DoctorStick - Photo Projects

Graffiti photos are all on Flickr. This is an archive of other one-off or favorite photos.

[doctorstick]

Reducing window glare for an object behind glass

Attempting to minimize the glare on the piece seen in the top picture led to quite a bit of research.  Circular polarizers were first item that looked useful.  Articles mentioned that these were useful for removing reflections seen in glass.  The main issue is that this seems to work best when shooting the glass from an angle 30-40 degrees.  When taking a photo of this piece at that angle, the polarizer was effective.  Unfortunately, that was not the shot that I was attempting to capture.  Although the filter will probably useful in future projects, it was not particularly suited to this task.  The reflection on the window with the word "Express" on it could be reduced with the polarizer since with the wide angle lens (10mm), the glass is actually being shot at that 30-40 degree angle.

The wall that this image is on faces north, so it is going to be in shadow for the majority of the year.  The buildings in the reflection seen in the glass will be well lit on a sunny day.  Glass is reflects approximately 4% of the light incident upon it, so the reduction in reflection comes from the less brightly lit buildings and trees.  That's the first reason that the picture on the bottom came out better.  

In photoshop, there were a few things that I could do to help make the image of the Orca stand out.  The majority of the illustration is black and white.  Due to this fact, I was able to use the adjustment brush to drop the exposure on the black sections which make the reflections appear to dim.  On the white sections, I can do the opposite to eliminate the detail from the reflections.  The teal section was more difficult, so I used a second technique.

A option to reduce the impact of reflections that I came across was to put the subject of the image into focus and have the reflection be out of focus.  The idea is that if the reflection is not detailed, then it won't be as distracting.  The image in the glass will be in focus not at the focal plane of the glass, but at the actual distance the object lies from the glass.  Basically, even if the glass is close, the image in the glass is seen by the camera as being far away.  The lens used treats anything over 4 feet away as being at infinity.  This means that because I have to stand 10 feet away from the image to capture its entirety, both the Orca and the buildings will always be at infinity and will thus both be in focus.  

Photoshop was used to mimic the desired effect.  Using the adjustment brush, I reduced the clarity (-100) and sharpness (-40) on the buildings and trees.  Since the subject was an illustration, the loss of sharpness is not impacting the solid colored sections.  The change in the final image was subtle, but again helped to bring out the Orca.

Like most editing tasks, the particulars of the image will determine the tools required to get the wanted final product. 

This piece was created by Mosher and is hosted by Gallerie F in Chicago.

[doctorstick]

Here is a picture from when I was first attempting to use the Photoshop panorama tools.  Loading a number of pictures and setting it to auto came produced what is above.  It isn't what I was going for, but there is something about it that I like.  I later learned that the trick to making these panoramas is to lock the layer that shares the perspective of the final product that you are going for.  In most cases, that'd be the picture that you took straight on.  I'll eventually get around to fixing the picture and putting it up on the Flickr.

[doctorstick]

Bringing Back the Sky

Shooting in RAW has many benefits, and one of them is all the information that you may not realize still lives in the highlights and shadows of photos.  

The photo on top was my first attempt at cleaning up this photo.  The sun is behind the building, so exposing to the wall left a blown out sky.  There were a few tags on the white portion of the wall that needed to be dealt with.  I used the clone tool to get rid of them and then the healing brush to hide the color variation.

Later in my studies, I found a nice little trick to bring the sky back.  I used the adjustment brush in CameraRaw to highlight the sky.  Dropping the exposure and the highlights reveals the sky and the clouds, but keeps them a dull grey.  The blue sky can be created by adjusting the color temperature to the blue side and upping the saturation.  

The results seem fairly natural and I tried to avoid making the sky too blue.  I also changed the white balance of the main picture to make it less cool.  This technique has save a few photos where a single exposure was not enough to make everything look nice.

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This falls in the category of pictures that I would have rather planned.  Nevertheless, it captures a nice moment.  This is the mirrored ping pong table at the Museum of Contemporary Art which is a part of Alberto Aguilar's Home Field Play.  Rather than try to expose for the table, I'm left with silhouettes of the players.  Only basic rotation, contrast, and a little vibrance boost.

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A 10mm (16mm with crop sensor) picture of Lake Michigan.  This was taken last July and I'm putting it up now to remind me that there are still some sunny summer days ahead.  There is a tiny boat out there if you pay attention.  A lazy picture for a lazy day.

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This is one of the first photoshop challenges that I gave myself when trying to learn the program.  This is from July of last year.  The building above used to regularly have advertisements painted on it.  This one was for a Roy Lichtenstein exhibit that was happening at the Art Institute.  The only way to get the shot from dead-on would be to stand on the highway, so I opted to use the transform tool.  It would be fun to show how funny the rest of the picture looks when warping the center picture to make it look straight.  I used a combination of the perspective and the skew tool.  It took me far longer than it should have, but I was very pleased with the result.  Try it for yourself if you are so inclined.

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Sea of Clouds.  Shot out the window on the last flight that I took.  The fog on the window softened the edges of the picture, which I think looks really nice.  I left in the natural vignetting of the lens.  A good little advertisement for Southwest.

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Here is a shot from my recent trip to D.C. from back in March.   I cannot remember which station this is in and I should have written that down.  The stop had a convenient overlook where this could be taken.  A 16mm (10 on cropped sensor) focal length was used to exaggerate the length of the tunnel and the size of the ceiling.  A tripod was used, but it had to be leaned against the wall so that the handrails would not be in the shot.  This is a 3 second exposure with a bit of brightness and contrast tweaking.  

The first thing that I noticed with the original was that it was not symmetrical.  After a quick google image search, I found that most shots of the D.C. underground are not centered properly.  For this picture, I spent some time with lens correction to adjust the horizontal perspective and the rotation to get a mostly symmetrical picture.  The crop grid was helpful in this.  The lines and intersections were used to visually line up things on the left and right of the picture.  A 16x9 crop was used to get the end of the tunnel centered.  A ruler could have been used for perfection.  I should have spent more time getting the source material right, but I felt like if I stood there too long with a tripod that the authorities might have had a problem.

If I were to go back and try this again, there are a couple of things that I would do.  First, I'd find a setup like this where there are not large advertisements.  Second, I think I might try the layering trick where multiple pictures are stacked to remove the people.

I have a fascination with these large interior shots and will try to post more in the future.

[doctorstick]

A fly from August of 2012.  I doubt that it's still with us.  Shot with the 70-300mm lens that I was using to photograph the Blue Angels from my deck while attempting to make sure that the auto-focus was working.  Those planes move really fast!  The lens naturally has some vignetting that I took out and then reintroduced after a slight crop to correct the framing.  That's about it for editing.  This picture has been sitting in a folder for quite some time and I always get a smile when I look at it.

[doctorstick]

Here are two panoramas made of this piece by Nudnick in Chicago.  The third picture (Clamnation, Blutt, and Nice One) shows the same location and all of the things that get in the way.  Now that the trees are full of leaves, a good portion of the view is blocked when shot from the street.  Both panoramas are taken from the edge of the sidewalk.  

The first was taken from approximately at the center by rotating the camera.  Photoshop stitched them with little trouble using the perspective alignment, although this was the only one of three sets that came out.  Make sure to lock the layer that is looking straight-on!  When the perspective is adjusted on the left and right side, artifacts remain. One obvious remnant is stretched branch.  The second involves the tan stones that jut out about a third of the way up the wall.  Notice how you can see the sides of both the left and right.  Also, there is a vertical black line that is visible on the right side of the face where the wood sticks out.  Lastly, since I was shooting at F10, the extreme left and right sides are out of focus and suffer from chromatic aberration.    

The second was taken as a series of pictures by moving from left to right.  These were combined using the collage alignment.  Photoshop did a not so hot job with that.  I'd suggest using it as a starting point and then transform individual layers to get them more perfect.  The auto-blend does a pretty good job, but I did have to erase branches from some layers to make sure they weren't floating in mid-air in the final product.  I believe the second looks quite a bit better, but it was a fair amount more work.  

In both cases, I was shooting very wide angle and the distortion at the edge of the lens is difficult.  It was somewhat of a necessity seeing the amount of room I had to work with (notice the exaggeration of depth of the normal sidewalk in the third shot).  I like the second shot quite a bit more.  My eyes were transfixed on the visual oddities of the first and I couldn't enjoy the picture.  A fun project overall.

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Long exposure shot (30 sec) from December 2012 in Tampa.  I used a neutral gradient filter to bring down the sky at the top of the picture.  I also raised the levels on the telescope that's over there on the right.  I played a little bit with the reduce noise (strength 8, preserve detail 40%, 0% on color and sharpen).  There was nothing too over the top with any of the adjustments.  Mostly it was a bit of tweaking.

We had to stay very still.  There is a little bit of motion blur on the two of us if you zoom in.  There are a number of high points in this shot for me including the size of the fire, the light/long shadows from across the street, and the bright stars.

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This is a wide-angle (10mm on cropped sensor) interior shot of the old Chicago Exchange.  I believe that it was a 3-5 second exposure taken just before the security guard yelled at me.  Those highlights in the background had to be taken down quite a bit.  

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Here is a shot from the Snow Monkey Park near Nagano from April 2012.  No serious editing.  This little guy was very interested in this lady's laces.  He ran off a few seconds later. 

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Here is a long exposure (30 sec @ ISO100) shot of Tokyo from across the bay in Daito.  This was taken back in April 2012.  Not much editing necessary.  There were some spots of noise in the sky that had to be remedied, but that's about it.

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A couple of photos taken last July during an Architectural Boat Tour.  The first just needed a slight crop.  The second needed an odd gradient filter angle set positive to bring the bridge back from the shadows.  I'm sure that I did a little clarity bump on both of them.