I used to take pictures: Popanyinning August, 2009
I have started a project to move everything I can over to my QNAP server. As part of this I am pulling all my various (hundreds of) folders of digital pictures together into a Photoshop Elements (PSE) library.
I thought that as long as I am doing this I might find some semi-interesting pictures that I used to take and do some random posts showing you some of these pictures.
These pictures will only be from when I went fully digital which was about 2003.
These first few are from a weekend trip to Popanyinning back in August 2009 just after they had some serious rain there—which I don’t think has happened since.
These shots were taken along the Hotham River, which at the Popanyinning end should probably be called the Hotham Creek or the Hotham Trickle. It is normally only about three to five metres wide and for about ten months of the year has no water in it. We are in mid-winter now and I would have an even money bet that the Hotham River is not running even now.
Anyway, here are the pictures—which sadly I can only post 650 pixels wide, sighhhh.
Yep, that track on the other side is the road into someone’s house. Not to worry. This ‘flooding’ will last one day at best.
I did Photomatix tone mapping treatments of a picture of Seriously Cute Niece (SCN) back here if you want to have a look at them again or if you are a new reader and missed them (sample picture shown at right).
Although Photomatix it intended for producing true tone mapped HDR images from multiple exposures it will do ‘mock’ tone mapped images from a single image. The quality of the mock tone mapped HDR image depends on the detail and exposure depth in the original picture.
Photomatix works very well will with single RAW images from high-end DSLR cameras because there is generally a lot of exposure depth in the RAW images from a DSLR.
I have tried Photomatix with images from my various smartphones (Motorola Defy, Nokia 920, and Nokia 720) and I can report that the results are pretty much crap.
Anyway, here is the shot taken on the Hotham River with some tone mapping treatment. Firstly the non-tone mapped shot and then two tone mapped treatments.
I sort of like that dark and gloomy one (the last one). On my 24” 1920x1200 DELL UltraSharp screen it almost looks somewhat 3D-ish.
The next picture is of a tree trunk alongside the Hotham River. As I remember it, whatever that is growing on the side of the tree looked a lot brighter than it does in this picture. Being there it looked almost neon with the sun shining over my shoulder directly onto it. However this is how the camera captured it. I could have tried it with Photmatix but I decided to just post it how it came out of the camera.
Well that’s about if from this folder. So until I find something else from the past to post . . .
