Archive for the ‘Tucker’ 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! »
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 am not dead, I promise! I am just in Hawaii without a laptop. I have my little netbook which is good for browsing the internet and checking email, but at the merest mention of “photomatix” or “35MB raw file” it cries and melts into a little pool of plastic. My dad has his Macbook Pro here, so I will hopefully be able to use that in a day or so to at least get one or two shots up on the blog. I’ve been here two days and have already filled up two 16GB cards…. there will be so much work to do when I get home it is almost not worth thinking about. We are currently staying on the island of Kauai, in Hanalei Bay in a house right on the beach, literally 10 steps from it, so when we’re not out seeing the sights we are probably in the water or reading by the water. Such a nice break from the (unnaturally cold) Atlanta winter! We spent the morning at a botanical garden up in the mountains, and have plans to visit volcanoes, black sand beaches, and Pearl Harbor as we island hop over the next week or so. More updates will come as soon as I get my hands on a copy of photomatix. I would post some iPhone-HDR I’ve been taking along the way but it just doesn’t do it justice.
Posted in Hawaii, Kauai, 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! »
I know, I know, I haven’t posted in forever… a confluence of having nothing new and no time has led to this… but I once again went back in time, to an age when RAW was a little-understood setting in the camera and chose another shot from London to post. The Hampton Court Palace and surrounding gardens was home to many figures of British royalty, most notably King Henry VIII. He expanded the palace and added some ridiculously awesome gardens including mazes, fountains, lakes, you name it… I wish I could go back there, with the 5D Mark II, a tripod, and those same clouds and shoot this again! The image quality out of the 300D is laughably poor but the single-shot HDR capability of Photomatix 4 is (and I’ll say it again) just out of this world and makes this a picture worth posting. Unlike Trey Ratcliff’s most recent completely out of focus portrait. Um anyway. Trey’s work is usually great; no idea what he thought he was doing with that one.
I have a few more shots will post, one or two from Maine, one of the stormy cloudy Atlanta skyline, and some macro stuff. The bulk of my new material will start flooding in during and after my trip to Hawaii in late December. I am heading off to Ohio soon for my grandmothers funeral, so while the circumstances are not pleasant, I will definitely bring my camera and see what happens, see if I can’t make something good out of a sad situation. I’ll be in Maine for Thanksgiving, but I don’t have high hopes for that either because snow turns really nastily grey in most shots unless you get the light just right… but who knows. It’s always better to have the camera with you than to have that feeling of “oh, man, this is totally awesome… why is my camera at home??”
All of that awesome noise, chromatic aberration, and un-sharpness makes me appreciate technological advancement and love my 5D even more. Still, great clouds are great clouds!
I thought I’d straightened this in Photoshop, but it appears tilted here. Oh well. I don’t really have the desire to fix it…. even though it is distracting…. ugh
Posted in Architecture, Nature, Outdoor, Single-Shot, Tucker | 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! »
I can’t stop raving about how awesome Photomatix 4 is with making HDR images out of single RAW files! It’s nearly magical, and no, this won’t be the last time you hear me (or any of us for that matter) say this. I’ve had a lot of fun digging through my photo library looking for some RAWs that deserve processing, and I remembered that on my trip to DC a few summers ago we had some great clouds as we visited the World War II memorial, on our way to the Lincoln Memorial. Yes, these shots fall under the category of “generic tourist shot made to look cool because of HDR” but that’s kinda the point. The HDR process turned a “boring” photo into something post-worthy, and I like that there is a new variable here beyond simply finding a good subject to photograph that can determine the quality of the photo. In this case, HDR was actually essential to these shots even being considered usable, and I’ve included links to the original RAW files (compressed, of course, but color-accurate) so you can see what I mean. They were poorly exposed to begin with.
I can't believe how much definition in the trees came through after the HDR process!
 There is almost no definition in the trees! |
 Before the HDR process. |
I rarely comment on issues of composition beyond the occasional note, but in the image below a lot of things are coming together to make this work. Obviously, symmetry is huge. 4 pillars on each side, opposing groves of trees, equal parts foreground and background, horizontal bands of clouds mirroring horizontal swaths of grass and pavement. All of the orthogonal lines converge on the single point on the horizon, the Memorial itself, but more prevalent is the layers of horizontal elements that recede back, the alternating grass and pavement, and bands of dark and light clouds. All of this is stark and obvious in the black and white; it is muted and becomes lost in the original color version.
The picture comes alive in black and white.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 40D, Architecture, Handheld HDR, Outdoor, Single-Shot, Tucker, Washington DC | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Photomatix 4 is finally out, and man, it was worth the wait. The entire application has been sped up significantly, and the interface is a lot nicer. The best new feature by FAR though is the single-shot RAW tone-mapping ability. You could somewhat do this in previous versions, and we’d been getting around it by “faking” the HDR process and making 3 shots by lightening and darkening the same image in photoshop and saving out the copies, but that was time-consuming and annoying. Now, at the click of a button, Photomatix treats your single RAW file as though it were a bracketed set… with AMAZING results. Truly, this will enable creativity far beyond what we could do before for a few reasons, mainly that you can do HDRs of moving subjects with a single shot, and if you have some RAWS from before you knew about HDR (as I do) you will be able to make them come alive! That second reason is why I’m so excited, because I have TONS of RAW photos that I will now be able to process and post. I dug way, way back for this one, from right around the time that photography was becoming interesting to me, in 9th grade. This is (… obviously) Stonehenge, from a trip to London that we took, and I had shot in RAW that particular day because I didn’t know what it was and wanted to experiment. Turns out, the Canon Digital Rebel 300D did not capture RAW data that well, and the resulting files were really, really dark. Not a problem for Photomatix 4!
Even though I didn't know anything about photography and had no formal training, it's hard to mess up a picture of Stonehenge! It's also hard to take a unique picture… HDR helps with that, making it a bit different than the average tourist shot.
Posted in Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, Single-Shot, 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 »
More from Castello Ricasoli
Around Siena Again
Going Downtown
Night Light in the Back Alleys of Inman Park