Another green shot - HDR in the forest

Cork tree in La Plaine des Maures

The bad weather of the previous months seriously disturbed my work and put me in a real hurry. So i had to work all the week end and even on May first which is the biggest non working day here.

Yesterday evening i needed to breath a little fresh air. I took my camera and drove to a place where there are red rocks on the ground, wild lavender and some little streams and ponds. I arrived a little before the good light and decided to explore a little bit the cork tree forest just near. Although it was a little walk to wait for the light i took the four exposures used in this image thinking it would give me the occasion to practice tone mapping a little more.
10 minutes later it was raining again :)

Ghost forest - Another step on the abstract way

Ghost forest

Landscape photography is my main interest for a long time but sometimes i like to make some different images.
It's never bad to add a little diversity to a portfolio and more important, sometimes i just need a little change. It makes me think and see differently and that also helps me in my most usual work.
Neuro scientists start to say that when we always repeat the same things, we always use the same highways in our brain but when we change, it starts to open some new little paths. Asian philosophers are saying the same for thousand years ...

A forest photo and a free powerful tool to backup your digital images

Provence forest at springtime

Managing a correct backup for digital photos is easier and cheaper than correctly archiving slides or negatives but it has to be done correctly.

Cobian Backup is certainly one of the most valuable free software i know.
All my photos are on hard drives inside my main computer and i use Cobian to copy them to some external drives.

It's a very complete software but really simple to use :

You setup some tasks with source and destination folders and when you want to backup you files you just run your tasks.

Tasks can be run manually or by an integrated automatic scheduler, they can make full or incremental or differential backups. You can define some files types you don't wan't to backup, you can use local drives, network drives or online servers as destinations (i really don't recommend to use an online server excepted if it's your own but do as you want).
Backup can be compressed or not, encrypted or not and the software can also shutdown correctly your computer when all tasks are terminated.

Another very important point : If Cobian backup has a problem with a file and can't work with it, it doesn't stops the task, it just skips the file and write the trouble he met in his log file. So when all tasks are done you can check the logs and see if all is ok or if you have some problematic files.

The road through the forest to Notre Dame des Anges - Springtime HDR

The road through the forest to Notre Dame des Anges

The church of Notre Dame des Anges is at the end of this road, a few km far from this place.

I took the 3 exposures for this image a few days ago just after dawn and just before the rain. After all my complaints about the weather we have i thought i had to show what the current springtime looks here :)

The chapel in the forest

Malière chapel - Provence

This chapel is in a narrow valley really close to my village. So close that i've never photographied it before :) Perharps also because the valley is so narrow that good light is rare.
The chapel is a little mysterious. Every body call it a chapel but nobody knows if it's really one or a mausolée. It's a private place, can't be approached very close and nobody seems to know who is the real owner ...

Most often i just use my long lenses for some helicopter shots and i don't carry them for my usual landscape work.
This chapel gave me an occasion to change my habitudes and to retrive the pleasure to use such a lens on a tripod.

HDR at the river and an update on my tips for HDR landscapes

Malière river - Provence

That's just the kind of image which is difficult to make with a single shot without blocking the shadows and or burning the highlights...

I've updated today my old tips for using HDR photography in landscapes. You can have a look here.

Fauve - playing with colors and motion

Fauve

This morning between 5 and 9 am it didn't rain ...

A chestnut tree flower and 5 photographers to discover

Chestnut tree flower in Provence forest

A note for the first time readers : I live in a little Provence village and all around is a huge forest with mostly chestnut trees and cork trees, so don't be suprised if you find many chestnut relatives images while browsing this blog :)

This morning i spent a long time reviewing and cleaning the favorite's folders of my different browsers. I like doing that from time to time and it's sometimes a real leasure to re-discover some websites bookmarked from a long time.

Here are 5 photographers websites i wanted to share. I cant't comment each because of my english writting so i'll just say that they all have their own style, they all have a different approach of photography but they all make some very beautiful work.

• Adam Burton
• Edward Burtynsky
• Pete Myers
• Tony Sweet
• William Neill

HDR waterfall in the forest

Waterfall in Provence forest

The bad weather is still there and i stuck with my archives.
I took the 3 exposures used here in 2008 december and they where sleeping on an hard drive. Today was their day.

A high definition waterfall photo you can browse with zoomify

Done and posted here a little more than one year ago, this image became one of my most popular photo.

It was made by stitching 9 frames with PTGui. The resulting file was cropped to fit the desired aspect ratio and the final image weights around 25 megapixels.
I thought i could deserve a detailed view with zoomify. Once more, what you can see here with zoomify is from a compressed jpeg file and doesn't exactly reflects the real file quality but i can give an idea of what we can do with softwares like PTGui.

LINKS :
My waterfalls, rivers and streams photo gallery.
All my waterfall images.

Notre Dame des Anges - 2 HDR outside views

By a rainy day ...

Notre Dame des Anges, a curious church in Provence - HDR

Notre Dame des Anges

Notre Dames des Anges is right on the top of the highest mountain around my village. This place is dedicated to a saint who had the power to cure people diseases. The walls are covered with gifts that peoples offered to say thank you or ask for a cure. Not only the walls, some special and bigger gifts also hang on the ceiling. When i did this shot, over my head were a little boat and ... a dead crocodile.

Click on the picture above to see it at a better size or click here if you want to visit the big file with zoomify.

If you often come here, you may know that i like and follow the work of Michelle Basic Hendry an canadian painter. Twitter just told me she had terminated a church painting and wrote about it. If you're right brained, you can beleive that ideas cross the oceans :)

Mushrooms with short DOF

Mushrooms on a chestnut tree trunk in Provence forest

Yesterday i read a post about Bokeh on the James Wei's blog and it reminds me this old picture.

In 2004 november i was shooting for some chestnuts producers needing some new images for their marketing. So one day i was making photos in a chestnut trees forest when i see an old trunk rotting (google translation) on the forest ground with many autumn ferns all around. That was not the kind of images i was intended to make but i took a few shots and coming closer i saw these little mushrooms on the trunk. I had no real macro lens with me this day but i took a 28-70 f2.8 zoom lens, put my tripod the most close i could on the sloping and slippy ground and took 3 or 4 photos in manual focusing mode with just changing the focusing distance between the different shots.
Why manual focusing and focusing bracketing ? Because i knew that autofocus wouldn't be perfectly reliable in this kind of shots and in 2004 APS DSLRs didn't had some stunning viewfinders :)

I'm not sure that the blur is strong enough on the front and back part of this image to make a real bokeh effect but i really like the short depth of field here.

One nice and curious sale today

Today a marketing agency licenced this photo for an environmental project about water and forest.

For me that's a nice sale because i'm always pleased when my photos are used in some projects about our natural environment but i find their choice a little curious : This little stone cave was built to protect a water source in the forest around the Chartreuse de la Verne but we can't sea any water on this image. I wonder why they didn't choose one of my river or waterfall image instead of this one ?

Another chestnut tree and an old story

A chestnut tree in Provence forest

In the film era, i used many cameras from different brands but for 35 mm minolta was my real fav. I loved how they were innovatives and how beautiful were their viewfinders ...
Switching to digital i had to leave Minolta and switched to Nikon but i couldn't resist to buy a dimage 7i in 2002 and a dimage A1 in 2003. They were not real working tools but mostly the cameras you always have with you. I have to say that i had a great fun with them. I sold the 7i when i bought the A1 and the A1 died (sony sensor problem) two years ago.

It's not impossible that the photo posted above is the biggest portrait ever done with a dimage A1. It's a stitched mosaic of 12 images and weights more than 22 million pixels. I own a print measuring a little more than 1 meter large and i love it. Nobody could tell it was done with a 5 mpx camera.
I've spent hours and hours looking at the original file and at the print, i've never seen any stiching problem.

I don't really know why i did that. This tree is in the forest around my home, i love him and have many shots of him. One day i had this idea that's all :)

No seascape today, i thought you would need a little change

Chestnut tree leaves

I still have many recent seascapes to process and show here but i thought some would be pleased with a bit of green.
I took this one in october 2007 while coming back to my car after an afternoon in the autumn forest. I remember the wait for the wind to stop to keep the leaves sharp in the low light.

Dusk time in the forest

Dusk time at the Chartreuse de la Verne

I've spent many time shooting during these last three days. That's a photo from yesterday in the late evening. The long exposure (125 seconds) really helps to retrieve some colors in the scene under a really low light. Of course such an long exposure can't give very sharp leaves in the forest but today i don't think that's really a problem. Some years ago i would probably not have done this shot. I was working in a photo agency and we were reviewing slides from photographers on a light table with a strong magnifying glass. This one OK, this one no ... I guess we wouldn't have accepted any forest shot if we couldn't count the leaves on the trees :)

Today i spent most of the day shooting paintings for a painter and after that i rapidly went to the beach for some seascapes at dusk time. Shooting paintings is an usual part of my job and i have to say that it's a real pleasure. It gives inspiration and it's always a good lesson about composition and colors.
A painter i often work with became a friend and 5 years ago for the birth of my daughter she offered her a large beautiful painting and told us Put it where she can see it, touch it, play with it. That's done whith Liquitex acrylic and it can't be damaged by a child. Five years after i can say that it's true and Liquitex on canvas can resist to many things :)

Waterfall - a larger view

Waterfall in Provence forest

I've ever posted a square photo of this waterfall but i also like this new version :)

A winter day at the lake and a few words about my new filter holder

Lonely tree around the Lac des Escarcets

Yesterday in the afternoon i left my office under a beautiful blue sky and drove to one of my favorite places in winter  : the Lac des Escarcets.
Arrived at the lake, no more blue sky but some uniform white clouds. I thought to go back immediately but perharps because i started to feel lonely without my daughter or perharps because i wanted to test my new filter holder with a very wide angle lens, i went for a little walk around the place.

Regular readers may know that i have recently renewed my graduated ND filters. With them i've bought one new filter holder designed to work with wide angle lenses.
That's a Hitech MK4 wide angle with 2 slots for filters.
The most common problem when using filter olders with a wide angle lens is vignetting. So i tested my new one with my Sigma 10-20 and i'm very happy with the results : at 10 mm there is some vignetting (i can see the holder in the corners of the viewfinder :)), from 11.5 mm no more vignetting, the images are perfect.
Note for photographers : i use 100 mm wide filters and can't say about the holder designed for 85 mm wide filters.

The photo above was done with a 0.3 soft filter. That means that the darkerst part is one stop darker than the clearest one. That's a perfect example of an image i could have done without any filter but where using filter really increase the file quality : without the filter i should have underexpose the photo to keep the sky perfect and some part of the tree trunk and the vegetation all around would have been a little noisy. Of course, one stop underexposure is not a very big issue when you shoot raw but the fact is that the filter really gives a better file and makes post processing easier.

Next in the serie ...

Afternoon light in La Plaine des Maures

The rain is still falling and i'm still processing the file from the last sunny day ...