Hardly Harley

I thought this was going to be the week that I stumbled and didn't turn something in for at least one of the projects, but I was able to get photos in for both of them. Just not in a photographic state of mind. So for +Project 52 B&W our theme was night lights. Had I been on my game earlier in the week I would have lined something up with the moon through a window in my house illuminating the hall. By the time I got my act together fog and clouds obscured the moon and I was left with this night light. And a mirror.

I spend some time on G+ looking at photos. Usually I'm looking at style as I'm trying to figure out just what my style is. Other times I'm looking for ideas and subjects. I've been seeing a lot of these water arches recently so I was happy to come across one of my own. I'll have to try and venture back here with a little more water drama and not in the middle of the day.

This is a seven shot HDR. I wanted to get all the detail in the shadows of the rock formation so figured HDR was the way to go. Apart from that I used Topaz Labs Detail. It was a very windy day, and my fairly lightweight camera and tripod were probably moving a bit during shooting. Detail lets me lessen blur and sharpen things up a bit.

Just a quick post with some shots that I shared on Google+ that I thought I'd bring in here too. These were shot over the weekend. This first one is an infrared shot that tempted me after I had decided to not shoot IR anymore. For saying how windy it was on the coast, it was remarkably still here allowing this five second exposure to not look that bad in terms of motion blur. I've yet to figure out how to effectively do color channel switching, so the only thing I've done to this is set the white balance and increase contrast.

It's Monday and that means another recap. For +Weekly Photo Project 2013 our theme was technology.  There's not much to this shot, and I wouldn't place it high on my favorite lists. The one thing I will say about it is that flip-out and rotate touch screen made this a much easier shot to take. This was held as high up as I could reach, then when I thought I had the shot I wanted I just tapped the screen for the shot. Not much in the way of processing either. I wanted to emphasize the dirtiness of the dishes so took the shot into Topaz Labs Detail. All in all a boring shot.

My +Project 52 B&W is a very strick black and white group. No sepia toning. No toning above 15%, whatever that means. I'm sometimes surprised shades of grey are allowed haha. I suppose it makes sense, the group is a black and white group, but there's some fun to be found in toning. Topaz Labs Black and White Effects have some great dual and quad tone toning presets that I always want to play with but don't because of the rules. Well it's Thursday and this photo is (probably) only going to be used here on the blog so here's "Black Cerulean Tea Dynamic" from B&W Effects Cerulean collection.

I'm still trying to get a hold on toning, but it's basically moving color tones to be other color tones. This photo has four colors to it, a dark blue, a very light red, black, and white. I don't think Silver Efex Pro by Nik/Google has quad toning, but just the fairly standard dual tone. Hopefully I can play more with these in future photos.

I thought since our +Weekly Photo Project 2013 group just finished up the theme of HDR that I go into a little more depth on how I created my image. Most of my steps were taken from +Trey Ratcliff's wonderful +Stuck In Customs HDR walk through and changed to better fit my equipment and workflow. The above two photos show what the camera felt was the correct exposure for the scene and what my finished HDR photo turned out to be. And after the break I'll outline how I got from the shot on the left to the shot on the right.

We didn't change too many of the themes for +Weekly Photo Project 2013 when we were using the 2012 group's themes, but some did get the axe. In place of one of those themes was my suggestion for HDR. Yes, I might have suggested it because I knew I'd have no problem coming up with a photo, but I also thought of it as a good way to introduce the method to those who had never done it before. This is a 7 shot photo processed in Photomatix then bombarded with Topaz Labs' DeNoise, Adjust and Detail.

While hiking around I stumbled across this. I didn't really think much of it until I heard some kid wondering who/what lived in there. Man, where'd the imagination go? 8 year old me would have been betting on some kind of amphibious undiscovered monster living there. Maybe the North American Loch Ness monster. The kind of whirlpool action on the right just adds to the mystery of the cave. Man, I wish I could look at things like that kid again.

In terms of the photo itself, it's a seven exposure HDR. HDR does interesting things to water, which I tend to like, making it more turquoise and showing more contrast. I'm about at the end of my Nik collection trial and did process the photo through the two different sets of plugins. Though I liked how the photo looked initially coming out of HDR Efex Pro, I felt more comfortable going through the Topaz plugins in getting what I wanted

This was quite literally a last minute shot for +Weekly Photo Project 2013. I hadn't an idea for our theme of Night, and the weather wasn't helping much. So, I looked outside the front door. From my G+ post:
"So there I was, sitting at my computer looking at all the #weeklyphotoproject2013   photos when it dawned on me, tonight is the last night I can take a night photo (and be on time). Well, the weather was one reason why it came down to this. So, there I was squatting on my front doorway stairs with a remote shutter release in one hand, an umbrella in the other and my camera hanging upside down from my tripod, which I didn't know it could do until today, so there's that. Everyone's been there before, right? No? Well, the neighbors tend to look at you strangely."  That pretty much says it all. I did minimal work on the post processing side, some DeNoise-ing and a little brightening of the shadows.

On a rare sunny day in Humboldt I was able to trek to get this 7 shot panorama of College Cove with Pewetoll Island and Trinidad Head being fogged in.

This is a seven shot panorama processed in Photoshop for the actual stitching. I also ran it through Hugin, but have been finding Photoshop's stitching to be more consistent. I thought Hugin would handle these shots better since it was handheld, but Photoshop just beat out Hugin. I then ran two copies of the photo through Nik and Topaz Labs software and at the end I chose the Topaz Labs processed version. In Adjust I used the Vibrance pre-set and fiddled with the adjustments from there. Then to finish it I took to Detail. I had originally envisioned this shot in black and white, but wasn't able to get it together in time for posting, though I think I'll try it later.

For +Weekly Photo Project 2013 our theme was Playing With Light. I had a couple ideas on the theme, but when I got to shooting them they just didn't work out. So due to it being the last minute I had to find something in the archive. I liked this shot in black and white better, but it turned out ok.