Laugh it up, friends! Photog slips on HDR banana skin!

BUT FIRST…the story. I have been looking for the opportunity for a different picture of a cruise ship in front of the Rabaul volcanoes, particularly the most active one, Tavurvur. Then as I mentioned a week or three back, I came on a nicely framed view while taking my morning constitutional.

My spies told me another ship was due in today, but nobody I knew could give me an exact arrival time. They tend to arrive in the 6-7am bracket, so I determined to be there and set up for anything after 6am.

Scouted the site again on Friday, saw that some grass was growing up into my window. So on Saturday morning, I took the bush knife on the walk and slashed down the errant stalks.

This morning, I had the alarm set for 5.10am, was out of the house 10 minutes later, and a brisk walk in a pretty bright pre-dawn with a fair bit of light, high cloud around showing nice pinks (a change from yesterday when rain was pelting down for half the day) had me at the site ready to shoot at 6.40am.

Set up the tripod, GX7 on top, 12-35 on the front, 100-300 in the bag. Huh? The 12-35 @ 35 wasn't really long enough! Why didn't I bring the 45-150??? Okay, we won't go into that. But setting the camera to EX TELE (effectively 1.4x with an 8MPX image) would do the trick. Set it up, took a test shot. Nice. But then thought that it was placing both Tavurvur crater and the ship right in the middle of the frame. Not so good. So I fiddled a bit with the framing, better.

Sunrise showed some nice slanting light across the mountains but no sign of the ship. How long would that nice light last? Not long in the tropics -- the sun leaps straight for the zenith.

Then the light started to play tricks. The high cloud intermittently masking the sun. Aargh! But I was only waiting, and the cloud, as I had expected, pretty much cleared.

A bunch of kids showed up from the neighboring village. As we do here, I told them what I was doing and they told me what they were doing and remarked that they had seen me cutting the grass the day before, and noted that if I went to the top of the hill behind me, I would get a very clear view. I told them I had scouted that and would think about going there to photograph the boat on the way out this afternoon if the weather stayed good (it has currently clouded right over).

So there we were. Then the kids all dashed off to the beach where they would have a clear view out to sea to see if they could see the ship. 10 minutes later, the squad came scrambling back up the cliff. No, not yet.

And so we whiled away an hour or so in companionable chat about school, the goings on in their village, and so on with intermittent dashes down to the beach until they sighted the ship at about 7.10am. It hove into my frame at 7.32 -- and I began shooting.

By this time the light was getting a bit flat so I decided that rather than switching from Standard to Vivid mode, I would shoot HDR with bursts of 5 frames separated by 2/3rds of a stop to get a bit more snap and sparkle into the pix. Sure, the ship was moving, but it was a long way away.

Great thinking, young fellow!

So here is where you start laughing!

Sure, I was reaching out with the 100-300, but hey! The same multi-image showed up in a smaller but still significant way in the 35 shots. LOL. Though you would like that! These big ships move deceptively fast! So Mr Smartypants's plan for HDR was out the window right there!

My first check of the framing just after sunrise. A nice bit of steam and whatever coming from the crater, but the crater, Tavurvur, is too centralized.

I shifted my shooting position by just a pace or so and had the opportunity to check out the result with a cargo ship leaving the harbor. That's better -- although I didn't pay enough attention to the vertical situation -- I should have had the camera about 20-30cm lower. not the chancy light!

The ship itself, the Sea Princess, finally comes steaming past a little after 7.30am. You can see the difference in the light on the mountains compared with the earlier shots. Oh well, at least the sun was shining! I cropped a little off the top to get rid of a bit of blank sky. And this, of course, was just middle shot out of the five shot bracket. Heh, heh!

Several shots taken with the 12-35 @ 35, then I switched to he 100-300 and made a slight change of viewpoint for this and the subsequent shot. Do you notice that the nice plumes of steam or whatever from the volcano have abated? Blast it!!! They were quite picturesque!

The 100-300 reaching out to the max. I didn't have the name of the ship (I was planning to ring someone later) but I have it now -- I read it off the bow in this shot!

I processed the pix in PhotopLine with the first step applying dehazing. I selected a light blue haze color rather than let the program calculate the haze itself because it was showing some differences in color between the 35mm shots and the 300mm shots.

The pix taken with the EX TELE setting had a limited range in the histogram, so I spread it with curve adjustment and added some contrast. They were also showing some "grain" in the sky, so I ran them through Topaz Adjust, doing only some noise reduction. I sharpened all the pix somewhat. I also adjust the white point based on a reading off the stern.

The kids liked the photos I took, I distributed some kina (our currency) among them, they shot off home to their village, and I shouldered my stuff and walked briskly back home pretty satisfied with my morning.

Then I uploaded the pix to the computer and discovered the HDR fiasco! What a hoot!