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Showing posts from March, 2013

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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Peaking Sunset

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Topaz'd Sunset Pulled this set out of the archive. Earlier this week Nik (owned by Google) released a new version of their software plugin suite for Aperture (and those other photo editors) for a much reduced price of $150. Considering the suite used to go for $450-$500 this was a pretty big deal. In this suite is an HDR plugin (HDR Efex), a black and white conversion (Silver Efex), a color and tone enhancer (Color Efex), a sharpener, and a denoise tool. I had gotten Silver Efex and absolutely love it, but had tried some earlier version of HDR Efex that I felt weren't as good as Photomatix, and I couldn't get into using Color Efex. But with this new release and tempting price I thought I'd try them again. Nik'd Sunset I denoised in Topaz's DeNoise. After playing with Nik's version I just felt more comfortable with DeNoise and wanted the 2 HDR photos to start off on the same equal footing. After that one set of exposures went to Photomatix for HDRin
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Weekly Photo Projects, Week 12

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No More Fires for This Guy Another Monday another week done for my photo projects. For  +Weekly Photo Project 2013  the theme was Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I was tempted to find a copy of the movie and just shoot that, but then this abandoned firetruck ruined those plans. This is a seven exposure HDR that might have gotten a little too sharp and crispy. Especially in the sky, which is why I cropped it the way I did.
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Putting It All Together

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Cool barn Recently a friend of mine shared with me some really great faux color infrared photos. Though he didn't know it the shots bummed me out because the quality of them were something I wouldn't be able to mimic until I permanently alter a camera to only shoot in the infrared spectrum. My main problem with how I shoot IR is that due to the very long exposure times I get so much blur that I can't stand looking at my own photos. So I decided to try and challenge myself and shoot trying to minimize the biggest weakness of my setup, blur. On this really bright and sunny day (the same day I shot this panorama ) trees were ruled out because there was a slight breeze. Bushes were ruled out for the same reason. But a field seemed to do the trick. A field with a barn in it worked even better. Still trying to figure out just how to expose for IR I did a couple things different. First I set a custom white balance on the grass, with the IR filter on my lens. Then I put the
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Weekly Photo Projects, Week 11

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Panoramic Spring Week 11 came and went with little fanfare. For  +Weekly Photo Project 2013  I used this five shot panorama that I originally thought would be a throw away shot. I was trying to use my auto exposure lock function on my camera (which either didn't work the way I expected, or just didn't work at all for this shot) and thought I'd be tossing this shot after I finished stitching the five shots together. I ended up keeping it because I liked the vibrant colors, and really liked the clouds. If you zoom in (on the original at least) you can even see what I hope to be the last patches of snow on the background mountains.
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Pewetoll Island From the Other Side

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Pewetoll Island and Trinidad Head I'm glad I was able to capture the other side of Pewetoll Island at sunset. The light was hitting the island just right, but I was having a hard time capturing it. So I did what I often do and turned the auto-bracket option on and fired of 7 exposures. Then I quickly scampered off the rock that was soon going to be underwater. I couldn't find a single exposure that I really liked so went to HDR them all. It worked out really nicely I think. But I didn't like the large amount of water that was originally showing at the bottom of the photo, and cropping it at 16x9 wasn't doing enough for me. So this is a 2.35x1 crop, or what is sometimes referred to as a cinema crop, since a lot of movies these days are coming out like this. I liked how it worked for this shot. In the background and to the right is Trinidad Head, and to the left you can just make out some of the coastal houses that make up the town of Trinidad.
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Weekly Photo Projects, Week 10

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Pewetoll Island A little late with the blog posting because I was a little late with one of the photos for this week. For  +Project 52 B&W  I went and grabbed a quick shot of Pewetoll Island (also shown here ). The choppier water left me unsure about how the reflection would turn out, but I like that it's not as detailed as past shots I have of it. I love the detail in the island and trees. This G3 is really impressing me, still.
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Revisiting an Old Friend

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An Old Friend Haven't been in a photography mood lately, which is why I completely missed last week and am late with this week's posting. I think I need to dig into my archives and work on some of those. When I get a new camera I like to look through my archive at photos I've really liked from my old cameras and try to recreate the shot with the new camera. This gives me a chance to evaluate the new camera and how it differs from the past ones. This isn't one of those shots that I would use for comparison, mainly because this is two shots merged into one. Using my neutral density filter I took a shot of the falls at f22 giving me a couple seconds of exposure to get the silky look of the falls. Unfortunately it was a bit windy so the foliage around the falls were not very sharp to blurry. So I kept the water part then masked in a shot I took at a much faster shutter speed to pull the foliage in nice and sharp.
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Weekly Photo Projects, Week 9

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Foggy Trees Week 9 almost had me diving into my archive to satisfy one group, and a last minute shot for the other. For  +Weekly Photo Project 2013  weather and timing weren't working in my favor four our landscape theme. I was never out shooting at the same time the sun was out. I was thinking I'd need to go into my archive to find something when I happened across this. I had accidentally shot this in auto-bracket mode, giving me 7 exposures, so I jokingly played with HDRing it thinking nothing would come of it. The exposures were really flat to begin with, but when it came out of the HDRing there was more depth to the trees there. As the day was very monochromatic, and HDR didn't help with the color, I decided to just ditch all semblance of color in Topaz Labs B&W Effects 2. I started off in their Platinum Collection, which makes use of quad-toning, added some grain to disguise my poor noise reduction technique (or lack thereof) and added a vignette to it. I find
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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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