This is a video of Katie’s dance performance at the 2012 OPUS chamber music camp on Aug 10, 2012. Vivienne, in blue, is the teacher. Robin, in green, is the other student. The three designed the interpretive dance themselves. This performance was a part of the Arts Connections Seminar.
Month: August 2012 (page 3 of 4)
Below is another HDR photo, though I’m not entirely happy with it. It was taken from part way down Golden Eagle Blvd at a place that overlooks a good portion of the town.
I spent a long time playing with various tone mapping operators, but in the end chose Mantuik ’08 again, this time with a Color Saturation of 1.00, Contrast Enhancement of 1.51, Pre-Gamma of 1.3, and (post) Gamma of about 0.5. (I forgot to record the precise value of the final brightness adjustment.) In GIMP, I despeckled the road, ran unsharp mask on the entire image with a radius of 5, amount of 1.00, and threshold of 0. I decreased the brightness of the sky using Curves and adjusted the contrast of the highway too using Curves. I thought it would be cool to darken the road surface, but enhance the colors of the stripes. (I’m recording what I’ve done here more for my benefit than anyone elses.)
While playing around with the various tone mapping parameters, I found that sometimes small changes in one parameter can lead to large changes in the resulting image. I was able to get some reasonable looking results from Fattal, but it did not show much glow in the sky. It looked just weird with a dearth of stars for no apparent reason. The other thing about Fattal is that histogram usually has one big bump in it. I find it difficult to do any further editing using Curves on such images.
Most of the tone mapping results contained bright speckles on the road and other areas in the immediate foreground. These are not evident or at least not obvious in the original exposures and I’m at a loss to explain them. I was able to remove them by running GIMP’s despeckle filter with the Recursive box checked. If I don’t allow it to run recursively, it removed some speckles, but seemed to add new ones for some reason. I had to constrain the region in which I used the despeckle filter too as I found that it removed some of the lights and stars when running it on the entire image.
The glow in the sky is not due to a sunset, but rather the lights of Scottsdale. The bright red house in the foreground really was that color, but only for one exposure. I’m not sure why it’s a bright red in just that one exposure. In the subsequent exposure, the house is no longer red, but it looks like the garage door has opened and green light is spilling out. In all later exposures, the house is dark.
I’m note sure what HDR got me in this instance as I think I might’ve been able to obtain similar results by just using the brightest exposure. I did some tone mapping operations where the lights were considerably more muted, but I ended up not using any of those results.
We got rain late in the day on Wednesday, preceded by a dust storm. We were surprised to see a rather sizable rainbow amidst the dust. This is a view from our balcony in the same direction that we’d normally look to see Four Peaks.
I showed the above picture to Marie and she was very disappointed because she had seen a work in progress where the dust storm looked more like a firestorm. I had been trying to find a way to sharpen the rainbow at the time and wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on elsewhere as I knew I could mask it out so long as I was able to achieve the effect with the rainbow that I was looking for. Here’s a “firestorm” version just for Marie.
Today’s hike started at the Lousley Hill Trailhead where Amy, Bob, Linda, Janet, and I started off. We took Lousley Wash up towards Pemberton. Amy turned around about a hundred yards shy of hitting the Pemberton. The rest of us continued on, hiking the Scenic Trail and then stopping briefly at the Trailhead Staging Area. From there we took Pemberton back to Lousley Wash which took as back to the Lousley Hill Trail, just a short distance from the parking lot. Total distance at that point was just over seven miles. Bob wanted to get in even more mileage – he’s been averaging over eight miles a day for the month so far – so I did one lap of Lousley Hill with him, bringing our total distance up to a bit over eight miles for the day.
I drank all of my water today, three liters worth. It was warm out, with the temperature at 88 degrees when I checked it at 4:45am.
Janet, Amy, Bob, and Linda:
Janet, Amy, Kevin, and Linda:
We saw a mountain biker while hiking the Scenic Trail. He’s the only (other) person we saw during our entire hike.
A raven perched on a dead tree branch near the Trailhead Staging Area:
Ranger Amy says that this yellow flower, below, is a Desert Senna flower. The Senna seedpod contains the active ingredient used in some over-the-counter laxatives, including Senokot. (Thanks again to Ranger Amy for the flower identification!)
Several days ago, I took some photos of the crested saguaro near the parking area for the Dixie Mine Trail Head. While I liked the night shot of the saguaro, I felt that I could do better.
So, last night, I decided to give real HDR photography a try. I went out well after sundown and brought a tripod with me. For the photo below, I used eight different exposures each taken one stop apart. I turned off image stabilization, locked the focus, and shot at f/3.5 in manual mode. The longest and brightest exposure was thirty seconds long. I wanted to go even longer so that I could use a lower ISO than 400, but that’s the longest (non-bulb) setting that my NEX-7 has. Each subsequent (and darker) exposure had the shutter open half as long as the previous exposure. My NEX-7 does not have an auto-bracketing mode that can be triggered with a remote, so I manually adjusted the shutter speed between each exposure. This is, of course, less than ideal because touching the camera in between exposures could cause it to move slightly.
I processed those eight exposures with Luminance HDR and used the Mantiuk ’08 tone mapping operation with color saturation set to 1.26 and contrast enhancement set to 1.11. I’m not going to pretend that I know what these parameters mean or even if they were optimal for my photo(s), but I’m recording them here so I’ll know what they were if I want to try something like this again.
I had a problem with the stars in the resulting image. The Earth’s position with respect to the stars changes moment to moment due to the rotation of the Earth. This was evident after merging the eight images together. For each star, there was a sequence of stars each offset from one another by a small but noticeable amount. So, using GIMP, I edited back in the stars from the brightest of the eight images. I think I could have tried to mask the sky for all but one of the exposures using Luminance HDR, but I’m better at using GIMP.
Here is a 1:1 crop of an interesting portion of the scene. In the upper right, you can see a portion of the “crested” arm of the saguaro.
Update on 2012-08-22:
I learned recently that I didn’t check the correct box to cause the HDR software that I’m using to align layers. In some instances this makes a big difference. So I reran the Luminance HDR on the same set of exposures as before, this time telling it to use hugin align_image_stack. It takes quite a while longer to do the processing but, in the case of the fountain photos, it was worth it. When it finished, I had it use Drago for the tone mapping with the default parameters (Bias = 0.85 and Pre-Gamma = 1). The output looked atrocious without any adjustment of the levels or gamma when it’s done. Nevertheless, I wrote the file out as is, choosing to do those adjustments in GIMP.
In GIMP, I found that I got good results by simply duplicating the background and then using the multiply layer mode to combine them. That result required only minor tweaking via curves. After that, I replaced the sky with the brightest of the exposures used to form the image and ran curves on the sky, making the necessary adjustments so that I saw lots of stars. Once that was done, I ran unsharp mask on the entire image with a radius of 8 pixels and an amount of 0.70.
The image below looks very similar to the one above, but it’s a bit sharper in some areas and I think the lighting and colors is better too.
Bob sent me some photos of the birds that he has in and around his house. He asked me to edit them and post them here.
A hummingbird built her nest just outside of Bob’s house.
Hungry little birds were born…
Next up is Daffy, whom Bob has had for many years. Bob tells me that she’s named after the daffodil, a yellow and white flower. She is a Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, also known as a Yellow-crested Cockatoo. She weighs 285 grams or a bit over half a pound.
She talks too! She says “hello” when the phone rings and “goodbye” when someone is leaving.
She’s very affectionate, to Bob anyway…
But, sometimes, she gives him the cold shoulder:
Daffy is often lonely during the day without Bob, so he got her a companion, whom he named Daisy, an Umbrella Cockatoo that weighs in at 500 grams or about 1.1 pounds.
Bob is slowly trying to get the birds acquainted with each other, moving their cages slightly closer together each day. Daisy has been sticking her leg out in between the bars of her cage so that she can wave at Daffy. Daffy did not respond well to this at first, but is, perhaps, slowly warming to Daisy.
Daisy talks too. On her first day in the house, Daisy said “Oh, it’s okay.” in response to some of Daffy’s cries. But she has said other things too, leading Bob to conclude that her previous owner just wasn’t able to tolerate a noisy bird. (Bob got her, via his bird doctor, from an avian homeless shelter.)
I hiked the Dixie Mine and the Sonoran Trail late in the day yesterday. The temperature was a comfortable 104 degrees, but for some reason, mine was the only car in the parking lot.
There is a crested saguaro at the trailhead. This is what it looked like on my way out:
I saw this cactus on my way out while hiking the Dixie Mine Trail. I think it is a type of hedgehog cactus.
I got to the boundary between the park and the preserve just as the sun was setting. Here’s a photo of Four Peaks off in the distance.
Here’s another view of Four Peaks, with a field of Teddy Bear Cholla in the foreground.
Even though it was dark, I continued to take photos on the way back. I kept the ISO at 400 or less, so some long exposure times were needed and not all of them worked out so well due to the fact that I was hand holding the camera. This one, however, looks okay.
I took another photo of the crested saguaro when I got back to the trailhead. The EXIF info says that this was shot at ISO 800, f/3.5 with an exposure bias of -1.3 for half a second. I had it in auto-HDR mode, however, and one of the exposures took a lot longer, perhaps several seconds. I’m not sure that exposure was used however since one of the Sony Specific EXIF tags indicates that an error occurred during processing. I probably moved the camera too much for that one exposure.
I sharpened this photo in GIMP using a grain extract / merge with a Gaussian blur radius of 25 pixels on the extract layer. I merged those layers together and then duplicated it and used screen mode to combine the layers.
I visited Joe today and helped him move some stuff. I got a photo of him and his cat, Squirrel. (We called her Molly when she lived with us.)
Today’s hike took us half way around the North Trail to the Chuparosa. At that point, Ranger Amy headed back so that she could open up the Visitor’s Center on time. Bob, Janet, Nancy, and I continued on the Chuparosa to the Pemberton. From there we made our way over to Lousley Hill and hiked to the top. We then found our way over to the Verde Trail and then back to the North Trail and our vehicles. Total distance today was 7.1 miles.
Sunrise at the North Trailhead:
I think this is just one saguaro, below. It’s kind of weird how it grew up a very short ways and immediately branched off with some very sizable arms.
Bob, Janet, and Nancy:
Kevin, Janet, and Nancy:
A view of Four Peaks from the top of Lousley Hill:
Resting at the top of Lousley Hill:
Lousley Wash:
Three Saguaros that we came upon shortly after leaving Lousley Wash:
Buckhorn cholla with saguaros in the distance:
A hummingbird. Unfortunately, the camera that I used today couldn’t zoom in very closely on it. These shots were taken less than half a second apart.
Recent rain has brought some of the flowers out again. This one is on a creosote bush. (Thanks to Ranger Amy for the identification.) The Sony RX100‘s aperture was set to f/1.8 for this shot. Note that it does a pretty good job of providing a short depth of field.
Yesterday…
Today (2012-08-02)…
Darrick says he’ll send a new photo once it’s done. I’ll update this post when that happens.