Kevin MacLeod

Moonlight Sentinel Full moon rising in Sausalito Sausalito...

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:43:00 -0700

Moonlight Sentinel

Full moon rising in Sausalito

Sausalito detour, the day before these three photos were taken.

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Lunar Waters Long exposure of the setting moon This was taken...

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:00:00 -0700

Lunar Waters

Long exposure of the setting moon

This was taken the same night this shot was, about an hour earlier. These shots were my first real experience doing long exposure night shots, and the first time I made a real effort to capture the stars.

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Forest Faded Looking down on a forested hillside enveloped by...

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:57:00 -0700

Forest Faded

Looking down on a forested hillside enveloped by fog

This was taken on the road up Mt. Tamalpais. The entire mountain was engulfed in fog all around, and once I finally managed to burst through the clouds, it made for a great opportunity to take a shot. I will probably post some shots from the summit over the next few days.

I also want to start getting in to black and white photography. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in this field - partly because they seem to be less popular than my colorful landscape stuff - but I don’t want the work I create to be dependant on meaningless viewer metrics. I’ve always felt its important to create the art you want to create, and I’m going to keep doing that.

I’ve probably spent too much time talking about lens sharpness lately. Although I do enjoy digging into the nitty gritty technical details of these lenses on a pixel-per-pixel level - and I’ll continue to do so - I have to admit that it just isn’t particularly important. The fact is, pretty much any lens is going to be pretty sharp on a modern camera. Case in point, this shot, taken with the Nikkor 28mm-80mm 1:3.3-5.6G.

Coastal City San Francisco cityscape from afar. This is the...

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:00:00 -0700

Coastal City

San Francisco cityscape from afar.

This is the second one in a series of shots from this day. The clouds and lighting here were just stunning, and I spent the whole afternoon just driving around the Marin Headlands taking pictures.

I wanted to get an ultrawide coast scene in there, and this spot made for a perfect vantage point over the city and bridge. The light rays coming from behind the bridge were unexpected, but a very welcome surprise!

Sunlight Bridge The Golden Gate Bridge, lit by an incredible...

Thu, 09 May 2013 07:50:00 -0700

Sunlight Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge, lit by an incredible sky.

This shot has certainly been done before, including a handful of times by me, so I try to avoid posting it unless I have something new to contribute to the liteny of existing photos. In this case, the sky made it easy.

I spent hours out this day just exploring the area. It’s rare that the sky is such that anywhere you point the camera, you basically can’t help but get a good photo. This day afforded such an opportunity, and I intend on posting several more pictures from the hundreds I shot.

This particular shot is a two-shot panorama taken with the 16-35 f4 VR at 16mm - proving that if there is such a thing as “too wide”, I haven’t found it yet. Postwork was all done manually in Photoshop.

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Beacon in the Mist Sunrise though the San Francisco fog I shot...

Sun, 05 May 2013 13:20:00 -0700

Beacon in the Mist

Sunrise though the San Francisco fog

I shot this shot a few minutes later.

This one was assembled as a 3 part RAW panorama, with some manual HDR expansion from alternate exposure. This cheap 50mm lens really is stellar for landscape shooting. Basically zero distortion at infinity, extremely sharp, weighs nothing. For probably about three quarters of my shooting, I could make do with this as my only lens.

Rippling Sands Wide Angle landscape featuring the Ritchmond...

Sat, 04 May 2013 06:46:19 -0700

Rippling Sands

Wide Angle landscape featuring the Ritchmond Bridge and Bay Bridge.

I shot this one a couple of months ago, but I’ve been on a bit of a marathon with photography lately, and this is one of many older shots I just never got around to until now.

I shot this one with the D800E, using the Nikon 16-35 VR lens. After using this lens for a while, I can conclude that it really is an amazing lens. Great build quality, 77mm filter compatibility, and an extremely useful zoom range. Although it isn’t nearly as sharp as any of my primes, it IS sharp - as evidenced by the detail in the dirt in this shot. For a wide angle junkie, this is the perfect walkabout lens.

Duality Ultra-wide San Francisco moonrise. This one was taken...

Fri, 03 May 2013 05:12:00 -0700

Duality

Ultra-wide San Francisco moonrise.

This one was taken the same day as these other two shots of mine, about an hour after the latter.

I wanted to capture both the moonrise and the heavy lighting of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the contrasting shades of blue and red those elements bestowed upon the scene. The 14mm made it easy, but not without distortion - I had to line the shot up very carefully in order to get the architecture to look good.

Still, the lens is amazing, and I can’t complain. With a lens this sharp, you can afford to correct distortion later without ruining micro-details.

Twin Peaks Skyline Twin Peaks Panorama - the second in my multi...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:29:00 -0700

Twin Peaks Skyline

Twin Peaks Panorama - the second in my multi part series. This particular entry was captured with the Sigma 35mm 1.4 Art lens.

With this, I wanted to capture the entirety of the scene as I saw it, more than anything else. It contains the composition from my previous entry, captured with the 50mm 1.8, but also contains the sky, the stars, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Twin Peaks hillside behind me - really everything I could reasonably see without seeing the place I’m standing. As you can imagine, 35mm isn’t wide enough to do that. This particular entity was stitched together out of 6 individual exposures, each 20 seconds long.

I really wanted to bring out the stars, and did my best to compensate for the (obviously major) light pollution San Francisco will provide. I’m looking forward to coming here on a day when the city is blanketed in fog, and trying to capture the stars undisturbed. View this one as big as you can to see the most of the stars as possible - it helps.

As for the lens, I will go into more detail about the Sigma 35mm 1.4 in a second post later today, but suffice it to say the lens is incredibly, unbelievably sharp. Like, scary sharp. Sharp enough to distinguish things down the pixel level on the D800E’s sensor. Sharpness isn’t everything, but the lens also excels when it comes to everything else. It lets in tons of light, distortion is very minimal, chromatic aberrations are very minimal, the fit and finish is outstanding… it might not be the bargain that the Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D lens is, but if sharp landscapes are your thing - especially at night - this is one incredible lens.

Civilization Summit Twin Peaks, San Francisco. I’ve been...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:25:00 -0700

Civilization Summit

Twin Peaks, San Francisco.

I’ve been here before and taken a couple of photos I happen to really like, but this time I came with a different idea in mind.

My dad and I have been growing our arsenal of lenses recently, and Twin Peaks at night is a perfect place to test how these lenses perform in regards to landscapes. An extremely contrasty scene with copious amounts of bright lights, mixed with incredibly sharp architectural elements at every distance, makes for the perfect equipment test field. The lenses I used for this particular shoot were the Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D (seen here), the Sigma 35mm 1.4 Art lens, and Samyang 14mm 2.8 ultra wide.

My goal wasn’t to create and a perfect shot-for-shot comparison between these lenses - those are boring, and readily available elsewhere for those who care - rather, my goal was to create some interesting pieces of artwork with each of them, with the commonality being the scene and conditions. I plan on uploading an example of a piece of art made using each of the lenses, then a second picture detailing some more technical details and pixel-level analysis. That keeps nicely with my belief that the art you create with a piece of technology is more important than the technology itself, but also feeds my (and potentially your) interest in discussing the nitty-gritty pixel-level detail.

I’ll keep a series of posts coming over the next few days, then write an article in summery of my findings that will be available on my site afterwards.

Anyways, on to this picture:

This particular photograph is a two part multi-exposure panorama, taken with the Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D lens, and processed in Photoshop.

I’ve always liked these long-exposure city shots, but I’ve just never been able to do them particularly well until recently. But hey, if the view from Twin Peaks can’t inspire you to take a good shot, you’re not trying hard enough! It really is a breathtaking sight, and the way I processed this one, I was simply trying to do the scene justice.

Twilight Gold San Francisco moonrise; second in the...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:20:00 -0700

Twilight Gold

San Francisco moonrise; second in the series.

Similar to the previous shot in this series, the basic composition and idea for this shot were in my head for some time - at least since taking this shot from the same location. I was waiting for the weather conditions and time of day to be such that the composition of rocks, city, and pier had some sort of counterpoint. After a few fruitless visits, I finally got one I like!

This is also my first upload taken with the new Sigma 35mm 1.4 Art lens. Not the first I’ve taken - I have a bunch just waiting to edit - but the first upload. It’s a really, really amazing lens. Of course sharpness isn’t everything, but this lens is still unbelievably sharp - I have a few pictures where it resolves per-pixel detail at 36 megapixels on the D800E. I’ll talk more about this lens in future uploads that are geared more towards testing it, but suffice it to say, it’s a real stunner.

Aside from that, this was taken with the Nikon D800E, and processed in Photoshop.

Bay Moon San Francisco moonrise. I’ve been working on...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 04:17:00 -0700

Bay Moon

San Francisco moonrise.

I’ve been working on the ideas that would eventually lead to this shot for some time. I knew I wanted to do a long-exposure shot of the water rushing over the rocks, I knew I wanted to do a wide angle shot incorporating the water and the cityscape, and I knew I wanted to get something with the full moon in it. I wasn’t necessarily planning to combine all of them into one shot, but when I got here, everything just sort of seemed perfect. And even then, I almost missed the shot - I just barely managed to get the moon before it creeped away behind the clouds!

With that said, this shot did take a fair amount of work to get right, both at the time of the shooting and in post work. The ISO was higher than it should of been because the depth of field was so high, and I was using a weaker lens than I should have been. Ultimately though, it’s worth any amount of work to get a photo you’re happy with.

This was a multi-exposure shot, taken with the Nikon D800E, and processed in Photoshop.

Florida Summer Watching alteredandtorn watching the Florida...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 04:12:00 -0700

Florida Summer

Watching alteredandtorn watching the Florida sunset.

I posted a version of this photo a year or so ago, when I originally took it. While I like that photo, I’ve always thought it was rather busy. There is beauty in simplicity that gets lost in the desire to capture “the whole scene” - that is something I have to consciously remember, or I fall into the habit of trying to bring out detail in everything, rather than in trying to compose an interesting shot.

Luckily, when you take a shot well to begin with, it gives you a lot of leeway to improve it later in post. In this instance, I was able to correct the distortion and crop the image such as to end up with the picture I probably should have just taken in the first place! Oh well, without a time machine, this was the next best thing.

This one was taken with the old Nikon D200 and processed in Photoshop and Photomatix. It was a complete reprocessing job, rather than a tweak to the older version.

Beyond the Hills I’ve been meaning to get into more long...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 04:35:00 -0700

Beyond the Hills

I’ve been meaning to get into more long exposure night photography - I’m hoping this is the first of many more. For a first experiment with this type of thing, I am very satisfied with the results I’m getting so far, and I’m excited to get out and shoot more!

This one was taken with the Samyang 14mm f2.8 ultrawide on a Nikon D800E.

Perspective This one is a wide angle long exposure, taken with...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:12:00 -0700

Perspective

This one is a wide angle long exposure, taken with the D800E using the 16-35 VR.

Ultra wide shots are still something I don’t have a huge amount of experience with, but they are a lot of fun, and I’m learning my way around composing them.

This was a single long exposure, processed minimally in Photoshop.

Dawn City Here’s another shot from the Marin...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 09:18:00 -0700

Dawn City

Here’s another shot from the Marin Headlands.
Early morning on a week day, just before sunrise, means fewer people than usual. In fact, I had the whole place to myself for most of the time I was shooting there.

If it seems like I’ve been posting a lot of pictures of this view lately, it’s because I have. It isn’t because I’m completely out of ideas, though - there’s actually a reason behind it. It is because I’ve recently been exploring new techniques and experimenting with new equipment, and it helps to do these things with a relatively consistent subject matter, in order to make. And frankly, in terms of landscapes, there are few subjects in the world quite like this one.

Anyways, this one was taken as a 6-part multi-exposure HDR panorama with the D800E using a 50mm prime lens.

Moonrise Bridge Wide-angle long exposure HDR, from the Marin...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:03:31 -0700

Moonrise Bridge

Wide-angle long exposure HDR, from the Marin Headlands. When I saw the moon shining this bright through the clouds, I couldn’t resist going out and trying to capture it.

This one was taken the same night that this recent upload was.

This one was a 5-exposure HDR panorama, with mostly RAW data manually composed. It was taken with the D800E using the 16-35 VR lens.

Storm Cloud Bay Sunset in the Marin Headlands. I’ve been...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 14:21:00 -0700

Storm Cloud Bay

Sunset in the Marin Headlands.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. My previous technique wasn’t yielding any results that I cared about.

I mad some technical mistakes on some of my earliest photographs taken with the D800E, including this one.

First, I didn’t realize the effects diffraction would have at small apertures on such a high resolution sensor, so many of my shots were extremely blurry at F22. Second, I was shooting at the “virtual” lowest-ISO setting. Turns out all that does is overexpose your photo, then turn down the brightness in RAW. That works fine, unless you have blown-out highlights that need to be recovered.

Still, even with those issues, I was able to work with this one. Some of the others from the same day, not so lucky.

New processing techniques and a better vision prevailed, and now I have something I’m satisfied with.

This one was a two-shot panorama with some manually composed HDR elements in the sky.

Late Night Light A full moon over the San Francisco bay,...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 08:32:00 -0700

Late Night Light

A full moon over the San Francisco bay, obscured by a thick blanket of rolling clouds.

Ultra wide angle 3 exposure photograph, taken with the D800E, and combined manually into a higher dynamic range image with the desired amount of motion blur.

Fields Falling Wide angle sunset, over the bay. This one was...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:47:00 -0700

Fields Falling

Wide angle sunset, over the bay. This one was really difficult to capture and process due to inconsistent lighting in the scene, but I’m reasonably satisfied with the result, and it’s always good to push oneself.