randywilson

<p>As others have suggested, converting to black and white is the way to go, as most of the color content of the image is noise rather than signal anyway. Still, any attempt to recover any sort of detail in the subjects' faces is probably futile, but as other posters have shown, it is possible to make this look like a pretty typical old snapshot taken in horrific light, if that is your hope.</p><div></div>

<p>When I go into black bear country at night I try to make a lot of noise, as black bears tend to be less aggressive than grizzlies and will usually try to avoid contact with humans. </p>

<p>HDR isn't your only post-processing option. There are several other approaches to high-contrast subjects that can yield pleasant and realistic results. Perhaps the easiest and most useful involves the use of the exposure, recovery, fill light, and blacks sliders in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. I believe the most recent versions of these software packages have replaced these tools with newer variations on the same idea. Another approach that is helpful with more difficult subjects is the manual blending of different exposures of the same image.</p>

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<p><em>However, I knew that the ISS would pass near the Moon and I wanted to include it in my composition.</em></p>

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<p>In that case, take one frame of the moon exposed correctly and then blend it with the exposure or exposures of the ISS, each with the overexposed moon removed.</p>

 

<p>So, are you wanting to make sure the background remains black, and that is why you would stop down and decrease ISO for a continuous 2-minute exposure? Because that is the only part of the image that will remain equivalent. The moving parts of the image would become much dimmer, for the reasons you have mentioned.</p>

<p>There's no reason on earth that your buffer shouldn't be able to keep up with exposures that are occurring every 4 or 8 seconds. You are aware that the 5D has two different types of in-camera noise reduction? Perhaps you have dark frame noise reduction turned on? This requires an exposure with the shutter closed that lasts as long as the exposure with the shutter open.</p>

<p>I think the ISS in your image is rather dim; so I might try the exposure at ISO 1600, 2 min. f/5.6.</p>

<p>I don't know whether there are copyrights being ignored at Shorpy's page (<a href="http://shorpy.com">http://shorpy.com</a>), but there is fascinating breadth and range of photos posted there, including a number by Dorothea Lange and other Depression era photographers.</p>

<p>Photoshop/Adobe Camera Raw/Lightroom sharpening tools such as Smart Sharpen and Unsharp Mask have features designed to help you selectively sharpen certain pixels while leaving others unaffected, in part to keep from sharpening noise rather than actual picture elements. Look into the threshhold or masking sliders within these tools.</p>

<p>There you have it, Douglas. Wad up photo.net and throw it away. Ansel Adams wasted his time writing those silly books. No one knows anything you can't learn by filling up your flash memory a few times.</p>

<p>Adobe Bridge. Comes with Photoshop.</p>

<p>Under clear skies, do your shooting early or late to get low angle light, and try to find situations where you can shoot back lit foliage. Cloudy days allow you to shoot all day. And always, always use the polarizing filter.</p>

<p>One thing you can do in post processing that might help is to get the color balance right. Often that is enough to restore the vibrant colors you remember seeing. Often if the color balance is too blue the colors in the image will look drab and washed out. </p>

<p>If you're using Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, use the blacks slider to bring the left edge of your histogram farther to the left to help deepen the dark areas in the image, especially if you're following the recommended practice for digital photographing of shooting to the right. This will also enhance the vibrance and saturation of the colors.</p>

<p>You might also gently nudge the vibrance slider to the right some. Also, in Camera Raw there are camera pre-set modes such as Landscape, Camera Standard, or Camera Faithful which may enhance the saturation some.</p>

<p>As a last resort, you could use the individual color sliders under the HSL tab in Camera Raw or Lightroom to adjust the hue, saturation, or luminance of different colors.</p>

 

<p>I'm sorry, I meant to say "the active layer".</p>

 

<p>In CS5, the Layers window has a symbol in the strip above the layers that looks like an X. Clicking that will unlock the active window.</p>

 

<p>New releases of Photoshop always have a new capability or improved functionality that make it more than worthwhile to upgrade. CS5, for example, has a vastly improved noise reduction tool in its ACR component that I thought would be particularly helpful to the original poster. I don't chase newness in software, but I welcome new software that enables me to do things that I couldn't do before or lets me do the same old things 10 times faster.</p>

<p>Not knowing the particular problems you have with CS2, I'd point out that you're three generations of PS behind and should perhaps consider upgrading to the current version, CS5. You may find that all or many of the shortcomings you face have been addressed by a release of the software that is not three or four years old.</p>

 

<p>You don't have to disable domain forwarding at your registrar in order to go directly to your zenfolio site. You can go directly by typing in an address in the form of <a href="http://xxxx.zenfolio.com">http://xxxx.zenfolio.com</a>, where xxxx is the name of the site you set up when you signed on to Zenfolio.</p>

<p>Zenfolio and Smugmug are two photo hosting sites that offer e-commerce capabilities. There are others as well, but these seem to be the two best known.</p>

<p>I find that google indexes all the titles and captions of the photos in my Zenfolio galleries. <br>

One thing I don't like about Zenfolio, though, is that there's a 25 Mb limit on individual image file size, which means that I have to upload jpegs instead of tiffs. I believe that Smugmug does not have a limit.</p>

<p>Thanks for the response, Jim. Apparently you were right about yesterday being a holiday in Jersey. I received a reply to my email to tocad.com today and have completed an order for the tripod part I needed. The cost was very reasonable, and the leg section should be wending its way to Arkansas shortly.</p>

 

<p>I've damaged one of the leg sections of my Velbon El Carmagne 630 tripod. Does anyone know of a good on-line source for replacement parts? I'm not having much luck getting a reply from tocad.com to my email query about the availability of Velbon parts for sale.</p>

 

<p><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/9391311-md.jpg" alt="" width="679" height="465" />Junie Junie Moon on a hike in Lonesome Hollow. Best photo hiking dog ever.</p>

<p>Set it to do no sharpening at all and do everything in post processing.</p>

 

<p>As pointed out in an earlier post, you're trying to photograph scenes with a greater range of tonality than can be recorded on film or a digital sensor. There are ways to finesse this problem under certain circumstances. Learning how to use a GND is the old-fashioned, pre-digital way, but still a practical approach to the problem, even when you're faced with a relatively uneven horizon. Using bracketed exposures of the same scene combined in software such as Photoshop using blended layers or HDR processing is another approach. </p>

<p>However, I don't know of any way to have a sun in the frame that is that high and hot that doesn't make hash of the image, except under special circumstances. To have a decent sun under the conditions you're shooting in, you need to have either significant amounts of haze or a sun very close to setting, or both. Even stacking multiple GNDs might not get the bright and dark parts of the scene to co-exist happily in the frame. </p>

<p>A U-shaped histogram represents an image that is maximally contrasty, with much of the image consisting of very dark pixels and much consisting of very bright pixels and not much in between.</p>

<p>The histogram is just a two-axis graph with tonality from dark to bright represented on the horizontal axis and number of pixels represented on the vertical axis.</p>

<p>There have been some useful tips listed here, but we're all flying a little blind and giving scattershot advice because without seeing examples we don't really know what you don't like about your images and what we might be able infer from the images themselves about how they came to be the way they are and what might be done to get them closer to what you want.</p>

<p>One note about the "vivid" and similar settings on your camera: those refer to processing that is done in camera on jpeg files and have no effect on the RAW files.</p>

 

<p>You may already have anticipated that you may need larger and faster compact flash cards for the same reason that your computer may not be up to snuff: the 5DII files will be much larger than the ones from a 10D.<br>

<br />As mentioned in an earlier post, you don't have to have CS4 to convert raw files, but Adobe Camera Raw has evolved into a very powerful and easy to use post processing tool, and you may want to consider updating to CS4 so that you can use the latest versions in your workflow.<br>

<br />You might also want to consider getting an extra battery.</p>