pipes and glass

white dogs and dynamic range

This isn't what you like to see when you open up an image in LightRoom 2.4. The bright red area indicates one or more color channels are at 100%. This means you have lost some of the visual information. If all three color channels are at 100% you basically have no visual information.

This is a problem with contrast that exceeds the dynamic range of the digital sensor. I could have dropped the exposure until the white dog dropped into the acceptable range but that would have pushed the man into the lower end of the gray scale. This isn't something you want to do.



By reducing the exposure in LightRoom 2.4 more than 3 levels, I was able to separate the different channels here to show what part of the image is totally blocked. The pink area is blocked only in the red channel, the middle blues two channels are blocked and the light blue is blocked in all three channels. This is a summary, an over simplified explanation of what you are seeing.



So what can be done with an image like this? Well, I left the overall exposure as shot, didn't use any recovery but used the adjustment brush tool in LightRoom 2.4 to select an area on the dogs bright side, then reduced the exposure about 35 and desaturated it somewhat to remove the color distortion. The result isn't too horrible. I've posted it above. There isn't any texture in the bright fur, which is what we want to see in highlights, texture. But short of just giving up on shooting images like this, a highlight with some gray scale variation is better than a completely blocked up white mass. Soft fur in certain kinds of light will not show any texture, the light needs to be at an angle which produces shadows. In this case the light is blasting directly at the broadside of the dog, so there wouldn't be much texture even with reduced exposure.

man & dog

Shot just before 8 pm this evening at the beach. My only subject tonight. Lots of people but no subjects. Took seven exposures before he spotted me.

a door of welcome

General Offices

This was taken South Downtown Seattle. An employee saw me shooting and came out and offered to unlock the gates so I could shoot inside the yard. For some reason this didn't appeal to me. I thanked him and moved on.

sidewalk cafe

The main street of Burien Washington now has several eating/drinking establishments where you can sit out on the sidewalk. Why anyone would want to do this is beyond comprehension.

blue beach

It was a dark and stormy night, well anyway it was dark, it actually did start to rain just as I was packing up my gear. Some other blues Blue Door and Blue School.

the photo shoot

Seahurst beach an hour ago. Crain Photography was down at waterline shooting a model. I have done some other shoots, here is one at Fort Lawton, close up, where you can see it The Shoot - Fort Lawton

walking man

Three shots of a man walking.

hookah

The girl with her guitar, dog and sister wasn't they only attention grabber at the park last night. This fellow with the hookah was up the beach a hundred yards, more or less by himself with his daughter and his hookah. Who knows what he was smoking. There is no law enforcement in this park. Anything short of serial murder will not result in any police presence. Hookahs like Varsity Cheerleaders with guitars are a little out of the ordinary. But in a park where Serbian men spend all day roasting a pig on a spit, and Cossacks dance, and various marginal people pursue their private obsessions, smoking a hookah while your toddler plays on the beach doesn't really qualify as outside the norm since this beach is realized ultimate reality multiculturalism.

girl with guitar

this girl reminds me a someone I knew forty years ago.

Seahurst beach isn't a place where pretty girls go to sit on the beach and play their guitars. That is Alki Point or Golden Gardens. Even there, the guitar part of the picture is a little bit odd. I occasionally see men playing a guitar on the beach, sitting alone, way off by themselves, just to practice. But this is first time i have seen a Varsity Cheer leader from Evergreen High School playing a guitar on any beach any where. And she was right at ground zero, the most populated and busy part of the this mile long beach. She was not making much music. I couldn't hear a sound above all the other background noise.

The light was perfect, ideal for portraits and I could not pass up an opportunity to use that light to light this subject. With an effective focal length of 600mm (35mm equiv) you don't need to stand close to the subject but she new she was being photographed, even with a hundred people milling around on the beach, a girl like her has built in radar which detects cameras pointed in her direction.

three amigos

shot an hour ago at seahurst beach

end of the day

shot last night at sundown on seahurst beach.

winter light

This was taken early afternoon on Jan 17, 2009 at Fisherman's Wharf. The light in January is good all day long, when sun is out. Looking at this now, the title, the light, the treatment, I am thinking there must be something here about Ingmar Bergman or Andrew Weyth.

live out of balance

driftwood

Shot this afternoon at the beach. Not much happening at the beach today, cloudy and cool.

Had a question asked about how this was shot and developed, to which I replied: This was shot from above, looking over a concrete bulkhead. Had to do some fancy moves just to get the shot. I had spent half an hour plodding around in the bear grass looking for something to shoot. As I was walking up the steps to the prom, I saw this log and liked the way it was nestled in the grass.

I bracketed the exposure, getting it right up to where the yellows were starting to blow out on the dead grass. That gave me lots of shadow margin to play with. I usually let the black block up in the shadows during development but don't like blocked negatives if I can avoid it.

PP was something of a pain. Worked it up in two versions, a natural one and a tortured negative version (useful for heavy metal images). I got it looking good in LR2 but when I exported it to a jpg the colors flattened out for some reason. So I had to go back and jack up the saturation and via trial an error getting the final version looking like the LR2 screen. Ended up with thirteen snapshots (LR2) which is a new record. Allows me to go back and recreate the stages of development.

Didn't do any noise reduction beyond the standard color noise filtering in LR which is set to 15. I like noise, so I don't filter for it.

Portlock - Fisherman's Wharf

wheels

... get yourself a set of wheels. South Seattle BNSF Car Shop. You can see the setting of the previous post Paint Job in the background, where if you look close you will note that I was shooting through a hole in the fence. Places constraints on angle and composition.

paint job

South Seattle, near the BNSF switching yards, there is some renovation going on.

woof ...