I’m terrible at getting up to an alarm clock. Even when I know it’s a fantastic sunrise just waiting to be digitally archived.
Well the other day I did it. I managed to drag my bum out of bed and head on down to New Brighton Pier to see what I could find. And I’m soooo glad I did! By 7am it was already about 25°C and the surfers were turning up in droves, all keen to get in a good mornings session before having to head off to work.
Due to me being a little slow reacting to the alarm clock I hadn’t quite made it to New Brighton when the sun broke the horizon. As soon as I saw the first few rays I pulled over, climbed the dunes and grabbed a shot;
Another example of one shot semi-hdr photography using my D700... "Active D-Lighting set to high Captain! Thanks Scotty, now hit it with a dose of D-Lighting and some Levels & Curves in Capture NX2!"
After half falling back down the dunes to my car I headed on down to the pier. Only one other photog had made the effort to get out of bed early so we had the beach and the surfers to ourselves. It turned out to be one of those mornings where pretty well anything I pointed the camera looked great. I like those 
Luckily the surfers who turned up were so entranced by the call of the breakers they didn’t notice me following them around (or more likely they just wanted to keep away from the dishevelled looking, coffee craving, odd ball with the camera )
Five minutes drive down the coast from home. Why on earth would you want to live anywhere else? Well barring a tsunami that is. But apart from the threat of a wall of water washing you away, life here is pretty damm good.
For the full set of images click here.
I’ve read some mixed reviews of Nikon’s Active D-Lighting. Some like it, some hate it. From what I can see most of those who love it do so because they process with Capture NX2. Those who hate it use something else (Lightroom, Aperture, something non Nikon) and so don’t see any benefit.
For those of you not familiar with the technology here is a quick catchup;
Active D-Lighting (ADL) analyses a photo as it’s metered and automatically adjusts the highlights and shadows to obtain the widest dynamic range. You set ADL in the ‘Shooting’ menu of your Nikon to one of the following; Auto, High, Medium, Low or Off. You will only receive the benefit ADL if you are processing with Capture NX2, in anything else the adjustments will be lost and the file will just come out looking slightly overexposed.
The end result of all this is that if you shoot with ADL turned on, and you process with Capture NX2 (not the most user friendly of programs but a must if you want the best quality out of your NEF files) you’ll get an image that has a much better dynamic range (almost HDR like in some cases) than shooting without it. The nice thing is that you can always turn the adjustments off in CNX2 if you don’t like what’s been done to the file.
In the past using a HDR technique was great so long as nothing moved between the bracketed exposures. Now you can get almost the same effect with just one shot, no more blurry ghosts as people move between frames…
Which brings me to my example of how ADL can come to the rescue. There are times when you are shooting a dark subject against a bright background (or vis versa if it’s penguins in the Antarctic) when you either don’t have time to set up a flash, the subject is too far away for your flash, it’s not convenient to use one etc. Rather than having to spend hours in post processing blending multiple exposures of each shot for a faux HDR image, or working the contrast / exposure / fill light levels for each shot, switch on ADL. Here’s a ‘with and without’ example (remember you can turn the ADL adjustments off after the fact in CNX2, which is how I got the ‘without ADL’ image).
Comments (0) 
Themocracy