travel light?

I'm flying back to Indonesia tomorrow for three weeks and Singapore for a week.

Will go to Manado and probably Bromo or Tana Toraja depending on the time.

What do I have in my camera bag (the National Geographic backpak)? Not a lot.

One body, one lens, one flash and one tripod. That's the Nikon D300 with the 18-55mm VR lens attached, an SB600 and my Gitzo carbon fibre tripod.

Other than that it's just the standard extra battery, charger, polarizer, small netbook and an external hard drive.

Should I do film? Maybe I should. I've got myself a Nikon F100 body but I have still yet to use it. Definitely after this trip. I'm pretty sure I'll need to carry a lot less (laptop, hard drive) than what I'm carrying now.

my first holga result

Yes, it was all over the place.

Ha!

A lot of the subjects aren't in focus. I'm not sure if that's the way the Holga's supposed to be or it's my fault since I didn't use the depth of field thing.

I like some of them anyway.

Will do better next time.

D700

I want a D700.

I don't need one but I want one.

The only reason I can think of to upgrade is that it's a full frame dSLR and having the same megapixel count as my current D300 (12 megapixels), with D700's larger sensor, each pixel would be bigger and my brain is telling me that each can store much more colour information compared to D300's.

It should also boost low light performance. I've seen usable photos taken with ISO 4000, and this is for submissions to image libraries. This, paired with a fast lens could eliminate the use of tripods for night photography unless you'd want that long shutter effect.

So why not get one?

It's frickin' expensive. I can't afford one right now, or anytime soon that is.

And second, I'd need to get a lens to go with it. Probably the 24-70mm. I'd prefer if Nikon would have something like 14-50mm f/2.8 as I don't usually go more than that. And the 24-70mm costs around AU$2500.

So in total, getting a D700 with a 24-70mm lens would cost me around AU$5500.

If I managed to sell all my gear at the moment, I would probably have AU$3000. You do the math.

Another reason is that I don't do a lot of indoor shots. I know it's a hassle carrying my tripod but that's the price I'm willing to pay for clear images.

Last but not least, this is just my complaint that D700 doesn't have 100% viewfinder and a live histogram. I've always wanted a live histogram.

I'll stick with my D300 for now.

my best friend

breakfast at blue train cafe

my HDR tutorial

I know it's been done a million times but I just wanted to do my own version of it so here's the way I do my HDR images.

What you need, image-wise?

For HDR processing, you'd need to take photos of a scene with at least 3 different exposures. I usually go for 2-steps underexposed, 2-steps overexposed and the supposedly correct exposure.

Tools:

- I use a dSLR, you can use any cameras that would allow exposure bracketing

- a tripod is 99% a must (especially when trying to HDR at night), unless you've got a really steady hand

- shutter release is recommended but not compulsory. I usually use mine for night HDRs only.

My camera setup:

- I shoot with Aperture Priority mode for HDRs. It's the A Mode in Nikons.

- I'll select the desired aperture.

- I'll set the bracketing option to 5 or 7 or 9 exposures depending on the scene. This is because my D300 can only bracket at 1-step intervals compared to the D80 I used to have which can bracket at 2-step intervals (boss!!). I wish they'd kept this feature in the D300 but that rant is for another time.

- set the camera shotting mode to Continuous High Speed (CH on the D300)

And you're ready to go.

Once the camera is on a tripod and my setup has been done, I'd frame and hold the shutter release until the camera finished shooting. If you set the bracketing to 5 frames, it will shoot 5 times and it will then stop.

When shooting at night, a shutter release would be handy as sometimes for the 1- or 2-step overexposure, it could take a while for the camera before it releases the shutter (20- to 30-second exposure or more) and a shutter release would minimise the movement of the camera.

HDR EXAMPLE

Below are three photos of the State Library of Victoria I took years ago when I still have the D80. Exposures from firts to last: 2-steps underexposed, correct exposure, 2-steps overexposed.

Now I'll be generating a HDR image from these three photos. I use Photomatix, but there are lots of HDR softwares out there (even Photoshop does it too) so feel free to try them.

In Photomatix, click HDR - Generate (or Ctrl + G).

It will ask you to load the pics for HDR generation. Click Browse, I'll select the pics I've got and click Open then click OK.

Another dialogue box will appear. Leave them on default but tick on 'Attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts' then select (depending on the scene) 'Moving objects/people' or Ripples'. In this case I'll select Moving objects/people. If a tripod was used when taking photos, the checkbox doesn't need to be ticked, but I always do it just in case. Then click OK.

Wait for a few seconds, an image should appear with a small box saying HDR Viewer. We're not done yet here.

Close the HDR Viewer, then click HDR - Tone Mapping (Ctrl +T).

Another dialogue box should appear like the one below. I'd usually leave everything at their default value except for Strength and Light Smoothing. I'd usually put the Strength around 80-100 and Light Smoothing to the very right or second from the right. Seems to give me the most natural result. When you're done here, click OK, then save. I usually save the file as a Tiff file as I'm bringing it over to Photoshop.

Here's the pic generated by Photomatix that I'm bringing over to Photoshop.

Tweak the photo until you think it's right. I'd usually fix the curves at least, sometimes the levels if I need to. And just tweaking the colour until I feel I've got the right mood for the scene. Here's the final image after tweaking in Photoshop.

And I'm done. You'd notice that the leaves on the top left corner are a bit blurry. This is because it was windy when I took these photos.

IMPORTANT STUFF

Don't use Shutter Priority Mode. Why? Because Shutter Priority will bracket different exposures with variable apertures which we don't want for HDR. We want the same depth of field for the different exposures.

When editing in Photomatix or Photoshop, watch out for Halos appearing around hard edges. We don't want this and it makes your HDR image look amateurish. And yes, I've been there too.

When doing HDRs handheld (yes it is possible), make sure you zoom in at 100% to see if your images are aligned perfectly before tweaking even in Photomatix. You can do this after Photomatix has generated your HDR image before closing the HDR Viewer dialogue box.

And last but not least, if you want to have a look at more HDR examples, here's my HDR Set live at my Flickr.

stuck

Argh, I think I'm kinda stuck.

I've been using my 35mm f/1.8 lately and today I found myself feeling that 18mm is so very wide.

I'm not sure why but at the moment I felt like my 35mm lens is best for composing and framing.

Uh oh...

point nepean national park

I'm glad I had the chance to do some outdoor shooting again. It's been a while and it feels like a very long time.

Went to Point Nepean National Park with some friends today. It's at Seaford, Mornington Peninsula. We went even thought the forecast said it was going to be really bad, thunderstorm.

When we got there, the weather wasn't that good, but it wasn't raining so that's a relief.

Anyway I had fun shooting with my D300, my Holda and the Polaroids (including the latest Fuji Instax 500).

Here's the best pics of today.

I will now complain about my Fuji Polaroid cameras. I think I'd have to put some kind of tape in front of where the body opens (to insert the film). I got back from today's trip only to find out that both of them, inside my bag, somehow managed to open their bodies and made the film obsolete (especially the huge Instax 500). I had two left in that body and when I opened my bag, those two weren't usable anymore. The Mini Instax was OK. It was open, but the film was OK, but now I don't know how much exposures I actually have left in there.

I will tape both of them as punishment (and a way to conserve the precious polaroid films).

published

Here and here are some examples of my photos which have been published on the web.

Some of the others have also been published in some Lonely Planet guidebooks.