TheChymera's Photoblog

Photographer, Neuroscientist, FOSS-Enthusiast, Writer. Out here on tumblr I document my photographic activities by posting biweekly photo updates alongside short field reports or processing reports about them. You can buy commercial licenses (no attribution, share-alike, etc.) and high-resolution printouts of my work via my 500px prime store. You can also see photography tutorials written by me on the Chymeric Tutorials website! In addition to photography I spend a lot of time writing open literature and blogging about neuroenhancement. Check me out! All original content on this site is licensed CC-BY-SA and is to be attributed to "Horea Christian (chymera.eu)". .photoblog-responsive { width: 300px; height: 250px; } @media(min-width: 500px) { .photoblog-responsive { width: 160px; height: 600px; } } (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

[thechymera]

“Emerald Baths” - deep greens in the Roman Baths of Bath.

Well, when spring finally does come to England, green is indeed the color - and not just in the fields but also in the open courtyards of its more ancient buildings. Gray melts into gold, and gold in turn melts into green - and the girl is clothed just coloufully enough to stand out of the background.

I like the composition of this shot a lot (in fact, almost as much as the colors), and did a nice harmonic means crop on it to enhance that slightly off-center look of her pointing hand even further. The rest of the processing was quite fun, especially since I did not have to do any tricky denoising. It was mostly sharpening to emphasize the stone texture, and a  b it of tonemapping to add more contrast to the features of the girl, and not have the shadow of the pillar slice across her that much.

God I love how deep and calm that water looks. 

[thechymera]

“Grandmother in Winter” - a special extra post this week in honour of my grandmother's birthday ^^

Love the smile, love the colors, love the texture - hate the door frame in the background. This was not actually meant to be a photoshoot, but when browsing through the pictures this one just jumped off the monitor. I like the dynamic pose, the slight smile, and the relaxed look - much unlike the stiffness of the pictures that she actually posed for. 

The processing turned out to be a bit more difficult than I had initially anticipated: This being cropped from a larger picture, I am afraid the reduced resolution really shows. I would have liked to have more detail in the facial features - especially the wrinkles - to be able to emphasize them without also emphasizing the noise. Whether I tried using tonemapping or sharpening, I could not really make the hair and skin look crisper without turning the noise up - nor could I really denoise without smudging some of the fine detail. The color processing was also a bit of a pain - since I wanted to make the picture vibrant, but ended up getting red, green, or gold tint in it. In the end I struck a nice balance, but unless your monitor is accurately calibrated - some tint might magically reappear at your end ^^  

[thechymera]

“Summer in Australia” - as winter dawns upon us - so does summer upon Australia ;)

A macro shot taken in a small resort north of Cairns. Ok, it's summer all year round up there, but shhhhh!

Not much fancy processing on this shot - I just denoised, sharpened it, and tried out some faded color processing profiles on top of that. Which of the three do you like best? 

[thechymera]

“Golden Mansion” - an old sunlight facade in central Oxford.

I finally reached deep into the RawTherapee faded color profiles list, since the pastel gold and azure of the original picture really did not seem to go with the bare branches, sober gables and patchy roof. I always had a thing for the "purple" faded color profiles - since for one thing, they aren't really purple - and since they have a very distinctive look, which however sadly usually does not go well with my shots. Finally I found a photo which is indeed complimented by it, so I am also happy to tick that off my list. 

[thechymera]

“November Sky” - late autumn scenery captured last winter in Christ church Meadows, Oxford.

This was shortly after the annual flood in Oxford, though as much is not obvious from this shot. I did not like most of the photos from this session at the time (perhaps the gloomy weather seemed nothing except annoying when it was going on and on), but now that I am back in sunnier lands, I can finally appreciate the gloom again.

My signature processing (denoising ALL the noise + unsharp mask) often tends to obfuscate small-scale features if they are low contrast, and create a drawing-like appearance (this is especially the case for hair)... But in this particular case, a lot of the small-scale features are high-contrast, which means I totally nailed it with my over-zealous processing.

Enjoy the rich branch web and the orange-gray palette!

[thechymera]

“Toga Party!” - me posing at a toga party, fit for a cameo.

The toga party concept should be familiar to any of you who attended college in the Anglo-Saxon world, or just watched the all-time classic, Animal House. In truth, or little toga party was accompanied by a lot less debauchery than the generic stereotype (and indeed a lot less than what I had hoped). At the end I was sober enough to part with my camera - ok, make that drunk enough to part with my camera - and sober enough to explain to a fellow party-goer how to snap a passable shot on manual. He in turn turned out to be sober enough to actually understand my instructions and accomplish it.

The photo contains some retouching dome in the GIMP. Not that I wished to erase all the blemishes on my face (photorealism FTW!) but there were bits of other people sticking into the background, completely irrelevant to the main feature of this shot: ME. 

[thechymera]

“Vista” - shooting a fellow photographer shooting a photo of the drenched landscape ^^

This was a late-evening photo walk on a gloomy day two winters ago. I dug out this beauty while sifting through my old photos looking for exactly such pictures. It's funny how some images which were discarded as bland at that time can look beautiful when seen through different eyes.

I actually tried to enhance the blandness of this picture a bit, and increase the contrast with the hair and scarf. Turned out to be a bit difficult since the hue range of those overlapped with the orange sunset (which was  overexposed at that). I tried to balance that out as best I could, but I would have liked the golden halo around the hair and spreading towards the bark to be even more vibrant. In any case, I think the picture still brings the point across - it'S the photographer that brings beauty to the landscape ;)

[thechymera]

“Fatbird” - Similarly to my last avian photography model, Blackbird, just a lot rounder ^^

Ok, and admittedly more colorful ;) Again, this is another photo from my trip to The Living Rainforest in Berkshire.

I really like how I managed to capture the detail in this shot, and was almost tempted to go for the GIMP and edit the bird ring out. Not this time, but the temptation was indeed strong. The color palette of the bird was very well suited for my hue-based post-processing; and thus I was able to selectively make it more vibrant (via the red and blue hues) without oversaturating the green background. Not to understate this little fellow, though, the bird was already really vibrant IRL!

[thechymera]

“Blackbird” - a deeply black bird among the lush vegetation of The Living Rainforest in Berkshire, England.

Even in the cold and gloomy English winter, the Oxford Photography Meetup Group can still find the odd tropical paradise ;) Sadly, enclosed tropical paradises don't make for very nice photo opportunities due to the ever-present utility elements in the backdrop. Here such distractors are quite blurred, but you can still find them if you look carefully. I really liked how this fella's deep plumage contrasts with the vibrant backdrop and with his beak, and on the processing part the challenge was to get the black deep enough, but still preserve highlights and detail on the feathers - and, of course, the luminosity of the background.

[thechymera]

“Death of Faith” - concluding my "faith" series, a mostly faith-unrelated exhibit from the British Museum.

I tried to snap a lot of shots at the British Museum, especially seeing how they had a very permissive policy on photography - but given the protective glass and low lighting (I would often have needed to use the flash - where their policy was, however, not that permissive) most images were fit for immediate deletion. This one turned out astonishingly well, but I am sad to say it was the only one.

Processing seems to get a lot easier with black-and white shots, since the chrominance noise goes away with the color detail. I am generally not that fond of black-and-white photography, but in this case it seemed to fit the scene quite well. Not least of all since the actual color of the exhibit was a strikingly sepia-resemblant maroon (which I like even less than B/W ^^). 

[thechymera]

“Faith's Wings” - keeping in line with my "faith" series, this week faith flies like a swan!

Far from being a daring photomanipulation (check out those shadows!) or a miracle (but I love miracles!), the attentive observer might notice the thin string suspending the stuffed swan from the ceiling. Keeping in line with my 0% Photoshop-(and GIMP, etc) motto I did not retouche that detail.

Tonemapping - again - helped me a lot on this shot, since I had to lighten up the detail of the rather dark church interior. I also found that gothic interiors throw sharp shadows and thus support my trademark "denoising & edge-sharpening" workflow for emphasizing fine lines. One thing that I could not make work was - of course - the swan. Even at the underexposure level of my shot, it was still over-exposed. If only I had used bracketing and my amazing bracketing script back then! 

[thechymera]

“Flowering Faith?” - Artificial flowers in front of the altar.

Shot in the Mannheim palace chapel - now located in the west wing of the University of Mannheim's main campus. I was unsure whether blurred altar and sharp flowers looked better than blurred flowers and sharp altar - but the latter did look a bit like a nice picture with a splotch in the corner ^^

The processing of the picture was very easy as denoising did not affect the background that much, and neither did edge sharpening. Not much esle I had to do for this - maybe not the most breathtaking of my pics, but straight from the camera it already looked almost as gorgeous as this ^^ One thing that annoyed me about the composition was the gray flight of stairs behind the door in the lower right. Sadly, there's no way I could have cropped it without damaging the rest of my composition.

[thechymera]

“Autumn Cutie” - looking into the early autumn Heidelberg sunset.

An older picture - shot last year - that I tried to revamp with my current photographic knowledge. For some reason this is one of the shots where I had difficulties creating a processing profile even only slightly better than the camera default. I still don't know exactly why, but the camera seems to have the edge on me where processing sandstone and reddish skin tones are concerned.

[thechymera]

“A Toast to Summer!” - the last - I think - of my late summer shots, two students drinking overlooking the Altstadt (Old City) of Heidelberg.

I grabbed this shot coming down from the Heiligenberg, and it seemed oh-so-relaxed then as it does now. Maybe even more so - the summer breeze doesn't blow through my office that much...

Since it was rather late I needed to lighten the shot up a fair bit, which was the easy part of the post-processing. Sadly getting the lighting of the background and foreground to match was a rather different story. As you can imagine, the foreground was significantly darkened, so I had to help on that front a bit with some tonemapping (a quasi-HDR technique which enhances local contrast at the cost of low-frequency feature contrast - in our case foreground-vs-background contrast). That worked out fine, but it turns out I did want some substantial contrast between foreground and background. So it was a tricky balancing of setting to get the contrast high enough, without overexposing the background or underexposing the foreground. Not least of all tonemapping lead to some interesting color artifacts in the background.

All in all I like what I was finally able to do with it; and given the wonderful composition (perfect rule of thirds for you right there!) I would not have given up on this for anything in the world anyway.

[thechymera]

“Summer’s Dawn” - beautiful golden hours are how you know that summer’s definitely over in Heidelberg.

Continuing my streak of late summer/autumn shots, I’m happy to share a picture of the most glorious golden hour I have ever witnessed in Heidelberg. I hope my photographic skill and processing prowess (lol) do this day justice, but in all fairness I wouldn’t expect that even of myself :D

The picture itself was beautiful, but the pressure of getting the processing as right as the substrate made it a bit of a lengthy affair. Making the red of the sandstone vibrant enough to stand out of the colorful trees while also not over-saturating the orange highlights of the scenery took some wavelength-spectrum juggling - but all in all it seems to have turned out fine. Looking back I only wish I would not have gone all tourist-style and pointed the camera smack at the castle, but hey, they only do it because it’s so gorgeous ^^

[thechymera]

“Heidelberger Weizen” - Shot on one of the last days of summer.

The sandstone Alte Brücke (Old Bridge) of Heidelberg runs south-to-north and lends itself for amazing sunset shots - either reflecting the golden evening light (as seen here) or as a silhouette (as seen from the upstream side).

I took this picture with a polarization-filtering optical system (an affordable Hoya Pro1 Digital 67mm from Amazon mounted on my AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-105mm kit lens) which enhanced the wonderful contrast between the vibrantly illuminated bridge and the already darkening sky. The advantage to using a polarization filter over frequency lightness manipulation is that you can specifically filter out light sources independently of their color  - but rather based by their position relative to you, and, of course, based on whether or not the light is polarized. With post-processing color manipulations for instance, it would have been tricky to darken the sky without darkening its reflection in the water (though the darkening effect on the sky would have been more homogeneous, and not halo-like as seen here).

In any case I'd call this photo a success, requiring only very minimal post processing (some sharpening to enhance the texture of the bridge) and depicting a wonderful atmosphere. I very much like the pensive resting cyclist in the bottom right - and of course the Heidelberger wheat beer on the right ;)

[thechymera]

“Rehashed Mossy Sandstone” - A late-summer shot of the Heiligenbergturm atop the Heiligenberg in Heidelberg. Try saying that five times fast ;)

The Heiligenbergturm was built in the 19th century out of stone from the nearby Stephanskloster ruins as an outlook platform. It looks old, majestic, and is a great location for outdoor activities of both the drunken and the sober varieties. Not least of all its red sandstone and green velvety moss cover look just gorgeous in the late-afternoon sunlight.

Sandstone has always proven a bit difficult for me to post-process correctly, as it's difficult to recreate its natural vibrancy without burning any of the more saturated colors, and without resorting to wavelength-based saturation increase (which itself creates too steep a contrast between the bare and mossy sandstone). I hope I could do this wonderful structure some justice, though I fear the picture still falls a bit short of the actual scene's beauty ^^