09/22/16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Sunset at Calico Rock on the White River

Sunset from Calico Rock on the White River in Arkansas

Sunset from Calico Rock on the White River in Arkansas

Taken with a Fuji X-Pro2, ISO 400, 35mm F2.0 lens, at F9, Panorama taken in 4 vertical images, each segment 3 exposures for a total of 12.  Worked up in Adobe LR

 

Calico Rock, is one of the more interesting spots on the White River in Arkansas.  You can drive right to it and when you arrive, you have a sweeping view of one of the larger bends of the White River.  The bluff is about 150 feet above the river and you really cannot see much of the bluff itself.  However there is one vantage spot where you can look to the west an there is a small out cropping that adds a lot to the photograph.  Many call this “little Hawksbill Craig” after the larger feature up on the Buffalo River.  However I just like to photograph the valley.  If you look downstream, you will see the town of Calico Rock on the left hand bank of the river.

This shot was taken in a series of vertical segments, 4 total and for each segment I exposed 3 images.  I then worked each of the 3 shots into a HDR balanced image in Lightroom.  After that, I took the final 4 images and created a panorama.  It’s very important to realize that you do not want to do any work on the individual HDR segments before the panorama merge.  I prefer to use the boundary warp feature of Lightroom also as most of panoramas in taken like this will only work in a spherical format and thus your top and bottom edges will have some problems.

The Fuji X-Pro2 makes this very easy with it’s automatic bracketing shutter, where you only have to press the shutter once to fire all 3 brackets.

I have found that Fuji made some very good positive changes to the dynamic range of the X-Pro2 as can be seen in this image.  Also Adobe must have done a bit of tweaking to their X-trans conversion for the X-Pro2.

You can get to Calico Rock from Little Rock, in about 3 hours and the drive is quite beautiful.

 

09/21/16 Featured Arkansas landscape photography–6 finger falls on Falling Water Creek

Late May on 6 finger falls in Newton County

Late May on 6 finger falls in Newton County

Taken with a Phase One IQ100 and 35mm LS lens, 2 part horizontal pano.  Taken in 4 shots to merge later for foreground and background in Helicon Focus

Arkansas has many great streams to hike but one of the best is Falling Water Creek, which is well named as it has a large number of waterfalls it’s entire length before emptying into Richland Creek.  Falling water creek has an upper and lower half, and some of the best spots to photograph are on the lower half.  There you will find creek wide ledges like 6 finger falls.  6 finger falls, named for the cut outs the creek has made in the ledge, is quite a wonder.  It offers great photographic opportunities year round but is best in the fall and spring.  You will be lucky to find any water in the creek in the fall and if you do consider yourself lucky.  The banks are lined with deciduous trees that offer a great display of fall color.

You will also like the fact that for most of it’s length, falling water creek has a forest service road that parallels it’s length and so offers quick access.  This of course means in Arkansas you can expect to find all types of folks here on a good weekend, so plan your trip during the week if at all possible.  The forest road is number 1205.  Heading due north on the road, falling water creek will be on your right for the upper half, and then after you cross it on the left.  For a portion of it’s length, the Ozark Highland trail is just above the road on the right, below the bridge.  This is great day hike also.

Make sure to include a trip to the mouth of falling water creek at Richland Creek campground.  Richland is the crown jewel of creeks in Arkansas and is also protected as a Wilderness Area, so you can enjoy a day without hearing a 4 wheeler.

 

 

09_10_16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Sunset from Sam’s Throne

Late summer sunset from Sams Throne in the Arkansas Ozark mountains.

Late summer sunset from Sams Throne in the Arkansas Ozark mountains.

Taken with a Pentax K1 in three vertical segments of 4 exposures each, LR used for HDR conversion to 3 vertical segemnts, Stitched in Lightroom into single 3 part panorama, ISO 100, F11 Pentax 15-30mm Lens @ 17mm.

In the late summertime of September, the Arkansas skies can surprise you.  Many times you will find a pure blue sky about 1 hour before sunset, only to see some light cloud cover roll right as the sun sets.  On this evening, I was able to catch some of this at Sam’s Throne.  I had hoped to have clear skies as I was going to stay for a while after dark and work the Milky Way with the Pentax Astrotracer feature, but the sunset was a added bonus for sure.

Sam’s Throne is one of the premier climbing spots in Arkansas due to the bluffs that run for over 1 mile.  The rock is a type of sand stone and and during the sunset will take on an orange color.  The rocks are also covered with a bright orange lichen, one that I have really only found in this part of Arkansas.  So at the times of bright and intense light, the rock of the bluffs can really stand out.  I like to work from a spot where you can catch both the true throne (the smaller peak in the center of the image) and pick up the bluff line.  During the late summertime the sun will set just off the bluff through the trees and can add a wonderful effect as it will accent the pines at the top of the bluff line.

This photograph, is quite a composition as it was taken in 12 frames, 4 from each station in a short panorama.  I then blended each segment with Lightroom’s HDR tool into a 3 dng files, that were then combined into a 3 part panorama.  This allowed me to capture both the brightest highlights in the shot and keep the noise out of my shadows.  The green of the trees was just perfect on this evening, just a bit of yellow starting to show up in the tops.  There were a few trees already starting to go into a full color display, but these were more towards the top of the bluff.

You can pick any of hundreds of spots to work at Sam’s.  In this shot, you can see on the left side the same bluff line as it has worked around the hillside.  I sometimes like to work from that spot also as you can still capture the sunset and you have a different perspective of Sam’s.

It takes about 2.5 hours to get to this part of Arkansas from Little Rock, and the drive north from Russellville is well worth it, especially in the Spring and Fall when the trees take on very unique colors.

 

08/22/16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–The washing machine on the Cossatot River Southwest Arkansas

Cossatot Falls on the Cossatot River, one of the most impressive water features in Arkansas.

Cossatot Falls on the Cossatot River, one of the most impressive water features in Arkansas.

Taken with a Canon 5D MKII and 24mm TS-E lens, with a CL-PL and ND 0.9 filter installed, exposure time approximately 1.5 seconds.

You can find some excellent photographic opportunities on the Cossatot River, along with some of the best Arkansas whitewater.  Go down there anytime the river is running over 500 cfs (cubic feet per second) and you can expect to see a lot of kayakers running the falls.

I like to hike the 6 falls when there is about 100 to 400 cfs max running the river.  This allows you to make easy crossings and you can still get down close enough to the river to get some great angles.  The river will run muddy right after a rain storm due to the massive amount of timber clear cutting in the area, so plan on heading down a day or so after a big rain.

You can easily hike down the entire left side (left side facing downstream) and there are 6 separate ledges which the river cuts through.  Each has a unique rapid and name:

Cossatosser, Eyeopener, BMF, The Washing Machine, Whiplash, and Shoulder bone.

If you make it down there, remember that the sun will move across the river from left to right so the some of the best photograph will be early in the morning.  The falls run due south.  There are a ton of huge rocks that line the river and each of them will allow you a spot to setup for some great photos.  The washing machine, featured in this photo has some of the best angles up on top of the ledge, but you need to cross over right above this small rapid.  If the river is running too high, this can easily become a hazard so be careful.  All the rocks are covered with slim moss and will be slick.

The rock is sandstone or something close and in the sun will take on a wonderful red-orange hue so try to make it on nice sunny day.

 

08/21/16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Storm Clouds over Buffalo Point, Buffalo National River Arkansas

The Buffalo River at Buffalo Point in early August with a morning storm rolling in.

The Buffalo River at Buffalo Point in early August with a morning storm rolling in.

Taken with a Phase One IQ100 and Phase One XF/35LS lens, at ISO 100, F12 for 1/40 of a second on tripod, single exposure.

This was taken back in early August 2016 on the Buffalo River in Northwest Arkansas.  This part of the river is known as Buffalo Point, and is one of the more popular spots on the river.  It features one of the larger campgrounds on the Buffalo along with hundreds of miles of hiking trails.  Within 9 miles of Buffalo Point, you can driver over to Rush Arkansas which is an old mining town which dates back to around 1917.  There is not much left standing at Rush, but it still offers some nice hiking.

This image shows just how fast conditions can change.  I walked down to the river before sunrise.  This particular bluff is on the east side of the river, thus will not get any sunlight until mid day.  It’s a great spot to catch a sunset if the clouds lineup, but you also can expect to find hundreds of people wandering around the beach which just add confusion to both the scene and water.  On this morning I was hoping to catch the area to myself, and for about a magic 40 minutes I had just that.  There was almost no wind blowing, so I also was able to get a very nice reflection of the bluff.  This bluff is about 80 feet tall and the face about 35 feet or so and it’s one of the classic Ozark bluffs made 100% from limestone so you can expect to get some interesting color from the rock.

I worked the area up and downstream, but this spot was the best as a early morning storm rolled in.  When I first arrived there were no clouds in the sky at all just a bit of river fog, but within 30 minutes the top of an old thunderhead came over the river and really added to the shot.  The heat and humidity were intense but the photographic opportunities were excellent.

This is single exposure from an IQ100 Phase One digital back and I have to say that the overall dynamic range of this back is impressive.  The ability to finally cover a shot with just one exposure, knowing that you have room to work up shadows without a bracketing series of exposures is a great feature and long overdue from Phase One.

 

 

08/20/16 Featured Arkansas Photography–Early morning at Buffalo Point, Buffalo National River

Early mornings are some of the best times to photograph the Buffalo River. This is from Buffalo Point.

Early mornings are some of the best times to photograph the Buffalo River. This is from Buffalo Point.

Taken with a Phase One IQ100 and 35LS lens, no filters @ ISO 100 for 1/40th of a second F12 and Phase One XF.

While on a trip to the lower Buffalo River, I was able to spend the night at Buffalo Point Campground.  This is the first campground that was built on the Buffalo, and dates back to the WPA and CCC days of the late 1930’s in Arkansas.  Here you are pretty low down on the river as there is only about 20 or so miles left before the river runs into the White River.  Buffalo Point is a very popular spot on the river as it has an excellent campground, and there is a great swimming hole below the large bluff on the far side of the river.  From here you can take a quick float down to Rush which is about 8 miles or do down river.  It’s a great float to take in the fall to enjoy the fall colors as most often there will be enough water for floating year round.

I was hoping to catch the early morning light burning off the fog but there was only a small amount of fog.  However there was a large cloud bank moving in from the west and sun managed to pop the lower clouds along with the fog rising up towards the top of the bluff.  I had the place to myself, which on this river is a rare event so I was able to have almost 45 minutes before the first floaters started to come down from Hwy 14 and break up the great reflection on the river.

The Phase One XF and IQ100 worked together very well on this occasion.  I was using a tripod due to the slower exposure times and the fact that the 35LS lens is so heavy.  The camera controls on the back of the IQ100 LCD made working with this scene very easy.  I ended up shooting several manual brackets but due to the impressive dynamic range of the IQ100 sensor, I was able to create this image from one exposure.  The 35LS lens performed quite well, giving me excellent details throughout the image.

 

 

Pentax K1 White Dot Issue on Longer Exposures–Same as the other cameras using the Sony 36MP chip

Example of Pentax k1 White Dot issue

Example of Pentax k1 White Dot issue–Click on image to view in better detail

 

With the introduction of the full frame Pentax K1, Ricoh Imaging appears to have made a giant stride forwards with technology, however it appears that they overlooked one critical issue with the 36MP Sony sensor–White Dots with longer exposures.  

I have worked with the K1 now for several months and have found it to be an excellent platform for most photography, however one of my main reasons for the investment in the K1 was astro-photography.  Night sky work, not telescope work.  Photography of both the MilkyWay and star trails.  Both of these forms of photography require long exposures and in most cases multiple stacked exposures for the best results.  What you quickly find, that when used in this fashion, the K1 creates thousands to millions of fine white dots, as shown in the photo above.  These are not traditional noise, as we know it, as that tends show up as stuck pixel (red, green and blue) or extra grain in the shot.  This exact same problem was visible in early shots taken with the Nikon D810, and Nikon quickly recalled all the early shipping D810’s and made some type of a firmware and hardware fix.  It was not a standard firmware fix, as the camera had to be sent to a Nikon service center for the fix.  But it worked!!.  The D800e also had the same problem, but Nikon did not fix these with a recall, they just fixed the problem on later shipping cameras.  I know this because I owned 2 D800e’s and the first camera had the issue terribly and the 2nd camera was clean.  My D810 also showed the problem immediately but was much better after the Nikon fix.

Read more about the Nikon recall here–Nikon Recall for White Dots.

Read more about the Nikon D800e Problem here–Nikon D800e White Dots.

I have noticed this issue in all my long exposures with the K1, from 30 seconds to 2.5 minutes, at ISO ranges from 320 to 5000.  The issue becomes worse over time so it’s fair to state that it’s a temperature related issue from the sensor, just like Nikon noted.  How does this issue effect your photography?  Read more below.

Photographer’s Notes:

  1. The main concern here is that the millions of white dots are not easily removed in post.  Currently Adobe Lightroom does nothing to remove them and Phase One’s Capture One with the single pixel noise reduction slider will take most of them out, albeit at a possible loss of details.
  2. Where will you see this issue?  With any long exposure of 30 seconds or more and if the outdoor temperature is above 85 degrees F, expect the problem to be very severe.
  3. Will you see this issue with Astrotracer photography?  Yes, with the Astrotracer feature of the camera enabled, you will see the white dots unless you turn on the “Long exposure noise reduction” feature in the camera
  4. OK, if I can remove them with the “Long Exposure Noise Reduction” what is the big deal”  Good question and I will answer this in more details later on, but the main reason is that LENR (long exposure noise reduction) requires the camera to take another exposure the same length as the previous exposure so you are wasting battery life, shooting time, and heating the sensor up.
  5. Why do the White dots bother Stacking work?  The white dots remain fixed throughout the exposures, however over time expect to gain a few thousands more.  If you are stacking and want to remove gaps created by stacking, the white dots become very problematic.

Read more about why stacking for star trails is important here:  Stacking for better night photography.

Why the White Dots are a concern for Night Photography:

There are many reason, but for sure 2 come to mind immediately.

If you stack for star trails. This allows you to use partial moonlight to illuminate the foreground of your subject which gives you a much more natural look to your image. Stacking requires a intervalometer to be used as you need to have a timer and control over the interval, which in this case is 1.  The fact that the intervalometer will close the shutter between each stack, means you will have a slight gap in your star trails.  This is easily fixed with the use of software that will slightly rotate your final image to cover up the gaps.  Examples of this type of software are “Star Tracer”  If you rotate the images with the white dots, they become dotted lines though out the entire file and contrast sharply with you star trails, in effect ruining the image.  There is no easy way to remove all the millions of dotted lines either.

So this says you have to work up the images in a raw converter that will removed the dots to a good degree and so far the only software I have found that will do this is Capture One, by Phase One.  You are eliminated from any Adobe product like ACR or Lightroom as both just seem to magnify the dots.  Also any image work, where you might add clarity to help brighten the stars will also brighten the white dots.

If you use the Pentax LENR (long exposure noise reduction) most of the white dots are taken out, but this brings up some more issues.

The LENR takes an exposure that is just as long as the original, so if you just complete a 2 minute exposure, the camera will lock up while it takes a 2nd matching dark frame.  You cannot make any other adjustments to the camera or view anything during this time frame.  The resulting dark frame create a much larger gap in your star trails photography, and Star Tracer can remove them, but at a huge price since your image will heavily blurred by the rotation to fix this large a gap.  Sure you cut back on the time from 2 minutes to 30 seconds, but then you more than likely will have to increase your ISO to a point that the increase in will degrade your details in the foreground portion of your image.  But that still may be something I try with the K1 and Star Tracer to see if I can get an acceptable solution.

LENR is also very wasteful.  Thing about it, you are just using up both battery life and possibly heating up your sensor due to extra processing going on.  The use of LENR, also precludes using a intervalometer as it will throw off your sequence.  If you are set to shoot at an interval of 1 for 2 minutes etc. then when the dark frame kicks in it will start to run into your actual next exposure time, and shorten it.  This also adds up over time and creates unbalanced exposures.

If you are using Pentax Astrotracer for night shots of the Milky Way, odds are you should go ahead and enable LENR, as the max time you are going to kept out of the camera is 5 minutes and the difference in the images is most impressive.  This also precludes you using Pixel shift for night work something I was curious about since pixel shift seems to give better results at higher ISOs with the K1.  But if you are working traditional star trails, then LENR is not a great idea and thus you have to consider using Capture One for your raw.  Make another note, do not capture as jpg as even Capture One won’t remove the white dots from jpgs, they are fixed forever in the image.

Here is an example from the same crop shown at the top of this article that was worked in Capture One.  Click on the file to view at 100% and you can see that Phase One has done a very good job here on the raw conversion for the K1, as most the white dots are removed.

Example of the Capture One and white dot removal

Example of the Capture One and white dot removal

 

 

 

 

 

 

08/16/16 Capture One “Error when processing a file” in Windows

If you use Capture One for raw processing, over the years Phase One has continued to bring new useful enhancements to this particular software.  If you own and use any Phase One digital back you will most likely use Capture One for the vast majority of processing.  As these new features roll out, it seems that Phase One is not able to keep up with basic and simple errors.  Errors that are not catastrophic but errors that still take a lot to time away from processing out files.  If you work with Capture One in either Win7, Win8 or Win10, you may have received this type of error during an attempt to process a file: Click on image to view it larger.

 

Error screen from Capture One while processing a file.

Error screen from Capture One while processing a file.

This problem has something to do with how Capture One hands off processing to Open CL and nvidia cards.  The error occurs like playing Russian Roulette, as you never know exactly when it will start to show up.  Sometimes I will get it on the first image I process, others times after 5 or or 10 images have been processed.  However once the error occurs, then you can expect to continue over an over and until you close C1 and reopen it.  Each time you get the error, you have to click to close the error box and then attempt to reprocess out the image.  Sometimes you can get the image to go ahead on the next attempt other times you may get this error 5, 10, 15, 20 times.  It’s as if the particular file has been marked by C1.  Here are some typical questions and answers.

  1. If you are a batch processing person, then this error is even worse, as odds are out of 20 files 3 may not process, so you have to manually go back and edit your processing to see which files did not run.  This takes even more time.  So for me batch is out.
  2. When did this error show up? It appeared with C1 Vr 9 and has continued through all new releases.
  3. Did I attempt to open a case with Phase One? Yes I opened a case, and Phase One’s answer was the usual “remove all instances of C1 on your PC and reinstall it based on our posted instructions”.
  4. Did that fix the problem? NO
  5. Have I opened a case via a dealer? Yes,
  6. Did that help? Yes, Phase One came back to me with a script to totally disable Open CL on my PC
  7. Is that a good solution? No as Capture One is very dependent on Open CL for both zooming to 100%, drawing masks, and working with local adjustments.
  8. Does this happen with any camera file or only a Phase raw file? Yes it happens, on Nikon, Sony, Fuji, Canon and Phase One
  9. Do you have this occur on only 1 PC or multiples? Yes ever PC I own (6) will get this error with C1 Vr 9, Pro or Data Back release
  10. If you run the script does the error go away? Yes
  11. Is your Nvidia card current on all of it’s various drivers? Yes
  12. Are you the only person getting this error? NO, I have reported on the Luminous Landscape forums and have received plenty of responses that other photographers running windows are also getting this error
  13. Has anyone on the Luminous Landscape forum from Phase One attempted to help? NO
  14. Is this a big issue that disrupts workflow? YES last night alone to process only 3 IQ100 files, it took me 5 different attempts

Surprisingly Phase One does not seem to notice this issue when they test on their side, personally I don’t buy that.  Phase One’s first answer was that I was running a Nvidia GTX960 card which is not on the list of supported video cards by Capture One.  Everyone one knows that is total BS, but you have to make the change.  So I did, and purchased a GTX970 card, did the error go away or decrease in frequency? No.  Did I expect that it would? No.

Here is link to the Luminous Landscape post that has more details.

 

I can only assume that this is a timing issue between C1 and the Nvidia card and that if for some millisecond there is a hiccup in communication.  I even took the steps to removed all instances of any older Nvidia drivers from my PC, which is an time consuming process but the error still continues.  All of my desktop PC’s run Nvidia cards, GTX970’s but the MacPro 15″ (under bootcamp and win10) is using an Intel graphics card and I believe the Surface Pro 3 and 2 both use Intel graphic cards also.  All of these machine get the error at sometime.  The desktop PC’s are either a 3.4Ghz i7 or a 4.0Ghz i7 on Asus boards.

This is not the first time that Capture One developed a troublesome issue with windows as for most of the time Capture One Vr 8 was out there was a terrible error where if you minimized C1 to the taskbar then attempted to reopen it, C1 froze and had to be forced closed.  Sometimes this error created a need to have the PC rebooted.

My experience with C1 goes way to back to the 3.7.x versions and I have used it continuously since.  There are many processing features in Capture One that are essential to my workflow so for now, I will just keep on closing the error out and trying again, but it would nice for Phase One to figure out this issue and I do hope that it does not transfer to Capture One 10, which I assume is coming soon.

Photographer Notes:

I am a working photographer, mainly working with landscape imaging.  Capture One is my go to raw converter for all Phase One raw files (P45, IQ160, IQ260, IQ280, IQ180 IQ150 and IQ100) along with Fuji and Nikon raw files.  I have just started working with the Pentax K1 and have found that Capture One has an excellent profile for this camera, however Capture One does not support the pixel shift format from the K1, but that is another topic.

This error can become very disruptive at times especially if you are attempting to process out more than 10 files at a time as more than likely of the 10 3 will error out.  It also eliminates the use of the batch processing feature for larger jobs since the time it takes to reconcile the batch takes too long.

It is my hope that Phase One will address this in a future release however my feelings are until more photographers raise up the issue Phase One will not focus on it.

Phase One/Capture One is a much more Mac centric program and the development always seems to fall first to the Mac side of the software and eventually to the Windows side even thought worldwide the number of Windows licenses vastly outnumbers Mac

08/15/16 A close look at the Dynamic Range of the Phase One IQ100

I have been using the IQ100 now for several months, and have noticed that there are some interesting facets to the dynamic range of this digital back.  Lets take a more detailed look at this particular image taken on the Buffalo River, in Arkansas

The Buffalo River at Buffalo Point in early August with a morning storm rolling in.

The Buffalo River at Buffalo Point in early August with a morning storm rolling in.

The IQ100 is of course the first 100MP digital camera ever marketed, was introduced in January of 2016 by Phase One, and so far has had a very good reception.  I was very interested in the previous IQ250, 50MP digital back, however it has a 1:3 crop factor, which for my work, (example this image) would have been too much to sacrifice.  I use wide angle lenses in most of work unless I am stitching and the 30 percent loss in focal view was too much for me.  But I easily saw with the IQ250 the massive advantages that CMOS had over the traditional CCD Phase One backs.  This showed up for me in two main areas, noise and dynamic range.  These both have many definitions but for me it’s simple:

Noise, how much noise will I see in areas of shadow, at base ISO and at higher ISO.  If I push an image, how much detail is lost to noise in the shadows.  With a CCD back, there was never too much room here even at base ISO of 50

Dynamic Range, with one single exposure, what can I capture? If I adjust for highlights, will my shadows be filled with too much noise or vise versa.  Also how well does my color saturation hold up at higher ISO ranges.  With CCD digital backs, the color saturation fell off very quickly once past the base ISO.  You might be able to get one more stop before the saturation was lost.

Moving to the IQ100 from the IQ260 I was hoping to see similar if not greater dynamic range at base ISO to the Nikon D810.  I still regard the Nikon D810 as the flagship for dynamic range at base ISO of 64. With the Nikon D810 it’s easy to push a single exposure as much as 2.5 stops and still have wonderful details in the areas of shadow.   Phase One (P1) rates the IQ100 at a base ISO of 50 so I was hoping to be able to get at least 2 stops of details when shooting at ISO 50.  So on my first couple of outings with the IQ100, I mainly used ISO50 and planned to push the shots when necessary.  I quickly found out that this the chip in the IQ100 (made by Sony) behaves differently that the 36MP chip in the D810 (also by Sony).

In working at base ISO 50, it became apparent to me that a shadow push of even 1 stop may be enough to cause you to lose details in the shadows, and also a huge amount of color saturation.  This was a surprise to me as I had expected to get even better push than what I was seeing with the D810.  However it was also soon apparent that the IQ100 has quite a bit of leeway with highlights, much more so than any of the CCD backs I have used from Phase One in the past.  You can easily let your highlights go past 1 to 1.5 stops and still regain the finer whites.   If you combine the “highlights” slider in Capture One, along the exposure slider, there is a lot of recovery.  Looking at the example below:  Click on the image to view it larger

Screen shots of IQ100 image side by side

Screen shots of IQ100 image side by side

The image on the right side is the base image before any adjustments, the image on the left side, I just pulled the overall exposure down from center to -99 (almost 1 stop) and then adjusted the highlights to 47 from the far left.  This pulled back all of the sky and actually provided some very nice cloud features.  I then just added a local adjustment layer to the lower portion of the file, (non sky) and pulled up the overall exposure then added one more adjustment layer to tweak a few dark areas.  Overall the end result to me is very nice and again is testimony to just how much range is in a single exposure from this chip.  The take away is for sure feel free to let your highlights go a bit so that you can pull in a bit more shadow details.

Here another example.

Buffalo Point IQ100

2nd Example of highlight range IQ100

Here the original raw file is on the left side.  Initial thoughts are that the sky is pretty blown, but with just a bit of highlight adjustment and overall exposure work, you can pull back the sky to a very manageable level.  The bluff and trees will easily recover to most of their full detail with a bit of shadow recovery and local adjustment layer to work only on that part of the image.

From my photography I feel if there is a downside to the IQ100 dynamic range, it would be in the shadow recovery.  Here you have to be very careful as just one stop or two can make a huge difference between good details and color in the shadows.  Lets go back to an example from the same set of images.  If you look at the image at the top of this article, you can see that towards the far right on the bluff there is a dark area.  I shot this scene in several brackets at both ISO 50 and 100 as I was unsure as to just how the clouds would capture.  As it turned out, the clouds/sky were not the problem, but the dark shadows were.  Look at this comparison: make sure to click on the image to view it full screen.

IQ100 side by side for shadow details

IQ100 side by side for shadow details

The image on the left was shot at ISO 50 at 1/25th of a second, F12, and the image on the left was taken immediately next at ISO50 and 1/60th of a second F12.  If you click on the image, you can see that the bluff and trees along the bluff are almost devoid of color and there is considerably more noise.  Both of these screen crops are from sharpened final images.  The image on the left holds the green down into the shadows where as the same part of the image on the right is starting to lose the color fidelity.  The color you may be able to pull back with some work in Photoshop, but the noise and loss of overall details you will never get back.  So the point, is that you really need to watch your exposure and if you are unsure, bracket the frames.  Just a difference in 1/25th and 1/60th can make a big improvement in the overall quality of the final image.

Photographer’s Notes:

I feel that there is considerably more dynamic range in the IQ100 CMOS back, over similar CCD backs like the IQ260 and IQ380 (60 and 80MP respectively)

The IQ100 has a tendency to push to a green overall tint and it seems that the greens can easily be come over saturated.

When working in mixed outdoor lighting, I would recommend exposing to the right, and pushing the highlights, as from my shooting experience you can easily recover 1 stop and possibly 1.5 stops in the highlights.

The shadows will quickly loss details and color if underexposed, even at base ISO of 50 or one push to ISO100.  Once these details are lost you will not be able to get them back easily.

Considering that the 100MP back will start to suffer softness from diffraction at apertures past F11, you need to balance your shooting between both shutter speeds (subject allowing) and ISO.

When working on a single file, don’t be fooled into thinking that you have lost your highlights as you will be surprised to see just how much dynamic range and malleability is available in these fantastic files.

 

 

 

 

 

 

08/08/16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Milky Way over Buffalo Point, Buffalo National River

The Milky Way over the Buffalo River at Buffalo Point, Buffalo National River.

The Milky Way over the Buffalo River at Buffalo Point, Buffalo National River.

Taken with a Pentax K1 and 15-30mm lens @ 15mm and F 3.2 ISO 3200 for 2 minutes using the Pentax Astrotracer function in camera.

This was my first test for night photography with the Pentax K1, and overall I was pleased with the results from the Astrotracer feature in camera.  This photograph is a combo from a 2 minute Astrotracer shot for the MilkyWay, and several different shots for the foreground at various times.  I used a small lantern down by the bluff to add some local illumination.

Chris Kennedy and I worked for about 2 hours, starting with a very clear night sky and temperatures around 89 degrees with 100% humidity.  2 hours later the temperature was about the same, so I was sweating just standing around waiting on the camera.  But there was little to no wind so I was able to pull a nice reflection of the bluff on the river and if there had been a bit more water or a better angle by me, I might have gotten a Milky Way reflection.

Buffalo Point is one of the more popular spots on the Buffalo River, and the only campground with full electric hookups, so it will always be crowded in the summer months.  You can either reserve a campground in the lower camping loops or you can try to get a spot in loop A, where it is always first come first serve, and loop A is the original WPA worked sites.  I hope to get back to work this place in fall, both for the Milky Way and later on for Star trails.  Star Trails will be a bit more difficult due to the location of the moon and due north.

Paul Caldwell

 

Copyright © Paul Caldwell, Photos of Arkansas