Tag Archives: Photos

Scott Klettke Photography – The Power of the Watermark

I’ve started adding unobtrusive watermarks to some of my favorite photos and then limiting access to the originals. I don’t really know why I’m going to do this because it would be pretty easy to cut off the bottom of each photo to remove the watermark. But, it does, in my opinion, make the photos seem more “professional.” I’m using Smugmug (referral code secretly added…hey, you save $5!) to add the watermark to each photo I designate. What I did was create a transparent PNG and then tell Smugmug that I wanted that PNG to be a watermark. From there it’s very easy to add that watermark to new or existing images. (I think you have to have a Professional level account to do this from within Smugmug.)

Here are a few examples:
Watermark Example 1 - Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia in the fog

Watermark Example 2 - Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia

Watermark Example 3 - Balanced Rock at Sunset

Wow!! If I don’t say so myself, those photos look incredible. They’d look great without the watermark, in all honesty. But don’t the watermarks just make you want to buy them? (They do? Contact me as soon as possible.)

Christianity in Nazi Germany

While I was researching the German history of Czech occupation for the captions of my Prague photos, I came across some very interesting and scary photos. The author of the site, just entitled Nazi photos, writes, “The following photos provide a pictorial glimpse of Hitler, how his Nazis mixed religion with government, and the support for Hitler by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Germany. In, no way, does this gallery of photos intend to support Nazism or anti-Semitism, but instead, intends to warn against them.”

“Although Hitler had problems with the Catholic Church and eventually wanted to replace Catholicism with his brand of Christianity, the very fact that Hitler wanted a united German Church proves that he supported Christianity.”

I still find it hard to believe that something like this could have happened so recently in a supposedly civilized (though that shouldn’t matter) Europe. Sadly, I feel like similar genocide is occurring in Africa and elsewhere but the world outcry has not yet been the same.

Tone Mapping & HDR: Before and After

On my recent trip to Prague, I used the auto-bracketing feature of my digital SLR to take a series of three photos that I later stitched together using Photomatix to form the final tone mapped HDR image. The collection of my tone mapped HDR photos starts here.

Resources I used:
Stuck In Customs >> HDR Tutorial
Vanilla Days : HDR Tutorial (Page not currently loading so text only Google cached version is shown.)
hdrphotos.net – HDR II (Page not currently loading so Google cached version is shown.)

You can make the photos have a very natural appearance to an almost cartoonish appearance. I have tried to keep my photos on the natural side, but a few are on the border. Basically with this post I just want to give a few examples to show how much more detail is available when HDR photos are made. These were all handheld and would have improved with the use of a tripod. Click the small photos below to enlarge them.
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