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In the recent HDR Collaboration project, Inland Sailor, I mentioned that prior to snapping those brackets we had indulged in a great lobster dinner. This scene is from Thurston’s Lobster Pound in Bernard, Maine, where lobster boats unload their daily catch to be enjoyed at the waterfront restaurant. It’s a great place to kick back and enjoy the scenery while waiting for your crustaceans to steam.

To be honest, I’ve become a bit bored with standard processing techniques, even though there is always room for improvement (perhaps particularly so in my case.) I’m sure it’s just a temporary condition. However, in order to fully break away from my typical stuff, I decided to give the image more of a nostalgic, postcard feel using a few techniques that I don’t usually approach. Given that the composition of the original shot was cluttered and had a chaos of different colors, I like the way that this treatment works with the scene, and hope you like it, too.

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Starting with an tonemapped image from 7 exposures (+/-1EV, f/14, 75mm, ISO200), I applied a Shadowmap derived from Nik’s Silver Efex Pro, adjusted for some imperfections, then turned around in SEP to apply both aged toning and light vignette effects. Seeing that it was a bit too monochromatic, I allowed just a hint of color to sneak through in places. Various other more subtle plug-ins were used, including Topaz DeNoise and Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 for final dressing.

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Peter Limmer works away at the Limmer Boot Company in Intervale, New Hampshire.

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” is a well worn and time-honored phrase. I’m happy to say that in some cases, they do still make ‘em like they used to, and I’m out to find those artisans who continue to create high quality products and art, regardless of the cost. Come to think of it, if any product is made with skill and love, is it not art in its own right?

On a whim, I typed “cheap Chinese products” into Google and got 33,400,000 hits, most of them rather proudly touting their ‘cheapness.’  Perhaps not so curiously, this is 27 times fewer hits than if you enter “Justin Bieber cheap product.” I’m just sayin’.

We’ve all had the experience of buying something that breaks shortly after purchase, or worse, shortly after the warranty expires. Check the label, and you’ll see an obvious trend: It’s a piece of mass produced garbage made overseas that sacrifices quality for the corporate bottom line. I’d rather pay much more for something that was made with skill and love, by someone who pays attention to each item, than to live a life with garbage-to-be.

The following is proudly displayed on the Limmer Custom Boot website:
“Our boots are a sound investment whether stock or Custom as they offer extreme durability and reliability. It is not unusual to have boots in our repair department that are 50+ years old and still going strong. With over 30 years of experience in making boots, Peter S. Limmer, grandson of Peter Sr, will put the same painstaking care and effort in making you the best pair of boots you will ever wear.
“Simplicity, practicality and painstakingly wrought quality are fundamental to an understanding of the uncompromising standards that have gone into the creation of all Limmer boots and shoes.

“Born from a family tradition that was firmly established when it was carried across the Atlantic Ocean and launched in this country in 1925, Limmer represents a unique combination of old fashioned family pride and the humble dedication that comes from devotion to craft.
A name that says hard work and meticulous effort, Limmer is your guarantee of quality in every purchase.”

That’s music to my ears. So, here’s an image to celebrate the hard working and dedicated artisan who still makes something to be proud of. Part of a waning culture, Peter continues the family tradition of producing a quality product — “Art” by any other name.

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If one has never been to this place, one should visit, at least once.

Of all the places we travel in New England in the fall, Acadia National Park is one of our favorite stops. The conundrum is that we appreciate solitude and wilderness, but ANP in autumn is anything but empty. Over the years, though, we’ve found a rhythm to visiting, and know of a few small spots where you can spend the day with very few signs of human activity. Despite the popularity of ANP (one of the most heavily visited of the National Parks), the natural beauty is, I think, unparalleled, particularly on the east coast.

Feel the warmth of the sun by viewing larger. Just click on the image to open a new window.

This image proved fairly difficult to process, and I went through several iterations. Whenever I got the sun flare to show up as I wanted (i.e., not blown out), most of the HDR processing programs created serious halos, especially around the tree branches on the left. Trying to merge in original exposures or sky-enhanced layers proved to be too difficult because of the varying intensities of light in the sky. It turned out to be a tug-of-war between a good sun flare and excessive haloing, with neither really winning. In the end, although I merged the brackets (+/-2EV) with HDR Expose, Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro turned out the best preliminary result, although some fixing up had to be done: Denoising filters used to knock down HDR Efex Pro’s noise levels wound up overly softening a few elements. Once again, Topaz InFocus, my new favorite plug-in, came to the rescue to bring back the detail in the rocks. I also have to give a nod to the Content-Aware Fill feature of my new Photoshop CS5 for taking out some lens refraction spots… nothing could’ve been easier!

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And what would a seagull want for Thanksgiving dinner?

“Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads,
Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up yum

Ask a fish head, anything you want to,
They won’t answer, they can’t talk.”

There. If you’re at all familiar with this Barnes and Barnes song featured on Dr. Demento, then you’ll have this foolish and annoying ditty running through your head all day today… just like me. Grrrrr…

This poor soul was found as-is on a ramp piling at Fort Macon State Park in eastern North Carolina. With no tripod, I went for the hand-held brackets at +/-2EV.  Photomatix Pro 4, Nik filters, and Topaz InFocus made it worthwhile, and not just a little bit gross.

Click on the image to see it in all its disgusting glory.

Better get there before Charles DeGull gets all the good stuff…

Charles DeGull

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It was just another beautiful autumn day at Acadia National Park on the Maine coast.

This is The Bowl, a small tarn near the Beehives on the eastern side of Mt. Desert Island. It was such a nice day, we just had to pull up for a while. Couldn’t just sit there — right? — so I started clicking off some hand-held brackets. Because of the inevitable camera motion when shooting hand-held and the usual softness brought about by HDR processing, this image needed some help. It was shot at 11mm f/2.8 with a CPL filter, which didn’t help matters.

While I don’t often recite highly detailed recipes, I thought this was a good example of “rescuing” an image that would otherwise sit as nothing more than a pleasant memory in the library. Thanks to one of my new favorite toys, Topaz InFocus, it became a viable HDR image.

I started off with a three-bracket (+/-2EV) merge in HDR Expose, with basic brightness and highlight adjustments in Unified Color’s Photoshop plug-in, 32 Float. Returning the result as a layer, a lens correction was used to relieve some barrel distortion. I invoked the new Topaz InFocus filter, dialing in just the right radius settings for this subject (1.76 radius, 2.7 suppress) in order to provide sharp detail in the wood grain of the logs. There were artifacts left in the tree line and water surface, but these could be addressed later. Having recently received an upgrade to Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 Complete, I had access to the Pro Contrast filter, which can really help to pop an image and remove color cast. Topaz DeNoise was then used to remove the artifacts created by the InFocus pass (I’m trying to wean myself off of Imagenomic Noiseware Pro since they’re not currently 64-bit.) I had originally used one of my favorite tricks, Nik’s Darken/Lighten Center, to bring the eye toward the logs, but it created a hyper-polarized effect by darkening the sky, which just seemed unnaturally blue.

One thing that has become clear to me (pun not intended) is that Topaz InFocus tends to work best when you have discrete, straight edges in an image. The cityscape that Topaz provides on their website is a good example of this. For this landscape image of The Bowl, you wouldn’t want to preview the area of trees, as that area is soft and irregularly shaped. Bringing the InFocus preview window to the logs and foreground detail, however, provided the harder edges needed for the filter’s algorithms to work properly. Knowing this seems to be one key to having the filter work best for you.

You can see this image larger by clicking on it. A new window will open on the Waterscapes gallery.