On Valentine's Day, Jenn and I went to Belmont, where we got married and where we like to walk around. It's a beautiful location with something new to appreciate every time you go. Of course, I had my camera with me and took a few portraits of Jenn.

In this shot, I had the 580EX II on camera but I had both the clear and gold diffusers on it which sufficiently knocked down the brightness of flash to avoid that harsh on camera light. It's one of my favorite shots of Jenn.

A couple weeks ago, Aaron, Andrew and I spent some time at Pinhole Box Studios, playing around with studio lights and basically makes fools of ourselves after awhile. But before we started jumping around (seriously), we did take some time to take portraits of Aaron's beautiful wife Lisa. Such as the shot here:

Now Lisa's beautiful and she's already doing a lot of the heavy lifting for me. For my part, the shot is pretty good but as Lisa said later:

See, Geoff, now this is where "your hair looks like you just woke up-and not in a good way" would be something GOOD to tell your model.

Now I'm sure Lisa is just being overly critical of herself but I am one to try and make things better. So using Portraiture, cloning some of the hair and a few other tweaks, I ended up with this:



It's not a huge difference but that's what I was going for. Just giving it a little nudge.

And I didn't even need to buy anything!

So a couple months ago I ordered the Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 lens from B&H. As a good Strobist, I threw in a couple Rosco gel packs for good measure. And then I hit a kink. The shipping on the lens was free but the gel packs were $4.95. Call me cheap but I couldn't justify to myself or especially to my wife, another $5 for a 1 cent item. So I dropped the gel packs from the order, mentioned it on the DC/VA/Baltimore Strobist group and went about my life.

Fast forward to today. Checked my e-mail. An order notification from B&H. Funny, I didn't think I'd ordered anything lately unless I had been sleeping browsing B&H (a possibility). The order was for two Cinegel Swatchbook. Wha....

Received an e-mail from Henry Posner, letting me know he had seen my post and apologized for not seeing it earlier. He had wanted to refund the shipping cost of the gel packs (a mute point since I didn't order them) and send the Cinegel Swatchbooks since the Roscos were out of stock. For free.

To say I am speechless is an understatement. I can't begin to thank Henry and I'm pretty sure I'll be a B&H customer for life.

Thought I'd pass along this story. I normal don't complain about these things on Flickr but in this case, I'm glad I did and I'm glad there are people like Henry.

Cheers!

When - March 8th - 3:00 till 5:00~
Where - Downtown Fredericksburg.


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The other three questions:
What - To take pictures...
Who - Hopefully, you.
How - With your camera. Or cellphone.

I apologize for the pun in the title.

Meet at the Fredericksburg dock. Should be enough parking there for everyone.

The route I have planned is for us to walk up Sophia St. till it intersects with William St. and then walk back down Caroline St. You'll be able to get shots of the bridges from the dock and from the William St Bridge. We'll also make a stop at the Fredericksburg train station because that really hasn't been photographed enough. And who doesn't want to get yet another shot of Caroline St.?

The route is a little under two miles but that's just a rough estimate and I foresee us spending a lot of time in specific places. The weather will likely be cool if not down right cold but you never know, so dress accordingly. There is a lot of traffic near the William St. bridge so please be careful and mindful of cars.

Hope you can make it. :)

For those who do not know, HDR stands for high dynamic range, the acronym being no more meaningful than the title till you learn about HDR. So here goes.

In photography you will encounter times when you can only get certain things from an image. A setting sun will turn objects in front of it into silhouettes. Try compensating for that by exposing for the object and the sunset will be washed out. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just how light (and therefor photography) works. One exposure (photograph) only has so much information at a particular f-stop and shutterspeed.

Except when you increase your photographic toolkit to include HDR. By bracketing exposures (which I'm not about to get into) you can have one "correct" exposure, one overexposed exposure and one underexposed exposure. Great, you now have one okay looking photo with two not so good looking photos. Why would you possibly want that?

Enter the tool of the computer. Photomatix, or any other HDR program, will take the information from each of these images and merge them into one image. This exposure is the sum of it's parts, now with more information than any one of the original three exposures. Congratulations, you've just made an HDR image.

But it looks like crap.

Which is why you need tonemapping, another tool Photomatix (or other program) gives you. I won't go into what tonemapping is since I have really no idea what you're exactly doing here. To me, it's where Photomatix does some black magic and I get an interesting looking picture.

Ta da!

I really don't do much else besides that. I have the strength and saturation levels maxed out, really only changing them very little. That's really all I do. I let the computer chug through it's computations outputting the image. And I get the credit.

There are a few more tips which I'll list below but before I do I want to talk about the ethical dilemma I feel about HDR. HDR is a tool and done judiciously, it can produce some very interesting results. But like any tool which produces fairly consistent exciting results the creator is led to more and more rely on it instead of relying on themself. I can guarantee you that once you do a few HDR images you will start seeing more and more reasons to do so again.

It's an artistic addiction.

And you should be trying to get an image in camera not after. I have no problem with post processing (within reason) but the arete of photography should be doing the most with what you have there and then.

So I feel...guilty about doing HDR. I won't stop doing it but I still feel queasy. So then there must be a caveat to relieve my conscience and let the two photographers in my soul live in peace.

Like I said, judicious is the key. If you want to get the light inside a building but also maintain the detail outside, like in this image, HDR is a good tool to use. But using HDR for poops and giggles to make up for what's not there in the first place is well wrong.

I'm not sure if that explains my quandary but there you go.

Tips for HDR:

• Keep a low ISO. ISO 100 is best, 200 is probably too high. The higher ISO's introduce graininess and this is exaggerated with HDR. Three images, three times the graininess.


• Keep your camera steady. Tripod is best but if you can take it quickly you'll probably be okay.


• Likewise, motion is not your friend. Someone moving, a tree branch swaying in the wind. Bad. They will ghost. Either wait till they leave the image, ask them to remain very still or deal with it.


• You can use more than three exposures, I've only done 3 so far.


• Your camera probably has an autobracketing feature. Look in your manual.