Magic Lantern, 5D MK III and firmware 1.2.3

Magic Lantern, 5D MK III and firmware 1.2.3

I personally know quite a few photographers who hesitated to install Magic Lantern on their Canon 5D MK III just for a single reason - it required them to downgrade 5D firmware to version 1.1.3 while the latest one is 1.2.3. And as Canon introduced quite a few fixes since 1.1.3 for many it was a reason to wait for 1.2.3 support in Magic Lantern.

Unfortunately adding support for new firmware version is not as simple as it might sound (and it sounds really simple). In fact - it might be very difficult. As a software developer I can tell you that it's sometimes better to stick to an older version of firmware/library because supporting new version might require a lot of changes and also might break existing functionality. However, it looks like Magic Lantern team finally started to work on supporting most recent firmware and if you're interested in the progress, you can track it here. Apparently a few things don't work at the moment but the progress they're making is really impressive. I think we will see working version in a few days from now. If you're interested about Magic Lantern, you can learn more from my recent post.

As I'm writing about Magic Lantern again I would like to mention that I plan a whole series of tutorials about using Magic Lantern (because I was asked by some of my readers to do that). If there are any particular features that you would like to see covered, just let me know (eg. in the comments below). Please note, however, that I will only cover "still" part of Magic Lantern as I'm not really interested in video recording.

Daily photo - Path in the Mountains

Today High Dynamic Range image was taken last autumn in Tatra mountains. Very dramatic and quite extreme lighting conditions required use of HDR so I captured 5 photos at 1.5 EV spacing.

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Benro Travel Angel Tripod Review (Carbon Fibre version)

Introduction

There are two pieces of photography equipment that I'm never really happy with - tripods and bags. I have quite a few of each and my collection growths every few months.

The main problem with tripods is that majority of them is either steady or light. There aren't that many that have both features. Another thing is that most of the tripods are relatively large. Both things make them difficult to use during long hikes. It's not a problem for me if I have to walk with a heavy and huge tripod for an hour or two, but after ten hours every piece of equipment becomes heavier.

So I was looking for a solution for that and quite recently found Travel Angel tripod series from Benro. Name caused some interest because it implied it was perfect for travel photographers and I decided to look into it more carefully. It turned out that Benro offers tripods targeted for travel/landscape photographers that are both small (very small, take a look at the image below), light and steady (they are made of carbon fibres) and that are very easy to set up.

Travel Angel's legs can be inverted and folded back 180° making it very small in size what's really great when travelling.

I decided to get one without much thinking :) especially as I needed one to shoot in the mountains. There are many versions of Travel Angel available and I decided to get 4-section Carbon Fibre one with a maximum height of ~150 cm.

Using Travel Angel

It is indeed very small. You can easily hold it in your hands (in case you don't want to use a tripod case... BTW one comes with this tripod) as the legs can be inverted and folded back 180° making it even smaller in size.

And it is also very light - together with a ball head it weights around 1.5 kg! Wow - it's less than my 5D MK III with an L-series lens :)

Despite the fact it's so light, it's very steady at the same time and there are a few things that help in achieving that:

• Carbon fibers are usually less prone to vibrations than aluminum,
• There is a hook situated at the bottom of center column that makes it possible to hang additional weight to stabilize the tripod,
• Rubber feet of tripod legs can be replaced with steel spikes (included in the set) which sounds like a great solution for softer ground.

Setting up a tripod is really easy and can be done very quickly. Based on promotional materials it should take up to 15 - 18 seconds. Although for me it usually takes a bit longer, I was still able to do that in something around 25 seconds (even when wearing thick gloves) what's quite impressive because it limits the chances of loosing the shot significantly.

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Evening in Warsaw

Daily photo - Evening in Warsaw

Today daily photo could have a completely different title - "first snow" - as it's first snow fall this winter. I hoped to capture snow fall while standing there (what would create very moody image) but unfortunately snow flakes were way too small to be visible in the photos (apart from ugly dots caused by snow flakes on lens front element).

It's also another "test" image captured with Sony NEX-6 which I quickly reviewed just yesterday. This time it's a regular high dynamic range photo - I captured 5 exposures, changing shutter speed manually due to auto-bracketing limitations of NEX, at 1 EV spacing and then used Fusion/Real-Estate available in Photomatix Pro 5 to create very natural looking result. Although Fusion/Real-Estate, as the name implies, is targeted toward real-estate photographers I use it with success for both landscapes and night scenes for a few months now. Its biggest strength is that it provides easy control over how well the highlights are preserved. As you can see in the image below I haven't restored highlights completely. Some of the lamps seem to be blown out. However, it was done on purpose as this way the lamps look like they are glowing - what's much more natural and realistic.

If you're interested in learning more about Fusion, make sure to read my HDR tutorial, especially the part about Exposure Fusion. If you prefer reading tutorials offline (or printing them), you can also download it as an eBook.

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Sony NEX-6 - first field test

Sony NEX-6

I finally managed to test Sony NEX-6 in real-life situation - I decided to test it during blue hour in Warsaw - you'll find "test" photo later in this post. Also my girlfriend played with it a few days earlier so generally I now know more less its strengths and weaknesses (the camera, not my girlfriend). Note it's not the review yet. It will come at later date, after I will use NEX for longer time.

The biggest advantage of Sony NEX-6 for me is its size and weight. It's really small and light. It really looks like a typical compact camera. Together with a lens it weighs less than Canon DSLR body alone. It's so light that when I had it in my backpack I needed to check it's really there or whether I forgot to take it from home. It's really light.

With its small size, comes one issue though. If you have large fingers or try controlling this camera wearing thick gloves, you might have problems. As you will read later on, I tried to shoot in gloves (it was cold!) but as I ended up pressing various buttons accidentally (eg. for changing ISO or switching from AF to MF) or changing exposure I gave up.

What's really important is that image quality is really impressive (much better than I expected from camera of that size). 16 megapixel ASP-C-sized sensor is really powerful. In fact it's noticeably better than on my backup DSLR - Canon 50D. It handles high ISOs very well with ISO 3200 being perfectly usable and ISO 6400 also usable (although there is quite a lot of noise in it). I didn't go further so I'm yet to make my opinion on even higher ISO values. Also dynamic range seems to be very good what's another positive surprise.

Generally the camera is really advanced and packed with features that both amateurs and professionals will love. From manual modes (bulb mode is also present), wide ISO range (ISO 100 - ISO 25600), RAW support to focus assisting features. There are 2 I especially like (both available when focusing manually):

• Focus peaking - shows which parts of the image are in focus using bright colour (eg. red or yellow) visual cue,
• Focus assistant - automatically zooms in when you're focusing so you can set your focus precisely.

These features weren't new for me as I'm using MagicLantern on my Canons but I'm glad they are present on NEX-6 :) There are more interesting features like 10 fps burst mode, excellent electronic viewfinder (that can show you real-time histogram), a lot of creative effects and more.

One of the biggest disadvantages for me is how quickly the battery drains. Sony says it should suffice for around 300 photos, which is already a rather low number, but for me it was usually even lower. Probably due to the fact that I was shooting in cold (batteries drain faster) and using longer exposures (batteries don't like that). For a whole day of shooting I will need around 3 batteries I guess. Or 4. And oh - recharging seems to last forever!

And finally a few disadvantages for HDR photographers:

• You can only capture 3 exposures in auto-bracketing mode, at 3 EV spacing maximum. It alone wouldn't be a big problem as it's sufficient in many cases, but there is something worse...
• Auto-bracketing CANNOT be started with neither 2s delay nor with remote controller. Basically it means that in order to capture photos in auto-bracketing mode you need to hold shutter release button while all 3 exposures are taken. It's not a big deal when you're shooting in bright light with fast shutter speed, but when you're shooting sunset for instance or long exposure - it becomes a serious issue. Holding shutter release will introduce a lot of camera shake and thus will significantly affect images sharpness. What I do to overcome this is to shoot in Manual mode and quickly change exposure between the shots - this way I can at least use remote controller. Photos might be a little misaligned but it's still better than blurry.

Daily photo - Warsaw: City in Motion

Time for a daily photo - today long-exposure High Dynamic Range image taken with Sony NEX-6. I'm hardly ever happy with my photos but I'm really satisfied and proud how the one below turned out:

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SmugMug and Prints

SmugMug account

It was for very long time on my todo list to set up SmugMug account (it seems that these days each photographer has one) and I finally did - you find it here: http://hdrphotographer.smugmug.com/. If you haven't heard about it yet, SmugMug is a web service for storing, sharing and selling photos. Great way to create fantastic and professional looking online portfolio.

My design, which you can see on the right, is very simple at the moment but I plan to work on it later. For now I wanted to keep things clean.

There were several reasons I chose SmugMug:

• I needed a good and professional looking portfolio (so far it's simple but it still looks quite nice),
• SmugMug offers a lot of customization options - you can not only choose from predefined themes but also change colours and add a lot of widgets to your page to make it look unique,
• According to other photographers it's very reliable,
• It offers much more than just a portfolio (eg. it allows to view/create slideshows, sell photos, print them etc.),
• Image quality is great - images look really crisp what is important if you want to impress others with your work (and that's one of the reasons one want to have portfolio after all :) ).

For now only a very small subset of my photos is available there but I plan to successively add more of my images and in the future to closely integrate my blog with it (i.e. to use it as a hosting to my images).

Prints of my photos

The fact that I started to use SmugMug has one more interesting side-effect. You can now purchase prints of my photos (as I decided to get Portfolio plan). You can also buy digital downloads to use my photos as wallpaper for instance. Please note, however, that some photos are available as HD wallpapers for free here - so you don't need to buy them.

To buy my photos you can either:

• Visit my SmugMug account, select photo of your choice and click on the Buy button there or
• You can buy the photos directly from my blog by clicking on the Buy button below a photo.

The button looks like this:

At the moment you will find such a button only under newest photos but I will keep adding it also to the older images.

Daily photo - evening in Warsaw

Despite the fact that below high dynamic range photo was taken last year, I could say it was taken just yesterday because Old Town of Warsaw looks almost the same as 12 months ago. Christmas decorations which are still hanging are almost identical as ones in 2013. And probably even a year before.

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Black & white winter

500px once again

I must say that in the last few days I started to use 500px much more once again and as I reported here it looks very promising so far. A few of my photos reached more than 4000 views what's fantastic. I hope to continue using it in the next weeks and I hope it will stay the same.

Daily photo - Dolina Kościeliska

Today black & white High Dynamic Range photo was taken last winter in Dolina Kościeliska... at least this is what I think looking at the dates. But quite frankly - I'm not sure if I'm right it was taken there :) I will have to start logging GPS coordinates finally because it's not the first time I'm not sure of location.

The conditions were absolutely gorgeous - a lot of snow, quite dramatic clouds and amazing contrast. The last one made me decide to convert this photo to black & white to make this contrast even more apparent.

What I really like about this image, apart from contrast, is composition with path and stream both leading the eye towards the background. BTW when viewing a lot of my photos I noticed is that I use this composition quite a lot.

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Stream in Koscieliska Valley

Landscape photography

For me it took a really long time to define myself as a photographer. I try my hand in various things from landscape photography, cityscapes, animals to macro. I even take portraits from time to time (I wish I was better in them!). However, recently I take more and more landscape photos and I feel most comfortable with them. I also enjoy taking them the most. Impatiently waiting for sunset and seeing how beautiful it turns out... well, it's super exciting! And very rewarding. Especially as you often need to make sacrifices to capture good landscape photo (you need to either get up very early or miss dinner) So yes, I think I can be called landscape photographer :)

Why I'm not calling myself HDR photographer (apart from this blog's name)? Well, as I discussed in this post, High Dynamic Range is just a tool, technique to overcome limitations of our cameras. But it's not separate genre of photography. You can use it for landscape, architecture, real-estate, product or portrait photography. I'm also not black & white photographer, despite I often use it. HDR is just a tool. Very useful - but a tool.

Daily photo - Stream in Koscieliska Valley

I really like revisiting same places during different seasons, weather conditions or during different times of day as each of them make specific place look differently. Same place might look magical under some conditions, mysterious under others and even boring sometimes.

Very recently I uploaded photo from Koscieliska Valley here. Today I'd like to share yet another photo from there. From almost exactly same spot... yet both photos are completely different. First one was taken in winter. Photo from today was captured last autumn. Which one do you prefer? And why?

Capturing whole dynamic range of this scene required taking 5 photos at 1.5 EV spacing. As always I used Photomatix Pro to create HDR image from them and to tone-map it. After that I loaded this photo into Photoshop and used luminosity masking on it to give desired look to the image - I increased contrast and saturation locally.

Also as I wanted to add a little blur to water (but just a little bit) I used ND8 neutral density filter. If you're not familiar with it - ND8 stops about 3 EV of light. It means that instead of shutter speed of around 1/32s I could use 1/4s which already gives some blur to water - not much but that was what I wanted here.

I also think that composition of this photo is rather nice with river leading the eye (and having shape of inverted S-Curve) and strong vertical lines of tall trees in the background that greatly attracts viewer's attention.

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Wacom Intuos Pro M tablet review

Introduction

In the last year or two I started to spend much more time in Photoshop, post-processing my photos in it. For me it's no longer only about applying global contrast and saturation. I started to work locally - I add a bit of contrast here and a touch of colour there. To make my local changes I use layer masks which I need to paint with a brush tool.

Up to now as many other photographers I was using a mouse, but the more photos I processed the more I was tired with it. It wasn't that precise, to change brush size or opacity I needed to change it manually (and set it to a fixed value) what made it more difficult to do very smooth transitions. After some consideration I made a decision - I need a tablet. And I got one - Wacom Intuos Pro M.

Before you proceed, a word of warning: if you don't use Photoshop (or Gimp or any other advanced photo editor) such a tablet will be virtually useless for you. Many applications (including Lightroom) can't make use of its features - especially they don't support pen pressure. It will work in them but it will be just a mouse. Fancy mouse and nothing more.

A short explanation - M in the name stands for Medium. Intuos Pro tablet comes in a few flavours: small, medium and large which differ in size of tablet. Medium size was perfect for my needs and fits well in my limited working space.

Some most important features:

Price: small - $250.00  medium - $350.00  large - $500.00

2048 levels of sensitivity (in both pen tip and eraser)

Wireless support

8 customizable buttons (Express Keys)

Multi-function touch ring with 4 customizable functions

Multi-touch and hand gestures support

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500px vs the rest - small update

500px just got better

In the last few months I did a few comparisons of popular web sites from photographer's and photography blogger perspective. The comparison included such websites as 500px, Flickr, Google+ and Facebook. Pinterest was also mentioned.

You can read first part of the comparison here and the second one: here.

I mentioned in these posts that I really liked 500px, especially for image quality. And it's still true because photos you can find there are truly amazing. What I didn't like at the time of writing was that it was very difficult to get more than just a few hundred of views and recently it even got worse with 100 - 200 views per photo on average. In fact this made me decide to temporarily stop uploading photos there.

However, I have to do 500px justice. Apparently they listened to feedback community gave them and changed their algorithms once again recently. I'm still testing it but so far it looks very promising. For the last few photos I uploaded there I already received 1500+ views what's very good.

But the list of changes is longer than updating internal algorithms. They greatly improved profile page design (it now looks ultra-modern and is one of the most beautiful I've ever seen), you can see example in the image on the right, and improved Store functionality - although I still find it quite simple.

Unfortunately you still cannot comment directly from the Flow page what results in a small and somewhat funny looking issue - your photos might have a few thousand of views and a few hundreds of likes/faves but just a few comments. +500px please do allow commenting directly from the Flow page.

BTW you can visit my 500px account here.

Daily photo - Foggy Day

Once you start taking HDR photos it might quickly become an obsession. I remember that after I got started with high dynamic range photography, I was capturing bracketed exposures even if situation didn't require this because dynamic range of the scene was very low. And there are scenes like that. Really. One of them are foggy conditions as in the image below:

In such circumstances a single exposure was enough to capture whole dynamic range and to show the mood of the scene.

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Painterly photo from Dolina Koscieliska

Using tablet for editing photos

Recently I switched from using regular mouse to Wacom Intuos tablet for photo editing in Photoshop. And you know what? I love it! I really do! Editing is now so much quicker, easier and especially more precise. Although I'm not very good neither in drawing nor in painting (I'm terrible in both in fact) I have no problems with using this tablet. I apply my changes with strength that I want to and exactly where I want to. Making long "brush strokes" is also easier than with regular mouse.

Moreover, as this tablet is very customizable I configured its buttons in such a way that I almost don't need to touch keyboard during editing. Fantastic. Another step to improve efficiency while editing.

You can expect full review of this tablet on my blog in a really short time.

Daily photo - Painterly photo from Dolina Kościeliska

Daily HDR photo is from Kościeliska Valley (Dolina Kościeliska) - a very beautiful and picturesque place in Tatra mountains. One of my favourites in fact. I especially like it's beginning (just after entrance to Tatra National Park) which you can see in the photo below.

I used my painterly processing (you can find more details about it here) on this image to emphasize picturesque nature of this place. I started with a high dynamic range image (5 exposures, 1 EV apart), that I tone-mapped in Photomatix Pro and then adjusted in Photoshop. After that I simply applied my painterly technique to it. I really like how it turned out - it looks really painterly to me. What are your thoughts about this image?

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Winter HDR photography

Winter landscapes

This winter in Poland isn't very impressive so far. There's almost no snow, temperatures are abnormally high - recently it was +15 degrees Celsius while normally at this time of the year it's around -10 degrees Celsius. Sometimes -20 or less. So instead of winter we're having some warm spring here... ok, now the things changed a little bit because it's -7 today and it is supposed to be -22 in a few days but I take these predictions with a grain of salt, especially as in south of Poland (mountains) it's still rather warm.

All that is too bad, because in my opinion winter is one of the best times of the year for landscape photography. Short day makes it easier to photograph both sunrise and sunset (you won't miss neither breakfast nor dinner), light is very warm, reflections in the ice are just extraordinary.

At the same time, winter is one of the most challenging seasons because lighting conditions are often extreme with very bright highlights and very dark shadows. Ultra white snow and dark trees produce very high contrast what makes it very difficult to capture whole dynamic range of the scene with a single shot. Such conditions often require High Dynamic Range photography. For this reason I wrote short tutorial about taking HDR photos in winter.

Daily Photo - Hala Ornak

Previous winter was much better (well, it was real winter). When I was in Polish Tatra mountains last February it was snowing all the time for the first few days what was a promise of beautiful sceneries for landscape photography. And I was right. As you could have noticed I took a lot of beautiful winter images last year including the one below.

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Street in Barcelona redone

Facebook comments are no more active

After a lot of consideration I decided to disable Facebook commenting system on my blog today and only leave Google+ for that (I used both up to now). There are several reasons for such a decision but the main one is that it slowed down the blog significantly.

In my tests it seems that loading Facebook social plugin could take as much as 30% of blog's loading time (even a few seconds)! Perhaps I implemented something wrong or maybe Google doesn't like FB and artificially slows it down :) who knows.

The other reason is that not so many of you used it in fact. Most of the comments on my blog are done via Google+ commenting system. Funny thing is that even those of you who visit my blog by clicking on the links on Facebook decide to use Google+ to write comments. So hopefully this change won't impact number of comments much.

Daily post - street in Barcelona

I don't like to repost my photos but sometimes I just have to. Previously I shared this photo here (with a short description). But recently I gave this shot yet another try... and in fact I like this new version much more. It has sort of vintage feel to it due to its tonality.

BTW to get such look I used one of my autumn presets for Lightroom. You can download whole collection for free by clicking on the link in previous sentence.

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Available online means it's free?

Available online = free?

It's quite depressing when you make your content available online, when you share your photos and tutorials without any charge just to notice that your content gets copied, gets stolen.

I often get questions about permission to use my photos, or translating my tutorials for instance and I really appreciate that! I almost always agree because it's cool to see my images on some nice website with my name under them. It's also great to see my tutorials translated into Italian or German. Really great! But yes, I require that my name is visible and the link to my blog is provided. But that's the only cost that I require for non-commercial use.

However, it sometimes happens that someone simply copies whole my content (eg. whole tutorial) and puts it online with his own signature. Or download my photos and use them as theirs. I know that every photographer wants to get exposure but it's just not fair, it's just stealing. You can't name it differently. Every month I spend many hours writing my tutorials (and please note that I'm doing it in my free time as I'm full-time software developer - not photographer), sometimes it takes even a few days or even weeks to get one particular tutorial finished and polished (like my HDR tutorial or Star Photos Tutorial)... I don't get as much exposure for it as I would like to... but hey, if it can help someone - it's great! I'm really happy if someone writes me an email or comment telling that my tutorial inspired them to try HDR photography or star photography. Or that one of my articles helped them in understanding particular subject of photography. It gives me a lot of satisfaction and motivation to work even harder.

But then someone comes to my website, copies whole text and puts it on his blog, stealing part of that little exposure I could get. And I can do virtually nothing. Fighting with piracy is almost impossible - even huge corporations can't do much about it.

That said it's very sad that people can't understand that if something is available online without extra charges, it doesn't mean you can do anything with it (unless license allows for that or author gives you permission for that). For instance you can't copy or modify my photos or tutorials. You can't sign them with your own name.

Daily photo - Street in Cascais

Today HDR photo was taken in the small town of Cascais, near Lisbon.

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First tests of Sony NEX-6

Quick tests of Sony NEX-6

Today I finally had a chance to do some quick tests of my new Sony NEX-6 camera (and Sony 10-18 f/4 lens) that I will use almost exclusively for the next few weeks (sort of experiment before one of my trips). First impression is - man, it's so light! Even with a lens I can hardly feel its weight. Amazing! Especially compared to DSLR :) And it's so small that I can hide it my jacket's pocket! As for the images themselves I'm not sharing anything yet as the light was very boring and flat today so they aren't very good (they are just boring). Hopefully I'll manage to capture something better in the next few days. But as far as I can see, image quality is quite nice even on high ISO. So everything looks promising.

Daily Photo - Cannon in Lisbon

Today's HDR photo was taken in Sao Jorge Castle in Lisbon. I captured just 3 exposures (at that time I almost never captured more) but it was enough to capture whole dynamic range of the scene. I also composed it in such a way that both visible wheels are in the points of imaginary 3x3 grid thus satisfying rule of thirds.

What I like most about this image, is the amount of details in the cannon itself. It was a beautiful piece of weaponry and with tone-mapping I could further enhance these details and make them pop.

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HDR tutorial eBook downloaded 2000 times

2k downloads of HDR tutorial

Some great news today! My free HDR tutorial eBook has been downloaded 2000 times (and online version displayed 35.000 times). Thank you everyone for your positive comments about it. Some of you even said it's the best HDR tutorial out there! I really appreciate that given how many good tutorials are available about high dynamic range photography. Without your help I definitely wouldn't reach this milestone so quickly! And just recently I shared info about 1000 first downloads.

If you haven't read my HDR tutorial yet you can download it here or read it online here. Note that I use techniques described in it for almost all my photos. So if you like my style, go for it. And even if you don't you can learn much from this tutorial.

Next goal is quite ambitious - 5000 downloads :) hopefully I'll reach it before April this year. I would of course appreciate your help (you know, sharing the link to it among your friends, commenting, liking and similar).

Also due to popular demand I can reveal that I will work on translating this tutorial into Polish. Many of my Polish friends asked for it and I try to listen to your feedback. Moreover, I'm currently in the process of planning and designing another huge part of this tutorial. However, it will take at least few weeks to write it. But stay tuned for more information.

BTW as you can see I changed post format a little bit. I now intend to write more text, instead of simple was there, and took a photo. Hopefully it'll work for you as I have some interesting ideas to cover. This time I write about one of my tutorials but I plan to write more about the photos themselves, including composition and situation in which the photos were taken.

Daily photo - Staw Smreczynski in Tatra Mountains

For this photo I used my painterly technique that I described here. This time, however, I didn't want to make this effect very strong - I just applied it to water and trees to reduce some distracting details in them.

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Turn your DSLR into a beast with Magic Lantern

Cliffs of Cabo da Roca in Portugal. High Dynamic Range image from 3 exposures, tone-mapped in Photomatix Pro 5 using Contrast Optimizer. After using Photomatix, I finished the image using luminosity masks in Photoshop.

As you probably know I'm great fan of Magic Lantern firmware and I wrote several posts about it in the past. As I'm getting a lot of questions about Magic Lantern, its safety, some features, etc. I decided to write yet another post about it.

Update is coming?

BTW Magic Lantern caused some stir on Twitter recently with their short tweet:

"Psst... prepare for a little "sensor upgrade" :)"

Although details about this upgrade are still fairly unknown we can safely assume that by little they actually meant something huge, something groundbreaking. As far as I remember by little they initially described dual ISO feature. But as you might now dual ISO feature is just a fancy name for 14 EV dynamic range... instead of ~12 EV that most Canon cameras normally produce. So it wasn't little - it was huge! One of the biggest improvements for still shooters (although now it's also available in movie recording mode).

What can we expect this time? It's really hard to guess - it can be virtually anything as Magic Lantern proved that there are no limits for them. Ok, there are some limits but sooner or later they find the way around them. For instance you can record RAW video and they recently added audio recording support to it - something what was initially believed to be hard or even impossible to do. So this time it might be anything (except maybe increasing megapixel count of your DSLR) but for sure it won't be little. I wouldn't be surprised if they found the way to decrease noise level on higher ISOs for instance ;)

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New look of the blog

Street Gallery - although at first glance this image isn't particularly interesting, what I like about it are different light sources - magenta in foreground and on the walls and yellow on the bricks in the middle of the frame - creating some very nice colours and atmosphere.

If you're regular visitor to my blog (you are, aren't you?) you probably noticed that design of the blog changed quite significantly today! Indeed in the last few days I was quite busy with crafting HTML and CSS code of my blog, trying to make it more modern and to increase it's readability.

Please, note that it isn't final desired look (I intend to make some font/colour changes as well as redesigning right column). As a software developer I've been always a great fan of iteration-based approach. With this approach you implement part of functionality (iteration) and show it to the client. You gather feedback from him and go on with another iteration, gather feedback again, and start another iteration... and so on and so forth. In case of this blog, you are my "clients" as you read this blog. I prefer to show you just part of the intended changes (one iteration) instead of making all the changes just to be told that the design isn't good or that it's ugly.

So yes, I'm looking forward to your opinions, feedback, suggestions and of course reports of things that aren't working anymore (I changed quite a few things so I wouldn't be surprising if many features would be broken or looking/acting weird).

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The Best of 2013 - By Community

Time's up! This year's The Best of 2013 project is over. The idea was to share the best photos from my photography friends and here they are.

Thank you everyone for contributing! You took some amazing images in 2013 and I hope that you will continue to do that in 2014 :) and that you will share them in next year's edition of this project (hopefully more people will take part!).

The order in which the photographers and their photos are listed is completely random. Apart from the photos I provided links to Google+, Facebook, Flickr and 500px accounts below each author's name so make sure to follow the artists whose photos you liked.

Also click on the images to view them in large size as many of them look MUCH better in larger size.

Stuart Dyckhoff Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/wm/1/102165221944293633376/posts

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Tutorial: simulating infrared photography in Photoshop

This photo was created using technique described in this tutorial. It was full of greens captured on a sunny day. This kind of scenes works best with this technique.

It's my 3rd tutorial about infrared photography. If you haven't read previous ones yet, you can read them here:

• Introduction to infrared photography - will introduce you to the world of infrared photograhy. In this part I talk about equipment needed to get started with IR photography and I also give some tips on taking infrared photos,
• Post-processing infrared photos - in this part I focus on the post-processing of IR photos to get them this very typical look with blue skies and white foliage.

Both above tutorials assume that you either have an IR-modified camera (meaning that it takes photos in IR wavelengths instead of visible spectrum) or that you use infrared filter that you put in front of your lens. I do the latter - using Hoya R72 screw-in filter.

However, what if you don't have any of these? Well, Photoshop can come to the rescue (as always) - you can simulate this effect and as you will see it's very easy.

Please note that simulated effect won't be identical as capturing real infrared photos but it will be pretty close. Also there are many ways of doing this in Photoshop and below I will just show you one of them.

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Post-processing workflow: Dynamic water

It's been a while since my last post-processing workflow so it's high time for a new one (for more comparisons like this one go here). Also from now on this series will be known as Post-processing workflow.

Today a photo I took 1.5 years ago on Fuerteventura island. The highlights in the 0 EV photo (Before) are blown out making the sky look almost completely white and very flat even though in reality it was very interesting. Thanks to HDR I was able to restore them, including beautiful yellows just above horizon caused by rising sun. I took 5 photos at 1 EV spacing but I ended up using only -1 EV, 0 EV and +1 EV photos as the remaining 2 didn't contribute to the image that much.

BTW to learn more about HDR photography, read my HDR tutorial.

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Colours in the sky

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First of all I would like to remind that you can still share your best photos and be featured on my blog. For more information, read this post. Deadline for sharing your images is 14th January.

My next trip will be somewhat special. For the first time in 5 or 6 years I will be travelling without my DSLR! It makes me really nervous and causes some nightmares (especially as there will be some great views there)... I keep repeating to myself 'it's not only about photos', 'it's not only about photos'... fortunately I will have a camera with me - I decided to get Sony NEX for this trip with a couple of lenses. I don't think it will work as great for me as Canon 5D MK III (and I'll probably miss my favourite Canon 24 f/1.4 lens pretty badly...) but it's still better than nothing :) and maybe this little and light camera will prove me wrong. If you follow +Trey Ratcliff's blog: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/ than you probably know that he recently SWITCHED to NEX from Nikon DSLRs! It's a great recommendation I think.

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One cold winter

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It's been 5 days since my last post here. Normally I don't make such long breaks (unless I have no internet connection). However, this time my main computer was down (faulty GPU) and I couldn't access my Lightroom catalogue what made it rather difficult to choose any photos to post.

Now as the issue is partially resolved I can upload something new on my blog. Not much (just a photo), as working on 24 inches monitor with a crazy resolution of 1280 x 1024 is a rather uncomfortable experience. I hope to fix all the issues in the next few days so hopefully I'll get back to regular posting pretty soon.

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Complete HDR Tutorial eBook (German version)

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For all my German readers (actually there is quite a few of you!), I have great news. Thanks to +Frank Tegtmeyer (https://plus.google.com/107425056907438373444/), you can now read my free Complete HDR Tutorial eBook in your native language! Frank made great effort and translated whole tutorial into German. Thanks a lot for this effort Frank.

You can download German version here.

If you prefer to read English version, you can read it here.

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Dolina Kościeliska in Black & White

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Today I would like to share black & white HDR photo I took in Dolina Koscieliska (Koscieliska Valley) in Polish Tatra Mountains. Conversion to black & white in case of this photo was pretty natural choice as the original image was close to monochrome as well - there was a lot of whites (snow, clouds) and tones close to black (stream, rocks, trees trunks).

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Early morning

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Today I would like to share yet another landscape photo from Tatra mountains. It was very early in the morning and the sun just started to appear from behind the mountains what created very interesting light with right side of the image being still in the shadows and left part glowing. Another interesting thing is the shape in the bottom left corner. When I was shooting this photo I wasn't sure what it was but after viewing final image I realized it was a car :) yes - there was that much snow last year.

BTW in case you missed it, be sure to share your 2 best photos here. I will then feature them on 14th January on my blog what hopefully will give you some more exposure.

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Sunrise in Tatra mountains

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Today I'd like to share one of my favourite HDR photos from last year - fog over the valley in Tatra mountains. This image was taken during winter sunrise and I had really golden light. I really recommend to view this image in large size (to do that - just click on the image above) because only then you will be able to appreciate the light and see all details hidden in the fog.

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Share your best of 2013

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First of all I would like to wish you all the best in 2014!

As you might have seen already, recently I shared my best photos from 2013. As photography community is very important to me I would like to invite you to take part in a small project codename (probably temporary) - The Best of 2013. If you like to be part of it, simply send me the links (in comments to this post) to 2 your best photos and I will share them on my blog on 14th of January.

It doesn't matter you are pro or amateur - you will be featured. If there will be too many photos I will share them in a few turns but I will share all of them.

Some conditions that must be met:

• The photos must be taken in 2013 (it can be edited in 2014 however),
• The photos must have at least 900px on the longer side,
• Please provide the link to your page (or Facebook profile, 500px profile, etc.) as well as the name under which you would like to be credited,
• Links to photos must be sent in the comments under this post,
• You have to provide links to exactly 2 photos.

Also please share the link with your friends - the more photos, the better :)

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