Finishing Up August With a Mix

I'm going to share some photos from the time since my last blog post to end up the month of August.

First, I made some shots at a flute concert held in an old stone church last Friday. I had my 5D Mark III and 50mm f/1.8 STM lens. 

The next morning I did some walking around Cohoes and caught a different view of the water tower on Peebles Island and some low water on the first branch of the Mohawk River from a bridge on Ontario Street.

Lastly, yesterday I was walking on Van Schaick Island and ran into a pretty cool buck which was bigger than I am. I was about fifty feet away from him and didn't really want to hang around as he didn't show the slightest fear of me.

Old Canal Reflections

Once again, I was out with a crop sensor body and a 200mm lens looking for wildlife to shoot. This time up along the old Champlain Canal North of Waterford, NY. Like last time, I didn't get wildlife shots but came away with some decent reflections in the dark, still waters of the canal.

Here are some of the results, all single file images processed normally in Canon's DPP software.

Canon 7D, EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM, f/2.8, 1/500 sec., ISO 400

Canon 7D, EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM, f/2.8, 1/125 sec., ISO 400

Canon 7D, EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM, f/4, 1/1500 sec., ISO 400

Canon 7D, EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM, f/2.8, 1/250 sec., ISO 400

Hydroelectric Dam Abstracts

I walked around Peebles Island yesterday morning with my EOS 7D and the 200mm f/2.8L lens that I'm trying to sell. I was mostly looking for wildlife but didn't have much luck in that department.

The Mohawk River is running a little high due to the over an inch and a half of rain the region received two days ago. The hydroelectric dam that runs between Peebles Island and Bock Island is still missing its wooden extension although the wooden supports are now also gone and the water flows smoothly over the concrete dam. You can read about the dam in a blog post here.

Carrying only the crop sensor 7D and the 200mm (320mm equivalent) lens, I was limited in my compositional options. The 7D will only bracket three files so I exposed normal, - 1 1/2 and + 1 1/2 EV files. The 200mm lens does not have image stabilization but the 7D shoots at 8 frames a second so hand held HDR processing was a possibility.

Here are some results, all processed simply with Photomatix Pro's default presets.

One More From Yesterday

I want to tear down one other image from yesterday morning. Like the others, the final image is a five file HDR composite. This one, though was zoomed all the way out at 24mm to get the clouds and their reflection in the water where the Mohawk River meets the Hudson River.

The 24-105mm lens at 24mm does have a bit of corner vignetting and the HDR processing amplifies that quite a bit. Normally I just use the RAW files from the camera in the HDR software but for this I first corrected for the vignetting in Canon software and saved them as TIFF files for the HDR processing.

This first file is the normally exposed scene prior to any lens correction:

24mm, f/5.6, 1/180 sec., ISO 100

Here is the same file after correcting for lens aberrations including distortion:

Here is the five file HDR processed end result using the Painterly 2 presets on Photomatix Pro:

Here's what the image would look like without correcting the RAW files first:

Finally, the geography portion of the post. This cropped section of the image shows Peebles Island, Waterford, Saratoga County in the foreground. The sandy beach is on the tip of Van Schaick Island, Cohoes, Albany County and the shoreline on the left is mainland Troy, Rensselaer County.

A Late Start for August

Part of the reason for a late start to blogging in August is the demise (mostly) of my 2010 MacBook Pro. At the end I had to use a mouse and a USB keyboard to do any work at all. The replacement 2015 MacBook Air has the same RAM and storage size but it has a faster processor, the storage is an SSD rather than a hard drive and the screen resolution is 1440x900 rather than 1280x800.

The new computer processes photo files noticeably faster and has USB-3 ports which will transfer files much faster. A Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter lets me use my firewire drives without having to resort to their slower USB-2 alternative connections.

Today is the first chance I've had to process files on the new machine. My walk over to and around Waterford afforded the material. My 5D Mark III and 24-105mm lens were the capturing tools. The new computer and Photomatix Pro software were the processing tools for five file HDR images.

82mm, f/8, ISO 100

55mm, f/8, ISO 100

28mm, f/8, ISO 100

32mm, f/8, ISO 100