Fnittriga bilder

Filled with a giggling joy, some of my pictures end up at their best once I have bashed the living daylights out of their coloration. Sparkly, garish, brash and aggressive, I do think they end up with something … special about them too.

Kungsgatstornet

Strega on a rooftop

Purple rooftop

Strega and a candle

Brunnsviken

Framed by the two Stockholm scenes in their tranquil blue tones, the portraits of a glass of Strega on a San Francisco rooftop flank the perspective-highlighting rooftop in corrugated steel and brash purple sky. All of these photos have a touch of the psychedelic, that with the mood itself, rises through the sequence, peaks with the purple picture, and then decays again until the dramatic sky over Brunnsviken looks almost normal to the dazed spectator emerging after the picture sequence.

Well in greenery [HDR]

HDR capture of a well in Roslagen

This picture evokes in me a serene feeling, the rural calm that so many go out from the city to their country houses to find. The pictured well is worn, but not decrepit, and it sits in a cradle of luminous lush greenery.

The impression is helped by colour symbolism as well as composition: the dominant colour is green; a colour of nature, and also according to Segerholm (and more) a colour of calm; and the composition has quite a number of calming, horizontal lines, countering the vertical frame of the picture and calming the eye.

It is not, though, a single-mindedly closed image. The interpretation of serenity and rural calm may just as well be replaced by an interpretation of mans impact on nature, with the well shoving the wilderness aside — an interpretation aided by the comparatively large space in the image given to the well itself. 

A sunflare over Snowbird (HDR)

In flight drink (Candy HDR)

Candy HDR in Snowbird

The view from the balcony of my hotel room at Snowbird. This one a somewhat egregiously treated HDR version.

[CA Roadtrip] The problem with HDR…

…is sometimes I just can get it to look just right. Here's what'd be a gorgeous use case for the technique: a sunset. Shot into the sun that just barely hides behind a cloud. In front of us, red plants on the ground. A -2.0/0.0/+2.0 exposure bracket certainly gets us everything we need in terms of pixels.

But a straight up and down HDR can't quite distinguish between the darkness of the plants, and the darkness of the darker bits of sky, so we can't quite get the balance right. Gradiented filters just look awkward. So it is in with the mask we go!

A first attempt, I mask with exposure modification while still in Photoshop with 32 bit, before I even flatten the image down from the full on HDR master:

but it doesn't really look good. Possibly because of me being still too clumsy with the masking brush, possibly some other reason, but it doesn't come out quite the way I had hoped.

Second attempt, just layer the +2 and the -2 exposures, and mask in the flowers from the lighter onto the sky and ocean of the darker one.

If anything, I'd feel this looks worse. But then, I'm not sure. Maybe this could've been saved with better brushing in Photoshop. Maybe you all really like this and I'm just being my usual obnoxiously perfectionist self.

I honestly don't know.

Telefonplan (HDR)

At the old Ericsson offices in Stockholm, where the entire area has been named for the presence of the telephone industry.

Photographing at the onset of dusk, I used HDR to get decent exposure and the colorful sky.

Alcatraz water reservoir and cell house

As a Christmas gift to any reader celebrating on Christmas day rather than eve, here is a piece of nice and illustrative HDR.

This was a clean example of where HDR is good to use. The shrubs in shadow, the reservoir in sunlight, a bright sunny day. I shot one, and saw immediately on the preview that the sky as well as the shade both were blown out. Reset for HDR, shoot three in a row, and then merge at home.

And once Photoshop loads up the HDR dialogue, it was immediately obvious that hardly anything more had to be done to the picture: the automatic HDR settings were pretty much what I wanted out of it — a naturalistic look, but balanced the dark and light tones.

Stanford chapel HDR

Again, trying to illustrate the clouds, using HDR with a very naturalistic approach to just give the sky enough texture to look interesting. Ithink I got the balance better here.

Stanford in HDR

Experimenting more with a subtle, realistic approach to HDR that still accents the cloud formations. This season seems to be the time to get stuff like this done in the South Bay — where the weather much too often is too well behaved to make the clouds the picture…

I think this one might have gone a bit overboard, though — the haze around the actual buildings detract from the naturality. But it ends up being a nice pic anyway.

Bright red tree

A somewhat aggressive HDR. Which was the point of the photo, not even trying for realism here.

HDR colorful cables

I found these colorful cables just outside University City in Philadelphia, and I became fascinated with the bright colours they had — the blue of the sky, the red of the rust and the green of the oxidized copper cables.

Golden Gate by night

Going out to catch stars and try astrophotography, I ended up shooting a whole sequence of various exposures, tripod mounted, of the Golden Gate Bridge.

This is the reasonably natural whitebalanced HDR composite I generated.

Golden Gate, all fuzzy

From the same source pictures as yesterday, here's the Golden Gate bridge again — but aggressively tone mapped to provoke a fuzzy picture, with strong red accents.

HDR: A Stanford Sunset

As the sun sets over Stanford Campus, I stand ready with my camera. Bracketed shot, HDR processed, and a colourful view of the Stanford chapel emerges.

HDR: A SOMA rooftop

The view over a rooftop from one warehouse collective to the next warehouse. -2/0/+2 bracketed, HDR merged, and aggressively tone mapped.

HDR: A study in Strega, part 2

As for the second Strega shot, more texture and less bright flaring light, and with the colour of the Strega tinting the nearby candle.

And with a red apple (or is it a tomato?) hanging in the background as a contrast element.

HDR: A study in Strega

Some experiments with HDR: on a rooftop, at a SOMA warehouse housing collective, drinking Strega with good friends, I started shooting bracketed shots of my drink, in order to see what I could do with them.

Over the next few days, some of these results.

First out, a glass of Strega tinting and spreading the light coming through it.

Geisha shrine on Shinbashi-dori

More HDR from Yasaka

I really love the results from our late night tripod photo shoot on the temple grounds of the Yasaka temple in Kyoto.



I will move on to other subjects. Any week now, I promise!