Hello everybody!
I've just had two weeks of vacations. I had the time to rest, and finally get more than 4-5 hours of sleep per night. Unfortunately, the weather has been
TERRIBLE, and by terrible I mean
LOTS of SUN, and
NO CLOUDS at all! It's a landscape photographer's nightmare...
On to photography topics... I have been investigating on the topic of the need, or not, for the boring
in-camera long exposure noise reduction feature. For long I have wondered if I really had to have this thing turned on, while I was freezing out there and waiting for the noise reduction to accomplish his job. Read on to find out...
First of all, a bit of explanation. For the ones who don't usually shoot long exposures, the
in-camera long exposure noise reduction function is a feature where, after shooting a long exposure shot, the camera automatically closes the shutter, and then takes another photo with exactly the same exposure time. Why? Because with long exposures the sensor generates quite a lot of
heat-generated "hot pixels" (red, yellow or white single pixels scattered all over the image), which you obviously don't want appearing on your photo. As such, the camera developers created a feature, available in most dSLRs, where the camera will take a 2nd long exposure shot right after the first one, this time with the shutter closed, so that it can detect those hot pixels, and then subtract them from the original image, cleaning up all of them in the right spots.
The problem is that, if it is a
pain in the ass to wait 2 minutes out there in the cold, with your feet and tripod soaked in water, then imagine what it its to still have to wait two aditional minutes (where the camera is locked and unusable), while it generates the shutter-closed long exposure, to apply the mentioned noise reduction. Considering that the "
golden hour", where the light is at it's best with the sun touching the horizon, last about 15-30 minutes, if you are using 2+2minute exposures, you will be shooting half the photos you could shoot in this critical moment... and all of you know as sometimes long exposures come
wrong, due to exposure misjudgements.
So I finally had the time to start
searching for this subject on google, and found that there are many people who
don't use this function. I learned that this feature was mainly developed for
astrophotography, where long exposures sometimes reach hours, where lot's of noise is generated due to the sensor heating. There were even some photographers stating that long exposure landscape photos taken with this feature turned off, had better detail (even though this last one is quite controversial). Finally, some photographers also said that the landscape long exposure photos did HAVE hot pixels, but that lightroom and adobe camera raw
automatically cleaned them as soon as the raw file was opened. This last one sounded
too good to be true...
Since I would love to be able to turn this function off, I
did my own tests in the last week. I seized the only day that had a few clouds and went out to shoot with my full ND filter, and made about 30 long-exposure sunset photos, with the
long exposure noise reduction turned off...
As I arrived home, I uploaded the photos. On the preview windows on Adobe Bridge, I could clearly see about 50 hot pixels per photo, perfectly visible and disturbing... then I opened one of the images in Adobe Camera Raw, et voila,
all the hot pixels instantly dissapeared as soon as the image opened! :-D Adobe Camera Raw automatically cleaned every single hot pixel of each image!As such... from now on...
Long-exposure noise reduction TURNED OFF! :-D
And now... a brief moment of advertising... my latest deviations:
- 2nd Landscapes/waterscapes contest by Rykardo
My portuguese friend
is running a new landscape/waterscape contest, and I have the honour of being one of the judges. All the info about the contest, taken from
Rykardo's journal, below:
2º Landscapes/waterscape Contest
>> Introductory note:
Me (=Rykardo) and my friends =Inebriantia, =AndyMumford, =soulofautumn87, =Alex37, =realityDream and *islandtime apresent the second Landscapes/waterscape Contest.
>> Description of the contest:
This contest it intends only Landscapes or Waterscapes photos.
>> Rules:
* Its allowed only one photo for person.
* To participate send me (=Rykardo) note with subject "2º Landscapes/waterscape Contest".
* The photo must have a minimum resolution of 400x400 px.
* Are accepted only photos of the year 2009.
>> Judges:
* =Rykardo
* =Inebriantia 
* =AndyMumford 
* =soulofautumn87 
* =Alex37 
* =realityDream 
* *islandtime 
>> Function of the judge:
The fuction of the judge will be choise the best 10 photos and give:
1º > 10 points
2º > 9 points
3º > 8 points
4º > 7 points
5º > 6 Points
6º > 5 Points
7º > 4 points
8º > 3 points
9º > 2 points
10º> 1 points
>> Prizes:
1º Featured by
2º and 3º Featured by who offer the feature (briefly announced in my Journal)
>> Note:
All works received will be featured on news article.
>> Deadline:
The deadline is 15 September, 2009
- APN Nature Contest Winners!
As many of you already know, the mega hyper ultra APN Nature Contest already has its winners! You can check the transcript from the oficial news below. Congratulations to all the winners, it was a pleasure to be a judge, and what a difficult task it was to choose among so many great images.
It is with great pleasure that today I am announcing the winners of the official deviantART Photography-Animals, Plants, & Nature "Nature's Natural Contest" that was recently held. I really wish to thank the judges for pulling into the utterly grueling task of having to judge this contest. The entries were honestly just amazing, all of which can be seen by browsing the Contest Gallery itself . I wish to give everyone a huge thanks and a hats off to all the contestants, everyone seriously did a great job! The sheer quality on the entries we received is completely mind boggling. If you all wish to find some new people to watch and add a lot of 
I highly suggest you browse the contest category!
This truely was a hard contest, and the purpose was to show textures that occur naturally in nature. The judges had a very hard time, answering the question "Ok this is a GREAT shot BUT does it show the textures that occur naturally within nature?" and one that was often very hard to decipher.
I wish to thank 
for being the judges and donating their time to help choose the best images possible.
So without any delay, the winners and runners up are below.
The Winners!
1st place - 1 yr subscription & $50 devcash is 
with:
2nd place - 6 months & $25 devcash is 
with:
3rd place - 3 months & $15 devcash is 
with:
Runners up - 1 month subs & emoticon button pack are:
with his entry of
with his entry of
with his entry of
with his entry of
Again, thank you ALL contestants for making this a contest that will be remembered! Be sure to swing by the official Photography-APN Chatroom anytime and talk shop with all us! It's always a tremendous pleasure to spend some time selecting the favourites among my favourites. These are works of art that deserve all the exposure they can get!
Go show your support to the amazing artists behind those images!:thumb123140918:
:thumb116517223:
:thumb123118256:
:thumb123321374: :thumb123812275:
:thumb123993272:
:thumb124190107:
here --> 
