The Mysterious Forest

A Start Date Emerges

It's been a long slog getting this enterprise started but I can finally give a starting date for my adventure. Right now I should be arriving stateside around April 1 (no April Fool's jokes please) and a week or so later I can hit the road. My schedule for this cycle is somewhat truncated due to the awkward starting time. I'd originally hoped to be on the road around the first of the year but all this crap with Russian residency and registration took far longer than I'd expected (actually took 7 months all together). But the final nail was driven last Friday and now I can start getting serious about the logistics of moving forward.

The other part of this process is planning a schedule ... a moving target given the constant slippage of my starting date. I've pretty much concluded that, for the first few years anyway, I can't be on the road all the time or even a majority of the time. It takes practice to establish the correct rhythms which are, not too surprising, very different from a normal day. For example, much of my photographic activity takes place around sunset and sunrise with the intervening hours devoted to night sky and low light capture and many hours of the pristine darkness reserved for color grading and editing my work product. You'd be surprised how much time is devoted to just organizing and protecting all the data your cameras generate. That leaves the daylight hours for scouting locations, eating, driving, housekeeping and sleeping. I suspect an inordinate amount of time gets devoted to finding truck stops/campgrounds for showering and food stores/gas stations for all the provisions needed to keep my enterprise going and healthy. I suspect there won't be enough hours in the day for all the things I need/want to do.

So my plan is to spend half the year on the road (this year only 3 months due to the late start) and half the year with my family in Russia. As Russian winters are extremely hard on my asthma, I'll be forced stateside from around November first to the end of April. This isn't as inconvenient as it first appears as I can use the time off to process more photos and create videos from my time lapse efforts plus plan for the next cycle (which isn't as easy is one might think ... it's taken literally months to get ready for this truncated three month cycle).

Provisioning a 6-month Road Trip

Amazon and B&H Photo/Video must be tired of my incessant visits to their websites where I constantly groom the list of needs/wants for this business. There are lenses/filters/tripods and a host of other camera related items to buy plus a long list of essentials needed for survival. I've managed to find some really cool stuff by reading a long list of articles about 4x4 back country living and the 'RV life'. For instance, I've found a 12 volt refrigerator that uses an actual compressor (not thermoelectric coolers), made by an outfit in Australia, that is so frugal it runs off a parked car battery for days and leaves enough juice to start the engine. No more soggy bread or warm soda for me ... no sir! And a Honda generator that's so clean I can run my computers off it but is so quiet you need to really strain to hear it. Add to these all the basics one needs to live off the grid and it boggles the mind. Maybe someday I'll publish a list of all the items I've acquired during the first few months of this adventure. Sure hope the bank account holds up under the strain!

The Old Tree Deep in the Forest

I lived for many years in western Connecticut. One of my most favorite places in this world is a privately owned preserved in Washington, CT called Hidden Valley. To find it you head north from Danbury on Rt. 7 to New Milford ... look for the big iron bridge crossing the Housatonic River. Follow the signs through town to Rt. 202 and head north until reaching Rt. 47. Turn south and drive a few miles to Bee Brook bridge. Park in the gravel parking area just before the bridge and follow the trail to the river and beyond. It's an amazing place.

Anyway, during my last trip home I spent an afternoon wandering through the preserve, looking for interesting compositions. I found these two, old trees just off the trail. The wonderful grouping of tree trunks, moss and small plants really struck me. This is an HDR image with a bit of post in Photoshop. mostly to bring out the colors in the bark and to darken the background. What a wonderful place to drink in nature's beauty.

The Hidden Forest - 25 mm(1.6 crop), 1/2 sec, f/3.2 (license CC BY-NC 4.0)

Palace of Fine Arts

Pixel Wars

I'm presently updating my camera gear and have been watching very closely the current (and pending) offerings of both Canon and Sony bodies. For a while now the Sony sensor (used in both the Sony A7R and the Nikon D800/810) has been the king of the hill with 36 megapixels in a full frame format. An amazing instrument with wonderful dynamic range and the resolution ... truly mind boggling. Unfortunately, until a few weeks ago Canon was far behind with the 5D Mk III topping out at 'only' 22 megapixels. Still a respectable resolution but not in the same ballpark as the others. Well, that all changed last month with the announcement of the 5DS and 5DSR, anchored to a mind blowing 50.6 megapixel sensor. The few pictures I've seen from this monster are very impressive but so is the cost ... $3.6K. Not huge but a significant increase over the previous 5D body. For someone on a limited budget that's a significant hit.

But there's an even bigger issue with the mega bodies ... glass. There are few lenses that can measure up to the demands of this new camera. In fact, I'm convinced one of the reasons Canon held off on delivering 50+ megapixel full frame bodies is that they don't have lenses that can do justice to the staggering resolution. I'll discuss this more in a minute. There are, of course, 3-rd party lenses like the Zeiss offerings but they are all primes and rather expensive. I'm not poor but not rich either and buying a full complement of primes would break the Bank of England and my back. Unfortunately, the cheaper 3-rd party lenses just don't have the quality and resolution to work with these new cameras (the Sigma Art series may be an exception but they are not cheap either ... costing up to $1000 per copy). So, given my intention to buy one of these new cameras in the near future, what lenses am I buying now ...

The Great Lens Decision

I've spent a long time exploring the lenses that would form the basis of my new adventure. Good images need great glass. I've read many reviews and looked at a long list of candidates before settling on two that are, in my opinion, the best combination of versatility, resolution and price. I'll tell you which ones in a moment but I first want to point out a little measurement tool most non-professionals don't know about. It's called the lens' MTF or Modulation Transfer Function. This is a measurement of how the lens treats light and images. It is a theoretical process that takes known patterns, transforms them through the lens and measures the resulting distortion at the sensor. You can read a very good description of the process and the justification here, here and, for the technically challenged, here. For an excellent article (PDF) about reading MTF curves, go here. Although you needn't be an expert in optics to buy lenses, this set of curves can be a big help in cutting through the haze of propaganda most lens manufactures throw out there. They were a big help in my decision process.

The important thing to understand about MTF and lenses is the 'faster' the lens, the more likely it is to create issues with distortion and resolution. When you think about it, this is obvious. Fast lenses have larger apertures to let in more light (an f/2.8 lens gathers twice the light of an f/4). But, more light challenges the lens' elements to be ever more precise and 'perfect' until you reach the diffraction limit of the glass which is a point beyond which no lens can pass. It's the reason why Zeiss and Leica lenses cost more than a small car ... near perfection costs big money to achieve.

First off, both lenses I chose are zooms ... I need some versatility and need to limit my collection to just a few key elements. Zooms create additional challenges for lens design as the optics need to be nearly perfect as they shift relative to each other during the zooming process. It's hard enough to create a good prime and near impossible to create a good zoom. And the faster the zoom, the harder it is to get good images. Fact of life and not negotiable.

So, my selection criteria were as follows:

1) Has to be Canon as I'm already a Canon shooter and have an investment in bodies and compatible lenses. Don't have the money to switch horses midstream,

2) Weight is a significant factor. I'm not young anymore and my bad back can't take the weight of massive zoom lenses and heavy bodies,

3) Best resolution I can find so the eventual megapixel camera I buy isn't insulted by crappy glass,

4) Not so expensive I have to sell my children to get the money.

First Lens: Canon 70-200 f/4 zoom lens (available B&H)

The MTF for this lens is here while the f/2.8 version is here). Both are excellent at f/8 (the solid, heavy blue line at top of graph) but the faster f/2.8 has issues wide open (black solid heavy line) while the f/4 is much better. I read several reviews about the f/2.8 which expressed disappointment with softness on the edges and that was using a 5D Mk III. On the higher resolution sensors it would be disastrous. I'd be forced to use the lens at f/4 or lower just to keep the softness from ruining my images. Given that, why waste a grand (criteria 4) and twice the weight (1.67 vs. 3.28 lbs) (criteria 2) for a lens I can't use wide open? So I got the f/4 version and will live with the minor inconvenience of losing a stop in speed.

Second Lens: Canon 16-35 f/4 zoom lens (available B&H)

The MTF for this lens is here and the f/2.8 version is here. In this case, the f/4 is far better even at f/8. Again, reviews didn't like the softness from the f/2.8 while they raved about the f/4. I saved $400 and a bit of weight (1.3 vs. 1.4 lbs) but got a much better lens. Speed isn't an issue for me as most of my work is landscape and equivalent.

As I get better at this and, hopefully, make a few dollars I'll buy some fast primes to compliment my zooms. I've already got my eye on the new Sigma 24 mm f/1.4 for night sky photography and other pursuits requiring a really fast lens. And should I get the soon to be released Sony A7R Mk II or the A9, there are some very nice Sony/Zeiss lenses to choose from. But, for now, I've got two excellent lenses that will be more than adequate for the next body I get.

The Grand Pavilion

A couple years ago I was in San Francisco visiting my kid and had a few days to wander around the city. Although I lived in the area for years, I never had the chance to explore the Palace of Fine Arts which is a great park not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. I've seen lots of pictures shot looking across the lake to show the pavilion but never have I seen a picture taken on the inside. Unfortunate as the dome is beautiful and impressive. To get this shot, I got low to the ground and shot upward, taking 2 sets of brackets images for HDR and to combine in a vertical panorama.

I've revisited these images several times as my knowledge has improved. For a long time I couldn't get the pano to work as I'd not taken into account the parallax issues and didn't use a pano head so my first several efforts showed only part of the full picture taken from the bottom shot. That changed a few weeks ago when I finally got the two image pairs to match in Photoshop using PhotoMerge. I also tried Hugin (an open source pano stitcher that's really powerful for multi-row image sets) but found it didn't give me as good an image.

I have to admit I really don't like this image all that much for several reasons. First there's the pano issue which, while resolved, isn't perfect. Photoshop had to distort the bottom image way out of proportion because of the parallax mismatch between the two images. Second, for some reason I shot the images at f/22 and the diffraction killed the resolution. Couldn't see that on the small screen but it's obvious if you blow the image up to 100%. Third, the sky really sucked during my visit. The salty air around San Francisco can turn the sky a very pale, washed out blue which is very unappealing and is hard to work around. Finally, I was in a rush to visit lots of places around the city and didn't wait for some better light and the image suffers as a consequence. But I wanted to put it here to show the great lengths I went to to get a reasonable image.

One major problem is I didn't get the image accurately centered in the camera. Notice how the dark triangle on the upper left side is larger than on the right and how the left urn seems to be lower in the image than the right. I could have rotated and cropped the image but that often causes issues with softness and distortion. I'm trying to learn what processing steps cause the greatest image distortion as this will be a major issue when I get the megapixel camera. Again, that rushing thing and a problem I'm working really hard to overcome. Returning to this exact place with the right equipment is on my bucket list and may happen this year if things work out as planned.

Palace of Fine Arts - 17 mm (1.6 crop), f/22, 1/6 second (license CC BY-NC 4.0)

After running the image sets through PhotoMatix I used PhotoMerge in Photoshop to create the final panorama. As I said before, the image is somewhat distorted because this utility had to stretch the bottom image to get the columns to match up correctly. The result isn't too bad as you get this dramatic impression of looking very far up but you do get a surreal feeling when looking at it.

There was some serious chromatic aberration around the arches which had to be fixed. I'd tried to remove most of it using the tools in Adobe Camera Raw and PhotoMatix but there was still a strong purple fringe in the left arch (see below). I discovered the best way to eliminate this was to select the fringe using the Select > Color Range tool and adjust the settings until I'd gotten most of the pixels. I then used my paint brush and selected a color close to the fringe (from the building side) to paint away the fringe. Worked really well for the most part ... however there's no way to fix the crappy focusing and diffraction. That needs a better, more experienced operator (me) behind the lens.

Chromatic aberration at it's best

It doesn't get any uglier than this

The image at left highlights the big issue for this image. I have this really impressive structure which ought to blow your socks off and the beautiful arches are flooded with some of the ugliest light I've every seen. Totally washed out and uninteresting. This had to be fixed but the fix was ugly. I don't normally like to doctor images, especially the sky, and I'm willing to fall on the sword for violating my promise never to do anything like this. I'm not selling this photo for that reason. But I wanted to see what I could do with this image so was willing to make this compromise for the purpose of learning what to do. Fortunately I live in Albuquerque which has an abundance of beautiful clouds so I took the image from there and worked it into the Palace of Fine Arts.

This is Photoshop and not express so I don't know how much of this can be done with this more basic tool. I used the "Magic Wand" selection tool to pick the bright pixels in all three arches. The cloud image was put on a layer above the panorama with a mask that was mostly black except for the three arches which were white. I feathered the mask edge by 1.5 pixels to remove that telltale edge one often sees with merged photos. As you can see, the effect is quite dramatic and elevates the image to a higher level. Just wish the clouds were from California, not New Mexico.

There were also some local corrections for color and to remove a few inconvenient flares that marred the final image. But, given what I started with, not a bad outcome. However, this image was a brutal teacher for me. Like my high school drafting teacher who used to throw erasers at inattentive students, this set of images kicked me hard. Lack of patience and inexperience with the camera (which was all of 3 weeks old at the time) set me up to miss a golden opportunity. I'm not so dependent on the camera making correct decisions anymore and now use a lot more manual focusing. I'm also getting a reasonable size tablet computer that plugs into the camera so I can look at the image more carefully and get a better focus. And I'm starting to think a lot more about depth of field and shutter speed and noise and all the things that separate a serious photographer from an 'enthusiast'. So I'm grateful to this image for being hard on me. I've learned a lot more from it than almost any other image I've taken.