition elements, such as the old and young figures on the far left and the American flag in the center, this picture evokes the feel of an Americana style from the past.

Fisheye

Santa gave me a fisheye optic for my Lensbaby Composer.  Truth be told, I find this a lot more interesting to use than the default tilt-shift lens of the Composer.

Freaturing a 12mm focal length, this lens can shoot from one inch to infinity.

To Infinity and Beyond!

This is a shot of the Buzz Lightyear toy in my cubicle at work.  I put a black card behind it, relishing the 2001 Space Odyssey-like reflecting lights on the plastic helmet.  To help matters along, I added a lens flare effect from photoshop.

In the following shot, I lined up the Pink Panther figures to look somewhat like the Keep on Trucking graphic from the 70s.  Shot from a short distance, the line of panthers shows nicely the perspective effect that you gain with a fisheye lens.

Here's another one, among my first shots with this lens, that also shows the type of perspective I'm talking about:

This shot of Stewart Hall on WVU's main campus illustrates the visual distortion of a landscape shot.  Note the barrel distortion and chromatic effects in the four corners.

None of these shots are what I would call great, but this has been a very fun lens to play around with.
Like this car, I'm happy:

I want to be like Georgia O'Keeffe

I want to live alone in the desert
I want to be like Georgia O'Keefe
I want to live on the Upper East Side
And never go down in the street

Splendid Isolation
I don't need no one
Splendid Isolation


These are lyrics from the song Splendid Isolation by Warren Zevon.

There's something about this picture that I took yesterday that reminds me a bit of Georgia O'Keeffe's art:

It's part of the "Mocha Moon" Hibiscus, a very large and stunningly beautiful flower.  I've been driving by this medium-sized shrub every day for the past month or two, and yesterday I finally stopped to take a picture of it.

I rotated the image a bit to angle the pistil in the right direction, and I used the "golden spiral" as my cropping template.

What is in a name?

My lunchtime activity consisted of a quick walk down part of the rail trail near my workplace.  I wanted to try out the photostacking portion of my digital camera's Magic Lantern software.
I was using a monopod, but there was no breeze today, so I got a nice sequence of eight shots of a Toadflax (Linaria vulgaris).

The focus stacking worked out pretty well, as you can see in the above composite shot.

This pretty little relative of the snapdragon is an invasive species in North America.  It's quite successful around here, because it thrives in disturbed land.  And West Virginia is a pretty disturbed land.

The flowers are largely closed off by the underlip of the plant, so it takes a strong insect like a determined bee or a bumblebee to pry its way into it.

Because of its widespread range and its long history as an herbal, the Linaria vulgaris has a long list of aliases:

• brideweed
• bridewort
• butter and eggs
• butter haycocks
• bread and butter 
• bunny haycocks (ok, what are haycocks?)
• bunny mouths 
• calf's snout 
• Continental weed
• dead men's bones 
• devil's flax 
• devil's flower 
• doggies 
• dragon bushes 
• eggs and bacon  
• eggs and butter 
• false flax 
• flaxweed 
• fluellen 
• gallweed 
• gallwort
• impudent lawyer (is that a great name, or what?)
• Jacob's ladder
• lion's mouth 
• monkey flower  
• North American ramsted
• rabbit flower 
• rancid 
• ransted 
• snapdragon 
• wild flax 
• wild snapdragon 
• wild tobacco
• yellow rod
• yellow toadflax

Haycock, I just learned, is the name of a small conical haystack, usually only three or four feet in diameter and six or so feet high.

Now, don't tell me that you didn't learn something today.

If you want to surf the web some more, by all means check out Haycocks N^o.09.

Midnight confessions

Yesterday I posted a photo of a Snowy Egret that I had taken while in Florida last month.  Much to my surprise, this picture has garnered more "likes" on Google+ than any other picture that I have ever posted -- 273 after just one day on the Birds4All community.

Snowy Egret (Egretta thula) is preparing for takeoff: seat back and folding trays are in an upright position.

The thing that I hate to admit is that this is a PhotoShop retouch job.   Here's the original:

Try as I might, I couldn't do a motion de-blur well enough to fix the head around the eyes and beak.  So I did what any other art department flack would have done -- I pasted in a head shot of the same bird from a different photo.   Sue me.  At least it was the same bird.

In my continued effort to justify my re-touching, I recognized that it was a pretty nice picture.  The bird was in a springing position, about to take flight.  I had unfortunately missed getting the tips of the wings, but for the blurred head, the rest of this shot is quite nice.  I can get away with the blurred wings, as they impart the right bit of energy to the shot.  But a blurred head with two eyes is a no-no.

Oh Happy Day

The majority of my "social" activity is doubtlessly my posting photographs to Google Plus.  One of the communities to which I like to post is the Landscape Photography Community, which has periodic themes for their submissions.   Their current theme, event #105, is "Oh Happy Day."  The theme is supposed to be a landscape photo that evokes that emotion (for the photographer, at least).

I had to go all the way back to December 1, 2014, for my Happy Day^TM, and that's probably a stretch.

On that day, I was at Englewood Beach on Florida's Gulf Coast.  I had recently bought a Canon EF 70-200 f/4L telephoto lens, and I had been trying to get shots of the various birds and things at the beach.

To the uninitiated, the "L" (Canon Luxury Lenses) series of Canon lenses is their professional line of SLR photography lenses.  Ever the poor boy, I got the bottom end of the best -- a 200 mm lens with no image stabilization (IS), which would have added a couple hundred more dollars to the price tag.

Even when I was just laying on the beach sunbathing, I couldn't keep from futzing with the camera.  I rolled over on my blanket and saw this group of Royal Terns congregating between me and another sunbather.

It was so bright out on the beach that I was able to shoot at the lowest ISO (100) and stopped down to f/16 at 1/100 of a second, hoping to get the best depth of field beyond the birds.  I didn't exactly succeed in that regard, but the results are still nice, maybe even more aesthetic by virtue of keeping the bikini-clad sunbather slightly out of focus.

Still, after all this time, I can appreciate the quality of the lens.  I went back to the camera raw image file and gave it minimum adjustments for brightness and color balance.  The rest is straight out of the camera.   Those are some sharp looking birds in that picture.

So, that's my happy place:  wildlife, a sunny beach on the ocean, a nice lens, and a little incidental eye candy.  That's a nice place to be.

Ferny

Another Sunday afternoon on the rail trail, at my favorite section above Little Falls.  I was on foot once again, being afraid to cause more damage to the bumper of my Mazda CX-5 by wrestling a bike in and out of the back.

I saw a nice stand of ferns, which look somewhat different from the rest of the ferns along the rail trail.  These look more like some form of maidenhair:

I took this shot with the idea that it would make an interesting screen texture.  This is an Enfused shot composed of three bracketed exposures:  1/25, 1/50, and 1/100 sec at f/13,  The Enfusion is similar to an HDR shot, but I think it gives a more faithful mixing of the high and low ends of the exposure spectrum.  Honestly, I find it hard to see a difference between the Enfused and the HDR versions, but I'm discounting the fact that I had done a bit of laborious darkening of some of the foliage in the HDR version.

Here is the Enfused version (left) next to the HDR version (right).  See if you can tell the difference:

Mr. Blue Sky

There's something odd about Valley Falls State Park near Fairmont.  It seems that the sky is overcast whenever I go there, and that's despite the fact that the sky is clear elsewhere.

The fall colors were probably at their peak on Sunday, and at least the sun was breaking through in places.  Some think that sky adds to the drama of the picture.  Some think that it's a shame that it was overcast.

This is for them:

I have had some experience with using PhotoShop to fix a dull sky, but I had always steered clear of situations where there was a lot of feathery detail like heavy foliage.  You should see the challenge that such a shot would present:  the foliage is difficult to isolate and mask.

I found and tried this tutorial: Photoshop Tutorial: How to Replace a sky in photoshop cs5.  The trick was to use channels, isolating the one channel which presents the greatest contrast between the foliage and the sky.  In this case, I worked with the blue channel.  You then progressively tweak levels to further isolate the difference between foliage and sky.

While the results are nice, I can't help feeling cheap.  I've cheated in some way, improving upon nature.

On that pensive thought, here's my SYTL: ELO - Mr. Blue Sky (official video - 2012 version)

My Pictures Stink

Earlier this year, I bought the book Your Photos Stink!: David Busch's Lessons in Elevating Your Photography from Awful to Awesome.  Sorry to say that I haven't gone all the way through this book, but I learned enough to be dangerous.

Here's a lesson that I applied:

This picture is of a Fuller's Teasel (Dipsacus fullonum) that I shot near Wally World.  Granted, it's nothing special, but to me it has a certain je ne sais quoi.  I even tried to go artsy-fartsy with it and render it in black & white.  It was then that I noted the "stink" factor:  the ant on the top-right of teasel is distracting.  I mean, it's a nice ant and all, but she wasn't meant to be the subject of my picture.  She had to go.

Here is the artsy-fartsy black & white teasel but without the ant:

You probably think I'm talking about putting lipstick on a pig, if you want to call my teasel a pig. Truth be told, I'm thinking that the color shot is more aesthetically pleasing.  But you have to admit that the shot is much better without the little photo bomber.

Using PhotoShop Stack Mode to minimize high ISO graininess

Meet the Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa), a species of milkweed native to eastern North America.  This seems to be a particularly good year for them.  I see prominent patches of their orange blooms off the side of the road as I drive around lately.

I took a series of focus-stack shots in the evening yesterday and ended up using 19 of them to make this picture.  Lately, I've been using the Auto ISO setting on my camera, so because of the time of day and the f/16 stop I was using, the Auto ISO ended up going all the way to 3200.

The first step in my process is to align all of the shots to each other.  Although I was using a tripod, a slight breeze was causing noticeable movement.  It wasn't so bad that the alignment process couldn't deal with it.

A bigger problem arose when I tried to do the Auto-blend step in PhotoShop to create the focus stack.  I had a very pesky photo bomber waltzing through my picture.  That's her, below, dancing from flower to flower.

Normally, like in the case of a fly, I'll just eliminate the shots that have the photo bomber.  In this case, however, the bomber was in quite a few of them.

I decided to invoke a technique that I have rarely used.  After I restacked the images, I used the PhotoShop command Layer --> Smart Objects --> Stack Mode --> Median, which analyzed the picture and removed anything that wasn't in all of the shots, i.e., the ant.

Try as I might, however, I couldn't find a way to Auto-blend the layers without bringing back the photo bomber.  As luck would have it, though, the f/16 aperture I had used already gave me a fairly decent depth of field.  While researching the other Stack Mode commands in the hope of finding something that would help me, I discovered that the Mean command was particularly good for removing graininess from high-ISO stacked images.  And it did it quite well.

If you look closely at the image with the photo bomber and compare it to the first image, you'll see the reduction in graininess that I'm talking about.  

Avian Flu

I'm hearing more and more recently about the avian flu.  The price of eggs is supposed to be going up because of this.  There was even a piece in today's Mountaineer ENews:   Safeguard your poultry flock amid avian flu concerns.  Wouldn't you know it, though?  The direct link to the safeguard article is broken!

But I'm going somewhere with this, and I had better get there...   another idea for my first million dollars:  flu masks for poultry, i..e., chickens and ducks.  This is going to be a test of my PhotoShop skills, because I doubt that I'm actually going to be able to get masks on a bird for real.

I did some marketing research on Google, looking to see if anyone else has come up with my brilliant idea.  So far, it's MY idea.    Visions of crowd funding are dancing in my head.

Oh, BTW, in my search, this was among the first hits:  a DIY mask:

Great Photo Project

A co-worker sent me a link today to this interesting blog post by Chris Dale from Morgantown:
Historical photos – Then and now.  This was posted May 25, 2015, but as far as I can tell, it's the only thing currently on this Morgantown History site.

Chris Dale did a fabulous job recreating the camera angle and image size for a number of historical photos.  He superimposed his images over the originals, giving a very fine before & after view.  Due to differences in lens, no doubt, some photos such as the March 1944 "West Virginia University and The War," aren't as dead-on as other shots.  That's a minor complaint, though.  I can't emphasize how amazing this work really is.

A Spartan Portrait

I took some pictures of emus last week on my visit to Shields' Greenhouse in Spraggs, PA.  Using a telephoto lens, I managed to get in close.  Too close, some might say.

This is what it looked like, processed in color:

I usually don't do much black & white, but this subject demanded that I try.  Here's the same emu rendered with Silver Efex Pro 2.  I used the D019 Fine Art filter w/ a Kodak ISO 32 Panatomic X grain (or lack of) effect:

Thus my dilemma.  Which is better?  The color or the black & white?  From my indecision came a compromise.  I layered the black & white over the color and then set the blending mode to Multiply. The result looks like something in the style of the movie 300.

It works for the emu.  This is a very Spartan portrait.

Too much of a pink thing

Rhododendron blooms in the natural light of this morning's "golden hour."  Composed from a 15-shot focus stack.  

I normally like to process with LAB color (picture #1), but this time I thought that a straight RGB image (picture #2) was easier on the eyes.

Late bloomers

The backyard flower garden held a surprise yesterday.  Despite the hard frost on Monday morning, a fair number of Marsh Gentians (Gentiana pneumonanthe) were blooming their collective hearts out on Tuesday afternoon.

These are both focus stacks, courtesy of Magic Lantern.  The flower in the upper image was much closer to the ground, so it wasn't affected by the occasional breeze.  The bottom flower was much more exposed, and I had to go through the stack several times to eliminate probably half of the layers where the flower had been blown to one side or the other. 

Falling Water

No, this has nothing to do with the Frank Lloyd Wright house in southwestern Pennsylvania.  This is a small waterfall at Valley Falls State Park, east of Fairmont.

As usual, it was a clear, sunny day that turned cloudy as soon as I arrived with my camera and tripod.  I was experimenting with bracketing exposures and cranking back the density of my variable neutral density filter.  Apparently (make note of this!), the best results seem to be with the smallest aperture.  This shot was at f/18, and it took a full eight seconds.

A lot of the photos where I used the neutral density filter have noticeable "noise."  This one doesn't have much at all.  There wasn't too much exposure correction needed in the Lightroom version, either.

Late season blooms

The same evening that I captured the fern bottom, I shot a less ambitious focus stack of what I think might be a delphinium.  I didn't have any direct sun hitting this at six, p.m., but the lighting is decent.

The delphinium  required a bit of post-processing by hand to correct for some areas that PhotoShop's focus stacking algorithm couldn't seem to handle.  In addition, there were several ants traipsing about the flower.  The moved haltingly enough to leave ghosts here and there about the bloom.  I left one (at about 8 o'clock).

Tiny sliders on my fern

There was  hardly a breeze yesterday evening, so I attempted my most ambitious focus stack to date. With more than 100 shots of the bottom part of a fern, I had to skip every other shot in order to lessen the amount of computer processing that would be required.

Here is a 52-shot stack:

I didn't time how long it took for each processing step, but it took PhotoShop something on the order of ten minutes to align the shots and another ten minutes to create the focus stack.  The resulting file was huge -- approximately 5.3 GB.  Thank goodness that the primary Adobe swap file resided on the solid state drive!

A Growing Ferns from Spores web page helps to define some of the plant anatomy.  Each large, dark pod is called a sorus.  The individual spores are packed inside each sorus.  The covering of the sorus is called the indusium.

Close-up, they look like little spore sliders.

SYTL to The Slider, by T-Rex.