An HDR Comparison

Posted on March 4, 2019 by Mike Nelson Pedde — 7 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

When you mention the term HDR, many people’s thoughts automatically jump to tonemapping and the results that can produce. That’s not what this post is about. If you don’t understand what HDR is all about or why you might want to use it in your photography, I suggest starting here: Why Use HDR? I’ll wait…

Okay, welcome back. I recently acquired a Sony A7R III and one of the features of this camera is that it has a very wide dynamic range – 12 to 14 stops are claimed. To that end, HDR capture with this camera isn’t often necessary. However, a friend of mine and I were out at Victoria’s famous Butchart Gardens last weekend and I wanted to try bracketing a few exposures just to see. Now, when it comes to the question of how many exposures to make and at what EV levels, there’s really only one answer: it depends. It depends on the scene and it also depends on the camera you’re using and what capabilities it has. For my experiment I decided to shoot 5 bracketed exposures at -4/-2/0/+2/+4 EV. Here’s an example of one of those combined images after having been pushed around a bit in Lr.

Continue Reading →

City of Angels

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Mike Nelson Pedde — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

On most evenings, around sunset, you’ll see groups of people gathered along the Dallas Road walkway that runs along the south shore of Victoria. Every sunrise and every sunset is unique, but sometimes the Earth just outdoes herself. This was January 24, 2019, at Holland Point.

Marcia’s image first. This is a composite of 10 cell phone images, joined up with Autopano Pro and pushed around a bit in Lightroom.

Mike recently received a new Sony A7RIII camera and has been playing with it a bit. Three images here, at different focal lengths:

57mm

24mm

12mm

Obviously, the sky and the ocean deserve most of the credit here. Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,

M&M

2018: A Photography Retrospective

Posted on December 31, 2018 by Mike Nelson Pedde — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

As we close out 2018, many photographers choose to offer their best 10 or 12 images of the year. We did something similar with our 2019 Photo Calendars post, but we wanted to offer our favourite images from the year as well. Perhaps not coincidentally, they were both featured in our upcoming calendar.

Marcia’s first:
Victoria is known as the city of flowers, and Marcia loves to do flower macros. The timing on this one allowed her to capture some of the morning’s moisture as well, and if you look in the spheres you can see continuing reflections of the flowers!

And Mike’s:
This is a composite image of 30 images, made on the trail near the Othello Tunnels outside of Hope, BC. Fortunately it was a relatively windless day, so the images stacked together added to the sense of flow in the water without too much movement in the leaves on shore.

Creating a retrospective is a worthwhile exercise for every photographer. We went through over 12,000 images to choose the 12 for our calendar images! With digital it’s easy to shoot a thousand images a day, but how many of them are your best work?

Now go out and make some images!

Hugs,
M&M

2019 Photo Calendars

Posted on December 19, 2018 by Mike Nelson Pedde — 14 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

This is the ninth year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with the past several years, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software. As we’ve done before we’ve also added a full-page calendar option, below.

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2016 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2016 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

Continue Reading →

Happy Father’s Day!

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Mike Nelson Pedde — Leave a reply

To all fathers and those who have assumed the role: uncles, aunts, grandparents, siblings, friends and others, today we salute you for the monumental task you have undertaken. Remember to lead with love.

Hugs,
M&M

Father and Son
(look closely)

2018 Photo Calendars

Posted on December 19, 2017 by Mike Nelson Pedde — 5 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

This is the eighth year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with the past couple of years, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software. As we’ve done before we’ve also added a full-page calendar option, below.

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – August

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Mike Nelson Pedde — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

August was a pretty quiet month for us, photographically at least. However, we did have a couple of interesting images to make. Marcia’s first:

ST EVAL

One day while we were down at the Inner Harbour, we spotted this yacht in port. She looks to be a converted fishing trawler, beautifully done up! We took three of Marcia’s images and combined them into one triptych.

Happy Faces!!

About a week later when Mike went to the grocery store he encountered this group, all with the most beautiful, happy faces! It was too good to pass by without making an image!

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M

Photo of the Month – June

Posted on July 6, 2017 by Mike Nelson Pedde — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

We had a fairly busy month photographically in June, including some time at the Oak Bay Tea Party and several walks along Dallas Road. It can be a challenge selecting one image from each batch for the month, but we’re happy with our choices. Marcia first:

Marcia’s image is a bit different from our regular work in that it was not only made with her phone, but processed using phone software as well. Prisma was used to create the slight graphic effect, and then that image was overlaid on the original image using Snapseed. Phones don’t have the memory or processing capacity of a computer, but used well they can still provide good results!

St. John’s Wort grows with wild abandon here in Victoria (although it’s not as invasive as some other species), and while we love its bright yellow flowers, it also reminds us of a short clip from the wonderful book ‘My Brother’s Farm‘ by Doug Jones. In the book he mentioned that his brother had tried to grow St. John’s Wort on the farm, but it wouldn’t take. His thought was, “I don’t know why…maybe it’s depressed.” 😉

We get some great clouds here in Victoria, both in the inner harbour and along the Dallas Road walkway, paralleling the Juan de Fuca Strait. This is a composite image made of four exposures, combined and pushed around some in Lightroom.

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M

Photo of the Month – Big Skies

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Mike Nelson Pedde — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

We thought we’d do a themed post for May’s images. Although Marcia is mostly renowned for her flower photography, she does in fact shoot a wide variety of other work as well! As we’re both big fans of clouds and cloud watching, we thought we’d use clouds as the basis for our photos of the month. Marcia’s first.

Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – April

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Mike Nelson Pedde — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

Eek! Already mid-May and we haven’t done a Photo of the Month post for April yet! Just so much happening in this town… At the end of April we had the opportunity to go out to Finnerty Gardens at the University of Victoria and wander around for a couple of hours. We had a great time. There’s one place in the gardens where four saplings have grown together, and where the stems join they form a perfect bowl. Victoria’s spring rains filled the bowl with water, and falling camellia flowers completed the scene. Here’s Marcia’s image!