03 Jun 2011
Well, that was the perfect time for rebooting this blog. NOT! After my last post, I’ve been VERY busy at work. We were moving to a new building, where the IT infrastructure is maintained by another party, the hospital. We managed to arrange they give us a virtual network on top of their network, so we can still use the university computers (although we rolled out new laptops for everybody). Still, it is a huge improvement over the hospital network, since we are NOT behind a firewall that blocks almost everything! I was very happy to be home at the end of the day, so updating the blog was not a priority. In the meantime though, I redecorated my daughters room.
The day before we moved to the new building, I managed to get some shots while the floor was still empty. That is, without people… Below are two of them. Processing was similar for both the shots: I took the standard 3 shots (-2 eV, 0 eV, 2 eV), created an extra -4 eV shot from the -2 eV one, removed some chromatic abberation, saved all as TIFF and used the four TIFFs to create an HDR image. Then the tonemapping, removing some noise, adjusting levels and curves, removing some more noise, and then I sharpened the image. I used my Gorillapod for the first time (I tried it out earlier of course, but now I REALLY used it!). Especially in the second shot it came in handy: I wrapped its legs around one of those poles to get a shot from above.
The HRM department
Another one from the office
03 May 2011
A comment on one of my shots (shown here on the left) made me look into a problem this picture shows. This picture is taken with the cheap kit lens on my DSLR. Not exactly the best lens in the world. Now take a look at the right side of the picture. I think you’ll notice the problem immediately. The effect you see here is called chromatic aberration.
You’ll see it better in the cutout here on the right. Chromatic aberration stems from the fact that light is composed of all the colors of the rainbow and everything in between. When the light passes through a lens not all colors are refracted the same, meaning not all colors will focus in the same spot. This leaves you with a blue fringe (in this case) right where there is a big difference in contrast, like in this window. In this HDR picture the effect is even worse than in a “normal” picture.
Now, how to solve this? Normally I use Photoshop Lightroom to directly export the RAW files to Photomatix to create the HDR. Nothing in that workflow would be able to reduce the effect. Then, as by accident, I came across the HDR Cookbook by another Flickr user called Farbspiel (he commented on the picture above too, so it was very accidental ;)!). One part of his cookbook talks about how to reduce chromatic aberration, so I decided to give it a try. Farbspiel recommends opening the RAW files first in Adobe Raw Converter, reducing the chromatic aberration there, and then save the files as TIFFs. After you’ve done that, startup Photomatix, open the TIFFs and do your HDR magic, and save the resulting file again as a TIFF. Now you can edit this tonemapped picture in Photoshop to your needs.
The result was stunning. You can see it here on the left. The chromatic aberration was not completely gone, but I blame the cheap lens. I did some more work in Photoshop to reduce the blue fringe and I also made some other decisions in the tonemapping, so the picture looks a bit different, but overall I’m quite pleased. What’s do you think?
01 May 2011
Yes, this is in English! Read on and I’ll explain why…
Lately on this blog I’ve just been cross posting some pictures I took and posted to Flickr. It definitely is not the way to get this blog forward. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with this blog. Is blogging still the way to go? Should I just get a Tumblr-blog to post the pictures to? Or should I just stick with Flickr and tweet about every new picture? Should I just dump the blog?
Hell, no!
I’ve complained about writing earlier (in Dutch). I even found a draft post I wrote about this topic but never published… hey, procrastinators are the leaders of tomorrow! So there is definitely a problem on my side. This is something I have to deal with if I decide this blog stays and I want it to go forward.
The problem is, I guess, what this blog lacks. There is no common subject for any posts to cling to. Well, there is, actually, but I have to take it to the next level. And I think I’ve found a way to do it all: as I’m more and more thinking about photography, trying to shoot more, and more importantly, share more, I think this blog could boost my photography skills and get me more exposure. That also means I will have to write more, post more, get more readers, more interaction, more more, and then even more of everything. And since the Dutch audience isn’t exactly the largest, I’ve decided to do it all in English.
So, expect some changes on this blog! I already have some subjects for a number of blogposts in mind. I also want to extend the site, besides the blog. I’m already working on that too, but it needs some more time to come to fruition.
Switching to English also means a new title for the blog. I mean, an English-written blog with a title only the Dutch readers will understand is a bit daft, don’t you think. Starting now this blog will be called “Me, myself and I (and nothing else)”.
Wish me luck!
29 Apr 2011
28 Apr 2011
25 Apr 2011
24 Apr 2011
22 Apr 2011
20 Apr 2011
07 Apr 2011
