Book Preview—Wildflower Country
We have just posted a lively preview of our book, filled with focus stacking photography, HDRI and macro panoramas: Wildflower Country. Get thee hence and have a gander.
Macro Focus Stack of Black Bean flowers
We have sent off the makings of our next book, Rainforest Country, but photography continues unabated. Beautiful things are all around and we cannot stop ourselves. Black Beans are glorying. You just need to stop and look. These arabesques and bubblings make me think of textile design, and what Florence Broadhurst would have made of it. Or what I may well make of it.
Photography e-Books: Focus Stacking, HDRI, Macro Panoramas
Want to know how we do it?
Lemon-scented Darwinia
I think e-Books featuring the making of an image “from go to woah” would be valuable to a lot of people, with notes on focus stacking, HDR photography and decisions made along the way. For example, the making of a particular focus stacked picture of ours, and how it turned out looking like it did. Like looking over my shoulder as I make an image. We’d price them somewhere in the range of a photography magazine, and it would be a lot more instructive.
It’s certainly something I always wished to see from photographers I admire. If you think this is a good idea, or if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see, let us know in the comments.
For now, our new book Wildflower Country is the best example out there of the possibilities of focus stacking techniques put to their best use.
Death to Film Mentality in Digital Photography
Expose To The Right (ETR) and More
Some digital photographers pride themselves on “getting it right in-camera”: taking a photo that needs little development before printing or some other output. Some say it results in a more “real” photograph, usually accompanied by some bluster implying that any more work than that is introducing artificiality.
This is old film thinking. Digital is a different animal altogether, and it can record detail that a film camera can’t even hope to poke a stick at. So why in God’s name would you ask such a wonderful thing to behave like an old film camera? Unless you’re not interested in exploring new territory… the photographic revolution of digital…
IF you want to make the most of what quality your digital camera can capture, you need to understand how digital sensors behave in recording different tonal ranges, and how your camera’s histogram displays information about those tonal ranges. You’re going to have to get off your butt and do some learning and re-thinking of photography.
Undeveloped, unexciting RAW file
Shooting RAW with ultimate quality in mind makes for exposures that look unexciting in-camera. You have to then develop them yourself in a good RAW developer. It makes for more work, but you can extract magic. So if the ultimate quality is what you’re after, and you aren’t afraid of developing your own pictures, read on.
The developed RAW file
Shooting RAW optimally, you capture what looks in-camera to be a flat photograph. But there’s fantastic stuff hiding in there. You have work ahead. Like the latent image on film, digital RAWS have to be developed. That’s where your RAW developer comes in. There’s no magic or artificiality in this: you are extracting detail that your camera recorded.
The best and most concise explanations of the how and why of ETR can be found on The Luminous Landscape here and here, and John Paul Caponigro’s blog entries, “Digital Exposure” and “How The Camera Sees”.
Eric Rolls Prize for Nature Writing
Very exciting news—we have jointly won the inagural Eric Rolls Prize for Nature Writing!
A quote from the Watermark Literary Society: In announcing the winner of the inaugural Eric Rolls Prize for Natural History Writing, Ian Templeman, chair of the judging panel, was enthusiastic in his praise for the high quality of the entries, the variety of approach and the affectionate understanding for the diversity of Australian landscapes; desert drifts, dark forests, sweeping high country and coastal lake systems, explored by the writers.
The winning entry, Larry comes to Bulurru, a joint entry from Stanley and Kaisa Breeden, is a wonderful story of a love affair with a landscape and the plants and animals that share the territory. The narrator intersperses his text with the voice of his partner and her response to the forest’s speaking. Together the authors tell of the terrible invasion by Cyclone Larry. The cyclone was like a living thing ─ a huge dragon that roared and furied and screamed. Their story ends with the wonder of the forest’s resilience and the landscape’s slow renewal.
This biennial prize was established by the Watermark Literary Society to honour Eric Rolls who died in 2007. He was a Founder of the Society and remains Perpetual Patron. The judging panel included Nicholas Drayson and Watermark President and Eric Rolls’s wife, Elaine van Kempen, who commented:
Eric would have been delighted with the range of subject and genre, very pleased with the literary skill of the writers. He would have enjoyed their observations of weather, topography and landform as well as of the birds and wild creatures that inhabit those places…
As part of their Prize, Stanley and Kaisa Breeden will participate in the June 2011 Watermark Muster at Kendall, New South Wales.
You can read more about it here, too: Wildflower pair win nature writing prize.
Kings Park Wildflower Country Photography Exhibition
A large format outdoor exhibition of pictures from Wildflower Country is on in September at the Wildflower Festival in King’s Park, Perth. Get down there and have a look!Outdoor exhibition of Wildflower Country, Kings Park.
Wildflower Country Windows
The beautiful Boffins Bookshop in Perth created some wonderful window displays celebrating the launch of Wildflower Country!
We ran a competition whereby people purchasing Wildflower Country could enter in the draw to win a limited edition fine art print of our Red Lechenaultia. We are very proud of this print—the detail in that rich red is fantastic.
Window at Boffins Bookshop—featuring fine art print of Red Lechenaultia
Lou and winners Red Lechenaultia print
Boffins Bookshop owner Lou Pontarolo flanked by happy print winners! Lou is one half of the dynamic duo that is Boffins!
Kaisa’s Focus Stack Workflow, 2009
This is actually a reply to a friend that asked about how we achieve the clarity in our photographs and our basic workflow. I thought it would be useful to post it here.
I think the clarity we achieve is down to a combination of anal retentive attention to shooting technique, RAW processing and focus stacking (when appropriate).
I couldn’t resist getting some screen-grabs of my actual working files so I can show you what I’m talking about.
As an example, the Dampiera you mentioned is a focus stack of 7 exposures. I used to use PhotoAcute but now I use Helicon Focus ’cause it has improved a great deal. I did tinker with the super resolution in ‘Acute but I prefer to upsample at the end with Genuine Fractals.
First we view all our RAWs at 100% and mercilessly cull any that aren’t as sharp as we can get. Garbage in, garbage out.
Below is an undeveloped RAW file from the middle of the stack. 100% crop:
Undeveloped RAW file
One of the most vital steps in our work is the actual RAW capture. We did a lot of research into understanding how digital sensors behave, and how to capture the most information they can. In short, nothing clipped, and histogram to the right without blowing highlights. If things are going to clip no matter what, that’s when we shift into HDR shooting. We use a heavy tripod and
mirror lockup too. Always. No exceptions. Never handheld.
Then I process the RAW file. Again, making sure not to clip any information, correcting colour balance and optimizing all the detail hiding in there. RAW processors I use are Capture One Pro (by Phase One), Iridient Digital’s Raw Developer, and sometimes (not often though) Adobe’s Lightroom. Below is the single processed RAW file (now a tiff file):
Developed Tiff file
Then I stack the tiffs in Helicon Focus Pro or PhotoAcute (whichever program is best to date—I switch whenever something improves in either program).
I open the stacked file in Photoshop (I’ve turned off the adjustments so you can see what it’s like at this stage):
And here’s the finished file with the adjustments turned on:
Photoshop adjustments turned ON
You can see, there’s not much adjustment in Photoshop. I think the heavy work gets done when you develop the RAW. The sharpening I use is Nik Software’s Sharpener Pro. I adjust the contrast until it looks right. My eye improves all the time. I’m revisiting pictures I developed earlier in the year. But I wouldn’t be able to bring out that detail had the RAW file not been taken in the best possible way (ie. heavy tripod, mirror lockup, histogram not clipping, no wind!). These files have really good tonal and colour separation, which is something you don’t often see, and the focus stacking really gives it super clarity, hence it doesn’t look like what we are used to.
Then of course, you can find that something moved in the middle of the shoot and you have to go out another day and photograph again…
Then the banksia you admired is just a single shot.
So the clarity is a combination of all these things. Sorry it’s not a neat, simple answer.
Wildflower Country—Discovering Biodiversity in Australia’s Southwest
Our up-and-coming book entitled Wildflower Country—Discovering Biodiversity in Australia’s Southwest is well underway! All of the 166 pictures have been processed and are looking truly wonderful.
Wildflower Country is really a biodiversity story in wildflowers, and a grand opportunity to show off our hard-won skills in digital macro photography as well as the spectacular wave of flowering that occurs in Western Australia’s biodiversity hotspot. Most photographs are comprised of up to 20 exposures to achieve a wondrous depth of field and clarity. As far as we know, this is the first time anything quite like this has been done.
It’s been exciting work and we can’t wait to show it to everyone. Our book will be published in by Fremantle Press in Spring of 2010—synchronistically, the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity. All omens are good.
For more info about this book, please see our Wildflower Country page.
Photoshop CS4 Focus Stacking continued
PS CS4 and PhotoAcute blends compared again
Well, I’ve tried it again. I like that Photoshop doesn’t skew your stacks, but it does have problems with the masking. See the little out-of-focus spots on the beetle’s head and back here:
If I go in and edit the masks, (fiddly, but it’s an essential option to have) I then get this:
And that’s just the beetle. Same problems with the surrounding flowers in the pic. This beetle takes up only a tiny portion of the whole image.
Now I compare this with a blended stack made in PhotoAcute:
That’s the repaired PS image on the left. Photoshop doesn’t skew, but it doesn’t mask better than PhotoAcute. PhotoAcute blends better, but it doesn’t give me a layered, masked file to use in Photoshop.
My verdict? I wish Photoshop blended better. And PhotoAcute exported layered, masked files and didn’t skew things.
