I've been home 2 weeks now and, surprisingly, am still plagued by exhaustion. I'm sleeping a lot more than I should, much to the consternation of my wife and daughter. I just can't seem to get back on Moscow time no matter what I do. I've probably had one night of good sleep so far but most I get maybe 4 hours and wake up just as the sun comes up. Really not sure what's causing this but it's a major headache. I've been using a new asthma inhaler which sort of works but I still find myself short of breath much of the time. Maybe that's the issue ... the new med may be making me sleepy and I may be chronically short of oxygen. Oh well...
As for my processing, it's proceeding slowly. As I feared, many of my images are not all that impressive. I knew I had an issue with holding steady ... I've discovered that my sense of balance isn't what it used to be and that really messes with holding still during longer exposures. Even with stabilization turned on I find too many images are blurred and worthless. Add to that I wasn't really able to get in a groove with the new camera and too many of my images are not in focus or the exposures are wrong. Not sure yet what the problem was/is but I need to figure it out by next year. Probably just need to get time with the instrument so I can learn it's sweet spots. Really hope it's not the camera.
Photomatix & chromatic aberrations
Chromatic aberrations (CA) are the bane of every photographer's work. They are a fact of life, an issue with every lens ever made. Because glass bends different colors of light at different angles, there are always issues with color fringing. This is especially an issue when an image goes from bright to dark. I'm sure you've seen them if you look at your pictures close enough. Photomatix, the HDR software, has the ability to remove CA but there's a problem. In some images, especially when there is a very strong transition from bright sun to heavy shade and it's very sharp, you tend to get bleeding from the bright area into the dark. This is an acute issue at higher f-numbers. Because of the way Photomatix works, it merges and tone-maps the various exposures before attempting to remove CA and that's an issue. If you have any of this bleeding in your brighter exposures, the resulting merged image has a very messy transition between light and dark and the CA algorithm can't handle the transition. That means you have an ugly fringe along the transition and it's really noticeable. You can't really fix this after the merge. So, to remove the issue you need to run a CA pass on the photos BEFORE putting them into Photomatix. I use the excellent CA in Lightroom which is available in the Develop module under "Lens Corrections". If you do this first and then use Photomatix the problem disappears. Check out the light/dark transition in today's image ... middle of the photo on the left side. No CA to be found but boy was there an ugly mess there without correction.
Capitol Reef
I had never heard of this national park until I saw it on the Utah map. It's been around for a long time but gets very little attention. It's really a hiker's park as there aren't a lot of things to see from the road. I also didn't have a lot of time there as the campground was full and there weren't a lot of places to pull off and sleep. All parks discourage your sleeping in the observation areas although I do on occasion break this rule in some of the larger parks. I even get a 'wink' from the rangers as they tell me it's not allowed. But Capital Reef was very adamant that I couldn't sleep in the park. So I decided to find a good spot for a sunset shoot and then move on. Little did I know that 'moving on' would entail driving for several hours on very dark mountain roads to find a rest area. Saw way too many large elk standing at the road's edge ... all it would have taken was for one to jump out in my path and I would have been ... literally ... roadkill. Driving at night in the mountains is not a good idea.
After driving up and down the only major park road I found a spot just south of the campground. These huge vertical walls just screamed out to be part of the image and the road had just the right curve to make it an interesting compositional element. I was fortunate that the sky cooperated with a massive, dark cloud bank in just the right spot. And the sky was completely open to the west so the sun could make it's contribution to the overall look. I parked and waited. As the show progressed I kept taking 5 image sequences, spaced 1 ev apart. It took a while but was worth it. The resulting image is the essence of Capitol Reef ... wild and utterly amazing.
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| Capitol Reef Sunset - 16mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,copyright CC BY-NC 4.0 |
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