Share this:

~

Nothing straight, here…

The St. Georg Protestant Church is located in the historic city center of Hattingen, Germany. Of all buildings in Hattingen, it is surely the one most noticed from afar.

The church was built in 1200 from local Ruhr sandstone. Remains of a Roman pillar base and two column bases from the period after 820 were discovered in 1972 during excavations inside the church.

Since the building anchors the town center, there are many good approaches for a photo, but I think this angle shows it best. The rough cobblestone street and the crooked medieval buildings give a sense of disarray to the scene, so although I straightened up a few lines here and there, it is difficult to find a good point of reference for vertical and horizontal lines. I thought it was better to have a sense of crazy angles in the scene.

Lest you think I went too far with Photoshop’s puppet warp feature, the church’s steeple is truly tilted to one side. Evidently this is one of about 90 listed (and listing) church steeples with this attribute. Some theories suggest that it was built this way deliberately, so that if a storm took down the steeple, it wouldn’t fall on the nave. Others suggest that it’s due to the revenge of an underpaid carpenter. The way I see it, if you put all that slate on a skinny little structure, it’s going to start leaning at some point.

500px | Google+ | Twitter | Purchase a Print

Share this:

~

Just another sunset from our campsite in Maine, autumn of 2012.

I understand that we should ‘shoot where we live’ – and there are plenty of opportunities to do so – but the Great State of Maine, with its natural beauty, presents a target-rich environment for beautiful shots. Sometimes, you don’t even have to wander out of your campsite, as was the case here. We were just sittin’ around chilling as the sun went down, and the sky lit up as you see here. While snapping the shutter furiously, I had to remind myself to soak it in.

500px | Google+ | Twitter | Purchase a Print

Merged in Photomatix Pro to 32-bit TIFF, pre-processed without tonemapping in ACR, finished in Photoshop CS6 with Nik Color Efex Pro filters.

Share this:

~

…Annnnd, we’re back!

About a month ago, I posted the previous image Into The Dark, mentioning how we unplug from all the conveniences and trappings of modern culture. When we do this, we like to travel around the less visited spots in New England, sleeping in a tent, soaking in the scenery from some of our favorite places.

About the second week in, we traveled up to far northern Maine, just short of the Canadian border, to Flagstaff Lake, near the Bigelow mountain range. This is the view from our campsite. If it looks a bit familiar, it’s the same location where I shot Flagstaff Lake Sunrise in 2009.

When you have a great scene in front of you, it’s tempting to try to recreate a previous success. I fought the urge to do just that, trying my best to come up with new compositions and angles. Besides, the conditions never seem to cooperate for a repeat performance, so I cleared any previously held notions and just regarded the new view, the clouds draping the mountains, and yet another spectacular sunrise event.

500px | Google+ | Follow on Twitter | Galleries & Prints

Share this:

~

Happy belated New Year!

I’m surprised. I haven’t posted anything since December 20th, 2011. It feels good to be pinning one up again.

Part of the reason for my absence from Online World is that in late December we started a decorative painting (faux painting) contract at a house across the river. The client had stringent deadlines that caused us to work pretty much constantly through the holidays. We had only enough spare time to do the Christmas and New Year stuff.

We’ll try not to do that again…

One afternoon while at the client’s house, there were epic cloud formations masking the setting sun. Good thing I had my shooter with me. The scene was made even better when a large pod of dolphins swam right by the house.

That might not be considered unusual, except that this is the Neuse River, which, though technically freshwater in New Bern, is more brackish. (I haven’t personally checked the taste, as the Neuse made the list of top-10 endangered rivers for several years in a row.) On a few occasions you can find dolphins swimming this far upriver, even though the closest access to ocean water is at least 40 miles away.

I take the dolphin as a good sign that the health of the river is improving.

500px | Google+ | Follow on Twitter | Galleries & Prints

Share this:

~

This past autumn while in Maine, we had a nice visit at Eliot Coleman’s Four Season farm (lettuce in Maine, in January!) One of the assistants there suggested that for a nice lunch, we should drive just down the road to Orr Cove. Best tip we had on the entire trip!

We pulled off to the side of the one-lane road, making sandwiches and firing off some sun flare brackets, after which, we drove about 50′ to The Good Life Center, the place where we found the Alien Landing.

~

This image was particularly tough to process, which is why I didn’t offer it up for the recent HDR Collaboration, choosing Inland Sailor instead. The sun flare caused a great deal of spotting and CA, and the dust on the sensor didn’t help much, either. Eleven exposures, f/22, 17mm.

500px | Google+ | Follow on Twitter | Galleries | Facebook

Share this:

~

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The way I see it, it has been an incredible year. Since this time last year, I’ve been fortunate enough to continue doing what I love, part of which is sharing the results with all of you. The friends I’ve met and the camaraderie we’ve shared is truly something special, so thank you for following along and hooking up with me, as I have in turn been watching what you create.

This has also been a year of extraordinary change, both in the world and in our perspectives on what we’re doing here. Having been around for better than a half century now, I can’t recall a period of such transformation, save perhaps for the late ’60s. Some of the changes may be unsettling for some, but I can’t help but think that it will result in something better for all of us. At the very least, things aren’t boring and certain, which suits me.

There is currently – and always will be – suffering in the world, and on this Thanksgiving I think of all the people who are actively transforming (or even maintaining!) the status quo at their own peril, hoping for a better, freer, and safer place to be. Not all of us will agree with their messages or methods, either side, but their dedication should never be challenged, nor should their perspective be marginalized. As always, no one perspective is the single ‘right’ way, but neither can anyone ever be 100% wrong. There is something important to all points of view; now it’s a matter of figuring out how they – and we – will fit together.

We’re living in a time of unprecedented adventure. Will we make it? Sometimes it seems like a horse race, but we can hold out Hope, which is really all we can hope to have anyway. In the meantime, as photographers and creatives, we can satisfy ourselves by finding the beautiful things in the world and bringing them home to share with others. In a rather big way, that’s what gives me Hope.

So, thanks for what you do… you enrich the lives of others with your creativity and thoughtfulness.

Rob

~

The image was taken at Cobscook Bay State Park in northern coastal Maine. Although it’s an HDR taken from eleven exposures, it would look much the same if I used the single middle exposure… the sunrise really was that spectacular. 

 
500px | Google+ | Follow on Twitter | Galleries | Facebook

Share this:

Storm at the Stage – @ Rob Hanson Photography

~

One of our favorite places to spend our vacation time is in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We drop our tent in a campground located a bit to the right of this frame, and spend as much time as possible hiking the hills.

The weather doesn’t always cooperate.

I know that there’s merit in climbing a mountain in almost any weather, but as the years go by I see less and less sense in spending the day going up, only to not see a thing. I’ll leave that for the younger ones…

When the weather turns foul – as it frequently does in the mountains in autumn – we retreat to a certain spot along the road, where we can sit in the warm truck, watching the clouds rolling over the peaks, while plotting the next day’s adventures… weather permitting.

500px | Google+ | Follow on Twitter | Galleries | Facebook

Initially, I wasn’t sure what to do with this image as there was no distinct subject in the full frame that came out of the camera. I found that cropping it as a 2:1 panoramic did the trick. HDR from seven exposures +/-1EV, HDR Express, 32 Float, and Photomatix for the base, Nik and OnOne for the embellishments in Photoshop.

Share this:

~
“Speak softly, but carry a big stick. You will go far.”

It’s a phrase coined by Theodore Roosevelt, although it is possibly a proverb from South Africa. Roosevelt described his style of foreign policy as “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis.”

~

I’ve always found portrait orientation to be difficult. Our monitors all tend to be wide-screen, and that makes sense, as that’s how our eyes are conditioned to view the world. I’ve never heard of a “tall screen” monitor, after all. Perhaps that’s why scroll bars were invented. [Correction: Dave Wilson tells me that he has a portrait-orientation monitor.]

For a larger view (and more scrolling), visit this image in a new window on the Waterscapes gallery. Just click the image.

HDR from five exposures at 1EV steps. Photomatix Pro 4, Shadowmapping, and NIK Color Efex Pro filters.

As always, thanks for looking, and for your kind comments.

Share this:

Click on the image above to see it larger in a new window on my Waterscapes Gallery.

~
When on an extended camping trip, one’s next move is usually determined by the weather. In this case in northern Maine, with no internet access or NOAA weather radio reception, we weren’t sure whether or not to stay another day.

The sunset told us to stick around a while… which we did.

This was taken during a superior sunset from Dunn Point at Lily Bay State Park, on Moosehead Lake, northern Maine. During that time, we were visited by ducks, beavers, loons, and one very curious red fox.

~

For this image, I combined outputs from two different HDR processing programs, HDR Efex Pro from NIK Software, and Photomatix Pro 4. HDR Efex Pro did some wonderful things for the water and mountains, but Photomatix Pro brought out the drama in the sky.  Using these two outputs, along with the shadowmapping process (see tutorial section), I created a decent composite. A few adjustments were made to desat the sky, smooth out the water a bit, and Topaz Detail and Topaz Adjust were used to bring out some of the finely structured, subtle details here and there.

Share this:

[A larger version of this image can be seen on my gallery at SmugMug,  here (Opens in a new tab/window)]

This image represents to me, 1) a continuation of a series of shots taken on one spectacularly cold Maine morning, and 2) a chance for further experimentation with blending output from two different HDR programs.

As for the first point, I had to drag myself out of a very warm, very comfortable, downy sleeping bag to shoot the sunrise.  Strong coffee is my friend.

To the second point…

This was taken from a set of three brackets (ISO 200, f/2.8, +/- 2 EV.)  I ran the set through Photomatix Pro 3 and created several different tonemap files.  One of the tonemaps was a Shadowmap for later use, one a Vivid (saturated) version and one a “nice” version (“nice” because I just thought it looked nice.) After producing those tonemaps, I also fed the brackets into HDR Expose, adjusting settings until it looked just right.

The output from HDR Expose was quite good on its own, but I thought it could use an extra touch, so I went to the Photomatix output to take a look. As it sometimes turns out, while the output from HDR Expose was solid, clear, and ‘true-to-life’, Photomatix output often has more punch and detail due to the available microcontrast settings.  There’s just something about the tonemapping process that jazzes up certain features.

Using the Shadowmapping technique, I layered the Shadowmap on the Vivid layer, toned down the saturation, and then blended it with the ‘nice’ tonemap. The result brought some subtle but necessary detail to the distant woods and some of the clouds.

When all of that looked good, I flattened the layers and copied the result on top of the HDR Expose version. Setting the opacity of the Shadowmap down to about 25-30% in Normal mode gave me a good result… other blending modes were too dark. The result was a highly realistic image — thanks to HDR Expose — with subtle but important details, color, and microcontrast from the Photomatix layer.

From there, the image took a trip into Topaz Adjust 4 for further punch-up. Using the NIK Color Efex Pro Darken/Lighten Center filter, I added a subtle dark vignette around the edges. Toward the end, I wasn’t delighted with the darkness of the distant shoreline, so I added an Exposure layer and masked it in to bring up the trees just a bit.

Surely, there are other ways to do this sort of processing, and some of them are bound to be easier paths to the same end. But each element seems to bring something to the final version, and playing around with different combinations can be both rewarding and frustrating.  Sometimes I do wonder if I should have just popped a single 0EV file into Topaz to see what would have happened.  Maybe tomorrow morning… over a cup of coffee.