Budweiser Clydesdales Horses

I happened upon the Budweiser Clydesdale Horses show at a local strip mall in June 2009. Unfortunately the show had just ended, but I was able to get a few pictures as the crew was packing up. As luck would have it I had my Nikon D90 with me and got some very nice shots. Magnificent animals and a beautiful day. You can see the photo gallery by following this link to my photo website.

There are 20 pictures from the show that day at my photo website. Follow the link to see all of them. Leave a comment if you like the photographs or share the post on your favorite social site.

[mapsmarker marker="33"]

Lunch at Gervasi Vineyard and the Sony DSC-H70

In the summer when the weather is nice my wife and I like to go to a restaurant and sit outside for lunch or dinner and enjoy our meal. Unfortunately that typically means looking out over a parking lot as cars drive by. Not so at our local winery, Gervasi Vineyard. For the past 2 years we have been able to relax near the lake, enjoy our meal and never once see a car drive by.  It also gives me an opportunity to take a few pictures and post them to my photo site, and send some to Facebook from my iPhone (hey, this site is about photography). I recently bought my wife a Sony DSC-H70 camera and decided to give it a try after lunch. It replaced her Kodak Z1485IS and I wanted to see what it could do. Right off the bat I noticed that the colors of the Sony seemed to be a little more true to life and the amount of color noise in the pictures was significantly less. Of course low light pictures and small cameras just don't get along so don't expect miracles. I also liked that the LCD was bright and easier to see than the LCD on the Kodak. I am not going to bother with all of the camera specs, you can find that elsewhere on the net.

So, let's take a look at a few pictures from the Sony DSC-H70 all shot in the 16:9 aspect ratio.

The picture above was taken at ISO 80, focal length 4.25mm, f/8 at 1/200 second. Notice the distortion on the 2 structures at the bottom of the picture. Both structures are leaning toward the center of the picture.

The picture above was taken at ISO 80, focal length 4.25mm, f/8 at 1/125 second.

 The camera also has built in skin smoothing which I was curious to try. I have to say that it can do a very good job with excellent results on both light and dark skin. However, like most technologies randomly applied, it can also give some very plastic looking results. Our friend took this picture of my wife and I, it is a little soft on focus, but skin smoothing has been applied to both of us by the camera. Judge for yourself if you like it.

The picture above was taken at ISO 80, focal length 10.09mm, f/4.5 at 1/60 second with flash. I adjusted the contrast of the picture, because it was a little washed out from the flash.

The camera also has a panorama feature that I tried out. You push the shutter button once, and then you move the camera from left to right and the H70 does the rest. To use it properly you have to get the timing down a bit, as to how fast you move the camera from left to right. My first couple of pics ended before the far most right pictures were captured. For those pictures I just cropped out the blank area on the right and made a smaller panorama.

Here is an example of a full panorama picture the Sony DSC-H70 can capture.

The picture above was taken at ISO 250, focal length 4.25mm, f/8 at 1/160 second.

Overall I like the camera, but I always end up comparing everything to my Nikon D90, and so I am always hoping for more in a small camera. Lets hope all manufactures stop with the megapixels and concentrate on better lenses!

[mapsmarker marker="12"]

Brunswick Ohio 2011

I went to the Brunswick Family Restaurant Car Show in Brunswick, Ohio this past Saturday. There were lots of cars and motorcycles to admire. Took a few pictures and then kicked back and enjoyed a dog and coke. Well, by a few I mean 387 pictures. I am still working on the photo gallery posting a few pictures a day. Check out my photo site for other photo galleries from past Brunswick shows in 2010 and 2004. [mapsmarker marker="11"]

ScanCafe: Give it a try!

I have done a lot of picture scanning over the years and for the most part I am happy with what I have done. I do make a few adjustments while scanning, trying to get a better scan, but that doesn't make me an expert. Most of the pictures I have scanned were from the 1930's through the 1960's. They were are all in family albums, and most were black and white. Scanning them required taking the albums apart. However, when it comes to my 35mm pictures I have the negatives and slides available, which make for better results. Fantastic, except for the fact that this can take a lot of time and money to get a decent result. After scanning you will probably still want to process them through your favorite editing application, but that is optional of course. I prefer Lightroom and Photoshop. Then key wording, captions and posting to my website are the final steps. So the time invested adds up very quickly. Working with the RAW,  jpg or tiff pictures for publication to my site is where I want to invest my time. If I could find someone that did a decent job scanning my pictures and then I worked with them after that point, that would be perfect for me.

Based on the above a friend and I decided to send some slides to ScanCafe and see what they could do.  I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about shipping costs or wait time. That is posted on their site and has been commented on by a few people. I read all of the ScanCafe site very carefully and read a couple of reviews. I was not surprised or shocked by anything that occurred, and I didn't go bouncing off the walls with wild speculation waiting on the delivery of my photos and DVD. The slides and a few prints were processed and returned in less than 2 months. In total we sent just under 600 slides and prints. It was their $130 plus S&H box that they provided to ship everything in. We bundled the slides into groups of 50 and numbered them. When they were returned they were still  in the bundles of 50 that we had sent, and all fit onto a single DVD. Each numbered bundle was on the DVD under a directory with the same bundle number. That made it very easy to identify each bundle and what it contained. I did not see anything that was damaged and the scans were well done. The 4x6 paper prints looked about what I typically can achieve and unless I had a lot of prints with no negatives, I wouldn't have any prints scanned. A few slides had some scratches and dust that had not been removed, but most were in good enough shape that not much repair work was required in my editing apps.

Some people will probably be concerned about their photos, negatives and/or slides being sent to India, but regardless of where your photos are sent, there is always a chance of them being lost or destroyed. Even if they never leave your house there is a chance of them being lost forever. A real world example dates back to the 70's when my friend worked for a well known department store. A courier would drive to each store and pickup the film that had been dropped off for processing. One day the courier accidentally left a bag of film in a restaurant and it was mistaken for a bag of trash and was thrown into a dumpster. It was never recovered. My friend was instructed to tell the customers that their film and the courier had been killed in a fiery car crash to keep their customers from pursuing the matter further. It actually worked. So there are no guarantees with anything you do.

Seeing is believing and so here are some examples of slide conversions done for me by ScanCafe. The photographs of the bridge were taken on the July 4th weekend in 1977. The trio is a lounge band called "Something Different" and was photographed around the same time period. They were filmed in the basement of my friends house and the yellow cast is how the slides looked back then. All were stored in plastic cases that were provided by the processing lab.

Most of the digital versions of my slides were color balanced properly, had low noise and minor spots and marks on them. Next time I will try out there pro services to see how they compare to the standard service. ScanCafe offers a great value when it comes to digital transfer of slide film. Next up will be some negatives as well. Give them a try and be patient. It takes a few weeks to get your photos back.

Photoshop CS5 Vs Microsoft ICE

I love panoramas and over the years I have used various software applications to create them. Now that I am using Photoshop CS5 I really don't need any other software to create them. However, not everyone uses Photoshop so how does Photoshop Photomerge compare with other applications? I recently tried out Microsoft's ICE (Image Composite Editor) on several pictures, just to see what it could do. Without any work other than cropping, how well does ICE standup against Photoshop CS5? I picked two pictures that I took in South Africa in front of the Breakers Resort at Umhlanga Beach. The reason I picked the two photos is because of the 5 fountains that I could use to help understand what was used from each picture. Note: If you use Photoshop, you can see exactly how the picture was stitched. I did nothing other than to drop them into each application using the automatic features of the applications to see how well each one handled the stitching function. Since the ICE application is a free download it doesn't have to be perfect to have great value. What I discovered was that ICE did a great job with the pictures that I selected, with the benefit that it is free. Let's take a look at the results.

So here are the two pictures that I started out with. My sister-in-law is standing in front of the resort and I took her picture. However I couldn't get the full name on the wall so I took a second picture of just the Breakers Resort name by itself.

I dropped the above two pictures into ICE and the result was almost perfect.

[color-box color=yellow]

Notice the shadow from the roof has a slight shift where the picture was stitched together. [/color-box]

Now let's look at the results using Photoshop CS5 Photomerge.

Note that both applications stitched the photographs together almost exactly the same. The left 2 fountains are from the left picture and the other fountains are from the right picture. There are three barriers that can be seen in the foreground. The middle barrier is from the left picture in both examples. The "Breakers Resort" is from the right picture. Notice the roof line shadow is different thought. In the Microsoft ICE software the shadow from the left picture is lower than the shadow from the right picture. In the Photoshop CS5 version the shadow from the left picture is slightly higher than the shadow from the right picture, and it is in a different location. So Photoshop did a little better in the shadow area of the picture. However, the big difference is in the amount of data Photoshop was able to keep as compared to ICE. To do the stitching in ICE the left picture has more zoom applied to it than the right picture. Photoshop was able to keep more data from both pictures and did a slightly better stitch as well.

But is this a fair comparison? Could ICE do better? I decided to try to use the other stitch options that ICE provided. Using the Automatic feature it used "Planar Motion 3". I decided to try other camera motion options provided, and I found that the automatic feature did indeed select the best setting. This is a very high level compare of the two products and of course Photoshop allows me to do a lot more with the picture once I have created it. Using ICE you may need to go to your photo editing program of choice and get more creative.

The above CS5 examples were created with "Blend Images Together" checked. Let's take a look at the results of a photomerge without checking "Blend Images Together.

The results were cropped based on the usable image created. Notice the shadow of the roof line has been resolved and the objects used from each of the pictures has changed. The stitching no longer takes into account shadows or color matching. Since the two images are almost identical in exposure and color, turning off blending in this case produces good results, but a small amount data from each picture is lost compared to the CS5 blended version, but still more data than the ICE version.

Just for fun I selected the Geometric Distortion Correction in CS5 to see what the results would be.

I love panoramas because they really help the viewer better understand the environment where the picture was taken. A picture of sand could be a beach or a sandbox, maybe it is quicksand! Help the viewer understand what they are seeing by providing a perspective. Remember to think panorama the next time you go out to take photographs. Make sure your photos overlap by as much as 40%. Too much or too little overlap will prevent the automated panoramic features from performing the stitch. Remember to that GPS GEO tagging can add an even higher level to the viewers perspective!

Great Pictures Are Everywhere

Every Christmas I take a picture of the Christmas tree. This past year was no different and I took the usual pictures, but I decided that I wanted to take some close-ups of the ornaments. I did that a few years ago, so I thought I would do it again. Later as my wife and I were looking at the pictures we have taken at Christmas, she commented on various things we had done throughout the years. A very pleasant conversation talking about the time we have shared, and all brought on by a few pictures that together tell a story.

-