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.

Morning gold at Bau Rouge beach - long exposure with the Hoya ND 400 filter

Saturday was the first sunny day here after one week on unstopping rain.
This bad weather complicates my work about shooting gardens and pools and i have a very few time for personnal images. I just did a very short visit to the sea in the morning before a pool session planned during the week but reported because of the rain.

Note : If you're interested in long exposure photography, you can have a look at some tips i've posted here.

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.

An orange touch in the deep blue

A winter afternoon at Bau Rouge beach

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 :)

Last rays on the sand beach

Péllegrin beach in La Londe les Maures - Provence

Same place, same day but i would say half an hour before the one in my previous post.

Just some blue

Mediterranean blue

I don't do very often this kind of minimal shot. I had spent the end of the day waiting for dusk on a sand beach in La Londe les Maures when i turned my lens to the horizon. The 120 seconds exposure is just due to the low late dusk light. If i remember well i had 2 Hitech GND filters mounted in front of my lens to avoid a too strong over exposure of the sky.

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.

Increasing my long exposures collection - one more with the Hoya ND 400

Le Pradet near Cap Garonne

I don't know why but that's something i've always loved to do : Returning often to the same place and capturing the same frames under different lights ...

Yesterday i started the week before 5 am because i had to be in Le Pradet to make some shots of the main city beach at dawn time. A few hours later, my job was terminated and i moved to this wilder place and took this one plus a few ones with waves breaking on these rocks.

For this one i used two filters : the Hoya ND 400 to give me the 20s exposure under the strong light and a Hitech GND to give a little more pop to the foreground.

One new beach view in Toulon

Le Mourillon - Toulon

A file from one month ago, processed today. Done with a Nikon D200 and a Hitech soft GND filter.

My other views of Toulon are 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 ?

The typical dawn on the jetty and a few tech thoughts

Dawn on the Mediterranean sea - La Londe les Maures

Argentière beach at La Londe les Maures. Same day than this one but a few hours before.

While commenting on my previous post, Mark Alan Meader gave me the link to this dpreview article about dynamic range. It made me think to a few things :

• It reminds me this other dpreview post about the Ricoh CX1. During the past years, camera makers were mostly communicating about the high number of pixels they put in their cameras. For compact cameras i'm not sure that increasing the mega pixels was always a good thing. It seems that now they're looking at other aspects of image quality and i think that's nice.

• About the Iridix technologie :
  I don't use the D-Lighting option in any of my Nikon cameras but i'm pleased to know how it works. In fact that's very similar to what we do when we use masks to apply different curve settings to different parts of the image. I tend to prefer this manual craft work instead of an automatic one but that's certainly because i'm an old time photographer who prefers to decide himself instead of giving the decision to an electronic chip :)
  Of course in camera D-Lighting can be interesting on a consumer camera or when shooting jpeg.

  This kind of work about dynamic range certainly gives the best of what can be captured by the camera sensor but it's not HDR photography. When the contrast of the scene exceeds the sensor capabilities you can't catch it all in a single shot and no algorithm will reveal the uncaught details.

I thought you could like an other purple dusk at Bau Rouge beach

Purple dusk at Bau Rouge beach - Carqueiranne

I can't count (perharps my readers can) how many times i was there during the past year. Beleive it or not i had never noticed this white rock before :)

Another Alpilles landscape

Cliffs around Eyguières - Alpilles Massif

Another view of the Alpilles Massif, also done with my old Nikon D100, the Tamron 17-50 and PTGui.

12 frames were stitched to produce a high definition file which has been cropped to fit the 4x3 aspect ratio. I'm always amazed to see how PTGui can perfectly stitch images with such a complicated vegetation.

You can visit the original file whith Zoomify here. Not exactly the original file because the 16 bits TIF file has been converted to a 8 bits jpeg before uploading but it can give you an idea.