David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the sky. Sunrise, sunset, clouds, and weather
I used a 16 mm Fisheye lens to take acquire some winter night sky images. The images were combined using the startrails.exe program to get the star trail images. The first image is a composite of 15 60 second images relatively early in the evening. The next three are composites of 16, 35, and 300 second (5 minute) images.
Early Morning Double Rainbow in Patagonia. Comparison of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Processing Programs. Digital camera sensors are not able to deal with the full dynamic range that the human eye can process. The same is true with computer monitors and printers. There are several commercial programs that will combine over and under exposed digital images to provide a composite digital image that tries to express the wider dynamic range of the eye. I continue to evaluate the commercial HDR programs. The following images are of an early morning double rainbow taken at Lago Grey in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile during my Photography Workshop in Patagonia with Thom Hogan (10-January-2011). The inital image is the original single exposure. This is followed by four HDR images processed with 1) Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro, 2) Photomatix Pro, 3) Nik HDR Pro, and 4) HDR Express Pro. Please reply with comments on which HDR image you like or don’t like.
The sky was clear last night so I set up two cameras to record the night sky. The SpaceWeather site reported that the Quadrantids meteor shower should peak in the early morning hours. The Nikon D3x with a 24 mm f/1.4G lens was set up to look north above my roof. I used an external power supply for this camera so I wouldn’t need to change batteries during the night. The second camera was a Nikon D3 with a 14-24 mm f/2.8 lens looking south. For both cameras, I used the MC-35 remote set for 59 second exposures, once a minute (the extra second is needed to transfer the image from the camera to the memory card). It was cold (getting down to 10° F), and I was glad that at least one camera was using an external power supply. I had to change the battery in the D3 every 2 hours, and even then it was so cold that the battery ran out before the time. The following are a meteor trail image and a time-lapsed video of everything from the night.
There are several image processing programs available to combine images to afford wider panorama images. The images of Laguna Torre were taken on a hike from El Chalten in Parque Nacional Los Glaciares while on a Photography Workshop in Patagonia with Thom Hogan on 01-January-2011. Three examples shown below have four portrait orientation images combined using Photoshop CS5, AutoPano Giga 2.5, and PTGui. All three composite images were cropped to the largest rectangle: Photoshop (11865 x 5814), AutoPano (12572 x 6266), and PTGui (12091 x 5979). Photoshop did the best job in minimizing the stitching artifacts in the water. AutoPano Giga did the best job in including the most image area — our hiking guide in the far lower right corner of the image is not cut off
Sun Rising from under the Sunshine Skyway bridge viewed from Fort De Soto Park. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
