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Showing posts from September, 2012

Running... Again?

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  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 
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A Northern California Beach

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What? Were you expecting bikini clad women? The beach and fog go hand in hand up here. With the occasional sunbathing uprooted tree, and various other debris littered over this beach, this is a typical northern California beach. A foggy California beach.
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Week 39 GPlus Project 52 - Patriotic Negative Space

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Flying the "wrong way" A fairly simple assignment for week 39 with the theme being Negative Space. Not much done to the shot except to up the saturation so the flag jumped out a bit more. You can view this, and the rest of my Project 52 photos here .
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Rock Face

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Out and about and came across this rock jutting out of the trail I was on. Snapped 5 brackets for a possible HDR shot and promptly forgot about them. When I did find them last week I wasn't expecting much. The color version was ok but didn't really do it for me. Could also be because I'm on an B&W kick currently. Taking the color HDR version into Silver Efex Pro got me this. It looks very moody. The rock face
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Week 38 Fall GPlus Project 52

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With fall coming, so comes the fog Our assignment this past week was fall/spring (depending on your chosen hemisphere) and I really thought the timing was pretty bad. It's just too early to start seeing the usual signs of fall; leaves changing color, leaves falling, or bare tree so I really didn't know what to do. But then the fog appeared, making everything else disappear. Photo was originally going to be color but, as fog will do, the color were very subdued and not all that pleasant to look at. Thought I'd give it a go with Silver Efex Pro 2 and liked the results better. You can view this, and the rest of my Project 52 photos here .
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HDR Tennis

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There's a group/page on Facebook called HDR Tennis . Basically it's a group of established, maybe even professional (I don't know for sure) HDR shooters that are given a set of bracketed shots and come up with their own HDR interpretation. It's really interesting to see how differently everyone "sees" a shot. The admins are nice enough to let us lay people have a go at the brackets, and so I did. Keep in mind the shots aren't mine, but the admittedly over the top processing is. This was an interesting exercise because normally when when I shoot brackets for HDR work I have an idea of what I want to do with them as I'm shooting them. Working with someone else's brackets, where I didn't have that base to start from, was kind of refreshing and allowed me to do some things that maybe I wouldn't have done had the shots been mine to begin with. If you like it, and you're on Facebook, please head on over here to "like" it, thank...
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Coastal Infrared

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This turned out, unintentionally, to be infrared week here. I took this, and a bunch of other shots recently on what I'll call my second outing with the IR lens. The purpose of these shots were to experiment with the in camera white balance and ISO settings. With my lens "wide open" at 3.5 my exposure times were anywhere from 2.5 seconds (ISO 100) to .6 seconds (ISO 400) which was as high as I was willing to bump the ISO up. But I didn't think I'd be using these shots for anything more than a learning session. But when I got to working on this I was really liking the look of it. This also took a lot more work to put together. I was really happy with how the foreground and the water turned out, but I wasn't crazy about the sky. Where the clouds and the ocean meet visually was a very vague area light wise and I wanted there to be more separation between the two. Using my latest tool in my arsenal, Topaz Labs photoFXlabs, I used layers. I converted one image in...
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Week 37 GPlus Project 52

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IR Hydrangea The theme for this week was From the Garden. I took a bunch of different photos of various things and plants in the garden but none of them really popped out at me. So then I screwed my infrared lens on and began shooting again. As I've mentioned in a previous post shooting in IR has it's drawbacks since I'm using a non-converted camera, but on a calm bright day it can work pretty well. Here is a hydrangea plant, normally green with blue flowers, rendered in IR. I'm still trying to find a way to cut down on the redness of the photo that isn't effected so much by the IR. You can view this, and the rest of my Project 52 photos here .
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The Victorian Inn

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Have I mentioned I really like black and white? This is the Victorian Inn at Ferndale. It's a 5 shot HDR that looked quite good in color, but as I'm considering posting a weekly black and white shot thought I'd see how it looked in monochrome. The clouds, which were ok in color, just really jumped and the intricacies of the hotel architecture were more apparent. And since the building is from a time when color photographs were a rarity the black and white treatment seemed to fit. The process: HDRing in Photomatix Pro, then taking the color version to Topaz Labs Adjust. Did some levels and other work in Aperture then finished off in Silver Efex Pro II. The Victorian Inn
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Location: 400 Ocean Ave, Ferndale, CA 95536, USA
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Week 36 GPlus Project 52

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A hunk of metal For week 36 our theme was metal, so I happened across this hunk of metal. This was a perfect candidate for some HDR as the lighting inside the warehouse was horrible. I really wish I had brought a tripod because with the lighting as bad as it was I was having a hard time keeping the camera still enough for the brighter exposures. After HDRing I put it through Topaz Labs Adjust which did a great job of bringing a feel to the photo, but I wanted something more. With so many plug-ins it's sometimes hard to remember them all, but I remembered Topaz Labs Detail which really brought out texture in the locomotive. It really finished the photo off for me, and is a tool I need to remember more often. You can view this, and the rest of my Project 52 photos here .
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Popular posts from this blog

Running... Again?

Image
  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 
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The Pros and (Mostly) Cons of Upgrading to a 4K Monitor

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I'm in the process of getting back into photography which will mean a new camera, more on that in a later post. But the first step for me was a new computer, one with the horsepower to handle a modern day camera and its RAW files. Along with the computer comes a new 4K monitor. 4K is great for media consumption, right? Your characters on your favorite show or movie really look detailed and realistic. Scenery looks wonderful. Everything looks great, right? Wrong. You know what doesn't look great? That photo I took in 2012 that I thought was sharp but is very much not. I transferred over my past catalogs of photos over to Lightroom Classic and eagerly began opening up some of my favorite photos. At first I was happy with how the colors looked and how the scene was composed. Then I noticed it was a little soft. Well I had just gotten a new contacts prescription so that must be it. Changed to my glasses and the photos were even blurrier! I went through photo after photo and most ca...
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