HMNS - Cullen Hall of Gems & Minerals

[Scott1970]

HMNS - Cullen Hall of Gems and Minerals - Part 1 | Facebook

HMNS - Cullen Hall of Gems and Minerals - Part 2 | Facebook

General procedure I used for producing these shots:

1. Canon 7D with EF 24-70mm f/2.8L (and a few with EF 100mm f/2.8 macro)
2. Tripod mounted, cable release, mirror lockup enabled
3. Five individual exposures, typically -2 EV to +2 EV in 1-stop increments
4. ISO 100, f/11 (earlier shots at f/8), capture in Raw
5. First step of post: Photomatix Pro 4.1, batch bracketed photos, fuse exposures with Fusion/Auto and Fusion Adjust (Preset: Adjusted)
6. Process TIFFs created in Photomatix in Photoshop CS5: in Camera Raw, apply lens correction, adjust white balance, exposure, contrast, blacks, etc. Once imported into Photoshop, convert to 16-bit, denoise with Noiseware Pro, convert to lab color, apply photo (multiply, Lab color, usually 25-50% transparency), convert to RGB, use brush tool to remove halo from shooting through glass and distracting background objects, if any, sharpen, save as PSD. Actions created for many of these that can easily be automated, and batch them to save time.
7. Add border, captions, save as JPG.

Comments/critiques welcome.

[auddii]

Where you at the museum after hours? They usually don't allow tripods during normal operating hours.

[Scott1970]

Originally Posted by auddii

Where you at the museum after hours? They usually don't allow tripods during normal operating hours.

No, normal hours. I asked, they said it was OK. I try to keep it to lower traffic times.