Hardly Harley

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Showing posts from February, 2015

February Running Update

February 27, 2015

Super Slo-Mo Clouds I thought I'd post how my running is going. Though technically the end of the month is tomorrow, I won't be running as I like to get in a day of rest between runs. Today was an 8 miler as I start getting ready to move from 7 to 8 mile runs over the next couple weeks. As you can see below, for a month with 3 less days than the one before it, I did pretty good in February. My Runtastic Running Stats The only bad news that isn't immediately apparent in these stats is that I've gotten slower on my average mile times. I'm not that concerned with it as I know I've had some days where the calves are hurting more than usual and January was just 7 mile runs whereas February saw me adding some 8 and 9 mile runs here and there.

Sunset Surfer

February 27, 2015

Getting in that last wave Back to something more familiar for me, and from my archive. This was shot over a year ago, and to the best of my knowledge hasn't been on the blog. Speaking about my blog specifically, I'm unhappy with Blogger. Not because of their recent announcement that blogs posting adult (porn) content would either be taken down or put into a private setting, but because that any attempt at using the organizational tools is a fruitless endeavor. The page for all my posts is unbelievably slow, if it loads at all. It's a good thing I use an IFTTT recipe to send a copy of all my blog posts to Evernote so I can quickly look and search through blog posts. This photo was processed before I had come up with a workflow that kept track of when and how photos were shared, hence my desire to look through my blog posts to see if this had been shared before. I feel a little stuck with Blogger. I use Google+ Photos as my main hub for photo sharing/storing and integr

The Birds

February 25, 2015

The Bird Invasion I don't do street photography much, and when I do it's never of people. I watch videos of street photographers getting in front of people and taking their photos and I get anxious. And I'm not even there! So my street photography stuff is primarily buildings or other scenes where I'm not feeling like I'm invading anyone's personal space. In terms of this shot, I'm shooting for the birds. They make a nice compositional line leading from the back of the photo to the front and provide good contrast to the pre-sunset sky. I intentionally kept the bottom left corner dark as the structure is kind of distracting. I went black and white with this from the very beginning, meaning I had my camera set to record a color RAW and a black and white JPEG. I really liked the look of the JPEG black and white and went to emulate that look through the RAW conversion to black and white. Basic exposure fixes were taken care of in Aperture (yes, still in

101 and the Redwood Coast

February 23, 2015

The Redwood Coast I've had this shot sitting around Aperture (yes, still Aperture) for almost a year now. I took this on my way up to Crater Lake. I like the shot, 101 (and yes, only 2 lanes, a far cry from the 4 or more in the Bay Area) literally hugging the coast and going in and out of Redwood forests with the ever present fog found in the area. I sat on this for awhile because I didn't like it as much as a quick, almost accidental snap I took with my Moto X which I ended up liking the composition more. Moto X Capture of 101 101 is more prominent in this shot, which is untouched by any kind of editing, except the auto editing Google+ photos does. The lines are stronger here, but the colors are muted. More muted than I remember them being, but also not out of the question for this area of the coast. I like the more prominent coast line in the top shot, which would have cut down on the road in the bottom shot. So between the two maybe there is no "better"

A photo journal

February 16, 2015

This sunset was for the birds I came across an article from Digital Photography School that I first rushed by, but then came back to. The post was about keeping a photo journal. At first I thought it was something along the lines of what I have going on in Evernote now, articles of tips, lists of places to shoot, etc. But this was a journal of how the photographer felt about individual shoots or outings. You can see the article here . This got me thinking. In Aperture I often times keep photos that I remember having high hopes for but for one reason or another fell flat. The idea is that I'll somehow magically come back to them and learn from whatever mistake I had done. If you can't sense the sarcasm in that last sentence, I'm sorry, but basically I rarely if ever go into Aperture looking for shots that I wished had turned out better.

Cape Mendocino Lighthouse

February 11, 2015

Cape Mendocino Lighthouse, on the Lost Coast A little south of the Black Sand Beach I photographed earlier is Cape Mendocino Lighthouse. The lighthouse is located in a small community called Shelter Cove, on Point Delgada at Mel Coombs Park. For you lighthouse aficionados out there, here is a write up on it's history. The area itself is an interesting mix of what I would assume are large vacation homes with great views of the ocean, a golf course, and a runway. The runway is in the middle of the community and looks to be about one of the craziest places I could think of to land and take off. The golf course is right next to the airport. Or it's part of the airport. I didn't really see much to divide the two. The timing for the shot wasn't the best, strong mid-afternoon sun. And I sadly forgot to switch from JPEG only to RAWs, which annoys me. I almost think of all these shots (over 200) as second class shots based on the fact they were shot in JPEG form only.

Apple Photos

February 10, 2015

Apple has pushed a developer preview of their new desktop photos app, simply named Photos, out to testers today. Realistically I had been preparing myself for being underwhelmed by the initial release, but I find I'm even more underwhelmed than I thought I would be. First, let me say, it looks great. It doesn't seem to choke on large libraries of photos, the basic editing tools look to be quite good, and the fit into the whole iOS/iDevice/iCloud ecosystem looks to be great. That last part is an issue for me seeing as how I'm an Android user with a Mac computer, but more on that in a minute. I'm not going to get into previewing what Photos is, The Verge and Wired (and every other tech blog) have some good write ups of it if you want that. Instead I'm going to point out the red flags that these articles have shown.

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