It's Good To Be Friday

Hey all... It is a little late but I wanted to get something out. The weather in West Michigan these past couple of days has been just beautiful. Clear sky, cool mornings and the highs in the low 70's. Just pristine. Ergo I have not been on the iMac very much the past couple of days.

This image above is a six image pano of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River dividing Washington and Oregon. It is the last dam on the Columbia before going out to the Pacific Ocean. and has a really interesting and viewable salmon ladder as they go upstream to spawn.

Go out and have a great weekend in what ever you choose or have to do.

Cya Monday... Doug

LR2 Just Rocks

I just gotta tell ya! Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 just rocks, and oh yes! That is the full name of the application so it's no surprise that most all call it simply Lightroom. This was somewhere around the 15th shot I took after we arrived at Mt. Hood. I had an EF 24-105 f/4L IS lens mounted on my 40D and it was about this time that I realized I still had the white balance set to fluorescent for some shots I took back at Midway Airport in Chicago. It is not so bad now that ACR or the Develop module in Lightroom will edit jpg's, but RAW still takes the cake and other than the drive space the workflow is essentially the same as with a jpg file. But that's not the rocking think about LR2.

Shot at 1/200th at f/7.1 at an ISO 0f 200 at 40 mm, this is the shot as it came out of the camera in all of it's fluorescent whit balance. The couple in the shot are my brother & sister-in-law.

White balance in check it was off to the normal adjustment sliders. A touch of exposure to even up the histogram, push the recover just a tad to bring back highlight detail and fill light to get some of the shadows. Brightness I may use if exposure is not necessary and contrast I usually leave forth curve. Speaking of which tweak in a nice shallow S-curve to pop the photo. The sky did not have the depth that it had in person so rather than have to go into Photoshop to work in the sky, Lightroom now has the adjustment brush and graduated filter tool. These are now grouped with the crop, red eye, and spot removal tools. Clicking on the color for the graduated filter tool selecting a blue and dragging it down from the top of the screen gives a very nice boost to the blue in the sky. This works really well with a flat horizon, hence the only hick-up in my plan. The tom of Mt. Hood took on a very blue tint. The adjustment brush has an auto-mask function that worsks great but does not extend to the  graduated filter  tool.

Clicking on the adjustment brush gives me a new node to work with and I simply needed to paint over the blue tint of the mountain with some yellow (slightly towards the red) to introduce some anti-blue if you will. It was just a bit strong but that could be backed off using the amount slider while the node is active. Totally adjustable, totally non-destructive, and totally ROCKS!

I processed about sixty photos for a slideshow in PhotoMagico and only a couple of the images required a trip to Photoshop. One of those being a seven image pano.

Hey Thats about it for me today. Take care... Doug

That's a Waterfall

Multnomah falls is one of the most photographed waterfalls in the world. It is not the biggest but it is one of the easiest to get to. Park the car, walk about 75 yards and start clicking. Located east of Portland Oregon along the Columbia River Gorge it is truly breathtaking. The water over the edge falls some 620 feet into the pool at the bottom.

What really brought some significance to this was just two days prior we were on Mt. Hood and my son called telling me he had repelled deep into the earth. Close to 600 feet. It was pretty amazing to look at these falls and how small we felt to imaging a single rope hanging over the edge with a young man descending. Yikes!

This is a six shot pano of the falls and was shot using a Canon 40D with an EF 16-35 f/2.8L USM lens mounted. It is somewhat of a wide lens but with the crop factor it was not too bad. Focal length was 35mm which helped also. Speed was 1/3rd second at f20 and an ISO of 100. If I recall, I had a circular polarizer screwed on the front to knock it down a couple of stops. Pano assembly was in CS3. The shots were taken in landscape to which I rotated so PS could better assemble the images. Once together it was flattened, rotated, and worked with. Prior to deleting the original pano layers the file was at 1.06 GB. Now that's a fat file!

Hey! I got to go off to Z-land. Cya tomorrow... Doug

Back to Work

Well it's time to get back to work, my day job if you will. Back in Columbus and I am more than happy that I am not at the Hyatt. Actually I'm at the Marriott Courtyard by the airport. You know, the one where the internet actually works! Time off is always a pleasure but it is good to be back at your craft, especially when they are footing the bill for your time off.

I spent some time over the weekend going through the 800 or so photos I managed to capture on our trip to the Great Northwest. My workflow is rejects, keepers, key wording, collections, picks, adjustment. Of course that does not always work when you want to get those few out right now. Lightroom is such a great program for this end of the workflow. The Bridge is a great viewer/browser but it just does not hold a candle to Lightroom.

Now for the pic of the day. It was our last night on the coast and we went down to have some fine Fish and Chips at Mo's in Newport Oregon. Well, Mo's was closed for a company party. So it was off to another location. We got seated only to find out they did not serve Fish and Chips. The waitress was very gracious as eleven of us we getting up to continue the Fish and Chips quest. So gracious in fact that she recommended one of the other waterfront restaurants. On the waterfront was no lie. There was a deck (a bit cold for the meal in question) that overlooked a dock. All during the meal the very LOUD sea lions were barking and growling at each other.

After dinner we were out clicking away the these lovable creatures of the sea. They are truly the puppy dogs of the sea. The similarities are really amazing.

• They have whiskers
• That pointy dog nose
• A face that anyone can love
• They bark
• They growl
• They scratch the same. (Obviously the fin does pretty good)
• They even bite at themselves the same way.
• They lay around
• The tangle with each other

It was just a hoot to watch these guys. we must have spent an hour leaning over the rail watching and listening. (Ok so it was a cheap thrill)

Gotta get going as I have an early day tomorrow. Cya... Doug

Infrared in Post

Infrared photography is becoming more popular today than ever before. It seems to be more retro than a very punchy black and white. Since I have just returned from a very enjoyable time out in Oregon and have downloaded all my images into Lightroom® I took a moment to play with one of the images of a running river through a setting in the forest. I saw this technique somewhere and I would love to give credit where it is due but frankly I see so much educational information the authors tend to fade from memory. Probably like I will to you in a couple of days.

The image above is an untouched RAW file from Lightroom. On the other hand the black and white image below has had Fill Light and Clarity have been punched a little. Additionally some of the shadows have been burned in a couple of places to give the B&W treatment some depth.

Take a look at the Grayscale sliders below. The greens and yellows have been really punched while all the others have been reduced to their minimum, or close to it.

The result is shown below. Ok it is not a true infrared photo, by tweaking the sliders in lightroom you can get a fairly good representation of that IR image you have always wanted. By boosting the greens and yellows you are defining the same area that the IR sensor/film would pick up the most heat energy in the shot. 

One final thing to do in post is to take the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom and dial down the Clarity. Be careful to just paint over the highlights in the leaves as this has an effect of blurring the image.

Looks klind of cool and it gives a very nice effect on an otherwise basic image.

Hey! Have a great weekend and I am back on the road next week at work so Cya then... Doug

The Great North West

Good Monday to you all. The post is a little late but that is because we have been running all weekend. Last week while in the Mt Hood area we got out in the morning and were able to get the wonderful shots of Mt Hood glistening in the waters of Trillium Lake.

While there we had run into another photographer that was shooting with a buddy of his. The were nice enough and told us some interesting tid-bits and that we should continue on the road when we were done. He said it was a gravel road but we should have no problem with it. As it turned out there was not a problem to get people to stay.

Well... He was right but the road (below) was twenty miles of hard and rough road. Fortunately due to the slow speed we were able to react to many off road features.

As there were three of us in the truck we decided to put it out that if anyone of us wanted to stop for a photo op we would stop. What it turned out to be was a five second committee decision weather we would stop or not. One such stop is this image below.

The closer to the banks we got, the better we knew the shot was going to be. The shadows are sharp, the river leads you into the photo, there is a massive foreground object, and the sun is eliminating the background. The specs are at 3.2 seconds at f/14 and 40 mm focal length.

Continuing downstream there was another opportunity. This 3.0 second at f/4 shooting at 100 mm gave such a nice soft velvet feel to the running water. With so much quality scenes to shoot it was hard to pick out the ones I wanted to take to post. Being on the laptop I am limited in my production as I do not have Lightroom installed on it.

Over the weekend we were downtown Portland for the Race for the Cure and got some images from that I will post later this week as well as the seashore photos I took today in Newport Oregon.

Take care for now... Doug

Photo Geek Squad

Today we were up at the crack of dawn... Well, actually we were driving in the dark to get to this location. It is Trillium Lake south of Mt Hood. As you can gather from the image, the lake is absolutely still. After we had been there for a while it took a few ducks to get out on the water to finally break the calm. There are a number of fires in around the Mt Hood area and it is causing a definite haze area to deal with. Even with a polarizer, it reduces but does not get rid of the haze. Some things we just have to get along with.

There were two locations that we shot at today. The other was a place called Zig Zag Falls on, what would you expect, the Zig Zag River. We wanted to visit a couple of falls but this was the only one where the hiking trail was open. The forestry service has closed a number of the falls due to the high fire risk. At the end of the road there was a trail that went about 3/4 mile meandering through, up, over, and around the wooded area to get to the falls.

This was the first really good water I have been able to shoot since I got the Canon 40D and it was magnificent. There were eight of us total but only two of my brothers-in-law were shooting D-SLR's

It was a blast for all three of us as neither of us have had an opportunity to just roam around with another photog and just geek over the fun in photography.

I may get a post out over the weekend but I would not count on it.

Take care... Doug

Mt. Hood Oregon

Hey all, we got to Portland OR in fine shape. Those people over at Southwest Airlines are something. Service was great, and people were friendly. Management must be doing something right at that airline. Here are some pix from our afternoon up on Mt Hood.

The above image was from a walking path that is probably a couple of hundred feet above the lodge. I am Mr. Sea Level and it was not long before the huffing and puffing started. Short steps gets you a long way wt these elevations.

We had to make it to the snow pack only to be mildly disappointed. The workers move snow down to lower elevations so it will melt. It must have something to do with preventing avalanches in the during the next snow season. At any rate, we had to ravel up a wash in order to get to this point. we are now well out of view by anyone at the lodge.

Looking up from the wash we were walking in were these trees. Some living, some dead, or so it would seam. It looked like a striking image with the brilliant blue sky background. I had a circular polarizer screwed on and it really helped with the sky. There was a good bit of haze in the air as there was a fire going on to the northeast of Mt Hood.

Finally driving down the mountain I had to stop and take a number of shots of the haze and the lower mountains. It was a long day with airline travel and all but we had a lot of fun just shooting. All the images I took today were with a EF 24-105 f4.0 L IS USM lens on a EOS 40D. We are up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for some morning shots off a lake south of Mt Hood.

Take care and enjoy... Doug

We Are Off

This image was the nucleus that drove me to plan on traveling out to Portland this year. For a number of years now Evelyn and one or more of her sisters travel to Portland to walk in a "Race for the Cure" as my sister-in-law in the Portland area is a cancer survivor.

When I loaded up Evelyn' images from her point-and-shoot this was one of the spectacular shots she had captured. The location is from the shores of Mirror Lake just southwest of Government Camp OR.

So today is the day that we head West. We will be in the Mt Hood area Thursday and Friday then back in Portland over the weekend and out to the coast next week. Hopefully i will have an internet connection some of the time so I can get some images out.

Take care and I will do my best... Doug

The Two Portlands

This was an intersting day when these two photos where shot. The photo of Mt. Hood was taken by my wife while on her annual trip to Poirtland OR. The waterfront photo was taken by yours truely while in Portland ME. Go figure, two Portland's on the same day. We were bot using point and shoot cameras in the 5-7 megapixel range. They were both worked on (very mildly) in Photoshop, tweeking the richness of the blues and sharpening slightly. The rules were thrown out the window for Mt. Hood but with the majesty of the view and the reflection in the lake, the horizon had to be centered for semitry' sake.

We were separated by an entire country and we got these two really cool shots. I am a little envious as I think my wifes photo is better than mine, but after all... It is Mt. Hood.

Next year my brother-in-law and I both plan on going west with the gals to capture some really cool landscapes in the Pacific Northwest.

All for now!

Doug

Getting Your Feet Wet in Photography

My wife was out in Portland OR this past fall with two of her sisters. One of which is pictured here. Nancy (pictured) had her Hubby's Nikon DSLR to practice some shooting. My wife snapped this pic with a point-and-shoot then I toyed with it in Photoshop. As Nancy is a relatively new shooter, I thought the title was appropriate. There are a couple more shots that the ladies took that I will put up here over the next couple of days. Some really excellent shots of Mt. Hood.

Oddly enough I was on a trip and in Portland ME for a few days and got some really nice shots on the waterfront. I will get some of the up here in the next few days.

Cya later.

Doug