I posted a photo of the Korean Joint Security Area the night after visiting it, while still in Seoul. Finally, today, one of my colleagues had time to assemble a high-dynamic-range image from a set I took for that purpose. I think it's a much better photograph:
Not only did I get the colors closer to reality (always hard to do with a laptop), but combining three different exposures into this one HDRI brings out the details in the shadowy foreground as well as on the DPRK building we were facing.
Thanks, Matt.
Yesterday, on the Siberia side of the Bering Sea:
Our flight path yesterday followed the terminator as the earth turned. The sun stayed right on the tip of the left wing for about 90 minutes before we jogged slightly west over Kamchatka.
I've held off posting this one from my walk through Hampstead Heath last month because it needed a little Photoshopping. Today at lunch one of my colleagues let me use her laptop for five minutes. Voilà:
I'll have to round up some of the HDR sequences I've shot over the past couple of years...this is fun.
A couple I know asked me to take some photos of their 10-month-old daughter recently. Et voilà:
The publicity photos I took a couple of weeks ago have started getting published. Spectralia's first news release went with this one:
I'll keep posting the ones they use.
It helps if you can get a few hundred meters off shore:
That was Thursday Night, on the Sarah's Inn Cruise for a Cause. We got excessively lucky with the weather, so I brought my real camera with me.
This morning I did some more publicity stills for Comedy of Errors; I'll post some of those as soon as I have approval from the cast.
Now I'm off to Wrigley. The Cubs won last night, but so did the Brewers, so we're still tied for fourth.
On Sunday the Spectralia Theater Company had me shoot their publicity stills for this summer's Comedy of Errors production. The play goes up this summer at several Chicago Park District parks as part of the Bard in the Parks program.
Doctor Pinch (Don Johnson) and Antipholous of Ephesus (Peter Ash):
The Courtezan of Ephesus (Mary-Kate Arnold):
The play opens June 29th at Ravenswood Manor Park in Chicago.
At last night's performance, the venue used dim, magenta lighting on the stage that made poor Lauren O'Connell look like a pink ghost. Here's one image exactly as it came out of my camera:
Fortunately, I shoot raw photos, which take up lots of room (about 22 MB each) but with the benefit of lots of uncompressed image information. It's therefore relatively easy, using Adobe Lightroom, to correct for it. Magenta lights are pretty grim, though; the only reasonable correction was to make it black and white:
Had I shot these as JPEGs, the correction would have been almost impossible. The raw format stores light in four layers, much like physical film does. JPEG compression "develops" it all together.
Plus, I have my camera set to interpolate a black frame under an exposed frame when shooting above ISO 1600. (This photo was shot at ISO 12,800.) That gives the processing software even more information to help produce a usable image from horrible conditions.
This caught my eye as I walked to work from the El this morning:
History buffs and Chicagoans may recognize this spot as the place where the Great Flood of 1992 started.