32 thoughts on “Landscape: Idaho”

  2. I’m not one who’s drawn to the HDR aesthetic in my own work, but this is a good example of why many are.

    Well done!

    Cheers,

    b&

    1. 100% with you Ben.

      This image is not possible wihtout HDR or splicing. (E.g. the reflection can never be brighter than the incident image.)

  5. Gosh, magical, this is just showing off. Lucky Stephen; from certain angles and in unusual light, the view in my suburban Birmingham, England, is surprisingly adequate.

  6. Ben, I’m not fond what you call the hdr aesthetic either, and seldom use it, but it’s another tool. What I’m after is the most naturalistic photo. The human visual system has far more dynamic range than the most sophisticated camera. Given the lighting of this scene, no single exposure could capture it. (For those not familiar with hdr, several photos — usually three — are recorded at different exposures and then combined on the computer or in the camera.) If I desaturated the color it might look more realistic, but I have a prejudice about using photoshop. 🙂 What you see is a product of the information recorded by the camera, with nothing added.

    1. I actually think the hardware in the current crop of cameras are pretty close to capable of capturing that much dynamic range in one exposure — and, without doubt, no more than two or three exposures will do the trick.

      The problem is all of our file formats assume that you’re examining a print in an idealized viewing booth. For sending the final result to a printer, that’s a great assumption. But the original scene has lots of bits that were “brighter than white” (because the clouds were acting as light sources), with the net result being too much dynamic range for the file format to encode.

      HDR is the least-bad solution to dealing with that today, but the real solution is a file format that uses an absolute color space rather than a relative one. It probably needs to be floating-point instead of integer, too. I understand that the movie industry has one or more such file formats, but there’s nothing familiar to stills photographer for working with any of that.

      You’d still left with how to compress the dynamic range of the original scene into the much smaller dynamic range of either a printer or a display, but at least there’d be some more sensible ways of going about it.

      Cheers,

      b&

      1. This hdr was composed of three photos taken at +/-1 EV, varing the shutter speed with evaluative metering. The camera is a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, which is pretty much top of the line for full-frame digital cameras. If I could show you the individual exposures I’m sure you would agree that none of them were even close.

        1. The 5DIII is what I shoot with, too.

          It’d be interesting to have a go at the RAW files, but that’s an awful lot of data to throw around Teh Innertubes….

          b&

          1. Ahhh, I so almost bought the 5DMkIII and opted for the 7D for the reach of the crop. It was a hard decision for me because I’m so obsessed with any noise in dark areas but I have a 300mm prime and with the 1.6x crop factor I get a 480mm prime. I knew I’d miss the reach so I opted for the 7D. It’s an upgrade to my 40D so it’s a nice upgrade.

            Lovely HDR picture BTW!

          2. The 5DIII / 7D conundrum is one that’s bugged many.

            If you crop the 5DIII image to the same field of view, you get actually better results than the native image from the 7D, even though the 7D has more megapickles.

            But if you crop further, it’s not all that much longer before the 7D comes out on top.

            Of course, the 5DIII with a 500 f/4 or a 400 f/2.8 will significantly outperform the 7D with a 300 f/2.8…but it’ll also cost and weigh an order of magnitude more….

            The 7D has a faster frame rate, but the 5DIII has much better autofocus, and I understand you wind up with a few more “keepers” with the 5DIII than the 7D.

            But the 7D is smaller and lighter and cheaper…but the 5DIII has the silent shutter…but the 7D….

            Regardless, both are fantastic cameras. If you can’t get the shot with either, the problem isn’t the camera.

            The 7D is just about at the age when Canon is likely to update it. I’d bet you lunch that we’ll see the 7DII announced before the year is out…but I won’t bet you more than that. Should be an awesome camera.

            Cheers,

            b&

          3. The 70D is out now that almost seems comparable to the 7D. Yeah for me shutter speed and reach won out because investing in bigger, heavier, costlier primes was not what I wanted to do. If I were a professional then I would just buy both 🙂 I even opted out of the 300 mm f/2.8 prime a few years ago in favour of the f/4.0 because the one extra f stop wasn’t enough to justify schlepping the much bigger lens around. One day im hoping some technology will mean I will no longer be stuck with these choices torturing me!

          4. Yeah, I don’t think I’d buy a 7D over the 70D.

            The 300 f/4 is a superlative lens if you’ve got good light to work in. Relatively small and lightweight and cheap, and it goes toe-to-toe with its bigger brethren in terms of image quality.

            I wouldn’t hold out much hope for technology, though…there’re hard physical limits of so many photons per square inch. We’ll probably see lighter telephotos in the future, and perhaps even shorter ones…but a 400mm f/2.8 is always going to have a 6″ front element….

            On the other hand…well, the 5DIII is a better camera than any film camera ever made. Better autofocus, better metering…if there was a film version of the 5DIII available at the time the 1v was released, nobody would have bought the 1v. And now consider that the 5DIII has better image quality than anything Ansel Adams worked with…

            …and I’d say that your photographic dream world is already here….

            Cheers,

            b&

          5. I love that camera. When I go out to shoot wildlife I usually take a 100-400mm zoom and a monopod. I put the motor drive on, use AF servo mode, bump the ISO to at least 1000, and take LOTS of photos, saving few. The state of the art in camera technology has advanced very far from the old film and early digital days, but as a technologist I think there’s a lot more headroom. Look for great things to come.

          6. The 100-400 would probably be my choice even over the new 200-400 1.4x. The 200-400 is heavy, expensive, and slow. The 100-400 is light, cheap, and slow. I know there’re those going gaga over the 200-400, but I just don’t see the attraction.

            Depending on how big you plan on printing, the 5DIII produces great files well past ISO 1000. I don’t think twice about ISO 3200, and ISO 6400 is perfectly usable if you nail the exposure, especially if you’re willing to do a bit of extra work in post-processing.

            At ISO 100, I can push the shadows by several stops. Quite literally, I can take the proverbial picture of the backlit garden shed in noontime Sun with the interior in shadow, expose properly for daylight, and push the interior of the shed to standard exposure. It’s insane. I’ve done similar experiments where a standard development is near-featureless black, and recovered it with minimal noise that cleans up fantastically in Photoshop.

            b&

    2. I like HDR for panoramas like this and agree that it’s far more satisfying than photoshopping.

  7. Wow; my screen’s too small to do that full justice.

    I esp. love the colors of the variably distant mountain ridges, and how the far one shows in spots above the tree-line at left-middle.

    And look at that irrigation! A bit of wildlife to the right, of human incursion to the left.

  8. The irrigated field is barley, which I sell to Coors and Budweiser. 🙁 I’d never drink that swill. The price of barley has been very good. Next year I’m going to alfalfa, and looking forward to it. It’s a prettier crop, better for wildlife (my major interest), the price is also good, and I can feed it to my livestock.

        1. I bet the horses love the big spaces.

          Are the goats milkers, or meat, or pets, or…?

          I know another regular here, Linda Grilli Calhoun, raises goats….

          b&

          1. The goats are for milk — French Alpines. My daughter makes cheese.

          3. I’m very fortunate. The fly fishing and duck and goose hunting are also top notch. I could harvest elk with special “depredation” permits, but I choose not to. I also have interesting neighbors. By the way, I’ve seen political comments here about Idaho politics and Mormonism. I live in Blaine County which, atypical of Idaho, is a very blue county. Statewide Idaho politics are a disgrace. Regarding Mormons, I know many, and by and large they are less insufferable than Evangelical Christians. They tend not to believe their transparently bullshit church doctrine. I’m sure there are exceptions, but they keep it to themselves here, if not overseas. The key to Mormon “faith” is not the faith, but the strong sense of community. I’m a Pastafarian.

          4. Ramen!

            (Though I’m a Unicornitarian, myself…I’m too much of a traditionalist for the beer volcano and stripper factory. But pasta is good!)

            The Mormons I know personally are all lovely people. And, while they never fail to “let slip” that they’re churchgoers and that the church in question is LDS, they’ve never tried to convert me. And the only times their wacky beliefs have come into conversation have been in perfectly appropriate ways — somebody else brings it up, or it relates to the son’s wedding plans when he gets back from the Reserves deployment in Afghanistan, or whatever.

            I also know that, genuinely friendly smiling faces notwithstanding, there’s some nasty shit that goes on out of public view, especially with respect to those who aren’t straight white adult males.

            But I’d never know that from my personal interactions with them.

            Cheers,

            b&

    2. I’m sorry, you have significantly more than your share of the good life, and you need to start parceling it out.

      😀

      Sounds idyllic.

      1. I know you are only kidding about parceling it out but, that would be awful. We’ll just have to live with our unjust deserts. 🙂

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