The world outside my head.

Time Lapse – Edmonton Photographer

Dave Wilson — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 04:52:10 +0000

So, headed out to try some time lapse tonight after spending the vast majority of my day virtually paralyzed due to a pinched nerve in my back (though my doctor says it’s a severely strained muscle. Whatever Doc.)

Anyway, I’m sitting around waiting for the shots to get captured after setting it all up. This is how photography should be! Ha ha ha. Note the two tiny sticks in the lower left just atop the hill. Yeah, those are my camera and my friend Shauna’s camera on tripods about 300 feet away from where we sit safe from all the blood sucking Mosquitos while the camera does the work!

Lightning. Sweet Lightning! – Edmonton Photographer

Dave Wilson — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:20:39 +0000

Tonight as I was leaving J.O.B. 2.5 I noticed a bit of lightning in the distance. Looked pretty solid so I figured hey, I’ll go perch myself up on a hill off the AH and see what I can grab.

Now yesterday, Sunday, my friend Shauna and I blew through a pile of gasoline trying to get out front of a storm, um, front, in order to try and get some shots without getting poured on. We were moderately successful. Although being the bad teacher that I am, she misunderstood what I was saying when explaining how to set up her camera to take shots. Of course I was busy shooting and not really paying attention. To me it sounded like she was setting things up good, but alas, I should have checked because she ended up with nothing. Though really neither did I. I ended up with this being my best shot;

Lightning on the Back Road.

Not terrible, and with some work I could get rid of the drop smudge in the bottom right and maybe make it somewhat interesting. Really, I think the best thing I may have come away with yesterday was sweet timelapse stuff. If it’s any good I’ll post it later, haven’t look at it yet.

But tonight the lightning seemed pretty good and there was no rain going on because the main storm was a fair ways away yet.

So off I went. This is one reason why I ALWAYS try to take my camera with me everywhere. Since I had it with me, I didn’t have to waste time going home to get it first. Thank GOD! Because to get where I wanted to go I had to journey 25% the way around the entire bloody city just to get the other side of the Henday and to the hills I actually wanted. Sure, I could pulled over and just run across, but that could cost me as well if I decide that a side road would lead me to a better landscape. No, I needed to have all my tools with me and that includes my car. So, around I went. As it turned out, I ended up doing all my shooting with about 50 meters of the Anthony Henday.

It started off slowly while I tried to get my settings dialed in. A good rule of thumb is to start with F11, ISO 100, and shutter speed of 30 seconds just to see what you get for landscape illumination. I just went straight to BULB which is the mode where as long as you’re holding the shutter button, your shutter is open. The idea here is that you hold the shutter open and when lightning flashes, you let go and you have your shot!

Not always though.

Lightning will not ALWAYS act as a flash bulb.

Sometimes you will need to leave your shutter open for a while after a strike to bring out the definition of your surroundings.

Eventually I started getting what I needed.

The first shot is the default out of the camera and the second with some very minor tweaking of exposure and black levels.

Not too terrible...

Hmmm

...Much better...

The second one is pretty nice and amazingly well centered. But I was sure something better was only a few moments away.

So I waited.

And I shot.

And I got a lot of shots with lightning just out of the left side of my frame.

And then after a few shots that were alright but not fantastic I got this baby!

OMG!!!

I thought, Yup, that’s pretty darn sweet! And if it was the only good shot of the night I’d have been happy.

But it wasn’t!

While I got a lot of shots with very nice strikes in them, they were typically very off centre. Maybe some cropping will make some look good but generally, those will never get used.

I decided to move a little closer to the water and try to get more of that in the shot. But as I moved I became concerned that I was missing shots.

So I parked my tripod again, re-aimed, and eventually I got this one and thought, Wow! It’s like they’re reaching for me!

They Reach!

Now I thought, YES!!! NOW we’re cooking with propane! This was soon followed up by;

Nice Marbling!

And now I felt, yeah, this was a good night.

But as I tried for a few more shots the rain began to fall. But just a little.

I then began an inner debate. Do I leave now and accept what I’ve gotten, or do I venture yet closer to the water and risk a getting very wet if the sky opens up.

I decided to wait for the sky to open up and I ventured closer to the water.

Man am I glad I did!!!

WHOOO!!!!!

And then tragedy struck! I had been shooting in BULB, at ISO 100, and a aperture of 5,6!!! The strikes had been fairly thin, not overly bright. 5.6 was working reat for me. Until;

SO BRIGHT!!!

Now, if I had shot this in .jpg, the best I could hope for in bring things back is;

Still a globby white blob at the top of the shot.

Notice the red shift as we increase contrast by shifting the blacks and midrange around? And I’ve recovered absolutely nothing in the bright range.

Fortunately, I choose to shoot everything in RAW because for me, my next shot COULD BE my greatest work of art and I want to be sure I have as much detail and ifnromation captured as possible to ensure the best possible range of editing options I can get.

While certainly in need of more work, and the removal of that water smudge, I was able to recover a lot more detail with the RAW file;

Mmmmm, flashy goodness!

While still a large glob of white at the top of my shot, it’s at least a bit smaller and I can see more of my main bolt. With everything more to the right, my final edit will probably see this as a square image. And that water smudge will be removed.

At this point, the rain was starting to really come down and the wind had picked up and things were getting COLD!!! So I tried for one more shot before running to back to my car. Didn’t get anything so I bolted. Naturally, as soon as I turned my back the whole world lit up!!!

Such is the life of the photographer.

As I drove back home there were so many more bright flashes. It pained me to know what was going on out there was not being captured by me! But I didn’t bring a rain coat. And my camera has virtually no protection from the elements. So alas, there was nothing I could do but miss literally dozens of shots.

Note to self: buy rain gear!

CS5 Content Aware Fill / Edmonton Portrait Photographer

Dave Wilson — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:09:08 +0000

With the release of Adobe’s Photoshop CS5 one of it’s most hyped features was the magical Content Aware Fill. With this you could select anything you didn’t want in a photo and simply delete it! The examples were awe inspiring but I had to wait to try it out myself. I KNEW there would be issues. Ohhh! Word press 3.0 is available! Um, sorry, shiney things distract me!

Anyway, for the most part this really is a magical tool! I have had it work awesome in some very tricky situations, situations I was SURE it would fail at are where it’s shone most brightly. And yet, situations where I would think I would barely be challenged seem to cause it some real grief. I’m hoping I’m simply doing something wrong but so far, no solution has been found that I’m aware of.

Take this example. Behind my subject here is a shadow from a nearby lamp. I want to remove this shadow. I would think that Content Aware Fill (CAF) would handle this quite nicely, but no, it’s a mess!

With Shadow.

This is with all my Photoshop settings at whatever I happened to be using at the time.

Hmmmm, yucky!

My good friend Ferd Isaac suggested that my paint brush was too big. Considering this function is done with a selection you might think that the brush setting would be irrelevant. Well, this is Photoshop and some functions do rely on settings of seemingly unrelated tools so this didn’t seem too far fetched to me. I gave it a try. I set my paint brush to 1 px and also set my healing brush to 1 px. Well….

Brushes at 1 pixel. Not so hot!

I really don’t think it had ANY impact at all. The theory was that the size of the brush determines how far out CAF would look for filling materials. Doesn’t seem to be the case.

Dave Paduch theorizes that because it’s a very noisy shot (640 ISO on a Canon 40D, plus I added noise) perhaps the math is getting confused and no longer able to properly discern various elements of the image due to the heavy noise. I tried going back to the original RAW image to see how it would fare. The yellow line indicates the selection area. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have worked any better or worse. Click it to see it full.

Not much better.

So now it’s back to old school methods. I tried the standard healing brush and clone methods but for some reason I was always left with a smudge above his head. I was starting to go crazy. I’m sure I’ve done this a million times. Why the issue all of a sudden. So I sent the file to my friend Dave and he had a look. Sure enough, he soon sent me a fixed version with an explanation of why I was having trouble. The method he used is one I’ve never really tried but which makes complete sense once I heard it. Duh!

And yet, as I type this, my mind wanders to yet another new feature of CS5. Refine Edge. Let’s see how that does. Click for the larger image.

Required actual work, but hey, it was worth it! hehehe

I think maybe I’ll make my own tutorial on this. Maybe even a video tutorial! You tube has several, but not always very real world scenarios. Hmmm…Always so many ideas. Follow through needs to happen more often! Thoughts?

Bear Babes – Edmonton Glamour Photography

Dave Wilson — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 07:58:07 +0000

On May 28th, 100.3 The Bear radio station held it’s finals for their Bear Babes 2011 Calendar which raises money to support the Stollery Children’s Hospital. Last year they raised over $46,000 but we know we can do better! We’ve been a part of this for almost 10 years and we were there again this year to photograph the contestants. From the group of girls competeing on May 28th 16 were chosen to be photographed. Once all 16 have been photographed selected images from their photoshoots will be used on the Bear’s web site for the public to vote on the final 12 that will actually appear in the calendar and the girl with the highest votes will be crowned cover girl!

Here’s just a few of the contestants, not all of them were chosen for the top 16, sadly not everyone can get in. But chances are good we will work with all of them again!

Alana and Jordan Paul / Edmonton Wedding Photography

Dave Wilson — Sun, 16 May 2010 01:17:46 +0000

On May 8th we had the pleasure of joining Alana and Jordan as they embarked on their journey of marriage. A beautiful ceremony was made awesomely amusing with Alana’s declaration of “Yuppers I do!”. It’s obvious these two really are best friends and we wish them a great many years of happiness together! Thank you so much for including us in your day!

We’re slowly getting through the editing of their photos and I just wanted to post a few here because I know everyone is dying to see them! More will come in the next few days.

In The Details / Edmonton Wedding Photographer

Dave Wilson — Sat, 15 May 2010 06:05:47 +0000

A few weeks ago Mel and I took an opportunity to hang out with Kelly from Studio Four Twelve while she shot the wedding of Mike and Sabrina. We had a lot of fun and created many great images for them. For Mel and I, one of our favorite things is to create beautiful, even artistic images of the many decorations and environmental items that might be found at any given wedding. Here’s a few we got from that day.

Father’s Day Contest! / Edmonton Portrait Photographer

Dave Wilson — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:49:47 +0000

Okay! Congratulations to Kristen Cowan for winning the Mother’s Day contest. She’s won a free portrait session for her Mom.

Which brings us to our Father’s Day contest! Same deal folks. Tell us a story of why you have the best Father in the world! On June 1st we’ll pick a winner who will receive a session of about 1 hour long and will result in up to 5 images being fully edited, printable at 8 x 10, and burned onto a CD.

So what are you waiting for!? Get writing!

My Dad!

Tyson and Erin’s Wedding / Edmonton Wedding Photography

Dave Wilson — Sun, 02 May 2010 09:33:38 +0000

Today I went and performed second shooter duties for my good friend Kelly from www.studiofourtwelve.com for the wedding of Tyson and Erin. These two are seriously wacky and a lot of fun! Here’s a few of my favorite shots. Thanks for letting me come along today guys!

Shots around town / Edmonton Photographer

Dave Wilson — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:04:30 +0000

I’m trying to catch up on my back log of everything. Here’s a few shots from last week. I’ll soon be posting stuff from as far back as last summer, may be even further back if I’m inspired enough!

Edmonton Photographer

Dave Wilson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:17:18 +0000

So, I’ve been playing around with a new plug in called Topaz Adjust. It’s interesting and most of it’s effects are kind of useless except for specific situations but it’s fun too. Here’s a few shots I’ve done with it.