bracketing – CanonBlogger

How I shot Lightning!

August 12, 2009 Jason6 Comments

Today the post is going to revolve more around a set of photos I took the other day – you see while en route back to the house, I noticed that the clouds were passing over the mountains and the sun was starting to set. It had the makings for a really nice sunset. Never one to turn away the opportunity to capture a sunset, I hurried home and gathered my gear, and took off to my favorite spot near the house for landscape work.

Well, the clouds and the sun didn’t really cooperate so I gave up on that and starting fiddling around with some HDR kinds of things. I saw a traffic light nearby and there wasn’t much traffic so tried to time some bracketed exposures (my shutter speed was getting near 30 seconds on the top end of the bracket). Some possibilities developed, but nothing too earth shattering, and I was starting to feel a few drops of rain, so I packed up to head back over to the house – about 2 miles away.

As I was coming back to the house, the clouds that evaded me on the mountainous horizon were ominously hanging over the cityline of Denver (another scene I’d been meaning to shoot) and flashes of lightning were coursing through the clouds, with some pretty regular spikes coming down. All of this was about 30 miles away, and heading away from me so i was feeling pretty safe except for the possibility of some raindrops now and then.

So, I found a nook by the open range, set up the camera on my trusty tripod, and tried to recall things I’d read about how to shoot lightning. Apparently some of it stuck, because I came away with this:

So, how did I do this? I kept four key things in mind:

I used my tripod! Stability was key because every single exposure was no less than 15 seconds! When shooting lightning, you want to open the shutter for a longer time to increase your odds of catching it. Because it was flashing so regularly I eventually dropped my shutter to 15 seconds and still managed 6 or 7 really good captures.
Keep the noise Down – I dropped my ISO to 100 for all shots and made sure long exposure noise reduction was turned on in camera. Sure it took twice as long to capture each image, but in the long run it was worth it because there was much less noise to process on the back end.
Don’t touch the camera! I set the camera to bracket exposures and put it on a two-second delay. So, by the time the camera shutter opened I was no longer touching it, and then the second and third shots fired automatically.
I made sure I was in a sweet spot of my lens. Part of this is knowing your gear – I was shooting the 10-22mm (wide angle) from Canon, and know that when it goes below f4 it can get fuzzy. So, I was at f11 for most of my shots. Great depth of field and everything is sharp!

Well, a fifth one was post-processing. After a few rather unpleasant attempts to process as HDR images, I enlisted the aide of friend-of-the-blog Terry Reinert, who you know from our podcast talk a short time ago. Terry is wicked smart (he’s an engineer) and knows the heck out of HDR. I asked him what I was doing wrong (because the clouds were getting blotches scattered through them and generally looking poorly). He gave some insights, what he was finding yielded better results and sent me a low res sample via email. I liked the path he took, but the colors were not quite where I remembered them from Sunday, so dove in again with the new-found knowledge. I tried a few quick variations on his technique, but in the interests of time, just did a short version to post here. Once I get my final edit done (probably this weekend, I will likely be adding the image to my portfolio, so will also post that here as well. For now though, I wanted to share the back story and a quick version of one processed version that I found appealing. I am not crazy about the black across the bottom, but since my time was limited here, I’ll likely be addressing that this weekend when I have more time. For now though, the quick version and a panorama crop looked kinda cool!

Thanks go out to Terry for giving a hand. In our discussion he also mentioned possibly doing a tutorial on blending using the images, so keep your eyes on Terry’s blog (Where Art and Engineering Collide) as I may be a featured artist! (How cool would that be?) ETA: On posting the link to his blog, I see he’s already put his tutorial together – thanks Terry! 🙂

In other blog/photo news, as you all know from yesterday, the OnOne Giveaway concluded with Pete Petersheim being the big winner. The new contest is underway though, with a new thread up at the Learning Digital Photography group on Flickr, so be sure to stop in there and share your images in the new thread (the theme this go around is “Fun” since the price is a Wacom Bamboo Fun!) Good luck to everyone and don’t forget to have some fun!

Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

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A video short on HDR and bracketing

May 28, 2009 Jason4 Comments

One of the more popular posts here on the blog has been two that consisted of explanations on how to bracket multiple exposures in camera in order to capture a wider range of exposure values than is typically permitted in a single frame. Typically, these various exposures are then seamed together in some editor like Photoshop, Photomatix or other that is available to produce an effect called HDR – high dynamic range. You can get some impressive results with various techniques that appeal to different subjective perspectives.

Here at the blog though, rather than take sides on such post processing methods, it’s more fun to show people how to do things, and then let you all take your own liberties either with the approach or with your processing afterward, or both to get results that appeal to you! With that in mind, the feedback I’ve received from the previous discussions included a large number of people that asked for visuals of the process (I guess they are all visual learners).

Well, rather than take several dozens of images showing all the various settings and then explaining how I got toeach, a video seemed a more appropriate approach. So, here’s the video short for those of you that requested visual aids. It’s not the most professional but you should be able to get the gist.

This would also be a good time to remind everyone that we are in the dwindling days of the Adobe Lightroom contest. You can win your own free copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, courtesy of the folks at Adobe, simply by entering images you’ve taken in May over at the LDP Flickr thread. Limit two images per person, but there’s still room for many more entries (no limit on the number of PEOPLE that can participate!) just join the group for free and post your images. Good luck to all and may the best photo win! (Final results will be posted in June – I’l send my top ten picks back to Tom Hogarty for final judging when he’ll pick the winner!)

That’s it for today – I should have the podcast up tomorrow, but as always, no promises as my schedule has been fluctuating at work lately. Happy shooting, and I will be back with more news, information, insights, tips and tricks tomorrow, whether in written or audio form. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

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Setting bracketing exposures – shutter priority

March 4, 2009 Jason14 Comments

As promised yesterday, today I will be talking about bracketing your exposures based on shutter priority. After a couple comments yesterday that it seemed unusual to bracket on aperture rather than shutter speed, I felt that in this companion post I should acknowledge that, it is. The reason for the post? One of the downsides I mentioned is that your depth of field will change considerably from a wide open setting to that of, say, f22. That can also be an upside though because as you merge bracketed exposures into an HDR image, you can also add depth of field if you make the adjustments in aperture priority over shutter priority.

Additionally, I led off with aperture priority because it’s not the norm, and as most readers will know – I try to approach things from a new perspective when possible. Finally, as I followed up with in the comments section, the simple fact of the matter was that I could not remember whether 250 or 200 was the absolute middle point for shutter speeds (this is the risk of adding gray above the brain, rather than to the brain! *grin*). So, I led off with the post where I knew the numbers rote! 🙂

So, in the interests of full disclosure, shutter speed is a more common way to go when making bracketed exposures. After verifying my numbers in camera, here’s how it breaks down using shutter speed to bracket multiple times:

fstopshutter

I also realized that I did not give the step-by-step yesterday, so here’s the process I would follow:

First, meter the scene, set your camera to ISO 100 and exposure priority and adjust to 1/250th of a second. Check where your f-stop is.
Second, switch to manual, and adjust all settings to match that metering.
Third, adjust the shutter speed down to 1/30th of a second, and fire off 3 exposures and the camera will bracket over and under one stop.
Fourth, adjust the shutter speed up to 1/250th of a second, and fire off a second set of three exposures (the camera will bracket over and under one stop).
Finally, adjust the shutter speed up to 1/2000th of a second and fire off your last set of three exposures.

Voila! You now have 9 exposures to merge together for a bracketed workup to take advantage of a high dynamic range, or for exposure blending, as desired. Of course the same rules from yesterday also apply:

Be shooting on a tripod
Be using a remote release (or timer)
Be using mirror lockup
All other settings remain constant
and that lighting conditions aren’t changing appreciably
You are set to manual focus
Your lens is set to its hyperfocal distance

Any final thoughts to share on how to bracket exposures? Anything I missed or additional tips to share? Feel free to sound off in the comments section! In the meantime, Happy Shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!