I have a book available!

I have two exhibitions at present.

1) Artists Association of Nantucket’s Joyce & Seward Johnson’s Gallery

2) Nantucket Memorial Airport – Photographer’s Alliance of Nantucket’s display

With my horn sufficiently tooted, here’s your chance to see actual prints.

Here are two photos shown three ways: straight out of camera, fused exposures, HDR with tone mapping. The originals (SOOC) are the captures with the best average exposure for the scene. The fused exposure version was made taking three exposures of the same scene, and using Photomatix to merge the exposures, without any further adjustments. Then taking the merged result into Photoshop and using the curves tool to heighten the contrast. The third version is my standard HDR merge using Photomatix’s tonemapping. It’s always a surprise to see what results from the tonemapping. Often the image is amazing, but sometimes it’s a little over the top. I’m experimenting with the Exposure Fusion feature to see if I like the more subtle images you can make with it. What do you think?

SOOC

EF

HDR

SOOC

EF

HDR

Monday I got my new camera. Let’s call it Bill. It’s a Nikon D700. It’s more camera than a hobbyist deserves, but it’s sweet. You hear about the middle-age guy, going through a life crisis, purchasing a Porsche. This is my Porsche.

I’ve only made it halfway through the manual. There are still buttons that I do not know how to use. But my initial impression, using only a 50mm prime lens, is that this camera is amazing. The pics look great, right out of the camera.

Here are a few samples:

Had the pleasure of helping Amy horsesit Dr. Suzanne Duncan’s two horses, the mare Grace, and her new foal Liberty Belle. I took a few pictures of them, but I wasn’t satisfied with how they came out. Enter Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, and Photomatix Pro.

Here is the final product (click to see it bigger):

But this is what it looked like straight out of the camera:

I used Lightroom and Photoshop to convert the Raw file to a 16-bit TIFF file, sharpen it slightly, and adjust the contrast. This represents my usual workflow with a Raw file out of the camera. This made it look like this:

I then used Lightroom to create five separate versions of the picture, adjusting the exposure up and down 2 stops:

I exported these five files into Photomatix Pro and used this to tonemap the picture into an high dynamic range or HDR image:

This looked interesting, but I wasn’t satisfied with how the sky looked. So I open this back up in Photoshop, applied a gradual mask to the background and used a Color EFx Pro filter to add the illusion of fog to the sky, resulting in the final picture you see above.

Sounds like a lot of work to salvage what is still a mediocre image, but it was a fun exercise in creativity.

I am judging a monthly photo contest on an online photography forum. The theme is Summertime. I have to pick the winners from the following photos, according to the technical and creative aspects of the photographs, in accordance with the theme. Anyone want to help? Tell me in the comments section which ones work for you:

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Playing around with Photoshop to see if I can create a faked Tilt-Shift miniature.

Here’s the before:

Here’s the after:

I need some practice, but it’s a fun effect.

Back in May, for Jack’s birthday, we got him a Panasonic DMC-TS1 compact digital camera. Any excuse to get a new camera in the house is good for me. I chose this camera because it is supposed to be tough. Impact resistant. And water resistant to 10 feet. This afternoon we took it to the beach, and I put it to test.

Diving in to the waves, snapping pictures while body surfing, not worrying about the water…made me realize that Panasonic has produced a real winner with the Lumix TS1. Mistreat it and it’ll still turn in better photos than many other digital cameras on the market. 12 MP. Movies. Great 28-120 mm lens. Sharp images without worry about beach abuse. Love it!