PhotoFriday :: Trees

Tropical Avenue of Rainforest Kauri Trees, Paronella Park

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Trees

PhotoFriday :: RED

Photographed at Rainforest Habitat Port Douglas

For PhotoFriday‘s topic RED

Just friends

 

PhotoFriday :: Nature Walk

Part of the Buderim Forest board walk under construction.


For PhotoFriday‘s topic Nature Walk

PhotoFriday :: Scenic Wonder (Rainforest Light)

rainforest light, originally uploaded by imageo.

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves" ...Henry David Thoreau

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Scenic Wonder

A couple of Vertoramas

The Rainforest is a wonderful place, but hard to capture in a single still image. I frequently take a series, like for a stitch panorama only progressive moving higher. This type of image is usually known as vertoramas. Not so many stitching packages can handle this but autostitch will do a good job, providing you turn off the auto straightening, otherwise you will end up with a very distorted result as below. 

Forest Floor

click, click, click

 
Today was bright and sunny, so attempting to photograph the dappled light in the beech forest, on the Kepler track, gave a very contrasty result. The strong light is appealing but the shadows are dark and featureless and the spots of light burnt out. So I set my camera to bracketting, for two reason. Firstly it might give me a better ideas of the right EV adjustment (but judging this by comparing small images on the LCD screen outside is not really a reliable approach), Secondly it gave me the opportunity to post process the set of photos as a HDRi image (using the three exposures to get detail into the murky darks and/or washed out whites). I had plenty of card capacity (doing the three clicks at every photo soon eats up storage space if you are not careful) so most of my photographing in the forest was bracketted
To keep everything simple while I travel I just have picturenaut on a memory stick, so I have been relying on its fairly automatic tone mapping selection. However they were in my opinion changing the “greenness”. Ok, I know some parts of Lord of the Rings was filmed nearby but the green was just not what I had seen. The remedy lay in the gamma adjustment settings, I change that from computed gamma to none. Suddenly my forest photos was beautifully lit again without the artificial green glow.

rainforest HDR

Stream just below the glow worm cave

HDR revisited, and a newbie

I was testing out my new lens (the replacement for a favorite that had an unfortunate accident) in the local rainforest. I was using it at a decent wide angle (32mm, that’s about 48mm equivalent in old-school 35mm jargon) and decided to take a EV bracketed set for some HDR post processing, even though I didn’t have a tripod.

I was happy with the original image, and below are the ±1.5 EV photo also taken at the same time. The exposures weren’t so long but with the mirror movement between shots it was long enough to guarantee that I might move and my photos would be out of registration. To complicate things there was a reasonable breeze moving the ferns.

Since my chief bug-bear with currently available HDRi software is image registration, this is the prefect set to test out the new Picturenaut program, which is self promoted  as a new breed of HDR tools. It is free to download, small and compact, fast and easy to use. Just running with all the default settings I got the expected poorly registered result.
Then I tried the the Automatic image alignment check box, and the results where not bad, still some poor registration as you move away from the center but still a much better result that most other software will do with the same image set. I think I keep Picturenaut around for some more testing! Which is a big deal for me at the moment because I am becoming more and more in favor of doing less post processing or other fiddling about on my images. By the way it has one limitation that may discouraged the die-hard digital photographers, is it does not currently have support for raw image formats.

My favored HDRi tool is still dynamic photo. Whilst I did have to do a lot of manual adjustment and pin adding rather that rely on auto registration, (and it did not do as good a job as Picturenaut on this example) I think the result with thw extra manual work is crisper and does give a more even rendering of the tone mappings, closer to what I believe I saw.

feather in the forest

More of the birds at Grant’s Picnic ground in Kalista

Light in the rainforest

Rainforest Fantasy

Rainforest Fantasy, originally uploaded by imageo.

This fantastic rainforest flower was photographed in the Bicentennial Conservatory house at The Botanical Gardens of Adelaide

pure

Yet another two panel autostiched image. Taken in Mossman Gorge during heavy rain.

For PhotoFriday, topic purity.

Using stitched images is perfect for work deep in a rainforest where you actually want a super wide angle to take in all the detail, but not end up with a fish eye distortion. I just took one photo one above the other then used autostitch. There is plenty of natural lines and surfaces to help the software do perfect image matching. The results is a very natural wide view, without the disturbing perspective. It was dark and raining at the time so the aperture is wide and most things are in good focus.