Today we went to Crown Hill to take some fall color pictures. Which I didn’t, but I did get to use my new 6D and then play around with Photomatix.
Crown Hill HDRI
Canon 6D
Gale got a new camera a while back. Her first full frame. Big deal I thought. Is a full frame really that different?
YES IT IS
When I first looked through it I couldn’t stop laughing. Not that it’s funny, but just what a difference it makes. I literally did a double take. She has a 17mm lens and I’m sure it has a 90 degree field of view. Actually I just looked it up, it’s 93 degree! For comparison, my 40D was 67 degrees with the same lens! This is HUGE!
But it meant that I got her 40D for a great deal. I was happy, she was happy, we was happy.
Until it broke. I was taking shots of flowers and it shuddered, gurgled and stopped. Then all it would do was give an ERR99, which is a generic fault for a million different things. I suspect it was the curtain lens busted. $200+ repair. Or I could just spend the extra and get a 6D.
So I did.
Today we are going to Crown Hill to try it out. her with her fancy 17mm and me with my 50mm (which I love)
FYI on my old camera my 50mm acted like an 84mm which gave me a 24 degree field of vision and now gives me 40 degrees!
Single Image HDR
I’ve played around with HDR before. Both in Photoshop and with Photomatix. The usual way is to take three shots at different exposures and then use the app to combine them into a tonemapped image. The problem is, that without a tripod, it’s really tricky to keep the camera still for all three shots. The program will do what it can to line the shots up, but they are never perfect.
What would be better would be to use a single RAW file and create the three under, normal and over exposed images. In photoshop you can do this with camera raw and then combine those three images into an HDR file.
Photomatix has a SINGLE SHOT option which does it for you. So I tried that today. The shot on the left is the regularly exposed image and the one on the right is the HDR Image created from it. Not too shabby. Maybe not as good as a real bracketted shot, but hard to tell unless you were to compare the two.
Just another option for creating HDRI after the fact (when you didn’t think about it at the time of taking the photo).
Retired Letterbox – Nice Work!
Back in June of 2003 I placed two letterboxes in woods near Tunbridge Wells. One was quickly removed. I hid it behind a wall and think the land owner probably removed it.
The other one, however, remained in place. This trip I checked on it, as you may have read in a post from a few weeks back. After 12 years it’s not in great shape. The stamp and pad are going and the pages have several forms of fungus and mold. I had planned to transplant it to America, but having watched The Strain, I’m worried that I may introduce some pathogen to the colonies.
In order to preserve all the stamps I collected from people that found it, in creating this album.
Dartmoor
