I used to make a point of closeup nature photos, simplifying the complexity of plant structure down to a few lines, in dull light. For the first time in ages, I spent most of yesterday afternoon with just the old Helios 58mm lens attached, walking around, seeing what could be seen.
Didn’t expect ladybirds to feature at this time of year.
I spent a happy several hours wandering around The Hermitage by Dunkeld over the weekend, taking in very much the end of nature’s autumn displays – tree foliage fallen and fading, the light dull overcast all afternoon (and mostly raining, at that).
First, a few conventional scenes beside the River Braan and the Black Linn waterfalls from the bridge, as one does:
From there I explored a new direction away from the river, up through the Craigvinean woods to the Pine Cone viewpoint. The weather descended – from bright sunshine strolling through the colourful larches, it turned completely dreich grey and mist arose from the trees reducing visibility to barely 50yd. Quite spooky 🙂
On the way back, a particular beech tree caught my attention; with a bit of work, the 18mm prime revealed a particularly strong composition, illustrating the tree’s curving trunk. An unusual use for focus-stacking, too: it was so dark when I started the sequence, the camera was at 30s, ISO 400 even at f/2.0; by the time I finished 8 minutes layer, it was completely pitch black night.
In August I called in on an old friend in Inverary for a small guided tour around the local forests with camera in hand.
There was one particular photo I had in mind – ever since I first saw an old ruined barn with disused farm machinery, it was crying-out for the bokeh-panorama (aka Brenizer) technique – instead of one straight shot composed with the final focal-length in mind, one uses a longer lens (preferably a fast prime) and stitches the results into a panorama, to give an image with narrower DoF than was possible at the focal length in question.
Here’s the straight scene, taken on the Fuji X-H1 on the 16-50mm f/2.8 at 18mm – even wide open there’s no significant blurring in the background.
So here’s the stitched result, taken using a Helios 56mm f/2 wide open – drastic focus drop-off:
It took 100 frames at source – 2.4Gpx – but the result would be the equivalent of an 18mm lens at f/0.6.Â
The second technique was keystone/perspective adjustment. On seeing a stone waterworks in the woods, my friend challenged me to get a view of it straight-on without using the drone. That’s simple enough – even though it’s several feet above head-height.
The third technique was simple long exposure: night had long fallen before I left the town but the clouds moving across Loch Fyne/Shira looked pleasantly ominous. Keeping base ISO, f/6.4 gave a 7s base exposure – with HDR 5*±2/3EV this became 7+18+30+27+10 = 92s combined total, retaining exposure from brightest point of clouds into shadowy areas in the mountainsides. (Contrast is not just a daytime problem!)
Several long exposures blended together into an HDR image of clouds and smooth water, Loch Shira from Inverary.
For years I’ve been a fan of superresolution – taking multiple images of a scene with subtle sub-pixel shifts and upscaling before blending to give a greater resolution photo than any one source.
One of the features I used occasionally on the Pentax K-1 was its pixel-shift, whereby the sensor moved four times around a 1px square; this gives an improved pixel-level resolution and full chroma detail at each point.
Having exchanged that for the Fuji X-H1, I still look to perform super-resolution one way or another. Hand-held HDR always works – in this case even better than either the K-1 or the X-T20 because the X-H1 permits 5 or 7 frames per bracket at ±2/3EV each, which is ideal.
But I thought I’d experiment with a different approach: focus-stacking. This way, the camera racks the focus from foreground to background in many fine steps. Keeping the focal-length the same, the effective zoom changes subtly between successive images. Essentially, where hand-held HDR varies the position stochastically in an X-Y plane, focus-stacking means pixels from the source frames track a predictable radial line in the superresolved image.
The X-H1 has focus-bracketing but leaves the blending up to the user in post. That’s OK.
First, an overview of the scene:
Scene overview: Fuji X-H1, 18-135mm lens at 127mm, f/8 narrow DoF
The X-H1 made 50 frames, focussing progressively from front to back. These were blended using enfuse:
time align_image_stack -a /tmp/aligned_ -d -i -x -y -z -C [A-Z]*.{tif,tiff,jpg,JPG,png}
time enfuse -o "fused_$base" /tmp/aligned_* -d 16 -l 29 --hard-mask --saturation-weight=0 --entropy-weight=0.4 --contrast-weight=1 --exposure-weight=0 --gray-projector=l-star --contrast-edge-scale=0.3
The results are a little strange to behold – while the effective DoF is much increased (the distant wood texture is clear) the rock detail is quite soft; I suspect some of the above numbers need tweaking.
However, with a bit of work – both enhancing the local contrast and using in-painting to tidy up the rock itself – a pleasant image emerges:
The final polished result: banded rock on wood, Fuji X-H1
A definite improvement. I may have to use it in my landscape work a bit 🙂
A few weeks ago, I spent a happy Saturday afternoon strolling around the Birks of Aberfeldy, testing the newly acquired Fuji X-T20.
For context, a general landscape of the lower end of the gorge with the Moness water flowing around rocks and pebbles in the riverbed:
The Moness river flowing over rocks and pebbles
For consistency, everything else was shot coupled with the Helios 58mm f/2 lens using the Acros+Yellow black&white film emulation mode and ISO 200.
Some abstract tree foliage patterns:
Details of tiny flowers closeup:
Of all the mini-waterfalls up the left side of the gorge, I’m particularly fond of the way the water flows over the moss on this one:
Statue of Robert Burns sitting on a bench:
Scultpure of Robert Burns sitting on a bench at the Birks of Aberfeldy
Shortly after these photos were made, the heavens opened – a huge cumulonimbus cloud the shape of the Starship Enterprise disgorged itself over a lot of Highland Perthshire, flooding the roads in Aberfeldy itself; as I was walking down the north side of the gorge, it was quite disconcerting feeling the sandy gravel getting washed away in the channels underfoot. Fun fun!
A handful of photos from a walk in the woods in Morvern – mostly native birch and oak trees, back-lit by low golden late-afternoon sunlight – absolutely beautiful. Come walk with me.
Lady Mary’s Walk runs West from Crieff along the side of the River Earn, mostly on the flat until one reaches the foot of Laggan Hill after a mile or so, where it forms a circular route back to MacRosty Park.
At the end of April I went for a stroll to hunt bluebells.
The path was particularly pleasant – quiet, leading on through the woods.
As an aside, I’m sure there never used to be such a profusion of wild garlic on these Perthshire woodland nature trails 10 years ago – I only first encountered the stuff whilst out in Galloway.
I was a bit early for optimum bluebell season, but did find a few areas of good blue ground coverage:
And at the western extremity of the route there is a ruined house – it could be quite eerie given the right lighting.
One of my favourite walks around the local area is the Oak Walk – running along the edge of a large field, it gets beautiful evening sunlight and has some characterful trees
One or two local folk have populated it with wooden sculptures, for amusement factor
And the surrounding paths are well populated with wild raspberries, brambles and even willowherb/fireherb looking pretty in the light.
It’s been a lousy grey and wet day – definitely dreich – here, so here are a few photos of a walk I took down the road one evening a few weeks ago, on a lovely sunny day.
Graveyards? Not exactly my usual photographic cup of tea, but OK then…
Landscape is a bit more my scene, however. There’s some lovely undulating pastoral scenery around here, with views across to the distinctive shape of Ben Effray.
All photos made using the Olympus Pen-F and the four-thirds 12-60mm f/2.8 lens using 5-shot handheld HDR technique.
It’s been a while since I made photos of closeups in the woods – and for the most part, last time around I avoided contrasty light for the purpose too. Last night, I took a single prime lens (my favourite Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 of old) and one of my favoured strolls over Craigie Hill around the golf course, seeing what there was to be seen under the trees…
There’s an impressive outcrop of rocks (psammite and semi-pelite, looking rather like limestone) near the waterfalls in the River Affric. Some kindly soul had balanced these pebbles on a boulder on their way past previously.
The last in a short series of photos from a stroll around Perth.
These are all processed slightly differently from my usual workflow – instead of darktable, I used RawTherapee with a film emulation (allegedly Fuji Provia). As with the others in this series, all images were made on a Helios 58mm f/2 prime lens, pretty wide open.
For the final instalment in this series of images from Inverawe, three of the most characteristic subjects: sweeping lines of larch branches; a closeup of a particularly characterful oak leaf; and the road leading ever on and beyond.
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The beginnings of yummy juiciness – red and some ripe black blackberries.
I can never remember whether these are thistles or teasels. Either way, it’s quite an impressive ball of spikes.
Go on, say it: you don’t want to be sitting on that…
