Tag: photography

Fun with digital photography

Recently I’ve been diving into High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. Initially I used Bracketeer to combine three photos that had been taken with different exposure (-2, 0, +2 stops). But very quickly I became unsatisfied with the output from Bracketeer. After a little research, it turns out Bracketeer only fuse photos with different exposures. Whereas other HDR software also perform tone mapping. After listening to a TWiP podcast about HDR and read through the HDR tutorial by Trey Ratcliff, I decided to try Photomatix Pro last week to see what different result I would get.

To demostrate the difference between Bracketeer and Photomatix, here are two identical photos processed by each software with the original exposure on the left:

Original
Bracketeer
Photomatix

As you can see, the result from Photomatix is so much more natural looking (though it can also produce extremely psychadelic version) than Bracketeer. And more importantly, I get to this very good photo very easily, whereas the options in Bracketeer are extremely technical and confusing.

Both are commercial software with Bracketeer a little bit less expensive than Photomatix. But judging from the output quality, I would thoroughly recommend going straight to Photomatix if you want to experiment with HDR.

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The High Line

Having a brand new camera body encourages me to take more photos during the weekend (funny that always works). Today, Leah and I went to the High Line after having brunch with some friends. From the Wikipedia, the High Line is

The High Line is a 1.45-mile (2.33 km) section of the former elevated freight railroad of the West Side Line, along the lower west side of Manhattan, which has been redesigned and planted as a greenway. The High Line runs from the former 34th Street freightyard, near the Javits Convention Center, through the neighborhood of Chelsea to Gansevoort Street in the Meat Packing District of the West Village.

The High Line
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Philadelphia Experiment

Leah and I went to Philadelphia on a weekend trip this past weekend. For me, it was two days of experiments. All of which are for our trip to Naples/Pompeii later in July.

Canon 50D
The 50D is a vast improvement over my old 10D, bought way back in 2003. The increase in pixel count is obvious, but it is other much more subtle features that impress me. First, the quick startup time from sleep mode. The 10D takes about 5-10 seconds to wake up, thus sometimes I would miss shots. The 50D wakes up and ready to shoot almost instantaneously. The LCD screen is of course larger but it is the colour rendition that makes me take notice. With 10D, the LCD is always too bright and colour too saturated. The screen is still slightly too bright but the colour is almost spot on so preview is actually accurate. The low(er) noise level on high ISO settings makes it, for the first time for me at least, viable to shoot indoor with ISO1600 without worrying about unusable image. Images are still noisy but at least it is manageable.
Kata DR 467
I've been using a camera hipbag inside my Oakley backpack on trips for a few years now. Mainly so it is not obvious that I'm carrying an expensive digital camera. While that worked fairly well, it was awkward to store and retrieve the camera as I have two bag openings to deal with. Alex Lindsay (from PixelCorp and MacBreak Weekly) on Twitter recommended Kata DR-467 for travelling with DSLR. I looked online as well as touched it for real in B&H before deciding to buy it. After this weekend, I was so glad I bought it! I can't believe I didn't get it earlier. The slide out compartment at the bottom for the camera and lenses are the best feature, making it very easy to store/retrieve camera on the go.
GeoCoder
I've always wanted to geotag my photos so this trip was a perfect opportunity to utilise the built-in GPS in my iPhone to try that. I found on the AppStore this free app, GeoCoder, which claims to make geotagging easy. It was pretty easy to use and I just needed to remember to start a 'recording' in GeoCoder at the beginning of the day and stop it at the end. I was afraid that it would drain my battery quickly but it turned out not to be the case.
I was pretty excited about this whole geotagging thing until I got home and tried to use the GPX files GeoCoder produces in Google Earth. Turns out the iPhone GPS receiver is not sensitive enough to pick up GPS signal when the phone is in my pants pocket! So all I have are a handful of GPS locations whenever I took my phone out for a quick Twitter check or the iPhone happened to have enough signal.
So GeoCoder is out for me for the time being.
For the Naples/Pompeii trip, I have considered using one of my iPhone case and strap it to the Kata's shoulder strap in order to get decent GPS signal for the iPhone. Or I can purchase one of the cheaper GPS recorder and use that instead. I'd probably still need to expose the recorder to the sky somehow though.

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