I have always had a fascination with nature as well as a passion for photography; the images in these galleries are the result of the union of those interests. My goal is to create simple and artistically successful images documenting living things in their natural setting, and as much as possible behaving in interesting ways.

Almost all of the images were captured in the area of central New Jersey, USA, where I live and find no shortage of photographic opportunities; these galleries no more than hint in fact at the wildlife diversity that the state has to offer.

I endeavor to travel light .. carrying only one body, often just one lens, plus a few sundry items in a photography vest; I prefer to remain unburdened by backpack or tripod. Almost all the images, both large and small, were captured using a Canon EOS 40D and 300mm f/4L IS lens, acquired in early 2008. This precipitated a turning point in my photographic style of which these galleries are the result. Only a handful of the images recorded in these galleries predate this time.

New images are being added on a regular basis.

Please enjoy!

Then pebbles did the stream caress,
With eddies tumbling, less and less,
And tiny bubbles, almost clear,
Did bounce around, then disappear.

Eventually the water slowed,
It felt the ocean, calm, reposed.
The pebbles shrank to grains of sand,
The briny depths were close at hand.

The rounding of the final bend,
Foretold the journey’s blissful end,
The waters they did start to mingle,
Embracing, pairing, becoming single.

Warmed by the sun of early Spring,
A tender gift a bud did bring,
As bit by bit a leaf unfurled,
And revealed itself to the world

Although that leaf was first alone,
Soon others sprouted atop the throne,
Of twigs and branches, trunk and bark,
On the finest Maple in the park.

The crown of leaves, a green display,
Intensified with each passing day,
Two songbirds came and made a nest,
And soon two eggs inside did rest.

SUMMER

The sun climbed higher in the sky,
And as each day it arced by,
The leaves they turned to face the rays
Of Summer sunshines’ fiery blaze.

Young children often did come by,
To play in the playground just nearby.
And on the swings they laughed and swayed,
As parents sat in the leafy shade.

And crickets chirped beneath that tree,
While overhead, a hawk flew free,
And bees they buzzed, around and round,
A snake it slithered on the ground.

AUTUMN

A storm it did burst forth one day,
From clouds so very dark and grey,
And despite the thunder all around,
The stoic Maple stood its ground.

Inevitably the days grew shorter,
As the year moved into its third quarter,
And in the crisp, cajoling cold,
The leaves they turned a yellow gold

Soon there came the first hard frost,
And for the leaves all hope was lost.
They fluttered down upon the ground,
And piled up, without a sound.

WINTER

As the raking light of a Winter’s dawn,
Long shadows cast, across the lawn.
The tree stood calmly, gray and bare,
Bravely enduring the icy air.

And snow fell gently from aloft
Forming a blanket, deep and soft,
But despite the hefty weight of white.
The tree stayed solidly quite upright.

Eventually the cold diminished,
As Winter signalled it was finished,
And like so many times before,
Spring it did arrive once more ….

Each time the webpage is reloaded a different image is displayed depending on the season. Clicking on one of the images displays a gallery of all the images; if you click on one of the images in the gallery it displays in a separate window with information about the location or subject.

At the top of the webpage is a panoramic shot of the rear of Bloomberg Hall, the main building for the School of Natural Sciences. It was converted to black and white using Convert To B+W Pro and a solid color transparent layer was added using Adobe Photoshop CS2.

All the images were shot using a Canon EOS 5D with either a Canon 24-105 f/4L IS USM, Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM or Tamron f/2.8-3.5 XR Di lens. Around 50% of the shots were hand-held.

Post-processing in Photoshop was conducted on a number of the images. The interior shots are blended multiple exposures created using either Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix Pro. Local contrast enhancement was conducted on some images using HDRsoft’s Tone-mapping Plugin for Photoshop CS2.

New images are being added on a regular basis.

Tone mapping

Tone mapping is a technique that is applied to all digital images in the conversion from linear sensor data to that of an image in which tonal information corresponds more closely to the way the human eye perceives brightness. Such a mapping is done globally with pixel-independent settings, typically with a very simple gamma response curve.

Another type of tone mapping operates on an image with more complex, local operators that take into account the pixels surroundings. The mapping takes much longer, but is able to maintain local contrast very well. This local tone mapping technique is commonly used on 32-bit high dynamic range images created from multiple exposures where the application of a local tone mapping process compresses the tonal range down to one which may be viewed. It turns out though that this local tone mapping process is also useful in many instances on single images with detail in the shadows and/or highlights that needs revealing, and this is what HDRsoft’s tone mapping plugin is very useful for.

Note - If you don’t have Adobe Photoshop CS2 don’t worry, HDRsoft has another product, Photomatix, which incorporates all the functionality of the plugin in standalone software, as well as the capability to blend multiple exposures and to generate 32-bit high dynamic range (HDR) images.

Usage

A prerequisite for using the plugin is that the image should be in 16-bit format so you need to shoot RAW (ideally) or to output in Tiff at the least. I don’t recommend converting 8-bit Jpeg files to 16-bit color depth.

Noise levels in the image must also be very low but this is easily fixed with software such as Neat Image beforehand.

From a workflow point of view, the tone mapping plugin may be easily invoked from Photoshop CS2 right after importing the RAW file (and applying any noise reduction that may be necessary).

Here is a screen capture of the plugin’s control screen showing the default settings:

HDRsoft tone mapping plugin settings display
(click image to enlarge)

I generally leave most of the settings at their default values, perhaps adjusting the black and white point settings on occasion. Strength is the most important setting to adjust in order to control exactly how much detail is pulled out of shadows and highlights. This setting defaults to 40%.

Examples

To show you what the plugin can do, here are a couple of example images before/after application of the tone mapping plugin at default settings with a strength of 40%.

Image 1

The detail in this image is very slightly under the limit of the camera’s dynamic range and is exposed so that there is just about no shadow or highlight clipping in the RAW file. Unfortunately, there is a lot of interesting detail in the houses that can’t be seen very well at all.

Before tone mapping
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 200
(click image to enlarge)

Let’s see how the tone mapping plugin does:

After tone mapping
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 200
(click image to enlarge)

The difference is quite startling. A lot of detail has been pulled out of the shadows in the region of the buildings but there is still a good degree of contrast. The sky is pretty much identical and the sand has lightened up a little in a pleasing way.

Remember, this was with default values.

Click on Page 2 below for another example as well as some tips.

DxO has a product called DxO Analyzer which was developed by DxO to conduct performance tests on lenses. From this they were able to reverse engineer corrections for particular lens/body combinations and this is how DxO Optics Pro does its thing.

I came across these reviews of DxO Optics Pro - this one by Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape (plus an update to it after RAW support was added), and another by Alain Briot. Both authors sing the praises of DxO’s ability to correct for lens defects (see the first review for some amazing before/after shots) but Michael chooses to stick with Adobe Camera RAW for RAW conversion whereas Alain uses the RAW conversion capabilities of DxO too.

Some thoughts …

1. This is an amazing piece of software in terms of the way it corrects for lens defects but it isn’t cheap at $299. I’d be more inclined to make the jump to purchasing it if they supported the Tamron 17-35mm f/2.8-4 DI LD lens on the Canon EOS 5D body as opposed to just my Canon lenses. I probably need DxO Optics Pro more for the Tamron than anything.
2. Up to now I’ve been using PTlens to correct for pincushion and barrel distortion. PTlens actually does a better job of correcting these defects than Adobe Photoshop CS2, with 4 coefficents versus Photoshop’s 2, and furthermore is automatic. However, DxO Optics Pro takes the correction a step further since whereas the coefficients are calculated at a fixed distance in PTlens for a particular lens/body combination (it is free software after all), in DxO Optics Pro one of four distance ranges is selected to refine the coefficients to a greater level of accuracy than PTlens.
3. The fact that distance data must be provided in order to properly correct for pincushion and barrel distortion does amount to a hindrance to effective batch workflow but this isn’t DxO’s fault; distance information simply isn’t in the EXIF data. I don’t know why my Canon L-series lenses on a Canon EOS 5D body can’t report distance information to the EXIF data but it appears that this is in fact a general problem for other lens/body combinations too.
4. DxO Optics Pro is quite slow to operate. On my Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ system with 2GB RAM running Microsoft Windows XP it takes over a minute to perform lens corrections and noise reduction on a RAW file from a Canon EOS 5D. Utilizing corrections for lighting, color and exposure it takes almost twice as long but I find DxO Optics Pro most useful for correcting lens distortion and reducing noise, and prefer to leave other corrections for Adobe Camera RAW.
5. DxO Optics Pro supports output to DNG format but one gripe I have is that the DNG files are saved in linear format (i.e. demosaiced). They end up being around three times larger than either regular DNG files or the original RAW file and this means that I use triple the disk space. I’m waiting for a reply from DxO on why this is.

I recommend trying this software for yourself. You can download a free 21 day demo of DxO Optics Pro v3.5 for a single lens/body combination at http://www.dxo.com.

Walnford Grist Mill, New Jersey
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 3200
(noise reduction using Neat Image)
(click image to enlarge)

At the back of my mind was an article I’d read a couple of days earlier by Alain Briot in which he photographed inside a canyon at ISO 3200 as there wasn’t enough space to use a tripod. Alain’s image was shot with an EOS 1Ds Mark II but I was still surprised how good the image looked (with noise reduction). I knew that the Canon EOS 5D also has a reputation for extremely low noise and so it seemd like the perfect time to be daring and try this for myself too.

Walnford Grist Mill, New Jersey
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 3200
(noise reduction using Neat Image)
(click image to enlarge)

Taking into account the Image Stabilization on the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS lens I probably could have gotten away with ISO 800 handheld but I went all the way to ISO 3200. The RAW files were processed in Adobe Camera RAW with no Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction set to 15. In all cases the dynamic range of the scene exceeded the 5D’s capabilities and I chose to sacrifice the highlights in order to maintain shadow detail. Noise reduction was conducted using NeatImage. Apart from conversion to sRGB and sharpening using Photokit sharpener for web display, no other post processing was conducted.

Walnford Grist Mill, New Jersey
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 3200
(noise reduction using Neat Image)
(click image to enlarge)

Click on Page 2 below if you want to look at some 100% crops.

1. First we need to switch out the factory installed Linksys firmware for the latest DD-WRT firmware. I downloaded both the standard firmware and the mini firmware here. The files may be unpacked using unzip.
2. Now navigate to Administration --> Firmware Upgrade from the WRT54GL’s GUI administration tool. Browse to the wrt54g firmware file in the mini distribution (dd-wrt-v23_mini_wrt54g.bin for the v2.3 code). Select Upgrade to upload the new firmware on the router.

   NOTE - The DD-WRT Wiki states that you should upgrade from the Linksys factory firmware to the DD-WRT generic mini firmware before resetting to factory defaults and loading the generic standard (std) firmware. I tried this twice but each time I tried to load the mini firmware I ‘bricked’ the router rendering it unusable (see the section below on recovering from a bricked router) and was unable to reach the GUI in a browser although I could ping the unit. I also tried the generic standard firmware directly from the Linksys factory default firmware and was able to run that but discovered that the memory footprint was too large to enable a writeable JFFS filesystem (see later in this post).

3. Now navigate to Administration --> Services --> SSHD. Select Enable. Reboot the router for the change to take effect.

   At this stage you should be able to securely connect to the router via ssh:

   [root@laptop root]# ssh 192.168.1.1
   root@192.168.1.1's password:
   ---------------------------------------------------------------
   
                        DD-WRT build #23
                 some code portions OpenWRT and EWRT
          additional thanks to Cesar Gonzales, Toxic,
             Elektik, MBChris, Nbd, TheIndividual
         and all the wonderful supporters of this Project
   
                      http://www.dd-wrt.com
   
   ---------------------------------------------------------------
   
   BusyBox v1.01 (2005.12.23-18:13+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
   Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
    

4. In order to add our own iptables rules ordinarily we would add them by passing a command to nvram. e.g. this rule, which allows remote managment to the router’s WAN IP on port 8080:

   ~ # nvram set rc_firewall="
      iptables -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp -d 172.16.16.200
      --dport 8080 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.1:80"
   ~ # nvram commit
   

   Unfortunately, this doesn’t work as it should and I was unable to apply any iptables rules in this manner. I did some research online and found others with the same problem. It appears to boil down to a timing issue with the application of the nvram set rc_firewall command.

5. We can get round the inability to apply firewall commands to nvram by running them from a script which includes a delay. This is done using JFFS, which allows you to have a writeable filesystem on a router running DD-WRT.

   Administration--> Management --> JFFS2 enabled --> Enable
   

   After making this change, click save and reboot the router. Now test if the JFFS filesystem is writeable by connecting to the router using SSH and touching a file under /jffs (touch /jffs/test). If this works without a no space on device error then JFFS is working.

   Note - There is a way to run the generic standard version of the firmware and have a writeable filesystem mounted using samba, instead of having it available locally on the router using JFFS and the mini version of the firmware. It was more trouble for me to setup samba than to sacrifice a few features from the full firmware but your needs may be different. See here for more information on Samba.

6. We can now create an iptables script, save the script as e.g. /jffs/iptables.fw and make it executable. We then put /jffs/iptables.fw restart into nvram so it gets called whenever we change the firewall settings:

   ~ # nvram set rc_firewall="/jffs/iptables.fw"
   ~ # nvram commit
   

7. Here is a basic example iptables script which will get you started on using iptables with the WRT54GL:

   #!/bin/sh
   IPTABLES="/usr/sbin/iptables"
   INTERFACES="br0 lo"
   LAN="192.168.1.0./24"
   WANIP="your.wan.ip"
   
   # Wait a while due to timing problem
   sleep 30
   
   # Set default policies to ACCEPT"
   $IPTABLES -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
   $IPTABLES -P INPUT ACCEPT
   $IPTABLES -P FORWARD ACCEPT
   
   # Flush all tables and chains
   #
   cat /proc/net/ip_tables_names | while read table; do
   $IPTABLES -t $table -L -n | while read c chain rest; do
   if test "X$c" = "XChain" ; then
   $IPTABLES -t $table -F $chain
   fi
   done
   $IPTABLES -t $table -X
   done
   
   # Allow all loopback traffic
   $IPTABLES -A INPUT -i lo -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
   $IPTABLES -A OUTPUT -o lo -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
   
   # Allow all ESTABLISHED and RELATED traffic"
   $IPTABLES -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
   $IPTABLES -A OUTPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
   $IPTABLES -A FORWARD -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
   
   # Allow all LAN traffic to router"
   $IPTABLES -A INPUT -i br0 -s $LAN -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
   
   # Allow all traffic from router to ANY"
   $IPTABLES -A OUTPUT -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
   
   # Allow all traffic from LAN to ANY"
   $IPTABLES -A FORWARD -s $LAN -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
   
   # Allow dhcp
   $IPTABLES -A INPUT -i br0 -p udp -s 0.0.0.0 -d 255.255.255.255 \
    -p udp -m multiport --dports 68,67 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
   
   # Enable Network Address Translation
   $IPTABLES -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o vlan1 -s $LAN -j MASQUERADE
   
   # Fix MTU size
   $IPTABLES -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN \
    -m tcpmss --mss 1421:65535 -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu
   
   $IPTABLES -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
   $IPTABLES -P INPUT DROP
   $IPTABLES -P FORWARD DROP
   
   # enable IP forwarding
   echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
   
   exit 0
   

Footnote - Recovering from a bricked router

I’ve had to reset my WRT54GL router a few times now, and it only takes a minute. The easiest way is to use a tftp client on Linux to reinstall Linksys firmware back to the unit as follows:

tftp
tftp> connect 192.168.1.1
tftp> mode binary
tftp> put firmware.bin

Note - Don’t hit Enter after the put command. Firstly, power off the router, wait a few seconds and reinsert the power cable. Immediately after the unit receives power, the power light will flash for a few seconds and at this point you should hit Enter to upload the firmware to the router. It won’t look like anything is happening but after 15 seconds or so you will see a message that the transfer has been completed.

It seems like the results were mostly obtained using an EOS-1Ds Mark II body. Measurements were conducted with Imatest.

It didn’t take me long looking at the tests reults to see that the Canon 24-105 f/4 IS USM exhibits a lot more vignetting than the Canon 24-70 f/2.8 USM lens on the EOS-1Ds Mark II body.

1. You can take photos any place that’s open to the public. You can even be on private property and still legally take pictures. You might be trespassing of course, but that’s another issue.
2. You can take any photo that does not intrude upon or invade the privacy of a person (if that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy).
3. You can publish virtually anything if it doesn’t cast someone in an unfavorable light, or reveal private facts about them.

After reading this article I took a look at the Photographer’s Guide To Privacy, published by The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press. With respect to item 1 above, the authors of this document recommend acquiring consent (preferably written) before taking photographs in a private place. This strikes me as a safer way to proceed.