Free Shipping for Online Purchases

Treat your Valentine or yourself to a photograph custom printed and framed and enjoy free shipping if you purchase by midnight, February 8, 2010. This applies to all orders over $30 on my online store.
One of the advantages of buying art this way is the wide variety of paper, canvas, matting, and framing available. If you really want to make an impression and fill wall space, consider a gallery-wrapped canvas print. If you go for custom framing, be sure to look through the many mat choices and frame galleries.
To take advantage of this offer, visit my online galleries and store here and use promotional code VDay10.

Tour Time

Not to be confused with Tool Time, tour time refers to the Spring Art Studio Tour, featuring some of the most creative artists of central and north Whidbey Island. This March 6-7, 2010 event coincides with the annual Penn Cove MusselFest, so there are myriad reasons to visit the island.
The not-to-be-missed stop on the tour is my studio in Ann's Coup d'Art. Though Ann will be away from the island, it will be a great opportunity to visit Kay Parsons, Bev McQuary, Patty Picco, and moi.

Whidbey Island Book

My new book, Whidbey Island: The Jewel of Puget Sound, is now available. I've been selling copies at Ann's Coup d'Art, where my studio is. It is also available online at Amazon.com here.
The book is a portfolio of images representing Whidbey Island from the Deception Pass Bridge to Langley.

Metal Prints

Here are six of eight square images that are being produced by one of my labs, printed on metal. They will have 1/8" rounded corners and be mounted on blocks to float off the wall without frames. It seems an interesting and different presentation for photographs (it is pretty new) and these will be introduced at my holiday shows (see home page of www.whidbeypanoramas.com).

About the Photos

From top left to bottom right: The grave markers in Istanbul were shot in infrared and processed with sepia toning. IR is great for clouds! I noticed the trees in the pasture where the sheep graze on the edge of Barzitsa and watched for a foggy morning to shoot them. This was infrared converted to pure black and white (the raw IR images have some color in them). The fishing boat was near Varna in an estuary that serves as an extension of the port. It's another IR shot. The outdoor sink with dish is conventional digital color. It is in the back yard of the small pottery near the village where Bulgaria Art Workshops is being established (watch for news). Though it might look staged, the blue dish was there, waiting for my eye. The orange lifeboat was moored behind a dilapidated waterfront home on the Bosporus. The original shot is in color but I desaturated everything in the scene except the boat. I spotted the staircase while walking around the same Bosporus village in drizzle and was taken with the Mediterranean colors juxtaposed with potted flowers and weathered wood.

Infrared Photography

Never one to leave well enough alone, I sent my Canon G10 camera to have it converted to a dedicated infrared camera. NOTE: if you decide to have a camera converted by Lifepixel, as I did, please use my name as referrer; it won't cost you more but I'll make a few bucks. I chose the extended color option for my camera, which includes a sensor filter that accepts a wider light range. The idea is that this provides more to work with in creating what's known as "false color" IR images.
Here are some samples from today.


First is a "straight" image, right out of the camera with minor tweaking in Adobe Camera Raw. This is Dugualla Bay, by the way, on the northeast side of Whidbey Island. Low clouds obliterate the Cascades.



Next we have a grainery on Ebey's Prairie, framed by a pine branch. The top image is before processing. The bottom image is after a black & white adjustment layer and a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop CS4.


Finally, we have the blockhouse at Coupeville's Sunnyside Cemetery. To give it a traditional infrared look, I processed in Adobe Camera Raw with a minus clarity setting, producing more glow. Then I used a channel mixer layer to turn the red sky blue. Notice how the flag is burned out even though the rest of the image is well exposed. IR really reflects differently off of different materials. That seems to be why it can make what would ordinarily be a boring scene come to life.

Some things I think I've learned from my first IR outing include:

• Look for a variety of foliage, deciduous and conifer trees, crops, grasses.
• Look for cloud texture.
• Look for bright light (it's still a point-and-shoot camera with a tiny sensor).

Obviously, I need experience to optimize my raw and post-processing. I should try a polarizing filter. So far I have not noticed a "hot spot" problem with this camera/lens; that may vindicate my decision to stick to the P+S camera rather than converting a DSLR.

Encaustic Progress

Ann Wilson and Patty Picco have recently facilitated my encaustic endeavors. Ann has agreed to rent me studio space in the garage at Ann's Coupe d'Art in Coupeville. This allows me to install a stove vent hood to exhaust the fumes from keeping a bunch of beeswax hot, and I can open the garage door to enjoy Penn Cove breezes.

Patty tutored me for the best part of a day in her own garage studio, introducing me to a variety of techniques and making me drool for a hot palette. Now I'm going to have to build another accessory! I completed one new painting.

The piece pictured above is 12x12" on braced panel. The background is hand made paper, with a layer of unfiltered beeswax under and over it. The photograph is a scene from Silver Lake, Ohio, printed on 55# kozo paper, which I like because the wax really soaks in. I used a steel brush to score the area where I next added the brown stripe mirroring the sidewalk in the photo. Using a clay sculpting tool, I scraped away some of the stripe. "Sprinkles" of the scraped brown wax were dispersed to carry that color throughout the painting. Finally I covered everything with clear medium (filtered beeswax with damar resin to make it harder), being sure to drip a lot over the sides.

High Dynamic Range Photography ... HDR

Background
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography combines multiple shots at bracketed exposure (constant aperture, variable shutter speed) to render extended dynamic range and, often, an exaggerated look. I'm not an early adopter at high dynamic range (HDR) photography. Let's say I've been exercising some restraint; that sounds better than I'm lazy. Actually, I hate to buy software that I use infrequently and forget that I have, so I've been waiting to be sure I'll really do this. Last night, with the tax info off to my preparer, my reward was to dive in and try HDR.
I have been shooting bracketed sets of shots in anticipation of HDR imaging ... for about two years. That means I have some material to work with: Blue Hen Falls in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the Jacob Ebey House in Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve, the windmill in Windjammer Park in Oak Harbor Washington, sunrise across Saratoga Passage from Dugualla Bay on Whidbey Island.
I suppose I am an early adopter in a way; a good fifteen years ago, I shot a series of three exposures of a scene in Zion National Park on 4x5 film. I had the lightest and darkest drum scanned and later combined them in Photoshop. My Photoshop skills were limited, Photoshop tools were crude, and it took a lot of work to mask areas. Still, the result was pretty good. I may try to find the scans and do it again.
My approach to selecting an HDR program will be to try a quick conversion with each program, then select the top candidate and explore at greater depth to confirm that it suits my needs. So please keep in mind that the results and comments you see here are at the quick and dirty level, therefore subject to revision.

Photoshop CS4
This is to establish a baseline, not a suggestion that you'd want to do it this way. Can you tell how I was unimpressed with Photoshop's ability to creat HDR images?
Starting in Bridge, I selected the lightest, darkest, and good middle image. The full set is five images, but I don't think this scene requires all of them. Then it's TOOLS>PHOTOSHOP>MERGE TO HDR. When prompted, save the file as 32-bit. Then in Photoshop IMAGE>MODE>16 BIT (or 8 bit if you prefer). At this point, local adaptation seems to be the choice. Play with the sliders and the tone curve until you get something close. After processing, use Photoshop curves.

PHOTOSHOP TEST EXAMPLE

In Photoshop I applied the Strong Contrast preset in the curves dialog to achieve the look above. To me this still suffers from the flat look of a native HDR image.

Dynamic Photo HDR 4 ($55US)
The web site does a good job of selling Dynamic Photo HDR. It seems to be easy to use with gobs of flexibility. I was particularly taken with the apparent ability to create a range of looks from subtle to extreme HDR. Following are my initial impressions ... with no attempt to RTFM (read the manual).
It seems that aligning images is the expected first step in creating an HDR image. The assumption is that even with a tripod there can be some misalignment of images. I went with the flow. Working with a five image set (shot on a tripod), DPHDR needed manual help aligning the darkest image pair ... even with my windmill test which included blades of the windmill against the sky (boucoup contrast). It allowed me to manually adjust, but I found the interface difficult and not fabulously intuitive.
Step two is to walk away and make a cup of coffee while the HDR image is built. The resulting file contains the full dynamic range of information from all included images. When this is done, the fun begins.
DPHDR is a real playground when it comes to tweaking the image for output. HDR images contain much more information than monitors can represent, than printers can print, than eyes can see. Adjusting and compressing the information allows us to preserve detail ranging from shadows to hightlights that would be impossible to record within the limited dynamic range of digital capture (or film, for that matter). The result can be natural looking or exaggerated, usually with extreme local contrast. Each approach can be pleasing in its way.

DYNAMIC PHOTO HDR TEST EXAMPLE

My tests came out showing more digital noise than I like (I worked from NEF raw files) but I was able to achieve just the HDR look I wanted, on the verge of extreme but not over the top. The realtime preview of adjustments was responsive, allowing me to have a good time trying variations. It does take a little while to render the final tonemapped image.

Photomatix Pro 3 ($99US)

It always seems that when I spot HDR images in a gallery or when I'm judging a show, the author uses Photomatix. I'm willing to call it the gold standard based on the results I've seen. It strikes me as pretty spare, with a simple workflow and reasonable range of adjustments.

PP3 had no trouble aligning my test images. It offers just two types of tonemapping, with nine sliders to adjust parameters to get the desired look. It is necessary to make adjustments, release and wait for the preview to catch up: not real time preview. Although noticeably not as responsive as DPHDR, the delay was not too irritating.

PHOTOMATIX TEST EXAMPLE

I was not able to achieve as much "HDR look" with Photomatix, but found a pleasing lack of edge artifacts and grit in the result. I should note that I again worked directly from raw files. The publisher recommends converting to TIFF first, admitting that other raw converters are better than what's built in. I found that it produced a cleaner result than DPHDR.
At this point, I am inclined to go with Photomatix even though I'd like to be able to have the option to sometimes get a more extreme look. Clearly, this program will produce images that will sell, that fulfill my artistic ambitions, and that convey the mood of time and place.

FDR Tools Advanced (39 €)
FDR Tools has a slightly quirky interface, opening separate windows for various dialogs. When I launched it I saw the main window, plus windows for progress, Tools and Navigator. Navigator is actually the preview of your finished image, though the individual shots show up as thumbnails with histograms in the main window. This could be interesting.
FDRT was not initially intuitive, so I followed the steps outlined in the online manual, importing images, then clicking "edit," which creates the HDR raw image. For this trial run I chose the compressor method of tone mapping, with compression 10, contrast 6.4, smoothing 7, and bringing curves over to the darkest and lightest pixels, darkening the lightest ones a bit.
Opening the resulting 16-bit TIFF in Camera Raw 5.3, it was much flatter looking than the preview in FDRT. The red channel was clipping a bit so I lowered exposure, then cranked up clarity to +30. Using the default curves points in ACR, I left highlights at 0, lights at +60, darks at -20, and shadows at -80.

FDR TOOLS TEST EXAMPLE

For some reason the trial version of FDRT did not leave a visible watermark, as promised. As you can see, I was not able to get as punchy an image as with Photomatix. The good news is that the result seems pretty clean and halo-free. I would say that my primary gripe about FDRT is the inscruitable interface.

Essential HDR Community Edition (free)
It seems that the free "community edition" of Essential HDR is identical to Essential HDR Standard Edition ($48.99) except that it shrinks the image to less than one MB. I say it seems so because the full program cannot be downloaded until after purchase, so I have to go with this assumption for now.
EHDR is fast in all operations, but since it shrank my image, I cannot compare directly with other programs. The interface is intuitive and simple. Dabbling, I was able to create a range of looks, from moderate to extreme. Halos are a little more obvious in the final image than in the preview.
Once it has combined your source images, select the tone mapping method you prefer: Detail Revealer (my choice) or Fast Tone Balancer. Tweak the Details, Brightness, Color Saturation, and Fill Light sliders for the desired look. I set black point and white point is also available. Color balance can also be adjusted.

ESSENTIAL HDR TEST EXAMPLE

No Photoshop touch-up here; this is the result straight from the program. As I look more at the results I'm getting, I realize that the challenge in this image is to prserve the color of the tilled soil and dark forest.

Ariea HDR Max ($129US)
Well, HDR Max won't run in 30-day trial mode. I downloaded and installed it, but get an "unknown error" message when I click the trial radio button and next. After having the install program repair it, same crash.

Picturenaut HDR 2.12 (free)
Since Picturenaut will not accept raw files, I converted the three images to TIFF format in ACR first. The program quickly built the 32-bit HDR file. After trying both Adaptive Logarithmic and Photoreceptor Physiology tone mapping methods, I went with adaptive. I was struggling to get an interesting result when Picturenaut crashed. Play as I might with the sliders, I was not able to achieve anything remarkable. I will say that Picturenaut produced a clean image, free of grit and halo. But it really was no improvement over what I can get with careful processing of a single raw file.

PICTURENAUT HDR TEST EXAMPLE

This looks a bit like the Photoshop CS4 HDR image.

Photo Acute Studio ($119)
Photo Acute Studio seems to have two primary functions: building HDR files and extracting additional detail from a series of more than four shots. I did not explore the second function.
The interface is straightforward. On my first attempt, I brought in the three raw files I've been using. After setting everything up, PAS told me it wanted a DNG (Adobe) raw file. I went to the site a verified that the Nikon D300 and 50mm f1.8 lens used for these shots are supported in NEF format.
Plan B was to use my TIFF conversions of these images. The process was easy. First, I brought the images in, selected all three, and highlighted the one with no blocked highlights, as directed. I had to tell the program what camera and lens I used. I then chose the program's High Dynamic Trange Tripod Mounted preset and the processing took about two minutes. The result had a gross white halo around dark objects, but I saved it anyway.

PHOTO ACUTE HDR TEST EXAMPLE

I cannot show you the results of this test because Photoshop can't open the resulting 16-bit TIFF. Went back and processed again, saving as a JPEG this time. The results were no better, but at least you can see what it did. Since the result was rather dark, when I was resizing in Photoshop I applied the curves "lighter" preset.

What's Next?
I've covered the HDR programs of which I am currently aware, so the next step is to narrow the choices in a new blog entry. I plan to look closer at:

• Dynamic Photo HDR because the results were interesting if exaggerated. If it can be moderated, it's a great value at $55.
• Photomatix because the results were interesting if too tame.

Did I mention that these were the favored candidates at the start of my research?

The Master List

This is the big list of all of the cameras and lenses I've owned. I'll certainly update it as my memory is jogged. * indicates incomplete model name to be fixed later. As time permits, I'll add review comments on each item.

View Cameras

• Zone VI 4x5
• Sinar P 4x5
• Toyo View 4x5 field camera *
• V-Pan 6x17 (cm) panoramic monorail
• Speed Graphic 4x5 with Zeiss Planar 150mm f? (uncoated) lens in Copal shutter
  

View Camera Lenses (all in Copal shutters, if memory serves)

• ? 65mm
• Schneider 150mm *
• Calumet 150 mm
• Rodenstock Grandagon N 90mm f4.5
• Nikkor 360/500mm convertible telephoto *
• Rodenstock 210mm *

Wide-field Panoramic Cameras

• Fujifilm G617
• Art Panorama 617 with Nikkor 90mm f9?
• Hasselblad XPan with 45mm and 90mm lenses
• Custom based on Stereo Realist body opened to 100 wide frame with Mamya 75mm f5.6 lens from a Polaroid 600SE press camera
  

Short Rotation (swing lens) Panoramic Cameras

• Noblex 150UX (120 film)
  
• Noblex 135U (35mm film)
  
• Widelux 1500 (120 film)
  

Rotational Panoramic Cameras

• Hulcherama 120S
  
• Seitz Roundshot Super 220 VR
• Seitz Roundshot 65/70

Medium Format Cameras

• Hasselblad 500C
• Rollei 66
• Fujifilm G670
• Mamiya 645 Super
• Mamiya 645 Pro
• Pentax 645
• Rolleiflex twin lens *
• Agiflite aerial cameras
  

35mm SLR Cameras

• Nikon F Photomic FTn
• Nikkormat *
  
• Nikon F2
• Nikon F3 with motor drive
• Nikon F5

Other 35mm Cameras

• Petri Racer
• Rollei 35 *

Digital Cameras

• Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi
• Fujifilm Finepix S2 Pro
• Nikon D200
• Nikon D300

Medium Format Lenses

• List to come

SLR Lenses

• Soligor 28mm pre-set aperture
• Nikkor 80-200mm f8D (one ring)
• Nikkor 180mm f2.8
• Nikkor 70-200mm AF-S VR
• Nikkor 28mm f2 AIS
• Nikkor 12-24mm AF-S
• Nikkor 35mm f2 AF D
• Nikkor 50mm f1.8 AF D
• Nikkor 50mm f1.8
• Nikkor 105mm f2.5 (pre-AI and AIS versions)
• Nikkor 300mm f4 AF-S
• Nikkor 85mm f1.8 AF D
• Nikkor 35mm f3.5 PC AIS
  
• Nikkor 200mm f4 (pre-AI and AIS versions)
• Nikkor 24mm f2.8
• Nikkor 500mm f8 mirror
• Tamron SP AF 70-200mm f2.8 Di LD (IF) Macro