Anyone who's tried Image Averaging knows that once you've flattened your layers, you're left with a pile of "unneeded" images left over once you've created your final IA. I've been thinking about how else these could be used. There is the single frame for a short exposure version of your image, but why limit yourself to these two options. You can select any number from your set, as long as they are sequential, to create a exposure time equivalent of anything from the shutter speed of a single frame right they way up to the total long exposure equivalent you get from image averaging all the frames. This in effect allows you to choose the exposure time once you get back to base.

So in terms of creative photography, I thought about taking this one step further and blending these exposure times into a single image. In the example I want to present here I'll be blending a long exposure sea with long, medium and fast exposure sky.

Remember with IA you have the exact same visual image in terms of brightness/contrast/saturation no matter what the equivalent exposure time is. There is only one caveat... for maximum flexibility and granularity of your equivalent exposure time, you'll want to do short individual exposures and a LOT of them. The resulting processing time in this is quite significant. I think I spent about 2 - 3 hours on this piece alone. Although my PC is very slow I do have a speed benefit in that I'm "only" processing 12MP RAW files.

Cockenzie

I took a wee trip to explore some of the Edinburgh coastline - I've been making my way eastwards from Crammond. Today I was going from Leith Docks to have a look at the rocks at the far side. Sadly I couldn't find out how to get there as it looked closed to the public. After this I went to Joppa and found some interesting steps then headed to Prestonpans where Cockenzie Power Station is in the process of being demolished before finally stopping at Cockenzie

The image I'll be using to illustrate the idea of mixing exposures times is of a lovely, compact and bijou bay in Cockenzie at the end of my journey. I've visited this little bay once before: Cockenzie

Shooting

I stacked my 0.3 and 0.6 Lee Filters to cover the full frame and the 0.9 to grad out the sky.

I used an intervalometer and made sure to keep the delay as low as possible because the clouds where moving very quickly.

In total, I captured 105 frames in 7 groups of 15. All frames are exposed at around 1s with a 1s delay between each frame. The groups where spaced less accurately. Some are as little as 1s while others are as long as 15s. However the total long exposure time equivalent was 4m23s.

In each of the 3 versions below, I have used the same 4m23s image averaged sea. The variations between each image is only the number of frames I've used for the sky.

Long Exposure Sea, Long Exposure Sky

In the first version the sea and sky come from the run of image averaging of all 105 frames each at 1s exposures with a 1s delay giving a total 4m23s sea & sky long exposure equivalent.

Long Exposure Sea, 27s Exposure Sky

In this one I've taken a sequential subset of 15 frames, averaged these together as a shorter exposure equivalent then masked out everything but the sky. This means the image is made up of "two" exposures, one of 27s for the sky and the 4m23s for the sea.

Long Exposure Sea, 1s Exposure Sky

In the final version I've taken a single 1s exposure and masked out everything but the sky. This means this image is also a blend of "two" exposures, the first being a 1s exposure for the sky while the second is the 4m23s for the sea. I like the impact of this type of blend and this is the one I really wanted to show off. When I've used this blend I've always gone for the long exposure sea and fast exposure sky. It is a slightly strange effect but I quite like it.

Conclusions

I'm pretty sure it'd be difficult to do this without image averaging. You run the risk of changing the composition, even fractionally, by nudging the camera while mounting filters, introducing colour cast caused by the filter or even accidentally changing focus or zoom. To say nothing of the range of filters you'd need to employ. Finally, if your doing long exposures during the golden hour you have to take into account changing light conditions.

So how does the blend of short and long exposure times work for you? Did you barely notice till it's pointed out? Is it jarring and just downright wrong?

As ever, your thoughts are always welcome.

Neil.

p.s. This is a sample of my "Exposure Time Blends" to date: -

Welcome to the latest instalment of the Peco & Peel Photography Ordeal.

Peco and I have a simple system for location choices - we get shots each at choosing the location we'll be shooting. It's simple and fair - we had to implement this system because Skye was becoming a recurring theme. Not that there is anything wrong with Skye you understand, but consecutive visits where various falls on arses and a lack of luck with optimum photography weather gets you down. So the "shots each" system at least works for ensuring some variety of locations in which to experience useless photography but great camping weather - as well as the obligatory slips and slides.

It was Peco's pick this time so I was expecting to be heading back to Skye again. Instead the Moray coast was the destination of choice. As luck would have it, the timing for the trip was serendipitous as there is a sunrise event that happens for about a week, twice a year. That is, the sun rises through the sea arch, the Bow Fiddle Rock, at Portknockie in Moray. This happens in May and August. I noticed this a while ago when I was messing with The Photographers Ephemeris and had the place in mind for some future visit.

So with fingers crossed for good weather we headed off.

We stayed at the Sandend Caravan Park which was a perfect location to minimise the early morning drives to Portknockie. However it was a really busy place - loads of noisy kids running about till late and inconsiderate eejits banging music till even later. The site itself was nice & clean even if we where all a bit cramped in together.

I have to say, the grub up that way is simply awesome. We sampled the bakery and chipper hoose in Portsoy, Coo burgers & Ice cream in Lossiemouth as well as the now traditional bacon rolls in the morning. Yum!

As for the photography locations, we where concentrating on the BFR more than anything else and ended up there on 3 occasions. Once for a fairly unremarkable sunset and two equally not lighting the pants on fire sunrises. We also did an evening on Sandend Beach where we had a monstrous sky but little in the way of sunset. And finally we took a visit to Rattray Lighthouse near Peterhead on the way home.

Dragging your sorry ass out of bed at 4:30am

Summer sunrises are a bugger. The choice appears to be a later lie-in but at the cost of cold camping (winter) or wake-ups at truly shitty hours but a fairly warm sleep. Both are fairly uncomfortable coz, well come on, camping is shite!

Note to self, out of season static caravans! Cheap and a much higher standard of comfort! Plus you can go at more unsettled times of the year for that added touch of drama and action!

Maybe next time.

Isn't this a photography blog?

Well, yes I suppose I should get on with it.

As a regular reader you'll know I'm mad for Image Averaging but I've been having some issues with ghosting under certain conditions. I've gone through several trips where I've done silly numbers of exposures as a fix to the problem. This trip I paid special attention to the delays between frames. On a memorable image it's made up of 75 (!) frames with no delay - i.e. the camera shooting as fast as it can. On others I dispensed with the timing functions of the intervalometer and instead varied the delay by triggering the shutter manually.

I didn't have so many problems with ghosting on this trip. There is one image (Rattray Lighthouse #1) where there is some ghosting apparent but I kind of like the way it looked so I've left it in.

I'm putting the success down to the variable delay but to be honest I'm not too keen on this method. I love the photography, I love the standing around talking nonsense about will it/won't it happen (the sunset/sunrise), the techie nonsense about what shutter speeds, apertures, filters each of us is using and generally revelling in the greatness of the outdoors. I often go into hypnotic trances - often caused by the "beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep" of Peco's to be eternally damned remote - and I forget to trigger the shutter for waaaaaay too long! I've got some delays of over 30s on 10s exposures! From previous testing, this is a Bad Thing™.

However it all worked out in the end.

Show Me The Processing

As for the processing, there was a minimal amount done really. There is a couple of shots where I use a personal favourite short-cut - the black overlay/soft light trick - while for the rest, they where pretty much only processed in ACR.

Peco does his white balance different from me. Historically I've stuck to the pre-sets in the White Balance drop-down in ACR but this time I did most of them Peco's way - manually - a la Peco. Basically you just slide the Temperature and Tint sliders to taste.

I've done this to the vast majority of them, the exceptions being the following where I used the camera defaults. My Nikon often gives off a strong blue tint in low light. It's a favourite of mine and I keep coming back to it : -

Rattray Lighthouse #1
Rattray Lighthouse #2
Bow Fiddle Rock Sunset #1.2

Just a point of interest really. Not to say one method is better/worse or right/wrong - just down to taste really. But it's good to try different methods as you can sometimes surprise yourself.

It's All Bright When Shooting To The Right 

On a different note, one interesting aspect is that I've left the brightness captured by the camera in for the processing of Bow Fiddle Rock Sunset #1.2
. Some time ago I got into the habit of shooting to the right.

Practically speaking this means using the histogram to judge your exposure rather than the image on the LCD. This tends to result in rather bright NEFs on the LCD so there's not too much point in chimping :( 

When I get back to base I almost always pull the exposure back in ACR by around 2 stops. To understand why you bother with this, I highly recommend reading The Luminous Landscape's take on shooting to the right.

However in this one I decided to leave it as it was. I like the colour and although it wasn't nearly that bright to the eye at the time, I don't really have a problem with the fact it's not representative of what we saw with our eyes. The way I think about it, it's our eyes that don't have the ability to see the scene like this. The camera is perfectly capable of making a bright scene dark and visa-versa. I don't add movement, colour or light to a scene. I may exaggerate what's collected by the camera but in the case of this shot I've kept it as the camera saw it. I thought it made a nice change to the dark and moody like we have in Sandend Sunset #1
& Sandend Sunset #2.1

August 2013, Moray and Aberdeenshire

This trip nearly didn't happen. Coming on the back of the recent outing to Seton Sands I wasn't really expecting Ross "Can't" Scott to be up for a repeat so soon. Sure enough he wasn't, but a quick reminder of what he said while shooting on the previous trip...

"Is this not the greatest hobby in the world? Out the house, beautiful landscapes and fresh air!" 

His own wisdom changed his mind and the Peco & Peel travelling photography circus was on another mission! This time St. Monans (or St. Monance if you prefer). And Peco was driving \o/

As regular readers may know I've been to St. Monans before so knew pretty much what to expect. Although the tide was coming in, it wasn't nearly as high as I thought it might be. In hindsight I've no idea what the tide was at the last time but this trip it was definitely lower, this time you could see the base of the wall in the water. Hell it was so calm we even walked out on the thing to shoot back towards the village itself. See Ominous St Monans
.

I don't think my wall shots for this trip are as nice as the last one, I preferred the colour and conditions then but we did get an great find after the sun had set. As soon as I saw it I new I'd seen photographs of it before - a quick look at my flickr favourites shows a shot from Shahbaz Majeed. At the time I had no idea where it was, just that the rocks looked really interesting and that I wanted to go. I'm really glad to find them and will definitely be back here to pointedly ignore the wiggly wall and instead shoot the awesome rocks.

Partly my interest is in the geology and how such amazing looking rocks are created - I'm not any sort of knowledgeable type on this subject but I do find it endlessly interesting - not so much the rocks themselves as how time changes them. My guess is the spiky rocks are laid down in water over millions of years then later the land becomes buckled, bent and tilted to the angle we see today. As I said though, I know nothing. More knowledgeable types have written some information here.

My 3 shots of this didn't really do the place justice but at least I know where it is now and I shall be back. Razerback #1
, Razerback #2
and Razerback #3

All the images taken on this trip: -

July 2012, St Monans

I've been seeing shots of the wreck here many many times on Flickr and they are all pretty excellent. It's a really nice shot when you get it right. Lately Scott Masterton had been posting some crackers from this place and it made me want to go. Worse, the night he took these shots I was going to go to this exact spot but the weather looked ropey and I didn't bother... kicking myself or what?!

Anyway, the Peco & Peel Touring Photography Circus decided to scout this place out. I checked some tide times vs capture date/times and found that we might actually be pushing it to get there before the tide came too far in and covered the wreck.

Prescient of me! :(

When we arrived I wandered down to the beach to see that the wreck was in the water as I looked so I ran - yes ran* - back to the car to hurry up Rossco as we where loosing it fast!

I didn't end up getting anything of the wreck and I don't think Ross did either but we decided to hang around anyway. Well we where here and it'd be insanity just to leave. Especially as there's no guarantees the next place would be any better!

We did find a nice rock with green seaweed on it which pretty much became our focal point for the rest of the evening...

All the shots from this trip: -

July 2012, Seton Sands

*Funnier things have been seen, but not by reliable witnesses (with nods to Douglas Adams for the paraphrase)

As always, Ross and I have been talking about heading out for a wee trip for some time. Talking you understand. Ross "can't" Scott is sometimes difficult to pin down to get an nice evenings shooting done. To be fair I've not exactly been uber motivated myself, spending most of my time developing my content management system for my business.

In this wee outing I got a wee bonus in that we headed out early. With a full 6 hours of shooting ahead of us, we where both well excited - it's always the little things :) The plan was to dot about various places but end up at the X Class submarine wreck out at Aberlady Bay. 

First stop was North Berwick and the old pier. Peco got the shot there while I was muttering about poor light and the likely-hood of having to convert the shots to mono. My only shot from here worth mentioning is Steps To Craigleith
.

After North Berwick I was surprised to hear Rossco suggest Seacliff, he'd been before but never had any luck with the conditions. I, on the other hand, have been so many times I'm pretty sure I'm due part ownership of the road that the owners claim the entrance fee is for! Coz they sure as buggery don't do much in the way of repairs and upkeep!

I got my favourite shot of the day at Seacliff. I shot it with a 1980 Nikon E Series 70-200. It's a completely manual lens - which tbh for our sort of shooting doesn't matter in the slightest, but the realy downer is a previous owner dropped it and damaged the filter thread - it's a metal bodied lens so there's no bending it back or forcing on a adapter ring. Anyway, using this lens means no Lees :(

The thing I liked about this shot is the glowing sea. I've no idea how other togs do this but I've been using a second pass on the RAW files to bring up the foreground (or a second pass to bring down the sky - depending on how I exposed) and a happy accident of this is the glowing sea.

We sat about for a while at Seacliff swithering whether or not to leave. After about 10 shots of the Bass Rock it's easy to get bored of one spot so we decided to stick to the original plan. The decision to head to Aberlady had absolutely nothing what-so-ever to do with the fact that we'd be passing the worlds greatest chippy* and our stomach's thought our throats had been cut!

So after dinner we headed to Aberlady, parked at the nature reserve car park and headed out to the wreck. Actually I edited out a lot of prevaricating by myself about tides, time and weather - the real reason I baulked was the thought of the walk out there. On the map in my compumuter it's only a few inches walk - even on my nice big HD screen. I've since learned that the scale on the map is different from the scale of reality. Rossco showed amazing strength of character not to just leave me to my incessant moaning about having to walk! Although it has to be said, sod the birdies, build a damn road out to there!

And after all that walking I arrived at the wreck - Rossco came across a minor puddle he couldn't cross and turned back! Sheesh - only to find the sun had gone down behind the obligatory "clouds on the horizon" and the wind doing it's damnedest to blow me and my tripod out into the North Sea!

I got a shot off but it's not up to much - that said I didn't put too much work into processing it as I don't think it's that good anyway.

Neil.

All the shots

July 2012, East Lothian Mini Coastal Tour

*Avoid the steak pies. Nasty!

This means that in the winter, the site should be showing snowy images while in the summer they should be more ... well, summery 

However I've found a fatal flaw.

It's seems I don't get out very much in the month of June and that's resulteed in the selection of backgrounds being a bit meh, a wee bit pff.

If you reload the page, you should see a different one. There's only about 5 images taken over 6 years!  And none of them are that great either :( 

Ah well. Hopefully next month will be better! :)

I have to confess to being pretty unsure a trip down to Berwick-upon-Tweed for a sunset shoot was a particularly good idea.

My instinct is to try to at least point a bit towards the setting (or rising) sun. This instinctive desire to get in the sunlight is a conditioned reflex! I've spent so many trips shooting with an ultra-wide lens, looking for something interesting in the foreground and this type of shot usually works better when you have nice light illuminating whatever it is you have in the foreground. So my conditioned reflex coupled with an impression of the east coast being in deepest darkness at sunset meant I wasn't convinced we'd get much of interest. So as a compromise I suggested we just headed down to "scout" the place for a future sunrise. 

As it happened, the layout of the land and timing of our trip conspired to produce near perfect conditions - although we did leave about 45 minutes before the sun actually set. We did miss the so called golden hour, it didn't impact our shooting time as we'd arrived pretty early anyway.

However the main difference with this shoot came from the lenses we used. On our last trip and when we've discussed our photography since, we where talking about maybe having to use a bit of zoom to get a decent sunset of Fidra. As our discussion developed, we decided we would take our zooms on the next outing.

As it worked out, this was a particularly prescient of us given the location we went too. When we arrived the tide was out and the lighthouse was too far away for my traditional ultra wide shots! As we both had 70-200mm (70-210 for me) lenses with us so the distance didn't matter. Had my Sigma 10-20mm still been welded on my camera I'd have been a rather unhappy bunny shooting at a lighthouse too far away to show up well at such wide angles!

When we where shooting, Ross got way over excited about the change of lens and how this affected his compositions, but to be honest I wasn't enjoying myself quite so much.

While he was having fun with his Nikkor 70-200 2.8 shoulder mounted rocket launcher, I was using an early 80's Nikon Series E lens which is manual focus, manual metering. To make matters even more complicated, a previous owner had dropped the lens and bent filter threads so I couldn't fit my filters either. I tried holding some Lees in front of the lens but to be honest it was way too cold for that malarkey!

The lens does have one massive advantage over it's modern counterparts though and that is a rather useful DOF scale on the barrel. This got put to much good use particularly with Pools in the sand
and Towards the Lighthouse

Image Averaging 

As usual of late, I was shooting to the right and image averaging. However because I couldn't use filters, I was having to suffer relatively fast shutter speeds (between 1/10s and 1/60s) and this had an effect on the final results of the image averaging. A result I'm not too happy with. Ross used his 10 stop filter and he got nice silky sea while I got the mush you see below. As I say, I'm not too happy with the results.

That said, I'm using it as a learning experience and what I've learned is the delay between frames appears to be linked quite closely with the shutter speed of the individual frames. It appears as though you have to use a really small delay when doing faster shutter speeds while slower shutter speeds allow you to use much longer delays.

I think this is because with a slower shutter speed the object which is moving blurs it's edges more. When you average the blurred movement, the transition is smoother.

In some of the images I'd swear you can see individual, albeit faint, waves. This gives, in my opinion, a kind of nasty looking bokeh effect to the sea...

Another problem was a combination of wearing summer clothes and a wind that felt as though it came straight off the Siberian steppe! This meant I was too cold and anyway was using my patented photography hand warming technique that I couldn't be bothered fiddling with my Intervalometer and instead just manually shot whenever I felt like it. The result of this inattention is I shot a truly mind boggling stupid number of frames. I've processed 14 images so far and there is a couple left untouched as I write - they are not much different to what's already been show below - To get these 14 or so images, I fired off 520 frames! 

One of the photos (not uploaded) is made of 65 frames alone! FYI, on my P C JUNK PC it took about 15 minutes just to average the images! Lol that was considerably longer than it took to shoot the damn thing (3 minutes)!

Most of them however are "only" between 15 and 30 frames.

As I say, stupid frame count :)

Just as well disk space is cheap. This trip cost 3GB in PSD files alone (I keep these in case I need them in the future - e.g. for prints) with a grand total of 8GB for all the NEFs, PSDs and other accompanying files! 

Processing

In my desire to slow down the shutter speed missing filters, I stepped down the aperture quite a lot. When I say quite a lot, I mean F/32! Sure there was some diffraction but I could easily convince myself that it was simply due to being out of focus because of the manualness of the lens. At least that's what I told myself! Next trip I use the lens, I'll try F/11 instead :)

I was able to push the sharpening up massively from my norm to compensate for the softness though. And in truth, with some of them I had to do just that. My sharpening work flow is detailed here. Normally I only sharpen at 100% / ~2px (smart sharpen) but in many of these images I pushed this a LOT. Some of them, 3-4px and 200% and above! My second pass when saving for the web also had some little extra - instead of my usual 0.3px I was occasionally pushing it to 0.6px

I have to say though, because of the low noise characteristics of Image Averaging, this was easily achieved without introducing any artefacts. In fact I suspect if I hadn't mentioned it, you'd have been none the wiser. 

Nothing particularly interesting happened with my processing. I did my usual buggering around with the white balance - although to be honest I prefer the ones I used the white balance dropper tool (ACR) on the white of the lighthouse - These have an lovely blue colour and a cleanness about them I quite like. 

Playing With Blend Modes 

• I used a quick and dirty technique to add some colour and contrast to the sky.
• With all the layers image averaged and merged back to a single layer, I duplicate it then set the blend mode of the new layer to "Multiply", "Overlay" or "Soft Light" - depending on how it looks.
• I then use the opacity slider to tone down the effect. More so if I've chosen "Multiply" or "Overlay" as the blend mode.
• I then add a layer mask here and paint out the bits I don't want affected. I usually start with the gradient tool and do the gradient over the horizon.
• Next I then paint out the lighthouse and wall it stands on. This masking results in the blend mode only being applied to the sky itself.

And that's it. I don't think I'll be doing this sort of thing again with the lens, which I do like, until I can get filters mounted on it somehow. I really missed my Lees on this wee trip :( 

Here are my photos I've uploaded from the trip...

April 2012, Berwick-upon-Tweed

As it was I had to work quite hard in Photoplop to pull any colour from the shots. The reason the images are all different colours is because I like to mess around with the White Balance in ACR. To be honest, probably only one of these shots was actually required - they are all pretty much identical except for minor compositional changes and crops. Having 8 shots the same colour would be a bit boring so why not have a bugger around with the White Balance!?

Shooting 

Like my last trip, I was shot to the right and image averaged. Shooting to the right takes a bit of faith in the field. When you chimp your shots, they look blown to buggery even though the histogram says it's all good. Unlike last time, I did monitor the histogram more and changed the EV as required to keep the histogram loaded to the right. Again though this is tricky once the sun has lost height and can't light the foreground. i.e. there's a lot of contrast in the scene. 

Processing 

As I've not really got a particular favourite here I'm not going through the processing suffice to say: -

1. ACR - Variable WB | +30 Vibrance | Auto Levels
2. Image Average
3. All single passes except "Fishin' For Seagulls 5" which had 2 passes on the RAW
4. Graduated black layer in Soft Light blend mode
5. Touch of levels to brighten/darken slightly depending on the shot.
6. Sharpen then add my watermark.

Here are the shots from the trip: -

March 2012, Forth Rail Bridge

What's this "Fishin' For Seagulls" aw aboot?

Years ago there was a 2 part police murder/mystery show set in Edinburgh called "Low Winter Sun" (great name!). In it, there was a scene where a car, with a body in it, was found in the water near the pier the Inchcolm ferry leaves from in South Queensferry. Anyway, a couple of the cops are having a bit of banter and one asks the other (and I'm paraphrasing) how the car was found. The other cop says some locals were fishing for seagulls. The first cop replies with a "Huh?" to which the 2nd cop replies that there's "fuck all else to do in South Queensferry".

I've got a friend who lives there and it's a running joke when I ask what he's been up to.

This time, Ross and I took a trip to Yellowcraigs just outside Dirleton in East Lothian. The plan was to get a nice seascape of Fidra. You know what they say about plans!

Shooting Location

We had an absolutely stunning sunset but we where in a bad location. I'd managed to wobble my way across a boulder field trying to get as close as possible to the sea and Fidra. Unfortunately when we got there the foreground was quite cluttered so it's meant I had to do some heavy cropping when I got back home, hence a few panoramic crops. The square crops was also done to try to clean up some of the mess.

In hindsight I think we should have been higher up and more to our left for the sunset but the problem with that was Fidra would have been out of Frame. From our spot we where looking north instead of at worst, north west. Basically, location, angle, equipment, skill, foresight and the slightest glimmer of intelligence conspired to defeat me this time! :) This place is more a "deepest summer" location! So I look forward to a rematch!

It was a lovely night though. Quite warm after crossing the boulder field but with hardly any wind and the tide right out, the sea wasn't doing too much - safe even to turn your back on! There I said it!
Anyway, we were treated to an excellent display with the high clouds creating beautiful patterns across the sky. In some of the final shots, I didn't long expose the sky because I felt maybe the LE might ruin those patterns.

I image averaged all evening and it has a bonus which is that the technique lets you can choose, after you've done your long exposure, whether or not to use one of the frames for the sky alone - I.E. mixing long and short exposures. I did this in a few of the final images.

Shoot To The Right

One of the things I specifically wanted to do tonight was to try to properly "shoot to the right".

I took my test shots so I got the histogram how it's recommended then image averaged (did long exposures) all evening. I'm not sure if you're supposed to check the histogram regularly and make changes to the E.V. accordingly but I didn't pay that much attention. There was one I remember where the histo' is not far enough to the right but it was a very contrasty scene.

Reflecting Yellowcraigs

As the sun was setting, behind us, I started to feel the pull and turned round towards the light. Ross meanwhile, headed off in a different direction muttering about dunes.

My favourite shot of the night is the background image you see here, "Reflecting Yellowcraigs". Just a pity it's "off topic" for the evening - i.e. no Fidra :) When I saw the pool and then the sunset in the water, then found a group of 3 rocks... bingo :)

Image Averaging

As for overall this trip, I stuck to an IA formula of getting around 3 minutes equivalent long exposure time made up of 15 frames with a variation between 10 and 15 second delays.

In hindsight, this created shark gills (or snake belly) in a few of the LE's so I definitely got the delay wrong. I should have cut this back to 5 seconds and did 20-25 frames instead. I could've / should've added more grad filters to slow the shutter speed and/or stop down to F/16. Both of which I'd have done - before trying to change the frame count and delay too much - note for next time :)

Given also a good delay is variable with the exposure time, and the case of seascapes - wind speed! It didn't feel too bad today so maybe I need shorter delays with slower wind and fast shutter speeds. Anyway, noted and I'll see what happens next time.

Processing

Processing for "Reflecting Yellowcraigs" was pretty much the usual for me.

It's an image averaged shot but with a slight twist. The foreground is image averaged as normal (i.e. a long exposure of 4 minutes) while the sky is a single frame from the image average set of 17. The 1st one if I remember correctly. The single frame is a 4 second exposure.

This gives a somewhat incongruous effect of long exposure water, normal exposure sky. Although I have to admit, in this example you might not have noticed. The clouds where not moving very fast and there was very little wind to disturb the water.

ACR

In ACR I didn't do too much to the image - I left the white balance "As Shot" - meaning Auto on my camera. The Nikon appears to have done it's usual cold tones which I really like!

For all 17 frames opened in ACR I targeted processing for the foreground. I did my usual "Select All" | "Auto Levels" then: -

• Moved the "Blacks" slider to the hard left (0)
• Added some "Fill Light" (26)
• Added "Vibrance" (24)
• Added "Clarity" (8)

With that done I then stacked and averaged the images. 

For the sky, as I said, I took a single frame and undid my previous ACR settings for "Fill Light" and "Blacks".

Photoplop

In Photoshop I had a PSD with my image averaged result. I then opened the single frame for the sky and layered it above my image averaged result.

I then used my usual manual DRI blending technique to blend the sky frame and image averaged results together.

I had to remove quite a few dust bunnies - must... clean... sensor...

I also have to admit to cheating a bit. I visualised, composed and shot this to have 3 rocks in the foreground - unfortunately there was some seaweed just breaking the surface between the rocks that I found quite distracting so I cloned it out. There was also, more importantly, a 4th rock at the right hand edge of the frame - I didn't notice it when shooting - which I also cloned out.

Oh, and the halo at the centre left... it was like that! Wasn't me... honest.

EFX

The final bit of the post processing was a technique I learned years ago from a forum poster at pixalo.com (thanks Dave). This technique is really simple and lets you add a lot of punch (contrast and saturation) to your image with just a few clicks.

It's easy enough to do: -

1. add a new layer,
2. fill it with black
3. switch the blend mode to overlay or soft light.

In this example, overlay was simply clipping to dark grey so instead I switched to "Soft Light" and reduced the opacity back to 49% to tone down the effect a bit.

Next I added a layer mask then painted in white where I wanted the effect to occur - basically across the middle of the frame where the sky is a riot of colour and a little bit on the water - again where there is some colour (other than blue)

After this was done, I sharpened and added my watermark!

Job done.

Best Chippy Ever

On the way home we stopped at the chipper hoose in Gullane. Man it was good. If you ever pass through there, grab one. Absolutely amazing chips :)

Here are the images from the trip.

March 2012, Yellowcraigs

One of my contacts on Flickr had posted a shot from this place and I immediately fell in love with the sea wall/sea defence/art installation. It was such an interesting shape and as many have said, kinda looks like a snake :)

I put St Monans on my “to do” list of places to visit and was planning to go with Ross. I wanted a partner, if nothing else, just to cut down on the fuel costs (this shot cost me nearly £25 on petrol alone!) Sadly Rossco’s middle name is “Can’t” and he came up with some ingenious reason not to go.

I set my alarm for 5am although I barely needed it. Some idiot thought it would be fun to sing and play an acoustic guitar outside my window at 4 in the bloody morning! Ah the joys of living above the Cowgate! Anyway, I got up, packed a bag, glesga showered and set off. The drive up took less than 90 minutes so I arrived about 30 minutes before sunrise. Perfect!

While I was there, two other ‘togs had the same idea. Both as it happens, Flickerites. Alan arrived about 15 minutes before sunrise and Shahbaz about 20 minutes after sunrise! Rookie mistake Shahbaz :) although in his defence, he was caught behind a Sunday Driver!

Shooting

I spent more time talking than shooting. which was reflected in the frames I produced. I went up specifically to vary the number of frames and delays in the Image Averaging technique I use – I.E. try longer delays and use something other than 15 frames which is what I’d been doing on previous shoots.

Sadly I got so distracted by all the chat that I didn’t program my Intervalometer, I was simply triggering the shutter release in a rather haphazard fashion! Nor did I count the frames shot! This meant, of the 8 pictures I took that day, there was 6, 8, 19, 22, 29, 27 and 31 frames respectively. As I say, I wasn’t really paying attention.

The eagle eyed among you will notice I only mentioned the frames for 7 pictures. The one I missed out was a “normal” long exposure which was shot with a loan of a Lee Big Stopper from Shahbaz – thanks man.

This particular shot was 19 frames with an exposure between 10 and 30 seconds and a somewhat distracted gap between exposures of anything between 10 and 60 seconds! Not that it particularly mattered in this example as the wind was pretty low. The final result is equivalent to a long exposure of just over 12 minutes!

Being so distracted, I underexposed every single shot a I took that day – Luckily the Image Average technique allows you to underexpose and recover in the RAW processing without the noise penalty you usually get. Irrespective though, this still a very bad thing to be doing – especially when you consider you should be exposing to the right.

Processing

Before we dive into the processing, here is a before/after screenshot – click the thumbnail for a larger version.

St Monans #3 - Before / After

As you can see from the before/after comparison, the individual frames are pretty badly underexposed – The sky is fine, but everything else is pretty much useless as a single frame. In hindsight, I didn’t use my grads to properly balance the sky and foreground. I suspect I simply stacked them all and covered the whole frame with the ND part. Also, for some unfathomable reason I had my exposure compensation set to -0.33ev on 11 frames and -1ev on the remaining 8.

Because I underexposed I had to do two passes on the RAW files. One for the sky and the other for the foreground. This of course also means I had to do 2 passes of image averaging. Again, one for the sky and one for the foreground.

With these two image averaged layers I then blended them together with my favourite DRI blending technique. But instead of bracketed images, I am using two passes on the same RAW. However I’m getting ahead of myself. First up, the RAW processing.

RAW Processing | Common changes to both passes

I select all 19 frames in Bridge and open them in Photoshop. ACR intercepts them to do the RAW processing.

For both passes I have the white balance set to “Auto” – I.E. ACR decides what is the most appropriate white balance – I find this generally produces a warmer result than keeping sticking with “As Shot” – For me, the D90 produces a colder white balance on auto than ACR does.

I also had to straighten the horizon… one day I won’t have to do this… Maybe the spirit level on my tripod is wrong. I mean, 3 tripods, 2 cameras and 2 different spirit levels – one on the tripod and one of those hot shoe ones – which I promptly lost! Maybe the laws of physics are at fault somehow. Can’t possibly be my fault! :)

Lately I’ve been using the camera profiles in ACR (see the Camera Calibration tab). Instead of using the default “Adobe Standard” or “ACR4.6″, I’ve started using “Camera Landscape” – Not because they are better or worse, I just prefer the punchy colour you get from them. I suspect the options available on this tab may be camera model/brand specific so your mileage may vary.

I shot this with the Sigma 10-20 and I get a bit of chromatic aberration in the corners so I use ACR to correct this (Lens Corrections tab).

So that is the ACR settings common to both passes so now I do the changes for my first pass proper.

RAW Processing | First Pass

In this pass I’m going to work on the sky.

I click the “Auto” link in ACR to have it set the levels (exposure, recovery, fill light, blacks, brightness & contrast) as best as possible.

As this is done on 19 frames and each one tends to have a slightly different exposure there’s not much point in me detailing exactly what ACR did to each of them. Suffice to say it added just a tiny amount of brightness.

As this was all I did for the sky I then clicked “Done” to go back to Bridge ready to do the first pass of the image averaging.

Image Averaging | First Pass

With the same 19 frames still selected in Bridge, I go to the “Tools” menu, select “Photoshop” and then click “Load Files into Photoshop Layers”

Once my computer finishes having a fit, I have a PSD with all 19 frames loaded into individual layers. Now it’s time for the image averaging – I.E. setting the opacity of each layer according to a formula.

To save myself some time, I wrote a Photoshop script that does the image averaging for me. I then call that script via an action which is assigned to a keyboard combination – so image averaging becomes, for me, a matter of pressing a few keys :) Before the script, I have to admit, image averaging was a bit of a pain in the arse – going through 19 frames and setting the opacity for each layer was boring, prone to error and caused RSI!

After the script has run, I’m left with the same PSD but now with just the single layer which is a result of the 19 frames averaged together. Time to go back to Bridge for the 2nd pass.

RAW Processing | Second Pass

In the second pass I’m going to do my RAW processing for the foreground. Now, because I underexposed so badly, there is going to be a lot of noise introduced in this pass. But that’s OK as the image averaging technique is particularly awesome at killing off the noise.

So again, with the same 19 frames selected, I open them so ACR can intercept them.

As I had to bring the foreground up, the simplest way to do this is use the Exposure slider – I kept sliding up until I was happy with the foreground. Recall, I’m not worried about what happens so much with the sky, just the foreground – although I did have to be careful with the left hand side. The final result ended up with the Exposure slider at +2.05EV

With that complete it’s once again back to Bridge for the image averaging on the second pass. So I clicked “Done” in ACR to save the RAW changes and go back to Bridge

Image Averaging | Second Pass

Everything here is identical the the first pass. Once it’s complete I now have 2 Photoshop documents with single layers. Each one the image averaged result of the RAW processing steps described above.

Post Processing in Photoshop

So next it was time to do my DRI blending. I dragged one of the image averaged layers into the document of the other then masked the top layer and proceeded with the DRI blending. I’ll not go through this I’ve described it in a video here.

Once I was happy with the blending I switched the sky layer blend mode to Multiply. This gives the colour in the sky that little bit of oomph.

There was a fisherman at the end of the pier who occasionally moved himself and his rods over the course of the exposure so I spent a little time cloning his ghosts out. There was also some dust bunnies I’ve been carrying around for about a year which needed cleaned up. After that was a matter of adding some sharpening and a watermark and that was it.

Job Done!

November 2011, St Monans, Fife

One of my Flickr contacts posted a shot from here and I chimped! :) I thought the wall was a really interesting shape, so I added this place to the "must visits".

I was going to go a few weeks ago but a sudden attack of lazyitis had me bedridden. This weekend I decided that I was going. The tide would be in, the weather man made a prediction which, as it turned out was wrong but at least it sounded about perfect. So I set my alarm for 5am and headed out at about 5:30am.

I arrived nice an early and was able to start shooting before the big yella fella even hit the horizon.

I also bumped into a couple of Flickerites who had the same idea so that gave us all a chance to chat while shooting which was nice.

Anyhoo, below you'll see the shots in the order they where taken.

I was out a week or so before this trip, almost the first time this year, to do some images for a tutorial I'm writing on how to use the very excellent Image Averaging technique I saw mentioned on Flickr.

When I posted the image below, I got an interesting comment regarding a crop.

Bass Rock

Basically the Flickrite preferred the look of a more minimal crop and I agreed. Sadly, as the image had already been cropped square, there wasn't the pixels to do another one - especially as I feel cropping both axes means you've framed incorrectly.

So the point of this trip was to go and shoot the Bass Rock again but in a more minimal manner - to be honest I've done this before but I wanted to try again with my new favourite technique.

So there was the job, a minimalist long exposure shot of the Bass Rock

The first hurdle was where to shoot from. I've been to Seacliff a LOT so wanted to try somewhere else. I was targeting Canty Bay as I think this is about as close as you can get to the Bass Rock from the mainland but unfortunately these East Lothian types seem to hate strangers. I couldn't go down the road to Canty Bay, the great big PRIVATE sign was enough deterrent. Nor can you park outside the gate as the yokels have dumped a pile of earth you need a 4x4 to park on. So I had a look further down the road at Castleton. Same story, "Piss Off" signs everywhere.

So instead I went back to North Berwick and The Leithies. It's easy enough to get parked at the east end of Milsey Bay in North Berwick. And while there is a walk, it's not much for even me to complain about!

Shooting

Due to the use of the Image Averaging technique, I didn't bother with my usual bracketing routine. So that saves some work - albeit only to be replaced by something else :)

I stacked my LEE grad. filters, all three of them. The 0.9ND and 0.6ND covering the field of view completely with the 0.3ND just covering the sky.

The only other notable thing I did for this shot was set-up my Intervalometer to shoot 15 frames with a delay of 5 seconds between each frame and, as I was in manual mode, an exposure time of 2 seconds.

OK so the question I'd rather you didn't ask is "where do you get those numbers from?" :)

In summary, the camera and a few test exposures gave me the exposure time, the delay I pulled from a hat and the choice to do 15 frames was because of the thought of averaging more is scary on the donkey of a PC I use.

Post Processing

I'll break the processing down into three steps. The RAW processing I do in ACR, the image averaging and finally the rest of the Photoshop tweaks.

Because this was taken with the image averaging technique in mind there's 15 shots that need blended together. This increases the workflow more than usual but much of it can be batch processed making it slightly less painful than it could be.

RAW Processing

Step one is prepare the individual RAW files. Using Adobe Bridge, I selected all my frames that make up the shot and loaded them into ACR. I then hit the select all button to make sure I'm applying the changes to all the frames.

My perennial problem is they where squint. Always with the squint! So step one is to straighten them up.

Next I had a mess with the white balance and settled for "Daylight" - gave it the yummy blackcurrant sorbet look.

Pumped the vibrance up a tiny bit, added some contrast and gave the clarity slider a right good sliding.

Now for the long job...

Image Averaging

Step one is to load these into Photoshop. Instead of loading all 15 images then dragging them into a single document - which you can do, if you're a masochist - I simply use Adobe Bridge to do the grunt work.

In Bridge, I select all 15 frames, go to the Tools menu, select Photoshop, then Load Files into Photoshop Layers.

Step two is to wait while the images are stacked. This is the long bit. Longer if you have a computer from the dark ages. Go make a coffee.

Once you've grown considerably older, your new Photoshop document is ready for you to do the averaging.

For each of the layers except the bottom one I set them to an opacity level defined by a simple formula 100 x (1/number of layers below current +1) (This not making sense? See here).

Once that's done I then go to the Layers menu and choose Stamp Visible

With the image averaging done I can now get on with the rest of my Photoshop processing.

Photoshop Processing

There was 4 things I did: -

1. Removed some distracting rocks from the image as well as a couple *cough* of dust bunnies.
2. Added a black and white adjustment layer, chose "High Contrast Red Filter" then set the layer blend mode to Multiply. This really darkened down the image so I rolled back the opacity to 30%
3. I stamped a new layer and using Smart Sharpen added a little sharpening (I went with 100% & 1.9 pixels on the sliders). I then masked out everything except the Bass Rock - IE I only sharpened the Bass Rock. I took a bit of care around the edges as the sharpening had created a nasty halo so that got masked out too.
4. Finally I added my watermark.

That's it. Hope you like it.

Here are all the images from this particular trip.

August 2011, The Leithies

Ben Starav
(Original Processing)

This is an interesting photograph for me because initially I completely missed the composition! When I returned from the trip – which had been fairly wet and uneventful, photography wise, I’d skimmed through the shots. This didn’t really leap out at me. I’d done my normal DRI processing but wasn’t impressed with how it turned out.

The image is shot from the rubble beside an old pier at the head of Loch Etive looking across the loch towards the peak of Ben Starav shrouded in cloud.  Sadly the pier has been cleared away – I’ve no idea if the intention is to build a new one.
UPDATE: There is apparently a new pier. Not seen what it looks like yet.

Anyway, back to the processing. I was never particularly happy with the colour, I spent an age trying to get the clouds right and trying to get the colour balance and tone right – to little success.

So anyway, that was back in 2007 this was processed and dismissed. At the time I didn’t particularly notice the composition as I’d become fixated on the colour.

Roll on 3 years and in March 2010 I’m perusing the archives and I find this. The composition leapt out at me but I still didn’t like the colour. I decided muting the colour a bit and adding some contrast should make for better viewing.

Re-Processing

Here are the original 3 bracketed frames. (+/- 2EV)

0 EV

+2 EV

-2 EV

Basing my work on the original processing up the top, I added a little brightness in the midrange using the curves tool.

Next up is creating a new black and white layer. This is simply the normal image but in black and white – in this case, the red channel only. I’m often unsure about what difference it makes so i sometimes swap around to test the effect.

1. Select the topmost visible layer.
2. In the channels palette make sure only the red is visible.
3. Select all – Copy Merged.
4. Create a new layer
5. Paste the what you copied into the new layer.

You should now see a mono version of your image.

Next I switch the blend mode to multiply and adjust the opacity to reduce the effect or duplicate the layer to increase the effect.

The multiply blend mode does a wonderful job of toning down the colour while adding contrast – I used an opacity of 64% in this instance.

Other than some sharpening that is the image completed.

To me that is a vast improvement over the original processing. The changes are actually quite subtle with the colouring give a really dark and gritty feel while actually leaving the view crystal clear.

It's a bit like with computer programming (for me) - When I get stuck on a thorny problem with the code, I often find a better use of my time is to work on a different area and revisit the initial problem later. I.E. Your own "Fresh Eyes" approach.

In the From The Archives series of posts I want to go through my old collection of images and see if I can find anything worth processing or even re-working - specifically images I completely missed or rejected at the time.

Organisation for this trip was a bit of a disaster if truth be told. I set my alarm for 4:45am intending to go to Dunbar for a sunrise at the old harbour. Sadly I forgot to actually turn the alarm on!

Anyway, I woke up late 5:30am so decided to go to Carlingnose Point instead as I'd stand a better chance of getting there in time. I usually like to arrive a good 30 minutes before sunrise but this time I was only about 10 minutes early. The whole morning felt kind of rushed and I didn't particularly enjoy it. I was having particular problems with the exposure compensation. For some reason with the Sigma 10-20 I was doing my usual +0.33EV but when I put on my Sigma 18-50 it was underexposing like crazy. I can only assume I wasn't really paying attention to the position of my filters and that was causing the huge fluctuations. Whatever the cause I found it really distracting and it kind of ruined the morning for me - not to mention the shots - of which I managed to only get a single "keeper"

Shooting

I didn't stack my filters this time. Simply used a LEE 0.9 ND soft grad The shot above is made up of 2 frames from a bracketed set of 3 exposures at +/- 1.33EV. I ditched the +1.33EV frame as there wasn't really much use for it - there was nothing dark in the frame I wanted detail in. Here's the two frames I used straight out of the camera: -

Post Processing

My work flow goes from Bridge > ACR > Bridge > Photoshop

The post processing for this shot was quick and simple - for me.  According to the date/times on the files, from RAW processing to saving took 16 minutes. That's fast! ;)

RAW Processing

Talking of RAW processing. For 0EV I did an "Auto" levels in ACR while on the -1.33EV layer I brought set the Exposure slider by "-1.00" and the Recovery to "+28"

Next up I selected both layers and set the Vibrance to "+24".

For once I even remembered to do the Lens Correction to compensate for the Chromatic Aberration of the Sigma 10-20.

That pretty much sums up the RAW processing.

The usual thing to do in ACR when done is to click the "Open Images" button at the bottom right. Because I stack my exposures in Photoshop layers I do a slightly different thing. I click "Done" then in Bridge go to "Tools | Photoshop | Load Files into Photoshop Layers". This creates a new Photoshop document with the exposures stacked and nicely named.

DRI + Effects

The next stage of my processing is to blend the layers together. Normally I spend ages with the layer masks, painting in the parts of each exposure I want to keep. This time though I went for the quick approach.

Not much in the way of effects for this. I set the -1.33EV layer to "Multiply" mode. This immediately boosted the colour and darkened everything.

Too much, so I disabled the layer. Pressed ctrl + clicked on the RGB channel. That selected the highlights.

From the layer mask for -1.33EV I deleted the selection. This creates a greyscale version of the image on the mask. I then set the "Feather" on the "Masks" panel to 250px. This blurs the mask hugely.

The effect of the layer mask was to tone down the "Multiply" mode massively except on the highlights.

Next I stamped everything to a new layer (ctrl+shift+alt+e) and did a smart sharpen, slapped on my watermark and added the border.

Job done.

You can see the rest of the shots from this trip here.

In WXTide32, with the combination of daylight/night being shown along with the tide levels it makes it much easier when trying to find locations for the "Golden Hour"

You can download WXTide32 from here.

It integrates Google Maps so you can see instantly where the best place is to be.

You can download TPE from the authors site here.

Ross often bangs on about Dysart in Fife. Almost to the point of me needing to kill myself. OK I exaggerate for effect and when you see the work done by Alan Arnott (Vivid Image), you can understand his enthusiasm for the area.

Anyway, I decided to head up early one morning to see what the fuss was about.

5:30am the alarm goes off but I'm already awake and half dressed.

After quickly making some unidentifiable pate sandwiches for later, I head off on the 45 minute drive from Edinburgh to Dysart. When I got there I was absolutely gutted to see the clouds.

Great texture and high, but going from horizon to horizon and not looking like they where prepared to move just for me. It didn't look as though I was going to have much joy. However I've learned that no matter what, don't leave. You're there anyway, to leave straight away is just insanity - you never know what might happen.

I wander down to the beach looking for the rock formation Alan takes advantage of. Well, I find it and I'm in for another disappointment. It's about 2m from the water. OK so the day's starting to look like a no go so I just wander around looking for stuff to shoot.

One of them was this. By far my favourite of the day but you can decide for yourself by viewing the rest of them in a slideshow here.

Shooting

I stacked my LEE filters in order to slow the shutter speed down. I had a 0.3 and 0.6 ND grads completely cover the frame while the  0.9 ND grad was used on the sky alone.

The shot is made from 3 frames bracketed +/- 1.3EV. I bracket out of habit now,  although I must admit, I could have produced this without the bracketing and subsequent post processing. It's nice to get it right in a single frame, but to my mind it's harmless to bracket and gives you that little bit extra range should you want it.

Here are the three straight out of camera images: -

0ev

-1.33ev

+1.33ev

Post Processing

I load the 3 shots into Photoshop from Bridge, this causes ACR to start to allow me to begin the RAW processing.

I firstly look at the white balance. Usually choosing between "As Shot" and "Auto". I find the "Auto" option is usually warmer than "As Shot" and I often flip flop between the two as I can never decide which I like. This time though I really liked the cold blues the camera was finding so I stuck with "As Shot".

Next I select the 0EV frame only and do an "Auto" levels to see what ACR thinks the exposure should be at. If I'm happy with that then I'll move on to the next step, otherwise I'll adjust the exposure until I'm happy with it. Usually I stick to the Contrast, Recovery, Blacks and Exposure sliders.

Once I'm done with that I'll select all the exposures, add a touch of Vibrance (usually about +20ish) and straighten the horizon.

That pretty much wraps up my RAW processing.

Instead of pressing "Open Images" to continue loading into Photoshop, I'll press "Done" to go back to Bridge instead.

Back in Bridge, with the 3 exposures still selected I go to "Tools | Photoshop | Load Files into Photoshop Layers". This creates a new PS document with each of the exposures stacked with the file name as the name of the layer. It makes things easier for me later.

At this point I usually head down this sort of route but this time was different.

The Photoshop work here was very quick and simple: -

First 0EV is moved to the bottom layer.

Next a mask is put on +1.3EV and -1.3EV layers.

+1.33EV I mask out the sky and a little bit of the bottom right then switch the mode to "Soft Light" and lower the Opacity to 87% "Soft Light" is great for adding contrast and I mask out bits of the bottom right because it's usually a bit OTT when done on dark colours like the seaweed and darker browns of the rocks.

-1.33EV On the mask I selected from just below the two central rocks to the top of the frame. I then deleted the mask and switched the mode to "Multiply".

I then went to the "Masks" tab and changed the "Feather" setting to around 100px. This basically gradients in the the mask edges. It depends on the image what setting to use. You can do the same thing with the gradient tool. "Multiply" gives a really nice colour boost but also darkens things considerably. Therefore I always tend to back off the -EV layer using the opacity. In this case, back down to 47%.

Once I'm happy with the masking I then stamp visible (ctrl+alt+shift+e). This makes a new layer based on the content below.

I sharpened this (Smart Sharpen, 100%, 1.1px).

Next I added a new layer. Filled with black, changed the mode to "Soft Light", masked and painted out most of the mask except the corners to create a light vignette and then backed that off to 72% opacity.

Finally I slapped on my watermark and saved it.

Job done.

I've no idea how this compares to anyone else's work flow but for me this was a very fast process. Usually I can spend quite some time - especially in the layer masking - but this one didn't require very much work.

The following images where also shot on the same visit.

February 2010, Seafield, Kirkcaldy

Early morning surise at Seafield, Kirkcaldy

Shooting Diary

Ross and I went for a scouting trip to a few bits of Fife. We stopped at Carlingnose Point which is where this was shot. We wandered along to the old breakwater at Seafield in Kirkcaldy and then headed out to Elie for the sunset.

Carlingnose Point

First stop, neither of us had been here before. I'd seen where to park but due to an incredibly rude* hill I declined to walk down.

We'd both being seeing quite a few shots from this location, notably from David Queenan (NorthernXposure). Here, here and here. So we headed down to check the lie of the land as it where. I was most unhappy about the hill we had to walk down although it did give me something to complain about on the way back!

* It's very presence caused offence!

Seafield

Ross had seen Duncan's Seafield shots and later, my ones so I took him there so he could find it easily. He lives a hop, skip and jump from Fife so he can visit these places any time.

Elie

We'd been to Elie before, way back in the day, and I wanted to revisit. Partly because it was one of the better places to get a sunset that we hadn't been to recently and partly because I'd seen some lovely shots from there - sorry I can't find them now.

As it turned out the weather had other ideas. Anyway all my shots from the trip can be seen here. Ross is a bit more "organic" than me so you'll have to go through his stream to find his ones.

Shooting Setup

Bracketed 3 frames at +/- 1.33EV on a tripod and using a Phottix remote.

Honesty forces me to admit the eponymous "ET" brick was put there by me. I liked that the brick was lighter coloured and red compared to the surrounding grey rocks and I also liked that your eye would flick between the pier and the brick trying to decide what the subject was.

Worth noting is this is a rare middle of the day shot. I almost exclusively shoot for sunrise and sunset. This made for a refreshing change.

Post Processing

My work flow goes from Bridge > Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) > Bridge > Photoshop.

Here are are the three source images straight out of camera before I so much as touched a pixel.

RAW Processing

In ACR I made the following changes: - 0EV

I used the "Auto" levels on this frame. ACR felt I underexposed and added 0.7EV to the exposure. That ended up blowing out pixels of the ET brick - not that it mattered, the -1.33EV frame was fine.

-1.33EV

I added 0.6EV to this frame to pull it up a little more. This would mostly be used for the sky and ET brick so I didn't want it too dark.

+1.33EV

I did nothing to this except use the "Recovery" slider to pull back some of the blown parts - Not that I'd likely be using them.

For all the layers together I added 17 to the "Vibrance" and straightened the horizon. One day I will get a perfectly horizontal shot! Once I've done my RAW adjustments I go back to Bridge. I do this by clicking the "Done" button in ACR instead of the "Open Images" which would load the 3 files separately into Photoshop.

Dynamic Range Increase (DRI)

The next stage of the post processing is to load them into Photoshop for the DRI processing.

From Bridge I go to menu "Tools | Photoshop | Load Files into Photoshop Layers". This creates a new PS document with each of the exposures with their original filename - very handy for later when I want to save the PSD.

The DRI process is simple to do but complicated to describe so I've made a video which should make the explanation much easier. To summarise the DRI process, I took the sky, ET and a hint of the very close foreground rocks from the -1.33EV exposure while from the +1.33EV I only took a few bits for the edges of the rocks to give a highlight effect. Everything else is made up of the 0EV exposure.

Effects

Next I did a Black & White layer and chose "High Contrast Red Filter" from the presets - whichever preset you choose, it's easily changed later.

I then switched the mode of this layer to "Multiply". This darkens the dark parts considerably as well so I backed off the opacity to 69%. That little tweak is a bit complicated to work out what is going on. Certainly I've no real knowledge of what is happening, only that it tends to add a mega contrast. Here's how I think it breaks down: -

• The Black & White does what it says on the tin, converts to black and white. The presets act like channel masks to allow you to decide which channels you want to use to make up your black and white. The "High Contrast Red Filter" I guess gives a contrast red channel.
• The "Multiply" blend mode takes colours and multiplies them. So if you have some blue and multiply it with blue then you get BLUE. (I think)
• When doing a Multiply on a Black & White layer you're taking the colours the "High Contrast Red Filter" shifted towards black and making them darker. So it's a bit like blue multiplied by black is darker blue. (I think)
• Therefore the effect of this layer is to make the pixels formed by the blue and green channels darker but to leave the ones with red alone. As you can see from the SOOC image there's certainly a LOT more contrast in the final result. That was the intent. I wanted to make the sky look moody.

Once I did that I took one more step. I disabled the Black & White layer then ctrl+clicked the RGB channel to make a selection. I believe this selects the highlights from the resulting visible layers.

Next, I re-enabled the Black & White and selected the mask then alt+delete from the layer mask.

I then inverted this. The effect of this masking was to only allow the effect of the black & white layer to touch the darker parts of the scene. The highlights where unaffected. In effect it slightly brightened the effect. Next up it was a quick smart sharpen and slap on the watermark.

Job done!

The following was also shot the same day and processed in a similar manner. This one was taken at Seafield in Kirkcaldy.

Another World

The trip to Coldingham was the 3rd outing in a 3 day bender! Believe me I struggle to get out once a month, never mind 3 times in 2 days! 

I'd been keeping an eye on this spot though my "Virtual Scouting" which involves OS maps, Google Earth and The Photographer's Ephemeris. What I hadn't found was many pictures that showed this sea-stack. This had me worrying that maybe it was just a poor location.

I decided to risk it anyway and set the alarm for 5am. I also had the sense to make my munchies before I went to bed - a rare bit of forethought!

The drive from Edinburgh to Coldingham took just over an hour and was fairly uneventful - except when my GPS told me to run left and I told it to take a hike. Bit of luck that in hindsight. The road it wanted me to go down turned out to have lots of snow drifted over it - I came back that way.

Anyway, getting there wasn't an issue although I did have a moan to myself (friends will be shocked and appalled I moan even when on my own!) when I noted the lack of activity in the sky. I needn't have worried as there was lots of other things to wow about.

This shot, although not particularly stand out from my point of view seemed to do quite well on Explore - reaching a high point of #20. You can view this and the other shots from the same trip here. Follow the jump to read more about taking the shot and the post processing behind it.

Shooting

• For this I used my LEE filters (soft grad). Both the 0.3 ND and 0.6 ND to completely cover the frame then the 0.9 ND to graduate the sky.
• Obviously on a tripod,
• I used a Phottix remote to reduce shake further.
• I probably didn't use the mirror lock up as it's a pest to remember to switch it on.
• This is a bracketed shot of +/- 1.3EV

Post Processing

My work flow goes from Bridge > Adobe Camera Raw (ACR)  > Bridge > Photoshop - At least it does for bracketed shots. I group the bracketed shots in Bridge so they are easy to find in relation to each other then select them all and hit Enter. This loads up Photoshop. But before Photoshop can open the files, ACR intercepts them.

I do all my RAW processing in ACR.

One of my eternal battles is deciding which white balance to use. I'm not so worried about which one is "correct" rather which one looks best.

My camera seems to go for a much colder white balance than that which ACR selects when you select "Auto" from the white balance drop-down.

This time I decided to stick with "Auto" because it made the pinks in the clouds look positively neon!

For the 0EV shot I often click the "Auto" link just above the "Exposure" slider. This tells ACR to automatically set the contrast, exposure, black, fill light & recovery based on the content of the image. I've no idea if it's a good or bad thing to be doing but the results are often quite satisfactory. Certainly for this frame I used the "Auto" levels.

For  -1.3EV frame I added about 0.45 to the exposure and the +1.3EV I did nothing at all.

I've then select all the frames and added +20 to the Vibrance slider.

For once I didn't have to straighten the horizon!

That about wraps up the RAW processing. Instead of clicking the "Open Images" button at the bottom right of ACR I click the "Done" button. This sends us back to Bridge. From Bridge I go to "Tools | Photoshop | Load Files into Photoshop Layers". This creates a nice new PS document with each of the layers named from their original file names.

Dynamic Range Increase (DRI)

The next part takes me ages to do. It involves layers, masks and fine brushing around the edges to blend elements of the 3 exposures I want to keep together. Instead of me explaining it, take a look at this tutorial which visually shows you exactly what the process involves.

In summary, I took the sky from -1.3EV, the foreground finger of frosted seaweed on a rock as well as the Kip itself from +1.3EV. The rest is made up of the 0EV frame.

Once I'd done that, I cloned out some bunnies from the top right. I really must clean the sensor! Next I added a Saturation layer and set the saturation to -100. I then switched the mode for this layer to "Multiply". This darkens the image considerably and adds a colour punch.

I then selected the RED channel on the channels pallet and deleted this from the mask. This has the effect of applying the darkening and colour punch more to the blue and green channels rather than the red channel. The red was already nice and strong.

I then darkened the highlights slightly using the curves and only applied it to the the Kip and the finger of rock.

Next up I sharpened the whole thing (Smart Sharpen, 100%, 1.4px) and masked out the very edges of the Kip. I was finding the high contrast edge was giving strong sharpening artefacts so I simply masked out the edges - along with the sky which I don't usually sharpen anyway.

Finally I cropped the image square and splatted on my watermark.

Job done!

I wish I knew how long it took from start to finish. If memory serves I'd say around 30 minutes. The vast majority of that time in the DRI part of the post processing.

This is another shot I took on the same trip: -

The Red Weed

This was my first outing in a 2 day bender of 3 trips. I hadn't planned to do that many, it just worked out like that.

Duncan Smith has taken lots of great photographs of the crumbling wall at Seafield. You can see them here. I wanted to check this place out, so with my usual "Virtual Scouting" tools I went hunting for the location. I knew it was in Fife, near Kirkcaldy, but Duncan doesn't map his stuff so it was hard to be sure. By luck I noticed a land feature in Google Earth that looked promising and sure enough, user photos from Panoramio confirmed this was the spot.

So after watching the weather for the previous few days I pulled the trigger and set my alarm. 5:30am wake-up with sandwiches and juice pre-made from the night before! Sometimes I'm organised.

An uneventful drive over saw me arrive at about 6:50am with 30 minutes to go till the sun peeked over the horizon. I cut this one a bit fine, I could have done with being just a touch earlier. Being a bit green for this place I noticed that the lens I brought wasn't going to get anything like what Duncan was shooting. It turned out he was using about 100mm zoom where I was stuck with an ultra wide angle Sigma 10-20mm :) So unless me and my camera where going to take impromptu swimming lessons I wasn't going to get the ruins filling the frame!

In a way it turned out to be a good thing. It might be flattering but coming back with 10 shots framed just like Duncan's would probably be a bit lame. So I consider it a happy accident. Another happy accident was the tide. I never thought to check it before leaving but it was at about 4.5m from a high of 4.8m and a low of 1.4m - basically the tide was high. This meant that while I couldn't get closer to the ruins, it did give for an interesting sea breaking over them.

According to my GPS log I stayed until about 9am so that was a good 2 hours shooting - although I didn't get too much after about 8:15am once the sun got a bit higher.

You can see all the shots from this morning in a slide show here. Note that it's a different version of this particular shot that's on Flickr. Ross suggested a crop which vastly improved the look. Also, the one on Flickr is a pure HDR whereas this is a DRI.

Shooting

This was shot with the B+W 110 ND filter and I took 4 exposures to get everything I wanted. I tend to use complete guesswork at judging the exposure times with the 110. I've made up a chart here which is supposed to let me compensate for fitting the 110 however for some reason I can never get good results. Maybe the math is wrong or maybe I'm simply an idiot. So instead I use the same method Ross suggested at the outset. If it's too dark, double the time, if it's too bright, half it. Keep doing that till you get it right.

Anyway, the first exposure was 60s and while the sky was blown the foreground was really nice. I did a 2nd at 32s, a third at 15s and a 4th just for the sun at 7.8 seconds.

Post Processing

My work flow is Bridge > ACR  > Bridge > Photoshop

In ACR I did the following for all the shots: -

• Straightened the horizon
• Added +27 to the Vibrancy

I didn't do anything else to the first exposure, the 2nd I chose the "Auto" levels, the 3rd and 4th I brought the exposure down by 0.7 and 1.75 respectively.

For the white balance I usually flip flop between "As Shot" and "Auto". "As shot" being the cameras take and "Auto" being ACR. Normally the "As Shot" is colder than "Auto" but not this time. I'm always slightly baffled by the lack of consistency with white balance so I simply ignore it and choose one I like the look of.

That is all the RAW processing I did for this shot, now it was time for the DRI (Dynamic Range Increase) part.

At this point, instead of pressing "Open Images" at the bottom right of the ACR window, I click "Done" instead to go back to Bridge. From Bridge I got to "Tools | Photoshop | Load Files into Photoshop Layers". This creates a new Photoshop document with each of the images on their own layer and automatically named from their file name.

Instead of me trying to explain the DRI part of my post process, take a look here. Basically it's all about masking and blending of layers to select elements from each frame I want to keep to make up a final image.

That was pretty much the extent of the post processing for this one. There was a bit of cloning to remove a rock at the edge of the frame but other than that, it was a neutral post process.

Other Images From The Set 

This was also shot on the same morning: -

February 2010, Seafield, Kirkcaldy

Early morning surise at Seafield, Kirkcaldy

Buachaille Etive Mòr by orangep33l | View On Flickr

Ross and I spent the large part of November and early December talking about getting out during the holidays. I had particularly itchy feet as I wanted to make sure I had a photograph for a Christmas card for 2010.

I run my own business providing IT support and web development services. Every year I send my clients a Christmas card which I shot. I'd used up my "stock" of Christmassy type images so I needed to get a new one before the snow left.

With the weather being "interesting" we where a bit worried deciding if we should even attempt heading north. As it turned out we needn't have worried. The roads where completely clear and the weather was lovely too. I can't even confess to being cold as Rossco had got me a super duper warm jacket for crimbo! The best part was Ross doing the driving for once. o/

The trip didn't start off that well. Due to a brain fade on my part we missed sunrise by 3 hours. Not that we where aiming for sunrise, the sun doesn't hit the Black Mount till a good couple of hours after. I'd forgotten my walking boots so it meant we had to drive back into Edinburgh (from South Queensferry), pick them up then hit the road proper. But even before that I managed to break Ross's car and we had to bump start it down the shallowest hill in the world - no mean feat with a binding brake calliper!

Eventually we got on the road and after an uneventful but relaxing drive up (for me) we arrived at Rannoch. Ross kinda regresses back to childhood when he sees lots of snow and today was no different as we got out the car to chase some really nice light on the mountains. We got about 20ft from the car before Ross was up to his waist in a snow drift and the light had changed already! That pretty much summed up the day. Lots of snow and the light changing in a blink of an eye.

I did manage to get my Christmas card but that was about it for me. Oh, there is one other non-photography related item worth reporting. I'm now leading the "Who can fall over while carrying a camera and manage to not hurt said device" championship. Almost every time we go out, one of us takes a tumble. Ross took an early lead one morning in North Berwick with a stunning pirouette on some seaweed covered rock. Later in Skye I equalised with a slow motion slide down a muddy slope onto my ass.

Well today I took the lead with a step into oblivion. It happened about 5 minutes before the shot above was taken. We where walking down towards the river when I took a step into a peat bog. Lovely smelly things those are! What was annoying was as soon as my foot left the ground to take the step I knew it was gonna happen. Sadly inertia took over :) My camera was safe in the rucksack so maybe this one doesn't count though.

Our locations for stopping where: -

• Rannoch looking toward the Black Mount.
• Blackrock Cottage (my Christmas card)
• River Etive looking towards Buachaille Etive Mòr (above)
• Rannoch Dead Tree

You can see all 5 of my uploads from this trip here - including the one I'll use for the Christmas card. For Ross's you'll have to dig through his stream.

Shooting

I shot on the tripod using a LEE 0.9ND & 0.3ND soft grads stacked. Triggered with a Phottix remote.

The shot is made from 3 frames bracketed at +/- 2EV as per my habit. I try to get the first frame exposed as near to perfect as possible - the other two are just a bonus. It's not like storage space is expensive so there isn't really any harm. Here are the 3 shots straight out the camera: -

0ev

-2ev

+2ev

Post Processing

My work flow goes from Bridge > ACR > Bridge > Photoshop. In Bridge, I select the 3 files and hit enter. Instead of them loading directly into Photoshop, the are "intercepted" by Adobe Camera Raw where I do my RAW processing.

RAW Processing

For 0EV I did an auto-levels. This added to the exposure, increased the contrast, lowered the brightness and upped the blacks. For -2EV I manually added some contrast and increased the exposure 0.85. For +2EV I wasn't planning on doing much with it. It is completely blown out so I just did an "Auto" levels for the hell of it. Next I selected all the frames and added +17 to the Vibrance.

DRI + Effects

I spent many a minute doing my usual DRI (Dynamic Range Increase) layer blending technique. Instead of my explaining it, why not watch a video?

In summary I took the sky from -2EV and the rest from 0EV. With the +2EV layer I very lightly painted at the right hand side of the mountain and some of the foreground lumps of snow. This makes it look as though there is light coming from the right of the image.

I must admit, I've written this post 3 months after doing the processing and I didn't notice the use of the +2EV layer until I went back to my PSD to investigate. It's quite a nice subtle touch. Subtlety isn't normally my strong suit :)

In the left hand corner you'll notice the grass. I did make an attempt at cloning out the worst of it but quickly lost patience. I really should go back and finish the job properly! Once I got bored with the cloning I sharpened the final image and completely forgot to watermark! That's it. Nothing else was done.

Effects Again

I came back to this again - this time trying to clean up the grass. This time I cropped off the bottom and shifted up the rock with the "cat's tail" of snow near the center bottom of the frame.

I've still got to go back again and fix another couple of bits I'm not happy with. This is the latest version of the image: -