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...

OMG!!!

They Reach!

Nice Marbling!

WHOOO!!!!!

SO BRIGHT!!!

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

Mmmmm, flashy goodness!

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?

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!