Category: Photo Techniques

Ten-Years Ago (02-November-2008) — New Jersey

Backyard Autumn Nature in New Jersey.

Fall Colors — Intense Red Japanese Maple leaves before they fall off the tree. Image taken with a Nikon D700 camera and 50 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 200, 50 mm, f/5.6, 1/400 sec).

Fall Maple Leaves. Image taken with a Nikon D700 and 50 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 200, 50 mm, f/5.6, 1/400 sec). (David J. Mathre)
Fall Maple Leaves. Image taken with a Nikon D700 camera  and 50 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 200, 50 mm, f/5.6, 1/400 sec). (David J. Mathre)

Thursday (01-November-2018) — New Jersey

Backyard Autumn Nature in New Jersey.

One of the few days since I returned from Portugal that the rain stopped. The Japanese Maple tree is bright red. One pink Cosmos flower remained, and the Zinnia flowers are on their last leg. I need to mow the remaining wildflowers, and plant for next spring.

Japanese Maple. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)
Japanese Maple. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)
Japanese Maple. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)
Japanese Maple. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)
Late Blooming Pink Cosmos Flower. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)
Late Blooming Pink Cosmos Flower. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)
Late Blooming Red Zinnia Flower. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)
Late Blooming Red Zinnia Flower. Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (David J Mathre)

Tuesday (30-October-2018) — New Jersey

Autumn Night Sky Over New Jersey.

This was the night with a clear sky for a long time. I set up two cameras to record the nighttime sky  for composite Star Trail images. The first a Nikon D810a camera with 19 mm f/4 PC-E lens looking west. I like this camera for nighttime sky photography because it can be set to take images longer than 30 seconds (up to 900 seconds). The second a Nikon D850 camera with a 8-15 mm fisheye lens looking up from my patio. I forgot to reset the ISO for the Nikon D850 camera from 100 to 800. When I looked at the images, they were all black — but since the raw  for this camera have an amazing dynamic range, I was able to increase the brightness by 4 stops during post-processing and get decent images…

Star trails 20:05-03:20. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D810a camera and 19 mm PC-E lens (ISO 200, 19 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec) (David J Mathre)
Star (and jet) trails 20:05-03:20. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D810a camera and 19 mm PC-E lens (ISO 200, 19 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec) (David J Mathre)


Star Trails 19:56-01:59. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D850 camera and 8-15 mm fisheye (ISO 100, 15 mm, f/5.6, 30 sec) (David J Mathre)
Star Trails 19:56-01:59. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D850 camera and 8-15 mm fisheye (ISO 100, 15 mm, f/5.6, 30 sec) (David J Mathre)


Individual images from the slideshow can be viewed here.

Sunday (28-October-2018) — New Jersey

Backyard Autumn Nature in New Jersey.

It rained on Saturday, total accumulation just under an inch (23 mm). When I woke up Sunday, the clouds were beginning to clear, so I put the Garmin VIRB-360 camera out to see if I could catch some dawn cloud colors. I ended up leaving the camera out for 12 hours, connected to an external USB battery. I’m starting to play around with Adobe Premiere Pro for processing videos. The eight-bit range of colors and light recorded in the jpg images does limit the amount of processing going from the dark predawn to some sunlight. In the end, I compressed 12 hours to 1 minute time-lapsed video displayed both as a 360 degree panorama, and side by side little-planet and tunnel views. Bottom line, I can do better with the dawn cloud colors with raw images, but don’t have the time to individually process nearly 9000 images. A lot more to learn with Premiere Pro (and maybe After Effects).