The June HDR workshop was a great success and I had several people who expressed an interest but couldn’t make it on that particular day. As a result, I’ve arranged to give another workshop at Dragonfly Gallery on Saturday October 16th, 2010. This will follow the same plan as the previous class. If you are interested in learning how to take and process the kind of images I typically post here or on my photoblog, head on over to my workshop page to read about the class.

The workshop is limited to 8 people so please let me know as soon as possible if you would like to take part and I’ll add your name to the list.

Yesterday, July 24th 2010, was the day of the third annual World Wide Photo Walk organised by author and photography guru Scott Kelby. Over 33000 photographers in 1100 locations got together in groups of 50 to shoot pictures of parts of their local town or city and generally have three or four hours of camaraderie and photo-geekery.

Austin this year had 3 photo walks to choose from. Fellow HDR aficionado Pete Talke led a walk in the evening around the State Capitol and most of the local HDR types joined him. I was keen to shoot somewhere different, however, so teamed up with the group led by Simi Shonowo which started at 8am and walked south of the lake around the Palmer Events Center, Long Center and Auditorium Shores area. A third walk was also organised for the area of the Oasis Restaurant on Lake Travis.

Each walk ends at a restaurant to give people a chance to socialise and discuss the event. Our ending venue was Threadgill’s on Barton Springs Road – an excellent venue which had no trouble accomodating the 30 or so people who stayed for lunch at the end of the walk.

Once again, the walk was great fun. Our group had locals and also people who had travelled into the area to shoot somewhere different – several from San Antonio and one from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Although I enjoyed the walk, again, the experience was valuable more socially than photographically – I had a hard time getting particularly inspired and came away with only 3 or 4 pictures that I’m really happy with. No prizes this year but the event itself is definitely a winner and I would encourage any photographer who has not taken part to sign up when next year’s event is announced.

Things have been a bit quiet here recently since I’m currently on a trip to New Mexico and am relying on hotel WiFi which, unfortunately, is not universal. AT&T are living up to the standard I have come to expect by having no effective data coverage anywhere in the state as far as I can see – even downtown in Santa Fe, I am completely unable to get any kind of usable data connection. That is, however, a story for another blog posting.

Today, we spent the morning in downtown Santa Fe soaking up artistic inspiration. Not only is the city centre absolutely beautiful with fabulous adobe buildings everywhere, it’s also home to more excellent art galleries and museums than just about anywhere I’ve ever visited. After the must-be-visited Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the highlights for me were three photography galleries.

The Lisa Kristine Gallery contained some of the most beautiful images I have ever seen – large format prints of people and scenes shot mostly in Asia. Amazing portraits and landscapes with absolutely perfect light.

Since the demise of the last dedicated fine art photography gallery in Austin (by which I mean a gallery selling prints by internationally acclaimed and famous photographers) couple of years ago, I was also delighted to get a fix of superlative print quality at the Andrew Smith Gallery which features original prints by masters Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh amd Henri Cartier Bresson among others. You may think these photographers’ images are superb in books of their work but until you have seen original prints, you really don’t have any idea of just how amazing these images are. The tonal range in the prints is something to weep over.

In addition to these masters, I was also delighted to see more of the luminous landscape work of Christopher Burkett whose large format images blew me away when I first saw them four or five years ago. His large prints are, sadly, rather outside my budget but I came really close to signing a four figure check a few years ago when I saw one if his pictures of an aspen forest in autumn. You could see every vein on every leaf in a 30″x40″ print. Truly breathtaking.

The final gallery I visited was Photogenesis which featured the work of several photographers, most of whom were new to me. One that really caught my eye was Nicholas Trofimuk whose black and white landscapes are wonderful.

While I didn’t walk away with any large prints (unfortunately), I did treat myself to a copy of “The Portfolios of Ansel Adams” and several greeting cards to remind me of the day.

A great skill for a photographer to acquire (and which Jim Goldstein talks about in his blog post today) is the ability to see pictures in areas that may otherwise have been overlooked and to do this you must remove those blinkers and consider all possibilities in the location you find yourself rather than merely the view straight ahead or the original plan.

Look up, look down and look behind you!

I love wildlife photography and am in awe of the work done by people like Matt & Will Burrard-Lucas and Moose Peterson but it’s not something I ever reckon I’ll be particularly successful at since (a) the most interesting wildlife always seems to be an expensive airline ride away and (b) I can’t afford the kind of lenses that you need to take that really great picture of a lion without running the significant risk of ending up as its breakfast.

Wildlife, however, need not only involve wildebeest roaming the savannah or grizzly bears in Alaska. If you look around you, there are likely to be lots of exciting examples of wildlife to photograph as long as you think smaller. Bugs and insects are everywhere and as long as you have a lens with the ability to focus close (or close-up filters or extension tubes) and a flash you most likely can get some great wildlife shots within feet of your front door.

Take this shot, for example. I was finishing cleaning out our chicken coop (a highly nasty job requiring a face mask in the summer) and went to get some hay for their nesting box only to find a large (by Texas standards) scorpion having lunch on a piece of wood next to the hay bale. I raced inside to get the camera, macro lens and flash and shot a few images before he decided to hide from me. The lighting isn’t perfect but the shot definitely captured the moment. I took several more after this using a reflector to reduce the shadows and generally make the image look more natural but, by that time, the scorpion had moved and the composition wasn’t as good.

Next time you decide that you couldn’t possibly be a wildlife photographer, think small and see what you can find.

June 26th has been declared “International HDR Day” by well-known HDR photographers Rick Sammon and Trey Ratcliff so, in the spirit of the celebration, I had to take an HDR shot today and post it on all 3 of the sites I post photos to (here, Flickr and my photoblog).

This rather odd shot was taken at the Barsana Dham Hindu temple in Austin. The boys and I headed over there this morning to pick peaches in their orchard and took a wander around the temple afterwards. I didn’t have a lot of time since we were all thirsty after our fruit picking but got one image that I feel is worthy of posting.

If you haven’t tried shooting HDR and like “arty pictures,” give it a shot. It’s really pretty straighforward to do and you’ll have a lot of fun playing with the enormous number of possible variations you can create with each picture. You’ll find my HDR tutorial over on the photoblog and, if you prefer hands-on instruction, I’ll be giving another offering of my HDR workshop on a Saturday in either September or October this year.

By the way, in case anyone clicks through to the “About” page on DPExperience, I’m not that Dave Wilson. I appear to have an evil twin on Rick Sammon’s staff

The Barn Swallow nest in our garage is creaking from the weight of this summer’s new brood. I strongly suspect they will be taking flight some time in the next few days since they’ve definitely outgrown the available space!

This year’s experience with the swallows has been rather confusing. A pair arrived pretty early and hatched a brood of 3 chicks. Shortly thereafter, the male disappeared but the female kept feeding the young. Unfortunately one fell out the nest very early and didn’t survive and a second broke a wing presumably when trying to take flight for the first time. Around this time, however, another pair of swallows appears and were extremely agitated to find the next occupied.

We’re not sure, obviously, but our guess is that this as the original pair that build the nest and the first pair this year were interlopers. Regardless, the remaining check from the first brood took flight and the second pair took up residence and raised this fine group of chicks.

Some people complain about the mess a swallow’s nest generates and, yes, they do create quite a pile of guano to deal with but I consider that a minor inconvenience compared to the joy of watching these master aviators up close and the excitement of seeing the chicks grow up and take their initial flights.

My fingers are crossed for these guys this week!

Sean Galbraith is from Toronto and specialises in urban decay photography. He is also co-presenter of the TV show “PhotoXplorers” which covers the exploits of Sean and his colleagues hunting for shots in abandoned buildings. I’ve included a short documentary about his “DK Photogroup” at the end of this post. You can also watch the first PhotoXplorers episode on YouTube.

The second guest is Achim Runnebaum, a photographer now based in Nagoya, Japan and editor of RAN magazine.

Yesterday was the long-awaited HDR Workshop. This had been organised to coincide with the show and was held in the classroom at the gallery. We spent an hour or so discussing HDR background and how to shoot for HDR then headed down to the Capitol for a couple of hours of taking pictures. After lunch, we returned to the gallery and spent the rest of the day processing and looking at the results.

The folks who took part (click through the image for the list) did great work and produced some super images, some of which you will no doubt find on Flickr fairly soon.

After this class, I already have enough people interested to justify doing another so I’m planning on holding a second workshop some time in September or October. If you are interested, use the contact page and drop me a line.

The first part of my exhibition at Dragonfly Gallery at Rosedale is almost over. On Monday, part of the show will be taken down to be replaced by student photos from April’s workshop led by Raul Touzon. This was my first serious, themed show in a “real” gallery and it was a great pleasure and honour to hang my pictures in such a wonderful space. Thanks to owner Nina Mihm for the opportunity!

The top image here was taken by local photographer friend Rusty Jackson who arrived with a camera and kindly took a few shots. I also had my camera there so I grabbed an image of Rusty in return but this was one of only about 4 exposures I took that evening since I was rather busy talking to guests instead. By the way, if you have not seen Rusty’s work, I would strongly recommend a trip to his site where you will find some of the best examples of travel photography you are likely to find anywhere.

To all who came to see the show over the last couple of weeks, many thanks. If you’ve not seen it yet, please drop by the gallery between now and July 8th since you will still be able to view the best images along with a collection of other outstanding pictures from the workshop.

Disney World is both a wonderful place and a terrible place to take photographs. On the wonderful side, there’s the fact that no-one even batted an eye at me for lugging a large tripod and a backpack full of gear (no New York-style security guard hassle here) and also that there are just so many iconic images to be taken. This second point is also why it can be a terrible place to take pictures too.

Take Cinderella’s Castle, for example. The world and his wife (or husband depending upon your viewpoint) has the cliched picture of the castle taken from Main Street USA (I posted one that almost qualifies over on the photoblog earlier this week). Pretty much every really photogenic scene inside the park has been shot so many times that it can be really tricky finding anything new and making your pictures stand out from the other 10,000 of the same scene.

One approach is to look for different angles on the subjects but, again, this is tricky since there are so darn many great photographers who have been there before. Most of the good angles have already been found. I decided, however, to take a different approach with this shot. Why not change the feel of the typical shot instead of changing the basic content of the shot itself?

I was shooting a night just as the park people closed off the area immediately in front of the castle in preparation for the firework show. This gave me a great opportunity to get images of the castle with no-one in the frame. As you may know, the lighting on the castle cycles through several different colours and one of them was cool blue. I waited for this to come up and shot a series of images for an HDR with the castle bathed in cool light. After a bit of work in Photomatix and Lightroom, the resulting image is more reminiscent of a Dracula movie than Cinderella – not a hint of pink princesses, tiaras and sequins left at all (though the sign on the right giving times to the next Mickey Mouse show is a bit of a give-away).

Next time you are visiting some hugely overphotographed location, try to think of different things you can do to make your image stand out from the pack. Either try to find a different composition or, if that’s tricky, think of different ways you can present the subject.

Shooting at up to 6400 looks fabulous. This image was taken at 3200 and has had no processing other than a crop (Click here for the original sized image). If I ran some minimal noise reduction on it, it would definitely be as good as any 800 ISO image from the D90.

How does the camera cope at the stupidly high settings, though?

To try this out, I set the sensitvity at Hi02 (25600 ISO) and shot some tests inside some of the darker Disney rides. The following image illustrates the results both straight out of the camera (top left) and after a run through Imagenomics excellent Noiseware Pro (bottom right). You can’t really see the effect in the small image here but take a look at the original to see just how well the noise reduction worked. The result is a bit posterised but still definitely usable for small prints or emergency use.

I don’t know about you, but I’m stunned at how well both the camera and the software do on these images. The camera gives me at least 2 stops more usable sensitivity than the D90 and Noiseware probably adds another 2 stops to this allowing me to shoot comfortably at 6400 ISO and not have to worry about significant noise. In an emergency, I can take it all the way up to 25600 ISO and still be confident of ending up with something usable in low resolution applications. Wow!

Moving forward, expect more photography articles and tutorials (these are definitely the most popular posts on the site) along with the usual collection of images, background technical information and general chit-chat.

Thanks to everyone who reads the blog – I know you’re out there even if you don’t comment a lot

Will and his brother Matt are outstanding wildlife photographers from the UK who have gained fame recently through their adventures with the “Beetlecam”, a remote controlled car with a camera and a couple of flashes mounted on it. The vehicle gained fame not only for the amazing close-up photos of African wildlife Matt & Will captured with it but also for the fact that it was abducted by a lion at one point. Read more over on Matt & Will’s blog.

After the Beetlecam discussion, we wander around for the remainder of the hour talking about copyright registration, film processing chemicals, how cool the iPad is and whether or not photographers should be removing Flash from their web sites. This was all very well but, after talking about one of the coolest techy photo projects of the year, it was rather downhill from there as far as I was concerned

I’ve been extremely busy over the last 3 weeks or so getting ready for my new exhibition which opens tomorrow at the Dragonfly Gallery at Rosedale here in Austin. The show is titled “Shining up the Lone Star: A Brighter Take on Texas” and includes 21 images. mostly HDR, taken in and around central Texas. You can read more about the show here and can get a sneak preview of the images here.

The show will be hanging until July 8th. It has the gallery to itself for the first 3 weeks then is joined by the best student images from Raul Touzon’s recent workshop here in Austin. Due to vacation plans, the artist’s reception will be on the evening of Thursday, June 17th.

If you are going to be in Austin, please drop by and take a look. If you know any rich, photography-loving benefactors, please also encourage them to take a look

High ISO Operation

One of the main reasons I was interested in the D700 was it’s ability to shoot at high ISO settings with minimal noise. My initial testing has shown that the performance is every bit as good as I had hoped and I reckon I get about a 2EV improvement over the D90. Images at 1600 ISO are amazingly clean and I can shoot at 6400 ISO and get images that I am sure would look great at 12″x8″ and still be usable at larger sizes. The D700 tops out at 25600 ISO but I have yet to try this.

Exposure and Dynamic Range

The camera offers the option to shoot in either 12-bit or 14-bit mode and, since I’m shooting RAW, I have it set to 14-bit to save as much information as possible. I’ve not yet done any side-by-side testing to see if I can see any difference in the two modes, though. One thing I do notice, however, is that I can push and pull the exposure a lot further in Lightroom without seeing nasty artifacts than I could with the D90. A 2EV increase or decrease from the basic exposure still leaves me with an image that looks great.

This rather surprises me since, according to DXOMark, the D90 sensor actually has slightly higher dynamic range than the D700. Regardless, I definitely see a difference in the amount I can muck with the D700 files before noise or artifacts become annoying.

Autofocus

One feature that I was looking forward to was an increase in the number of autofocus points offered. My D90 had only 11 points that I could choose to focus on. When handholding, this was fine since I could set a focus point where I wanted then move the camera to reframe but for tripod-based situations and, specifically macro-photography I would very often find that I couldn’t get a focus point where I needed it to be and had to compromise my composition merely to move one of the limited number of points over the subject (or switch to manual focus). With the D700, however, I now have 51 focus points to choose from and this problem is a lot less likely to occur. The new camera also allows me to zoom the Live View display so that I can perform fine focus adjustment without having to rely upon the viewfinder. It is possible that the D90 would also allow this, though – I need to go back and re-read the manual to check.

While I had expected the increase in number of focus points, one huge difference that I had not expected is a very significant improvement in focus speed. On the D90, using high-end Nikon lenses, I was pretty impressed at how fast the focus would track but on the D700 it’s even faster still. Shooting soccer last week and using continuous autofocus with the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, the camera appeared to be refocusing about as fast as my own eyes could.

Build Quality

After a couple of years use, my D90 is beginning to show some wear (as you would expect). Some of the rubber grip moldings are sliding away from their original positions, for example. While I have no way of knowing if this kind of thing will happen to the D700 after similar use, I can say that this is a far more solid beast. It feels a great deal denser and gives the impression of being a very much more serious piece of equipment. The downside here, of course, is that it also feels a great deal heavier. The additional weatherisation offered by the D700 should be helpful whether I’m shooting in rain or, more likely, being accidentally hosed down by a kid in our local swimming pool (as happened today).

Also related to build quality, the sound the shutter makes when it releases is totally different from the D90 and altogether more “solid.” The shutter mechanism is speced for 150,000 releases on the D700 vs. 100,000 or so for the D90 as far as I can remember.

Additional Features Helpful for HDR

The D90 could shoot bracketed sequences of no more than 3 frames with spacings up to 2EVs. The D700 on ther other hand can shoot up to 9 frames with up to 1EV spacing. This gives me a broader autobracket range of +-4EVs but forces me to use closer spacing. I had recently come to the conclusion that 1EV bracketing resulted in cleaner HDRs so this is not a big problem and, as we all know, hard disk space is free theses days anyway.

Another couple of features are rather nice for HDR, especially when doing interior shots and long exposures. The D700 has the same “Exposure Delay” feature as the D90 (this causes the mirror to lift approximately a second before the shutter opens to give the mirror vibration a chance to damp a bit and, hence, to provide a sharper image) but it also offers a true mirror-lock-up mode to further reduce the chance of mirror vibration reducing sharpness.

Although not helping with sharpness, another feature I enjoy and which should help improve the quality of tripod-based images is the viewfinder cover. Rather than being a slip-on piece of plastic (which I never used because it required me to take the rubber eyepiece surround off before it could be installed), this is integrated into the D700 viewfinder and operated by a lever to the left of the eyepiece. Shutting it prevents light entering the camera via the eyepiece during shots where your head isn’t doing this job instead.

Shooting Speed

The D90 would give me 4fps in continuous shooting mode and the D700 increases this to about 5fps. I use this when shooting the kids’ sporting events but it’s also useful for handheld HDR to ensure minimal time between brackets. One feature the D700 offers, however, is a shooting speed improvement when a battery grip is installed and equipped with either AA batteries or a special Nikon battery (with a standard EN-EL3e battery you don’t see an improvement). In these configurations, 8fps is possible.

Overall, then, the D700 is definitely exceeding my pre-purchase expectations. It just feels so much more solid than the D90 and gives the distinct impression of being a far more serious piece of equipment. I’m delighted with the results I’ve seen so far and am looking forward to some shooting during the summer to see how it performs for me.

I’ve been in Texas 16 years now but, despite seeing about 3 or 4 snakes a year, have never actually come face-to-face with a rattler. Unfortunately, in the last 4 months, both of our dogs have so, when our Fox Terrier, Sugar, got bitten last night, it was time to track the critter down and try to persuade it (terminally) that hunting in our dogs’ yard was a poor decision.

Our quest began with us cutting down all the brush in the yard then looking for anything resembling a hole. A rancher acquaintance told me that the best way to flush out a den of rattlesnakes is to pour a small amount of gasoline in or near their suspected hideout. The smell, apparently, really pisses them off and they bolt out of there as fast as they can. The thought of confronting a band of pissed off, venomous snakes (especially ones that I used to have on a large poster entitled “The Worlds 7 Deadliest Creatures” on my childhood bedroom wall) didn’t appeal but it was less bad than the thought of one of the kids getting bitten so Nikki and I armed ourselves with various garden tools and the remainder of a can of 2-stroke and spent quite some time sprinkling holes and preparing to hit whatever emerged.

In the end, nothing did emerge so we’re left knowing that there is a snake out there somewhere but not knowing where. If there are any rattlesnake hunting experts out there, do leave a comment to let us know how we should go about catching (or, better, dispatching) this critter.

Oh, the photo – I didn’t have any pictures of living, venomous snakes so this is the best I could do. It’s a custom Lucchese cowboy boot made from a cobra skin. Someone obviously had better luck than we did on their snake hunt.

Raul Touzon in Sudan

PhotoNetCast episode #45 is now available. The special guest this week is photographer Raul Touzon who talks to Antonio Marques, Brian Auer and myself about his experiences shooting on assignment with the United Nations in Sudan. You can listen to the show directly from the PhotoNetCast web site or download it from iTunes.

Sudanese Girls with Dove

Schoolroom in Sudan

I remember as a kid of about 12 having a meltdown crisis one night when I discovered I was triple-booked for activities (Scouts, Aeromodeling Club, swimming, etc, etc,). At the time, however, I didn’t really appreciate that my plethora of after-school activities were causing at least as much of a headache to my parents who had to spend pretty much every evening running kids (myself and my 2 brothers) around the town to all these events. That has, however, now thoroughly changed.

Both the boys are in sports this season – Drew in baseball (the picture shows one of his friends undergoing his own little dugout crisis during last week’s game) and Cameron in soccer. They both have games and practice sessions each week and these are often at the same time but at different sport fields. As a result, Nikki and I spend a great deal of time driving back and forward between our home and Dripping Springs then sitting on the sidelines gabbing with the other parents while the boys play.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining. I actually rather enjoy attending the games and have got to know some of the parents pretty well through our season-long sideline chats. I do, however, have a very much better sense of how my folks must have felt when I had the audacity to complain about being overbooked as a kid!

Here’s the first image I’ve posted from the photowalk last night. This was one of the ones I was looking for when I organised the trek and I’m very happy with the result. I’m putting together a collection of local images for a show at the beginning of June and wanted a large canvas as the centrepiece so set out to capture something local and impressive.

This image uses a mixture of two techniques I’ve been using a lot lately. It is constructed from 4 separate HDR images each built from 3 exposures (12 frames in all). After processing each HDR into one section of the final image, I stitched them together into a wide panorama using Photoshop CS4.

I hope to be able to print this 4′x2′ on canvas for the show but I guess that will depend upon the price of said canvas print!