Secrets in the Closet

Back in July I posted about Leaving Paradise from Palm Beach Florida. Had some really nice images from that layover but I forgot to put one up that I had to process a little more.

This is a pano shot from the shore of Palm Beach to the west which ironically show downtown West Palm Beach in the image. I was walking around shooting in the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden and was unaware of the impending deluge. I knew I wanted to get a pano across the iner-coastal waterway but had no idea of what loomed beyond.

As it turned out, I was able to get back to the car without getting wet except for the beads of sweat form the incessantly hot and humid South Florida weather.

I was able to make it across the bridge and grabbed this image imminent squall. You can make out the double towers of the historic Breakers Hotel in the background.

Need to pack it in for the night. Take care... Doug

Leaving Paradise

On Tuesday I had to extend my hotel room in West Palm Beach FL and when I did the gentleman at the counter made the statement that I got to spend another day in paradise. This is what my dad used to call it from their porch in Fort Myers FL. It is amazing how many people migrate back and forth to the South Florida environment. Way too many people for me. While I enjoy visiting Florida now and again, I'm sorry, I would not want to live here. So to me leaving paradise is a good thing, especially after three days of hanging around then same hotel. 
Ok it wasn't that bad. We did have a car for most of Tuesday so we drove around some and I was able to get a little photo walk in. One of the other pilots is a huge "dido head" so we had to hunt down Rush Limbaugh' Southern Command. It was a gate of course on the northern end of the the island that is Palm Beach.

The photo walk was a pleasure and here are som images from that experience.

These two images above are of Palm Beach City Hall. Knew the relatively clear sky's with a circular polarizer would provide some really nice blues.

As we were walking down the sidewalk I saw this mirror and stopped surprising the two others guys that were with me. One of the guys was into photography many years ago and asked what I saw. I told him the mirror but he had no idea what was really going on in my head. The mirror had no appearance of support and I just found it so interesting.

It started to become an educational photo walk which I enjoy. Explaining what my thought process was enabled the other two to get into it a little bit rather than just accompanying me.

There was a door on the side of city hall that I just found beautiful.

Hopefully I will be able to find a use for this image other than just here on the blog. Here is a shot looking down Worth Avenue which is appropriately named as this is the Rodeo Drive of Palm Beach.

When we were driving back from the norther part of the island we pawed this church with amazing architecture. This time I left the guys in the cool car and went up and grabbed some shots.

This is an open hallway that completes the street side of the church. You can see the rail on the left side which faces the street. The arches are mirrored on the right and opens to a really nice courtyard shown ithe panoramic below. Click on the image for a larger view.

It is July and out of season in South Florida so the snow birds are gone but the heat and humidity is way too much for this Michigan boy. Nice place to visit but still nicer to leave.

Take care for now... Doug

It's a Wacky Business

Yesterday was just on of those days where you just have to chalk it up to... What ever! I must frost say that this is not a very photo centric blog post but I home you will find some humor in it eve though it's at my expense.

It started out at 5:30 in the morning when the alarm went off and I had to swap cars at the airport at 7:00. Then there was the two hour drive to meet a crew to do a check ride on the captain. The plan was to go to Pelston MI and get a car and drive to Grand Rapids. I would be home a day early, sweet!

I snapped a couple of shots from the airplane, here is Detroit Metro Airport and one of lake St. Clare.

Here is another from the airplane of one of the many proving grounds in the Detroit area.

Crew did a good job and we are in Pelston when I get a briefing update with the car information. Cool, the plan is coming together. So I go to the Avis counter to get the car and I get a message from our training scheduler asking me if I am on the road yet because she might have something for me tomorrow (read today). Now i could have just replied that I was on the road and that probably would have been the end of it. Thats just not right though. Besides, the Avis lady did not have the reservation. I giver her the number that I had from the brief and she finds it and a goes on to say that it was rejected. They are a franchise and not corporate Avis so they will not rent one ways to Grand Rapids. Nice! I checked with Hertz and they had a car so I called the company to advise and they said to give it ten minutes and I should get a brief update. So I walked around the vast Pelston terminal with my camera over my shoulder. I had already changed cloths for the drive home and was planning on making it a photo experience stopping along the way. So that's where I came up with the picture here of the Canadair RJ getting ready to leave the ramp.

Forty minutes later I finally get the update and it is still for Avis. Whiteout belaboring the point, it took a total of an hour and a half to Finally get a Hertz car that I could have set up in ten minutes. Isn't big business wonderful. The bad thing though was that I was no longer going home but driving to Pontiac MI. So the day ended up being one our in the airplane and six and a half hours of driving. I could have stopped k(and probably should have) on the way to Pontiac for some photos but it was now starting to get later in the day and I was no longer in any mood to enjoy much of anything.

My tomorrow (meaning today) was now going to be a check ride to Teterboro NJ and the airline home to GRR. So rather than getting home a day early, it is going to be a 9:45 pm arrival.

So when am I writing this post? Actually during a Checkride of some distance, I do have a chance to sit down so here you see my iPad out on the table and the headset that I use to monitor what the crew is saying between themselves and air traffic control.

We are currently at 35,000 feet and the WiFi is not on this aircraft so I am using BlogPress which is a very nice tool to work on posts while not online with Blogger. We are starting our descent into Teterboro so I have to go observe the crew I their descent and approach phase.

Just like any other passenger I have to be strapped in for takeoff and landing so here are a couple of shots of the New York area on our approach.

Closer shot of the NYC Skyline

Here is a shot of the Meadowlands

We are on short final for Teterboro here.

Take care... Doug

PDX Go Home Day

I missed yesterday even though we were just driving back to Portland from Cannon Beach. We did stop at Camp 18 on Rt 62 on the way back for lunch. A must stop for a great loggers meal if you are in the area.

Anyhow I spent some time last night processing images and cam up with what I think is a nice collection of our trip. Fifty tow in all and they will not all be here either. Here are a few of them. Some waterfall shots through some spectacularly green foliage. This one being Latourell Falls.

 These next images are of Multinomah Falls further up the Columbia River gourge. The water falls a total of 620 feet and in the first image is of the first drop of the falls and if you look close, you can see my adventurous son just to the left of the falls.

I did say adventurous. He climbed down to the edge of the water and took a picture with his iPhone over the edge. You can see in the following image the famous bridge and then the lodge at the very bottom. The iPhone really takes some spectacular images to which i am jealous as the Droid that I have just does not come up to the task.

Here you can see the bottom of the bridge and the lower falls.

The second day at Cannon Beach was a really nice day and it became a really nice photography day. A couple more here of Hay Stack Rock. One in color and another Ansel Adams image.

There were some clouds moving in and it provided a very dynamic difference in the colors of the sky and beach so I grabbed this one.

These next three images are taken from Ecola State Park. The surf, clouds, and rock formations were really something.

 This next image is what I have come to call "Where is Tim?" Did I say he was adventurous. Actually he is quite an accomplished rock climber and these rocks were not a big deal for him at all. When he came back he said he felt like he was in the movie "The Goonies". This was really funny as yesterday morning before leaving Cannon Beach we went dopwn to a coffee shop and had breakfast. There was a book on the history of Cannon Beach on the table and while I was paging through it I found that where Tim was climbing is one of the locations the Goonies was shot. No wonder he got that feeling.

I have some bird images I will share next week but this ought to do it for today.

Take care... Doug

PDX Day 2

Today was much rain and driving. After breakfast we headed up I-5 also known in these parts as "The 5". I suppose the Southern California mental migration has been complete when inanimate objects are given an identity. Anyhow, up the 5 we went to Longview which is were the Columbia River makes its turn back to the west which creates that little nub on the Northwest corner of Oregon. As we were crossing the river there was a ginormous Weyerhaeuser logging processing facility. I stopped at an overlook and could not get a really good shot of the plant but was able to get a 19 shot pano of the river valley.

Click on the image to see a larger view of it. I have the resolution down so as not to fatten the blog but the actual image is 96 inches long. We then made our way along U.S. 30 to Astoria. Now the Oregonians call this road Oregon Highway 30 claiming ownership which I take some offense too. This particular highway is one of the few coast to coast highways prior to the interstate system that still exists today. It runs from Atlantic City NJ to Astoria OR. For the most part Highway 30 and the famous Lincoln Highway are one in the same from Philadelphia PA to Granger WY. Ok,back on topic here!

Astoria was very, I mean Very wet and we did not have an opportunity to really get out of the car. 

Astoria is shipping town and is famous for not only being the town where Kindergarten Cop was filmed, but also one of the many west coast ports were the Shanghaiing was allowed in the 1800's. Re drove around Astoria just a bit even though it was raining and came across this little community at the waterfront and I just thought it made a nice picture.

On to Cannon Beach were we are spending a couple of nights. The weather cleared enough to get out and do some shooting so here is the infamous Hay Stack Rock of Cannon Beach.

This was the result of six stops of bracketing and brought into CS5's HDR Pro routine. I then tweaked it in Lightroom for some of the tonalities. Yes it was cloudy but even that gave way to some sunshine. This next shot was just a few minutes after the above one.

Really, the time on Hay Stack was 4:05 and this shot was at 4:21 in the afternoon. The weather changes out here as fast as it does in West Michigan.

I again went back out in the late evening for a sunset and got the next two images.

I alway like it when I can get the sun to starburst itself behind objects. Clouds do a great job of this.
That finishes u today. I'll see what I get up tomorrow.

Cya... Doug

Didn't Get a Single Thing

If you are sharp and have been with me for a while, you will realize the image above is from a different post I did on jpeg shooting. So why am I reusing an image? Did you read the title to the post today. Hello?

Last Friday was an absolutely beautiful day in Washington D.C. We were visiting some of our family and celebrating or grandsons first birthday. With the weather being as nice as it was and the fact that we had hit the mother load on the Cherry Blossoms in Washington, we had to go into the city to get some shots. The two main areas for the Cherry Blossoms are at the around the Tidal Basin at the Jefferson memorial (above) and the reflecting pond and the Lincoln memorial.

It was a great plan with a couple exceptions. First there were six of us and the baby. Little mom did not want to take the baby on the Metro (subway) as he had not been feeling well earlier in the week and I could not blame her for that. Second was the fact that in addition to the seven of us there must have been half the population of the know world or at least most of Japan that migrated to Washington D.C. to see what we wanted to see.

Looking at the map above, the red line which is a little over a mile, took nearly two hours to manage. In addition to that the other car in our group stopped in the middle of traffic just past the "T" in the road. We managed to get up to the round about that was closed and pulled out of traffic to wait for the the rest of our party and come up with a game plan. This is represented by the blue dot on the map.

No this is where it got a little shaky. At the Independence Ave intersections was a couple of the Park Police' finest trying to manage what was really an unmanageable task. That of traffic management at a time where there was too much traffic for the roadway system, but I guess that is a normal occurrence in the metro D.C. area and one of the main reasons we enjoy our life in West Michigan. Anyhow Deputy Dog saw us sitting there and was not happy and pointed for us to get back into traffic. My options were to:

1. Get back into traffic
2. Get out of the car and go talk to the officer; or 
3. Stay in the car and wait for him to come to us.

Well this must have been one of those times that judgement was not to be found in my brain. My decision to stay in the car may have been safe from a non aggressive move such as the second choice. Clearly I should have just got back into traffic an been on my way. The only problem was that two of our occupants had gone back to see about the other car. I was simply going to wait for them.

I don't remember the officers name (which is probably a good thing) but he as a motor policeman so I will just call him Poncherello because he reminded me of Erik Estrada from the 1977 series "CHiPs". So Ponch is strutting up to the car and verbally lays into me. I my feeble attempt to get a word in to explain the situation, I realized he had no interest in hearing my plea. Guess that would be saved for the judge. With my drivers license in hand, Ponch walks back to his motorcycle and retrieves his ticket book. Seeing as how I was going to get a ticket anyhow, I was sitting there thinking of how I could politely rebut his refusal to listen to reason. Here is where keeping my mouth shut probably was the best thing I could do. Ponch went to the back of the vehicle to write down the  tag number and came up to the window and told me that there are places to pull off and this was not one of them. I could have made a real fool out of myself and told him that in fact there were no other places to pull off because they were either taken or closed (by the police). But I remained silent and he gave me my licensee and told me to get moving. Not ticket. My wife figured that while he was at the back of the car he looked up and saw that his absence from the intersection he was supposed to be working was not getting the attention it so deserved and it was a higher priority that writing some idiot a citation. Personally I think when he saw the Florida tag with a Michigan drivers license he realized hi efforts were futile and that he would simply let it go. Either way I was happy

The other car got a jump and we all ended up back at the house after seven hours of driving a total of 85 miles. And how many images did I get on the 5D Mk II. Zilch, Nada, None, Zippo!!! I didn't get a single thing.

Take care all... Doug

Ouch!

So what do these two images have in common. Well... Paint for one thing. I had my trusty EF 24-105 f/4 IS L glass mounted to my 40D on a whale watching tour we took while in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago. The whales were pretty active as they were ending their stay in the Hawaiian waters. They were making their last preparations for their migration up to the Alaskan coast.

The hump back whales come down to the warm central Pacific waters to have their offspring an allow them to exercise and earn their stripes for the northern migration. The young whales will bend, blow, and breach around the waters stretching their muscles. Every action they take is in training for their big move. All under the watchful eye of mom whale.

There are rules in the Hawaiian Islands regarding approaching the migrating whales. Generally a vessel can not come within 100 yards of the whales. This is the rule for the captains, not necessarily for the whales though. I was up on the port side of the catamaran leaning up against the cabin corner which would be on the right side of the image above. I chose this location as it was the most protected from spray when the boat would his a wave. People on the trampoline and on the starboard side were definitely getting wet. We had seen a number of breaches and blows in the distance when a large spray came across the boat. The spray was a bit different than when the boat would his a wave, there was a strange noise associated with it. We were just figuring out the noise we witnessed was a whale blow very close to the boat when it happened. The boat lurched and then lunged in an unusual way, not at all like taking a wave the wrong way. We were flung sidewise while some fell onto the trampoline and others against the lifelines (guess thats why they call them that). Fortunately I was leaning against the cabin and was not only able to keep my footing but I was able to protect the camera from the spray. When the boat lunged I let my camera ride down the R-Strap while I held onto what ever I could grab. The camera banged around a little and the lens hood got that white marring but boy did I have a story.

Yes, that is what it was, a story. Hope it was a good one! What actually happened was while the camera was hanging on the R-Strap and I was maneuvering on the boat, the lens hood banged into a corner of the boat. Hence the white scar of paint on the hood. The rest of the story was all fabrication.

The lesson here regardless of how cool of a story you can come up with is this. My plastic hood took the hit and not the lens or camera. No harm, no foul. Not even to the whales.

Take care... Doug

Sporadic

That is the word for the day, maybe this month as evidenced by the rate of blogging I have gotten done this month. Shooting has been busier that the blogging which I guess is a good thing. One could blog full time if they wanted to. I think of David Ziser and his tremendous blog Digital Pro Talk... Every day. The amount of content David puts out is absolutely astounding.

Photography is not my primary source of income and therefore must fall into the orders of life's priorities. While it is a business, it must be moderated with the other strings pulling at my time. My lofty goals of one blog of worth per day remains a goal and to that end I will continue in my blogging efforts as I truly enjoy spewing my thoughts out in this cyber format. I have in the past had make-up posts to cover days I have missed, I will no longer be doing this as it is water under the bridge.

Anyhow for today I have a few images to share with you from our Hawaii trip.

We took a day to do some exploring off the beaten path and went up to the tip of the big island. We had already been to the other end of the island which was the southern most point in the United States. The winds we blowing pretty good and the waves were breaking nicely.

A quick look at Google maps gives a little insight into where you might be going but it really misses the mark for first hand information.

The first image in the post was take from a breaker of lava rock I climbed on to get the shot. Shown in the image above by the red arrow. Being careful not to get too close to get my gear spayed with salt water. I would do daily gear cleaning when we got back to the hotel just to get the salty grime off from the air. Below is a picture of a local riding some surf before it got too crazy. It was taken from the vantage point shown on the image above represented by the yellow arrow.

He did not stay too long as the surf was changing and getting a little more unpredictable. Seeing that the surface is all volcanic rock, I don't blame him.

Hope you'll understand about the postings and pleas come on back. I will be here!

Cya... Doug

Pan-O-Ram-A Workflow

After spending my free time last week going through the better bart of 1300 images from our Hawaii trip, I noticed there were a number of panoramic sequences. The beauty of pano's is the ability to come closer to sharing with the viewer the majesty of the scene the photographer is blessed to take in.

In this case we have a series of images taken from the sea walk at the Hilton Wiakoloa Village on the big island in Hawaii. Yes I know it is Hawaii, HI but it sounds cooler saying "the big island".

Notice the start and ending images which are not included in the pano. This is a Scott Kelby trick that I have adopted in my photography. It brackets the pano images so they are easy to select. Speaking of which, the screen shot below shows the selected images and a simple right click or Control click brings up a number of option. 

The "Edit In" is the menu item of choice as this is where you would normally make the jump to Photoshop (CMD-E or CTRL-E on windows does the same thing). This time you must move down the second list to Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. This takes these images into a Photoshop dialogue shown below.

I have the best results simply accepting the defaults on this screen by clicking OK. Now the magic begins. Normally when you take a Lightroom image to Photoshop, you get a copy of the image that is then saved back to Lightroom. We could have opened all these files in PS but then we would have had copies of all those images. Using the Merge to Panorama in Photoshop option simply uses the file and does not copy it. As you can see in the layers pallet below, all the files have been placed on their own layer with a layer mask.

This is really where the smoke and mirrors works its magic in Photoshop. The jagged edged black masks on the layers pallet shows the extent PS works at the pixel level. All to blend and position the images into one contiguous image. Once Photoshop has done its thing, I select the top layer and use the keyboard shortcut of Shift-Option-Command-E to merger visible while retaining the layers being merged.

This produces the following single image that we can now edit. One of the side effects of shooting a panorama is that the image ends up looking like a bow-tie after the merge that must be cropped resulting in a large amount of lost data. I was fortunate in this case. One of the techniques to mitigate this problem is to shoot in portrait. 

Anyhow I went to Free Transform (Cmd-T) and used the Warp option to streach the corners slightly. This is a subjective adjustment but you must be careful to maintain a realistic look to the image. If it starts to go funky you will have to either crop clone .

Finally a crop must be made. If not to clean up the edges then to remove the excess data in the image beyond the canvas. With all the tweaks and adjustments done in Photoshop you can send the file back to Lightroom. 

Simply click save and the image will show up in lightroom along with the original elements of the pano as shown below in the Lightroom Screen grab.

Stacking images will greatly increase the efficiency of you Lightroom workflow. If you like to keep the original images like I do, select all the images including the pano. Make sure the pano is the highlighted image of the selections. This will place the pano on top of the stack. Do not try to do this in a collection, it must be done from the Catalog Panel. 

Finally with the stack selected I hit the number 9 key to make it a blue selection. This way I can scroll or filter to very quickly see where my pano's are.

Notice I did not make any adjustments to the original images in Lightroom before taking them to Photoshop for the pano merge. Corrections would be made locally while in Photoshop knowing the limitations of Lightroom. Once back in Lightroom further adjustments are applied to the pano.

The biggest advice for a good pano is not to use a tripod (it helps of course), but to shoot in manual with an averaged exposure (I start at F/11 and adjust shutter speed from there) and once focused, go to manual and fire away. Here is the final image, enjoy!

Hey that pretty much fills the blog today. Like I promised last week I will have plenty of Hawaii images up this week.

Take care... Doug