Site moved!

Getting more and more into photoblogging, I decided to upgrade my experience, and am now self-hosting over at:

http://9littlebees.com

There are lots more posts and photos to look at, in a nice grid layout.

Sunny

First of what should be a number of posts with images I took on my recent trip to Germany. Enjoy!

And a couple more taken with my Tamron 35-80mm Macro lens.

And finally, the same image above, but in a subtle pseudo-HDR (made from a single RAW image using Photomatix):

Macro Beer

After thinking I bagged a bargain Pentax-M 50mm f/1.7 lens today on eBay, I realised that it was, in fact, the rather more ordinary f/2 version!

Anyway, I dug out some of my old kit and found some M42 mount extension tubes.  So I chucked them onto my existing 50mm f/1.4 lens and took a series of 3 images of a bottle of Becks beer before cracking it open and enjoying it in front of the Ghana vs. Uruguay World Cup football game.  Here’s the result:

So how did I do it?  Well, a tripod is a must.  I took three RAW images autobracketed at plus and minus 2 stops.  I was forced to go up to f/4, otherwise the depth-of-field was too narrow.  I then tweaked and desaturated each image in Photoshop before merging them in Photomatix.  The resulting image needed some pretty considerable burning in Photoshop to get rid of some distracting background out-of-focus patches.  Above is the result. 

RAW vs JPG Comparison

I’ve always read online and in magazines about the strengths of shooting in RAW mode.  However, I’ve never seen a noticeable increase in quality when I had done it in the past, and the extra time it takes to process them didn’t seem worth the effort.  Now that I have started dabbling a bit more with HDR, I thought I’d do a direct comparison…  I shot in RAW+ mode on my Pentax K10d, which basically means that each image taken stores both a RAW (DNG) and JPG.  I shot with my Sigma 15mm fisheye on a tripod using a remote and used the exact same tonemapping (in Photomatix) and layers (in Photoshop CS3) on both composite images.  Here are the results…

Above is the RAW HDR image of the pepper, below is the JPG.  Clicking on them will take you to the full-size image for each.

OK, so what’s the verdict?  A 100% crop of the above images shows us that the RAW image is noticeably better at handling contrast and colours, and the image is also sharper.  Look at how the small droplets of water are handled at the bottom of the crop – completely blown out on the JPG!

Again, we have the RAW image above and the JPG below.