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Photo experiment with soft light och blur. Sony Nex-5N, Konica Hexanon 50/1.7.
© Stefan Blomberg, scb@blombergs.net
We have found out today that we have a very nice autumn this year. It is dry and at daytime almost summery warm. Accordingly, the fall colors are so beautiful in the woods.
Since Flickr just shared the top timestack across their social channels, this seems like a good time for me to post a comparison of the same frames stacked in Lighten mode (top) vs Darken mode (bottom), both stacked in StarStax.
These frames were taken with my Sony Nex 5T, set up on a mini-tripod (dangerously close to the water). I used Sony's timelapse app to take a photo every six seconds (for maybe about half an hour? I'm not sure, I'd have to go look back at the frames to verify). Then, I put those frames in StarStax on my computer and stacked them in Lighten and Darken modes.
Lighten mode keeps the brightest pixel at each point. In a sunset this typically produces a lot of pinks and oranges and yellows, and overall produces a picture very much like what you would expect to get from a single long exposure photo of the same scene.
Darken mode, on the other hand, produces very eerie results from sunsets. While I did adjust the levels a little bit, I did not change the overall colors - those greens really did come from the sunset stacked in darken mode, even though green is the last color I'd think of in a sunset. I still don't fully understand it, but I often get a lot of turquoise and green from this process. Also, Darken mode keeps all the silhouettes of birds and planes and helicopters, and, if you look closely, even a DJI Phantom photography drone.
Photos posted separately, and album of more of these:
Landscape from the Káli basin, a part of the Balaton Uplands. I took this one in Káptalantóti after cheering for friends at the 2017 Duathlon Short Distance National Championships.
Fall foliage on a beautiful day in Somerville, MA.
This photo falls under "you don't just take the photo, you make the photo." While I do take plenty of quick snapshots, this one took planning and work and post-processing. This spot is right by the course of my daily work routine, though near a less-used route so I hadn't seen it before. One day, I noticed the bright blue chairs and the orange leaves and the beautiful lighting, and I quickly took some photos, trying to get a nice low perspective as if you're being invited to sit in the chairs and relax. You can see the result of that quick photo session here: flic.kr/p/zMtzVo - and also my comments about how while I liked the scene, I was unsatisfied with how the first set of photos came out.
So then, I kept staring at that photo and thinking about why it wasn't quite right. So, I went back the next day (when I had a break in the workday) and I started moving the chairs around and trying different angles and settings, and waiting for the clouds to cover and uncover the sun to get different lighting. I lucked out that the bright leaves were still there, and the lighting was just as good or maybe better with a few clouds in the sky.
In the end, I took about hundred photos to get this one (depending whether you count when the camera saves HDR and normal as one shot or two). Then, once I picked the HDR shot I liked best, I did some processing on it in Snapseed on my iPad to improve the overall lighting and to make the leaves and chairs pop. I feel like after processing, it looks more like how the scene looked in person when it caught my eye. The un-processed version had a lot of dark shadows because of the backlighting, which mess up the camera shot more than the human eye in person.
The other funny thing is that this scene looks really peaceful, but actually, that spot is surrounded by construction, and it was a lot of work for me to frame the shot with no people or machinery in it. Near the end of my photoshoot, someone started mowing the lawn, and I took a few more in between his passes, getting the one of the final shots that I liked just moments before he moved the chairs out of the way and got rid of all the fallen leaves. Probably the loud construction noise is the only reason those chairs were empty for me to photograph on such a beautiful day.
Maybe later, if people are interested, I'll post some behind the scenes stuff: unprocessed and/or non-HDR versions, shots at a different angle showing the construction, etc.
Update Nov 7, 2015: I posted a collage showing some behind the scenes shots on the framing and processing that went into this: www.flickr.com/photos/jesspictures/22457349309/
Update Feb 5 2016: check out the winter version! flic.kr/p/Dp4Bj7
Praia da Falesia in Algavre, Portugal. Four years passed since my visit there but it's still one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.
Part of the 160 km long Eagles' Nests Trail - a popular tourist and hikers trail named after a chain of 25 fortified medieval castles and defence watchtowers built in the 14th century on top of large limestone rocks and cliffs in southern Poland.
Most of the castles have not survived the many wars and foreign invasions and are now just picturesque ruins - Olsztyn Castle was finally destroyed by the Swedes in 1655.