On Monday, a coworker recommended I visit Edge River, New Jersey and take pictures of the New York skyline so I contacted Teejay Green and Sam Lodise and we left around 6:30 PM to capture the skyline.  This was our trip:

Le Trek

Or first stop was at KFC where we went through the timeless bonding ritual of eating a doubledown and then having to stop an hour later to use the bathroom.  We hit Hackensack and started going south until we hit a nice spot in Union City with both a Ben and Jerry’s and a Starbucks and a health peppering of well-dressed people with tiny dogs.

We took pictures and these were my best:

20101119-5075-NewYorksNonSkylineAnd2more [flickr album=72157625435366966 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

We drove a bit further south, and then into Brooklyn, and then through Manhattan, and then home.  Some time past Jersey City Teejay started googling New York City Skyline and we found that every shot of the skyline is pretty well taken from the same inaccessible spot below the Manhattan Bridge.  Having driven by that spot, and seeing that it’s surrounded by construction, we agreed that we either needed to rent a helicopter, or gain the ability to scale chain link fences.  The former is far more likely.

I had gone more than 10 days without taking any pictures.  This morning had a fine fog to it that I thought would look nice over Springfield Lake; the reservoir at the Churchville Nature Center.  I struck out and this is the majestic view of the lake I got:

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Some may find a certain romance to it, but I don’t.  Much more fruitful were the garden shots.

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A few of the shots take advantage of the modification to functional depth of field caused by the fog.  This is one of them.

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This is another, as if Silent Hill took place in an arboretum.

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This was done by zooming between 70 and 200mm focal length during a 2 second exposure.  The thick depth of field makes it appear less blurry than would have happened otherwise.

April 22, 2010-14-HDRatChurchville

I made almost no adjustment to color here.  The azaleas were that saturated.

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I thought this a good candidate for tonemapping.  It took me about six tries to make it look neither flat nor drugged out.  I was sure to save that setup this time.

March 28, 2010-1-blewittmergToday’s trip to High Rocks had me better prepared than last time.  I did some work on my shoes and replaced the battery sling on the Gigapan and set out.  My shoe laces broke and the Gigapan went apeshit, 0 for 2 so far.  So instead, I opted to practice some other techniques:

Thing 1 – Tonemapping

HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography is where one overcomes the limitations of a camera’s dynamic range (difference between brightest and darkest part of the picture) by taking multiple exposures at different light levels.  So, great, you’ve got an HDR image, the problem is that this simply passes the buck to our monitors which are also not HDR.  So one uses a process called tonemapping to compress that dynamic range.  Tonemapping can create something that looks closer to what the world looks like or blow it out to something a bit stranger.

So, here’s a starting picture:

March 28, 2010-16-Climbing

Here’s the tonemapped version:

March 28, 2010-16-Climbing_tonemapped

For starts you can simply make out more detail in the very bright areas (the sky) and very dark areas (rock crevasses).  Sometimes it just looks like you used a lightwash (flash) but the vividness is cranked up in a way adjusting saturation won’t manage.

So here’s a look at the types of tonemapping.  Here’s a source image:

March 28, 2010-164-Climbing

Here’s a trippy/acidy/blownout/overdone version that it sometimes associated with tonemapping:

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You’ll note that the very dark areas and very light areas are brought in such that the sky now appears less bright.

Here’s something more reasonable:

March 28, 2010-164-ClimbingAnd2more2

Tonemapping also has some limitations like when it’s rendered to jpeg.  Jpeg’s lossy and I should probably stick to TIF to reduce the compression.  The following image looks more apocalyptic and less poorly painted in the original.  I think the sky’s acceptable:

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I generally don’t like black and white photos and am not very good at taking them.  I don’t have the eye for color value which is what actually shows through.  Below is an exception:

March 28, 2010-146-Climbing-2

Here’s the root image:

March 28, 2010-146-Climbing

Here’s the tonemapped version:

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I think a little rotation made the photo a lot more interesting:

March 28, 2010-146-Climbing-edit

Action Merges

Action merges are where one takes many pictures of a particular action and merges them into a single frame.  This is a mediocre one of Mike Blewitt repelling:

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I did a sloppy job with merging the rope.

Here’s a better one of Sam climbing the face:

March 28, 2010-1-sammerge