Robert's Ramblings

Just how much can you see staring into a bright light globe? Not much and perhaps even less for a while after you look away as your eyes recover. So this image is an experiment in HDR to try and look into the light to see everything.

This image is a 375W heat lamp which produces in addition to heat a lot of useful light and a prime candidate for a HDR composite image. I could have taken one image with the light turned off but the lighting would have been very different and even the filament would be different as it changes its dimension with the heat of operating. My final three images I chose are three stops apart. The difference between extremes is 64 times!

The end result, well you decide after looking into the light!


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 148 - The Heat is On'. 1/8000s + 1/1000s + 1/125s at f/22 ISO 50 200mm hdr

There's not enough colour in our suburban environment. Sensible muted tones of whites, creams, browns greys and blacks abound everywhere broken by the greens of gardens, parks and street lined trees.

When I first saw this bright and chirpy fence-line fronting the West Beach Caravan Park I thought wow! Colour, colour, colour and more colour running off into the perspective distance. It always brings a smile to my face, especially early in the morning with the rising sun.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 147 - Captive Colour'. 1/200s at f/16 ISO 400 100mm

Well winter has now struck us with a vengeance and its not even June yet. It's cold and blustery with sweeping showers and not at all pleasant to be out in for long without sufficient weather-proofing and thermal fortification.

Sunflowers to the rescue!! I am not not sure where they were grown but if locally then it would have to be the tail end of the growing season. In any case they remind us of summer even though it has flown north for the winter.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 146 - Winter Sunshine'. 4 secs at f/4.0 ISO 200 100mm

A few seconds later my camera seemed to float just above the swirling surf as the tripod went for a late night swim!

I am only just starting to get brave enough to expose my gear to the elements but a swim in salt water is a little more serious that rain. It was cold and wet and rainy and blustery but I was rugged up to the hilt and just love being down on that windswept beach.

I had 10 minutes, took 6 shots and this is one of them.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 145 - Blustery Henley Beach'. 30 secs at f/14 ISO 400 17mm

I know this one is a similar to day 139, St Peter's Cathedral, but the similarities rapidly end when you compare them.

This is the third HDR image in my collection and was composed of 3 exposures of 2.5, 10 and 30 seconds respectively. I just happened to be attending an event at Adelaide Uni this evening and Bonython Hall would have to be the single most impressive building on campus. How could I not photograph it?


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 144 - Bonython Hall'. 2.5+10+30 secs at f/11 ISO 400 24mm

I think that the Moreton Bay Fig, Ficus macrophylla, is my favourite when it comes to amazing trees.

From the beautiful rich dark green foliage through to the dense bushy structure, a large robust trunk and finally those extraordinarily convoluted buttress roots, they are just stunning. We have some beautiful examples here in Adelaide.

This Moreton Bay Fig adorns the grounds of Prince Alfred College where it is slowly tearing up the car park!


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 143 - Wooden Lava'. 1/60 secs at f/8.0 ISO 800 28mm

I'm not sure that this year's RSPCA's Million Paws Walk count reached that magical 1,000,000 ( not by a long way! ) but it's an impressive sight all the same.

The starting grid of the Adelaide 2012 Million Paws Walk.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 142 - Million Paws'. 1/160 secs at f/8.0 ISO 200 47mm

Robert Rath How many people have seen this piece of art just East of the Adelaide University bridge on the River Torrens?

This piece by local sculptor Greg Johns is called 'Fugue' and was commissioned in in 1997. He has many pieces in similar style around Adelaide, interstate and overseas.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 141 - IRON'. 1/160 secs at f/14 ISO 200 47mm

Adelaide is known for being the 'City of Churches'.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 140 - No Smoking on the Court'. 8 secs at f/22 ISO 50 17mm

Adelaide is known for being the 'City of Churches'.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 139 - St Peter's Cathedral'. 2.5 secs at f/16 ISO 2000 20mm

It's funny how when things change slowly you can miss the obvious. All around me trees had been changing their colours from greens to yellow and crimson right in front of me and I had scarcely noticed.

When Jennifer pointed out the colours of the liquidambar tree in my parent's front garden, suggesting how nice a photo it would be, it was like opening my eyes for the first time to the colours of autumn.

The moral of this story for me that all work and no plays makes ...


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 138 - Autumn Crimson'. 1/200 sec at f/4.0 ISO 400 105mm

There is nothing supernatural about these hands by sight but over a long exposure they become but a ghostly apparition leaving behind haunting notes.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 137 - Ghostly Ivories'. 1/2 sec at f/4.0 ISO 2000 67mm

There are plenty of stories about ducks. They feature in Aesops' famous fables, early 19th century US congress and of course our local Canberra. I am led to believe however that ducks are quite intelligent!

I'm sure these three little ducks in the Greenock Tavern are having quite a spirited debate about the state of affairs!


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 136 - Duck Conversation'. 1/13 sec at 85mm f/4.0, ISO 2000

This mother's day mum got something a little exotic, these beautiful pink tulips. Of course I had to photograph them first but I want to try something a little exotic as well!

I wanted to back light but I also wanted to show off the beautiful colour. I took many shots with strobe only with a mixed bag of results. Again this was a daylight shoot so I needed to swamp the image with light so keep the background black. In the end I got the effect I wanted by hand holding the strobe behind and using a soft reflector in front to through back a little light to bring out the colour

This image is also a little larger than before as I am experimenting with new sizes for web publishing.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 135 - Tulips for Mum'. 1/200 sec at 100mm f/22, ISO 400

Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 134 - Beautiful Boats'. 8 secs at 65mm f/4.0, ISO 1000

Adelaide just sparkles when it's all lit up! Just pick anywhere along the Torrens in Elder Park, put your camera on a sturdy tripod and take a long exposure.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 132 - Twinkly Adelaide. 13 secs at 15mm f/13, ISO 400 crop

No matter how cold, or how late or how windy you will almost alway find fishers on our local jetties.

I once heard what I was told was an ancient Polynesian saying that 'the gods do not take from a man's life the time spent fishing'. It would seem this old couple might just know something.

I love natural light night photography because images taken this way really draw me to the place and the occasion. They are of course quite challenging however to do well. Working with low light, long exposures and moving images is simply is all part of the fun and sometime a little luck works its magic as well.

A very sturdy tripod is mandatory for long exposures and I cannot stress how important this really is. A flimsy tripod will wobble in the slightest breeze blurring long exposure images. I have even seen some enthusiasts use tripods made of steel and concrete for extreme telephoto astronomical photography where stability really matters.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 132 - Lamp Lit Fishers'. 5 secs at 17mm f/11, ISO 800 crop

I think it's amazing the variety of styles and materials and states of care that suburban front fences cover.

While out and about today I was noticing how there were fence themes in clusters as I made my way while out driving through the suburbs. There were brush themes, colourbond themes, wrought iron themes and stone pillar themes just to name a few. The clusters clearly showed how neighbors like to copy each other's ideas.

As I drove through down one particularly lovely and shady tree line street one fence really stood out. I guess it was quite an ordinary fence really but the combination of painted wrought iron, sandy stone pillars, immaculate garden and beautifully maintained old bungalow just worked!

I pulled over, jumped out of the my car and framed one image!! My fastest photo shoot ever!


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 131 - Iron Pickets'. 1/100 sec at 40mm f/4.0, ISO 160

If you spent six months in this leaky boat you'd be be well fed, have a fantastic water view but the rest of the experience would deteriorate rapidly from there!

The challenge is to work out where it is!

This is my third HDR image and I must admit that it is a lot of fun with endless possibilities for artistic input. This is however my first image with my image workflow under control. It goes something like this.

1. Capture the raw frames and store in my primary workspace.
2. Edit the render settings for the raw images and export them as temporary 16bit tiff input files (discarded later).
3. Process the HDR image and then export both the XMP settings file with the tone mapping details and the HDR output file as a 16bit TIFF back to be stored with the original raw files.
4. Complete any post processing treating the HDR output files as a new raw file.

Basically this process ensures I can recreate verbatim the same processing from raw files to final rendered JPG again in the future so I never ever need to store a range of rendered JPG files. I simply render the JPG files I need when I need them and I can revisit the HDR process if I need using virtual copies of the original raw file in order to distinguish different HDR processing paths. This last point is imported as I may want to use multiple HDR images in a layer stack for more artistic control. Then again maybe I won't.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 130 - Leaky Boat'. 1/(125,640,2500) sec at 40mm f/11, ISO 500 hdr

Adelaide has some wonderful graffiti artists whose talents are evident in any number of public places. This is not one of them!

Here this grotty opportunistic scrawl in the makeshift canvas of grime on steel has more to do with attitude than art. Strong words, names and filth marked this place.

I felt the need to capture this scene but not to linger any longer than I needed.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 129 - Grimy Graffiti'. 1/5 sec at 17mm f/22, ISO 200

I've been imagining photographing candles for a while now. Thinking about the different aspects of flame and smoke.

While working today at my desk I became aware of a sweet cinnamon aroma permeating the house. I looked for the source of the smell and all of a sudden I realised the smoke from the incense my daughter was burning would make a very interesting subject.

So armed with a 100mm macro lens and strobe on a sync cord I caught four images before the burning ended and the smoke vanished.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 128 - Incensity'. 1/200 sec at 100mm f/25, ISO 100 + strobe

The problem with HDR is how to manage it!

This image taken here at West Beach, a clump of rotten seaweed is actually 3 images taken 2 stops apart. The role and legitimacy that HDR processing has in photography is beyond the scope of this post but once a digital image maker has chosen this path there is a very big workflow challenge immediately faced.

We now have very good image processing workflow tools such as Aperture and Lightroom which model workflow on non-destructive additive steps. Put simply, we start with our original and each step of process such as tonal, colour, sharpness or touch up is laid out in steps which define how the final image will look without ever changing the original.

With HDR we are in trouble unless care is taken to integrate your HDR tool such as Photoshop or Photomatix into your particular workflow such that the integrity and repeatability of the process can be managed from originals to final rendering.

A good process will achieve the following points:

1. The process should preserve all original images and clearly link them back to the final rendered HDR image.
2. The process should minimise any intermediate images that need to be kept. Preferably there should be none but mostly one intermediate can't be avoided.
3. The HDR process settings should be kept as in-image metadata if possible otherwise a setting file needs to be kept independently for each final.

So why does this matter? With the size of digital raw files now coming from recent 20-40 megapixel cameras it is quite easy to take up to 500MB or more per image in a HDR project. Any process which creates or needs multiple copies will not only burn your hard drive but also make managing your HDR project messy and unwieldy. The second issue is that more often than not you will want to come back to your originals and make a little tweak here or there or produce new rendered final images of different quality or sizes. A well constructed and disciplined workflow will make this easy and not the nightmare it otherwise could become.

Have a play with HDR for a little fun and something new but if you get the bug then get your workflow sorted out quickly or you risk being buried!


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 127 - Rotting Colour'. 0.5+2+8 sec at 17mm f/22, ISO 100 hdr

Where do you keep your prisoners? In your dungeon of course! Well nowadays we call it a cellar and our prisoners are wine, preserves, potatoes, onions and other goodies!

When I grew up our dungeon was this amazing room under the house, full of cobwebs, damp musty smells and produce long forgotten. My parents had stopped going down there due to the stooping required to navigate the awkward steps and so we were sent on occasional errands for one thing or another. If anything down there was forgotten, it stayed that way.

Where we now live we have no dungeon. I'm sure they must have gone out of fashion some time back in the 70s. I miss those musty smells and those cobwebs. The next home we buy will have a dungeon for sure!!

So how do we keep our prisoners captive with no dungeon? In string bags!


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 126 - Captive' 6 sec at 40mm f/16, ISO 100

I love some of the beautiful expressions of cultural and civic pride we have adorned our city with. This sculpture in particular caught my attention a couple of years back and I have only now made an effort to go out of my way to photograph it.

Here's just one of the many quotes that can be read from the rings.

'Going back 50 years ago I recall fond memories of walking down Margaret Street on warm summer evenings and taking in the festive atmosphere created by the Italian families who would sit on their front porches eating, drinking, laughing and talking to one another across the street.'

It was quite busy around 7pm and trying to get a nice long exposure without glaring white car headlights presented a bit of a challenge. In the end I compromised on a high ISO and decreased F-Stop to limit the exposure to 20 seconds.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 125 - Norwood Rings'. 20 sec at 17mm f/10, ISO 800

One of the most self-indulgent investments I have ever made in kitchen appliances is my espresso machine.

Not one of your all singing, all dancing fully automagic button operated machines but a good old fully manual workhorse. First I get to choose the beans I want, next I have to choose how fine to grind. After that comes the question of how deep and how to pack the cup and finally how long to wait between pre-charging and pouring the shot.

It's a very engaging process with so many variables coming together for the perfect cup!

This photo was taken at a very slow shutter speed for maximum natural lighting with a bit of fill flash behind a soft diffuser to freeze the pour and bring out the highlights.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 124 - Expressions of Coffee'. 1/3 sec at 100mm f/4.5, ISO 100 + fill strobe

Yeah I know this one's a little clichéd and something you are more than not likely to find on some evangelical pamphlet but there it was this evening and how could I not pull over, grab my camera and take a few shots.

I'm not sure this type of image qualifies as a sunset. That was at least an hour or more away. Seascape or sunscape or evangelical pamphlet cover; call it what you will, it was certainly a beautiful sight.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 123 - Sunbeams'. 1/250 sec at 40mm f/11, ISO 100

I wanted to take a photo of the beautiful orange gerberas that Jennifer bought but I also wanted to do it in a way I have never tried before.

My aim was to create an image of a beautifully and evenly lit bloom in a perfectly black background (in the camera an not in Photoshop). To achieve this I knew I had to strobe light the flower as brightly as possible so that not only would all natural lighting be eliminated but also all the ambient reflected light from the strobe would also be so dim as to be eliminated.

This required three things, I had to get the flower as close to the lens as possible, I had to make the exposure as slow as possible and I had to use as much strobe power as possible.

After many attempts I almost gave up. When the strobe was very close the the flower was unevenly lit, when too far away or diffused the background was lit up in the image. What I needed was a macro strobe which is a circular ring of flash which circles the lens creating even light from all sides.

In the end I solved the problem by firing the strobe 4 times for the same image. Once from the left, the right, the bottom and the top. It worked so well I am looking forward to trying this technique in other challenging situations.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 122 - Happy Gee'.1/200 sec at 34mm f/22, ISO 200 + composite strobe

I have been resisting the temptation for quite some time now to play with High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. Tonight in a moment of weakness I finally succumbed, found a nice quiet dark location and captured multiple exposures.

For the uninitiated, the naive and the innocent, HDR is a technique where a set of identical frames are captured over a wide exposure range. The underexposed images capture bright objects such as streetlights, lit windows and reflections. The overexposed images capture the the detail in the shadows. The images in between help to reconstruct the relationship between them all and enhance the details in the mid tones.

Now armed with my set of exposures ranging from 2 seconds to 2 minutes I can use software to reconstruct a single image by getting the best detail from each one. Trey Ratcliff has a great tutorial here 'hdr tutorial'.

As with most things, good things in moderation and so it applies to HDR. I can see how it could get out of hand so for now I'll just dabble a little and see where this goes.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 121 - The Square'. 2+8+30+120 secs at 17mm f/11.0, ISO 1000 hdr

I am a bit disturbed at the size of this cow relative to the chicken. Well at least I from this point of view anyway.

Small realistic figurines placed in an environment normally associated with the full size object create some really odd perspectives. This pair of stall mascots at our local weekend market make it all the more strange with the dramatic scale difference between themselves.

Shots like this one are easy when you are prepared to physically change your perspective through position. Don't be shy to lie flat on the ground to see things from an unusual angle though I don't recommend doing it in the middle of a busy highway without taking the necessary precautions!


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 120 - Market Mascots'. 1/8000 sec at 21mm f/4.0, ISO 400 Crop

How many of us remember the old 'Oils Ain't Oils' advertisements 'back in the day'. Well, we won't be pouring this lovely golden oil into our cars but it will sure go well in our bodies!

Today we tasted this beautiful and fruity 'Extra Virgin' first press olive oil from Sorrells Vineyard and Winery down in Currency Creek, SA. I learned a little about the different varieties of olive which can be used to make olive oil and discovered that this oil was blended from Koroeniki, Mediterreanean, Kalamata and Moraki varieties.

It's obvious in hindsight that different varieties of olives do exist and of course will have different flavours and colours. Walk down any supermarket aisle in the oils section and you will see labels such as 'cold pressed', 'extra virgin', 'light' and a plethora of brand names but I have no recollection of ever having noticed a variety.

Remember how once all red wine was called 'claret'? Yet now we absolutely must know what's in the bottle! Let's hope that we see more of this in other foods. The more you know about something, the more you will enjoy it.

Sol was so right those many years ago as he preached that 'Oils Ain't Oils'.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 119 - Oils Ain't Oils'. 1/1000 sec at 40mm f/4.0, ISO 400 Crop