HDR time again

Meise Church 1
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

This time the Church in the lovely village of Meise, Belgium

waterspreeuw / White-throated dipper
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Quite rare in the Netherlands, extremely rare in the west part of the country, normally you only find this in Limburg and the Ardennes in Belgium/Luxembourg.
Nice bird to watch, very active and still tame enough to approach closely. Constantly in and out of the water. I've seen it fly trough a cascade of water to search for food behind it.

I found this bird via the website waarneming.nl where twitchers post all sorts of bird sightings. This one was spotted in a nature reserve where I walk almost every weekend.

Because I had 2 dozen confirmed sightings to work with it was extremely easy to pick an area to start searching for it. Right at the edge of that area I noticed 6 other bird enthousiast staring at something. Bingo! There it was darting in an out of the water. The 6 gave up rather quickly muttering something about a more tame second dipper that was supposed to be in the area. I walked to the other side of the clearing where the bird was and just waited leaning against a tree. Took about 10 minutes before it came close to me while foraging. I even managed a second shot when it had caught something.



Of course I'm not entirely satisfied with these shots. A grey, misty morning is not the best time to get enough light, let alone nice and warm light which does birds a lot more justice. I also wished for more tele than my 70-300VR provides. Despite that I think I did well and I got to shoot my first truly rare bird.

Ilse deLange - next to me

I'm often very slow to notice new music, the fact that I don't listen to any music stations on the radio and don't watch the shows on TV where these things are often announced makes me miss these things.

But, things get trough to me eventually like Ilse deLange's new album, next to me.

What can I say? I liked her first efforts in the 1990s, nice, laid back and somewhere between Country, Singer/songwriter and plain pop. I liked to see her do TV interviews, that shy but also somewhat impish smile, the very natural looking responses, for me a refreshing change from all the big American names with media coaching and rehearsed interviews.

Her latest album shows that the girl has matured in her music and has the good sense to hire a good crew. Next to me was the most obvious single choice but I also like Paper Plane (which I would have picked as the single), Caroussel and the lovely Ballad "almost". All in all a nice album, recommended!

Getting shitfaced!

poo on beak
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

This crow was fishing bags of dog shit out of the bin, rooting trough them in the hope of finding something tasty. Constantly wiping his beak clean.

It's that time of the year again

DSC_3357
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Sint Nicolaas has arrived!

I apologize for my friend...

I apologize for my friend...
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

There he is, posing majestically, assuming that his friend would be doing the same...
His friend chooses this time to do some intimate grooming.

DSC_3169
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

The Alexandrine Parakeet. At least half a dozen live in the trees near the office where I work. These were all in this bush stuffing themselves on berries.

A native of Afghanistan via India all the way to Vietnam which does, like the rose ringed parakeet, surprisingly well in our cities.

Pondering a longer lens

I'm getting fed up with how difficult it is to shoot birds, especially smaller ones with "just" a 70-300. So I'm pondering an addition. Problem is, as soon as you get beyond 300mm things get expensive really fast.

Sigma 50-500mm F4.5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM
Sigma 50-500mm F4-6.3 EX DG HSM
Sigma 150-500mm F5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM
Nikon AF 300 f4 IF-ED
Nikon AF-S 300 f4 D IF-ED
Tamron SP AF200-500mm F/5-6.3 Di LD (IF)
Nikon 400mm f3.5
Sigma 400mm f5.6
Yashma 300mm f2.8

Is the list so far. A few like the new Sigma 50-500 and the Nikon af-s 300mm are way too expensive. Ah, what to do?

Horsing around

Horsing around
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

More and more I'm enjoying when I can catch some movement in an animal picture. The most obvious way of doing this is panning of course but sometimes you get lucky and you can catch something like this paw moving.

Shooting trough wire is always tricky as you can see here again.

mandrill

mandrill
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

I was rather unsure when I shot this. Spend some time getting the big male of the group in a good view and, somehow, I ended up with this. Bit bummed about that pole in the view on the left.

What did amaze me is what a few clicks with the mouse in Adobe Camera RAW managed to get from what was originally a very drab image. The colours on the nose and the shoulders are magnificent!

Macaque mother

Macaque mother
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

We went to Ouwehand's zoo yesterday. Lousy weather for photography, solid overcast all the time.

This picture says it all for zoos. On one hand, live goes on, this mother is suckling her young. On the other hand, animals look out of place in an artificial environment as you can see by the background here.

I was by no means the only one carrying a DSLR, spotted quite a few of them. I was the only one using a monopod and not using the pop-up flash for everything.

I'm well camouflaged

I'm well camouflaged
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

I more or less stumbled upon this little deer, just about a year old I think. I was tracking a herd of one big male and at least 5 females by tracks alone when I heard something besides the path. This little girl was there with a bigger female, possible the mother. She noticed me and didn't feel much like running. Instead she did two paces and though she was hidden enough since she couldn't see me anymore and started cropping these greens.

Blacksmith

Blacksmith
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

A lot of people will convert to black and white purely because this is an old trade. I didn't, I converted because it was a low colour image to begin with and I wanted to emphasize certain aspects of the image.

Shots like this do make me realize how much of an art black and white really is. I wish I could do images like this out of camera. I'd be very interested in something the size of a small DSLR body or even an evil camera that could do a dozen different types of black & white film and do that very well.

bored now!

bored now!
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Took a bit of tweaking but this pic just looks so right to me. The colours really reflect what I saw at that time and still the deer pops out of the picture really well.

I'm slowly getting the hang of Nik's Viveza to make a subject pop.

The behaviour is really typical of a fallow deer buck, it's stared at me for a few minutes and now it has decided to wander away.

HDR Efex pro 1.0

Apparantly I'm not the only one who thinks this piece of software is not as good as it could be.

Yesterday at 21:06 I sent the following message to Nik Software:

Perhaps HDR efex was released a bit too soon.

I'm running it on an AMD x2, 240 @2.8 ghz with windows 7 and 3gb ram.

I'm on day 5 of my trial now, I've processed maybe a dozen pics so far.

HDR efex has crashed 4 times, invariably taking CS5 with it. On 3
counts it acted wonky and vivenza crashed twice (which it never does)

Processing from selecting 5 images in bridge until a completed image
takes 5 minutes easily.

OK, granted, you guys have show the world, including the people behind
photomatix, that it is possible to produce good HDR software with a
nice user interface. Shame it's still very buggy and requires a very
high end intel box to run.

I don't think I'm going to buy it, this is not 160 euros nice.

Now, within an hour I got this reply from Josh, a product manager at Nik (note the misspelling of my name, this makes me believe it's no autoreply)

Dear jereoen,

Thank you for contacting Nik Software.

We have run into a few issues that we are currently working to resolve. The issues you indicated you are having with HDR Efex Pro are affecting a small number of our users, however the update that we currently have planned for early next year is planned to resolve these types of issues.

Please keep an eye out for when this new version comes out, as it should be both much faster as well as much more stable for your system.

So... I'm curious to see how early next year this may be.

Since HDR Efex pro 1.0 runs fine on a friend's Intel based laptop I would advice anyone to try the trial version before buying this. If it runs it's very nice.

What I see on a sunday morning

_DSC2165_HDR
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Not an over the top HDR but a shot that more or less captures my sunday morning. Including, I like to think the verry chilly temperature this morning.

Roman bowman
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Some old shots from august I just got around to processing. Legio II augusta from the UK visited.

A Roman archer, something you don't see often. Even rarer, a Syrian auxilia

Now I'm not sure if this is also an auxiliares or a barbarian. The dagger suggests Gaul to me.

And last, the Aquilifer, I think. The person carrieng the Legion's standard. An important and well paying job.

I love VR!

D300 on a monopod, 70-300 VR on 250mm, iso 1600 and 1/4 shutter speed and I get this:




Not too shabby I think. OK, granted, this was one of about a dozen but still...

A bit further on I got this.


Now, pictures like this will never draw in the crowds, certainly not on flickr but I like it. I'd found this doe and was tracking her for a few minutes in my viewfinder waiting for her to raise her head briefly. She did when a walker some distance away stepped on a twig.

This one took some more effort, this buck is camera shy, doesn't run but strolls away taking care only to show his rear towards the camera. Waling a big circle and doing a slow approach work




All in all some nice work I think but still not the fighting bucks I'm hoping for.

HDR Efex Pro, a very quick review.

Yes, it's out and you can grab a trial here. Review is perhaps a bit too strong, first impression would be better.

I downloaded the 27mb trial and first surprise, even though it is apparantly a 64 bits plugin it still works well with my 32 bits Photoshop. You can call it from bridge but all that does is open CS5 and start the plugin with the files you selected. I have not yet tried it from lightroom

On my humble dual core 2GB AMD phenom box it's somewhat sluggish, more sluggish than Photomatix although it does seem to take roughly the same amount of time.

What it does fairly well is aligning, Photomatix seems slightly better in aligning my handheld shots. It does beat photomatix in one critical aspect, usability.

Photomatix has an interface with a load of rather cryptic settings on the left. HDR efex has about 30 presets that are all quite different. Each can be finetuned. For each preset a preview is rendered which takes a bit of time. I tested it on three images and it ran out of memory and crashed once.

Perhaps it's my test shots but right now it doesn't blow me away in output just yet but, honestly, I did a rather quick and dirty processing job on just two sets. It does excel in usability, it makes you feel in control, makes you feel like getting a good looking HDR is relatively simple.

HDR efex:



Photomatix (slighty different shot)



And this was a weird idea that seemed



More to come soon, certainly before my trial period runs out.

fallow deer brotherly love 2
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

There's a big chestnut tree that has been claimed by a very dominant male. Usually he's there alone bellowing to the other males in the area. On Monday morning he finally had company, quite a lot of company in fact. I counted at least 4 somewhat interested females and a score of young males that the big guy would sometimes chase away.

Also present, and that's something I don't see all that often, is these two very young males. Born this year and so young they don't even have antlers yet. Also so young that the big buck didn't feel threatened enough to chase them away.

All these are tricky shots. Half an hour after sunrise there's not that much light reaching trough that big chestnut tree. To get this relatively unobstructed view I had to move very slowly and ended up kneeling on a gravel path for almost 15 minutes before I caught these.



Photography like this can be improved by throwing money at it. Any of the more expensive bodies with a clean iso 3200 or even 6400 would have been nice to have. A longer and especially faster lens would have helped. But, the D300 with a humble 70-300 does a decent job as well.

DSC_1812_3_4_5_6_tonemapped
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Nik Software, makers of the controversial capture NX 2 suite and the pretty impressive dfine noise reduction plugin will release their latest software, a HDR tool this month.

I'm anxiously awaiting that, their other plugins are very good and photomatix, my main HDR tool, is driving me bonkers!

Run away!

Run away!
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Some fallow deer exhibit a typical gait, almost bouncing, just like Pepe le Pew in the old cartoons. The one on the right here is doing just that.

fallow deer season

DSC_1774
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

It's the beginning of the fallow deer mating season. I'm spending as much time out in the woods as I can squeeze in. This year I've set myself the goal of getting a good action shot of two males battling.

Unfortunately I've had no luck just yet. I did get a male jumping a canal twice and I've managed some good shots of female deer.

This one violates a few rules. There's really too much foreground in focus and the background is not as quiet as I would have liked it. Despite that I like it, the contrast in colours between foreground, deer and background work for me.

I didn't expect this

DSC_1713
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Normally I get maybe one stream crossing per year. This is the second one in a week or so. This guy was drinking and suddenly he decided he wanted to be on the other side.

How did a deer cross the stream?

How did a deer cross the stream?
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Is this too dark?

I was tracking this guy trough my viewfinder hoping for a nice silhouette when he disappeared behind a few trees. Heard him grunt and expected him to wander off when suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I saw him amble towards the canal, turned around and just had time to fire a few quick frames.

helmet

helmet
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

I like shots like this. Relatively easy and stil fun. Metered on the helmet and knew I would get the guy in the dark.

Nokia 5800 ebook reader

ZXReader, the only decent choice for reading ebooks on a touchscreen nokia such as the 5800 has reached the 2.0 version.

I've just done some quick testing. Default screen font is very big but once you set that to something smaller it's very readable.

Initial testing also indicate that it now (finally) allows you to read fb2 files without character set issues.

Now if only that project managed to translate their webpage.

You can get it here: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fzxstyles.allnokia.ru%2Fzxreader.php

Dolphins in the air II
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

If you can shoot a swallow feeding it's fledglings without landing then this should not pose much of a challenge. And it wasn't. Only real challenge was pointing my camera at the right spot of water, you never really know where they will jump.

Since this was some distance away I just went manual focus and set the lens to infinity.

Settings:

Exposure 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture f/10.0
Focal Length 200 mm
ISO Speed 400

I just had to ignore some annoying people in front of me that couldn't appreciate a D300 going at a high speed burst.

squinting sparrow
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Doesn't that sound like a ubuntu version?

I was in the Dolfinarium, our dutch version of seaworld but a lot smaller.

Anyway, places like that where food is sold and eaten you find house sparrows. Usually mangy little birds that clearly show they live on junkfood. Not this little lady, a healthy looking bird taking a few seconds to enjoy the sun while the whole clan is busy getting the seeds from these plants.

I really like this shot, it's extremely rare for me to find a small bird such as this relaxed enough to display this kind of behaviour.

Back to shooting deer

Or, sometimes it comes together. After my earlier success I did something really well when I came back from vacation and did my first sanity walk.

First I met this big fallow, ehh, fellow:



Exposure 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 300 mm
ISO Speed 1600

And a few minutes later this nice roe deer male came out of the undergrowth, stood there looking at me and continued it's way.



Exposure 0.013 sec (1/80)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 300 mm
ISO Speed 400

It's these things that the 70-300 VR does very well on the D300. Not too small, not too far away. I am quite proud of these. The fallow deer stands out well from the background and the roe is so typical for the way you often see this species.

Sandisk Sansa Clip+ review
A review of the Sandisk Sansa Clip+ 4gb mp3 player.

Over the last year or so my taste in music has changed dramatically. From a lot of pop, rock and country I've shifted to classical, opera and jazz. A taste in music that my old player, a Creative Zen V plus, could not cope with well. So it was time for a new device.
Last of a dying breed?
At least, so it sometimes seems to me. Look around in any shop and you will see multimedia devices in abundance, capable of playing videos, games and who knows what else? Devices dedicated to playing just music are becoming a rare breed.

Sandisk? Don't they make memory cards?
Yes they do, good and expensive cards. But they also make a series of fine mp3 players. I found this particular model trough a lot of searching and settled on it after reading this:
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2009/08/sandisk-sansa-clip-plus-review.php

So, what do you get?
Well, for not quite 50 euros I got a player, a set of cheap earbuds and a standard look usb-mini usb cable. Oh, and a manual in just about every European language.

What does it look like?

Tiny. A very prominent screen, slot on the right for a micro sd card, the same card used in almost all mobile phones, headphone connector. Tiny powerswitch on top and that's it. Oh, and a clip of course, integrated in the player.

Using it
Well, that's what's important isn't it? If you bought it for the looks you should have bought an ipod.

At first power-on it asks you the language you want to use and the region of the world. If you select Europe then you will get a volume limiter to prevent hearing damage.
There's a few free tracks included which I wiped immediately.

Transfering data is a matter of hooking it up to your computer, waiting a few moments and that's it. After that you can either use mediaplayer or another specialized tool such as mediamonkey or you can simply copy/paste with a file manager like windows explorer.

I loaded the device with a mix of medium and high quality mp3 files and a few flac files, plugged in my trusty sennheiser pmx-60, fiddled briefly with the album selector and settled down for a good listen.

OK, wow! Or WOW! Now, this bit is hard to describe. Clarity, pureness, depth. Suddenly a 192kb mp3 file sounds a bit mediocre, higher bitrates sound a lot better but with FLAC it really shines. This unit can easily give the kenwood set in my living room a run for it's money.

I compared this with a current generation Ipod touch. It's very close, mainly a matter of taste. Personally I think the Clip+ sounds just a bit better, crispier.

Sound quality aside, there's more to like. The clip is designed very well, you will not loose this, even in the gym. The control buttons work, providing just enough feedback. The screen is readable enough in the sun. The player charges with every standard mini-USB charger. Unlike the creative players which force you to buy a special charger this works with everything.

Conclusion
Costing only 40% of an ipod touch the Sansa Clip+ brings impressive sound quality in a very manageable package. If you just want to listen to your music and you value sound quality more than buying the same mediaplayer everyone else has then this is highly recommended!

Swallows in flight

I've seen swallows in flight quite a few times. Up until recently they proved to be very elusive models since the average swallow has a very erratic and rather random flight path. Combine that with their small size and high speed (I am going to do my very best not to quote Monty Python in this post!)

So, what I ended up with was a lot of blurry pictures of landscape where a swallow had just passed.

Untill a few weeks ago during our holliday in Somerset. There on the roof of a pub I noticed three fledgling barn swallows making an incredible amount of noise. Then I saw one of the parents swoop down and very quickly stuff a morsel of food into the fledglings. Despite having consumed most of a pint of Cotleigh's "snowy" ale already on an empty stomach I managed to get my camera out of the car and shoot a few frames.

Now this was at 1730 on a very overcast afternoon. Not much light. I quickly found out that I needed 1/2000 to freeze the action which ment shooting at high iso and almost wide open. Even at 300mm I had to crop so I ended up running Dfine 2.0 to remove the worst of the noise.

(all pics clickable)












Despite the obvious shortcomings I think these are excellent examples of behavioural pictures, they show behaviour that you don't see all that often or easily.

It's diffiicult to avoid

DSC_9537
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

A black and white conversion if you're dealing with steam engines. However in this case it wasn't because I wanted to emphasize the mood. No, I just had to deal with a high contrast and a blown sky. I n color I just didn't get the emphases on the three guys.

Intense pictures from the Vietnam war

Found this via nikonrumors which featured it because #19 is a photographer with a Nikon. All the rest is interesting as well.



And a free documentary on frontline photograhper Robert King:

Watch more free documentaries

Crossing the channel

DSC_8601
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

After our summer holliday in Cornwall last year turned out to be very nice we decided to go back this year.

First thing to solve is how to cross the channel. Last year's ferry crossings where somewhat less than a spectacular success. On the crossing from Calais to Dover we had to wait aboard the ferry for more than an hour because of a problem with the moorings in Dover.

Add to that the fact that you are herded from your car to the upper deck where there's a load of overpriced shops and restaurants and bars and very little possibilities to sit quietly. Throw in a mix of unwashed truck drivers who lie down wherever they can and busses full of schoolkids, half of them acting like getting an ASBO is a more important ambition that actually graduating school.
Oh, and most of the family gets seasick on a ferry.

So, this year the train, the tunnel or the chunnel or whatever else you want to call the eurotunnel. I loved it. You drive up, your number plate is scanned, you confirm your departure time. There's time to visit the toilettes in the terminal building (unlike the ferries the terminal building is cleaned at least a few times a day) and you drive your car in the train just like this. Relax for half an hour and drive away in Dover.

Esther staring out the window

Esther staring out the window
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Somehow my 50mm f1.8 and the light in my kitchen work so very well together. Like this shot. Focussed on the eye. Ran the pic trough capture nx, applied a touch of skin softner and a bit of glamour glow and this is the result. I like it!

Reality check

For lack of a better word let's call it that.

Anyone who spends any time around the major photography sites on the internet will notice there's an almost insane obsession with gear. We want top notch, a lot of us are willing to pay a lot of money for it and when we don't get what we want the first reaction is to throw money at it.

Now take a look at this:



Of course it's not serious, it's poking fun at a certain kind of photographer. But, let's be honest, how many of us haven't been in this frame of mind a little bit at one time or another?

Now let's take this one.



It's kinda long but this guy says a few very good things.

• know your gear
• if you buy a new lens get to know it before buying another one
• visualize your shots

I think all three are equally important. The last point is perhaps the most interesting. If you visualize something but you can't get it to turn out the way you want those website I mentioned earlier can be useful. Post your pic, with full exif, describe what you did and what you are not happy with. Good chance someone can help.

Of course sometimes the conclusion that you are expecting unreasonable things from your gear. Take this one.



Shot at iso 800 and a severe crop. ISo 800 will already show noise. A high contrast situation such as this will only make that worse. At a crop and you will see even more noise.

Conclusion. Lower the iso and bring my monopod. Or get closer. Or replace the 70-300 by something longer.

Sometimes techincal perfection doesn't matter as much as mood

fallow males
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

At least, that's what I think when I view this shot. Early morning, not much light. There's noise, I probably didn't get the best out of it in photoshop and still..