photography – Page 8 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Anniversary Weekend Part 4 – The Ocean

July 2, 2011 10:27 pm

On Sunday, breakfast was Eggs Benedict, but we opted to switch out the poached eggs for scrambled instead and to skip the Hollandaise sauce.

After packing up and checking out we headed to the ocean. We stopped on a roadside pullout which was a cliff overlooking a beach. As I mentioned in the Part 2, I like taking long exposure shots. This was my first chance to try it out on the ocean though. I took a whole lot of ’em, here are the best (remember you can click on the images to view them larger).

I got these long exposures by using a neutral density filter and a polarizer to cut down on the light. I also used the smallest apertures I could. Even so, the exposures were a little bright, but I was able to get things worked out pretty well by using RAW images.

Here’s that scene with a regular shutter speed:

I really like these shots. It was sunny, but the wind was blowing and it was a little chilly. So we wrapped up in the blankets I keep in the trunk. We sat on that cliff watching the ocean and taking pictures for about an hour. It was Jess’ favorite part of our whole trip.

Once we finished we got back in the car and drove down Highway 1 for a little while. Jess really wanted to get down to a beach so we stopped at Doran Beach. The water was cold. Very cold. But it was sandy, unlike CT beaches. I didn’t bring the camera with me so we don’t have any pictures, but we walked down the beach for a while before turning around. It was nice, but the constantly blowing wind seems to give Jess a headache.

After that it was time to head home. It was very nice to get out of town and spend time in a more secluded part of the state. A last peaceful hurrah before our world is up-ended by a baby in a few months.

While on a hike

May 22, 2011 4:07 pm

Yesterday I convinced Jess to go for a hike with me up at Del Valle Reservoir. It’s a nice area just outside of the Livermore city limits. I haven’t done anything outside in awhile beyond driving to/from work (or bicycling the same occasionally) and I wanted to be outside since it has been nice out.

So yesterday we drove out to the reservoir and did a short hike, about 1.2 miles. We stopped about halfway through and rested. While resting I took a bunch of pictures, none of which quite turned out how I had imagined. The wind was blowing rather strongly, so I thought it might be fun to try and get a picture of the tall, dry grass covering the hills blowing in the wind. Kind of like the kind of pictures you can get of water where it looks silky. Well, that didn’t quite work out, it mostly looks like a blurry mess, but I was able to adjust one to look kind of nice. I used an oil painting effect to get a somewhat impressionist version of the hillside. It looks okay, but there’s nowhere really for your eye to settle.
As we began hiking again we passed a bunch of thistles. We happened upon one that was growing all by itself which presented a nice opportunity to get it isolated from the background. As I mentioned, the wind was blowing so I didn’t have much control of the exposure besides cranking the shutter speed up as fast as it would go in order to keep it from blurring. This also meant I needed to bump up the ISO, so the shot came out a little bit grainy, but I think it still looks pretty good:
After the hike we stopped at Wienerschnitzel for some ice-cream. On our way to the reservoir we had seen that they were selling 79-cent soft-serve ice-cream cones. Jess, however, opted for a caramel sundae instead. Regardless, the ice-cream was good. I would be more than happy to make a regular thing of hiking / photographing for 1.5-2 hours and then getting ice-cream.

Melancholy Meerkat

May 16, 2011 9:23 pm

I submitted a picture from our trip to the San Diego Zoo to the Intermediate Pictorial category of our camera club this week. This year there have been a lot of good photographers in the intermediate group. Some months I disagree with the judge and the pictures that place. However, as we were going through the images this week I was thinking there were many very good pictures and that I wouldn’t feel grumpy about them being placed over mine. When my picture was shown the judge didn’t have any critiques about it, but also moved along fairly quickly without much comment. So I was actually quite surprised, and very flattered, when it was awarded first place.

I do rather like the photo. But I don’t claim to be able to find and take shots like this with any regularity. Of the 328 pictures I took at the zoo this is the only one that I still really liked after I worked with it. So I’d like to show a few of the steps this image took before the finished product.

Top-left: The original image as it came off the camera.
Top-right: The first step was to take out the extra blue. Your eye is very good at making you think the color balance is OK, but when you see the image with the blue removed it looks much better. The only thing done between the original and this image is the removal of the extra blue.
Bottom: Then I cropped in on the face and bumped up the contrast a little, the saturation a little, and removed some distracting blobs in the background.
The final step was to add some selective darkening to tone down overly bright areas and help the eye stay focused on the face. Here is the final image:

Walking down the street

March 12, 2011 12:42 pm

While Jess was at Cub Scouts on Wednesday I took a walk down the street with our camera seeing what there was to see. The lighting wasn’t particularly good, but I got a few decent shots.

Something is still bothering me about this shot, but I can’t put my finger on it. There is some chromatic aberration towards the edges, but I don’t think that’s the main thing bothering me. I usually don’t notice chromatic aberration very much because my glasses have always had substantial chromatic aberration, so it’s basically how I see the world.
The depth of field was too short on this one, so I applied an oil-painting effect which I think came out pretty well.
This image had some depth-of-field issues as well. The main line of 4 blossoms is slightly out of focus. You can’t really tell scaled down to this small size though. Regardless, I applied the oil painting effect (on the right), but I think scaled down I like them both. The one on the right has a calmer mood though. The one on the left might actually work well enough for a nature category but I think I would enjoy having the one on the right hanging on my wall more.

Presenting… GIMP

February 21, 2011 11:16 pm

The Monday following our adventure in Utah, Feb 7th, I gave a presentation about GIMP to our camera club. A few weeks back the presidency sent out a survey about club interests to help find topics for presentations. On the survey they asked if there was anything you’d be interested in presenting. So I volunteered to give a presentation about GIMP (free photo editing software). Pretty much everyone there uses some version of Photoshop so I wasn’t sure what their response would be, but it went quite well. A lot of people were very interested in being able to do the same things they’ve been doing, but not having to pay several hundred dollars every few years to do it. Hopefully at least some of them like it and end up saving themselves some money.