Colors at sunrise

Today I would like to share a photo taken during sunrise on Fuerteventura Island.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 50D
Lens: Canon 10-22 f/3.5-4.5 USM
Focal length: 24 mm
Aperture: f/11.0
Exposure time: 8 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 400
Number of exposures: 5
E.V. Step: 1
Flash used: no
Tripod: no
Filters: ND8 neutral density filter
Technique: manual blending, luminosity masks
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Lightroom 5.0, Photoshop CC

Smooth water

Today I'd like to share a long exposure photo I took last year on Fuerteventura island during one beautiful sunrise. The sea was really really rough as it was high tide. The waves hit the rocks with great anger splashing water all around me (and almost stealing tripod with my camera by hitting it directly). It was a really dynamic scene. But I had another idea for it. I decided that I would prefer something more calm and tranquil. So I put ND400 neutral density on my lens (it stops about 9 EV), set very slow aperture and long exposure (80 seconds). This way I tamed the sea. I made it calm. When I photographed this scene I could hear roaring sounds of waves hitting lava rocks. But when I look at this picture I hear no sound. It's more about silence :) It's so easy to cheat with photography :)

If you would like to learn more about smooth water effect, read my tutorial about it.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 47 mm
Aperture: f/22.0
Exposure time: 80 s
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 1
E.V. Step: n/a
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: ND400 neutral density filter
Technique: exposure fusion, luminosity masks
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Lightroom 5.0, Photoshop CC

Pinks in the sky

I've shared a few photos from that very sunrise on Fuerteventura already but it was really gorgeous one with all those pinks and purples in the sky so here is yet another HDR photo for you to watch.

In the case of this photo I took 5 exposures, 1.5 EV apart, Fused them in Photomatix Pro using Natural processing method and then finished it in Photoshop using luminosity masks.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 55 mm
Aperture: f/16.0
Exposure time: 3.2 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 5
E.V. Step: 1.5
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: ND8 neutral density filter
Technique: Fusion/Natural, luminosity masks
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Photomatix Pro 4.2.7 (Fusion/Natural), Lightroom 5.0, Photoshop CC

Milky Way wallpaper

One of my favorite and most popular photos. I shared it before but I think today is a good reason to reshare it as starting today you can download this image as a HD wallpaper. To get it just go to the Wallpapers section or click on one of the links below to get resolution suitable for your monitor:

• 1920x1200 
• 1600x1200

Sunrise on Fuerteventura

A little break from my photos from Greece today because I process them way slower than I hoped to. But I will post them in next few days so stay tuned if you're interested in the way I saw Crete or Santorini.

Instead today I'd like to share a sunrise photo taken on Fuerteventura. I decided to use slower shutter speed to give sense of motion and roughness of the sea. I didn't want to go with too slow times though because this way I would loose that fantastic dynamism of the scene (as very long exposures make the scene much calmer, as you can learn from my tutorial about that, than it is).

BTW funny thing - in the last few days it's much warmer in Warsaw than it was on Crete - 36 degrees centigrade vs "just" 30. I planned to take some photos but with temperatures that high I'm just trying to survive :)

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 24 mm
Aperture: f/13.0
Exposure time: 5 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 7
E.V. Step: 1 EV
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: ND8 neutral density filter
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Photomatix Pro, Lightroom 5.0, Photoshop CC

Thoughts: Reality is boring

Reality is boring. It might be controversial but that's the way it is. Let's face it. It can be beautiful (and often is!), I don't deny it, but at the same time we're so used to it that in many cases we, photographers, have to cheat to make it more appealing to the viewers. Otherwise many (or even majority!) of our photos would be mediocre, boring, lifeless.

For that reason we shoot long exposure (or ultra fast exposure) like in the image above to show motion of water and thus to make the image more dynamic than the scene really was. Moreover we use shallow depth of field to blur background and isolate the subject which wasn't really isolated, we use ultra wide angle lenses to show more than eye can see, use black & white treatment to add more drama and mood to otherwise fairly calm scene. Also for that very reason we use polarizing filters to boost colors, or increase saturation in post. For the same reason we photograph subjects from different perspective than we see normally: flowers from the ground level, mountains from above clouds level and boats from underwater.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 24 mm
Aperture: f/13.0
Exposure time: 4 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 7
E.V. Step: 1 EV
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: ND8 neutral density filter
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Photomatix Pro 4.2.7 (Details Enhancer), Lightroom 5.0, Photoshop CC

Magic Lantern - beyond 2.3... what's new?

This photo shows a small port in the town of El Cotillo on Fuerteventura Island.

If you're a user of Magic Lantern (and if you're a Canon shooter like me I really recommend that) you might wonder when there will be new version as last stable version (that is 2.3) was released quite some time ago. In fact new version is here... everyday. You can get it here. These are so called "nightly builds" meaning that they are built everyday. Of course one of the drawbacks is that they aren't tested very well so they might have stability issues as well as other bugs.

However, list of new features added since 2.3 should really make you consider installing it (and new features are added daily). Also many users install it and bugs are fixed quite fast after they are discovered.

If you're into recording videos you probably already heard that guys at Magic Lantern managed to enable 14-bit RAW video recording at Full HD resolution (even for 50D which didn't support video recording at all!). This is huge for sure but as I'm not really interested in movie making I find other features more important and useful for my type of work.

Here are my favourite features added after 2.3 release:

• RAW histogram and RAW zebras - did you know that Canon firmware shows histograms based on JPG preview of a photo? The problem is that although JPG histogram might show clipping, there might still be some room when shooting RAW. Magic Lantern now overcomes this limitation by enabling RAW histograms and zebras (which shows clipping).
• Auto ETTR (Expose To The Right) - Expose To The Right is a well-known technique which in short is about making sure the histogram is right aligned (that is the image is slightly overexposed). Due to various reasons I won't describe here (like signal to noise ratio) this results in a higher quality image with lower noise than by "properly" exposing photos. Auto ETTR feature finds right exposure automatically. You just press a button and you get optimal exposure parameters.
• Automatic AF micro adjustment using DotTune method - when lens and camera bodies are manufactured there is always a margin for AF to be slightly "off". This means that lens might produce back- or front-focused images. To make it easy to get rid of this issue, Canon added a microadjustment feature to their cameras allowing user to correct for this. However, fixing this is still tedious and rather difficult task. Fortunately this feature make it much easier to set AF micro adjustments. You mount your camera on a tripod, focus manually on a high contrast subject and start DotTune command from Magic Lantern menu. After about 2 minutes micro adjustment is found.
• New GUI - Magic Lantern also got a new look & feel. I find it clearer and more intuitive. You might think GUI is not that important but it makes working with ML much easier and effective.
• Audio notes - does it often happen to you that you forget some details about the shoot when you're back at home? Your thoughts, impressions, feelings, names of places or people in the photos? Now you can record them. Take a picture, hold a SET button and add your Audio Note. Unfortunately this feature doesn't seem to be supported by 5D MK III :(

There are tons of other improvements and fixes like eg. Warnings when you shoot JPEGs instead of RAWs, DOF and Flash bracketing, and much much more.

If you're brave enough to try nightly build, head to Magic Lantern website and discover all other features yourself.

Rocks at sunrise

Today a HDR photo taken during sunrise on Fuerteventura. I decided to put some rocks in foreground to add interest to this otherwise rather boring scene.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 40 mm
Aperture: f/18.0
Exposure time: 5 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 5
 E.V. Step: 1.5 EV
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: neutral density ND8 filter
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Photomatix Pro, Lightroom 5.0, Photoshop CC

Stars above the hotel

It'll never cease to amaze me how starry the sky is over Fuerteventura island. Even lights cannot make the stars disappear.

For this photo I stood very close to the sea hoping no wave would come and grab my tripod. And believe me I was nervous because I had to stand a few meters away from it as the ground was very wet and soft. Even changing location of feet while standing quite close to a tripod resulted in a completely blurry shot because it caused tripod to move.

In this case I used 5 exposures and manually blended them. This way I have both the stars in the sky, properly exposed hotel as well as nice reflections.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24 f/1.4 L USM II
Focal length: 24 mm
Aperture: f/1.4
Exposure time: 2.5 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 800
Number of exposures: 5
E.V. Step: 1
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: no
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Lightroom 4.2, Photoshop CS6

Have a rest under the stars - redone

Yesterday above photo was Top 1 for a few hours on 500px portal (if you're there make sure to add me to your friends) reaching 99.7 points and about 4000 views! Although this photo isn't new and I uploaded it earlier here, I think I prefer this new version. I really like magenta cast in it as well as more details in the darkest shadows. This version also benefits from deblurring using Topaz InFocus plugin.

Changing a subject a little bit, a few of my photos have been recently shared on a few websites. Just yesterday 50plusser website featured me, and a few days ago +Miroslav Petrasko added me to his Great Photographers list. Thank you!

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24 f/1.4 L USM II
Focal length: 24 mm
Aperture: f/1.4
Exposure time: 10s
ISO: 800
Number of exposures: 1
E.V. Step: n/a
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: no
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Lightroom 4.2, Photoshop CS6

Morning on Fuerteventura

Today another photo from Fuerteventura island, this one taken during early morning. I used ND8 neutral density filter to smooth water a little bit. This resulted in a very tranquil and calm scene.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 28 mm
Aperture: f/8.0
Exposure time: 25 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 5
E.V. Step: 1.0 EV
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: ND8 neutral density filter
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Lightroom 4.2, Photoshop CS6

B&W HDR from Timanfaya National Park

I love B&W HDR photos. I mentioned that a few times already. Here is another one taken in Timanfaya National park on Lanzarote Island (Canary Islands). I really like how the mountain (which is a volcano in fact) is detailed in this shot.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 70 mm
Aperture: f/8.0
Exposure time: 1/400 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 3
E.V. Step: 2
Flash used: no
Tripod: no
Filters: circular polarizing filter
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Photomatix Pro 4.2.5, Lightroom 4.2, Photoshop CS6

Canon 24 f/1.4 L USM II Review

Canon 5D MK II | 1/160 s | f/1.4 | ISO 200

For a few months now I'm a lucky owner of a Canon 24 f/1.4 L II lens. It's the fastest prime lens I own and use it for many of my landscape shots and almost for all night landscape shots (including both HDRs and astrophotos).

First some technical specs:

Apertures	f/1.4 - f/22
Field of view	84 degree
Minimum focusing distance	25 cm
Filter thread	77 mm
Dimensions	9.35 cm × 8.69 cm
Weight	650 g
Number of aperture blades	8
Auto-focus	YES
USM	YES
Image-stabilization	NO
Price	~ 1800 USD

The build quality is typical for L-series lens and it means it's excellent. The lens looks and feels very firm, solid and durable (in fact I think this lens looks more solid than most of the other L-lenses). The only downside is that it's pretty heavy (650 g) and quite large. It also uses 77 mm filter thread.

Sharpness is fantastic across whole frame. It might be a bit soft at f/1.4 (but still sharper than most of the lenses wide-open) but stop it down to just a f/2.8 or f/3.5 to get razor sharp images. However, please note that f/1.4 is still completely usable and I use it with success to capture many night photos.

Chromatic aberration is hard to notice even at f/1.4. There is also no noticeable issues with distortion. Also flares are rather small. Please note that I can compare results here to Canon 24-105 at 24 mm.

One more thing to note is that this lens produces very nice bokeh.

The greatest drawback is large vignetting at f/1.4 (vignetting is really strong!). However, together with very shallow depth of field produced by this aperture it creates interesting effect so it may not be a downside for everyone.

Another is that this lens is quite expensive (it costs about 1800$).

Summing up this short review, Canon 24 f/1.4 II is a truly wonderful lens which I would recommend to anyone serious about landscape photography as well as for anyone shooting in low-light situations (astrophotographers, wedding photographers, etc.).

Pros:
- excellent image quality (great sharpness, low chromatic aberration, low distortion)
- great build quality
- fast and accurate auto-focus
- beautiful bokeh
- very fast aperture

Cons:
- heavy vignetting at f/1.4
- quite expensive
- heavy

Below are a few more sample photos taken with this lens on 5D MK II:

Canon 5D MK II | 1/125 s | f/1.4 | ISO 200

Canon 5D MK II | 1/320 s | f/7.1 | ISO 100

Canon 5D MK II | 1/500 s | f/7.1 | ISO 100

Canon 5D MK II | 30 s | f/1.4 | ISO 100

Being happy with your own photos

Believe me or not for a very long time I was unhappy with my photos. I found all of them, but just a few, of very poor quality - both technically and regarding post-processing. However, this changed in the last 3 - 5 months although I'm not completely sure why. I'm now both happy and quite satisfied with photos I manage to make. And you know what? It's a great feeling. I'm now confident with my skills as a photographer. I'm also aware of the progress I'm making - day by day and week by week. Of course I still take better and worse photos - but that's completely normal. Even the one and great Ansel Adams took worse than usual photos from time to time I guess.

It doesn't just make me feel good but also it helps me to focus on taking good and better photos. I can think on the result I want to achieve, the effect or atmosphere I want to create in my photos. Not whether my photos will be good enough to share them.

All these doesn't make me great photographer in the blink of an eye. No. I still have a long way in front of me. Maybe I will never become great photographer at all. However, it's not really important (although it would be cool for instance to sell prints of my photos :) ). Because I'm already happy with my work even if no one is going to see it. I'm taking photos because I like it. I take them because this way I portray the world I see it.

Calm sea in the morning

Recently I uploaded quite a few photos from Madrid. To keep you interested, a small change of subject today. It's a long exposure (60 seconds) photo I took in the morning on Fuerteventura island. I wanted to create silky smooth water and I managed to. If you're interested in creating such an effect yourself, read my tutorial about it.

EXIF data:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 40 mm
Aperture: f/8.0
Exposure time: 60 s
ISO: 200
Number of exposures: 1
E.V. Step: n/a
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: ND400 neutral density filter
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Lightroom 4.2, Photoshop CS6

Thoughts: Learn your gear

You might have the best equipment under the sky and still take poor quality photos. Or you might have pretty decent photo gear and take photos like a pro. How it's possible? One of the key factors to take good photos, although one that many photographers doesn't mention at all, is knowing your gear. No lens or camera body is perfect under all conditions. Each of them has its strengths and weaknesses. In case of cameras it can be great dynamic range and low noise in low-light situations (on the pros side) but slow or inaccurate auto-focus mechanism (cons). Lens might produce great bokeh but might also have problems with chromatic aberration or flares.

Believe me, no equipment is ideal and getting to know that takes some time.

What I often do to learn my gear is to limit number of extra gear (mainly lenses) I'm taking with me. Although I own quite a few lenses and this collection seems to grow over time, I hardly ever have more than 2 with me. This way I limit my choices. I don't have to waste time wondering whether I should take a photo with prime or zoom or maybe telezoom. I just take it. I also try to change my setup from time to time. What I mean that one time I will take a wide-angle zoom lens + telezoom lens but the other time I will take wide-angle prime + standard zoom lens. What I try to avoid is to take 2 lenses with same or similar focal range. Instead I try to take lenses that would allow me to cover wider focal range.

When I'm back at home and download my photos I can clearly see issues and strengths in each of the lenses. Of course I don't inspect photos at 100%, trying to calculate lens' resolution for instance. No, there are many great tests which do it in a much more reliable way than I could do at home. However, looking with some care I can quickly see if there is strong colour fringing (chromatic aberration), vignetting or too strong distortion.

After some time you will know your gear perfectly. For instance now I know that for any night/sunrise/sunset landscape photos 24 f/1.4 II lens is a perfect choice. Low chromatic aberration and low flares help significantly during sunrises when I have sun in the frame. However, my general travel lens is Canon 24-105 f/4 L. Although it has some problems with chromatic aberration and isn't that sharp it's a great general purpose lens offering very universal range of focal ranges. Similarly if I'm to shoot some action I will probably use Canon 50D. Its fast burst (6 fps) mode is a great help. In addition the fact that it's a crop body it will make each lens longer (eg. 100 mm on a crop body becomes 160 mm) what is also very useful for action shots. However, for any serious landscape photo shoot or any night photos I'm taking 5D MK II because it offers lower noise and in general better image quality.

Blogging for 2 years!

Yes, that's true. I'm blogging here for exactly 2 years! I wrote my very first post on 24.03.2011 and it was just kind of "Hello World" post. However, for the first year I was writing very rarely, just every few weeks or even months. This changed during last year when I started to write new posts much more regularly (daily most of the time). This resulted in drastic increase in number of visits. From just a few (let's say 10 - 15) per day to more than 200 per day. It's still far from my goal but I'm working on it :)

However, this blog isn't my first one. My other one (which was a bit more popular) was about game and 3D graphics programming. I occasionally posted my photos there but at certain point decided to separate the two. I stopped blogging there on April 2012.

Here are some stats for the last year:

• pageviews: 111.000
• visits: 46.130

What's more this blog's Alexa rank is increasing pretty fast recently. When I checked it in December it was 8 million. Now it's 2.7 million. So the stats for the last couple of months look good. Also it's great that each month is better than previous one. Keeps me really motivated (mainly to write new tutorials and tips as these seem to be the most popular content here).

Although it's mainly my personal photography blog, the most popular posts are downloadable presets (for Photomatix Pro and Lightroom 4) and HDR tutorial. Also some of my other tutorials (there are 42 of them up do date and all free) are quite popular :)

However, the best thing about this blog is that it shows how my photography skills evolve over time. I'm still far from being happy with them but I see progress. Both composition and my post-processing skills seem to improve.

I have plenty of ideas for next year but you're more than welcome to share yours :)

Reflection at sunrise

I love shooting sunrises. Light is warm. It's calm. Nobody is there. Just me, tripod and a camera - and some wonders of nature :)

In this case I wanted to preserve as much mood of the scene I saw as possible. For that reason I tried to keep rocks rather dark (but you can still notice some details in them).

EXIF data:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 35 mm
Aperture: f/13.0
Exposure time: 1/6 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 7
E.V. Step: 1
Flash used: no
Tripod: no
Filters: no
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Lightroom 4.2, Photoshop CS6

Purple sky

Today just a photo without much talk :)

EXIF data:
Camera: Canon 50D
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 24 mm
Aperture: f/11
Exposure time: 1/2 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 5
E.V. Step: 1.5 E.V.
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: no
Software: Magic Lantern, Photomatix Pro 4.2.4, Lightroom 4.1, Photoshop CS5

Manually blended sunrise

In the last two days I submitted two tutorials: about Virtual Copies in Lightroom and about some HDR theory so if you're into reading tutorials click on either of these links :) Today there won't be any new tutorial (you have to wait until next week). Instead I'm posting another Fuerteventura sunrise.

However, this one is different. In that very case I didn't use HDR to increase dynamic range. Instead I used technique known as manual blending with help of luminance (or luminosity) masks. I'm not an expert on this technique yet so I won't cover details on it I will just give you the basic idea which is that you load all your files into Photoshop and then using layer masks cover/uncover parts of individual image. This is how the masking looked for 7 exposures I used:

The blending is far from being perfect but also not that bad for beginner :) But blending was just beginning of fun as I then started to apply global & local adjustments to the image (contrast, saturation, colour balance, dodge & burn, vignette):

I'm pretty happy with the output although I'm aware it isn't ideal. What do I think about manual blending? Well, it's a really powerful tool giving you full control over the image. However, it takes so much time to blend a single photo that I won't probably use it very often. Most of the time I'm very happy with my regular tone-mapped or fused images. However, luminosity masks are great tool for applying adjustments to the image to control contrast and saturation and I will use them for that purpose for sure.