Morton Arboretum

Been a while since my last post, hasn't been anything too exciting of late. Spent the week between Christmas and New Year's in Chicago. Christmas day spent some time visiting family in the western suburbs. Was right near Morton Arboretum in Lisle, some place I've always wanted to visit but never had the opportunity to. It happened that the grounds were free for the holiday.


Shot a ton of pictures in 90 minutes, had a couple keepers of snow covered trees that were interesting. But for an arboretum it was very random. A lot of the arboretums I've been to have very planned out, orderly designs, this seemed more natural. I was looking for those tree lined roads, trees standing alone in empty fields. Maybe it was something about the winter weather that encouraged me to look for that stuff, don't know; the first few things I shot didn't overwhelm me.

That's why I was happy when I found this stand of spruce trees. Something about spruce trees, standing very straight and tall; I find them really interesting to shoot. There are so many ways to approach them.

One day I took a little side trip to Lake Catherine, which is in Palos Heights, IL. It's a man made nature preserve and education center. A man made waterfall that feeds into a small lake. It's a nice area to take a short walk, see some ducks and geese.

 

Nothing too out of the box, just a nice way to spend the holidays taking pictures and being creative. 

Back in a few days with more from Chicago.

All Images copyrighted by Erik Markov

Turbines seem to be the next big thing in central Indiana. I first noticed some turbines already erected along I-65 north of Lafayette in July, with more structures being worked on. Every time I would drive back and forth to Chicago I would watch the progress as another few turbines were set up. And the scale of these are amazing.

It's a little too far out of the Kokomo Tribune's coverage area for a local story so I knew I wouldn't be going over to shoot them, but whenever I'd look at them while on the interstate I would think how I might shoot the assignment if I had it.

I think all photographers are like that to some extent. Whether it's watching a football game on television or being at some event in your off time, those creative thoughts are always flowing. Would I choose this angle or that, how I would light that subject etc.

One of the turbines emerges from the fog above

an Indiana cornfield.
Image copyright Erik Markov 2009

Something about the turbines just fascinates me. I don't know if it's the size, the complexity or it's just something new and unique.

I had to go up to NW Indiana for the day recently. It's an errand I could have and should have taken care of when I was there several weeks ago but I ended up putting it off. Maybe it's fortuitous that I procrastinated. I left Kokomo about 6 am and as it turns out it was extremely foggy that morning. It can get pretty foggy in central Indiana occasionally, but it usually burns off fairly early. That morning was a little different, as the fog was still hanging around at 7 am when I got to Lafayette where I was getting on the interstate.

At some point I figured I would go over to the area where the turbines are to get some photos, mainly just because of how unique they seem, particularly for Indiana. I just didn't plan for it to be that morning.

The fog was sticking around as I got to the area where the turbines are located near I-65, so of course I stopped to take a look. The sun was just coming up, making some cool colors as it reflected off the fog. One of the unusual things I had never seen was that there seemed to be almost two layers of fog. There was a layer closer to the ground, then a break, then more fog. As in the photo above, it almost made it appear as though the turbines were just magically appearing in the area.

A turbine rising above grain silos.
Image copyright Erik Markov 2009

One of the things I found interesting is the old and new competing, like in the photo above of silos being dwarfed by a turbine.

After I did my errands up north, I headed back to Kokomo. As I got farther south, some nice puffy cumulus clouds started to dot the sky, making for interesting background scenery.

Classic Indiana scene: Cornfields on either side of
a gravel road that disappears in the distance.

Image copyright Erik Markov 2009

Turbines sprouting up from cornfields. Who woulda thunk?

A turbine far in the distance framed by an old

barn in the middle of a soybean field.
Image copyright Erik Markov 2009

From what I've found on the internet, there are supposedly hundreds of more turbines that will be sprouting around central Indiana. It should be interesting to see what that means for Indiana's future development.


The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
Comments containing off-color or hurtful language may be removed.

HDR = WOW

I had the day off so I went to Indianapolis today. Had to pick up my credentials for the "Greatest Spectacle in Racing." (Indy 500 of course) Always a good day when it's time to get those. After that I went over to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to take some pictures.

The museum has a really great garden, lots of different flowers depending on the time of year, some cool architecture. Just a really nice place to spend an afternoon on a nice warm spring day.

Back in March I picked up a Nikon D700 to replace my D70. The D70 still works great, but after five years it just seemed time to replace it with something that had a little more punch. One of the main things I wanted as the ability to use a remote switch, something the D70 doesn't allow. Plus the full 35mm frame of the D700 means all those wide angles are, well... wide again. And the D70 I will keep around, plan on sending that out to be converted to an infrared camera.

I've done a little shooting with the new body since I got it in March, but nothing too exciting. Figured the colors of the garden would make for some fun stuff. Something else I've wanted to get into recently is HDR photography, High Dynamic Range. I've seen some other people online working with it and it seemed like fun. The first spot I tried was a waterfall that runs through the gardens. Plenty of shadows, color and even some motion from the water.

Color me impressed.

One the left is one image from the bracketed exposure,
probably what would be a decent exposure without HDR.
On the left is the HDR image.

Image copyright Erik Markov 2009

To get an idea of the setting of this photo, the water fall runs from the west down the hill to the east, and it's 1:30pm when I took the bracketed series of images.

For the HDR image I took 7 bracketed images from 1/60 to 1/15 of a second at f16. In the image you can see a little bit of ghosting in the trees because it was so windy. I was impressed though with how little ghosting there was in the water, I think it still looks fairly natural and I was a little concerned about that.

Update- Forgot to add the file size of the finished photo. 33mb, and the 7 files I used for the image in Photomatix were 7-9mb each. That was full res on the camera with fine compression. I just got a new desktop pc with 2.4ghx Intel quad core chip running 3gb of RAM which I used to process the images and I didn't notice any real slow down. Took maybe 20 seconds or so for Photomatix to compile the images into one. I say this only in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not positive how the software might work on a computer with a slower processor or less RAM. There is a FAQ on HDRsoft's site that might be able to answer some of these questions.

I put both images side by side so that you can see how much I lost with the processed HDR image. There was a small band I cropped off. This occurs because the HDR software has to line up the image as best as possible for it look correct. And there are a ton of settings in the software I am using, Photomatix by HDRsoft. Given more time to play around with it, I might be able to adjust it to eliminate that band. Just to be on the safe side I would watch what was on the edges of my frame to make sure I wouldn't lose anything important. Shooting a little loose is a good rule of thumb.

An HDR image with 9 exposures.
Image copyright Erik Markov 2009

I've seen some HDR images that look really good, so good that you can't even tell sometimes it's an HDR image. I think that's what to strive for, if you can get it so that it looks as though the image is lit by some sort of magic light, you've done a good job. And I've seen some images that are obviously HDR because they have been so overworked.

The above image with the 9 exposures skirts the edge of being overworked I think. Particularly in the grass on the left side of the waterfall. Also on the right side, the rock wall at the bottom of the falls, there is a highlight on the top of the rock that, at least to me, seems to have too much detail in it. In the series of 7 exposures, the highlight gets a little blown out which I think makes the image look a little more natural.

I've only played around with it a little thus far, but it's enjoyable process. it takes some playing around to learn what works and what doesn't. I shot some flowers that didn't work well as HDR images. The day was extremely windy and a small object like the flowers were getting sent every which way, causing a lot of ghosting in the HDR image.

To do an HDR image that will turn out well without wasting your time, a tripod is a near necessity. At the very least, a sturdy place, such as a rock to rest your camera on. A remote trigger is also helpful, keeps you from disrupting the frame. Any slight movement of the camera is going to result in an image that could be less than what you hoped for. And HDR software to process the image. Photoshop includes an HDR processor in its latest version and there are several companies that make software.

The great thing with Photomatix is you can download it and try it out to see if you like it before paying for it. It runs $99 so it's not exactly cheap, but considering how powerful of a program it is, seems pretty reasonable to me. As you can see from my images I haven't purchased it yet because i still have the watermarking on them, but I plan to rectify that soon.

This is just a guess on my part, but I think as I play around with it, it will be a long learning process finding out what works for a good HDR image and what doesn't. Shooting the image is the easy part, just bracket your exposures and you're good to go. It's being able to see before shooting the images what is going to work well that is the difficult part. Don't want to waste time shooting several series of images, only to process it later and find out it looks like crap for whatever reason.

The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Comments containing off-color or hateful language may be removed.