icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/3200 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Glowy
It was a nice day, so I stepped out for a short stroll with the camera. Many cherry trees have lots of stems and few blossoms, like in the photo below, but some still have large complements of blossoms. With the photo above, I put the sun behind the blossoms and tried to expose for the blossoms, but the result wasn't particularly good, but on a whim I cranked up the exposure in Lightroom, and the result has a nice dreamy glow, as if I had applied the Funky Joy touch-up as I did here.
Part of the effect could be that the wind was whipping the branches around and I was mostly shooting blindly.
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/2000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
The Next Tree Over
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Here They Are Together
Here are a couple more of the “over-exposed glowy” variety...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/2500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/2000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Backlit Growth
My destination for the stroll was a yaezakura cherry tree, which features late-blooming mixed-color ultra-puffy blossoms that Martha Stewart might have designed. Blooming in late April, it is the tree featured on my “10 Gallons of Blossoms on a 5-Gallon Branch” post, and in this 2008 Kyoto Cherry-Blossom Preview. Today, in mid April, it had just started to bloom...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/2000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Just Getting Started
The blossoms aren't necessarily all that attractive up close when they're blooming, but even less so as they're just emerging...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/500 sec, f/11, ISO 720 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sort Of.... Ugh
The one white blossom in that clump seemed appropriate for Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh, but it didn't come out all that well, but here's one where I did a good job of getting most of the edge in focus, so perhaps it's worth a try as a vertical desktop background...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Elsewhere on the tree was a long bare branch hanging down, ending in a clump of blossoms....
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1600 sec, f/4, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Looking Up
A different kind of tree not far away had lots of little growths on the stems.... not sure what's going on, but it looks like it's supposed to be that way, I guess...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Lines at the bus stops got long as others out for the area's blossoms and museums headed home...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Finally, I stopped by to check on the Lily of the Nile that I posted about a week ago. I noticed that it had collected some cherry-blossom petals...
But it was speckled with black bits of something that made me want to clean my computer monitor while inspecting the shots in Lightroom. In fact, I did clean my monitor, but the photos remained the same. So perhaps I'll wait until after a rain to check in on them again. But from afar, they always look pretty....
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/2500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 cropped — 1/1000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Almost Lost
DEC 2011 UPDATE: the “v3” camera profiles mentioned below have now been supersceeded by “v4” profiles mentioned here, available with Lr3.6.
If you shoot with a Nikon D3, D700, or D300, and use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, you'll want to know about the “Camera v3” beta camera-calibration profiles described in this Adobe-forum thread. (The actual profiles are in this ZIP file.)
This is important because in some cases, the standard “Camera” profiles that come with Lightroom ACR fail miserably for these three cameras. For example, consider this crop from the photo above:
Mottled Yuck!
“Camera Standard” profile that comes with Lightroom 3
Those mottled magenta splotches are not on the flower; they're a bug in Lightroom's camera profiles for the D3/D700/D300.
(The rest of this post is written from a Lightroom perspective, but the concepts apply to Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw module as well.)
Lightroom's “camera profiles” are internal recipes for how to convert the camera's raw hardware-specific sensor data into a color image. The camera itself has this built in as part of its JPEG engine, but that's not used if you shoot raw because the whole point of shooting raw is to give you control over the conversion process later. Thus, each raw converter (Lightroom, Aperture, ACR, Nikon View NX, etc.) has the latitude to make the conversion itself, as it sees fit.
In Lightroom's case, it gives you a choice from a number of “recipes” (profiles) for how the basic conversion to color image data is to be done. In the Develop module, at the bottom of the right-side panel, you'll find the Camera Calibration section, and a “Profile” selector that contains items such as “Adobe Standard”, “Camera Vivid”, “Camera Standard”, “Camera Portrait”, etc.
The ones with “Camera” in the name try to mimic the particular look and feel of the camera's own JPEG engine, with “Camera Standard” obviously being the profile to match what the camera does when it's not in any kind of special-look mode.
I think “Adobe Standard” is the one that Lightroom uses if you don't tell it otherwise, but it's so generic and its results so “blah” that as a matter of course I apply “Camera Standard” automatically to all my images as part of the Lightroom import process. This has worked great for me for years, but every so often... maybe every 5,000–10,000 photos or so, I'll come across a situation like that shown above, where there are clearly errors in how Lightroom is processing the image.
The magnitude of the problem seems closely tied to the white-balance setting, so sometimes it was easy enough to make go away.... but sometimes not, and the photo above is one such example. It happened so rarely that I didn't bother to investigate, but I really wanted to post this flower because it's a clear candidate for membership in the Voigtländer “Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh” club. I'd come across the flower by the side of the road during the “Mountain Play with Monet and Friends” outing a week ago.
So, I asked around and was directed to the Adobe forum linked above, and voila...
Smooth as a Baby's Bottom
with the new “Camera Standard” v3 Beta Profile
All the various “Camera” profiles (Camera Vivid, Camera Standard, etc.) could suffer from the mottled-color problem, at least for Nikon D3/D700/D300 hardware, but it seems it's been completely fixed with these v3 profiles.
All the images above are crops... here's the full frame, which might make a nice vertical desktop image...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
For context, here's a wider view, showing how the sun is shining directly on the rear of the blossom, thus causing it to glow from within when viewed from the top...
I don't know what kind of tree it is, but it had a lot of buds in various stages...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
I was very happy to get these profiles, but I'm not ready to switch to them for all my images. On the plus side they don't suffer from this rare-but-major splotch problem, but on the minus side, they seem too bright for my taste. The initial post in the Adobe thread says to set exposure to -½EV, but even when I do that, I feel details are lost in the highlights. This is just a gut feeling and I need to do more research, including reading the entire forum thread. However, it's important for D3/D700/D300 shooters to know these profiles are available, so I wanted to post about them right away.
icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 cropped — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos
Here are some more pictures from the first two stops during our essentially all-day drive at the start of our short but photographically-satisfying trip to Imabari City (Ehime Prefecture, Japan) at the start of the month. It was a trip which included an attraction so thrilling, the Towel Museum :-), that a single post couldn't contain its full measure of win: part 1, part 2.
Many of the photos on today's post are variations of pics seen on “On The Road to Imabari”, which I had prepared in haste that first night from the hotel.
I couldn't decide which view I liked best of the highway rest-stop picnic area that I led the earlier post with, so here's another view I like...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/6400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Highway Rest-Stop Picnic Area
We'd stopped for lunch at the westbound Seto parking area of the Sanyo Highway near Okayama because we knew had a cheap cafe with home-cooked taste, and it didn't disappoint. It was a pleasant area fairly high up on a hill...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Path to Where?
Looking over the edge of the dropoff, I found farmland and an orchard of some kind completely bare except for a splash of pink in three trees...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos
First Splash of Spring
The company that runs the highway reststops is apparently too cheap to make a sign that says “Seto-Area Specialty Burger!”, so they have a generic “Special-For-This-Area Burger!” sign...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Generic “This Area's Special Burger” Sign
But luckily they weren't too cheap to plant some cherry trees...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 280 — map & image data — nearby photos
It's at this rest stop that I started to realize the potential of the Voigtländer 125mm for the kind of photos I wrote about the other day in “Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh with Lily of the Nile”. Just compare the next two shots, noticing both aperture and focus point that goes into each...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/1600 sec, f/5.6, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Base of the Blossom @ f/5.6
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 720 — map & image data — nearby photos
Edge of the Blossom @ f/2.5
I just love the creaminess of the second one. Here's a crop from a similar one, but with the focus more toward the back, leaving the yellow anther a bit more defined (but still out of focus). Now, nothing is in focus except for an abstract, razor-thin ring around the blossom...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Abstract
Not bad for a highway rest stop.
Our route would take us on a 12-year-old highway that hops for 30 miles across bridges and islands between Honshu (the big main island of Japan) and Shikoku. Many of the islands are mountain peaks jutting from the water, and the first one offered a road to the top where we could enjoy the view....
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 15 mm — 1/500 sec, f/18, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sweeping View to the South West
The community on the low flat area next to the water certainly caught our eye....
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/11, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Tranquil Village
Of course, this immediately brought to mind the tsunami that had wiped out hundreds of miles of coastal communities in eastern Japan. After having seen videos of the unrelenting previously-inconceivable destruction of tsunami, it was now all to easy to imagine this entire community being wiped off the face of the earth in a few scant minutes.
This water is not the wide-open ocean, but a relatively small and well-protected inland sea, so perhaps tsunami are not a worry for this particular village, but one must wonder about similar villages across the thousands of miles of coastline that are at risk that the tsunami missed last time.
More vistas to the left, looking south east...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 @ 50 mm — 1/500 sec, f/16, ISO 900 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cross Traffic
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 500 mm — 1/500 sec, f/16, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
In between the two views, looking almost due south, is the fishing port featured in Low Tide and the photo that followed. In this less extreme view at 50mm (rather than 14mm or 420mm), I just love the layers of islands and mountains on the horizon....
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 50 mm — 1/800 sec, f/10, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/5000 sec, f/5.6, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Fumie and Anthony Enjoying the View
There was a tree of some sort with vivid pink blossoms, which appeared in the earlier post as “Mommy, Daddy, and Baby Blossom”. I was into the “creamy edge-of-focus” thing, so was trying various ways to capture something as the blossoms flopped around in the breeze. Here are two examples whose difference in focus and angle is ever so slight, but which have quite different feels...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 450 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/8000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
I think I like the first one better, but I find great appeal in the embracing edge of focus that encircles the yellow anther.
icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 210 mm, cropped — 1/500 sec, f/6, ISO 280 — full exif
Foraging Under the Cherry Blossoms
I glanced out the window to notice some little kids playing with the fallen cherry-blossom petals, and ran to grab the camera...
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 420 mm, cropped — 1/400 sec, f/6.3, ISO 6400 — full exif
Big Piles o' Petals
Unfortunately, when I grabbed the camera, neglected to notice that I'd left it in a five-stop exposure-bracket mode, so only every fifth frame was reasonably exposed. (For non camera geeks, this is only slightly better than leaving the lens cap on, or forgetting to put in film.) At least I was able to recover something from most of them, because I shoot in raw format, not JPEG.
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 380 mm, cropped — 1/500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 720 — full exif
Thar She Blows
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 240 mm, cropped — 1/500 sec, f/6, ISO 800 — full exif
A Touch Too Close To The Edge For My Taste
as far as I could tell, there was no adult around
These trees along the river quickly started molting the day after I posted “Lunch Under the Cherry Blossoms”, and now they're mostly a splotchy mess of blossoms, leaves, and stems, changing on a per-branch basis. The following pictures are from the same two or three trees right above the river...
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 340 mm — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 2000 — full exif
Branch of Blossoms
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 500 mm — 1/500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 560 — full exif
Mostly Leaves
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 340 mm — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 200 — full exif
Somewhat Ratty Mixture
A wonderful effect when they start losing the blossoms are big explosions of petals when a gust of wind comes along... a sudden flurry of sakura snow. It's absolutely beautiful, but not too easy to capture in a still picture. The “snow” from someone throwing a fist full of blossoms is a bit easier... I think I have a few nice ones in last year's “Fistfuls of Blossoms in Urban Kyoto”.
Meanwhile, the little kids, still sans adults for an uncomfortably long time, had moved from petals to rocks...
Throwing rocks into bodies of water seem to be a universal constant in the kid-desire universe.
(Eventually, a mom did come to collect the kids.)
icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cute × Cute
Cuteness (and Parental Indulgence) Incarnate
Because I know everyone is so excited at the prospect of hearing even more about the Towel Museum, I'm following up right away to yesterday's “The Towel Museum in Imabari Japan, Part 1” with Part 2 today. Be forewarned, though, that today's post is more of a gluttony of Moominanalia mixed with unabashed “my kid is so cute!” self indulgence.
As I commented in Part I, the “Towel Museum” could well be called the “Moomin Museum” (Moomin being a Scandinavian cartoon character), and of course we caved in to Anthony's sudden and wholly expected desire for his very own pricey stuffed Moomin.
After our museum tour, we headed down to the most-pleasant Museum Cafe for lunch. Fumie hung back a bit to check out some of the stores, so Anthony, his new Moomin, and my camera had some quality time together.
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 @ 24 mm — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 280 — map & image data — nearby photos
Waiting for Mommy
with Moomin and my iPhone
More Anthony × Moomin....
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 220 — map & image data — nearby photos
Backlit Glowing Moomin
On the table was a small glass with a few delicate flowers...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 450 — map & image data — nearby photos
Small Floral Arrangement
The picture above isn't all that interesting, but you can be sure that a future post will explore these flowers in the same vein as yesterday's “Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh with Lily of the Nile”.
Update: here indeed is that post: “Exploring a Glass of Dainty Flowers With the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5”
Eventually, Anthony got tired of Moomin and played with my iPhone...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 @ 24 mm — 1/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Behind him in a niche on the wall was a larger flower arrangement of sorts....
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/4, ISO 4000 — map & image data — nearby photos
“This Handicraft Made From Towel Material”
Eventually we had lunch, and it was quite good.
After lunch, Fumie checked out the gift shops again, while Anthony and I went out to wait with our cameras...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/6400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Yellow Hedge
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/5000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Going Macro
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 @ 24 mm — 1/5000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Higher View
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 @ 24 mm — 1/400 sec, f/10, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Museum Cafe Courtyard
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 @ 50 mm — 1/2000 sec, f/4.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
That's Was Our Table
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 @ 50 mm — 1/1250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Waiting for Mommy to Appear
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Odd Mountain Landscaping
probably to prevent erosion, but it sure looks odd
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/3200 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Parting Shot
as we're getting into the car to head home