I’m part of the Worth1000 community and a couple of years ago I participated in a Surf and Turf competition for which the idea was to combine a land animal and sea animal into one being. Lots of hilarious things come out of that. Mine was called the Seahound and it looked like this:

Seahound

Courtesy obligates me to mention that neither of the two images I used to create the above one were made by me. See below for the two sources. I have no way of retracing who the original photographers of these pictures were. I found them through a Google search when I came up with the idea of making a Seahound. Uses like this, non-commercial, supposedly fall under the creative commons license, meaning (in short) that, as long as the user doesn’t sell the derivative image onwards and doesn’t use it for commercial purposes, it is okay to use the source images. This image ended up 8th (out of 73) in the contest, with seven even more hilarious ones going first.

Seahound sources

Occasionally I do a Reverse Image Search on my work (typically the stuff that IS my own and COULD be used commercially) through Tineye and see if anything comes up. Several times something did come up, but nothing close to the results that were returned on this particular image. Together with a good number of other images from this competition it came up on a wide variety of sites, among which websites that sell backgrounds for cellphones and such.

Dilemma, then. What to do?
This is my image, I created it. But it it’s not completely my image, because I used source images that aren’t my own. Should I pursue this? Should I find out what I can do about it? Someone out there IS making money of images that aren’t his/her.
Kind of frustrating it is. And the biggest problem is that most likely the servers that host these images are based in some obscure country where the laws in these matters aren’t taken too seriously. And if for whatever miraculous reason they would reply to emails, or if for whatever miraculous reason the websites would be taken down, then they would simply set up another website within a couple of days.
Carrying water to the sea, that would be.

So… as you’ve noticed before in some of my posts I’m a big fan of Jim Carrey, and I’ll quote that favorite quote of mine from Liar Liar again:

…so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!

After the second post about cross-processing I thought I’d make second post about HDR to even things out. So here goes. Victim this time was the old church in Uusikaupunki, Finland.

No auto-bracketing or anything, just two straight-forward exposures. One for the church, one for the sky. Manually merged in Photoshop (CS3). I’ve never been too impressed with the auto-merge in Photoshop. Just upgraded my system to CS5 and I have yet to test those features there (I’ve heard they’ve improved a lot, so I’m curious to give that a go).

Left: D700, ISO800, 1/350 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm. Right: D700, ISO800, 1/1500 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm.

The above two images merged in Photoshop CS3. Levels, curves, contrast and saturation adjusted.

See there’s no halo around the church (sure, go ahead, click image to enlarge)? That’s one of those typical things you see when HDR exposures are merged together automatically using software. It’s one of the reasons why I prefer to do things manually (still). Then you’re sure that things are looking more natural, and if you HAVE to cheat, you decide where you cheat and how you cheat. Of course I’m cheating. Do you really think I’m masking around branches and leaves in the trees? Of course not. I cheat. But I make sure you don’t see it, unless I want you to see it

This has been standing in my draft queue for quite some time now. It wasn’t quite done yet, and there were a couple of things I needed to check first, but here we go then (a couple of days mentioned below isn’t quite accurate anymore, that’s a month and a half or so ago by now )

Wow… I’m getting the feeling I’m being watched

A couple of days ago I revisited my Digimarc experience and I wrote how I was contacted by Ms Gina Giachetti, representing Digimarc, and asked if I wanted to blog about the new Digimarc.
I wasn’t too keen at first to write about it, since my first experience with Digimarc wasn’t all that spectacular, but Ms Giachetti promised to put me in touch with a product manager to “talk things over”. For some reason that went all south because of a miscommunication, as it now appears: holidays from both sides (I had no idea Digimarc was located in Oregon, otherwise I could’ve stopped by the office in March when I was in Oregon!), busy time schedules, etc. etc.

Anyway… I posted the revisited the 28th in the morning, and that same day in the evening there’s a mail from Ms Giachetti waiting in my inbox. Yep, things had gone all south, and that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. So we gave it a second try and last Wednesday she set me up in a telephone conversation with Digimarc’s product manager Ben Bounketh. Very agreeable guy, I must say (I’m also not getting paid to say this, dang! ). We had a really interesting conversation in which he told me a bit more about Digimarc in general and more specifically about the watermarking process and product. I’m not going to repeat that all here, so you’ll have to head on to the Digimarc website. And -I already mentioned in my first post about Digimarc that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with their customer service- he set me up with a free Pro account for a year for me to test the new product. Wow!

Mr Bounketh presented me with a little video on how the new Digimarc Watermarking would be really imperceptible. And no matter how nice he sounded, my first reaction was “Sure, that’s a generic picture, the OLD watermarking would even work on that. You’re not getting off that easily with me!” So… You all probably remember the jellyfish picture I put my test on? That was the OLD method. Ghastly… Autch!

Digimarc watermark examples: left without watermark, right with watermark

So I thought, let’s see how Mr Bounketh’s statement will hold up in this image.

Again, left the example without Digimarc watermark, right with.

And well… Kudos, Mr Bounketh. Kudos to you and Digimarc. Compared to the old version this is a world of difference. Where you could see the obvious difference in the first example, even without the need to view full, in the second example I had to enlarge the areas to show the difference, and even then you can’t see it without looking at the full view.
When looking at a 4000+ pixels image at 100% you can see some slight noise in these even areas, but the quality of the images with watermark has improved so much that you can’t even really make a decent comparison anymore.
I’d still be a bit reluctant uploading images with an even background like this in full resolution to for example a stock agency, but for the “normal” images, with a more diverse and detailed background it will be no problem whatsoever, and for web images it will be perfect.

The watermark itself is pretty solid in terms of durability. I put the watermark in a 4000+ pixels image, downscaled in stages and in one go to 300pixels and only at that point was the watermark not found anymore. Upscaling and cropping the same story.
However… as with all editing with images you ARE supposed to do it in the hi-res version, and when I tested adding the watermark to a lower res version it came out with the same ghastly result. So added in a 4000 pixel image and then scaled down to 800 pixels is perfectly acceptable, but adding the watermark straight to the 800 pixels picture is a big no-no (still). When presenting this issue to Mr Bounketh, he did give a plausible explanation. In short and super-simplified something along the lines of the watermark having to be hidden in less available pixels).

Left the image in which the watermark was added at 800 pixels, right the image where it was added at 4000 pixels and then downscaled to 800 pixels (click to enlarge).

I can’t say anything on the reporting and scouting/tracking of images, yet. That will take some time, but I’m going to upload a batch of generic images with Digimarc watermark to my website and see if they are picked up and where they end up. Mr Bounketh did explain a little on how the searching and “tracking” works. He also noted that, because of the time and costs involved, at this point only larger sites with a lot of traffic will be scanned/indexed on a regular basis.  I’m not really sure if it will be super useful for (starting) artists who don’t have much traffic to their website, since those websites would be scanned/indexed only like once per 3-6 months. But since the price has gone down and the scouting/tracking is included in that price, there’s little to do about it anyway.
I’m happily testing away now, and I’ll probably do a re-re-revisited in a year or so, or if/when I get some data in on the scouting/tracking.

So not to confuse with HDR, because this hasn’t seen any HDR (and no, it’s not just about dragging the saturation slider to +100) 
If you’re intending to over-do it, with pictures that are suitable, it’s actually quite fun…

D700, ISO200, 1/1000 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm, and some serious Photoshopping...

Last Friday night there was a big Classic American car tour in Helsinki. Lots of nice cars: old ones, newer ones, new ones, small ones, bigger ones, huge ones… Great photo opp! Usually the drivers/owners of the cars also dress up to match the era of their car. Unfortunately this time I didn’t see much of that, and there were so many cars and so many people crowded together that it was next to impossible to get pictures of the whole car without getting the background or foreground completely cluttered. So I stuck to the beauty of the cars. Even the simplest car can turn into something artsy if you know where to look

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/3.3, Nikkor 50mm

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/3.3, Nikkor 50mm

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm (and some serious cross-processing in Photoshop)

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm

D700, ISO200, 1/350 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm

Last Saturday we were invited at a friend’s place for lunch. Oh, and to take some pictures. She’s got two lovely Egyptian Maus. One silver spotted and one black smoke, absolutely gorgeous cats. And we got to play around a bit with them.

Mauno, the silver spotted one, was a bit more cooperative than Eppu, the black smoke one, but I think things turned out very nicely. (More about Mauno and Eppu here and here).

We started with the “boring” stuff. Please, sit still, and look up. Head slightly more to the left… No, that’s too much… A bit back… That’s good. Chin up a bit more… nonono, not that much… cat nip is a bit lower…

D700, ISO800, 1/125 sec @ f/4, Nikkor 70-200mm

D700, ISO1600, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 70-200mm

Eppu wasn’t too much in the mood of activity, so we did a couple of extra chin-ups with him

D700, ISO400, 1/125 sec @ f/4, Nikkor 70-200mm

But after that we got onto the funky stuff…

D700, ISO400, 1/320 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 70-200mm, 2x off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox

D700, ISO400, 1/320 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 70-200mm, 2x off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox

D700, ISO400, 1/320 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 70-200mm, 2x off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox

The next one’s actually slowly starting to become my favorite. Not because it’s fantastic, but it’s so elegant. Mauno’s got style. Put him in a tail-coat and he can… well… Never mind
This picture does remind me very much of the fairy tale “The Master Cat” (Puss in Boots).

D700, ISO400, 1/320 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 70-200mm, 2x off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox

And then, well… after an afternoon of jumping… Also Mauno had enough and called it a day.

D700, ISO400, 1/320 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 70-200mm, 2x off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox

A month or so ago I wrote a little post about HDR. A little post about what HDR really is and how it should be used in order for it to be called HDR, and how the biggest part of the people confuse HDR with cross-processing.

I decided to also do a little post about cross-processing. Now, this cross-processing has nothing to do with combining shots which are taken from a series of photographs with different exposure times. It originates from the film days (you know, that funny plastic stuff with a light-sensitive emulsion layer, on which you took pictures in the previous century ) when photographers – by accident or on purpose – e.g developed on the “wrong” photographic paper or with the “wrong” chemicals. Cross-processed images are/were typically recognized from their unnatural colors and high contrast.

In the current days of digital cameras and Photoshop cross-processing has gained a stack of new possibilities. Blending modes in Photoshop are a great way to cross-process images. They’re a great way to get those unnatural, muted or seemingly super-saturated colors.

Under here I put a couple of pictures that are cross-processed (nothing over-done, mind you, I have the sliders and blending modes well under control ). On the left the unedited, straight out of camera RAW-file, on the right the processed image in Photoshop. This isn’t just a matter of boosting the saturation. If you were to do that, you’d lose all the detail.

Original image info: D200, ISO100, 1/180 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm

The final result

Original image info: D200, ISO100, 1/180 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm

The final result

You might want to click the images to see the details in the Photoshop settings. And if you want to try yourself, just scroll through the blending modes in the layer palette to see what effect it has on the image. It’s the best way to learn what the different modes do to the images.

Usually I know it instantly.
I see things in black and white when they “need” to be in black and white. Or at least when I think they “need” to be, since that’s a personal taste matter.
But this particular image was one of those ones of which I wasn’t quite sure. And I do think it works very well in both color and black and white…

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Sigma 10-20mm

Same camera settings, converted to black and white in Photoshop with some dodging and burning in the sky

Boy, is that a milked cow, or what?
These days the whole HDR thing is SO overdone! It seems like people don’t seem to understand the true meaning of this technique anymore.
True, you can do some funky stuff with it (although then it’s not really called HDR anymore but cross-processing), but some people really just don’t know when to stop and go waaay overboard with it.
So here’s a little 1-2-3 on HDR:
1) the abbreviation HDR stands for High Dynamic Range
2) the meaning of this High Dynamic Range is to capture a range of contrast with a series of exposures of the same subject, which your camera wouldn’t be able to capture in a single exposure
3) the result of of a true High Dynamic Range image is a believable image which doesn’t have HDR written all over it.

The exposures:

Left: D200, ISO100, 1/3 sec @ f/11, Sigma 10-20mm. Right: D200, ISO100, 1/30 sec @ f/11, Sigma 10-20mm.

The outcome:

Compiled from 2 images shown above

So yeah, it’s been awhile…
Things have been stupidly busy.
Oh, and I’ve been on holiday.
Oxymoron, right?

I won’t bother you with a day-to-day photo-thingy like I did with the Canaries, but there are some pictures you should see.

When we were in Portland, our host there was the proud owner of two gorgeous cats. Having two cats myself, I just couldn’t help myself…

D700, ISO400, 1/320 sec @ f/6.7, Nikkor 50mm 1.4, on-camera flash

D700, ISO1600, 1/125 sec @ f/2.4, Nikkor 50mm 1.4