Ship Wreck HDR

There is a wrecked ship lying in The Gurpur River near Tannir Bavi, Mangalore. Locals claim it was wrecked during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. It provided me a very nice opportunity to test the new version of Photomatix Pro 4 software. Even though Adobe Photoshop has now built in HDR function, Photomatix is one of my favorite HDR software.

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. The human eye can perceive scenes with a very high dynamic contrast ratio, Human eye sees more than 15 stops with a contrast up to 16384:1. Adaptation is achieved in part through adjustments of the iris and slow chemical changes, which take some time (e.g. the delay in being able to see when switching from bright lighting to pitch darkness). At any given time, the eye’s static range is smaller, around 10,000:1. In contrast digital photographs, color negatives and slides consist of multiple film layers that respond to light differently. Most digital camera sensors have 11 stops of light with a contrast of 2048:1. To obtain High dynamic range we need to resort to High dynamic range imaging technique.

Ship Wreck HDR

I used my Canon EOS 5D mark II with Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM Lens to take this photograph. I shot three bracketed shots with 2 stop exposure variation between the shots. So one shot was 2 stops under exposed than the normal exposure, second shot was correctly exposed and third was 2 stop over exposed. I fed these 3 shots into Photomatix through Adobe Lightroom using the new Adobe Lightroom plugin. After going through the Photomatix it produced a 32 Bit file which I did tone mapping to my taste. After developing in tone mapping process of Photomatix it was imported back to Lightroom as 16 bit Tif file. I exported the correct exposure file and the HDR file to Photoshop to remove the ghosting artifact. Once corrected I re-imported back to Lightroom.

Ship Wreck HDR

I would recommend any HDR enthusiast to refer to the invaluable HDR website along with very informative tutorials by Trey Ratcliff called Stuck In Customs. It has given me several insights, tips and methods to improve on my HDR photos.

Jeffrey's Lightroom Geoencoding Plugin

New high end point & shoots and almost all smartphones have Global Positioning System (GPS) built into them. They allow you to incorporate latitude & longitude of the location where the photo taken into the Exchangeable image file format (Exif) header of the photo. But more costly and sophisticated Digital SLR’s lack this simple tool. How will you incorporate this information is subject of my short tutorial. I will make it as simple as possible with bare minimal tools which I have incorporated in my workflow. I hope this information will be useful for all who want to include GPS info into their photos.

I make it a point to display Exchangeable image file format (Exif) on all my photos. I consider it a duty of a every responsible photographer to inform his viewer what parameters he has used while taking the particular photograph. I have seen many discussions on the secrecy of techniques which are not supposed to revealed to anybody.

I come from a Medical profession which also was filled with secrecy. Latin & Greek words doctors were used is mainly to either to confuse or hide facts from the common man . Prescriptions were totally unreadable except to the chemist and the doctor himself. All this has changed now. Internet and information revolution has given most of this hidden information to common man. This has been boon as well as bane to common man. On one hand he is bombarded with good information which is equally mixed with quackery as well marketing. He will be in a dilemma how to differentiate one another. Let us leave medical profession to guide a path through this mess.

Photography also suffered from the same irony, with digital camera everybody has become photographer. The basic knowledge as well as foundation of photography is lacking. I feel openness is the way forward in spreading awareness about photography. When I started this blog I had lot of trouble trying to display EXIF info as well getting that info into the photograph. WordPress engine I am using was not really had any effective tools which could read and display EXIF information in the way I wanted. I had to hack with several plugins to produce satisfactory result. GPS is one tool I relied upon to add location information into the image. Canon as opposed to Nikon has been neglecting the need for a GPS with DSLR’s.

Qstarz BT-Q1000XT GPS Travel Recorder

First you need to get a GPS tool. There are some dedicated GPS taggers which sit on the hot shoe of the camera and add the location information directly onto the photo. Nikon camera has quite a few solution. But since they tie you up with a particular software and hardware combination, I don’t recommend it. Get general GPS logger which log at regular interval GPS info onto a log file. After searching many alternatives I chose Qstarz BT-Q1000XT. It is a GPS Travel Recorder also known as a data logger (or track logger). Q1000XT is capable of recording up to 40 days, which is very reliable and powerful for long trip arrangement. You can log up to 400,000 waypoints as you like. I ordered it from a GPS shop in Delhi called Groovy GPS Store who specialize in selling GPS. On their website only older model (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) is listed. But the Newer model (Qstarz BT-Q1000XT) is what I got from them.

Your GPS position at each point in time (intervals vary e.g. every 5 second or so, as set by the device) is recorded as a track point. Digital cameras also time-stamp your images, so the two time stamps can be compared. Wherever the time stamps match (the clocks in both devices should be synchronized), the associated GPS coordinates can be linked to a particular photo. You can use any GPS logger, even your smartphone, so far as they have logging function and can produce a log in a format called GPX. GPX (the GPS Exchange Format) is a light-weight XML data format for the interchange of GPS data (waypoints, routes, and tracks) between applications and Web services on the Internet.

Here is an example track log of my Pelagic Bird watching Trip in GPX format (opens in a text editor). You can also check the map it renders on Google map below.

Click here for the map

The actual “matching” of track point to photo is done by the software. Before we look at accessing the logs and photo-matching, let’s take a quick look at the alternative, manual method of geo-location. You don’t need to buy a dedicated photo tracker to use the automatic method; you in-car navigation GPS device may suffice (with appropriate software), as could a GPS trekking product. What matters is the ability to record track logs.

Before getting this data logger I was using manual method of adding GPS coordinates. I used to locate my location manually on Google earth using my memory of the area where and when I took photo, and incorporating that into the photograph. It was not very accurate but an approximate way of GPS tagging your photo.

There are plenty of software, some come with the GPS device and few 3rd party GPS tools. I will not go through all of them as I have little experience using them except during early days of evaluating which was good for my purpose. Many of them failed to add GPS info into the Raw files I shoot (not directly into Raw file but xmp side car file). My workflow revolved around Adobe Light room & Photoshop. So I wanted to use a plugin to Adobe Light room which I can use easily on number of photos.

Because the Adobe Lightroom 3 doesn’t support geoencoding natively, you need to use a plugin, Jeffrey’s “GPS-Support” Geoencoding Plugin for Lightroom. It is released as donatioware. using this plugin you can geoencode your photos either using GPX log file from your GPS Logger, or by pinpointing your location on the Google Earth manually. You can also manually enter latitude & Longitude. It can batch process huge number of photos without a sweat.

This has been my workflow incorporating Geoencdng photos. So all you need is this plugin, GPS logger and Adobe Lightroom. When we export photos out of Adobe Lightroom they will be tagged with the GPS info. So next time you want to know location of any of my photo just expand it to the large size and have a look at the Exif info along with location on Google map.

If you want to learn further on geoencoding, check the following links.

• Adobe Lightroom 3 and geotagging: step by step how-to
• Jeffrey Friedl’s GPS Plugin
• GPS Photo GeoTagging I – Two Simple Solutions
• Using GPS Data To Geotag Photos: The Basics
• An ABC of geotagging photos on the Mac

Macro Stitching a Moth - Final Result

This panorama of Oleander Hawk-moth is by using 5 macro photos. In this tutorial I will use Adobe Photoshop CS4 which has greatly improved panorama tools, to produce this macro panorama. This version makes stitching odd photos so much easier than any other program I know of. If you notice these photos are not sequential like the normal pano shots we take. I took this way just to check the capability of Adobe Photoshop CS4 in identifying various segments. You will notice first two shots are of right and left wing, then three shots are of the body from top to bottom. This sort of mixed arrangement stumped most stitching applications out there.

My earlier favorite was PTGUI. When I tried it with these photos it failed miserably to recognize control points. The resulting panorama was a horrible mess. Adobe Photoshop CS4 excels in the aspect of recognition of various segments in the photos.

I was trying to photograph without tripod that day. My Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro was not able to get the full moth at 1:1 magnification. I used 20mm Kenko extension tube along with 100 mm and photographed the moth in 5 pieces with the intention of stitching together later.

I had to make sure that background was as clutter less as possible. This was easy as it was quite dark outside and I was using my Canon MT-24EX macro twin light flash so that background would be dark.

Next thing I wanted to make sure that there will be at least 20% overlap of parts in each photo, otherwise Photoshop will find it difficult to stitch them together.

Macro Stiching a Moth - Select Files

Once I imported the photos to Adobe Lightroom I selected these 5 shots and chose Edit in Photoshop as panorama.

Macro Stitching a Moth - Send to Photoshop

After churning out a bit, Photoshop CS4 produced this beautiful image of the Oleander moth all stitched together.

Macro Stitching a Moth - Panorama on Photoshop

I flattened all the layers and filled the transparent area with black around the moth. I also cropped and rotated to get this final result in Photoshop. So what we have at the end is around 100 mega pixel image of moth which is perfectly stitched and exposure blended. You can see this image at the beginning of this post.

If only I had tripod handy that day, I would have used macro focusing rail and could have taken several shots using canon MP-E 65mm 1x-5x macro and produced 1000 mega pixel monster photo ha ha, I was just joking

Anyway it was fun to try this panorama like stitching using macro that too with shots which were hand held. Photoshop CS4 has really improved its method of Photomerge and produces seamless stitching with excellent results. I hope this small tutorial helps many macro shooters out there who find their subject too big to fit in one frame