nikon girl, canon boy

I've been reading

I've been reading all night to figure out how to use my external flashes that I have, and all that i could figure out is that you want to measure the light that you have in the room and then stop 2 down. Which does not mean just to move two stops down from like f/4 to f/5; but it means to divided or multiply depending which why that you are going by 2. So i end up with f/4 to f/8, and then you adjust your shudder speed to relate. If you just move the f stop to f/8 then you would keep the same shutter speed, lets say 1/60. But then if you want to adjust and say go with a faster shutter speeded 1/125 then you need to bring down the f stop to f/5.6 to adjust on the scale. So i understand that part but my question is on the stobest's blog they don't tell me what to put my flashes on. They say to put i on manual but when I have it on manual it just has a much of different numbers going from 1/128 to 1/1 and then on the side it has a +/- .3, .7, and I have no idea what that means because that side does not explain it. So if anyone has any tips or answers I would be very thankful.

I just got!

The Battery Grip BG-E6, now i have no money, but my camera looks huge!

I know

I know this has nothing to do with art or anything but I was watching the movie 500 days of summer and i figure that his pretty much sums up my life with these pictures. I guess I made the screen caps so I guess i kind of made some art...?

Movies and real life

I like the whole idea of having these actors play out characters from their movies but no in costume. It is because of the actions that they are doing and making that you can tell what movie they are referencing. See if you can name all the movies...its not that hard to do. For a real challenge try to name the characters name too.

prints printed...

after a very stressful weekend everything is done, or at least to me now apears to be done until i figure out that i forgot to do something. My wonderful weekend started out friday morning when i went to the lab at 9am to print my pictures out only to have my hard drive not work on any of the computers. The power source for it would just not turn on. I freaked out for about 3 hours trying to get it to work and thinking of new ways to re shoot and have the project still ready by monday. Then after leaving school my hard drive decied to start working. I went back to school and got all my prints ready to print. It took me longer then I thought it would to print out because there was someone in front of me printing. So i ended up being pushed back till the end of the day, where they tell me come back on sunday and your prints will be ready. I was trying to get it done in one day but now i guess i have to drive back down sunday and pick up my prints. So today is sunday i come in at 1 only to find out that my prints have not printed out becuase the printer hates me, I stay around and my prints don't finish printing till 5pm. So what should have only taken a few hours on friday turned into two full days of work. I'm tired.

Andrew Wong

I stumbled across this guy on flickr and I really liked the way that he used the light in the background that is out of focus. It adds a very nice effect to the image. And no I'm not related to this guy.






Andrew Wong

updates on the blog

After my blog was flagged as a spam blog, and I fixed it, I had added some new links to my page. And I put a new picture up at the top. If you are wondering how to do this size the with for 645, because even though it says 660 it will make the image to large and it will go out side the border.

night time

Since I always for some reason seem to take my pictures at night I found this web site that has all these awesome images of night time images. I wish that I lived in a place where it snowed because I really like how that one bench picture looks.

blue or no blue?

So I can't figure out which picture I like more, the one where i changed the lighting to be more white or to have the light give off a blue feeling to it? Any comments?

Not fixed


Fixed

I think I've been thinking to much

about the project because I think i've been having dreams about seeing new places that have left their lights on, but i can't remember if they are dreams or if i actually saw new places that have left their lights on.

Project Upadate/ status

So There have been some set back with the project, i had called in about taking pictures inside one of the buildings that I had taken pictures of already and they had told me to call back another time and ask for one of their managers. But when i went back at night just to shoot the buildings that I shoot the first time they had turned off the lights. So I have been searching for new buildings and I've have pretty much driven from universal city to almost thousand oaks trying to find theses for rent stores that leave their lights on ventura blvd.


S

HDR

So I've been trying to figure out how to do HDR's because for my project I would like to have my pictures printed from HDR images so that more information can be taken in from the image. The problem that I have been running into is the fact the images look not how they are suppose to. They come off with a fake look that I don't want such as this image that I found on flickr.



So i've been looking for a new way to do HDR's when I found this on Gizmodo

Take Your Shots
As mentioned before, you'll get the most bang for your HDR buck with scenes that have both extremely bright and extremely dark areas of interesting detail to bring out. So choosing the right scene is an obvious first step.

1. Set your camera to auto exposure bracketing mode, which takes three (usually) sequential shots at three different exposure levels: one correctly exposed, one overexposed, and one underexposed. You can usually specifiy the amount of exposure stops to under- and overexpose—you probably want the maximum range, which is usually a full two stops in either direction.

2. You want to take the three shots in the quickest succession possible since we'll be merging them later and you don't want moving objects to foul that up. So turn your camera on burst shooting where possible and hold down the button, firing off three quickies without moving. This is where you'll need a tripod for cameras without AEB to keep the shots uniform.

Note: If you can, shoot in RAW. Photoshop can handle RAW files just fine, and the extra exposure information within compared to JPEG will make your HDR images all the more juicy. Also, the more source images you have the better, so if you do have a tripod and are shooting an immovable scene, bringing more than 3 images to your HDR file will only give you more detail to work with.

Create Your HDR Image
3. In Photoshop, go to File -> Automate -> Merge to HDR. Select your three images, click "Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images" if you think they may be slightly crooked, and then hit OK. Photoshop will chew on them for a while and then present you with your 32-bit HDR image.

You may notice that the file you have now doesn't look so hot. That's because a 32-bit HDR image isn't useful in itself unless you have a $50,000 HDR monitor. To look good on your screen and on paper, it must now be "tone mapped" into an 8-bit image that selectively uses parts from each exposure to accurately represent the scene.

4. Before we head to tone mapping, save your HDR as a 32-bit Portable Bit Map file so you can start fresh again if need be.

Tone Mapping Your Image
How you tone map the HDR file determines whether your result will look great or like the aforementioned clown vomit. We're using Photoshop here because it's more closely tuned, in my opinion, to achieving real-world results than HDR-specific software like Photomatix. Here, though, personal taste is everything, so if you like your images more or even less saturated and otherworldly than I do here, feel free to experiment, of course. They're your photos! It also helps to keep an eye on your originals as you're doing this to make sure you don't stray too far from reality.

To become a skilled HDR jockey in the tone mapping department, you'll need to be at least a little bit familiar with two fundamentals of digital imaging that tend to hide in the background for most users—the scary-looking graphs known as histograms and curves, both of which look like they belong in your school text book.

But no need to cower in fear! Watch this video right now to get the basic gist of curves (and also, essentially, histograms).

Now, armed with that knowledge, to tone-mapping!

5. With your 32-bit HDR file open, go to Image -> Mode -> 8 Bits/Channel. This will bring up the tone mapping window, which has four options in the drop-down: Exposure and Gamma, Highlight Compression, Equalize Histogram and Local Adaptation. The first three, to varying degrees, are automatic settings. To say I understand the specific differences between all four would be lying, but I do know this: Local Adaptation is the only one that lets you manually futz with the image curve, giving you the most creative control. Choose that one (but feel free to experiment with the others, of course).

6. Here's where things get kind of abstract. If you watched your tutorial video, you'll know you want to use the eyedropper tool to isolate areas of the image you want to work with, then create an anchor point and move that section of the curve into the ligher or darker area of the graph. You can start with the easiest adjustment, which is dragging the lower-left portion of the curve to where the histogram begins—this will make the darkest parts of your image pure black, which you want for good contrast.

7. Your next goal should be to fiddle with a point higher on the curve to make your whites whiter. So grab a point up there and move it into the top portion of the graph until the whites are to your liking in the live preview.

8. And finally, choose a point in the middle and work the midtones. Again, preference is key, but you'll want something that, in the end, represents a classic S-curve for the best contrast. In the end, you want an image that has black blacks, white whites (but few to zero completely washed out areas), and detail through the midrange. Your image may still look not so good when your curve is done, but that's OK.

9. The last step in the tone mapping process is to mess with the good ol' Radius and Threshold sliders. Again, like many things in Photoshop, I have no idea exactly what's being jiggered here, but these essentially control how HDR-ed out your HDR images will look, if that makes sense. The wrong setting will peg the image's edge detail, resulting in some yucky looking mess. I like to keep a little bit of blown-out highlights in the image too, to remind everyone it's still a photo.

So fiddle with these sliders until the live preview looks good in your esteemed opinion. Again, your image won't look perfect, even now. The object here is to strike the right balance between detail and a natural look.

Toning Your Image
Now you have a good old fashioned 8-bit image that contains some elements of all three of your original source files, tone mapped. The final step is applying some of Photoshop's basic tools used for any photo in order to bring out the most detail possible.

10. First, Levels. Even though you set contrast with your tone curve, you may still be able to fine tune it with levels. So under Image -> Adjustments -> Levels, make sure the black and white sliders are aligned with the left and right edges of your histogram mountain to the extent that it pleases you.

11. Next, Image -> Adjustments -> Shadows/Highlights, one of Photoshop's most magical tools. Here is where the areas of your image that previously looked too dark will reveal their glorious hidden detail. Slowly raise the Amount and Tonal Width sliders under Shadows until the detail comes out, but not too far into ugly boosted-out territory. Do the same for Highlights.

12. And last, Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation, where you probably want to boost the Saturation just a little bit to get the colors popping to your liking.

Gizmodo.com

venturea blvd

I've been looking up and down venturea blvd for the the right buildings for my project and its driving me nuts...get it driving... the joke sounded better in my head

Aaron Ruell

This photographer has a really interesting style of framing and the colors that are used are rather strange to the eye. There is nothing that sticks out as far as the idea of contrasting colors but yet everything just seems to melt into one smooth images with the colors being so close on the color wheel that it opposes itself but yet works in a strange way. Also the expressions on their faces are quite amazing also, just the look is so readilbe but at the same time the expressions that they show could mean a number of many things. Ruell had some type of code on his website so that I was unable to drag the pictures off of his site, but I screen caped his images...I showed him.


Aaron Ruell