Stunning Thanksgiving eve sky

On Thanksgiving eve this year, I happened to be outside just as the sun was setting and noticed a colorful, picture-worthy sky, cloaked in largely fiery orange hues.

I walked about a half-mile to where I grabbed a silhouette with my iPhone then ran (literally) home to grab my Canon 6D to hopefully catch more of the color in a camera with a greater resolution.

As I headed back with the DSLR, my goal was to return to the point where I'd taken the photo using the iPhone. But the sky color was fading, and the hues were changing to largely magenta, so I first grabbed the shot you see leading off the post before proceeding to the original point where I'd taken the iPhone shot.

When I got there, indeed, the color and cloud formation I had seen previously was gone. The iPhone shot appears below.

Yet another look at tulips

At the risk of overdoing the tulip pictures here, I post these images captured on an early, overcast Friday afternoon in the circular garden of my backyard. These tulips have finally bloomed in a color -- or colors -- I haven't quite been able to nail exactly just yet. There's definitely some orange, but also some raspberryish hue. It reminds me of a marbled sherbet color I've seen, and that's the best I can come up with. I get more intrigued by these each spring when they come up, and this is the third year for them. There's also a small patch of these in my front garden, and their colors, too, are finally emerging.

These were taken with a Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens at aperture value (priority) f/8, ISO-800 and shutter speeds ranging from 1/80 to 1/200. For about the last 10 minutes of my shoot of these tulips, a very light drizzle began to fall, so ... if you notice droplets on petals of some of these, that's the explanation. 

And to Tanya, the former work colleague who gave me these to plant: Your little horticultural babies are doing quite nicely. 

 

Just about orange tulips

This post is a simple one, and the length of text will reflect it.

 

My next-door neighbors have some beautiful orange tulips blooming right now (none of my tulips has shown color yet), so I took a few minutes Sunday to preserve in photographs that bulb show before the nasty weather system heading our way moved in, possibly threatening the petals.

Here you are, pure and simple: orange tulips ... and a couple of buds.

 

 

 

HDR demo at sunset

After my futile stab at trying to capture the bright orange setting sun Wednesday, I resolved to try again at my next opportunity.  That came Friday evening, and this time I decided to see what high-dynamic range (HDR) would get me in a sunset. I decided to use the Manual High School campus in Indianapolis as my backdrop. I also took a couple more shots of the railroad, which I cross to reach Manual from the park.

I realize some people still don't fully appreciate the buzz -- or even "the why" -- about HDR, so I'm including both single-frame (normal-exposure) and HDR versions of the same shots in this post, including a few with variation of treatments of the single-frame shots.

So, back to the park I went, pausing first to capture the sun alongside "The Tree," of, well, "The Tree" notoriety (see link). The HDR-treated shot appears at the top of this post; the single-frame version appears below. And yes, that tiny orange sphere on the left side of the tree trunk is the sun. In this case, I definitely prefer the HDR version. While the sun is small in both images, the single-frame version delivers virtually no pop to it.

In review, HDR photography is the melding of two or more images, taken rapidly, of the same scene, with each of those images having a different exposure -- usually one is overexposed slightly, another underexposed slightly and a third taken at normally metered exposure. In the melding process, through HDR software, optimum detail is culled from the three images to form one, dynamic image. While I'm not sure these HDR images deliver ideal "keepers" after the melding process, they do a decent job of illustrating the objective of HDR application.

On to the Manual campus (below), where you see the variation of shots I captured. In all instances, I lead with the HDR version and follow it with either one or two treatments of the single-frame variation. In instances where there are two treatments of the single-frame versions, I'll use the original, mostly unaltered/unedited version, and follow it with versions of how my edit software's "auto correct" feature felt I should handle it. The "auto correct" seemed challenged by what to do with the orange/bronze tint in the sky, and because of the dramatic change it offered, I decided to present both the unedited and software-suggested options.

The railroad tracks didn't have the sky color to challenge the edit software, so I didn't need to experiment with different edits. Only the original, edited versions (which involved only adding some contrast) are provided in addition to the HDRs.

You might be wondering which versions -- HDR or single-frame -- I prefer of these images. I'm still kicking around my thoughts on that. I appreciate the detail the HDRs provide, but I think I'm conflicted because I'm concerned that the detail -- the stadium seats and bright green grass, mostly -- negate the impact of the setting sun, which is why I went after these to begin with. Then I get to thinking that the sun is so small in relation to the other elements in most of the frames -- a fact that was out of my control -- that perhaps it doesn't deserve top billing. Maybe I should look upon the images as a composition of juxtaposition -- the sun against the Manual High School campus. The sun doesn't have to be the subject; it can be a strong component of each image's total parts. On the other hand, perhaps I can address the sun's relative size in the pictures at a later date through judicious crops. We'll see. These images were not cropped at all.

I lean toward the HDR versions in the case of the railroad shots, especially because of the added color detail. In the second RR image (shot #6), however, I sense a slight easier time finding the woman and children walking along the right side in the far distance in the single-frame version. They were not the reason I took that shot, but ... I was happy to have them as a little "golden nugget" in the shot.

Shot 1, HDR

Shot 1, single-frame, unedited

Shot 1, single-frame, edited

Shot 2, HDR 

Shot 2, single-frame, unedited 

Shot 2, single-frame, edited

Shot 3, HDR

Shot 3, single-frame, edited  

Shot 4, HDR

 

Shot 4, single-frame, unedited

Shot 4, single-frame, edited

Shot 5, HDR

 Shot 5, single-frame, edited

Shot 6, HDR

Shot 6, single-frame, edited