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Picture of the Day (Dial-up internet users enter at own risk!)

Columbia River near Entiat, WA

Fall colors in the late afternoon on the desert side of the Cascade Mountains.

Also trying out a new piece of software.

Lake%20Entiat1.jpg
 
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Fall colors in the late afternoon on the desert side of the Cascade Mountains.
Also trying out a new piece of software.

I have Photomatix, it's interesting to combine three bracketed exposures and see what happens. Depending on the lighting you can get HDR and just a colorful saturated pic. that one looks pretty good (realistic )
 
its a watermark Theresa...its put there to keep people from copying the photo for their own use etc.
 
This may be a dumb question but why does the picture have the word Photomatix in the mountains?
I have a trial version of the software. The trial version puts the watermark on the photo. If I decide to buy the software, I'll receive a license key that will deactivate the watermarking function.
 
I have Photomatix, it's interesting to combine three bracketed exposures and see what happens. Depending on the lighting you can get HDR and just a colorful saturated pic. that one looks pretty good (realistic )

I thought it came out very nicely, particularly for a first try. I was very pleased with Photomatix. When I merged the exposures it did a good job of filling in the tonal ranges, plus it corrected a lot chromatic aberrations that I normally have to deal with by hand. That chromatic aberration correction by itself makes the program valuable.

I saved the HDR merge as a 16-bit .TIFF file, which I then opened in PaintShop Pro. In PaintShop I did noise reduction, some mild clarification, and a curves adjustment (the Photomatix output was too dark).

This looks like a winner piece of software.
 
Anchorage Memorial Cemetery

Still playing with the new software. Here's the version of the photo I posted previously:

092608%20%28001-HDR%29.JPG


And here's the same thing with the Photomatix software:

080926%20%28001-HDR%29-2.jpg


For the technically-inclined. Both photos are High Dynamic Range merges of the same three layers. The first was done with the HDR function in PaintShopPro. The second is with the Photomatix HDR package. The second photo also took me one-fourth as long to process as the first photo.

I think I like the Photomatix package a lot.
 
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Steve the photos look wonderful. I envy your for your talent and patience in making the most out of your photos. My head's gonna explode from working with my polar bear photos in PS3!
 
Steve the photos look wonderful. I envy your for your talent and patience in making the most out of your photos. My head's gonna explode from working with my polar bear photos in PS3!

Yvonne - at the risk of stuffing more info in your head ... If this is too much just make a note of it for future reference.

One of the things that you become aware of as you start working with photographs is that eyes and cameras are very different. The eye is a very complex organ and from the receptors in the eye to the neurons in the brain that process the information from the eye there is a lot that happens to interpret the information. In contrast, the photosensor in a digital camera is very dumb. It simply records what is transmitted to it from the camera lens, recording red, green, and blue in tonal values ranging from 0 to 255.

Now, one of the big ways that the eye differs from a camera is in the ability to differentiate among shades of dark and shades of light. When we look at a scene that has high contrast - for example a stream flowing in the bottom of a deep shadowed canyon with snow-capped mountains towering overhead - the human eye adjusts to the scene by increasing the sensitivity of the light receptors in the retina that are focused on the dark shadowed areas and decreasing the senstivity of receptors that are receiving information from the snow on the mountains.

A camera is dumb. It can't make those adjustments. So in a high contrast scene if you adjust the camera to catch the details in the snow and the bright sky, the shadows in the canyon turn completely black. But if you set the camera exposure to pick up the details of the rocks, trees, and water in the canyon then the snow and the sky turn pure white.

In photography the solution is HDR processing. HDR stands for high dynamic range. In a setting such as I described, the photographer takes a series of pictures of the same scene, with the set of exposures bracketing the dynamicn range from the bright sun and snow to the dark canyons. The software then merges those, making the sorts of adjustments that the human eye naturally makes.

Because the most intriguing natural photos generally involve high dynamic range, the ability to do HDR processing is critical if you want to really create pictures that capture that same sense of Aha!!! that caused you to grab your camera and shoot that picture. If you're like me, you've gotten tired of getting prints back that you look at and feel disappointed because they just don't do justice to what you were looking at at the time. That's what impelled me to start to investigating how I could show in my photos what I was trying to capture in the first place.

If you're feeling overwhelmed right now, don't worry about HDR. Just know that it exists and that it's a way of working with photos to improve your ability to represent bright brights and dark darks. Then when you're ready to move to the next level, you will have an idea of where to start.
 
Kristin - I love the waterfall picture, but I especially like the picture of the tree and the marsh. Often when I consider what level I would like to advance to in my photography skills, I usually conclude that I should aspire to be as good as Kristin.

++++

BTW - do you submit any of your photos to Panoramio?
 
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I'm having fun.

Chulitna River, Denali State Park


Chulitna River and the Alaska Range, not far from Denali.

092708%20%28263-265%29.jpg
 
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Kristin - I love the waterfall picture, but I especially like the picture of the tree and the marsh. Often when I consider what level I would like to advance to in my photography skills, I usually conclude that I should aspire to be as good as Kristin.

++++

BTW - do you submit any of your photos to Panoramio?

Steve,

You're making me blush! :eek: Thanks so much for the compliment, but your photographs are fantastic... That one from Denali is gorgeous, love the colors. So you bought Photomatix? Did you get the 15% discount? (If not, you should contact them and ask them to apply it retroactively.)

No, I don't submit my photos anywhere. I've never even heard of Panoramio. What's it about?
 
Jack River, Cantwell, Alaska

This one came out pretty good.

092708%20%28499-501%29.jpg
 
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No, I don't submit my photos anywhere. I've never even heard of Panoramio. What's it about?

You upload your photos at Panoramio, and you can put a pin in a map for where the picture was taken. Then they will show up in Google Earth.
 
Steve & Kristin . . . thanks for sharing your knowledge, talent and wonderful photos! I am truly envious and will some day really delve deeper into my photographer's mindset and go to the next level with my interests.

Until then, I'll return the thread back to our regularly scheduled programming!
 
Chugach Mountains near Homer, Alaska

092708%20%28028HDR%29.jpg


Even my darkest bracket on this photo was overexposed for the clouds, so the clouds blew out to pure white.
 
Wow, geo, the only place I've seen orchids that perfect is the Boston spring flower show. Very nice!

Sadly, the organization that runs our show announced a few weeks ago that they have no funding so this year's is cancelled. My sisters and I have continued our Mom's tradition of going out to the show and dinner for 24 years - our cold damp miserable March won't be the same without it.

Susan

DW and I have the blackest thumbs when it comes to houseplants. Our relatives continue to give us houseplants as gifts and we continue to destroy them thru neglect, too much care, etc. It just does not work for us EXCEPT this orchid that DW's niece gave to us this past spring. DW took this shot just last week and emailed it to niece to prove we hadn't inadvertently destroyed it yet. It sits on window ledge in bathroom on south side of house.:)
 
Oh wow, I am jealous as all get out of those bird shots! Green, green, green!

My Christmas list has one thing on it - a DSLR camera. Anybody want to make suggestions or recommendations for cameras, accessories, lenses, etc??

I love most everything about my Sony Cybershot 7.2 but I need something better for amateur birdwatching and night shots. My favorite accessory is the battery charger and extra batteries; my least favorite is the adapter that's necessary to use lenses.

Surely some of you can be stand-ins for Santa's elves? :wave:
 
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