I took this picture from the foot bridge that crosses the Silver Creek below the South Falls in Silver Creek Falls State Park, Oregon. I took it back in February and all the shrubs and deciduous trees didn’t have any leaves on them. But there was a lot of water coming over the falls. I need to go back and revisit the State Park when everything is now green to see what possibilities there might be. It’s amazing how weather can really change what possibilities there are for good HDR photography. If the sky is overcast, as it is in this picture, it is very different than if it is sunny out. Anyways. What do you think of the composition of this photo?
Well, I’m on a mini-vacation at Sunriver for Labor Day weekend. I’ve brought my camera and I’ve taken what I think are some exciting photos. Unfortunately, I forgot my card reader at home and I can’t download the images onto my computer to process them. I’ll have to wait until I get back home to view them on a larger screen. So that means I don’t have any new photos to share today.
Instead, I thought I would review my five most popular photos from the HDR Spotting website. I haven’t submitted all of my photos to the site, I’ve only submitted 17. When you submit a photo to the HDR Spotting website, it is reviewed by three editor’s and then placed into a category: Latest, Featured, & Editor’s Pick. Of the 17 photos I have submitted, 14 photos have been Featured. I have not achieved the holy grail of getting one of my photos selected for Editor’s Pick but I’m holding out hope that I will achieve that one day. What is nice about the HDR Spotting website, is that it keeps track of how many views each photo gets. So I have feedback on which of my photos are the most popular.
I’m a little confused by the now number one photo on HDR Spotting. I almost didn’t submit it to HDR Spotting because it has many technical problems. There were water spots on the lens that made part of the photo blurry. Although I was using a tripod to take the photos, I was standing on a bridge and I think that made other parts of the photo blurry. But for whatever reason, it is the most popular. If anyone has any ideas why it is the most popular, please chime in. I’m still trying to figure out what makes one photo better than another. Trey Ratcliff’s eBook on composition has helped my understanding. So with out further ado, here are the top five most popular photos according to the HDR Spotting website and the number of views each photo has garnered as of today. Tell me if you agree.
1. Upper Multnomah Falls – 5511 Views
2. Multnomah Falls – 5323 Views
3. Silver Falls Surrounded by Trees – 3806 Views
4. Tulips with White Puffy Clouds – 3613 Views
5. Glacier 13 with Dan’s Land Cruiser – 3374 Views
I took this in April at the Woodburn Tulip Festival. I was using a macro lens – Nikon 105mm f/2.8 AF-S Micro VR. The aperture is set to f/3.2 and the shutter is 1/8000 second. I was playing with depth of field but didn’t realize that being close to an object intensifies the effect that aperture has on depth of field. It makes sense that it should. Just didn’t realize it at the time. I thought this was an interesting tulip, not like most that you see. I used Topaz Detail to highlight the coloring.
I took this photo in May at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge. I posted the original photo without cropping it in my Great Blue Heron post. I also posted the photo to the Nature Photographers’ Network and the people there suggested that I crop the photo down to make it a portrait and highlight the back-lit beak and vibrant eyes. They thought that the background in the original photo was too distracting. So which photo do you like better?
It was amazing to be so close to this bird and takes its picture from the photo blind. I was using a Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II lens. The bird was so close that I wasn’t able to include the feet in the original picture. I should have rotated the camera to take a vertical picture but I didn’t think of that at the time.
Original Photo:
This is the last picture I took up on Glacier 13 on the Alaska Cruiser Trek. I set the tripod up about two feet up off the ice to accentuate the rolling hump of ice next to the snow-covered crevasse. I really pushed the HDR in this photo to highlight the blue glacier ice, the dirt, and the snow. It was other-worldly being up on this glacier and I wanted to capture the mood of being on this dirty glacier with the surrounding mountains looking down on us. It was menacing being so close to the crevasses and moulins without crampons or traction devices.
I forget the name of this flower. Does anyone know? I was playing with depth of field on a macro lens that I had rented from Pro Photo Supply in Portland. The lens I rented was the Nikon 105mm f/2.8 AF-S Micro VR. For this photo, I had the aperture set at f/3.2, which was the lowest setting I could set for some reason. I did HDR on a single photo with Photomatix Pro, then used a filter in Topaz Adjust, and used Noiseware to reduce noise in the background.
I took this picture while on a birding walk with the Portland Audubon Society. I was using a Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II lens. I did not bring my tripod with me because it was a walk and it was very difficult to shoot with this very heavy lens handheld. It was difficult to get this bird in focus and composed in frame correctly. I did crop this photo to show just the bird and the reflection. I cropped it so that the bird fell along the Golden Rule lines in Lightroom. Aperture was at f/4 and shutter was 1/800 seconds. I did use HDR Photomatix Pro, Topaz Adjust’s Spicify, masked in parts with Photoshop, and adjusted the Hue/Saturation on the yellows and blues in Photoshop.
I just read Trey Ratcliff’s new eBook – Composing the Photo: Creating Order from Chaos – Bonus Edition. It full of great information. I hope that it will help me understand why some of my photos are so much more popular than the others. I need to reread it to soak up all the information.
I took this photo at the Tualatin River NWR in May. I used my Nikon D700 camera and rented the Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II lens. I cropped according to the Golden Rule as outlined in the Composing the Photo eBook in Lightroom. I then tonemapped it using HDR Photomatix Pro. After that I ran it through Topaz Adjust’s filter Portrait Smooth. I then tweaked the colors in Photoshop by reducing the Hue/Saturation on both yellow and blue. I finally ran it through Noiseware to get the last of the noise out of the bokeh background. Last of all, I increased the size of the photo to its original size using Genuine Fractals. What do you think?
I took this photo at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge in May. The water was drained but there was still a small pond next to the photo blind. So there were still a few birds around the water. This Great Blue Heron showed up and just looked magnificent. The Great Blue Heron is the official bird for the city of Portland, Oregon.
I tried doing HDR on this photo but it really messed up the beak and the feathers. I worked for a while in Photomatix Pro to get a realistic and stunning image but nothing really seemed to work. So this is not an HDR image. I did use Topaz Adjust. It gave a lot of options that did work well. I finally decided to use Portrait Smooth on this photo. It really worked well with the bokeh of the background that the lens produced (Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II).
What do you think? Do the feathers lack too much detail? Would you rather have more detail showing on the bird or does it all kind of flow together? I like the way this looks somewhat like a painting. The Great Blue Heron looks very regal is this stance to me and the background, which is not great, is not distracting.
This is another picture from the Alaska Cruiser Trek. We are lined up on the glacier. We couldn’t go any further because the crevasses stopped our progress. You can see some snow-filled crevasses in the foreground. No idea how deep they might be. Some were filled with water and are very dangerous. If you fell into a crevasse or moulin, you would freeze to death. So they are definitely to be avoided. You can see Charla’s BJ42 land cruiser. Luis has the light blue monster FJ40 land cruiser and you can see my darker blue FJ60 land cruiser. It was a lot of fun hanging out on the glacier. Click on the photo to get the camera information such as aperture or focal length through Smug Mug.
