The Wooden Bridge: Editing from Start to Finish in ON1 Photo Raw 2020

Once a year, I get together with a German friend that I met on an Olympus camera group on Facebook and we shoot together for a day or two. I say once a year, we managed it for the second year in a row last weekend, but it works so well that we're both adamant that we want to keep going. Both occasions have been incredibly productive photographically, partly as it's normally the only time in the year that I get up to catch sunrise on the Alps from home.

The Covered Bridge || Olympus 8 mm HDR f/8, 1 s, ISO 200 

Last year, we headed down to Füssen and the Stuiben Falls for some epic waterfall shots. This year I wanted to check out a composition that I'd driven past many times but never stopped for and then head to the Zipfelsbach waterfalls at Bad Hindelang. Covid prevented us from entering Austrian Tirol and so we had to stay on this side of the border. There was a chance of a decent sunrise, so I dragged myself out of a warm bed at 5.30 am, grabbed a quick breakfast and coffee before hitting the road. Matthias had driven down the day before and we'd had a productive afternoon in a nearby woods shooting mushrooms and fungi.

Dawn wasn't a huge success, but we did confirm that the composition was solid: a gently snaking farm track leading up to a village church with the Allgäu mountains in the background. Definitely something to be repeated in better conditions.

Dawn at Seeg || Olympus 8 mm HDR f/8, 1/3 s, ISO 200

The weather wasn't great - I tend to be a sunshine photographer, but Matthias seemed happy enough with the cloud cover. Grey days are great for waterfalls and so we headed down to Hinterstein to check out a location that I'd been to with the family earlier in the year and wanted to spend a little longer at. When we were there in May it was a hike rather than a photo jaunt and I wanted to spend a little longer trying to get some better compositions. Diffuse light is much better than direct sunlight for waterfalls due to the huge dynamic ranges involved - the highlights are really bright and the shadows are really dark, a challenge for any camera.

Driving up into the mountains from Seeg, the atmosphere became really moody and we had to actually stop once or twice to get the cameras out and take in the scenes around us, whether the misty fir trees or a hilltop signifying the change of season. It was nice to not have to be going anywhere or getting anywhere, just driving and being able to stop for 10 minutes here and there to take it all in and try to capture the atmosphere around us. I've long been trying to build in the communication of mood into my photos. The conditions made it easy.

Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold || Olympus 100 mm f/5.6, 1/13 s, ISO 200 

Autumn into Winter || Olympus 86 mm f/7.1, 1/5 s, ISO 200

We managed to get a few decent compositions of the waterfalls in the gentle drizzle before heading back down to Hinterstein with a view to finding lunch in the valley. On the road in, we'd noticed a covered wooden bridge on the side of the road and on a whim we decided to stop and check it out. After struggling to find a parking spot in the tiny village we took the cameras and tripods back to the bridge to see what we could find. Very quickly we realised that we'd struck gold. The bridge sits beautifully in the valley with wooded hills behind. The deciduous trees adjacent to the bridge were in good autumn colour and the river colour was a delightful turquoise.

Zipfelbach Waterfall || Olympus 21 mm f/9, 1/2 s, ISO 200

Not only that the bridge sat at the end of a horseshoe bend in the river. It was a bit overcast, but we reckoned we could make something of it nevertheless. We probably spent the best part of 30 minutes working the scene in order to get the best composition before we decided that there wasn't much more that we could do before heading back to the car and searching for an elusive lunch. One of us would spot one compositional element then the other another, walking up- and downstream looking for the best vantage point. From a certain angle you could just make out last night's snow on the hills behind, from another you could block out the road on the other side of the river, from another you could catch the whole river bend and bridge in one shot; it was a real game of cat and mouse to get the right composition. Personally I wasn't overly happy with the light, but I was very smug that once again my nose for a potential composition had proved right.

The Photo(s)

I tried a couple of standpoints along the river, shooting both portrait and landscape, trying to get the snow in and working with and without the grassy bank. Even in the dull-ish light we were having to take multiple shots to get the exposure right, underexposing to get the highlights and re-taking the shot over-exposed to get the shadow detail, a process called exposure bracketing that most modern cameras offer. 

I also used the on-board ND filter function of the camera to slow down the river. Rather than freezing the motion with a single short exposure, it adds a sense of calm to a water photo if you can take a longer exposure, evening out the flow.

Assembling the Panorama Images of the Bridge

On the single shots I also used a circular polariser to cut down the glare on the water, revealing the beautiful colours and stones beneath the surface. Using a polariser can make stitching panorama shots together tricky though, so for the panorama I took it off. Taking a panorama of a scene like this is relatively easy if you follow a few basic rules: 

• always shoot in manual so that the exposure is exactly the same for all the shots, exposing for the brightest part of the scene
• if necessary bracket the exposures (see above)
• focusing manually can help too, making sure that you avoid inadvertently focusing on a blade of grass in front of the camera for the critical middle shot
• make sure the camera is horizontal before you start
• overlap each photo by about a third to make the stitching easier

I did a double exposure for each shot, which actually caused me difficulties in the end - I should have done three, but more of that in the processing.

The Edit

I first bought ON1 Photo Raw soon after buying my Olympus E-M1 Mk II in March 2019. Up until then I was using Photoshop Elements as my main processing software, which only allowed me to perform universal edits. I looked long and hard at the market leading Adobe Lightroom, darling of professional landscape photographers all over, but was put off by the subscription-based approach to purchasing the software; you could only rent the software rather than buying it outright, a concept I couldn't warm to. Looking around for suitable alternatives I finally landed on ON1 (pronounced "on one"), a software that started out as a plug-in for Photoshop but which had relatively recently become a standalone product.

In the meantime I consider myself a relatively advanced user; I develop all of my photos with ON1 - with the exception of astro- and lunar photos as the sole image processor - and I think that I have a relatively good grasp of its capabilities.

Nevertheless, this next shot almost cost me my composure. I couldn't for the life of me get it to look how I wanted it, and in no way did it match Matthias' HDR image of the scene. 

To start with, I had a 9-shot panorama taken at 18 mm (36 mm full-frame equivalent) in portrait. Each shot was double - one light one dark for the sky.

The first step was to stitch each of the two panoramas separately in ON1 and then combine them to get exposure blending. I'd previously done a quick HDR exposure blend of another shot to get a feel for how it might turn out:

Colours are working, but missing the river bend...

The colours of the shot above are relatively pleasing (to my eye at least), as is the tonal range, so imagine my surprise when I stitched my panorama together and got this:

A Pale Comparison

No manner of shifting the white balance and trying to modify the colours would let me get anywhere near this. ON1 wouldn't let me combine the two panoramas for an HDR image. At first I thought it was  because there were only two images and an HDR customarily uses three, but it wouldn't accept the format of the stitched panoramas. So I created a third panorama of the darker series, artificially underexposed it and tried again, with the same result.

In the end, I had to create an HDR from each of the seven panels I ended up using for the final panorama, saving these as information-rich TIFs and then stitching those together to get the final image. Fortunately, this worked, but by this time I'd burnt through the best part of the evening trying to bend the original panoramas to my will.

And the Three Shall Be One!

This is the raw product of the panorama of the HDR images:

Our Starting Point

Now the editing can start. I don't generally do much in the way of global edits in the Develop tab of ON1 unless it's to rescue some highlights at a later stage. Most of my editing I do using a bunch of Effect Filters that I pre-load into each image prior to processing using a privately created preset. A preset is a bunch of amendments that you can apply to a photo in one go. I have one with all of my commonly used Effect Filters loaded and ready to go, but unselected. These are (in no particular order):

• Vignette: Big softy, set at 50% and active
• Curves: Unmodified but active

The following Filters are pre-loaded but in an inactive state:

• Tone Enhancer: Clarity
• Tone Enhancer: Shadows Lighter
• Tone Enhancer: Highlights Darker
• Tone Enhancer: Midtones Lighter
• Tone Enhancer: Tonal Contrast
• Colo(u)r Enhancer: Increase Colour
• Colo(u)r Enhancer: Warmer
• Dynamic Contrast
• Glow: Angel Glow

Many of these effects could be achieved using the Curves filter, but I find it convenient to process my images this way. Each of the Filters is clearly labelled and ready to switch on at the click of a radio button. In addition, I have four Local Effect Filters charged and ready to go: Darken (-1 EV), Lighten (+1 EV), Dehaze Adjustment and Vibrance Adjustment. The main differences between Effects and Local is that the former are normally applied to the whole image by default and the latter applied locally with a brush and the Local Effects are basically a repetition of the global adjustments of the Develop tab, whereas the Filter Effects go way beyond this.

I'll briefly go through all the edits I made to this image together with a quick explanation of why I did it and what part(s) of the image I did it to. The differences between individual images will be very subtle, especially at this resolution, but compare the starting point above with the final image at the bottom and you'll find a very different picture.

Crop

My first step with any image is to crop and level it using the crop tool. Here I just pulled in a bit of the image from each end and lost some of the unnecessary grass in the foreground. At the same time, I stamped out the awkward sapling centre picture and the electric fence by the logs and dulled down the repaired plank on the left of the bridge by locally reducing the saturation.

Colour Enhancer: Increase Colour

Applied just to the river to increase the saturation of the water. Applied using a gradient filter to exclude the trees in the middle as well as the grass in the foreground. Set at 40% opacity.

Tone Enhancer: Darken Shadows

The HDR process took a little too much contrast away, so instead of the usual Lighten Shadows, I used the opposite to bring a bit more substance to the image. Applied globally at 50% opacity.

Dynamic Contrast

There are at least five ways of adding sharpening detail in ON1; Structure in the Develop module or Sharpening, Tone Enhancer: Clarity, Tone Enhancer: Tonal Contrast and Dynamic Contrast. All five do the same or similar things in subtly different ways: they increase contrast in small areas of the image where there are light and dark edges - so-called micro contrast. The theory isn't terribly important, but it's something that should be used with caution. It's easy to add a ton of clarity (generic term, common also to Lightroom) to a picture and it'll look awful.

The different types of sharpening work best for different aspects of a picture. For example, I've found in ON1 that a little bit of Tonal Contrast works really well on adding a bit of detail to forest foliage. Dynamic Contrast, on the other hand, is great at bringing out a bit of detail in wood grain or rocks. In this image I used a masking brush to apply a little Dynamic Contrast to the rocks left and right of the bridge by the water and a little more to the bridge itself.

Tone Enhancer: Tonal Contrast

As mentioned above, a little Tonal Contrast gives a hint of crispness to the edges in forests. I used a radial filter here to add it to the centre of the picture.

Colour Enhancer

Painted in to reduce the saturation and brightness of the grass bank in the foreground whilst at the same time shifting the hue from green towards yellow. The bright green was too dominant in the photo and keeping the eye from progressing to the water and autumn foliage.

Colour Enhancer: Warmer, Colour Enhancer: Fall

Added globally at 100% and 50% respectively to bring out the autumn colours.

HDR Look

I very rarely use this quite strong filter, but here I used it at 45% across the picture to add a bit of brightness to the picture. A Sunshine filter would have had a similar effect, increasing brightness and decreasing darker portions of the photo.

Sunshine

Having mentioned the Sunshine filter, I thought I'd try it out. It adds an extra pep to the image too. Applied at 50% globally.

Glow: Orten

The Orten Effect is an interesting one, again I don't use it often. It adds a sort of ghostly glow that fits a slightly gloomy image like this.

And that's more or less it. I desaturated a tree that looked a tad over-saturated, darkened the grass bank a little more, opened up (lightened) the shadows under the roof of the bridge, lightened the rocks to the left of the bridge and I think that's about as good as I can get it. It sounds like a lot, and it is a lot more than I would do on most images - the easy ones I process in about 2-5 min, but it was necessary and, I believe, worth the effort.

The Covered Bridge || Olympus 7 Shot HDR Panorama

Osttirol Revisited - Part II

The dream is relatively straightforward and specific; buy up an old farmhouse with a barn but not too much land somewhere close to Lienz. The farmhouse has a large country-style kitchen with a massive table. The barn will be converted into holiday accommodation; downstairs the guest rooms and upstairs a massive open-air space that will serve as kitchen, dining room, living room, seminar room and anything else you'd chose to use it for. The barn will be available to rent for small groups of up to 10 people, mostly self-catering but with the option of breakfast in the farmhouse if needs be. It'll open for pretty much any type of group accommodation, but the focus will be on photo safaris and workshops in the surrounding mountains. Both the main chain of the Alps and Cortina - the heart of the Dolomites - will be within easy driving distance for day tours. When the kids visit, there will be plenty of room for them and when we get too infirm to run the photo safaris, we'll still have the additional income of the holiday let to fall back on. Like I say, straightforward and strangely specific.

Covered Bridge, Matrei || Olympus 25 mm, f/8, 1/40 s, ISO 200

In the meantime, I've got a few years to work on my photography and instructor skills. I'm not yet where I want to be, but I'm happy with the trajectory so far as I look back over the last two years. We'll keep you posted.

But back to our most recent foray to Osttirol.

Matrei and Kals

To change things up a bit, instead of hiking we decided to rent some trekking bikes and cycle up the valley along the Isel, a tour that I would recommend to anyone, especially the way round we did it; Lienz-Matrei-Lienz. The tour gains around 300 m in altitude over about 30 km - 300 m that are much more acceptable downward than up after lunch! 

The cycle ride up to Matrei was good fun if a little challenging in places. The bikes we'd rented from Probike Lienz (for a very reasonable price) admirably did the job of getting us up the valley and the views on the trail, which changes from one side of the river to the other, are varied. We found Matrei asleep at lunchtime, the streets practically deserted. Part Corona, part mid-day slump on a hot day. Quizzing the waiter in the pizzeria, even without Corona the village is quiet on sunny summer days as the tourists are all up in the mountains at midday.

Old Matrei || Olympus 24 mm, f/8, 1/40 s, ISO 200

After visiting the National Park Centre (really a must if you're in town), it was out into the streets. There are a couple of really quaint corners of old Matrei near the Park Centre, including the neighbouring Pfarre Matrei church, a couple of old wooden houses and the lovely covered bridge over the Bretterwandbach stream that bisects the village. 

Parish Church, Matrei || Olympus 13 mm, f/8, 1/200 s, ISO 200

One of my favourite scenes of the day was a little church on the hillside above the Isel in the tiny village of Gereiter.

St. Niklas, Matrei || Olympus 100 mm, f/8, 1/100 s, ISO 200

We stopped off on the way back to go up the Hochstein chairlifts and take in the view down the Drau valley. Of course, if you're up here already, you may as well come down on the Osttirodler, probably the coolest summer Rodelbahn out there.

The next day saw us up in Kals, a picturesque village at the foot of the Großglockner, July is still a little bit ahead of the main summer season and so only the cable car open was the one up to the Adlerlounge and so we headed up to the Rotenkogel before hitting the thoroughly recommendable Kals Matreier Törl Hütte. If you're ever up there, just don't forget to ask for Gina 😉. 

Towards the Großglockner || Olympus 12 mm, f/16, 1/125 s, ISO 200

Kals Matreier Törl Hütte || Olympus 34 mm, f/8, 1/160 s, ISO 200

On the way back we stopped off at the spectacular Staniska waterfall - always worth a visit either on the way to or from Kals from Lienz and really low hanging fruit - you have to walk 10 m from the car park to set up your camera! Generally I prefer shooting waterfalls in more subdued light because of the high contrast situation you'll often find, but the full-on afternoon sunshine here didn't detract too much. I used a variable ND filter here to reduce the light level so that I could shoot at 1/10 s to blur the water.

Staniska Waterfall || Olympus 14 mm, f/22, 1/10 s, ISO 64

Lienzer Dolomites

If you've seen any photos of the Lienzer Dolomites, you'll have probably seen shots of the beautiful Dolomitenhütte. This delightful hut lies at the starting point of many tours in the Lienzer Dolomites. You can drive up from the valley to 1,600, saving yourself a 1,000 m slog up a fairly boring track. From the Kreithof it's a toll road. Unless... We were camping at the Tristacher See and wanted to drive up for dinner at the hut accompanied by shooting the sunset. We drove up to the toll booth and found the barrier up and the hut unoccupied. Asking at the Hütte the road is open from 17.00 onward and you can drive up to the hut without paying the € 8.50 fee.

In the Stube, Dolomitenhütte || Olympus 44 mm, f/4, 1/3 s, ISO 200

Unfortunately the terrace was full, but inside the hut is very appealing too and so we settled down to dinner, waiting for the sun to set. We were not disappointed! The light was challenging - classical sunset problems of bright skies and dark foregrounds. I started writing how I overcome this problem in this post but decided that it was probably better in a post of its own. I'll post it later and link here.

Dolomitenhütte at Sunset I || Olympus 50 mm, f/5.6, 1/50 s, ISO 200

Dolomitenhütte at Sunset II || Olympus 23 mm, f/5.6, 1/125 s, ISO 200

The next day Sharon drove me up to the Kreithof and then went off with the kids to do another Klettersteig that was outside of my comfortable power to weight ratio, leaving me to meander down to Lavant on my own and take time over the photos. It was another case of everything going different than planned: I'd understood that there was a small gorge on the descent to the valley and a massive waterfall just beyond the village at the bottom. The gorge proved to be pretty much unshootable and I couldn't get to the waterfall because there was too much shooting! The Austrian army was using their firing range  at the bottom of the Frauenbach waterfall, preventing access. 

Emerald Beetle || Olympus 100 mm, f/8, 1/60 s, ISO 200

Harebells || Olympus 66 mm, f/4.5, 1/400 s, ISO 200

None of this stopped me from getting some lovely woodland images on the walk down and some decent shots of the St. Ulrich church above the village. There's a 'Stations of the Cross' path leading up to St. Ulrich and I followed this down into the old part of Lavant. The path comes out an old farm that looked like just the sort of place that I'd envisioned. After establishing that the Frauenbach waterfall was off the ticket for the day I went into a local restaurant to sate my thirst. The village lies at the northern foot of some pretty steep mountains. Speaking to the locals at the restaurant I discovered that the village doesn't see sun for two months a year - it simply doesn't get high enough behind the Lienzer Dolomites to shine. That's Lavant crossed off the list then!

St. Ulrich, Lavant || Olympus 29 mm, f/4, 1/500 s, ISO 200

The Wicked Woman

On our last day, the kids decided that they weren't getting enough exercise and went off mountainbiking on their own, leaving Sharon and I to drive up to the Hochsteinhütte above Lienz and from there to hike up the wonderfully named "Böses Weibele" - I think literally the Evil Wench. One of the many attractive things about Osttirol is the sheer variability of the mountains, from the high Alps of the Groß Venediger and Großglockner to the impressive crags of the Lienzer Dolomites and the more gentle slopes of the Vilgratener Mountains to the west. 

Down the Drau Valley || Olympus 13 mm, f/8, 1/250 s, ISO 200

The Böses Weibele was a fitting final tour - an Ausklang or finale. Only 500 m up from the 2,000 m high car park. The trail leads along a gently climbing long ridge up to the Weibele with amazing views both of the Drau and Isel valleys. As we were approaching the summit, Sharon spotted a bird hovering above the slopes not far from us - a kestrel. He/she didn't appear to be in any hurry, giving me time to swap out lenses for my longer-reaching Panasonic f/4-5.6 100-300 mm lens. She disappeared for a moment, swooping down on some prey, drifted down away towards Assling before returning to her starting point, letting me snap away in continuous shooting mode. Don't ask me how many shots I rattled off! This was about the best I could make of it. A shot I'm happy with, especially as the bird is nicely lit against a relatively dark background rather than being a black silhouette against a bright sky, but it's still not absolutely sharp. Probably my favourite shot of our time in Osttirol though as I've been looking at getting an image like this of a kestrel for a while.

Kestrel on the Böses Weibele || Olympus 300 mm, f/6.3, 1/2000 s, ISO 500

Location Scouting for Astrophotography

A couple of weeks ago, one of my photography pals texted me asking me if I wanted to join him on a Milky Way hunt some time since his summer plans had been scratched due to Corona (Matthias, you really need to set up a website so I can link to your photos!). He mentioned a couple of possible locations, which got me thinking; where would _I_ shoot the Milky Way from. I came up with an idea (that I won't share here yet, I haven't seen any other astro shots from here and I'd like to have a crack at it before someone else gets in first, so if you recognise any of the spots in this post, plesase keep them to yourself for now - hopefully in a month or so we'll be able to pull this off). I knew that I wanted to include some 'civilisation glow' in the shot if possible - the night glow from a human habitation and I opened up Google Earth to look for a possible mountainside that would give me the angle that I wanted.

Watching the Sun Go Down || Olympus f/16, 1/60, ISO 1250

It's not as easy as I'd thought to find a deforested slope facing the right direction in the lower alps. Despite my local knowledge, it took quite a bit of playing around before I found a peak that would work, and even then it was only on paper. At the end of May I headed down there for an evening to catch the sunset and the blue hour to see whether the angles matched up. Even a couple of days beforehand I wasn't too sure about the trip, no-one wanted to join me and I was a little wary of being on my own in the mountains at night - even in familiar territory there are plenty of things that can go wrong. And the forecast wasn't playing ball. Until Friday morning that is. All of a sudden the evening forecast was opening up - a green light.

It's a Sign! || Olympus f/8, 1/80 s, ISO 200

With sunset projected to be 21.05, I set off from home just after 18.00 to allow myself enough time to get down there, get up onto the ridge and find a couple of spots whilst the light was still good. Climbing up from the car park the light was gorgeous. A few high clouds might have been nice to complete the scene, but I wasn't going to complain. The few people still on the hills but coming down gave me some strange looks and I had a quick chat with one bloke who was interested to know what I was doing going up at that time of day before he got pulled to heal by his wife. And then I was on the ridge.

At the Ridge || Olympus f/8, 1/500 s, ISO 200

The views were beautiful, clear air with some mountain cloud hanging around the peaks. It was all I had hoped for from my virtual tour planning and more. There is some lovely rock around, and the peaks still have significant patches of snow on them despite the non-winter of 2019/20. From the ridge its a broad path leading to one of the peaks that had looked promising and so after taking a couple of smartphone shots I headed out, warm setting sun on my left, valley on my right. The light was catching the fir trees along the ridge, especially the skeletal branches of dead trees that had long since lost their bark to the elements. The orange light picked out the highlights nicely.

Catching the Last Rays || Olympus f/8, 1/80 s, ISO 250

Just before the potential spot that I'd looked out there's a broad shoulder that looked promising, the spot itself had a lot more trees and was a lot narrower than it had looked on the computer, pretty much ruling it out. By this time, the sky was beginning to turn orange in the west and I was desperate to find an open piece of hillside facing westwards. East wasn't a problem, I could get to a treeless spot there any time, but the other side was light forest. In the end I had to settle for a gap between the trees. I say settle, I think the silhouettes work quite nicely, but it wasn't the picture I had first envisioned. Dropping the aperture to f/16 helped with the sunburst.

And Down She Goes || Olympus f/16, 1/100 s, ISO 200

In the immediate aftermath of the sunset I headed back along the ridge to where I had first hit it to wait for the first stars. The path back offered a couple of nice shots too, and I particularly like this one with the roots on the path. This is a composite of two exposures, one for the foreground and one for the background. After mixed experience with ON1 Photo Raw's HDR assembling, I've gone over to using layers to assemble these shots, it gives me a deal more flexibility when I can control precisely which elements of the photo I use from each exposure. I'll write a separate blog entry on this some time.

The Path Goes On || Olympus f/6.3, 1/50 s, ISO 1600

Up until this point I'd had my go-to lens on the camera, the Zuiko f4 12-100 mm, getting back to the top of the ridge it was time to get the wide-angle zoom out, the Leica f2.8 8-18 mm. The wider aperture and wider field of view make this a great astro-landscape lens, although I wouldn't complain if there was a convenient lens with an even wider aperture for night shots. The optical quality is second to none though, provided I can focus it properly. During the daytime this isn't an issue, I just leave it on autofocus normally, but focusing on pin-pricks of light at night to get the infinity focus right is tricky, even with glasses.

Golden to Blue || Olympus f/4, 1/60 s, ISO 500

I set up the tripod with my Benro Geared Head to allow me good control over the level and direction and started shooting the blue hour. When hiking, I rarely wear more than t-shirt and shorts, but even setting out from the car I was wearing long sleeves and trousers. Despite my soft-shell jacket it was beginning to get quite cool in the late evening breeze. Wooly hat and gloves time, though putting the gloves on and off was a pain. I was glad of the tripod net that I'd bought for the occasion to store bits of camera in the low light, it made keeping kit under control in the dark a lot easier. 

Waiting for the Stars || Olympus f/2.8, 1/6 s, ISO 200

And so I sat and waited for the first stars to appear, the half-moon high in the sky away to my right, the dew beginning to fall. Taking a shot every five minutes or so, exposure bracketing just to be on the safe side. I was watching the clock too, I didn't want to be out too late on my own - there was still a trek down to the car in the dark. Even with the half-moon and my head-torch, stumbling around in the dark in the mountains shouldn't be taken lightly. And then there was the 90 min drive home.

Gibbous Moon over the Allgäu || Olympus f/3.3, 10 sec, ISO 200

The descent proved easier than I had feared and I was soon back on the tarmac. Definitely worth the evening's trek. Oh, and remember the SD card that went through the washing machine? It seems to have finally given up the ghost. Fortunately after I transferred the photos to the PC and not before. Sometimes you've gotta have a bit of luck!

End of the Day || Olympus f/4, 0.8 s, ISO 800

B&W Challenge

The Challenge

The lock-down seems to be fertile ground for photo projects and challenges, ranging from Joe Edelman’s much-publicised Stuck at Home series to Oddbjørn Austevik’s 1000 Step Challenge with many prominent proponents in between. They’re a great creative use of time, motivating us to hone our existing skills and perhaps pick up some new ones. And getting to know your gear well is always a good investment. I've spent some time with focus stacking* photos of snakeshead fritillaries that are growing in the garden and learned a lot about both the camera and the editing process.

Back in March the kids gave me Hoddinott and Bauer’s 52 Assignments in Landscape Photography for my birthday and I'd been looking forward to working through the book over the year and seeing what tips and tricks I could add to my toolbox, but a lot of the assignments require being out in, well, the landscape and that’s not so easy right now. Sure, I could shoot a panorama of the back garden, but who wants to see that?

*Focus stacking is a method of extending the depth of field to get more of the subject in focus, most often used in close-up photography and wide-angle landscape photography with close foreground. It involves taking multiple photos with various focal points from close to far and then assembling them  to one image using software (or in-camera).

Time for a Challenge || Olympus f7.1, 1/20 s, ISO 1600

I didn’t escape the challenge trend and was recently tagged on Facebook for a ‘Ten day 10-black and white photos describing daily life’ challenge, which I took up enthusiastically (thank you Silke). I’ve long felt that monochrome hasn’t really been my strong suit, but I recently watched a couple of videos on the matter online and wanted to try out some of the principles. Plus the photos had to be of everyday items, also something outside my normal photo-genre (gummybears notwithstanding - if you want to find out more check out #gummibeardiaries on Instagram - at the time of writing I was the only one using this hashtag, who knows, maybe it's taken off by the time you read this).

Daily Essentials || Olympus f8, 1/80 s, ISO 200

The trick with monochrome, so I’ve been told, is to almost fully edit your photo as normal, balancing the tones etc. and then do the monochrome conversion almost as the last step. For these still-lives (still-lifes?) I think this has worked pretty well. Depending on the subject matter I’ve tried to keep the depth of field quite low.

If you want the step-by-step on the ON1 edit, it was fairly simple. Here you go:

Develop:

• Apply camera and lens correction in develop

Filters:

• Big Softy Vignette at 50% opacity
• Tone Enhancer set on Auto, opacity 100% (normally I would do this by hand , but I tried the auto function and found it gave me the look I wanted)
• Border
• Black & White Chrome, neutral colo(u)r response

Further Options:

• Dynamic Contrast where appropriate to enhance detail
• Lens Blur to reduce depth of field
• Local edits as necessary

As you can see, I had a lot of fun with this project and I had eight of the images together within about two days without thinking about it too much. You can probably tell from the first two images that I'm a huge fan of wood grain and natural textures. I really liked the contrast here between the natural grain and the man-made objects. The last two photos took a bit longer and I had to wait for the muse to strike. I'd wanted to take a portrait of Chicco, the ginger tom that we acquired last year from a friend of a friend of a friend, but it turns out that he's camera shy, so I took this one of his sister Evi sitting in the cat tree, looking out the window. For all the complaints about noise in m4/3 sensors, these ISO 1600 shots are working out extremely well.

Evi watching the world go by || Olym-puss f8, 1/13, ISO 1600

Spontaneous or Planned?

Watching the modern photography gurus at the moment, a lot of them plan their photos down to the last detail; when the sun will hit a certain angle, precisely where to stand, checking the edges of your photo, etc. For a long time I’ve beaten myself up about this because this has not been my style; I’ve always been much more impulsive and spontaneous in my photography and studying the profis I felt that I was doing something wrong or that my photography was somehow second class.

Ascending || Olympus f13, 1/25 s, ISO 1600

I took this next photo of my glasses on a tiled surface as part of the B&W challenge. Having slept on it, I felt that I had overshot the mark with the narrow depth of field, but I was otherwise quite happy with the shot, the composition and light really work for me. The original was one of a set of two or three hand-held shots where I played about with the focal point and height of the camera.

Reading Glasses Reflecting || Olympus f5.6, 1/50 s, ISO 1600

Having slept on the image, I thought there was something I could do to improve it. When processing I realised that I’d got a wedge of the white wall below the tiles and there were a couple of other ‘border’ issues. I also wanted to broaden the depth of field and try to catch an area of focus in the magnifying part of the lens of the glasses.

So I set up my tripod, aligned the camera carefully, cleared the clutter from the background, twisted the glasses to the optimal position, focused manually on the bridge of the glasses, performed an aperture run from f4 to f22, realised that I was on auto ISO and it was running at 1600, set the ISO to the native 200 of the camera, repeated the aperture run, opened the camera, realised that I was missing the main SD card from the camera and that I was shooting on secondary, searched the living room for the missing card, realised I’d left it in my T-shirt pocket that was in the washing basket, gone upstairs to check the washing basket to realise that my lovely wife had been ultra-efficient and that the washing was in the machine already, spotted the card in the front of the washing machine, put the secondary in the computer, checked the images...
...and was disappointed that none of the images had the same feeling of the original.

Aperture series with the Zuiko f4 12-100 at about 10 cm:

f4		f5
f6.3		f8
f10		f13
f16		f20

Lessons Learned

I think that some of this has to do with the emotion that I realise that I’ve been trying to convey with my photos - another lesson that I’ve been trying to build into my photography. That emotion is something spontaneous, revelling in the magic of the moment and not something that I can express when I plan a shot to death. So, two lessons for the price of one; I now know which aperture to use out of the starting block for close-ups and, perhaps even more valuable, I’ve learned that I don’t need to beat myself up about being a spontaneous photographer and not a planned photographer - that’s just my style.

Dandelion Closeup || Olympus f10, 1/2000 s, ISO 800

So thanks for laying down the gauntlet Silke. What about the rest of you? What tricks have you picked up during the lock-down.

Oh, and by the way, the SD card survived. Washed in de-ionised water and then dried it for 3 h in rice.

Ende (see what I did there?) || Olympus f4, 1/50 s, ISO 1600