10-29-2011, 08:12 PM
Oink (and Whitey) - So sorry, sue me! Seriously, I'd be more than happy to take you on a summit tour when you eventually get here but can't guarantee a beautiful sunset - I've witnessed 20 years of Mauna Kea sunsets and the one in those pictures was a bit special.
Kathy (and hawaiideborah) - I did once try a photo book but the pictures didn't turn out well, but might try it again now I know a little more about techniques. My pictures from the summit can't be used commercially though so am a little limited there.
The technique I use sometimes is called High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. There are plenty of places that explain it on the web, but here's a summary:
Your eye can see things that are dark and bright at the same time, let's call it a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being dark and 10 bring bright. On the same scale a camera's sensor can only see from 3 to 8. Anything darker than 3 or brighter than 8 is either black or saturated in picture. There are two ways to get around that in order to make a picture look the way you see it with your eyes: (1) use a graduated filter that darkens the sky so that what was a 10 is now a 7, or (2) use HDR techniques. The latter involves taking under- and over-exposed images and then combining them in software. That way the under-exposed image captures the sky (for instance) and the over-exposed image captures the dark land.
I want to do the former at some point but getting the right filters and equipment is quite expensive, and this has already been an expensive year!
For HDR photography I use software called Photomatix. It's about $100 although if you have an .edu address you can get it for around $30. For regular processing I now use Adobe Lightroom which isn't cheap (around $300) but these days I take pictures in RAW format so need some decent software to process those images. Most people don't bother with RAW format so don't even bother with that route unless you know what I'm talking about! If you have a regular point-and-shoot I'd stick with free software such as Picasa.
(By the way, most of my pictures on my blog and on flickr where taken with a point-and-shoot camera although it was a fairly advanced example - I now use a Canon 60D after the old camera broke on a beach in California!).
Kathy - that Pfeiffer photo was actually quite boring I thought, but then added some positive vignetting to it just to make it look more interesting! (I.e., most photos have vignetting in the corners which makes those parts darker - I just made them look brighter!). I've wanted to take a sunset shot of that place for a couple of years now but wasn't there at sunset. I did the same thing for the Lone Cypress on 17-mile drive shot which is just before those Big Sur photos.
Thanks again, everyone, for your kind words! Wish I could get the camera out a little more often than I can right now...
Tom
http://apacificview.blogspot.com/
Kathy (and hawaiideborah) - I did once try a photo book but the pictures didn't turn out well, but might try it again now I know a little more about techniques. My pictures from the summit can't be used commercially though so am a little limited there.
The technique I use sometimes is called High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. There are plenty of places that explain it on the web, but here's a summary:
Your eye can see things that are dark and bright at the same time, let's call it a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being dark and 10 bring bright. On the same scale a camera's sensor can only see from 3 to 8. Anything darker than 3 or brighter than 8 is either black or saturated in picture. There are two ways to get around that in order to make a picture look the way you see it with your eyes: (1) use a graduated filter that darkens the sky so that what was a 10 is now a 7, or (2) use HDR techniques. The latter involves taking under- and over-exposed images and then combining them in software. That way the under-exposed image captures the sky (for instance) and the over-exposed image captures the dark land.
I want to do the former at some point but getting the right filters and equipment is quite expensive, and this has already been an expensive year!
For HDR photography I use software called Photomatix. It's about $100 although if you have an .edu address you can get it for around $30. For regular processing I now use Adobe Lightroom which isn't cheap (around $300) but these days I take pictures in RAW format so need some decent software to process those images. Most people don't bother with RAW format so don't even bother with that route unless you know what I'm talking about! If you have a regular point-and-shoot I'd stick with free software such as Picasa.
(By the way, most of my pictures on my blog and on flickr where taken with a point-and-shoot camera although it was a fairly advanced example - I now use a Canon 60D after the old camera broke on a beach in California!).
Kathy - that Pfeiffer photo was actually quite boring I thought, but then added some positive vignetting to it just to make it look more interesting! (I.e., most photos have vignetting in the corners which makes those parts darker - I just made them look brighter!). I've wanted to take a sunset shot of that place for a couple of years now but wasn't there at sunset. I did the same thing for the Lone Cypress on 17-mile drive shot which is just before those Big Sur photos.
Thanks again, everyone, for your kind words! Wish I could get the camera out a little more often than I can right now...
Tom
http://apacificview.blogspot.com/