### Tuesday Jul 28, 2009 at 23:51

# Using TPE, Part 1: the basics

Welcome to the first in what’s intended to be a short series of tutorials on how to use The Photographer’s Ephemeris.

TPE was inspired by a number of events during 2008: (i) a winter weekend workshop in Rocky Mountain National Park with Glen Randall which opened my eyes to how plan landscape shoots – topographic maps, compass, protractor and calculator; (ii) going to shoot Dream Lake once again a few months later, and realizing I hadn’t planned properly and (iii) heading up to Loch Vale last November for a shoot that was a total bust. After all that, I realized that I while I wanted to improve my planning, I’d rather do it at my computer. Finding no tools that combined all the right data or which worked on a Mac, TPE was born.

This tutorial is based on Beta 0.9.5. Click on a screenshot for a full-size expanded view.

## The screen layout

Let’s start by taking a look at the basics of the screen layout:

1. The elevation above sea level and latitude/longitude of the current location is shown above the map
2. The most important thing of all: the primary position marker. You can drag this freely to exactly the point you need
3. The time zone of the current location and difference from UTC (universal coordinated time – effectively the same as GMT)
4. The current selected date is displayed along with times and directions of sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset (where they occur)
5. You can change the selected date using the previous and next day buttons
6. Alternatively, select an arbitrary date (past or future) from the date control

You can see that the directions of sunrise, sunset and moonrise are shown on the map. (There is no moonrise on this date at this location.) The map legend can be toggled on or off – once you are familiar with the standard colours (which can be customized), you may wish to hide the Legend to declutter the map.

Rise/set information is shown for days before and after the selected day, allowing the optimal day for a shoot to be selected. This is particularly useful for moon images, given that the timing, azimuth and phase of the moon varies significantly from day to day.

## Finding a different location

I’m guessing you’re probably not planning a shoot in Timbuktu, so let’s find somewhere else.

Click in the search text box below the map (highlighted above) and type the name of the place you are searching for. Press enter to begin the search, or click the search button adjacent to the text box (magnifying glass). Google Maps will find the closest match to the specified location and reposition the map and the primary map marker to that place.

Where possible, specify a county, state or county name in addition to the town name, in order to ensure the best match. There’s Paris, and there’s Paris, Texas.

## The new location

OK. Now we’re in Estes Park, Colorado, USA near the east entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park:

Notice that the elevation and lat/long are updated reflecting the new location. The map marker lies over the town of Estes Park. Additionally, the time zone has changed to ‘America/Denver (MDT)’. TPE will automatically determine both time zone and daylight saving rule for any place and date you select.

## Moving into the park

Let’s assume we’re going to shoot sunrise at Dream Lake. You can manually pan around the map, zoom in and out and drag the primary marker to a precise location.

The marker is positioned on the eastern shore of the lake, from where a photograph of Hallett Peak and Flattop Mountain may be composed.

## Where will the light fall?

The lighter orange sunrise line terminates at the marker location, but our subject lies to the west. Holding down the Shift key will cause the rise/set lines to extend through the marker location, showing how the light will fall:

It’s clear that in late July, the rising sun will come from the north providing imperfect illumination of Dream Lake and and the valley walls above. Perhaps this is not the perfect time of year for the image…

(Alternatively, in the above example, you could reposition the marker farther up the valley to see where the light comes from. There are other good reasons to take this approach too, which we’ll cover in a subsequent tutorial.)

## A better date

Skipping a few weeks ahead to mid-September, using the date control, and holding down Shift once more, we can see that the rising sun will illuminate the drainage above Dream Lake perfectly, providing the possibility of good light conditions:

Note from the sunrise time on the right, that you can also have a slightly longer lie-in and still make the shot.

## Saving the location

Once you have a location identified, you may wish to save it for future use:

Click the Locations link button on the top right, click the add button (+) and type a name for the entry. The program will automatically look-up a default name based on the nearest known place name. You can configure the default format for the placename in the configuration options page. Alternatively, press Shift + to add a new Location.

That covers the basics. The same principles apply to any location you want to scout, including cities (for example, when will the full moon rise along 42nd Street in Manhattan).

In the next tutorial, we’ll look at some of the other information available in TPE, including twilight times and the Details view.

You might also enjoy “Understanding Light with The Photographer’s Ephemeris” co-authored with renowned landscape photographer Bruce Percy. It’s available through Bruce’s web-site

Posted in TPE Technique

Stephen · Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 23:51 · Permalink · Comment [36]

### Saturday Mar 28, 2009 at 08:32

# Just a little snow...

Just a little snow in Boulder, then, over the past 48 hours… This is the table and chairs on our back porch yesterday morning.

This is definitely the biggest spring storm we’ve seen since we moved here a couple of years ago. The commute to the office was rather a non-starter on Thursday morning – luckily I escaped from Highway 36 just in time to avoid sitting for hours in gridlock caused by multiple vehicles trying and failing to make it up the hill to Louisville.

Friday morning dawned cloudy and with a few more flurries before things started to break up by mid-morning. A quick mid-morning coffee run gave a chance to stop by at Chautauqua to capture that local favourite, the Flatirons, looking splendid in the clearing storm:

This was captured handheld with the trusty Canon Powershot G9. Post processing was Noise Ninja first (not so much for noise, but as the sharpening is great), then Nik Software Silver Efex Pro (High Structure preset, push the contrast and brightness a little further, Yellow filter, adjust the grain settings down a little, burn the top and side edges with a large transition, add a couple of control points to avoid overly darkening the top corners). Why the sharpening up-front instead of last, as would typically be the case? Silver Efex Pro has some wonderful digital grain effects, but you don’t really want to sharpen the grain post finalizing the image in Silver Efex.

Posted in Locations Technique

Stephen · Saturday, March 28, 2009, 08:32 · Permalink · Comment

### Sunday Dec 21, 2008 at 22:36

# An Aperture Automator workflow

I’ve been using Apple Aperture for a couple of years now and in general have been very happy with it. However, of late, I’ve been toying increasingly with both Photoshop (first CS2 which I’ve had a while, and latterly CS4) and Lightroom 2.0. I’m still much enamoured of Aperture’s unobstructive workflow (do what you want, when you want). Additionally, the export plug-in workflow is very nicely done.

So for now, Aperture it is. (The other barrier to switching is the 10,000+ carefully catalogued, keyworded images…)

For this site, I use images at three different sizes: large (up to 768×768), standard (up to 500×500) and thumbnails (160px max). The large sizes are used for the lightbox that pops up when you click on an image. Standard is what appears in the blog section, plus the individual image posts where I add additional commentary about the show. Finally, the thumbnails appear in the gallery listings.

The question is this: how to make a simple workflow to get all three images exported and uploaded to my site?

I use three tools. First Apple Aperture to export the watermarked versions. Secondly, the wonderful Transmit for my FTP uploads. And finally – and crucially – Apple Automator to put the whole workflow together.

Click on image for full size version.

Automator is included with Mac OS X. It provides a relatively simple drag-and-drop workflow building interface that can be put to many different uses. Additionally, many applications – including Aperture and Transmit – expose Automator actions that you can include in your own workflows.

Aperture exposes 13 different actions you can use with Automator, including Get Selected Images and Export Images. Each action typically allows one or more parameters to be set, for example, which export preset to use when exporting. Transmit allows you to automate uploads (including connection details).

Put all that together, and my automated export + upload workflow looks like this:

1) In Aperture, select the images you want to upload – this can be single or multiple. Make sure the version names are set how you want them
2) Run the Automator action (you can save as an ‘application’ to avoid opening the Automator program everytime).
3) The automation goes like this: get the selected images in Aperture
4) Export a 768×768 version. The output is saved into the specified folder.
5) Rename the file (I append ‘_l’ to denote the large version)
6) Upload via FTP to my web-site
7) Export a 500×500 version
8) Rename and upload
9) Copy and scale down the image to create the thumbnail
10) Rename and upload

That’s it. Three image versions created, named and uploaded to the web-site in just one click.

A word of warning: although I’m still using it for the thumbnails, I don’t recommend using Automator’s Scale Images action for anything that needs to be viewed critically. I had been using to resize my 768×768 images down to 500px, but the results are horribly soft. That’s why I do multiple exports from Aperture now.

You can download my workflow here: aperture_export_upload.workflow.zip

This was created with the following software versions:

- Mac OS X 10.5.6
- Apple Aperture 2.1.2
- Transmit 3.6.7

If you have other versions, this may not work for you. You’ll need to open the workflow in Automator (after unzipping it) and tweak a few things before it will run:

1) Select a Destination and Export Preset for the Apeture Export Versions steps – it’s unlikely you’ll have folders and presets that match the names in my workflow
2) Tweak the renaming steps to do what you need for your file naming scheme
3) Adjust the settings in the Transmit Upload Files steps to select a connection that you have already saved as a favourite (or specify the full connection details – but favourites are much easier to handle…)

Best to step through the workflow in Automator itself to make sure it’s doing what you want. Also, be warned that this doesn’t deal elegantly with duplicate files – if you’ve already run the workflow against an image, everything falls apart. This is probably addressable, but I didn’t need to worry too much about this happening.

Posted in Technique Technology

Stephen · Sunday, December 21, 2008, 22:36 · Permalink · Comment

### Friday Dec 12, 2008 at 23:10

# Mesa Arch, blended

This photograph comes from a trip we made to the Four Corners region (where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado intersect) back in June. Walk into any photograph gallery in the area and you’ll almost without doubt see a photograph of this view, sunrise at Mesa Arch, Island in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park, Utah.

This is the first photo I’ve processed with Photoshop CS4, newly installed on my Mac this very evening. Best thing is the the improvement in speed, having upgraded from CS2 (which was of course only compiled for PowerPC – no Intel version available).

I haven’t tried any of the new features in CS4, but have been using exposure blending techniques increasingly of late. (The basics are explained very nicely here in Layers Magazine.) The finished result shown above is a blend of two exposures, a primary covering 90% of the image exposed for the shadows and midtones, plus a second exposure (bracketed at the time) for the sky.

The effect is much much cleaner than anything I’ve managed to achieve with HDR techniques which tend to result in murky, improbable colours in the sky and a contrast range that just doesn’t look very believable. Well, not in my hands, at least.

One additional trick that I find useful is to insert an additional temporary layer just below the masked highlights layer (see the tutorial) and filled with black/dark gray. Toggle this on or off to see how neat your brushwork is or is not as you paint in the masked layer containing the correctly exposed highlights.

Read more about the image and the location here.

Posted in Locations Technique

Stephen · Friday, December 12, 2008, 23:10 · Permalink · Comment

### Monday Nov 24, 2008 at 08:40

# Serendipity

On the treck back down to the car on Saturday morning after my abortive attempt at shooting the Loch I managed to salvage at least one decent image from the trip.

This small, inconspicuous water-fall is located just upstream from the first footbridge on the trail to Alberta Falls from Glacier Gorge trailhead. I just happened to glance to my left while crossing the bridge on the way back.

Just as with the Loch, timing is everything and in this case, it worked out perfectly. The sun was just catching the water through the trees. That, plus the nearly-but-not-quite frozen fall made for a scene with some potential.

Having just mentioned that I didn’t get to use my Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter often enough, this proved a perfect opportunity. The exposure was 4 seconds at f/13 ISO 100.

A nice way to use the Vari-ND is as follows:

- Select your preferred ISO (presumably the lowest, given that the whole objective here is longer exposure times
- Select your preferred aperture (probably somewhere in the sharpest range for your lens – here I was slightly on the darker side of f/11)
- Dial-in your desired shutter speed (depends on the subject and the effect you’re looking for)
- Finally, adjust the Vari-ND until your meter reads as you want it

Of course, on occasions, you’ll run out of ND stops before you get the metering where you need it. If so, you can tweak the sequence of the steps above. However, doing things in that order allows you to use the Vari-ND as I think was intended – set your camera up as you want it and then reduce the light hitting the sensor by using the filter.

You may want to focus your lens (either manually or use AF-Lock) before increasing the ND setting on the filter. This directly affects available light through the lens and make it harder for either you or your camera’s autofocus system to get things set precisely.

One final thing to note: you can get some odd optical interactions when using the Vari-ND at or near its Max setting in conjunction with a circular polarizer, so beware in those circumstances.

Posted in Equipment Technique

Stephen · Monday, November 24, 2008, 08:40 · Permalink · Comment [1]

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