La Conner Waterfront

Here's a late afternoon shot of the waterfront at La Conner, Washington, looking back toward our hotel.

Shooting from a tripod on the end of a dock, I used my 11-18 mm wide angle zoom lens with both a graduated neutral density filter and a circular polarizer screwed on to the front.

-CG TTL

Animal or Vegetable?

This fishy looking image is a composite made from a macro shot of the leaves of a succulent flower I saw in a hanging pot in Christiansen's Nursery, near La Conner, Washington.

The image was taken with a Canon 500D close-up lens screwed on the front of my favorite 70-200 mm zoom telephoto. The end of the lens was about 20 inches from the flower.

The image was edited in Photoshop for tonality, color, saturation, and sharpness. Then it was copied, flipped 180 degrees, both horizontally and vertically, and layered on top of itself at 50% opacity.

Who says a flower can't be made to look like a fish!

-CG TTL

Antique Note

Here is another image taken at Christiansen's Nursery near La Conner, Washington. This is a layered composite made from several individual images:

The background is a close-up, multi-image montage of the flat leaves of a flower. The camera was rotated on my tripod just slightly between each of the four images.

The foreground is a shot of a hand-written note I ran across in the antique shop at Christiansen's. I have no idea what it says; it just looks old, French, and mysterious to me.

The outer frame I chose from PhotoFrames, a third-party plug-in that works with Photoshop. I picked the "torn paper" look to match the mysterious note.

-CG TTL

Butchart Fountain

Here's an image I took last week of a small fountain in Butchart Gardens on Victoria Island in British Columbia.

I took this image in aperture priority mode, set at f/8.0 to get the sharp focus and a moderate depth of field. I put my camera on a tripod and placed a circular polarizing filter on my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. This helped reduce the dynamic range and the specular highlights and extended the shutter speed (to about 1 second, as I recall) to give that "silky" look to the flowing water.

-CG TTL

General Motors Corporation

Another old truck shot, this time without AEB shooting and HDR processing.

Imagine what this old GMC truck has been through in its lifetime.

-CG TTL

Keep On Truckin'

I'm in Washington this week, about 80 miles North of Seattle, and the daffodils (...and a few tulips) are in bloom. I was shooting flower shots at a place near La Conner, Washington, called Christensen's Nursery, when these seriously old trucks were pointed out to me.

With a bright, overcast sky overhead, and dark shadows underneath, these trucks were good candidates for a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. With digital cameras, you sometimes have to choose between lost shadow detail or a blown out, overexposed sky. Using HDR, you can sometime save detail in both.

Using Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB), I took three images, one exposed properly, one overexposed by one stop, and one underexposed by one stop. I then blended these three images together, using a specialized HDR software called Photomatix.

The blended HDR image was then converted to a simple TIF file and final editing was completed in Photoshop. HDR blending can produce some surrealistic, high contrast images with vivid colors. Typically they can produce a more "painterly" look than you might see with your naked eye. But, they can also produce an image that is closer to what your eye actually sees dynamically, with more detail in the highlights and more detail in the shadows than a digital camera can normally see.

Click on this image, if you'd like to see a larger version.

-CG TTL