Dynamic World Thwarts Dynamic Range Photography

I'm seeing the world with a new awareness now. It's in constant motion -- trees, clouds, birds, people, and various other objects. And unfortunately, motion thwarts multi-shot HDR. This is demonstrated by some of my HDR attempts during the recent Tigard Festival of Balloons.

This photo looks fine in the thumbnail view; I used HDR techniques to balance out the bright sunlit clouds with the blue sky and darker clouds, forming a nice backdrop for a silhouetted hot air balloon. However, click on the photo for a bigger view, and you'll see a big problem.



Specifically, the balloon moved enough during the three HDR shots (taken 0.33 seconds apart) to create ghosting. Here is a close-up:



The HDR software makes some attempt to minimize ghosting due to picture object movemement, but there is only so much it can do.

Until cameras start getting built with High Dynamic Range sensors to capture contrasty motion scenes in one shot, much of the dynamic world will remain out of reach of HDR photography.

Father's Day Flight

Last Friday, David took me on a Father's Day flight, where we got to do the maneuvers and such that I had always heard about, but had never experienced personally: stalls, lazy eights, tight turns, short landings, etc. I even got to take the controls for quite a awhile -- not for the fancy maneuvers of course -- but I was able to make some 360-degree turns, altitude changes, etc. while at the same time scanning the sky for obstructing traffic.

During times I was not in "control" of the Cessna 206, I shot some photos, naturally. Most of them were the ordinary mountain vista pictures, but here is a fun one that's a favorite of mine:



In the cropped version, you can see the reflection a bit better:



If you want to see the rest of the "ordinary" photos, click here for a slideshow.

Full of Hot Air

Apparently I was full of hot air to think that it might not be obvious. But "Daniel-Man" was the first to comment, so he (and his Mom-emanuensus) gets the prize of unbridled admiration from Grandpa! :-)

Here are a couple of other views of the same balloon, which was among several that went directly over our house during the annual Tigard Balloon festival.

"What Is It?" Revisited

I had so much fun with animal "What Is It?" photos, I figured it would be good to challenge you all with a non-animal whatisit. Click on the image for a larger version. Once you have figured it out (or have a guess, or maybe it's obvious), add a comment with your view, and we will see who gets there first! :-)

Digital Zoo

For my Father's Day activity, I went to the Oregon Zoo with Kathy, Marybeth, and Amanda. Oh, and of course I took my fancy-dancy digital SLR. I came back with two sets of photos: 1) A small collection of birds that posed for me, and 2) A series of animals which inspired me to post some "What is it??" pairs.

To see a slideshow with the "What is it??" pairs, go here, or click this picture:



For a slideshow of eight cool birds, go here, or click this picture:



My favorite from the Father's Day zoo photos is the wide-billed bird examining its reflection in the water. A secondary favorite is the time-frozen splash from the water fowl diving below the surface.

The ever-morphing cloud of flying insects delivered a nice surprise for me. I saw the swarm at a distance as bright points of light against a dark background, and thought it would be cool to capture a nicely-shaped group of bug stars. When I zoomed up on the photos later, I exclaimed out loud, "Wow, they have legs!" And wings, of course. Much cooler than the simple dots of light I had expected.

The bat pictures were a fun technical challenge. To get them, I had to crank the camera's ISO up to 1,600 -- the first time I have had to do that for real (i.e. outside of test shots) since I got the DSLR. The bats were in near-constant motion. The camera's image stabilization helped mitigate the slow shutter speed for these hand-held shots (1/30th and 1/6th second), but I had to shoot at just the right moment for the bats to be motionless enough for the photo.

For the hippo shot, it was necessary to use HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, due to his (her?) bright sunlit back and deep-shadowed front. Don't ask me why the hippo felt compelled to use a rock as a pillow for his chin.

Speaking of HDR, I'm learning about some of its limitations. More about that in a later posting.

Monitoring the Differences

I realized that my monitor at work has much higher color saturation than the one I used at home to prepare the horse-and-mount-hood HDR photo. Since I don't know how my regular reader's own monitors behave color-wise (all three of you ;-), I figured it might be good to put it to a vote.

Please click on the image below for a large view, then leave a comment saying which looks better: "Left" or "Right." Thanks.

Bashful Moon meets Mr. HDR

In my 6/7/2008 "Bashful Moon" posting I said, "There is a technology coming of age [High Dynamic Range photography] that will do this kind of thing automatically -- digitally combining multiple exposures, to bring out the detail from all of them."

Well, here are two original exposures of the Bashful Moon. The first one shows the Moon's disk, but only the closest clouds are visible. There are plenty of clouds in the second exposure, but the Moon has completely disappeared into the highlights:





Running them through the Photomatix HDR image processing software gives the following result. Both the Moon's disk and the clouds are nicely visible.



Cropping makes it more interesting. You can clearly see that the reddish coloration around the moon forms a ring. This was evident when I viewed the cloud-shrouded Moon that night, but neither single exposure reveals that fact; only the combined image shows what I actually saw with my own eyes.



Just for jollies, I also cropped it the same as the 6/7/2008 posting. The color border around the Moon is still visible as a ring, yet that feature was not evident at all in the earlier blog entry.



I don't know about you, but I think this is cool stuff.

HDR Photography Comes of Age

HDR Photography -- High Dynamic Range -- has come of age. Although I'm sure there are more improvements to come, the problems I encountered in 2006 (e.g. alignment difficulties) have been solved.

As an experiment today, I shot some photo triplets from Baker Road outside Sherwood. For each view, I bracketed two stops in each direction. One of them had a horse that conveniently posed, motionless, through all three shots. Here are the original shots, the last of which is the best compromise between blowing out highlights on the horse, showing the mountain's snow, and making detail visible in the valley trees (you can click on the images for larger views):







I ran the images through a fresh trial version of Photomatix (mentioned in my previous posting), a program that derives a High Dyanamic Range image from the multiple exposures, then maps the tones to what can be rendered on a screen or print, yet preserving details in all luminosities. Here is the result:



My first response was, "Wow!" The subtle details in the horse's coloration and the valley trees have been preserved, yet the mountain snow and clouds are beautiful in the background. Here is a final cropped view:



I'm going to have to re-think my whole approach to high-contrast scenes, knowing this technology exists.

Bashful Moon

The Moon hates to be photographed. At least, it seems that way. It is exceedingly difficult to re-create, in a picture, what it looks like when one gazes toward Earth's faithful satellite. Granted, high in a clear sky, the "moon seen" looks the same as the "moon photographed." But if there is anything else in the scene -- clouds, water, or foreground objects -- it is impossible to capture both. To see the non-moon objects, the moon is overpoweringly exposed as a bright disk. An exposure that renders the disk with recognizable landmarks (like the "Man in the Moon") causes all else to disappear into the darkness. (In photographic terms, there is a seven-stop difference in the appropriate camera settings.)

Sometimes clouds help by providing a veil for the bashful Moon's face. But even then, the results can be disappointing. One night I was making some time-exposure test shots. I looked over to a different part of the sky, and beheld a beautiful moon-cloud scene. Swinging the camera over, I fired off a few shots at various exposures. Later, while examining the serendipitous photos, I was unhappy with all of them, for the reason mentioned above. But wait, this is digital photography! The "darkroom" tools at my disposal are way beyond what was available back in my film days.

So, I digitally combined two of the photos, one that showed the Moon, and another that showed the clouds. Here is the result; you can click on the picture for a larger view:




I performed the above-mentioned photo merging manually, in a photo editor. There is a technology coming of age that will do this kind of thing automatically -- digitally combining multiple exposures, to bring out the detail from all of them. Awhile ago, I performed some experiments with a Photomatix trial version. At the time, it didn't feel ready for prime time due to its poor handling of any image or camera movement whatsoever between the shots -- even one pixel difference was problematic. But the software may have been improved since then. Here is the link, FYI:

http://www.hdrsoft.com/