I’ve decided to have a bit of a contest to see who can be the first to post the name of this waterfall (I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t because I can’t remember what it’s called). It was an incredible site. The cliffs are arranged in a horseshoe shape and the water tumbles off in this semicircular surrounding way.
I would normally try to avoid posting two photos from Iceland in a row, but I’ve tried processing this photo more times than I can remember. It was pretty difficult, mainly because it was shot at midday facing directly into the sun. This is Godafoss, the incredible waterfall in Northern Iceland. On the other side of the river the landscape was swarmed by tour buses, but on this side, there was hardly anyone about. When I clambered my way down the cliffs to this little beach I was alone. Until my travel buddy came careening down the steep path to join me. We spent a while sat here, watching the people on the other side come for a quick look then head back to their buses.
I could have cropped out the guy standing to the left of the falls, but I decided I liked having him there. It helps to put the scale of the falls in perspective.
Here’s another shot of Gullfoss, right on the edge where the water tumbles down into a giant chasm. I saw a picture from a similar view to this one today, but in winter. It looked incredible. I think I’ll have to brave the cold to experience Iceland in winter, with the aurora borealis and the ice caves accessible!
We had a jeep that could take us to explore this trail that we found near the Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon. What an adventure this trail could have been. Unfortunately, it was behind a locked gate so I had to be content with snapping a shot of the flowers and moving on. We found a dirt track later where we could drive right through the fields. Half way down the road we stopped and took photos. Then, climbed up on top of our jeep, cuddled up and watched the clouds roll by… until another jeep rolled past and looked at us funny.
Tonight’s photo is a bit of an experiment, with a questionable level of success, and I’m going to tell you how I produced my first focus stacked HDR landscape image. I had an image in mind of the grapes hanging on their vines in front of the dome off in the distance. This required some careful lining up as in order to make the dome large enough in the frame I had to use my 300mm lens and stand a fair distance from the grapes. I also had the problem that there was a bit of breeze and the leaves were moving about. As a result I needed a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the leaves motion. However, I wanted to take bracketed exposures to produce an HDR image. As the HDR process creates a lot of noise in the image I was reluctant to increase my ISO to get the shutter speed up. This meant I had to increase my aperture to the point where I couldn’t get the depth of field I needed to keep the grapes and the dome in focus.
I had the term “focus stacking” in my mind. I wasn’t sure where I’d heard it but assumed it was some method for combining a number of images focused at different points into one fully focused image. With this in mind I set about taking bracketed images adjusting the focus from the front of the image all the way through to the back. It resulted in me taking the following 21 images (My gallery import isn’t working, you can see them here until I figure it out):
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Naturally, this was a daunting task. I did some reading on how to focus stack and discovered it was relatively easy. You simply upload the images to Photoshop and click on the following:
Then, like magic you have a tack sharp image from front to back. Well, at least that’s what the articles I read led me to believe. I set about to try this, with my regularly exposed images. After clicking Auto-Blend Layers Photoshop whirred away and did come out with a pretty magical result. I have no idea how it does it. It was good but it wasn’t perfect.
I had a number of areas that were still blurry and assumed I must have missed focusing on certain areas. I wasn’t sure how I could have done this as I adjusted the focus by such small increments. That was a few months ago and I had actually given up on this image. Tonight, I asked my travel partner what she thought I should work up tonight. I do that when I need some inspiration. Naturally, she always picks one of the places she visited with me. Tonight she said Italy. I’ve actually processed all of the Italy photos I expected to process, but then I remembered this one and decided to try again.
I did the s
ame thing I did last time, started by attempting to focus stack the regularly exposed images. I got the same result, blurry around the edges and with a few areas of the photo out of focus. Then I had an epiphany. I use Photomatix to produce HDR images, but I don’t trust the program to get it right, I go in and fix problem areas. I could do the same with this focus stacking stuff.
So, after combining the seven images that would become my one regularly exposed image I layered the result on top of the original 7 images and searched for in focus areas to replace the out of focus portions of the image. Once I found them, I masked through to the original photo to sharpen up the blurry areas. This worked pretty well, though I did still have some areas that I just failed to focus on – I did say it was an experiment, the results aren’t perfect.
Once I got this technique down I decided that I could do the same with the 7 underexposed and 7 overexposed images to produce the three different exposures I needed to create my HDR image. This went well and I was left with three images bracketed from -2 to +2. Once I had these three images I was able to process them in Photomatix and Photoshop as usual.
Read about how I do that in my Free HDR Tutorial.
I don’t think that I can really call this photo a success except for the fact that Iv’e got a few thoughts to take away from it. The biggest issue I had was the movement of the leaves. As you can see in the result, the areas that are still blurred are surrounding the leaves. This is due to the fact that in the photo where those areas were in focus, the leaves were blocking the view. I cuold have taken a similar approach to removing people from Charles Bridge and shot multiple shots at teh same exposures and focus. This would have increased my chances of catching all the areas of the final image in focus.
Another option would have been to make note of the spot and wait for a time when it was less windy. However, when travelling with limited time this could likely result in just giving up.
I also wish I had shot this at a higher ISO, to see if I could control the noise in post-processing. As it turns out, carrying out so many steps has resulted in a lot of noise in the final image anyway. I could have bracketed the images and, rather than using Photomatix to combine them simply masked the correctly exposed dome onto the correctly exposed vines.
That being said, I’ve enjoyed the process and think I’ll keep exploring the possiblities available with focus stacking. I do really like watching the magic of Photoshop as it combines the variously focused images into one.
This church in Hof was a happy find. I’d wanted to photograph turf roofed buildings the whole time I was there. We were on our way back to the Jockulsarlon Glacier lagoon, on the same day that we had to make it all the way to Reykjavik. We were pressed for time. But, before we left Hof, the tiny little town we’d spent the night in, we had to stop to photograph this church. I’ve posted other shots of the exterior and interior before.
Here is another shot from my hour spent on the boat dock at the Tampa Bay Grand Hyatt. For this shot I decided to drop the camera down low and extend the docks reach for the horizon. It’s interesting to compare this photo to the other two I’ve already released:
These photos were all taken within about a half hour as the sun was rising. It goes to show just how much the light conditions change as the sun rises, and how hectic it can be taking advantage of the changes. It can also make it difficult to decide when the right time to take the shot is! I’ve had a number of occasions, for example when I was shooting Horseshoe Bay, where I think I’ve taken all the pictures I want and then suddenly something happens that offers a better photo to send me running around taking them all again.
Here’s another shot of the Westfjords under the midnight sun in June 2012. One day, I’ll make it back there. It’s a truly incredible country.
Coordinating dinner and taking photos is often a pretty tricky task as dinner time so often coincides with the two hours either side of sunset. In this case, it wasn’t such a problem. If you look closely at the pizzeria to the right you can see my family and English relatives at the large table under the left awning.
Acqui Terme is named for this spring in a very interesting, pretty square. When I got there it was totally overcast, except for a small patch of blue sky a long way away. I decided to wait for it.
Time ticked away and I was thinking I may have to pack it in to go to dinner. Fortunately, everyone decided to eat in the pizzeria in the same square. I stayed with my camera, waiting for the blue sky to appear where I wanted it. I was very hungry and wanted to order but didn’t want to pack up my camera to do it. Just as I was about to give in to the hunger, and pack up, my very conscientious travel partner appeared with menu in hand. I ordered a pizza diavola and continued waiting. Once my window of blue sky arrived I moved quickly through three points I’d previously decided to take photos from. This was the last of them.
I arrived at the table just as my beer did… perfect!
I liked this bridge a lot. So much so that when I saw it from the road I decided I had to photograph it, despite the fact that we had to continue on the road about a quarter-mile more before we could pull in. I began walking back to the bridge, thinking my travel partner would follow. Unfortunately, she didn’t. She took off in the other direction. Come to think of it I still don’t know what she’d spotted there.
The problem was that I’d taken the car keys with me. After setting up to take today’s photo I broke down my gear and debated whether to cross the bridge or not. In the end I did, very gingerly. I took two more pictures there before returning and making the walk back to the car, interrupted by a photo of a farm. When I returned I found my travel buddy huddled next to the car, shivering. I felt pretty bad. Amazingly, she didn’t complain, but from that point on she was in charge of the car key every time we got out. This typically resulted in me returning to the car to find it heated to the temperature of the surface of the sun.
