Archive for the ‘5D Mark II’ Category
As most probably know, the bombing of Pearl Harbor was a crucial turning point in World War II, as the Japanese attack left America little choice but to enter the fight. More than nearly 70 years later and the hulking remains of the USS Arizona stand as a semi-submurged reminder of the devastation that came upon the quiet harbor on O’ahu so many years ago. In fact, it is still leaking oil, up to a quart a day, which is nearly unbelievable, but you can see it very clearly on top of the water and it would be pretty if it weren’t, well, awful. Still, it definitely added an aspect to this picture that made it worth posting. You can see the ship’s real bulk spreading out underwater if you look closely into the murky depths. They’ve done a great job making a memorial to the soldiers who lost their lives that day, and it was a soberingly beautiful place to visit. They also have the crowds well under control; you go in groups every half hour and, after watching a movie that gives you some background info, hop on a boat to take a short ride across to the memorial site. It is only accessible by these boats which keeps crowds to a minimum out at the actual memorial. There was a lot more to see at the national park that we unfortunately didn’t get to because of time but this was still worth the trip.
The oil makes creepily awesome patterns, and although this was a handheld bracket, Photomatix 4 dealt with the water shifting masterfully.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Hawaii, Landscape, Nature, O'ahu, Outdoor, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Last weekend, I was asked to “provide coverage of the Dalí Till Dawn event” at the High Museum in Atlanta, where I am currently working. This turned out to be a larger task than one person could handle, as they wanted both still AND video coverage of the whole night, which went from their normal closing hour of 5pm until 5am. Luckily I didn’t have to stay till 5am, but I did enlist Andrew’s help to do video and we were there until 2am. Giacomo came as well and he hung out with us towards the end. All in all it was a good time, and the only downside is the 600+ photos and hours+ of video I have is very difficult to edit down to a 3 minute video… it is coming along, but slowly. We were even able to take the time to grab a few night-HDRs of the museum, as well as a time-lapse HDR of the festivities inside which will probably make its way up on the blog soon. I really liked the way this photo turned out, as it shows the density and length of the line, but one thing it does not convey is how cold it was. These people were waiting in line for hours and hours in below-freezing temperatures, all to see the galleries within! Things like this make me feel validated in my love of art, because the Dalí show really was one that was worth waiting in that line to see. Anyway, here is this shot of the museum entrance around midnight.
This shot was taken with Andrew's 24-105mm, which is very likely to be my next lens purchase… that range on the full-frame 5D is so perfect.
Posted in 24-105mm f/4L IS, 5D Mark II, Atlanta, Night, Outdoor, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
So it may not be a big deal for the northern half of the country, but 6 inches of snow is bad news for Atlanta. The city has been shut down since Sunday night and the roads were largely impassable until yesterday. I saw on the news a trucker from Chicago who was stuck on the highway for 29 hours in the ice who said “Back home this wouldn’t have been such a big deal…” True. Atlanta has absolutely no infrastructure for dealing with snow and thus it has largely remained where it fell and then frozen there. Tucker, Andrew, and I finally got out yesterday when it warmed up enough for us not to die while waiting for a bracket, so we tried to shoot some pictures of the sunset from on top of a nearby parking deck.
Of course we had the eternal problem of "Oh that sunset looks beautiful, let's go take pictures," then by the time we get there it's almost gone…
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Atlanta, Giacomo, Outdoor, Sunset | 2 Comments »
If there’s one thing HDR does well, it is to showcase all of the colors in a scene in all their saturated glory. This picture stands out to me in this regard, because I do not remember seeing nearly this much red, blue, purple, or yellow in the rocks at the time. It was late afternoon, and the sun was at just the right angle to light up the water all the way down at the bottom, and reflecting off to catch the different hues of the rocks. This scene has it all, every color, texture, and angle you could ask for. There’s one other one from this same spot that came out really well and I processed them both simultaneously but I will wait to post that one. I’m thinking of throwing up another one from my most recent trip to Maine first as I shot a lot there over Thanksgiving and have only posted one of them. I guess the holes in the ground are caused by either volcanic or aquatic erosion… one of the two usually applies on Hawaii! In order to reach this spot we has to drive over some incredibly rough terrain but it was worth it. I do wish I’d had the luxury of time and a tripod, which would have enabled me to get a full, ±4 stop, 5 shot bracket and even more importantly, stability. If you are the pixel peeper type, which I myself am, you will see that this image is not nearly as sharp as the 5D usually provides, mostly because the 3 bracketed images were not quite perfectly aligned, even with all of Photomatix’s magic. This shot is now available in many resolutions over at our desktops page. Enjoy!
You can't see it in this one, but in other holes adjacent to this there are ladders running up the side. The cliffs are so steep that people would haul their canoes up these ladders.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Hawaii, Nature, Outdoor, The Big Island, Tucker, Tucker's Favorites | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
There really is no way to describe how weird/awesome/freaky it is to walk on hardened lava, in a location that, a few years ago, would have been entirely full of millions of tons of molten lava. The crater of Kilauea-Iki is still riven with cracks and chasms caused by the hardened lava breaking, and some of these reach thousands of feet down into the mantle where the lava still bubbles. When water reaches these depths, you get billowing columns of steam on the earth’s surface. It is actually kinda hard to see in this shot, but there is steam coming out of the crack toward the top. The different minerals that combined with the lava as it flowed over the earths surface created many awesome colors upon hardening. Reds and oranges are most common, as you can see here. The reddish haze in the clouds is actually called “Vog,” which is short for Volcanic Smog, caused by the combination of water vapor and poisonous gasses that escape from vents leftover from previous eruptions.
The vapor here is water, however in other places it can be sulfur dioxide, which is not nearly as harmless.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, The Big Island, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Located inside a trailer that looks like it might have been able to run 50 years ago, Famous Kahuku is one of many Kahuku shrimp places along the Kamehameha highway on O’ahu. These places are really authentically Asian, serving shrimp just about any way you want it, tempura, coconut, spicy, garlic, you name it… and it’s a delicious thing to bring back to the house and eat while watching the sunset. Famous Kahuku is, well, famous, and although we liked a different place better, the whole appearance of Famous just called out to be photographed, so I did, of course, in a bracket so that I could HDR it later. I’m not exactly sure this place has an A+ FDA inspection rating but ummm the shrimp was good!
We’re leaving today, which is sad, and we get into Atlanta at 7am which will be so rough (8.5 hour flight leaving at 4 or so in the afternoon, and we lose 5 hours on the way…) but all in all it was an amazing trip. At home I’ll be able to really dig into these HDRs and new content from Hawaii, from Andrew’s current trip to Orlando, and from whatever Giacomo decides to do in Atlanta will keep the blog fresh in the coming months. Giacomo and I (and Andrew once he’s back from Florida) are going to sit down and make a Facebook page for the site, as we’ve found that a large majority of our visitors are directed here from Facebook via direct links or seeing the blog link in our profiles. Maybe, if there’s time, we’ll work on adding some features/updating the site layout but mostly, our focus will be on new, great HDR content for all to enjoy.
Would YOU buy shrimp from this place? I hate the way the 16 distorts, it is really starting to bug me. See: barrel in the lower left corner.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Hawaii, O'ahu, Outdoor, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Mele Kalikimaka! (Happy Christmas!)
On a decidedly un-Christmasy note, here is an HDR from one of the many magical places we’ve been so far. These botanical gardens were truly something else, climbing high up into the mountains known as the Makano range. It was an overcast day but the bright tropical sun was able to pierce the clouds, giving us an awesome light as we hiked through the gardens. Hawaii is home to a staggering number of endemic plant and animal species, many of which we saw there.
Today we plan on going to the black sand beaches after a morning of presents and good food. It’s so fun to be able to go get new material every day, something that can’t be said about Atlanta (although I bet the 3 of us can get creative once we’re all together back in the South).
It was very much like a jungle, yet we were on a mountain, with a view of the ocean, listening to roosters crow. Truly strange and awesome.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Hawaii, Kauai, Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Try and say that name without either laughing or messing up… it took us literally all afternoon to get it right. Hawaii is, of course, full of these impossible to pronounce names (the native language is a spoken language, and all renderings of it into text are purely a Western construct to begin with…) but this is one of the better ones. We left the island of Kaua’i yesterday, hopped on two 20 minute flights, and were on the island of Hawaii (not to be confused with the state itself, some refer to the island as “The Big Island” so as not to be confused) staying in a cottage literally on the border of Volcano National Park. You know you’re close when the city you are staying in is “Volcano, Hawaii”. We got up early in a (failed) attempt to beat the (other) tourists and spent the day walking the Kilauea-Iki trail, which is a ~5m hike that goes around the rim of the Kilauea-Iki volcano, and then descends down and you trek straight across the bottom of the volcano, across a Martian plane of cracked black volcanic rock. I’ve never done anything like it; it was truly an alien experience. This shot is of a “crater” nearby that is part of the vista as you look out over Kilauea-Iki. Halema’uma’u continually belches steam and SO2 gas, making it not so fun to go near but really pretty. The HDR is from pretty far away, across the crater, using the 100mm macro (one of the first on this site to use that lens, incidentally) and the accompanying Youtube video is just something fun I shot with the 16-35 while we were at the visitor’s center, which is REALLY close to the steam-belching crater. There are, of course, HDRs from that as well… to be posted later… with the other 1100-odd HDRs I’ve gotten so far. It’s great and all, but when I think of the fact that we’ve still got half the trip ahead of us… let’s just say you’ll be seeing Hawaii shots for a while 
Right below the frame is the crater of Kilauea-Iki; it will be featured in future HDRs in all of its pitch-black glory.
In other news, Andrew sent me some shots he took with his newly acquired set of Nikon lenses using the Canon adapter. I cannot wait to get home and mess around with 14mm on the full frame 5D! Fun and, of course, HDRs, will ensue.
Posted in 100mm f/2.8L IS Macro, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Hawaii, Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, The Big Island, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Here’s one from the very first few hours we spent on Kaua’i. It was rainy and overcast, but by now you know what that means for HDR… great clouds! Everything I’ve shot so far has been handheld as a tripod would be too cumbersome to take on hikes, walk miles on the beach with, etc, and Photomatix handles this like a champ. The tricky bit will be when I encounter a scene that would benefit from having the 5-shot, ±4 stop bracket (a scene with ultra-high contrast, in direct sun) but so far everything has been rather evenly lit. I don’t even need to get into how awesome of a place Hawaii is but in brief, in the past two days we’ve walked on the beach, hiked through a botanical garden in the jungly-mountains, and snorkeled amongst fish that I thought could only exist with David Attenborough talking in my ear. The coming days will bring even better photography, but here’s a simple shot from the beach 5 feet outside the back of where we are staying. The black rocks are, of course, lava rocks. There is some actual name for them but it is escaping me. So for now, lava rocks, beach, and nice clouds.
It is darn near impossible to edit HDRs using only a trackpad… also I have no idea if the color/brightness is right as I am not used to this screen. Oh well.
As an aside, I’m excited to see what we can do with the time-lapse stuff when I get back to Atlanta, however I for one will not be editing thousands of RAW files into HDRs… Giacomo and Andrew can do that if they really want to make a pseudo-HDR video I just want to experiment with doing a time-lapse normally, perhaps set up on a tripod as we shoot HDRs (either a time-lapse of us, or of a scene off to the side of wherever we happen to be) after all, we will have the 5D, the 7D, and the 50D at our disposal, along with tons of great glass… gotta make use of it somehow!
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Hawaii, Kauai, Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
I have no real excuse for my lack of posts lately other than the fact that I have no new material… until now! I just got back from having Thanksgiving up in Maine, and I was able to take a little time to go exploring and get some HDRs. This was hard for a few reasons, beyond the fact that Thanksgiving is family time and I have a really cute new cousin. The biggest issue is that during the winter, the sun sets unnaturally early in the North, beginning around 3:30 and totally pitch black by 4:30. Waking up early is, of course, not an option, so I have about 3 hours of daylight to play with each day! I made good use of it on our last day, when some awesome clouds rolled in just as the sun began to set. After eating lunch, I went out to a favorite summertime-restaurant (closed for the winter) to use their deck to get some HDRs of the great clouds and colors. The sun also sets in an entirely different place in the winter, so my go-to spots to watch it during the summer are useless. That caused me to have to get creative, but that’s never a bad thing. The objects in the foreground here are floats from people’s docks; the ocean freezes around the edges during the winter, and many bays and coves (like ours) freeze over entirely, and if you were to leave your dock and float in the water it would simply break off because of the strain from the ice. All dock owners have their floats taken up on land as the seasons change, and some were stored on the shore by the Coveside restaurant. The boardwalk that stretches from the shore out across the water to the island doesn’t have a float, so the island remains accessible (albeit private…) during the winter.
There were many other floats around me but I wanted the focus to be as much on that great sky as on the foreground!
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Landscape, Maine, Nature, Outdoor, Sun in frame, Sunset, Tucker, Tucker's Favorites | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
A while back I posted some of the HDRs that I took of designer Rick Jones’ work. Those shots were of work he had done for clients, and he is truly able to visualize exactly what should go in a space in order to make it magical and transform it into a place in which you really just want to stay. He has done the same thing with his own home, and I posted some interior shots of his bathroom and kitchen before, and as the final part to this project he has asked me to photograph his back patio, yard, and shed, along with the steps on the front of the house. I’m nowhere near done with the processing as it takes an hour or so per photo, as many of you who have tried HDR and really put your heart into it know, but here’s a shot that I really liked to the point where I finished it up first, before starting from the beginning of the shoot! There is just so much going on here, from all of the different natural textures of the trees, plants, and stones, to the shifting colors in the sky, and the great pre-sunset light setting the foliage on fire. What a fairyland!
Time stops for a bit as you enjoy life outside in Rick Jones' beautiful backyard.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Architecture, Atlanta, Nature, Outdoor, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
This is quite possibly my favorite HDR I have processed, for a lot of reasons: it was one of the best sunsets I’ve witnessed on an incredibly still night; it is really cliche and I’m all about cliche; and the colors are just all there. The sky really looked like that, just a gradient of everything… it was also pouring rain, which doesn’t come through in the picture at all (except for the drops of water that were on my lens, requiring lots of love with photoshop to remove them…) I guess this shot just really encapsulates a lot of what Maine is to me, great sunsets, calm, open expanses of ocean, far-off islands, docks, lobster boats, buoys…. I’ve been sitting on it for a while and decided to reprocess it and was so pleased I just had to post it. It’s also available in the new desktops section for use as a wallpaper (as are a few new ones that I’ve added recently… check it out!) Anyway, here’s your daily dose of Maine sunset cliché.
The wooden structure in the foreground is a boat launching ramp, where you back your trailer up and unload your boat into the bay. At high tide, of course!
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Landscape, Maine, Nature, Sun in frame, Sunset, Tucker, Tucker's Favorites | 2 Comments »
I was at Paul’s the other day and wanted to mess with the macro, and his rack of recording equipment seemed to be the perfect subject. This was originally meant to be paired with another HDR as a dual-screen wallpaper kinda thing, but I am still processing the other one and will post it at a later time or perhaps not at all; I’m having some pretty severe issues with it due to the long exposures (30 seconds) causing lots of light to bleed where I don’t want it. Wasn’t that much of an issue in this one, although I did do some pretty severe levels adjustments that purposely clipped my shadows to mitigate the hazy light (you can still see how the textured surface, which should be black, is slightly orange, and badly green in the bottom right. Oh well.) I hadn’t originally planned for the light stars and in fact I was going to shoot these at f/2.8 to go for a soft-focus on the knobs, but I’d left the camera on f/8 accidentally and upon seeing the results thought duh, this is awesome! So I went with it.
Paul has cool audio stuff and I have cool photography stuff, when you combine them, you get cool photographs of audio stuff.
Posted in 100mm f/2.8L IS Macro, 5D Mark II, Indoor, Still Life, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
I’ve taken more time to tweak the site, most noticeably changing the header image to one from Maine. I also added a “Random Posts” widget to the sidebar. Hopefully this will let people who are new to the site see some of our older work from earlier in the summer. The only bug I have seen with it so far is that for pictures that are not landscape-oriented, the thumbnails end up smushed. There is little I can do about this, as it only lets me set an exact size for thumbnails and not a more dynamic “fit within” like WordPress lets me do for the main blog. Ah well, it’s certainly better than nothing, and the majority of our pictures are landscape format anyway. Beyond that, I noticed that the very earliest posts, before we had this current domain name, all linked their images to files on a different server and thus were showing up as question marks. I’ve fixed this too, (although some of Andrew’s are still not properly linked and thus will show up as question marks on the blog and in the sidebar widget) and in doing so decided to take one of those images that wasn’t showing up, reprocess it, and repost it, seeing as how most of you haven’t seen it anyway! This is a particularly dramatic shot and because of this I purposely processed it fairly surrealistically in Photomatix. The result is contrasty, saturated, distorted, and cool. I don’t know what it is about that location, I think it is the combination of so many different great elements at once, the graffiti, the splitting roads, the path underneath, and of course, that awesome Atlanta skyline… and when you throw a good sky in there on top of it all, well. It’s fun to shoot!
Thunderhead, god-rays, graffiti, oozing grass, and distortion… what's not to like?
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Atlanta, Outdoor, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
In the spirit of tweaking things on the site, I decided to revamp the HDR overview that I’d written a while back. It’s mostly the same, giving readers who don’t know much about the process an idea of the theory behind what we are doing and why it works so well. The old image I had used for that was OK, but not great, and I decided to root through my photo library to find a bracket that really showed what HDR is for. It’s still not perfect, but way better than it was. Hopefully I will have the time to really lay out a tutorial on how to do HDR from start to finish, but that is a very time-consuming task. The image I used in the overview might look familiar as I posted one from that same night a few weeks ago. This beautiful sunset was in Rockland, Maine, and the dramatic clouds and train tracks complete the shot. This is one of those “the photo wouldn’t be remarkable at all if not for the sunset and the HDR process” images, but that doesn’t bother me as much any more because part of what makes HDR so great is that it can do just that, turn something that would otherwise not have been worth photographing into something worth looking at.
This was a great little spot and I wish I'd had more time to properly explore it with a tripod, instead of going hand-held. Still, you can always count on Maine for great sunsets.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Maine, Outdoor, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Gardens at the Getty
A Visit to Mass MoCA
Mueller Hut and Mt. Cook