View allAll Photos Tagged pixelshift
Let's take a little trip back in time, 5 or 6 months ought to do it. Let's forget for a moment all about the virus and self-distancing and what-not. Back in happier times, I traveled to Zion National Park for a few days of hiking and exploring with some friends. It was a superb experience, the weather was fantastic and we got some great photos. One of the highlights was a day trip up the "Left Fork" of the Virgin River, to the formation better known as "The Subway", a tubular shape carved out by the water that develops a wonderful glow in the reflected mid afternoon light.
This spot has been photographed a zillion times, of course, and I used to see it regularly on top photographers' pages. Its popularity seems to have waned as other, newer locations have drawn attention. However, it's one I'd never been to before and although there really aren't that many different ways to shoot it, its still a nice feeling to capture such an iconic location ones self even if not particularly unique.
The trek to the Subway is an event in itself, approx 10 miles round trip (when one accounts for the many added steps to bypass various obstacles through the canyon passage), including some very steep ascents and descents. However, it is doable even for a middle-aged desk jockey like myself, as long as one brings appropriate equipment and supplies and leaves enough time. Also, you need a permit.
Anyways, hope everyone is having a great weekend. Have to say, I've done a lot of catching up on Flickr recently, a nice byproduct of being stuck at home. I'd prefer to be out shooting, but now I get to go through a big backlog of photos to work on.
EDIT: Well, a shoutout to Adelheid Smitt who noted the "light at the end of the tunnel" as a fitting metaphor for the times. Wish I'd thought of it originally, but I'm shamelessly stealing that as my new title.
big spring park Huntsville alabama….first ride with the da15 using the pentax K-3ii and it's pixel shift feature.....i'm certainly not accustom to landscapes unless it's at night but that's all about the sky
I've built up a pretty good backlog of pictures over the past year, which is a nice position to be in. One of my personal favorites is this little nook from Oneonta Gorge in Oregon. Although I'm usually chasing after the big epic landscape shots, there are often small, more subtle details that catch my eye. I don't think I am as talented at rendering those as some of the other great photographers here on Flickr. But, this image has always stuck with me on a very personal level. Sometimes I shoot images that are just pretty without much deeper meaning. This one speaks to me at multiple levels. I don't often go on about the deeper meaning of my photos, but sometimes I use my flickr posts as a kind of blog to express something more personal, and I feel the need to with this particular image. Dear reader, feel free to check out here ;-)
One of the things I like most about this image is that it represents the concept of 'balance' to me. First of all, it feels 'visually balanced'. I don't even know if that's really a thing. But it's a property that I have come to ascribe to certain images that just feel right. It has to do with the distribution of elements in the frame, and the visual weight of light and dark across the frame. It's not something I've specifically seen written about in my readings of photography literature. It might be encapsulated in some of the other composition rules, such as the rule of thirds. On the other hand, I'm still a relative newbie to this hobby, and it could be complete bullshit on my part. Secondly, the image represents life balance, a thing that I value very highly and strive for in my life. The rocks are shaped and worn by water and time. They have substance, density, persistence and strength. I am the rock. The ivy and ferns are vibrant, delicate, lively and fleeting. I am the ivy. The moss is there too, covering everything, flowing through the background. No. Uh Uh. No way. I am not freakin' moss!
I strive to be great at something (perhaps eventually I'll get there with photography), but I am satisfied to be good at many things, living in balance. Both selfish and self-sacrificing. Photography is my selfish side, my time to discover and create. I relish it all, the big waterfalls and dramatic sunsets; and the small scenes, speaking just to me, interesting only to me. I love the balance - the inner calm and feeling of being alive that comes from achieving it. And I love the act of balancing - the constant struggle against outside forces, wearing down my edges and shaping me.
If you stuck with me through that, thank you. And I'm sorry ;-)
Best viewed large on black background.
Beneath the vatnajökull glacier on Iceland's south coast incredible ice caves are carved by the waters flowing through and beneath the vast tongue of ice. As scientific understanding of this frozen world deepens, we begin to see that life survives even after being frozen in time for thousands of years. It even thrives in the waters underneath: icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/nature_and_travel/2017/07/10/r...
Kevin Benedict and I had the incredible experience of exploring the ice caves, led by the fantastic guides from Blue Iceland - blueiceland.is on an unforgettable visit in 2018. Deep inside the glacier I was mesmerized by the forms, textures and otherworldly glow coming from within the ice. At times it felt almost organic, like being inside an unimaginably large alien creature (yes, I have an active imagination and I watch and read too much Sci-Fi). With our recent understanding of the vast amount of bacteria, viruses and other microscopic life that lies within the ice, this may not be entirely inaccurate! I've already posted a couple other pictures from the ice cave, so I may be starting to get repetitive here, but this is possibly my favorite picture from the entire trip. I know abstracts aren't everyone's cup of tea, but the forms, the almost oily texture, the color and the glow of this particular surface within the cave made me almost giddy, and the fact that I was able to capture this surprisingly well in camera delights me to no end. It was *not* an easy photo to take as it was a rather tight space, and quite deep within the cave, so it required some sucking in of the tummy and rather complicated arranging of tripod and camera. I couldn't get the visual alignment quite as square as I would have liked but I was happy to get any shot at all (and astounded that the camera was able to find focus in such a dark place). I was also *very* relieved once I had the shot and was able to extricate myself and move back out to less claustrophobic conditions. So I know that few others will have the same emotional reaction to this icy abstract that I do and that's ok with me, this image brings me immense personal satisfaction and some good memories of being forced out of my comfort zone to experience something truly unique.
My camera, which I dearly love and has served me brilliantly, nonetheless has some flaws. The sensor is well known to have hot spot issues with longer epxosure shots. The same Sony sensor is used by both the Nikon D810 and Pentax K-1. Nikon provided a fix for this issue once it became evident (photographylife.com/news/nikon-confirms-the-d810-thermal-...), but Pentax chose to fix it via software, so the K-1 provides a hot-spot removal option on long exposure shots, which is effectively implemented as a two-phase shot where the camera takes the same image again with the shutter closed, finds all the non-black pixels and then subtracts them or some such thing. Anyway, this is ok BUT I don't use it that often in practice because it adds a large amount of in-camera processing time to an already long shot. Keep in mind I almost always shoot with Pentax's "Pixel Shift" mode which takes 4 shots moving the sensor 1 pixel between each shot and then combining them together to get improved sharpness, dynamic range and color fidelity. Pixel Shift proved an absolute technological god-send in the darkness of the ice caves allowing me to lift the shadows by 2 additional stops without adding noise. But now you have a shot which is already a 30 second exposure X 4, so two full minutes of exposure time. Adding the automatic in-camera hot spot reduction would've taken each shot to nearly 5 minutes (!). That's a long time to be hanging around in a dark cramped nook of a cave below a few million tons of ice. So to finally come to the point of this story, I didn't use the hot spot reduction. And it's a dark long-exposure shot. So there were a lot of hot spots I found in this image and it took hours of cloning to remove the 200+ hot spots from the resulting image. And I may not have found them all.
"Chaos of colors
comes to life in a lens as
Crane welcomes fall"
A Haiku seemed a fitting match for a Tokyo fall scene, so there's my little attempt. I tried several parks in Tokyo looking for the right mix of color until I found this little gem at Hibiya park in Chiyoda City area near the Imperial Palace. The rainbow of colors on display blew me away, and the little crane statue added just the right touch. The composition is rather chaotic with no clear focus, I rather wish I could've got something with the statue more central in the composition, but that angle just didn't work. As the haiku suggests, I personally feel that the chaos works to communicate the clutter of fall colors that somehow still come together to give one a feeling of peace and contentment.
Captured on a recent fast trip to Tokyo just before US thanksgiving. I was fortunate to hit this park first thing in the morning on a workday. I had tried some other parks on the weekend and they were mobbed with fall color seekers. On a weekday morning however, there were only a few souls lingering in the park while the rest of the world rushed to the office.
Taken with Pentax K-1 and Pentax 24-70mm lens using Pixel shift feature.
A very Happy New Year to all my Flickr friends!!
A classic scene - down at the beach at Portknockie, well, lying flat-out on a rocky boulder with the water lapping around, waves coming in breaking in front of me...
For just these two minutes the light and clouds were in just the right places.
Also in glowing black and white
Hard working juvenile male Ruby-throated Hummingbird in flight.
Fairly Uncommon.
Hope your long Labor Day weekend is going great... enjoy.
I had the great fortune to spend 8 glorious days traveling around Iceland recently, a long-planned joint project with Kevin Benedict.
We had planned for mid-March timing with the hope of getting both an ice cave visit and some visible auroras while hopefully avoiding the worst winter blasts that can readily shut down the Icelandic ring road. Fortune smiled upon us (mostly) and allowed us to hit all the sites we had planned (and with one magnificent aurora night to boot). One of the highest of highlights was a guided visit to a spectacular Ice Cave (thanks to our terrific guides from Blue Iceland - blueiceland.is). The Ice Cave is a wondrous experience, and it felt not unlike the slot canyons of US southwest, but with perhaps an even greater feeling of alienness on our own planet, as well as a not-entirely-shakeable feeling of nerves walking through water carved tunnels under millions of tonnes of moving ice!).
The possibilities for abstract photos are almost endless given the unique colors and formations created by the runoff flowing over ice. The ice itself is not quite as old as I was thinking (Vatnajokull glacier started forming about 2500 years ago), but nevertheless one has the feeling of walking back in time as one walks in to the cave. With the passing of Stephen Hawking, one of our most brilliant minds, a few short days after our trip to the ice cave, I thought a tribute to him was also a fitting title.
More to come!
Daily In Challenge, 2022.01.02
Flickr Friday
Lens, SMC Macro-Takumar 50mm, f/4.0, shot at f/8.0
In Camera Pixel Shift acitve.
Proper colours. The most beautiful shade of green pine foliage interspersed with orange/yellow warm birch trees, all lapping up the early morning light.
"We would be warm below the storm
In our little hideaway beneath the waves
Resting our head on the sea bed
In an octopus' garden near a cave"
It was a dreary stormy day in Portland. I caught enough of a break in the rain to spend some time with the famous little Japanese Maple there that photographers line up to shoot. But there are a number of other maples in the garden, including this little gem hidden in its own little cove with the rock placed just so and its fallen bounty of color landing oh so pleasingly on the moss covered rocks and in the water below.
To be perfectly honest, I found the whole setup a little too manicured maybe for my particular taste, but there's no denying its visual appeal. And who am I to whine about having the privilege to shoot such spectacular colors?
The branches of this little maple remind me of an octopus, which immediately triggers this classic Beatles melody.
NOT taken this year, but I'm itching for some color that hasn't really emerged yet around these parts, so going back to the catalog in anticipation (as many others seem to be doing as well).
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. The cliff on the right is the "Painted Wall", a 2,000+ ft vertical drop, named for the streaks of Pegmatite (no, I don't know what that is either) that run across it. This is a lesser known park in western Colorado, seemingly overshadowed by its neighbors like Canyonlands nearby in Arizona. Of the many great locations visit on recent trip with Kevin Benedict, this park really affected me. I love the different textures in the canyon, and I especially loved the quality of light streaking down the canyon in late afternoon.
Photographically I found this to be a very challenging location for many reasons. It's hard to get a photo that truly communicates the scope along with the magnificent coloring and some of the nuanced details. Shooting in to the setting sun created a lot of unpleasant sun spots on many of my shots. Also, the Painted Wall has a very large deep crevasse in it which tends to detract from the composition. Here I used a nearly square crop to largely eliminate the crevasse. I also tried some panorama shots which give a different kind of feel, and I may post one of those in future as well (I had a hard time choosing!). There is a vast range in tone between the bright sun and the dark regions at the bottom of the canyon. I found that a multiple exposure fusion was the only way I could adequately deal with the dynamic range. I tried to process it in such a way as to not make it scream 'HDR' (thought its still pretty obvious it is a multiple exposure).
I also took this opportunity to use the 'pixel shift' feature of the new Pentax K-3 ii, which uses the in-body image stabilization to take 4 pictures for each image, each shifted by 1 pixel in order to fully expose each pixel for true RGB (much like a foveon sensor). It then combines them in camera. So in fact, this photo is a fusion of 12 different images, 3 different exposures with 4 shots each. Theoretically this makes for lower noise, better dynamic range and greater clarity. While I have no objective proof that this works, I am quite impressed with the level of detail my relatively inexpensive APS-C Pentax was able to extract from this scene. While this feature is only useful in limited circumstances, it seems to be very effective in those cases where it can be used.. The Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 Art lens also contributes, as this lens is very very sharp when properly focused and exposed.