For all of these, I used my well used 17-40mm f/4L lens and a ND400 filter to get that nice smooth water look.

‘Til next time folks!

If you like these, you might be interested in learning about some of the techniques which I used:

• Multiple exposure blending
• How to estimate times for long exposures
• Enhancing colours in Photoshop

This is a stitched panorama, make up from 9 bracketed vertical frames (27 frames in total). I shot this using a 5D Mark II, 50mm f1.4 lens with 3 stop ND grad filter mounted, rotated on a panoramic head.

Later on as the sun went down, I managed to capture this classic shot of the jetty. I used my favourite exposure blending technique for this, the shot is a composite of two images. I used a 17-40mm f/4L on the wide end with a ND400 filter attached, exposure around 2 minutes from memory.

Night photography generally requires very long exposures, often several minutes at a time. To get the best image quality, we need to keep the ISO as low as possible to keep our noise levels down to acceptable levels and also to minimize the occurrence of hot pixels and sometime banding artifacts.

Now most people probably will wild guess exposures at night time and just adjust the camera settings to suit. Unfortunately since the exposures are so long, a lot of time can be spent making “dud exposures” that might not turn out just because you guess the wrong exposure time.

Here is what I do, a lot of modern DSLRs can be set up to ISO 6400 and higher, we’re going to use this to our advantage. Lets say we want to take our images at ISO 100 @ f/11 but we’re not sure what shutter speed to use. But we don’t really want to be guessing 2mins? 4 mins? 8mins and wasting our time. We set everything up and then switch our ISO to 6400. Going from ISO 100 to 6400 is equivalent to increasing our sensor sensitivity by 64 times, and the exposure time (shutter speed) can be reduced by also 64 times. This is very close to 60x. But guess what, there are 60 seconds in a minute! What this means is:

• 1 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 1 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• 2 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 2 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• 8 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 8 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• 30 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 30 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• and so forth…

While at ISO 6400, try a few different shutter speeds until you find what you’re after (basically by trial and error), and you’ll only be doing several second exposures so you won’t be wasting any previous time. Then once you find the shutter speed(s) you are after to give you the result you want, switch back to ISO 100 and exposure the same time but in minutes instead of seconds.

This is just not handy solely for night photos, it works great if you are using dark filters such as ND400 10-stop filters. You can use this technique to quickly judge long exposures also, and sometimes use it for composition when everything is so dark even Live View is no help (and you don’t want to unscrew/screw the filter all the time).

Some people may not have cameras that go up to ISO6400, that’s okay, you just need to make some quick calculations, but it won’t be as easy as a simple seconds-to-minute translation. So lets say your camera is ISO1600 max, then you can use ISO 1600 the same way but your translation table would be 4s@ISO1600 = 1m@ISO100, 16s@ISO1600 = 4m@ISO100 etc. Note the division of 4x to compensate for the 4x difference in sensitivity from ISO 6400 to ISO1600.

‘Til next time.

Runs on: Windows, Mac, Linux (requires Adobe AIR)

This is a great program for landscape photographers. Have you been ever out on a landscape photo shoot and wanted to know where exactly the sun and moon would rise and set. This program written by Stephen Trainor does just that. You get an embedded Google Maps layout on the left where you can find the location of your choice, select the date you’re after and it will let you know what time and angles the sun (and moon) will rise and fall at.

And if you have ever found that great location and the sun is in the wrong spot, you can look forward into the future and know exactly what time of the year is the best time to photograph that location.

If you have thought about “I wonder what time of year the sun would be in that direction”, now you can find out!

Go to TPE’s web site

WXTide32

Even though this program’s last release is back in 2007. It’s still considered a pretty powerful piece of software, and almost essential to landscape photographers. The program is used to predict tide movements. You can find tide information out from the news or from various web sites etc, but this being a standalone application, will let you see tide info offline, right on your computer. Just set your location of choice, and it can be used to print things such as tide charts with oscillating wave display, tide calenders and much more.

It even shows the sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset and the moon phase for any time from 1970 to 2037. The tide graph (shown below) shows handy it is to see what tide phase sunrise or sunset coincides with.

Go to wxtide32 web site

Photojunction

Runs on Windows, Mac

This piece of software is mainly for professionals who have a product line, and need a tool to design and manage albums and books. Photojunction use to be available only at a cost for its usage license, but recently they have teamed up with a few companies and have released the software for free usage.

It works very well, and is used by many photographers worldwide for designing wedding albums, portrait books, digital magazine style albums, and a whole lot more.

It can integrate with your local lab and publishers if they support it.

Visit Photojunction’s web site

XnView

Works on PC, Mac, Linux.

A very neat little program packed with features. It can load and display almost every known image format. It is a good “Image Management” tool if you can not afford some of the alternative commercial products (e.g Photo Mechanic, ACDSee).

Visit XnView web site.

Alternatives: ACDSee (commercial product, though somewhat a lot faster).

IrfanView

Runs on Windows.

This is a free image viewer. If you’re still using the default photo viewer in Windows, then you need to download and install this. Just simple quick image viewing.

Visit IrfanView web site.

exiftool

Runs on almost anything (based on Perl). Windows and Mac executables available.

Very handy command line too for bulk editing EXIF and IPTC data. For advanced users only! It requires using a command line, but its a great tool if you want to do batch commands such as:

• stripping EXIF data, or only certain parts of it.
• adding IPTC data to lots of photos (e.g adding copyright notices)

I might even do a tutorial on this later, on how to use exiftool to batch edit EXIF/IPTC data.

Visit exiftool’s web site.

Hugin

Runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD.

This is a  great open source free piece software for stitching multiple images together to make a panorama.

The best and most powerful stitching software available in my opinion is PTGui Pro. Although this isn’t as good as PTGui, it is up there with the best of them, and all things considering it is free, well worth a try.

Later versions of Adobe Photoshop can also stitch photos using its Photo Merge tool. However it isn’t as advanced as Hugin or PTGui it doesn’t give you the fine control over individual control points and distortion correction. Hugin easily beats Photoshop in my opinion.

Visit Hugin web site.

Alternative: PTGui (commercial).

Enfuse

Works on Windows, Mac, Linux.

I use Enfuse a lot, especially on stitched panoramas where I have bracketed shots. Where I would normally use a tone mapped HDR processing method, I now prefer to use this tool as I feel it gives me better look results.

There are many GUI (graphical user interface) front ends if you don’t want to mess around on a command line.

Visit Enfuse web site at panotools.org

Alternatives: Nothing any exists, its a very unique technique. Various HDR  tone mapping could be considered an alternative, but it just ain’t the same.

Here are some panoramas from the Grampians National Park, it is lovely area in north west Victoria. The first one is a sunrise at Baroka Lookout, and the second one a sunset at Reid’s Lookout. Both of these are stitched from a number of vertical frames with a 50mm lens.

Over at Brighton Beach, which is a along the bay just south of Melbourne, I caught a sunset, making this stitched panorama. It is almost a 270 degrees view, made up of multiple vertical frames with a an ultra wide 17-40mm f/4L lens (Canon), shot on the wide 17mm end.

At Clifton Springs, is a nice set of old piers which is a must-see for photographers in the area:

We also hit the Great Ocean Road, great sights to see there. This is Smyth’s Creek, its just off the road itself, you’ll miss it if you don’t look carefully.

So many photos and still not enough time to go through them all yet, so I might post more of them later

I’ve been a little quite on the blog front lately, probably just been a little busy. But I’m hoping to post a lot more stuff in the next few weeks. Some more tutorials, and behind the scenes articles, and not just posting my favourite work!

I have to thank Geoff for organising it and Brett for the use of his personal studio for this event.

Here are some of my favourite images from the day. The models were and make up artists were great and really contributed to the look of many of these, and top effort by them. It was a hot sweltering afternoon in the heat (no aircon in the studio), though you wouldn’t be able tell from the photos.

Graeme (below) is an avid sports and wedding photographer himself, but decided he would do some modelling for us today. This shot below was lit a rim light on either side and behind him (speedlights). The glancing light works great to emphasise muscle tone in men.

We have Rachel below (makeup by Bombshell Make Up & Beauty), who worked great with Graeme nicely. We used a floor fan close to them to give it the wind-swept hair look. Rim lighting was used on each of these and all were key lit with a powered monobloc with a large softbox.

Caitlan worked the camera nicely with several outfits, the “gangster look” turned out well. This, we used the same rim lighting set up, but with a gridded beauty dish key light.

Here is another one of the models, Myka. Doesn’t the make up look great on her? Make up was done by Glen Evans.

Sarah had a gothic make up theme on, and I went with the dark and eerie look here:

‘Til next time…

All of these except for the last were shot with my favourite filter, the ND400! The last panoramic image is a stitched image made up of 6 vertical hand held frames.

Here is my favorite shot from the evening:

This photo was made from blending two exposure together. A technique I blogged about previously in my tutorials section. It also had some colour adjustments performed in CIELAB mode, my favourite method of colour adjustment. The long movement in the clouds is due to the long exposure, of around 90 seconds while using my ND400 filter.

I love days like this when nature puts on a great show for us photographers.

The straight out of camera image below is what we will be working with today. It is an image of Bronte Baths in Sydney, NSW Australia.

Trying out Adobe Lightroom

Lets check out our image in Lightroom. The skies are little overexposed, but not too overexposed, as we still have enough detail in the RAW file to pull back. We use Lightroom’s gradient adjustments to reduce the exposure (darken) of the sky to obtain a bit more detail in them.

Now we need to adjust the white balance, to something a little more suitable and representative of what it really was that evening. I remember the skies were orange-red in colour, and the water was very deep green-blue in colour, but the in-camera auto white balance is lying! So we need to make an adjustment.

Lets try and get the skies right. I find it really helpful to make the image really vibrant (using the vibrancy adjuetment), as it enhances all the colours, making the white balance much more sensitive. Once you find the write white balance, you can pull back your vibrancy.

The skies here now look close to what it really was. But the water is now the wrong colour. So now we adjust the WB to 8719K and the water looks a lot better.

Lightroom’s Gradient Tools

But we have a problem, how do we do both of these adjustments, one to the sky, and one to the water or foreground. We look at Lightrooms gradient tools, which are very handy indeed.

We see can make gradient adjustments only to the following:

• exposure
• brightness
• contrast
• saturation
• clarity
• sharpness
• color filter

But we can’t do it with white balance! (you could do it with color filters i guess, but thats a little different all together). The solution to this is smart objects in Photoshop. Lets see how we can do this.

Open your image in Photoshop as a Smart Object.

Open in Photoshop

The little icon in the bottom right of the layer thumbnail shows that it is now opened as a smart object. Double clicking this will bring up the Adobe Camera Raw dialog box, which pretty much has all the adjustments available the same as on Lightroom.

We want to make 2 smart objects. As we want to make separate white balance adjustments (and maybe some other adjustments as well, as we see fit) to each of the copies.

We now make the desired white balance adjustments on each of the individual smart objects, one for the sky, and one for the foreground. You make any other adjustments you like as well, such as exposure etc. Don’t forget to pull that vibrancy slider back if you were trying out my previous white balance adjustment tip. For my image, I’m going to name my layers to something more description as well. I always like doing this.

Now that we have made the Camera RAW adjustments to the 2 smart objects, we apply a layer mask to the top layer so that only the skies layer adjustments show through in the sky section; while the foreground adjustments only apply fo the foreground. We can control how hard the transition is with how the define our layer mask, position, hard or soft transition, its your choice.

I apply a black to white gradient mask. The side that is black is the end which we will not see the skies adjustment, i.e it will show the foreground adjustment. Therefore the adjustment needs to be black towards the bottom, white to the top. Like so:

Now we see we have our graduated adjustment now. Now for a few other things I love about smart objects. We can also work in LAB colour mode non destructively. And we can now soft proof and show gamut warning. Unfortunately the gamut warning and soft proofing isn’t “live”. Here are some extra adjustments, and with gamut warning turned on (proofing to FujiFlex paper at one of my favourite printers).

We make a few little final adjustments, to get rid of the gamut clipping. Flatten the image, rasterise the smart objects and rotate the image a little to fix the crooked horizon.

So there you have it folks, perhaps it wasn’t the best image to do an example on, but its more of an excerise to show the advantages of using smart objects. A serious landscape would have a lot more work done it such as sharpening, dodging and burning, more careful color adjustments etc. But try it out.

When else would this be useful?

There are many situations where this type of graduated adjustment performed as smart objects could be useful. For example:

• Combined lighting situations, say with combined natural light and artificial lighting such as tungsten or fluorescent lighting. As long as athe lighting isn’t too far mixed together, say for example a light in a window, we can use custom white balancing for different portions of an image.

If you like this tutorial, you may also like to read:

• Photoshop Smart Objects for Photographers – Part 1, Soft Proofing and LAB Color Mode
• How to enhance colours in photographs with Photoshop
• Multiple Exposure Blending for Landscapes

This weekend, I met up with a few Flickr members for a sunrise shoot, at the secluded Susan Gilmore Beach. It was a nice morning, with clear skies though a few clouds would have made the images a bit more interesting. It was almost spot on at low tide, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it that low before, as I easily was able to walk there and back without wading through water!

Here are two of my favourite shots from the day.

On both of these images, I used my previously posted techniques for exposure blending and colour boosting.

The first image was around 20 minutes before the sun came up, and I used a ND8 (3 stop neutral density) filter, and the second image of the sun rising I used a ND400 filter, one of my favourite filters for landscape photography.