Last few days I've been going back to some of my old photo collections that I never processed. I'm always behind on my photography since it's not my full time job so there are great shots that get left behind. I haven't done any traveling in a few months so it's great to be able to play catchup. This one is from 2011. That's how far back my getting behind goes.
I actually really hope to go back to Toronoto Canada one of these days. There is so much to see and so much to do. Plus that's one of the coolest cities I've ever been to. Go Canada!
To get that crisp look you see in this photo I used this software called Color Efex Pro. It's got a filter called Detail Extractor that helps pull out all the micro detail. It's really nice for enhancing landscape photography.
Last year I was out shooting a lot of photography and it got to the point where I was just forgetting about days I shot. This was one of those days. It's from the Grand Canyon at Mohave Point. I colored a few photos from this day and then moved on since later I went to the Horse Shoe Bend, Utah, and Japan, Bali, and China shortly thereafter. After firing up my old drive I decided to give a visit to some of my old forgotten HDR landscapes already colored and ready to go. This one was in the batch. It's from Mohave Point. It's on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and one of the west most points. it's supposedly has the best sunsets although we were unfortunate the night we were there. The clouds sucked.
Needless to say, it's a very photogenic place. This photo is of the small traditional Japanese Market that's close to where the boat is that drops you off. It's an awesome little spot to get some nice photos that have that Traditional Japanese feel.
Now I'm calling this an HDR photo even though it's a single shot Raw. But I tonemapped it which pulls up the shadows and brings down the highlights. Since this is what people are referring to as HDR. When HDR really should only be applied to images that truly have a massive range of dynamic light. Most do not and the term HDR gets pinned on images that are tonemapped.
In Digital Photography the ISO is the setting that adjusts how sensitive your camera's sensor is to light. It usually ranges from 100-64,000+ on most cameras. The higher the number the less sensitive it is to light. Meaning, if your ISO was set to 64,000 you would be able to accurately expose a candle lit dinner. Where as if you were outside on a sunny day your ISO would only need to be set to about 100. So basically the ISO is what the camera uses to messure how much light is hitting the sensor.
You might be wondering what does ISO stands for? It's an abbreviation for International Organization for Standardization. I actually had to memorize that in college and was tested on it in my photography classes. Kind of sad hu?
Also before the ISO you might have heard of ASA if you ever shot film. It stands for American Standards Association. I was also tested on that.
I guess it's good that it is standardized so all cameras can have the same measurements for light. After all the shutter is standardized by time, the aperture is standardized by Trigonometry. So the ISO or film speed was the only wildcard and some organization decided to standardize what the numbers relate too. Now with the ISO each stop of light equals the ISO number.
Also if you want to learn all the crazy nerd details of ISO be sure to check out Film Speed / ISO photography at Wikipedia.
What does the ISO do?
Besides adjusting your cameras sensitivity to light it also controls how much digital noise you will have on your image. For example, if you set your ISO to 64,000 it's going to be very sensitive to light, but it's going to sacrifice sharpness and add a lot of digital noise.
If you were to shoot somewhere around an ISO 100 your images would almost have no noise and they would be very clean and sharp. This is how I shoot almost all of my landscapes.
A few examples of what the different ISO settings look like
The first is an example of the ISO set really high.
You can see the noise and grain pattern of the sensor standing out.
Now lets look at a very low ISO setting. This is set at 100 for this particular photo.
You can see there is almost no noise or grain.
How do you shoot at night or in the dark with a low ISO?
What I usually like to do is use a tripod when shooting landscapes then slow the shutter down to somewhere around 1 to even 30 seconds. That way I don't sacrifice any image quality and can still soak up all the light with a slow shutter.
The other technique (which usually won't work for landscape photography) is to use a flash. The flash will illuminate the scene so there is enough light for the camera to render images at a low ISO.
Other Digital Photography Tips for using your ISO
Always shoot RAW, and the reason for this is because you end up capturing a much larger dynamic range of light than you would with compressed Jpegs. So say you were shooting at a ISO 100 and all your photos came out too dark. You can adjust your exposure in a post processing program like Lightroom by simply moving the exposure slider to brighten everything up. This ultimately adjusts your cameras ISO in post or in the software. You'll get more noise the higher you go, but you'll at least have a workable photo.
Another good tip in playing it safe that I like to do, is shoot somewhere around an ISO of 320. This way if your photo is over exposed meaning the shots came out too bright, there is a chance that the camera's sensor was actually only exposed around the ISO rating of 100 so the information can still be recovered in Lightroom by moving the exposure slider to darker.
I almost always shoot at an ISO of 320 when I'm shooting street photography for this very reason.
More Resources on ISO
About ISO This is the actualy organizations website.
Photography MAD This one is from Photography Mad. They go into a little history on where ISO came from, The Values, Exposure Time, Noise Etc.
Digital-Photography-School Then of course there is the probloggers photo site Which has a nice simple explanation. I always like their stuff because it's very clean and straightfoward.
Great Youtube ISO video
So next time someone asks you, hey Pat what does the ISO do? or hey Robin, What is ISO? You can now explain it all to them as I have done to you.
As always, please like and share below, and if you're interested in more advanced photography tips you can check out my photography tips page.
I live only a few miles from Century city, maybe two but yet I've never been there to take photos. I've been to China, Indonesia, Japan three times, the Grand Canyon twice but I haven't been to this cool little place that's only two miles from my house. Kind of funny how that works. Century city is pretty cool, a quiet little spot in Los Angeles but this city also holds the infamous Die Hard building. Remember that building from the first Die Hard? Yep I drive right buy it every day from work and I can see it almost from my house. I've been meaning to get some photos of it one day. But for tonight, I went down to the mall wondered around for a bit to find a cool spot until stumbling upon this bridge. My main goal was actually to test out my new 9 stop ND filter but it got two be too dark before I found a good spot. I'll probably take it to the beach next weekend and see what it can produce.
The Yutoku Inari Shrine is built up on the side of a mountain with a trail leading to the top. On the way up you'll pass through many of these Torii as they are called in Japan. It's quite the hike and getting to the top gives you such an amazing view. It was really an awesome experience, but kind of a long hike. Well not too long. Maybe a little over a few hundred yards up a mountain.
Licensing & Prints
Something I don't really promote on my site but do get people asking me about is if they can buy or license my photos. I'd thought I would mention it finally since I do get a lot of request. How it works is all my photos are under a Creative Commons License. You can read about how you can use these photos in certain cases for free. All the details are found in my Licensing section.
And even more recently I've gotten a few requests on people looking to purchase prints for their house office or where ever suites their fetish. Almost all the photos found on this site are available for sale as prints on my smugmug account. The prints range from less expensive glossy which will you have to mount or frame yourself, to the more expensive stretched canvas or metal prints which come ready to hang. If you're wondering, the pricing on those goes up quickly because of the labor involved. Often times you can just click the photos to be sent directly to that photo on my smugmug account, or even to the direct buy page. For example, you can click the photo below to see all the options.
Last weekend I finished up a few video tutorials that I've been wanting to create for awhile. For now they are just the basics but I plan on getting a bit more advanced with them and eventually sharing all the tricks I use in my photography.
Hopefully this month I'll be able to make a completely HDR photography tutorials that cover every little thing about HDR. It seems to be a hot topic in the photography tutorial land and I've never been able to find really good and detailed HDR video tutorials that are free and made by people that actually produce consistent good HDR photos. And I refuse to pay for a tutorial since I believe knowledge should be free, so I've spent much of this last year learning HDR photography on my own and now I want to share it with new photographers looking to get started with this type of photography. So that means all my tutorials will be free and they will be awesome. So for now you can find them on my Photography Tips page. Have fun!
Today's Photo
Batu Bolong is just West of Tanah Lot which is the famous temple in the water of Bali. It seems there are temples just about everywhere in Bali. I'd like to see more of Indonesia one day. It's such an awesome country. If you ever go there you'll want to spend a full week. It's not the type of place where you can just stop by for three days. There is just too much stuff to do and see.
After spending all day at Miyajima we headed back to the boat to get back to the mainland before it got too dark. Surprisingly after doing a little shopping at the little tourist street there was still a sunset. It was a dark one so I had to do a rather longer exposure than usual. It always amazes me what kind of colors and light the camera can still pick up when set to a long exposure.
When I lived in San Diego this was one of the main beaches I would surf at. Every year it seems San Diego gets more and more crowded and more of the cities are trying to doing the L.A. thing where they put a parking meter next to any place that could possibly fit a car. This is one of the last beaches I know of where there is still relatively easy to find parking in the middle of the summer that's free. The spots known as Cherry Hill located directly behind Frogs Gym. And in the winter you can get some great sunsets and there are many abandoned stair ways that once led up to the houses on the cliffs above that you can take photos around. Like this one. Except this one was still in use.
The Kanmonkyo bridge connects Kyushu Island to the main island of Japan. Like the Golden Gate bridge this bridge is also a toll road. Actually almost all the main highways in Japan are tolls so going on road trips can get expensive.
Nothing too fancy about the processing of this photo. I used my usual HDR techniques to process it. I did a little bit more clean up work in Photoshop this time and it seems to make a difference. I find the noise reduction tools in Photoshop work a little better than the one in Lightroom. On my really messy images I'll use Topaz Denoise, but for this photo, Lightroom noise reduction before tonemapping and Photoshop noise reduction after seems to do the trick. With of course the Highpass filter.
