Firefall at Horsetail Fall

If you ever happen to be in Yosemite National Park from February 16-23, you can capture the amazing Firefall at Horsetail Fall. This has been documented as the optimum time to capture the sun reflecting off the falls, creating what appears to be a firefall of molten lava streaming down the cliffs.

Last Light on Horsetail Fall,  Galen Rowel, 1973

Perhaps the most well-known photos of this apparition was taken by noted climber and photographer Galen Rowel in Yosemite National Park, California in 1973. Each year, hundreds of amateur and professional photographers gather from around the world to capture this ephemeral scene.

Non Layer-Based Processing in Adobe Camera Raw

Harvey Hirsch at China Gourmet, West Orange NJ

A pleasant dim sum brunch gives way to some new opportunities...

I’d been on the prowl for a good local dim sum restaurant, so when my good friend and colleague Harvey Hirsch suggested China Gourmet in West Orange, I couldn’t resist. Harvey is the author of the well-known culinary blog, “Chew on This”, so documenting this event through video and still photography was a foregone conclusion. Armed with my trusty iPhone 4S, I was able to capture the moment for myself.

Original, unprocessed version.

As usual, the iPhone 4S’s HDR option did an excellent job of preserving highlight detail, as can be seen in the window. So, half my post-processing work is already done in-camera. For the rest, I use non-layer based processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

What is non-layer based processing? It’s using Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom to apply both overall and selective enhancements instead of Photoshop with its complex adjustment layers. Once the overall contrast and vibrance is established, the Adjustment Brush tool is used to make selective adjustments. In this example, I enhanced the skintones by adding shape and vibrance to the face, reduced saturation in the hand on the right, and balancing the one on the left to it.

There are no layers in Adobe Camera Raw, but rather “pins“ that you place near the area to be adjusted. You then brush in a mask much the same as you do in Photoshop, and make adjustments with simple sliders rather than complex adjustment layers. You can save as many “snapshots“ as you want, thus many versions within each image. You can even save the overall adjustments as presets that you can apply to similar images in a fraction of the time you’d spend in Photoshop. All the changes are stored as metadata, so the original pixels are never touched. You can then save out final copies in any format you want. preserving the original, small JPEG or RAW file as a master for future iterations.

But the real excitement for today was discovering new dining opportunities at China Gourmet. for more information on how you can enhance your dining experience, visit FreeRangeChowHound.com.

Panoramas on the iPhone 4s, IOS6

Panorama Captured with the IOS6 iPhone 4s native camera app.
1/470 s @ f/2.4, ISO 200

Until now, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Photosynth app for panoramic capture on the iPhone 4s. This morning I had the opportunity to put Apple’s IOS6-native version to the test, which is built right into the main camera app. Without using a tripod, and without taking too much care, the results are flawless. I cannot see a single seam in the stitching.

It was early morning, and the lighting was not the best. Because of a slight misalignment of the sensor, I had to tilt the camera slightly to the right as I panned. Unlike Photosynth, it did not “snap” a photo each time the leading end of one frame aligned with the trailing end of the previous; it was just one continuous scan, which produced a 10,800 x 2442 pixel image of 26.5MP in size.

With my Nikon D90 in tow, I attempted to produce the same results through a series of overlapping exposures later stitched together in Photoshop using Photomerge.

Huge disappointment, and not even worth showing. The stitching failed miserably. At best, it was a starting point for some further serious retouching. There will be much experimentation ahead to get Photomerge to work, and perhaps it will never be as good as the iPhone 4s. But at this point my conclusion would be that cameras that handle this processing internally rather than through post-processing individual exposures is the way to go.

Putting the Fun in Fungi

Fungus growing from a dead tree

Dropping off and picking up my daughter from school each morning, I spied this rather large fungus growing out of a ten foot high tree stump. It had been repurposed to attach a supporting cable for a nearby utility pole. It was just high enough to avoid tampering, so it survived untouched for quite a while.

Profile view.

Close up, the image takes on an abstract quality. As is my usual practice, I also took several exposures with my iPhone 4S...

From the iPhone 4S