Half Dome Fantasy

Half Dome Fantasy, originally uploaded by M0n0chrom3.

I've had this image sitting on my hard drive since my trip to Yosemite last summer. I never quite managed to render it in a way that I liked because it had too much dynamic range, but I recently experimented with the HDR tonemapping feature of CS2 (that I didn't know existed until recently). Basically, I loaded the 14-bit raw version of the image into CS2, changed bit depth to 32, then back again to 16, and the tonemapping dialogue appeared. A bit of fiddling later, and some minor dodging and burning and hey presto. :-)

I'm going to experiment a bit more with HDR techniques and probably write an essay on it when I have some interesting results, but so far I'm impressed with the possibilities. Not many people seem to do HDR black & white, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

Let there be lights...

I have wanted some kind of lighting for indoor photography for ages, but since I've typically mostly been an outdoor photography kind of person I never really quite got around to it. Well, I took the plunge today, and acquired a Westcott Spiderlite location kit.



It's a fairly basic studio lighting kit -- it comes in a soft flight bag, containing two stands, two lamp housings and two softboxes (one big one, one a bit smaller). Each lamp housing basically has five Edison screw bulb holders that are switched such that you can have 1, 2, 3, 4 or all 5 lights enabled. You can either get the kit with daylight balanced flourescents or strobes -- I actually paid slightly extra (surprisingly little) and got both, so I've now basically got mains powered high output strobes for portraiture and other medium format shenanigans, and continuous lights for use with the Better Light. I've not tried the strobes yet, partly because Keeble & Schucat only had one set in so I've only got enough for one head, and partly because I dumbly forgot to buy a PC cable (nothing to do with computers -- it's a standard flash sync cable). I did set up the Cambo, however, and fiddled around a bit photographing random stuff I found lying around. With both softboxes in relatively close, I can manage a 1/20th line time at 800 ASA at f/8 -- not blindingly bright, but enough to be going on with. Scans will be rather slow at that speed, but I can live with that. The lights run pretty cool, way cooler than hot lights -- the heads were hot to the touch but not extremely so after a couple of hours of continuous use with all 5 bulbs on in each head -- hot lights would be smoking by this time and would have most likely made the room unbearably hot. The colour temperature of the bulbs is rated at 5500K, and I've no reason to doubt it -- the light is very white to the naked eye, and with the default daylight balance setting on the Better Light there was very little colour cast, mostly the cyan shift caused by using the tungsten IR filter (I could probably use the daylight IR filter instead, but I often have problems controlling excessive IR with that filter so I pretty much always use the thicker tungsten filter instead). Doing a white balance off a piece of white mat board worked superbly -- the colour looked great, and there was no particular sign of noise at 800ASA (this is a typical Better Light feature -- the sensors have big 12 micron pixels so they tend to be substantially less noisy than conventional CCDs).

I've no pictures to post yet, it took me all evening to get them assembled and set up (and to clear out my work room so I had space to set everything up), but tomorrow I plan to have a go at some shots for a crazy project I have in mind that follows on from Chicken Egg Problem. I'll need a trip to Walmart first to acquire a few props, however.

I'll post more about this soon -- I'll put up a review of the lights once I've had a chance to use them for a couple of weeks (and try them with medium format too).