Rain and snow, and that the whole day through. Is it a wonder that I can’t offer anything real good?

On the other hand, although today’s images lack in quality, I somehow like these two pairs of wheeled transport devices.

Image #2, the two motorcycles, is curious in one respect: I couldn’t stand it at all and was about to throw it away, and then I remembered the two images that I had given critique today on Photo.net, a snail that was simply perfect, and a street scene, that I really liked, but where I felt something to be missing. The snail had a frame that was absolutely essential to the image’s effect, and after I loaded the street scene in Photoshop and added a white frame, I found the image much more satisfying. And really, adding a white frame to the motorcycles made them at least bearable.

It’s nothing that I do very often, but surprisingly it sometimes works wonders. Just something to keep in mind

For lack of a better title (or simply lack of time to search for one), the Song of the Day is once more “Just Friends” from the 2006 Amy Winehouse album “Back to Black”. See her perform on YouTube. It’s still as good as it was two weeks ago

Next week I’ll make an experiment. I will use only one lens (OK, I do that all the time), and it will be one unruly monster of a lens, the Sigma 150/2.8 Macro, a lens that has found an almost permanent residence on a shelf in Villach

You see, I’m back to longer focal lengths, and in the meantime I use the Nikon 70-300 VR. It’s fun to be where I was in SoFoBoMo.

I always use this lens at a minimum of 1/200s. With VR I could go further down, especially when I am at the short end, but at the long end, at an equivalent of 450mm, 1/200s is a speed where I can be sure that I am able to hold every image.

Of course you need a lot of light to do that, but summer is the season of light, if I can’t do it now, I can’t do it at all.

The Sigma 150/2.8 is a different thing. It has no VR, at 895g it is heavier than the 70-300, but I really look forward to use it wide open.

Long lenses make photographing really easy, because they eliminate all the context. It’s more a matter of getting used to the frame, of seeing in terms of long lenses, but once you are over that, it becomes pure bliss.

If that sounds strange, try it at one time. If you don’t own a long lens, consider buying a stabilized 70-300. Ted Byrne has the Canon version on his 40D and he is excited about its performance, I can say the same about the Nikon 70-300 VR, you really can’t go wrong, and especially when you use it on a crop factor camera, it is a bargain entrance to long reach.

The Song of the Day is “The Chain” from Fleetwood Mac’s mega-seller “Rumours”. I have the remastered album with an extra CD of rough versions. That’s what I’ve linked to, but if you’re not a real fan, the normal CD for half the money will suffice. Isn’t it amazing how inventive this industry is, when it comes to selling ever the same things once more? See a video, live in 1979, on YouTube.

Today I received an email from Topaz Labs. As a previous customer I was notified of their new Photoshop plugin called “Topaz Detail“. As a very casual user of Topaz Clean and an extremely satisfied user of Topaz Adjust, I have immediately downloaded the plugin and run it now with a 30 days test key. This image was partly made with it, though I may have been rather abusive

What it Topaz Detail? Well, it’s another one of their contrast manipulating plugins, and this time they unleash some really new technology. Why do I know? Because it’s slow. Real slow. In the beginning. Then it gets fast.

Topaz Detail introduces a lengthy analysis phase. On my laptop (Windows Vista, Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz, 4 GB of memory) it takes almost a minute to analyze a 12 megapixel image. Then it displays the image and to the left an assortment of pre-defined effects, just like their other plugins do. Again it is all about local contrast manipulation, and the results are very impressive. Actually they are so impressive that I’ll order the plugin today. There’s no need further thinking about it, I definitely will use it.

I said I’ve abused it, and that’s true, because what I did to an image that would have been OK, even right from the camera, was quite brutal. I strongly suppose that this plugin can do much more subtle things, for instance to landscapes. We’ll probably see more this weekend.

The Song of the Day is “Easy Ride” from Madonna’s 2003 album “American Life”. For me it’s one of her very best albums, so you can imagine my surprise when I found out that Amazon has it only via their marketplace, and at least in the US it seems to have been received with not much love. But, on the other hand, criticism against America was not overly popular at that time

Hear it on YouTube.

It’s Sunday evening, a short weekend is over, I’m back on my way to Vienna. From the train I just saw a breathtaking sundown, a little provocative after a steamy, hot day with dull, overcast sky

I don’t really care though. I was exhausted from yesterday anyway, I could not even convince myself to go swimming. Accordingly, the image that you see here was not shot today. It’s out of my SoFoBoMo reserve, one of the images that I made on May 4, the day that I began my fuzzy month.

And now please excuse me, I want to use the rest of the time on the train to define the layout for my book. This time for real

The Song of the Day is “Mirror” from the 1997 Beautiful South album “Blue Is the Colour”. YouTube has it for you.

It’s Wednesday morning, 5:45am, I’ve been up for an hour now, so has the sun, thus we’ll try to keep this short and sweet

Let’s begin with two more images of Monday. The first is one more time about the dream of the sky, the urban dream of being on top, although this is a very humble version.

The other is a detail of a motorcycle. The good thing about photographing these things with such a long lens (it’s the Nikon 70-300 VR at 300mm again) is the long working distance. You can inspect it: everything is curved and shiny, but you can’t see me anywhere reflected in all that chrome. This would be impossible to do with a shorter lens.

And with motorcycles we go on. Here’s another one: a detail image and the whole thing. I found it yesterday and I could easily have taken many more shots, but I ran out of time. Honestly, this is not a motorcycle, this is a landscape

On the SoFoBoMo front there is nothing new to report, at least I do not have any InDesign templates. Processing seven images kept me busy yesterday.

I guess I will take most of the images as I have processed them so far, i.e. I won’t try to re-work them into a common visual style. I will only group them loosely by the “kind of dream”.

Other than that, I still have not decided if I do a one-image-per-spread layout, i.e. the classic photo book where no image interferes with the other, or if I juxtapose images. The latter is more ambitious and harder to do right, but it opens up a whole world of expression. We’ll see. I’ll try both.

The Song of the Day is “In Our Dreams” by Emily Loizeau. I recently found her while following the recommendations on Deezer. They have both of her albums, the debut “L’ Autre Bout du Monde” and her current release “Pays Sauvage“, the one that contains this song, but at the moment they won’t play them to me. I don’t know why, it may be because I have already heard them some times.

Actually I can’t figure out how Deezer works. They have a help page, but they don’t explain why I can hear some songs some of the time but not all of the time. It may be license related, it may be due to a technical problem, because the website has just gone into maintenance mode

Whatever it is, I don’t care. In the meantime both CDs have arrived from Amazon, I have already ripped them, and all is well.

After Deezer have sorted out their technical problems, I’d still recommend you hear into the album. It has a wide variety of styles and it is really great music. If that does not work, here is a video that I have found on Dailymotion.

No censorship today. Promised

Instead I want to talk about a thing that I just did in Photoshop and that may be of interest to you. I probably should make a proper tutorial with screenshots and step-by-step images of it, but I am too tired. My day was rather hectic, I am on the train to Carinthia now and I will stay there for a week, and just like always before I go on vacation, things get really awry. In fact I fixed the last bug 15 minutes before I left. Let’s hopethat was it

Enough of work. Let’s look at the Image of the Day now. I shot it this morning against extreme backlight. To the left is the original out of the camera. Quite dark, huh? You should really click both to appreciate the difference.

Honestly, I didn’t think that I would be able to fix it. In that extreme contrasty light, there could not possibly be any detail left in the shadows, could it? Well, turned out it could. Obviously under these conditions, shooting in 14bit RAW is a real life saver.

I converted the image to a very flat file, just to make sure that I get every bit of detail that I can. Then I copied the layer, treated it with Noise Ninja, and changed the “Blend If” sliders to 0% in the highlights and 100% in the shadows, essentially giving me noise reduction with probably a little loss of texture in the shadows, while keeping the highlights crisp.

Eventually I intended to push saturation and put contrast back in, but before that, I wanted to heavily push local contrast. There are multiple ways to do that. One is, to use the tone mapping algorithms of some HDR tool like Photomatix Pro or Essential HDR, the other is, to use a specialized tool like PhotoLift, and finally one could even employ the good old unsharp mask filter to enhance local contrast with a high radius and a low amount (HIRALOAM, as Dan Margulis calls it). In this case I used PhotoLift, and I used it on a merged copy of the layers below, specifying a very high amount of local contrast (160 on their scale) and -90% global contrast. Thisyielded a ridiculous image, just like an HDR completely overdone, almost local contrast only. Then I changed the blending mode to “Soft Light”, and – voilà – back were contrast and quite some saturation.

At that point I recognized, that I would not get away with this image without further tricks. I had steepened contrast in the low tones so enormously, that there was now a red halo along most high-contrast edges. It’s not the lens, the Sigma 70/2.8 has almost no chromatic aberrations, neither lateral nor longitudinal, and of course not at f8, no, this must have been a sensor artifact due to the incredibly high contrast. Of course it was negligible in the original, but after so much amplification, it was clearly an issue.

What I did, was to create an edge mask. I have an action for that, because I use edge masks often to restrict sharpening to edges only. Basically it involves Photoshop’s “Find Edges” filter, desaturating, inverting and slightly blurring the result, and then manually applying levels, to find the right balance between edges and background.

I created such a mask, but only this time I did not apply it to a sharpening layer, but instead to a “Hue/Saturation” adjustment layer, and in that layer, I desaturated the reds to -80%. The result was striking. All the halo artifacts were gone.

Without any danger, I could now further increase saturation by a combination of “Hue/Saturation” layers in different blending modes and with different “Blend If” options. For more on that, please see my tutorial in “683- Welcome To The Republic“.

Finally I used my currently favorite sharpening method, involving a copy/merged layer, setting it to “Luminosity” mode, sharpening with 180/0.5/0, adjusting the “Blend If” sliders by splitting the darks and pulling them up to 63, splitting the lights and pulling them down to 128. In this case I even lowered opacity to 70%. The result was a very crisp sharpening in the mid-tones, completely without any sharpening artifacts laike halos. Ask me if this was too quick, I may explain it in a tutorial of it own.

EDIT: I normally don’t do that, but only at home did I recognize how laptop display and reason had failed me: The laptop can’t display real, deep blacks, and I had not payed attention to the histogram. The image as displayed yesterday evening was much too timid in the dark tones. I salvaged that by creating a CMYK image from a merged copy, taking the black channel, and multiplying it into the low half tones, with full blending in the blacks and no blending from medium gray upward.

Sorry. From here on it’s again the original text of the post.

The second image did not have any problem like #1. In fact I have shot it in flat, even light in a shadowy street. It did have a small amount of purple fringing though. Not much, but at f4, a certain amount of purple fringing is not uncommon along contrast edges on chrome parts. It may happen even with very good lenses like this Sigma 70/2.8 Macro lens.

Honestly, it wouldn’t have been necessary at all, but as I already was at it, I did the same trick again, this time to fight purple fringes. I added an edge mask to a “Hue/Saturation” layer, and with that layer I desaturated magenta and blue to -90%. If I had had those colors anywhere else in the image, I could have painted in the mask, to restrict the effect to the chrome areas, but in this caseit was not necessary.

Well, that’s it for today. I’m amazed that I managed to write that much

The Song of the Day is “Seein’ Red” by jazz clarinetist Edmond Hall. I have it on disc 31 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, that wonder weapon in all musical fights, but as this 168 CD collection may be a tad expensive in the US (did I ever mention it cost me 99€ only), I have also found the album “Profoundly Blue” for you. It contains the song as well as another album that you can hear at Deezer. Enjoy.

It’s a typical Friday. I woke up early and had a little time in the morning, but that was it. Now I sit on the train to Carinthia, and from the few morning images I could use at least this old Puch motorcycle.

Btw, this image and yesterday’s have something in common. Both of them were created from two images each. In both cases I had two versions, one a little too tight on the upper edge, the other on the lower edge. In both cases Photoshop’s “Align Layers” did a fine job and allowed me to cheat nicely.

Normally I like to frame tight and as exact as possible, but sometimes tight is too tight. Having more than one exposure can make all the difference then.

The Song of the Day is “I’m Still Here” from Tom Waits’ 2002 album “Alice”. Hear it on YouTube.

This morning was the first morning with fog here in the city. This means we’re headin’ for a fall gals! I’ve made some pictures of a foggy park, they are even not so bad, but I’ll spare us the cliché. It’s autumn, summer’s long gone and that must suffice.

This is an image that I shot on my way home. It is not the first image that I’ve taken of this venerable motorbike, but it is the first that gets published.

The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town” – not the David Byrne song from “Rei Momo“, not the Rod Steward version, no, it’s the Pogues that who have it on their 1985 album “Rum, Sodomy & the Lash“. See the video on YouTube. This is a true classic, you don’t want to miss it

Can you remember “593 – Controversy“? Well, this is the same place and the war goes on

This post had many inspirations. Faced by the new Canon 5D MkII, you can feel a certain tension in the Nikon crowd Everybody expected a 24 megapixel camera for Photokina, and what did we get? A 50/1.4. It may be fine, but I doubt it will be better than the new Sigma 50/1.4, though smaller and lighter.

Paul Lester recently wrote a clever post, “Avoiding occasional G.A.S cramps“, where he fights the lust for a D700 by using the D300 that he has. I have the slight suspicion that he is not yet really over it, at least he still reassures himself. Paul, let me tell you, that’s only the other side of G.A.S.

The other inspiration was Janine L. Thun from Hamburg. She has a beautiful daily photoblog, and in private conversation she asked me about the D300, considering buying one. I talked about my project to get a D700, and that way I arrived at my statement that, although high ISO is absolutely fine on the D300, ISO 6400 is not usable any more, and if at all, then only in B&W. She asked me for samples at 6400 and, well, here we are.

Reassurance? Click on any of the images. They all are JPEGs straight out of the camera. No Photoshop, no cropping, no nothing. I have set the camera to picture style “Monochrome” with a slight yellow tint applied, ISO 6400, and that was it.

It’s interesting what happens when you take ISO and noise out of the equation. Not that there is so much noise to begin with, at least at the sizes that I display here. It is a wholly new style of shooting, carefree.

There is something pleasant to the noise these new Nikon cameras produce. It began with the D200, and since then Nikon has perfected this film grain like look. I guess I will experiment with post-processing such images, because of course they may need some cropping, they may need a vignette applied, they may be material for any kind of my usual tricks, but what I have seen so far has made me feel very comfortable with my camera. Which may or may not preclude me from buying the D700

The Song of the Day is “Straight, No Chaser” from Thelonious Monk’s 1961 live album “Thelonious Monk in Italy”. See him perform eight years later on YouTube.

Yesterday I left work late, night had fallen, and though I had a usable bicycle, shot in the morning, I did not stop looking. I finally found a yellowish/orange Vespa scooter, but it would not pose as I needed it. It was impossible to separate from the grown-up motorcycles around it, and thus I used it as a diffuse foreground.

The Song of the Day is “The Way You Look Tonight” from Bryan Ferry’s wonderful 1999 album of standards, “As Time Goes By“. I have no luck with this album, nobody put the song on YouTube and the sound sample from last.fm covers only the instrumental intro, but at least if you are a resident of the US, you may be able to hear it on Rhapsody.com. At least that’s what I think, I can’t check.