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[Canon 5D Mark I, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L USM Macro, 2 Speedlight flashes]
Click in the photo the see the complete gallery

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I have been playing again with my little puppets. I still have this idea in my head, but it doesn’t seem to come out the way that I imagine. So I keep fooling around and I am sure that at the end I will get the image from my head to the screen.

Last autumn my daughter found a branch in the forest with a little mushroom attached to it. We took it home, and I could borrow it from her to take some shots. Again I tried to get the setting right and hoped I could get the picture from my brain to the screen. And I am pretty pleased with the end result.

The light comes from my desk-lamp (halogen light) and the blue background is a blue piece of carton. So no fancy stuff in the actual setup. The photos are shot with my 100mm macro lens and the Canon 5D Mark I.

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In Adobe Lightroom is adjusted the saturation and the blacks to get a bit more spice. Again I do like the end result but it is still not the same picture that lives in my head. So I will keep trying and am sure I will get there in the end.

I have been cleaning up my archive and found some shots I made last summer. I made some close-ups in the garden while i was enjoying the nice weather. This was the first summer that we had wasps in our garden. Normally I am happy when this little bug(ger) stays away, but this time I was glad that I could make some shots. (it is a wonderful creature after all). All shots were taken with my Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L USM Macro and my Canon 5D mark I

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We also went to the zoo (Artis in Amsterdam) where we visited the butterfly garden. This is paradise for the close-up fans. Sometimes the butterflies even land on your shoulder, which can be frustrating and wonderful at the same time. (You have a nice close-up view but it is impossible to take a nice shot) We went together with Nicki, my daughter, so it was not really possible to concentrate on the pictures, so this is definitely a place to go back to (when i am alone)

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Click on the photos to go to gallery

Change of the seasons, always a good moment to go outside with your camera.

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[Canon 5D Mark II - Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM - Canon Speedlite 580EX II with diffuser]

Just some experimenting within Lightroom. I did like the result so I wanted to share them here, click on the photos to see a larger version.

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I just realized that I never published anything about my new water drop setup.

So here it is. I have been busting my head for a long time on how to get around the issue of spending way too much money on an expensive drip installation and an electric trigger system.

And finally I saw the light. I needed a medical drip. So I started my search on the net and it took me a while to realize that it was a quest with no end. III asked around if someone knew somebody that had access to medical supplies. But no luck.

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Finally I found a website here in Holland that would sell drips to private an address. But only the drip system and not the bags that you need to fill up with liquid.

I decided that I would figure something out and ordered two sets. When I received the package I opened it as soon as possible and examined the system. Never paid any attention to stuff like this so did not know what to expect. Luckily one end had a thick sharp end, and I figured that I would be able to push this thru the cap of a lemonade bottle. And so I did.

I filled the bottle with water and found out that it was not working. I took a while to realize that I needed an extra hole in the other end of the bottle to let air in. And guess what, I had a system that produced drips that I could regulate.

So still no trigger system. I decided to go with the old fashion system – good luck.

See below for my first umbrella drops. Next phase will be to get the lighting right and the background / color. So still more to discover.

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Love black and white? Equally love HDR? Why not combine the two techniques? I have been playing with the idea for a while and I thought it was time to show the result.

So basically you have two ways to approach this. (In this example I used a single shot HDR.)

1) Make a HDR of the original and then edit that to black and white
2) Make a black and white edit of the original(s) and turn that to HDR.

In this example I went for option one. Just because that way I only had to produce one black and white edit instead of three. To be honest I can’t tell the differences in result between the two options but that is for a later moment to try out.

See below for the results. (click on the images for the larger versions)
From left to right the original – the original to B&W – HDR – HDR to B&W

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I love the way how you get the detail back when you use HDR. Just compare the trees from the original edits with the HDR edit (both B&W and color version).

Make sure you get your transformation to B&W correct. I personally am a lazy bastard and have a preset that I use in Silver Efex Pro from NikSoft. (one of my favorite tools) It also gives you the old fashion look by adding the original film grain (based on type of film).

I also like to add extra drama to the image during the B&W transformation. Just play with contrast , levels, etc…

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I was looking for a good noise reduction tool. When I looked on the internet it was not clear to me what would be the best program, so I did some testing.

My main goal is to reduce most of the noise without the use of all the fancy settings. Personally I do not hate some noise in my pictures. Probably because I own a Canon 5D which doesn’t generate much noise at all. But the main reason why I’m looking for noise reduction software has to do with HDR. When I generate a HDR image I always get more noise in my images then I wished for. So I am in need of some good noise reduction tool

Don’t expect too much of this mini test. Basically what I did was the following, I opened the original photo with the appropriate program or plug-in (within Adobe Photoshop CS4). If the program or plug-in had an automatic setting I used that. If not I only used the most basic adjustments/settings to get a decent result. Maybe I am just lazy, but hey I don’t want to spend my precious time with reducing noise.

So the image on the top left is a crop of the original HDR file. (the un-cropped image can be found in the following article "HDR Curacao – misty water"). The other images are the results of one of the following tools:

• Noise Ninja 2.2.1 (Stand Alone)
• Noise Ware 2.6 (Stand Alone)
• Noise Ware 4.2 (Photoshop plug-in)
• Photoshop CS4 (Stand Alone)
• Lightroom 3 (Stand Alone)
• NikSoft Dfine 2 (Photoshop plug-in)
• Neat Image Pro 6.0 (Stand Alone)
• Topaz Denoise 4(Photoshop plug-in)

The most important thing for me is that I don’t loose any important details in the photo, so that is one of the things I based my conclusion on. The other important one is of course the reduction of noise. So I used the images below to pick the best tool (for my use)

Conclusion
The build in functionality in Photoshop and Lightroom affect the details too much, so does Dfine from NikSoft and Topaz Denoise. Noise Ninja and Noiseware (the standalone versions) do a good job. For me the Plug-in version of Noiseware disturbs the details a wee bit too much. (which is strange in my opinion because you would think it would give the same result as the standalone). Neat Image was a disappointment to me. I read some good reviews on the net but in my test-case it doesn’t reduce much noise but does affect the details.

So I need to choose between Noise Ninja and Noiseware. Based on the images below I would say Noiseware 2.6 (standalone). Maybe I need to do some more testing with different photos.

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Another experiment that I have been working on, water drops. This is still a huge challenge for me. I keep doing something wrong.

The results I get are alright but that is where it ends. I have been reading many tutorials and this has improved the results but I am still not satisfied. There is always something (little) that prevents me of getting the result that I want.

For example, when you look at the pictures in this gallery you will see little white spots in the water. These are little air bubbles that were sticking to the bottom of my glass bowl. And I couldn’t find a way to get rid of them. I do realize, after reading a few more tuts, that I need to use the duration of the flash as exposure time and not the actual exposure time from the camera. So this will be something to play with. I also know now that you don’t need to light the actual water drop but that you need to use the reflection of the light. All little things that you need to be aware of…

Will be continued….

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Flowers and Close-up. A nice and relaxing subject…. It is just a way to work and test my close-up objectives and try to improve my Macro skills a wee bit. During spring and summertime we have some nice flowers in the garden which are good subjects to play with. And over and over again i keep getting surprised by the beautiful images you get when you crawl into the heart of flowers.

When I bought my first macro lens (Canon 100mm f/2.8) I started with photographing flowers, and now with the Canon MP-E 65mm in my possession it is even more intriguing to see the wonders of mother nature. In this article just a few examples. Most of the time I am looking for the tiny flowers opposite to the larges species. Just because it is more of a challenge for me to work with these.

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What I do know for sure is that there will follow more flower photographs in the future, due to the fact it is so much fun to do. Just click on the photo’s to see the larger versions.