Okay, the book has undergone some changes since my first concept. The publisher did an amazing job of laying the book out. The first change that was presented to me was the cover. Although the changes were minor, they looked great. So, here it is – you decide:

I love the way that they designed this. I like the inset photo of Gerry Niel of Mint Hill, North Carolina shooting a photograph on the shipwreck, Lana Carol – a scallop boat that sank in a Thanksgiving storm and the purple jellyfish on the spine.

Before I go further, I should explain that the book is going to be hard cover, 11” x 8 1/2”, with 166 pages and 235 color photographs. Schiffer Publishing has been a joy to work with. Everyone there has been incredible.

Some of you may have looked at my original design and a lot of you voted for the front cover. The main image used was chosen from your votes. I had pictured a North American lobster for the back cover but the Schiffer designers had another idea and I liked it better than mine. The lobster image is the last image on the inside of the book. The new back cover is:

The image of the lined anemones and blue mussels is pretty cool and it enhances the “Garden State” theme. Now, you can buy the book anywhere but if you want a signed copy, you will have to attend a book signing (none are planned yet but there will be) or purchase the book from my site when it is available. If you would like to be notified when the book is available, please fill out the contact info form below. This information will only be used to notify you of book availability and nothing else.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Since I am batch scanning my slides, I didn’t notice soon enough that many of these jellies had blown out highlights which I was trying to fix in Photoshop. Unfortunately, once highlights have no data in them, there aren’t any real good ways to fix the images. I found a way to adjust my scanner to deal with these highlights. It’s makes my post processing a little more involved but it allows me to have useful images where, without the change, I would have discarded them.

The image above is my normal settings for VueScan. They work pretty well for most things but not so well for this eight-ribbed hydromedusa. This is a small jellyfish – not more than one-quarter inch in diameter. Scanning at these setting produced the following image:

I cropped a small section of the image so that I could show how bad the scan is.

The whites are completely blown out and the image could not be saved.

I tried adjusting the image using “Levels” but using the black point eye dropper for the darkest part of the image still left the whites unusable.

There was also an additional marine invertebrate in the image that I could not identify with this scan.

This is the only image that I have of an eight-ribbed hydromedusa so it was important for me to try and save it.

I tried different settings in VueScan and come up with one that I really liked:

It was the  same setting that I used for normal scanning with the exception of changing my “white point” from a setting of “1” to a setting of “0.03.” That produced an image that looks like this:

The eight ribs of the hydromedusa are not blown out and now you can see the hitchhiker which I believe to be a juvenile long-finned squid.

After the initial scan, I was not able to use my standard batch processing of images in Adobe Photoshop CS5 as it also tended to blow out some of the highlights but not nearly as bad as my original scan.

I processed the image manually in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and used “Shadows and Highlights” to make my adjustments.

The final image is:

I think that I achieved the result that I was after. I had already scanned my slides of sea gooseberries and purple jellyfish and found that there were many in both directories with blown out highlights so I went ahead a rescanned the images using my new settings. I saved the settings in VueScan and named the settings “blownouthighlights.ini” so that I could use the settings for future scanning.

Here is another example of purple jellyfish that I was able to use after scanning using my blown out highlights setting. This is the raw scan:

Now the finished image after Photoshop editing:

My original scan of this jellyfish was so blown out that it was unusable. I found that I could scan all the images in this category using the blown out highlights settings and processing them in Photoshop. There was a little extra work but the ease of editing the formerly blown out images was worth the extra effort.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This is the photo of the bell of a lion’s mane jellyfish. There are two hitchhikers aboard the jellyfish. There is a Chaetognatha (below), Spadella cephaloptera, which is also known as an arrow worm. Arrow worms are transparent or translucent dart-shaped animals covered by a cuticle. They are predatory marine worms that are a major component of plankton worldwide.

The chaetognatha was cool but it wasn’t what I was excited about. In the upper left hand corner is a tiny, baby long-finned squid, Loligo pealei.

I have never seen a squid in New Jersey. I have seen their eggs but that is it. I am estimating that the squid was 1/4” to 1/2” long. I have a few other shots of the same jellyfish but from different angles. It is more difficult to see that it is a squid in the other photos but since they were taken one-after-the-other of the same jellyfish, I assumed that what I have is a view of the squid with its tentacles tucked underneath its body.

Now that I know what a baby squid looks like, I have found it on another photo. I missed it on the first scan because of the way that the scanner exposed the image. It blew out all the white areas. I rescanned using manual settings (this will be the subject of an upcoming blog) and lo and behold-there was another juvenile squid.

This is an eight-ribbed hydromedusa. It is the only photo that I have of one and our little hitchhiker is aboard.

So this was just one of the exciting things that I am experiencing as I continue on my quest. I will be bringing more to this site as I find them.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

On the plus side is seeing images that I made twenty years ago. I always thought that I could remember every image that I have taken but was I wrong! I look at some of these images and go “Wow, did I really take that picture?”

Before I started this project, I used to scan one slide at a time. That led me to only scan enough slides for each subcategory to fill one page in my web site photo gallery. That was a maximum of twenty images. The rest resided in albums. When I originally scanned the slides, I wasn’t aware about the importance of IPTC information embedded in digital files. I burned all the scanned slides as TIFF files onto CD’s and did not keep a copy on my PC. Every time I needed one of the digital files, I copied it off the CD to my hard drive and used it. That meant that I would need to add all the caption and image information to the file before sending it out. It took what should have been a five-minute project and made it a 30-minute task. Earlier this year, I decided to move all the images from the CD’s to my computer and get everything captioned and labeled. I am glad that I did it as I had a few CD’s that I could not read anymore which meant rescanning the original slides.

I was talking to my son, Tom, the other day about my project. He is recovering from a traumatic brain injury and I am constantly amazed with his progress. I asked if he knew why I was going to scan all my slides. My answer to him would have been that they are not doing me any good in albums on a shelf in my office. I need to get them on the web so that they can be seen. His answer to me about my reasoning was “for ease of access to the images.” I started to correct him but when I thought about what he said, I realized that this was the most important reason. Yesterday, his assessment was tested. I needed to upload 25 high resolution files to a Dropbox account. Some of them would have been on CD’s and it would have been a lot of work to get them in the condition required for delivery. Instead, I opened up my Dropbox folder and dragged and dropped images into it. I was done with my upload in less than 30 minutes. How great is that. Before I move on, if you have not heard about Dropbox, it a site where you can get 2 GB of storage space on the cloud. All you need is a gmail account. You can use this space to back up your computer files or to share photos or files with friends. I have been using it as a backup destination for my phone data and also for sharing with friends.

Once I realized how many slides I had to scan, I sat down and developed a work flow to make things easier. Here’s how it goes. I use Vuescan to batch scan slides with a Nikon 5000ED scanner with a Nikon SF-210 slide feeder. I can scan fifty slides at a time. Since all my slides are divided into categories like Fish, Invertebrates, Rays, Turtles, Marine Mammals, etc., I do each category and subcategory separately. Subcategories of fish would be Band Sea Bass, Black Sea Bass, etc. I could scan much faster if I just put fifty slides in at a time and scanned them all into a generic folder and then separated them afterwards. I hadn’t thought of doing that until just now and I may change my workflow in that direction. One of the hassles of doing things the way that I am now is that when I have subcategories with only a few slides, it is tedious to make a new folder, scan three slides, process those three and then move on.

Okay, I batch scan all the slides in a subcategory. Each slide is scanned at 4000 dpi and at 16 bits. The scanned image file is approximate 130 mb in size and are 1.3” x 0.9” at 4000 dpi. After scanning, I rename each slide to accommodate my current labeling system, add descriptions, keywords, copyright information, etc. For this I use IMatch. I have been using this program for a long time and it is extremely flexible and powerful.

As an example shown above, I can take all my images in a subcategory and assign them to categories. I the case above, the great barracuda images in this category are assigned to “Animals” “Fishes” “Marine” Barracuda (Sphyraenidae)” “Great Barracuda” and “Sphyraena barracuda.” I also assign other categories to the images such as “Location” “Oceans” “Atlantic” “South Carolina” etc. Once I have checked off the categories that I want for the images, I run a script called “Copy IMatch categories to IPTC keywords.”

All the categories that I assigned are now keywords in each image. If all the images were taken of the same subject and the image caption is the same for all, I would open the IMatch IPTC editor and add the remainder of the information that I want:

I entered the caption information and all the other criteria (except the object name which is the image number) and press the “Close” button and IMatch adds the information to the IPTC section of each image.

Now that I have completed my labeling work, I now have to process the images. When I was scanning one image at a time, I would open each individually in Photoshop and make all my adjustments. If I did this with the approximately 25,000 slides that I have, I would be at this forever. So I came up with another plan of action. I use a filter in Photoshop named “Perfectly Clear.” I have been very pleased with the way it processes and image. I run a batch program from Adobe Bridge to process each image in a folder using the Perfectly Clear filter.

Just a heads up, since my scanning process will go on for quite awhile, I am going to be adding some of the scanned photos to my blog posts and will probably be doing posts about the images themselves.

After the images are process with the filter, I open each one individually and crop each image to 8” x 12” at 300 dpi, and do all my usual Photoshop operations like spot removal, backscatter removal, etc.

I have an incredible sequence of a monkfish eating a black sea bass. What I forgot was that there were images in that sequence that I never scanned. This is one of them. The sea bass is in the monkfish’s throat and he is swallowing it. I scanned the image before this one and the image after but not this one. It was one of my “Wow” finds.

My wife, Veronica, and I would stop at the “2M” buoy about a mile outside of Manasquan Inlet. We usually stopped on an incoming tide which was when the water was the clearest around the buoy.

Other boaters would stop and ask if we were in trouble or did the person in the water need rescuing. Veronica and I would just laugh because they never realized what we could see beneath the surface.

On this day, we were blessed with the presence of an ocean sunfish (Mola mola). They are gentle giants that reach a height of ten feet from top fin tip  to bottom fin tip and a weight of 2000 pounds. They feed on jellyfish so they are no threat to humans.

While I was snorkeling, Veronica had a real treat. She saw the ocean sunfish breach out of the water. I have never seen that behavior and I am really glad that she got to see it. Like many animal encounters, you just have to be in the right place at the right time. I did not realize until I started scanning how many images that I have of ocean sunfish. The crazy thing is that I have seen one in a few years. It’s not because they are not there but because I am not in the right place at the right time.

Sea Ravens are members of the scorpionfish family. They come in four colors: brown, tan, yellow and red. The brown and tan are the most common. They yellow would be the next most common and the least common is the red variety.

Underwater, colors are lost as you go deeper in the water column. One of the first colors lost is red. It is lost at a depth of about ten feet. This red sea raven looks very dark colored. You can see the red color by shining a light on the fish. Photographers have to use a flash to get the red color in the photograph.

Now that I have gone off on a tangent, I am going to return to my slide scanning stories. First, if you have as many slides as I do to scan, you really need to either send them out and pay to have them done or purchase a quality scanner like the Nikon 5000ED and a slide feeder like the Nikon SF210. I don’t think that I would have undertaken this task with those two pieces of equipment. The bad part to purchasing the scanner and feeder is that they are not made anymore and you have to search places like EBay to find them. Additionally, they cost more now used than they did new. My two units together with shipping cost $2800.00. New, they were just shy of $1700.00. The plus side is that when your scanning project is done, you can sell them on EBay and retrieve a good part of your purchase price back. The other two things that I am finding invaluable in this project is the Vuescan scanning software and the IMatch image database program.

That’s all for today.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

scanner individually. I did some research and found that Nikon makes a slide feeder attachment, the SF-210 that attaches to the Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED or the 5000 ED. Unfortunately, I don’t own either of those scanners. The attachment does not work with my Nikon Coolscan V ED.

Well, I finally made up my mind and decided to see my scanner and buy a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED. What really surprised me was how expensive they have become. First, they are not made anymore so anyone that wants one will pay dearly. I started looking on eBay and found a few for sale. Rather than bidding and hoping to be successful, I made an offer on a Nikon 5000 ED scanner with a SF-210 slide feeder and my offer was accepted.

The final price was 75% more than what the two items sold for when new. After making my payment, I received the scanner and slide feeder three days later. I unpacked it and realized that the 5000 ED scanner looked very much like my V ED.

I set everything up and started scanning. The first few batches of slides went through just fine and I was really happy. I needed some time to develop a workflow that made the process as painless as possible. On my third batch of slides, I had a slide jam in the transport mechanism. This happened a few more times and it frustrated me. One of my hopes was to put 50 slides in the feeder and let them scan while I did other things. I did not want to babysit the feeder.

I started searching on line for a solution and found one in a reasonable amount of time. It seems that the spring that holds the slides in place before they are fed into the scanner is too strong. The fix is extremely simple and it took me less than ten minutes.

First power the scanner off and remove the SF-210 from the scanner.

There are two screws on the bottom of the unit that have to be removed. You will need a small Phillips head screwdriver for all the screws. The ones on the bottom of the unit are smaller than those on the top.

Next, remove the three screws from the top of the unit.

The problem spring is the one on the left side (longer spring). You will need two very sophisticated parts to finish the fix – paperclips.

I put two paperclips together, attached one to the post in the SF-210 and attached the spring to the second paperclip. That’s it. Put everything back together and scan away. I have not had a single jam since the fix. How cool is that?

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

So what you say? I have owned two slide scanners in my life. The first was a Polaroid Sprintscan 4000. It was a great scanner but one day, it died. My second and current scanner is a Nikon Coolscan V ED. It is also a great scanner but scanning slides is like watching grass grow. It is slow and tedious. I initially used the software that came with the Polaroid scanner to scan and then later used Nikon’s scanning software. They were both okay but I kept looking for a better option. I thought that I found it with Lasersoft’s Silverfast scanning software. I used it as a stand alone program and as a plugin for Photoshop. Truth be told, I always struggled with the software but I kept at it and was able to get some good scans. The problem was that each slide took about ten minutes to scan and process in Photoshop. At six slides an hour, my 120 slides would take 20 hours to scan. If that isn’t bad enough, I have thousands more slides to scan from my slide library.

I have looked over the years for other slide scanning software. There was one in particular that received rave reviews but I could never seem to get it to work to my satisfaction. The software is VueScan by Ed Hamrick. I saw some really great advantages to the program and I really wanted to make it work. The first advantage is cost. Silverfast is expensive and it only works with one scanner so if you have a flatbed scanner and a slide scanner, you will need a separate license for each. The current price for Silverfast 8 is $49.00 for the light version, $119.00 for the plus version and $299.00 for Silverfast 8 Studio. I am not going to explain the differences in each version. I currently own version 6 of the Silverfast 8 Studio (there is no version 7) but I will have to pay for an upgrade if I want to own version 8.

I decided to give VueScan another try. My biggest problem with the software is that I found it confusing to set up. I downloaded the software and did some googling to find out how to use it. I found a pretty good tutorial manual here. Before I explain the program, here are some reasons for my going in this direction. The software comes in two versions, standard for $49.00 and one year of free upgrades or the professional version for $79.00 with free lifetime upgrades. It also supports 1750 different scanners so you don’t need a separate license for each scanner and if you ever change scanners, you can still use VueScan with the new software. Another plus for owners of Silverfast software is that you can purchase the standard version of VueScan for $49.00 and then send Ed Hamrick (owner and developer of the program) and email with a scan of your Silverfast serial number (in my case, the latest version was a download so I sent him a copy of the confirming email) and a statement saying that you would not purchase version 8 of Silverfast and he will send you a free upgrade to the professional version of VueScan. I decided that if I could get the program to work to my satisfaction, I would move in that direction.

First, VueScan is a stand alone program and not a plugin for Photoshop. I thought that this might slow down my processing time but I was wrong. You can set VueScan to open the scanned image in Photoshop as soon as you hit the “Save” icon.

Let’s start. Before scanning, it is important to set up the program for your needs. I am going to explain how mine is setup for scanning with my Nikon Coolscan V ED (LS-50). When the program opens, there are tabs for different menus.

The first tab is marked “Input.” I set the first dropdown to “Scan to file” as that is what I intended to do. There are other choices like “Copy” which will turn your scanner into a copy machine or “Scan to Print” which will print your scanned file.

The source is set for my scanner. The media is slide film and the scan resolution is the highest for my scanner at 4000 dpi.

“Rotation” should be kept at “Right” since it’s easier to rotate an image in Photoshop while processing it. My scanner will autofocus (not every scanner can) so I set it to autofocus “Always.”

The next choice really helped me speed things along. “Auto scan” set to “Scan” or “Preview” will automatically start scanning your slide as soon as the scanner is ready. You don’t have to push the “Preview” or “Scan” button for each new slide.

I don’t use “Auto save” but it will ask you to put in a slide name for each image that is scanned.

I chose “Scan from preview” so that the preview and scan were done at the same time rather than in two separate operations. Changes can be made to the scan before saving the file. Each menu has a button at the bottom for “More” settings. In the beginning you don’t have to worry about this but here is what you will see in the “Input” tab after selection “More.”

There are the other options available but none are necessary until you understand how the software works.

Next we have the “Crop” tab.

The crop tab dictates the boundaries of the image are. I set mine to “Auto” which worked pretty well.

You will have the opportunity to adjust the boundaries after scanning.

I left the “Preview area” at “Current.”

The “Filter” tab has a few options.

I chose “Infrared clean” of “Light.” This options cleans dust and scratches from images. This option does not work when scanning prints.

I also chose “Restore colors” which helps bring back colors in older slides. I don’t use “Restore fading” and I do all my sharpening in “Photoshop.”

The “Color” tab has a lot of choices and some can be very important. “Color balance” should be set at “White balance” or “Neutral.” Don’t use “Auto levels” as it doesn’t seem to work well with my slides. Use “Neutral” when your photo has a color cast like green water in an underwater image or a sunset photo. When you use “Neutral, go the “Input” tab and change “Media type” to “Image.” The next three settings are ones that you don’t have to do anything with until you get more proficient with the program.

Download the manual that I linked to above and read it. It is only 52 pages long but it explains all of the settings. You can set the film type (if yours is available) in the dropdown menu or if not, leave it as “Generic.”

“Slide brand” for color slides is “Color” and “Slide type” is “Slide.” I profiled my scanner with an IT8 transparency so my “Scanner color space” is set to “ICC Profile.” The next two boxes show the scanner profile name and the location of the IT8 target file. If you don’t profile your scanner, set the “Scanner color space” to “Built-in.”

“Printer color space” is set to “sRGB” as most printers use that color space. “Film color space” is set to “Built-in” and both “Output color space” and “Monitor color space” are set to “Adobe RGB” which is the color space that I work in.

Just an additional point, if you want to reset your choices to the default setting, check the “Default options” box. Remember that checking the box will cause the loss of your current choices.

The “Output” tab allows you to set the “Default folder” where images will be stored.

I set the “Printed size” to “Scan size” but you can set it to 5” x 7” or 8” x 12.” This doesn’t affect the size of the file.

I chose not to use “Auto file name” and chose “Tiff file” because that is the type of file that I use for processed images.

The “Tiff file name” has the name of the current image. If you are going to use the “Infrared clean” option in the “Filter” tab, you need to use the “64 bit RGBI” option.

The three boxes in red are optional. I do not use them but I filled in information so that you could see how to use them.

The last tab is the “Prefs” tab. You can set “Language”, “Font size”, “Crop units” and “Printed units.” The “External viewer” check box will open your saved scan in the editing software of your choice. I have my Windows 7 computer setup to open Tiff files in Photoshop CS5.

The “External editor” check box will open up the text editor of your choice if you are doing OCR (optical character recognition) of a scanned document.

Now that everything is set, it is time to click on the “Preview” button to see our first slide. Since I chose “Auto scan”, I don’t have to click on the preview button. The image will scan as soon as the scanner is ready.

Once the image is on screen and in the “Preview” tab, I can adjust my outside borders by moving each border separately. There are plenty of times when no adjustments were needed.

You can click on the “Scan” tab to see what the scanned image looks like. With the “Preview” set to high resolution, they look the same except for the border lines which won’t show in the “Scan” tab:

All that’s left to do is hit the “Save” button and the image will open up in your photo editing software.

You can set the white and black points on your image using the black/white graph. It is found by clicking the “Image” menu in the top menu and selection “b/w graph.”

Here is what mine looked like while scanning, after scanning and after making a change to the white point:

The white point is the left hand triangle and the black point is the right hand triangle. These are not be be confused with the histogram of the image.

In the left hand image above, I moved the white point to the right to balance the image. The right hand image shows the histogram for the same image.

I have been extremely pleased with the results that I have achieved using VueScan. I find it works rather fast and that the scans have very good quality. I took Ed up on his offer on a free upgrade to the professional version of VueScan. I was happy to provide the statement that I would not be purchasing verion 8 of Silverfast. I am now a VueScan convert.

My suggestion before starting to use VueScan is to download the manual that I linked to at the beginning of this blog or go to the VueScan website and read through their tutorials. If you get hooked on VueScan, you might want to buy the VueScan Bible by Sasha Steinhoff from Amazon Books. Click on the image below.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Tom entered five photographs. I loved them all. Tom’s favorite is this  one. This is Duke, a hound dog owned by one of the employees at the Brick Reservoir, Ryan Pharo.

This one was a favorite of some of the visitors and Expo participants, It was taken at Deep Cut Gardens in Monmouth County, New Jersey:

I loved the composition in this photo:

This was another favorite also taken at Deep Cut Gardens:

Deep Cut Gardens is located at 152 Red Hill Road, Middletown, NJ 07748. It is part of the Monmouth County Park System. Tom found some beautiful flowers in a field and made this image:

Tom has always had an interest in photography and one of my favorite shots of his is of a red-tailed hawk that he took at Spring Meadow Golf Course in Farmingdale, New Jersey. Tom was playing golf and saw two red-tail hawks land on the golf course. He rode his golf cart back to his car and got his camera. He got as close to the hawks as possible and then crawled on his belly until he was close enough to get the shot. One of the hawks moved out of the picture but he did get two great shots. Here are those two shots:

I really love these two shots and considering that they were taken with a point-and-shoot camera impresses me even more. The Creativity Expo 2011 is a wonderful happening for all of the people that participated. It is hard enough to recover from a brain injury so any avenue that they can find to express themselves is great.

One of the things that Tom and his Community Skills therapist, Nina, realized after a few photographic excursions to parks was that “ACCESSIBILITY” does not mean full accessibility everywhere. I talked with Tom and Nina and we talked about how great it would be for physically challenged individuals to share their experiences about accessibility in the places that they visit. It would help them decided if an “accessible” venue is correct for their situation. This could be an excellent idea for an accessibility blog. It is something that an organization like the Brain Injury Association of New Jersey might be interested in. If you have any thoughts on this, please post them here or post a link to the article on web sites that might undertake such a blog or build an accessibility database.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This was one of the photos that I am not especially happy with but it is the one time that I dove and photographed subway cars sunk off New Jersey as artificial reefs and I wanted to make the photo look better. I thought that I would give Nik HDR Efex Pro a try and see what I could do. The plugin opens under the “File” “Automate” “Merge to HDR Efex Pro” menu in Photoshop CS5.

The plugin starts and presents a menu to choose the photos to merge into an HDR image.

Click on the “Select” button and choose your images:

I chose the three images that are shown above. Click “OK” and the process starts. If the program cannot determine the correct exposure differences, it will present the following screen. It could not tell the difference in exposure in this case because I took the initial exposure and manually corrected for +1 and –1 exposures and saved the over and underexposed images as separate files. If I actually took these three photos at different exposure settings, the program would be able to get the information from the photo’s metadata:

I manually keyed in the correct changes in exposure and then clicked the “OK” button. HDR Efex Pro has 33 presets that you can choose from. I will show the results of a few that I thought were interesting:

The photo above is the default effect created by blending the three images together. It looks much better than the original photo. The photo below is called “Night on Earth” effect. I liked this one a lot because it darkened the areas of the photo were backscatter is prominent:

I also liked the “End of the Road” effect. It is similar to “Night on Earth” but it adds some warmth to the photo:

You do not need three different images to accomplish the same results. You can choose one image at normal exposure and run the HDR Efex Pro plugin and end up with similar results. I ran the single image and found that I liked the results better using the three different exposures. For example, here is the “End of the Road” effect using a single image. Compare it to the one above using three separate exposures:

There is clearly a difference but I don’t think that the difference is huge. I wanted to see how this would work on an image taken in clear water so I chose a photo that I took of the shipwreck of the Oro Verde in Grand Cayman. I created one photo with a +1 f-stop exposure and a second of a –1 f-stop exposure and brought those along with the original image into HDR Efex Pro.

Here are a few of the results that I liked:

Notice the detail in the front of the wreck where there were heavier shadows before.

I like this better than the default image. It is a little darker and the water is a more vibrant blue. For a crazier look, check out “Night on Earth” effect on this photo:

The “Night on Earth” effect causes vignetting (dark areas) in the corners. The next effect is very similar without the vignetting.

The “End of the Road” effect puts this wreck into perspective. It really was the end of the road for the Oro Verde although it can be argued that since it now is a haven for marine life, perhaps it’s just a fork in the road.

I was going to end this here but I thought that it would be interesting to try this on something different. I have a photo of a southern stingray on the bottom in Grand Cayman with the live aboard dive boat, Cayman Aggressor IV in the background. Let’s see what HDR Efex Pro can do with that. First, I created one stop under and one stop overexposure images:

I loaded the images into the plugin and here are a few of the results:

I found that there were some very interesting prospects among the 33 presets. I am going to be spending more time with this plugin.

Will HDR Efex Pro make all of your photos better? No, but it can really make them look different and in this day and age, different is okay. Until next time, have fun shooting and being creative.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Along comes the world of digital photography, the internet, on-line publishing and the realization that anyone of us can make our book publishing dream come true; even if it’s not in the fashion that we imagined. More than twenty years ago, I wanted to publish a book on the underwater world off my home state of New Jersey. I proposed my idea to a number of publishers and received rejection after rejection. Then the letter came that I waited for – an acceptance. I was through the moon. One of the stipulations from the publisher, which was a college press, that funding be procured in advance of publication. The money never came and my dreams were dashed. I put my project away and thought about it from time to time but never did anything about it.

During the late summer of 2010, my dive buddy was out of commission due to health issues and my diving was done for the season. I needed a project to keep me busy and thoughts went to my unpublished book. I had some experience with on-line book publishers as I used MyPublisher to make a few family memory books. I found the software easy to use and the printed quality excellent.

I jumped into my project with both feet and started laying the book out with MyPublisher software. The first problem that I encountered was the inflexibility of MyPublisher templates. If my page layout did not fit one of their standard layouts, I was faced with trying to create the page in Adobe Photoshop, saving it as a jpeg file and then bringing it into MyPublisher as a full page spread.

Above is one example of a page that I couldn’t layout in MyPublisher. I wanted a small inset of a sea nettle and there was no layout for this situation.

I wanted the layout above for my chapter headings and could not do it in MyPublisher. My last example is having the ability to adjust the text box size to fit more text than I could fit in a MyPublisher template (below).

My last insurmountable hurtle came in the number of pages in the book. MyPublisher has a maximum page limit of 50 pages printed on both sides or 100 pages total. This was disappointing as I really like the quality of the finished product with MyPublisher.  I realized that I would far exceed 100 pages so I set out to find an on-line publisher that would provide all the specifics that I required. There was one other requirement in my project and that was keeping costs reasonable. My book about the underwater environment in New Jersey would be very unique and one that I wanted to be available to everyone at a reasonable cost. I will say that if the book was 100 pages or less, I would try to make it work in MyPublisher as I am familiar with the quality of their printing and the great promotions that they run (two for one; 40% off and free shipping, etc.).

I researched a lot of publishers and the one that I chose was Blurb. It met all of my criteria. It allowed for flexible layouts and the number of pages required and the price was reasonable compared to other publishers that met all of my requirements. I have some concerns about Blurb’s print quality as I read a lot of comments about iffy quality. Some people were incredibly happy with their results while others were totally disappointed. I decided to forge on when I read how accommodating their support staff was to customers who were not happy with their results.

I downloaded the Blurb software and started my layout. I know that I am a good photographer but my writing sometimes isn’t as good as I would like it to be. I hoped to enlist the talents of two people that I know to assist in the editing process. In order to do that, I needed to get them something to work with. Before I go farther, I have to explain that I can be anal about some things and one of those things is my photography. I planned on laying out the book, printing it to a PDF file and provide it to my two editors. I found that I could print from Blurb software to PDF but all the pages would have a watermark on them. This was not acceptable to me for one other reason than my anal tendencies. I wanted to put the PDF file on my website in a flipping book setup so that people could view the entire book online.

Before I continue, let me say that most people will be very happy to layout a book in the Blurb software. It is extremely flexible and easy to use so unless you have the web requirement that I did, you will not need to follow my new route.

I went to the Blurb forums and found that I could layout my book in Adobe InDesign and then export it in a Blurb/PDF format and upload  the PDF file for printing. This method met all of my criteria and I was excited to start. The only reservation that I had was that I have never used Adobe InDesign and wasn’t sure how to start. Again, I went to the Blurb forums and found that Blurb has premade templates to use with InDesign to layout a book. I downloaded the templates, fired up InDesign and was off and running. I laid out the entire book, printed it to PDF and showed it to my dive buddy, Beth Dalzell, and her husband, Wes. They made some constructive comments and after I dealt with the bruises on my ego, I moved forward. The first suggestion was the original title of the book – “New Jersey’s Underwater Desert.” It was the title that I planned to use from the beginning. The underwater terrain off the New Jersey coast is flat and sandy and it is very much like a desert. Shipwrecks, artificial reefs and rock piles are oases in that desert. Beth and Wes both thought that the name wouldn’t work for a book of beautiful photos.

The new name is “NEW JERSEY – THE UNDERWATER GARDEN STATE.” My wife, Veronica, came up with the title and it seemed so right. I worked on the book layout for more than a month and during that period, I learned a lot about Adobe InDesign. I made mistakes and if I was to do this again, I would go about it differently. In the next part of this blog, I will talk about using InDesign and the things that I would do differently. I will also talk about the highs and lows of accepting and not accepting the suggestions (critiques) from my two friends – Beth Dalzell and  Marty Dick.

© 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Before the introduction of digital cameras, underwater photography was a hobby that was headed for extinction. Maybe not total extinction but the numbers of underwater photographers were shrinking rather than growing. There are many reasons for the high dropout rate. First, many underwater photographers used a Nikonos camera system which was made to be primarily used underwater. The camera system was a great one as underwater systems go. The problem was that most people only used their cameras one or two weeks a year on a dive vacation. For that brief period of time, they would try their best to produce excellent underwater images. The greatest drawback for film underwater photography was the lack of feedback. Underwater photographers had to understand the nuances of film speed, lens opening, shutter speeds, strobe placement, strobe intensity and how they all worked together. To get feedback on their progress, photographers needed to have film developed. In many exotic places, this was not possible. Where it was, you had to accept the expertise of the person that was doing the developing. I lost a number of photos to a developer using old chemicals.

Here is a typical scenario of a struggling underwater photographer at a tropical dive location for their one week yearly vacation. As our photographer gets gear ready, he/she struggles to remember the setting that were used on the last vacation a year ago. The first dive is done with macro equipment so our photographer thinks “what lens opening did I use? – what shutter speed did I use? – which film did I use? – how did I position my strobes and what intensity were they set at? If the person is lucky or has a good memory, some or all of the settings are correct. If not, the results are a disaster. Now if the person has accessibility to film processing, he/she will learn the results of the photo dive by the next day. In the meantime, the same settings are used on another dive on the same day. The results could be two rolls of film with some nice keeper shots or two rolls of film with nothing useable. If the photographer does not have access to processing, the results will not be available until after the trip is over. By that time, the photographer may not even remember what settings were used. The same scenario applies to wide angle underwater photography.

The reason that this comes to mind is that in the later days of film, Robin was working hard at underwater photography. On the last tropical trip that we took together when Robin was using film, she returned home before any of her film was processed. The results were a disaster and she had decided to give up underwater photography.

I had already made the switch to digital photography and I urged her to give it a try before giving up. This is not an easy decision to make because underwater photography equipment is not inexpensive. Purchasing a digital slr (single lens reflex camera) and the most inexpensive underwater camera housing (Ikelite) and one lens would set you back about $2500 US dollars. It turned out to be the best investment that she made. Robin took to digital photography like a fish to water. She already understood the workings of a camera from her Nikonos days but now she was getting instant feedback on her efforts.

One of the great things about digital cameras is the ability to see a histogram after taking a photo. A histogram shows the photographer if the image is exposed correctly. You can see if it is underexposed, overexposed or correctly exposed. You can also see the composition of the photo in the camera’s LCD. A histogram shows the number of pixels of each color from black at the left side of the histogram to white at the right side. The horizontal placement of pixels show the tonal range from black on the right to white on the right. The vertical pixel values show the quantity of the colors in the various tonal ranges in the photo.

I wrote about histograms in the digital photography section of my website. You can read all about them here.

The left histogram shows underexposure (see how there is blank space on the right side). The middle histogram shows a properly exposed image and the right one shows an overexposed image (see how there is a lack of pixels on the left side of the histogram).

Digital cameras have caused a huge revival in underwater photography. When I was shooting film, underwater photographers purchased cameras based on whether there was an underwater housing for the camera. Now, there are housings for most camera brands including point and shoot cameras. The point and shoot camera in an underwater housing has seen an incredible growth, partially due to the fact that they are compact, easy to travel with and take great pictures. I am one of the judges at the “Beneath The Sea” photo contest each year and we have been amazed at the quality of the photos that we receive that were taken with point and shoot cameras.

There are really two parts to being a digital underwater photographer and they are the photography itself and the processing of the images in a computer. Robin took to the computer end of digital photography equally as well as she did to the photography end. Robin’s images improved greatly in a short period of time.

This sounds like a “happily ever after” story and mostly it is. What amuses me is that as Robin got better with her underwater photography, other things became troublesome. First you need to know a little bit about Robin Reed. She is one of those people that you fall in love with right away. She has a great sense of humor and she also doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind. Veronica and I met Robin after her husband, Warren started diving on our boat in New Jersey. The four of us got to be great friends and I became Robin’s official photography mentor – a position that I really enjoyed because I love helping people with their underwater photography.

Unfortunately, a job opportunity in Florida took Warren and Robin to Delray Beach, Florida and a long way from New Jersey. Despite the distance, we have remained great friends and we try to get together for a dive vacation each year. Robin has owned her underwater photography equipment for a number of years now. Robin doesn’t change easily. She still uses her Canon digital Rebel camera and doesn’t seem to get caught up in the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Warren and I have been after Robin to have her Ikelite housing and her Ikelite strobe upgraded to allow her to use TTL (through the lens) automatic exposure. Robin is not one who is quick to spend money. I wouldn’t call her cheap but she spends money wisely. Luckily, Robin had to send her housing back for some work and she decided that this was the time to make the upgrade to TTL. Warren and I both voiced our “Hoorays”.

One of the major drawbacks for Robin and her underwater photography system was the small viewfinder on her Ikelite housing. When we would go through her pictures, the thing that was the most evident was bad composition. I know that Robin understands composition and I can see it in the results of her images after she processes them in Adobe Photoshop. The problem turned out to be that Robin could not see her subject correctly through her viewfinder. She needed a magnified viewfinder to really see her subject. She procrastinated as she is known to do and in this case, it was not a bad thing although she suffered through a lot of disappointment and frustration when she looked at her images. In the last few years, a number of accessory magnifying viewfinders have come on the market.

This is a Nauticam 180° viewfinder fitted to an Ikelite housing. It does a great job of magnifying the camera image and costs around $1100 US dollars. Not an inexpensive investment.

This is the Inon 45° viewfinder. It also fits on many housings including the Ikelite. It costs around $800 installed (if no modifications need to be made to the housing). The two viewfinders are very different. The Nauticam is a straight-on view viewfinder while the Inon requires that you view from an angle. They both do a great job of magnifying the image so the choice is personal.

After urging Robin to purchase an enlarging viewfinder for a number of years, I was shocked when she told me that she was taking the plunge. Robin went to Reef Photo & Video in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and the salesperson stayed with her for nearly two hours, changing viewfinders from the Nauticam to the the Inon and back again. He wanted her to feel comfortable with her choice. In the end, Robin chose the Inon viewfinder. She was told to leave her housing and they would have the viewfinder installed in short order.

When Robin arrived home, Warren had a thought that made them both concerned. Would the warranty on her Ikelite housing be null and void with the addition of the viewfinder by a third party. Robin called Ikelite and was pleasantly surprised that Ikelite was aware of the viewfinder additions as well as modifications made to the housing when required for the viewfinder. They were okay with the work done by Reef Photo & Video and that Robin should not be concerned.

Well, for right now, all is well in the underwater photography world of Robin Reed. As of today, she has not gotten an opportunity to try her new viewfinder. Mother Nature has not been cooperative for diving in Florida over the last few weekends. She has not cooperated very well for diving in New Jersey the last few weekends either.

If you would like to learn more about Robin Reed and her photography, please visit her website at Robin-Reed.com.

© 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.