NEWS
Nikon have announced the launch of a London Nikon School in April of this year. One day courses already available to book include D7000 Skills for £119 and Speedlight (flash) for £149.
An interesting Rambus and Binary Pixel technology has been developed to reset over-saturated sensor pixels in mid-exposure. This should enable an increase in the dynamic range of cameras - of particular application to compacts and phone cameras which are prone to burnt-out highlights.
Nikon have acknowledged a problem with exceptional amounts of debris appearing on D600 SLR sensors. This will require a service visit to fix.
IMPACTFUL MONO
We have covered colour to mono conversion techniques in this group before (see downloadable paper on the mono group page of the APS website) but I gave myself the challenge of producing a dramatic mono conversion from a particularly low-contrast colour image taken under misty flat lighting conditions. I am no mono expert and was looking for the best quick fix. Here is my 'journey';
- Starting Point.jpg (65.86 KiB) Viewed 6118 times
Moving on to Lightroom, the B&W presets offered a greater variety of results and the Red High Contrast preset was moving in the right direction. Further tweaking of the settings would no doubt have improved this further but my reservation with this approach is that the original colour image is no longer available after exporting the image into Photoshop. Within Lightroom the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brushes would be helpful in achieving localised adjustments, eg darkening the sky - it seems that mono landscapes require a stormy sky!
Back in Elements, I fired up Topaz Labs B&W Effects (£40 or less with discounts and bundles) and quickly added drama with presets such as Dynamic II Smooth. The Local Adjustments feature enables up to 5 detailed masks to be created for dodging, burning, smoothing etc which is a powerful feature, although going beyond the presets could potentially involve the manipulation of over 50 sliders which is rather too many, I feel.
Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 (£133) has a reputation for being the premier mono conversion plug-in so I was keen to try it on 15 days free trial. The implementation is quite similar to Topaz and the presets High Structure Harsh and Full Dynamic Harsh were good and Film Noir 1 was even a touch too dramatic! The Control Point feature enables localised control over the image although I was slightly disappointed to find that it was limited to circular brushes - albeit any quantity of circular brushes capable of being linked together and with edge detection.
I had taken three bracketed exposures of the original scene comprising 0, -2 and +2 stops and my next experiment was to combine these with Photomatix HDR software to create a more dramatic colour image. Subsequently opening this into the Topaz and Nik plug-ins gave me yet-more conversion options.
Reviewing all of these options side-by-side I decided that the non-HDR Topaz Dynamic II Smooth conversion was closest to my goal. Opening this into Photoshop I then applied adjustment layers to modify tone and contrast to small areas until I was happy with the result.
- Final Result.jpg (90.28 KiB) Viewed 6118 times
EXTREME NIGHT-TIME PHOTOGRAPHY
I recently returned from a trip to Nevada where I experimented with some night photography for the first time in years.
Death Valley is an excellent dark-sky area and our stay at Furnace Creek coincided with an outing by the Las Vegas Astronomical Society. It was a clear night and I was able to capture some great exposures of the Milky Way with tripod, fisheye lens at maximum aperture and exposures of up to one minute. The images through the expensive LVAS telescopes were interesting but less impressive than I expected. Tiny dots merely became slightly bigger dots.
- Dark Sky.jpg (54.58 KiB) Viewed 6118 times
- Zoom Blur.jpg (94.14 KiB) Viewed 6118 times
- Slow Shutter Cam App.jpg (62.94 KiB) Viewed 6118 times
Thursday 4th April 2013
Cheers, Steve Brabner.