Fall! A Great Time to Get Out to the Woods

Fall! A Great Time to Get Out to the Woods

And not just for beautifully colored leaves. This fall try slowing down and really observing your surroundings. You never know what you’ll see. On a recent trek through a local nature trail I discovered a nice variety of wild mushrooms and learned that they make great photographic subjects. If you can identify any of these mushrooms, please post in a comment below. Click on the images to see them larger.

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Happy 4th of July

These images were taken on July 3rd with the Rokinon 85 f/1.4 lens at f/5.6 and ISO 400 on a Canon 5D Mark IV.  Click on the image to see it at full size.

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Great Blue Heron Rookery

If you can find a great blue heron rookery in your area it is worth checking it out.

An Unusual Bird to Find in Rhode Island

The scissor-tailed flycatcher, also known as the Texas bird-of-paradise and swallow-tailed flycatcher, is a long-tailed bird of the genus Tyrannus, whose members are collectively referred to as kingbirds. Wikipedia

Scientific name: Tyrannus forficatus

Higher classification: Kingbird

Rank: Species

Symbol of: Oklahoma

Did you know: Scissor-tailed flycatcher has grey head and back, white throat and belly, dark brown wings with white edges and salmon-pink flanks, lateral sides of the body and bottom parts of wings.softschools.com

Bird Images

These images are from a local refuge, called Sachuest in Newport, RI.

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Great Egret

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The great egret, also known as the common egret, large egret or great white egret or great white heron is a large, widely-distributed egret, with four subspecies found in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and southern Europe. Wikipedia

Scientific name: Ardea alba

Mass: 1.5 – 3.3 lbs (Adult)

Wingspan: 4.3 – 5.6 ft. (Adult)

Length: 2.6 – 3.4 ft. (Adult)

Rank: Species

Did you know: The Great Egret (also known as the Common Egret) is a large wading bird found worldwide.

Astrophotography at Pemaquid Lighthouse

I've done plenty of night photography but this was my first real attempt at astrophotography and it was a whole lot of fun.  I mentioned in a previous post that I purchased the Rokinon 24 mm f/1.4 specifically for astrophotography, but as it turns out it's a pretty great lens for landscapes too.

I shot these images while testing the lens for it's night time capabilities.  The first image is a composite of two exposures.  One exposure to correctly expose the sky and one to correctly expose the lighthouse, then the two images were blended together in Photoshop.

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Pemaquid Lighthouse, Maine

As I was following the Milky Way, it led me to photograph this stand of pine trees.  The Lighthouse actually did the light painting on the trees during my 20-second exposure.  This image is actually a panorama of sorts.  When I made my first exposureI had just the tree tops and more sky, on the second exposure I lowered the camera to include more of the trees.  Later, when post processing I got the idea to put the two images together in Lightroom, which created this taller version.  I like it taller because it shows more of the Milky way and trees.  I wish I would have thought of while I was shooting the images because I could have made an image that went from the ground to the top of the Milky Way.

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If you would like to learn some of these Lightroom adjustments, click here to sign up for a free 10 e-mail short course.  Or if you want to just jump right into my complete Lightroom course you can purchase it below.  Check it out it's on sale right now!

Removing Distractions with the Perfect Eraser or a Clone Brush

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Original Image with distractions such as ropes, a car and porta johns.

I had recently made a video about how to remove distractions from an image using On1's Perfect Eraser tool.  However, the image I worked on had a simple blue sky background and it wasn't very challenging for the software to clone out some branches.  A youtube view asked to see a video of it cloning in a more challenging spot.  Click here to see the first video and look below to see the new video.  

Removing Distractions with the Perfect Eraser Tool:  Part II

As you can see from the video the Perfect Eraser tool works well, but it is a little slow.  It takes quite a bit of time to process each cloned area and I think you could do as well if not better with the clone tool or the patch tool in Photoshop.  Here is the image I ended up with after using the Perfect Eraser tool.  It did ok in some areas but there are many places that need to be cleaned up.

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Results from just using the Perfect Eraser tool.

Next, I tried to clean up the image with a technique I saw from Aaron Nace by using a bokeh brush that he created to clone over objects that really didn't have enough pixels around it to use the clone tool.  I think the trick to using it well is using a low flow rate of around 8-10%.  I'm sure I didn't do as well as Aaron but I think it came out pretty well.

Using a Clone Brush to Remove Distractions:  Part III 

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Final Result

Please post comments below to let me know what you thought of this post and how you think the final image came out.  Also please use the sharing tools on this page to share this post on your favorite social media sites.

Thank You,

Gary Detonnancourt

Last Night on the Lake

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