F80EXR – Ornamental Gardens and Tulip Festival

Karen and I met last night after work for a nice walk along the canal to see the tulip festival. Parking near the Dow’s Lake pavilion is a little pricey, so we parked near the experimental farm and walked in. But first, we paused to shoot the experimental farm where there were many lovely early spring flowers in bloom.

The gardens sport a massive number of Lilac bushes in all colors. Here is the ubiquitous French Lilac, essentially identical to the one in my front yard :-)

Then, some spectacular dark Lilacs and another light one. Simply gorgeous.

 

 

Next, we encounter some early Iris. Small, and very cute.

   

A nice little shrine of some sort graces the gardens. It’s a little hidden, but you eventually stumble onto it.

A short while later, we see a Rhododendron.

 

A bed of strange tulips ….

  Rather normal yellow tulips.

A spectacular apple or cherry tree and another beside it. Amazing, these are.

  This bud was buried pretty deep. Karen spotted the dark pink but I could not see it for quite a while. Color just does not impinge on me :-)

Then looking up towards the sky, you need ot add positive compensation to get the blossoms to not be silhouettes.

And down again.

A couple of magnificent Magnolia blossoms. What it must be like to be in the south in the spring! These two are, I believe in the Arboretum.

 

And then we broke out onto the road and crossed a small bridge over the O-Train tunnel. I’d forgotten we even have such a thing :-)   What amazing timing to actually see one coming.

As we approached Dow’s Lake pavilion, we saw a mated pair of Mallard Ducks performing what appeared to be a synchronized swim :-)

Once inside the pavilion, we sat at the window overlooking the lake in a restaurant called Malone’s. Nice place. Gorgeous views. I loved shooting the boats at dock on the calm lake.

 

 

After dinner, we wandered along the canal. The tulip festival is a little hard to miss.

Sadly, the tulips got confused by the extremely warm weather we had a month ago, so many of the beds are already done with weeks left in the festival. Such is life I suppose.

I shot this one from across the street.

And later, we crossed the street and were next to the beds. Many were still in full bloom, but this may be the last week where full beds can be seen.

  

It’s past 8pm now and the sun is down. We’re on the last dregs of light, so this is becoming a real test of the F80EXR. The exposure of this next one is 800 ISO at f/5.6 and 1/20s. I am shooting at –2/3EV in order to avoid blowing highlights as many of the tulips are very bright colored. What some may not know is that late evening skies and cloudy skies create huge expanses of light that can still cause highlights to go over. The camera is still trying to go for mid-grey.

Getting groups is enjoyable. I continue to try for that elusive amazing shot that just grabs you.

 

It’s very difficult with tulips when they are planted fairly far apart. Too much dirt showing.

By the way, we’re at 1600 ISO now, and I am running Topaz Denoise 4 on most of these images. It’s Intellinoise setup seems to be pretty good.

White is very challenging because you really want to get a nice graduated contrast in a very small part of the spectrum. I usually play with a curve that looks like this to try to drag out some texture in whites:

Leave the middle of the curve alone and later you can use another curve or even levels to pull up the mid tones a bit.

The we saw these totally weird yellow ones.

 

That last shot was at 400 ISO because it was out in the open a bit more, and of course the sea of yellow is very reflective.

As we approached numerous beds strung out in a row, I decided to try for some of those funky shots where there are seams in the image. Like flags, I suppose.

From a low angle:

Looks very different from a higher angle:

I much prefer the lower angle as there is less space between the colored flowers.

Karen helped me see some of these shots as her color sense functions much better than mine.

   

Another funky tulip …

A classic shot of Karen in the tulip beds. It’s quite dark by now (for the camera, which does not have exponential response curves,) so the exposure is a little long and there is a bit of blur.

I must always remember to shoot many images of people to get one sharp one when shutter speeds are longer. Most don’t like to sit still for more than one or two shots, but it’s the only way.

Some of the colors are pretty amazing.

 

This bed impressed the heck out of both of us.

And finally, we arrive back at the pavilion.

 

And when I arrived home later, I found that the mailbox had begun blooming …

D300 70-300VR Tamron 1.4x Shoots Saturn

As many know by now, I have a thing for shooting the night sky. I just love getting images of the heavens. I think the night sky is unquestionably the most beautiful and awe inspiring sight visible from this planet.

I shot Saturn a while ago but made a right mess of it. Pretty ugly images overall.

Tonight I got the bug again and thought I’d have another go. I looked up some images and decided to start from their exposures. I chose the D300 with 70-300VR, since that is 450mm effective and the longest combo I have, and I decided to be a bit conservative and use the 1.4x teleconverter from Tamron instead of the Kenko 2x. There is no question that images from the 1.4x are far superior to images from the 2x. Check any web site where it has been tested. They all agree.

So … I used a tripod with only two sections extended so it was extremely solid. I shot the camera with mirror up, allowing the timer to expire each time and self release after 30 seconds. This gave me rock steady images. And I got one image that I am extremely pleased with.

I will admit that I have seen many better images of Saturn. But this was shot in my back yard with a consumer zoom on a prosumer dSLR.

 D300, 70-300VR, Tamron 1.4x, f/16, 8/10s, 400ISO

 

Now, for comparison purposes, how does Saturn actually look this year? Well, just about exactly how I shot it, as you can see in this image:

Click on that image to go to the web site that houses it. Anyway, you can see that we are pretty close to edge on right now, which lends the image above some credence. How cool :-)

Should You Process Your Images?

I’ve seen debates rage over the purity of images out of camera. “I want to get it right in the camera!” is the rally cry of the righteous. Yet they are missing a very important point.

In order to create really compelling images, you need all the data intact. All of it. You can’t risk blowing highlights and blocking shadows by asking the camera to hammer out the final product with all the saturation and contrast you desire for that “pop” that gives an image impact. You end up playing with razor thin margins for error and crossing the line all too often.

Once a highlight is blown or a shadow is blocked, there is no data left to process! So what do you do?

The answer, in my opinion, is to separate the concerns. The job at capture time is to fill the histogram with real data without losing any. No blown highlights and no blocked shadows. Let me illustrate with a few graphs:

Blocked shadows are obvious in any histogram. Everything bunches up to the left hand side and there is no space at all between the end of the histogram and the end of the data. Put another way, it does not cross x=0 at or below y=0. It crosses above. That’s bad. You can see images like this all the time, with blackness where there should be leaves in shadow. It’s pretty ugly in my opinion. The main cause is severe underexposure or very strong tone curves.

Blown highlights are the same on the right side of the histogram. Basically the data goes slamming into the end of the histogram and a bunch disappears. You see large white patches with no detail at all. Some cameras play tricks and fill in light grey, but that just makes for grey patches with no detail. 245,245,245 in a large section is actually uglier in my opinion than 255,255,255 … at least the latter is honest :-)  The cause is the same as blocked shadows, although inverted … severe overexposure *of the highlights* … the rest might look fine. Harsh tone curves do a lot of damage.

This is what we want to see. A histogram with all the data *inside* the curve. The image is a little flat-looking, but that’s ok. I always process my images, so I can apply curves to add more pop.

So let’s look at an image as an example. You will see what I mean, I am sure.

This is from that series I posted yesterday … some lovely garden shots form the F80EXR. My usual settings, which are designed to grab a great capture under most circumstances.

 

This image is not horrible, but I find it rather dull. The color is washed out, there is only a small but of the 3D look to the tulip itself and the background is a mess and totally distracting. All in all, a nice flower but a rotten picture.

Its histogram, however, is pretty good.

There is no problem with the highlights, perhaps 1/3 stop underexposed (and I am fine with that) … note that the exposure was set at –1EV compensation, so as I have said before, don’t be afraid to chimp and set more negative compensation where you are getting problems. The yellow tulip makes up a small percentage of the frame, so I kept reducing exposure until the frame was more properly exposed, bringing the tulip in line as well.

I could have metered the tulip with spot metering and set +1ev compensation … that would have put the tulip at about the right part of the zone system. Works either way, the point is to check and adjust to make sure you get a great capture!

I took this image and performed rather a lot of processing on it. Of course, that’s only a few minites with my work flow. I used ACR6, then CS5. Some exposure and contrast work, some content-aware fill to fix the background. Some sharpening. Some local contrast. The usual.

This is what I cam up with.

Is that sufficient pop?

The histogram now shows more blocked shadows, which is perfectly acceptable because I chose that look.

 

And there you have it. One more thing … just to amuse you :-)

Cisco / Linksys 400N Router - Setup Matters

Just a quick note to mention that routers are not always very fast or reliable on their default settings. I have been having trouble for weeks with the new Cisco (Linksys) 400N router I got a while ago. And it got worse and worse until it simply stopped behaving.

I checked on the Internet for issues with this router and found a couple of people who suggested different settings from the defaults. But they suggested almost exactly the *same* set of different settings. This of course bodes very well.

So after a bit of agony in trying to get the router to take the new settings (hint, if Windows 7 asks you if you would like to upgrade the new router with the settings from your computer, and if you are finding it difficult to otherwise talk to your router after a factory reset, just say yes) I ran a speed test on my favorite test site, http://speedtest.net.

I am paying for 18mbps down and 1mbps up, and I cannot say that I find these numbers disappointing.

So don’t be afraid to use better settings for your router, assuming of course you trust the source.

Here are the settings that I used:

Remember to click on Save Settings for each page.

For 2.4 GHZ

• Wireless Network mode should be mixed
• Provide a unique name in the Wireless Network Name (SSID) box in order to differentiate your network from your neighbors’ networks
• Set the Radio Band to Wide-40MHz and change the Wide channel to 9 and Standard Channel to 11-2.462GHz
• Wireless SSID broadcast should be Enabled

For 5 GHz

• Wireless Network mode should be mixed
• Provide a unique name in the Wireless Network Name (SSID) box in order to differentiate your network from your neighbors’ networks (note, I also provided a name slightly different from the 2.4ghz network so it was easily distinguishable)
• Set the Radio Band to Wide-40MHz and change the Wide channel to159 and Standard Channel to 161-5.805GHz

For Wireless Security

• Click on the Sub tab under Wireless > Wireless Security
• Change the Wireless security mode to WPA, For Encryption, select TKIP
• For Passphrase input your desired WPA Key. For example – MySecretKey - this will serve as your network key whenever you connect to your wireless network. Do NOT give this key to anyone. NOTE : Passphrase should be more that 8 characters

In Advanced Wireless Settings

• Change the Beacon Interval to 75 (I used 50)
• Change the Fragmentation Threshold to 2304
• Change the RTS Threshold to 2307 (I used 2304)

Now see if you can locate your Wireless Network and attempt to connect

F80EXR – Garden Delights

The F80EXR was sitting there in tears because I carried the F70EXR when I went out on Friday night. Home alone with nothing to do but stew :-)

So I took it out for some garden shots today while there is still something to shoot. I should have shot velvia, since the light was quite soft from the clouds. But I didn’t … remember that I like captures that have flat tone curves so that I can do what I like during post processing.

Well, I was quite impressed by what the F80EXR returned to me. Here they are in no specific order.

  

 

Yessir, the F80EXR shoots nicely in the garden. I shot all of these at 300mm in macro mode. These are crops of 4:3 images to fit 3:2 (thought I’d try that again) and they are all full width. So this is exactly what you would see shooting at 300mm in macro mode. Excellent camera for shooting in tight quarters. Can’t quite do what the HS10 can do with its 720mm zoom, but then the HS10 can’t quite fit in a pocket :-)