Photos, photoshop and reality

'Between all the plastic surgery and Photoshop, who knows what celebrities really look like anymore?' Something I just stumbled upon here.
Just for fun ;-)

HDR built-in: New Sony camera A550

Rumours had been around in the internet for more than half a year already, so I am a bit late to discover that the recently released Sony α550 camera has a trick inbuilt to make HDR pictures. HDR = High Dynamic Range and means that you can get pictures that show detail in the dark parts as well as in the light parts. Without HDR you'd get details in the dark parts but a pure white spot of clouds, or the other way around: well-deatiled clouds but completely black shadows. The α550 takes two pictures successively and combines them automatically to an HDR picture! That is almost the ideal I was waiting for, as I admitted some time ago: an HDR-sensor. Anyone interested in my "old" α700? ;-)

Fieldfare found

The fieldfares returned later in the same day, and that time my camera was ready. Admittedly, I still had to crop the picture enormously, because the birds mainly stayed in the back of the garden and I "only" have a 300 mm (450 mm equivalent, if you count the crop factor).

Winter keeps going strong

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Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

This year's winter seems to last eternally. At least it's more of a winter than we have had for a decade, and of course just when you get winterguest birds in your garden, you don't have your camera ready (4 fieldfares, in Dutch 'kramsvogels'). So you'll have to make do with an 'Image du soleil levant', the painting that sparkled off impressionism in the end of the 19th century, but then in a 21st century fashion. Keep warm!

How a Classic was Made: Moon over Hernandez

'Moon over Hernandez' is one of Ansel Adams's iconic landscape photos, and in this videoblog by Marc Silber of the Digital Photography School, Ansel's son Michael tells a little about how the picture was made. It was a shot 'at the spur of the moment', a single negative at intuitive exposure settings (he couldn't find the exposure meter!) because before Ansel could make a second one, the light in the foreground had faded. In our digital age, we could have made a dozen photos, bracketed for exposure...

But the real point was how different a straight print from the negative was from the final black-and-white print: all kinds of darkroom magic was used, for instance to make the sky darker (Adams's later prints were even more dramatic than his first published ones) and mask some clouds at the top. The video showed a whole 'storyboard' that Ansel used for a graphic depiction of all that he wanted to do when enlarging the picture--much like the different steps you would have in Lightroom, or like the different layers you would use in Photoshop.

The main lesson for us, black-and-white landscape photographers: interpret your pictures afterwards when processing it at the computer, to get the result you want. There is not a single-best conversion from the red, blue and green pixels that make up your sensor data into the black-and-white you are going to print, and 'highlighting' certain areas of your picture through software adaptations is allowed--maybe we can make our own classic!