Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Good Advice for Extension Tubes

I just started to use extension tubes and one of my flickr friends, Wink http://www.flickr.com/photos/68842954@N00, gave me some very good advice.

Set the camera to aperture to f/5.6 - f/9, manual focus, and the shutter release to continuous, hold the shutter button down as you gently move the camera in and out for a least 6-8 shots for each scene, you can then choose the best focus later.

I have yet to try this out, but I did do several shots stopping up...if you don't you cannot see much. Now I will try it on a different lens. Do not try it on a 50mm...it is too hard to manually focus. An 18-55mm works well and most photographers have that lens in their kit.

Texture ~ Tessitura ~

One of the displays at the Arts and Crafts Fair. I liked the different use of fabrics and the other bags and shirts were similar. They made for a good photo opportunity!

Saturday, October 2, 2010

A fun trick to produce off camera HDR

I was experimenting in Photoshop and thought what would a photo look like if you merge the RAW with the JPEG. I made the JPEG the same size as the RAW, this is critical, then merged the layers. Wow! To my surprise the photo looked like HDR! It is very important to ensure that you make your JPEG the exact same dimensions as the RAW. Open both and copy the RAW dimensions into the JPEG under "image size", then merge down with the JPEG as the top layer. Try it out, it will not work for all pictures, very busy ones, but does well with a bench, the one I used or other objects without too much detail. I also painted over some areas to give them an extra punch with a 30% set at "Overlay"... try different brushes and styles.

Colorful Useless things ~ Colorato Inutile Cose ~

I saw a barrel of ceramic mushrooms at the garden store. I removed the price tags. Would you pay 9 USD for one of them? I guess people with too much money would buy them? Who knows?