TAZM PICTURES

I’ve read a number of explanations of tone mapping, but I confess I still don’t understand what’s going on.  I know it’s a way to manipulate a digital image so that what you see in the image better approximates what you remember having seen in real life – rather than the disappointing result you usually get when the lights or darks in a scene with a wide brightness range get washed out at one end of the spectrum.

We arrived at Hoodia Lodge, about 20 km from Sesriem, Namibia and the entrance to Sossusvlei Park, late in the afternoon.  It was cloudy, but there were promising breaks in the clouds as the sun was sinking behind the mountains.  I grabbed the camera and headed uphill, facing away from the setting sun, in the hopes of being able to take some bracketed photos and create some HDR exposures.  Eventually, the sun did what I wanted, and there was a break which ended up illuminating a part of the distant valley while we were still in the shade, and I began snapping away.

Unfortunately, the HDR idea didn’t pan out – the low light caused some focusing problems, and the moving clouds caused the bracketed exposures to vary too much to combine.  But from the RAW exposures I was able to produce a few tone mapped images – I hope you like them. I may need to go back and clean up some of the spots from dust on the sensor (or so it seems) in one of the photos.

First there was this rainbow…and as the sun set…

…the valley across the way became illuminated.

I’ve been playing around with tonemapping software – Photomatix – which can both be used to create HDR photos from bracketed JPEGs, and an HDR photo from a single RAW file. These are some photos I took of the same sunset (varying zoom levels), and I tonemapped some and just did a regular RAW-to-PNG conversion for another. I’m still trying to figure out what these techniques do for photos.  Can you tell which is which?

Answer: the first three are tonemapped with Photomatix; the last one is not.

I never tire of these Windhoek sunsets during the “rainy season”. But I’m always amazed by how much of a difference cropping and zooming make on sunset photography. These are three photos taken in succession of the same sunset, with the same camera settings (OK, roughly), but zoomed.  The point is, when you’re photographing a sunset, don’t necessarily always focus on getting the widest shot possible – sometimes you can get really cool effects by zooming in on parts of the horizon (or clouds).  It’s also interesting seeing what the automatic settings on some cameras will do.  Experiment!

Strange things happen to the light in the last minutes before sunset.  And in Windhoek, during the “rainy season” (usually December and January) it’s even more extreme.  Every night, there are a few minutes where everything turns a brilliant yellow as the sun dips near the horizon.  Usually there is a gap in the clouds just above the horizon that results in the clouds going all shades of orange and pink.  And if you’re lucky, it’s raining somewhere in the distance, which will turn a bright orange haze.  It happens every night.  How we suffer here.  And it’s virtually impossible to capture with a camera.

But if you can imagine to be someplace really cool or interesting when that moment comes, the pictures will be amazing.  Best I could do was my dog….

The “golden hour” directly before sunset offers really interesting options for photography.  If you’re on a game drive in Namibia at the right time in the right place, you can get some truly stunning photos.  Unfortunately, however, you’re at the mercy of the driver many times, and if you’re facing directly into the sun it can be frustrating.  If you understand how your camera reacts in those conditions and experiment, however, you can get some interesting effects.  In our case we came across a group of zebras.  I was trying to maximize the “halo effect” of the animals, avoid too many shadows/profiles, and pick up the dust they were kicking up.  Here is the outcome.

I love doing timelapses – especially of natural phenomena.  But I admit it can be a lot harder than it first appears – if you want to do it right.  But moving to Namibia and finding housing on a westward-facing hill – I knew that would be a great opportunity to hone my timelapse skills.

The first few months I lived here, I don’t think it rained once.  Not for like four months.  And hardly a cloud in the sky.  Still, the sunsets were pretty awesome.  But then, around December, as spring and the rainy season started to approach in Windhoek, it was like the evening sky had shifted into a whole different gear.  Every evening was amazing – in the afternoon it would start to cloud up, and then there would be a break near the horizon to let the sun peek through – the perfect setup for an amazing lightshow.  I told my friends and relatives back home we had pretty sunsets, and they were all, “oh, that’s nice, we have them too”.  And I said, “No, really – you don’t understand.”  And I thought to make it clear I would try and film as many consecutive sunsets as possible, to drive home the point, “No, really – every night here is an amazing sunset.”

So this is how this video came about – one of my most time-consuming projects, once you add everything up.  I used my iPad, which has an excellent timelapse app – and because it fits pretty much just one way in the railing, so that I got the same view every night.  Most of the missing nights in January, the sunsets were just as spectacular, but we were out.  In February the rains began in earnest, and the project really started to peter out.  I think you can see the clouds get thicker too – they are not as colorful at that point.  Then I thought it would be fun to see how I could combine multiple sunsets, and experimented a bit.  Here it is:

I think it turned out pretty good.  A few notes that may be of interest to other videographers.

• During the first section, where 21 sunsets all blend into each other, it’s important to make sure the shots are all aligned.  So if you have an object that shows up in every shot – like the trees in my case – they should be in exactly the same place.  I had a millimeter here and there of variation.  If you don’t line them up, you get “jump cut” effects.  Which isn’t noticeable if you let the sunset run all the way through to darkness – but I found that didn’t look as good in the video.
• To stretch the three sunsets across one screen, you have to uncheck the little box that maintains the ratio between width and height.  I don’t think all editing programs let you do that.
• When you run 4 or 9 or 16 screens simultaneously, you don’t want to eyeball the size and placement.  Go into your editing parameters and write down the x and y coordinates, and make them all the same percentage of the original.  Otherwise it takes forever to get it right.
• It takes a lot of processing power to run that many tracks simultaneously.  In the shot where there are 16 tracks running at the same time, every little edit took forever to make, while the computer churned away.
• Remember to put your settings on manual – white balance, shutter speed, focus – whatever your camera does automatically, make it manual.  With the iPad it’s not as big a deal – in some ways the auto exposure gives you a longer timelapse because it increases the number of good frames you can grab when the sky is at its lightest and darkest – but you get some flicker.  On a regular camera it is much worse.

Although you can’t beat the price for video and music editing software when it comes to iFilm and GarageBand for the iPad, trying to create a video from top to bottom using nothing but an iPad 2 still leaves a bit to be desired.  Probably people who have never used any other video or music programs never notice – but I find myself constantly wishing I could resize the video, fade music in and out, or make color alterations.  This is to say nothing of trying to use an iPad to record video in the first place.

I recently took a trip to the Namibian coastal town of Swakopmund, and took the very rare step of bringing neither a camera nor a computer.  Of course, as I arrived, the “golden hour” at sunset was approaching (the hour or so after dawn and before sunset when the light lets you capture amazing footage) and I thought the wind and waves at sunset on the westward-facing coast would make for some good video.  So I grabbed my iPad.

The video below is the result – all of the footage was captured with the iPad (you can see some of the auto-balance and lighting issues), edited using the iFilm app, and then I added some music made in iPad’s GarageBand.  It runs a bit long at the end, mainly because the music is a bit long.  Then I uploaded it to YouTube and cheated a bit – using the stabilize function to cut down on the movement caused by the strong coastal wind hitting the iPad while I was recording.  I think it turned out OK.  Yes, that is a dead penguin on the beach.

It’s fun to play around with reflections off a body of water – though in my experience, it’s rare to come across a body of water (a) that’s calm enough to reflect without too much distortion (b) at the right time of day and (c) where there’s something worth reflecting.

At a recent visit to Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, Okaukuejo Camp sits alongside a (man-made) watering hole to the west – and in the last few months before the rains begin (October is ideal) all sorts of animals meander down to the water’s edge at sunset.  That can make for a lot of fun shots:

I thought the photo above was interesting because it combines the reflected rhinoceros and a reflected bird, with a jackal that happens to be on the other side of the watering hole, in profile.

In this photo, a rhinoceros, a giraffe and a bird (neither of which are actually seen in the shot) are reflected in the watering hole.  Because the rhino is somewhat camouflaged against the rocks in the waning light, I thought it might be fun to flip the photo.

Finally, this lone springbok.  I find the mirror image remarkable because the water is completely calm, in spite of the fact that the springbok just walked into the water and is drinking at the time of the photo.  No ripples!

The other day I was working on a home video of a recent vacation to Egypt, and I invited my 12-year-old to a pre-screening of my near-final draft (a shorter version here), and she told me it was all wrong.  “Why?” I asked, horrified.  “Your horizons are all crooked.”  And she was right.  I had captured scores of amazing ocean sunsets and Nile River shots, and virtually every horizon was crooked.

A decent photographer probably would have known better than to photograph crookedly in the first place.  I use a hybrid camcorder for stills that I hold in my right hand – so virtually all of them had a slight tilt to one side – and some worse.  But what surprised me was that I was so focused on the colors and edges and transitions, that I had failed to correct the angles in the video editing process.

It’s very easy to fix – in most programs, the same place you adjust settings for size and x/y orientation, you can also nudge the photo (or video) by degrees or fractions of degrees – minus for counterclockwise, normal for clockwise.  If you move the camera during a video, you can even designate keyframes to get the video to turn as needed.

So that’s a major lesson learned for me – I fixed them all in about 15 minutes and we were back in business.  What’s another one?  Watch this video carefully and see if you can spot the other major pitfall (in addition to the crooked horizon):

Did you catch it?  If you watched carefully, you should have trouble reading this.  Stop-motion videos of sunrises and sunsets over the ocean are fun to do, but it’s not really about the sun – it’s about the lightshow in the clouds or on the water.  By staring at this video for the full 90 seconds of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” you ended up partly blind (don’t worry, it’ll pass).  So that’s something else to bear in mind.

Having said all that, however, World Run Day is on Sunday, 7 October.  Raise some money for your favorite charity and get some exercise at the same time – check out www.runday.com for the details.  When you get your vision back, that is.