Ah what fun it is to film a bird and then later extract the best still image from the clip.
This Robin only sang for a few moments and then was off, but it was just the work of a moment to choose the best frame and extract it.
Here's the original:
And here it is after some post-processing. Marvellous! You'd be hard pushed to identify this as a video frame rather than a photo wouldn't you?
I've always fancied trying Infrared (IR) photography but you need expensive filters, a very expensive camera or you need to remove filters from an existing camera.
Imagine how happy I was to discover that Photoshop (CS4) has a simulated IR filter effect!
Here's a good overview of the subject:
One of the most charming contrasting color effects you can get in photography is by using infrared. An easy way to understand near-infrared light is to think of it as the color of the rainbow next to red, a color that is invisible to the human eye. But near-infrared is not the same as thermal imaging.
Because everyday objects reflect infrared in proportions that differ sharply from that of visible light, the tonal relationships are wildly unexpected. Such near-infrared techniques used in photography give subjects an exotic, antique look. Green vegetation becomes white, whereas human skin becomes pale and ghostly. The resulting images look alien.
Digital cameras use CCD and other similar sensors to capture infrared images. Although all digital cameras available on the market are sensitive to infrared light, they are equipped with infrared-blocking filters. The main reason for this is that consumer cameras are designed to capture visible light. But sometimes these filters are used together, giving very interesting in-camera effects like false color, wood effects etc.
To start with infrared photography, all you need to have is
Near-infrared images straight out of the camera do not always look good and are usually not as dramatic and beautiful as normally captured images. Hence, a lot of post-processing is done to enhance these images. Some techniques used in post-processing are equalization, focus shift, small aperture, light leaks, digital false color, halo, etc.
Below, we present a selection of over 40 beautiful infrared images. Some of these images have undergone heavy post-processing, and all of these examples display the names of the photographers, along with links to their websites.
Also take a look at our previous photography articles:
Source:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/11/40-incredible-near-infrared-photos/
Here's my first attempt. As it says above, green vegetation gives off a lot of IR so it turns whitr, whereas a blue sky has almost no IR component so appears very dark.
One of my old macro shots, Lea Valley at sunrise:
And after the IR filter is applied:
Again as it says above, this is just the beginning of the post-processing process. Now I need to learn how to do all that other stuff. I'll be back!
A drawback of camcorders is that they don't have a very wide angle of view. This is a problem for a lot of the stuff I want to do eg scenery, sunsets, tilt shift, etc.
The SD900 opens up to 35mm but I need more. My first thought was to adapt my homemade Fisheye setup
So I took it apart.
Success?
Er, no.
Though it's possible I've created a new art form...
The solution is to use a proper converter lens but the Panasonic version costs around £170, so we won't be going down that route (UniM tells me)
What to do?
See next post!
The thing about wanting things is that once you get those things you want other things. And the thing is, the more things you get, the more things you need to go with the other things.
And so it is turning out to be with the Panasonic SD900. I thought that once I had it in my hands I would never want for anything again. And then I realised I needed more powerful SD cards. (£17 for a 16Gb card from Amazon) Then I realised that the 1 hour usable time on the Panasonic battery is nowhere near enough so I had to buy the high power backup battery for an eye-watering £84 (Note to Panasonic; you are a bunch of rip-off merchants; love the product, hate the producer)
Then I saw this stunning time lapse video on Vimeo. Do please watch it full screen in HD. It's truly breathtaking.
I can do the time lapse thingy now, but how does he do the moving around at the same time? He uses a six foot Dolly. I want one. No, I NEED one.
You can buy them here for a starting price of $447.50 but I don't think i can justify the cost to UniM so I'm looking into how to make my own. Any thoughts anyone?
In the meantime, here's the video:
At Amwell yesterday, I was comparing the telephoto performance of my new toy, the Panasonic HDC-SD900 camcorder to my trust old Nikon D60 DSLR + Sigma APO 150-500mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM is an ultra-telephoto lens
Given the size (over a foot long when racked out to 500mm) weight (almost 2kg) and expense of the Sigma (£700) I was expecting it to be far superior to the Panasonic
And I was pleased (relieved, frankly) to find that it outperforms the tiny Panasonic, which is not designed with still images in mind anyway, but the Panasonic still did well in the test.
Many people slag off the stills facility on the Panasonic as useless but I think it's rather fantastic. In Burst Mode you get 180 2.2mb images in just over 3 seconds, which is going to be wonderful for those mid-air butterfly shots I've always wanted to take, as well as fun "scientific" projects like water filled balloons and smashing bottles etc. Also, you can take a still shot whilst filming, and you can extract pretty good images from the video too.
Anyway, back to the test. This is the Nikon + Sigma at full 500mm, uncropped:
And here's the Panasonic at full 12X Zoom. (In video mode you can easily shoot at 30X but in stills mode it's restricted to 12X in full resolution mode)
Ok, it doesn't have the rich colours of the Nikon but then you wouldn't expect it to. As a "stand alone" image, I would say it's a pretty good result.
Cropping into the images you can really see the differences though.
Nikon + Sigma:
Panasonic:
Not great but still usable.
And with a bit of fiddling in Photoshop, you can get a very decent result.
This is one of my favourite Venezuela images, the Februa Cracker butterfly (Hamadryas februa). (previous post)
The camouflage is so good that it's almost invisible against the bark of the tree...
But after a Photoshop job on it, the patterns show up really well:
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