Hardly Harley

Day 2. Again from the archives, and admittedly not one of the better spider/spider web shots you'll see. I think part of the problem with this shot is the spider is too small, it's really not as out of focus as it looks when you zoom in on it, but the web was the focus of this shot for me.

If you're a photographer chances are you've seen the various 5 day challenges going around the various social media sites. Last year I took part in a number of different short challenges, in between my year long photo project and my own personal photography. They're fun and usually a nice break from the other projects I have going on. This year I've not had much of a desire to take part in even the short five day challenges. Also, thankfully, I've not been called out by many to take part in a challenge. But when +Chuq Von Rospach of http://www.chuqui.com/, a photographer I admire, and a good all around guy, I felt I should take part. Now there doesn't seem to be any rule stating that photos need to be taken during the 5 day series so since I've been going through my archives I'm going to post never before seen photos, starting with this one. A redwood grove in black and white.

The theme over at +The Patch - PhotogrAphy Themed CHallenge was Urban Landscape. I didn't have a chance to shoot for that week, but since I was going through my archives and cleaning them out I ran across some San Francisco shots that I felt would work. For choices I wanted to choose a photo I hadn't used before and hadn't processed before. This is obviously the Port of San Francisco with a ferry coming in taken from pier 14.

Digital cameras are great. You can shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and not worry about wasting shots. Storage cards are cheap and plentiful, and the hard drives/SSDs/cloud backup these photos get stored on are also cheap. So why not shoot everything AND keep everything? Because looking through a project where you shot 47 pairs of an arch looking for the right shutter speed and timing of the water is annoying a year later. Because looking through a bunch of crap shots that you kept because maybe you can save one of those 47 pairs in post processing is a lie. There's no way I was going to process all 47 pairs (they're pairs because my camera was set to shoot B&W JPEGs and color RAWs) in search of the best final shot. Now thankfully at some point shortly after import I rated these shots. Basically I only ended up keeping the couple 4 star shots and deleted the rest. Odds are I won't miss those other 45 pairs.

So beyond thinking I could fix everything in post processi…

Like most photographers I shoot with two cameras; my dedicated camera and my phone. I like the flexibility because the phone let's me shoot and share right away, and I get to grab those shot's GPS coordinates and import them to my non GPS'd shots once I get into Aperture. The other nice thing with using Google's photo backup service is that Google "gifts" me with Auto Awesomed shots. Whether it's putting together multiple shots to get a panorama, HDR, or an animated gif, or just applying filters and borders, G+ usually spits out something nice, and admittedly gimmicky, to shoot out to my non-photography friends who won't judge me for using tools like this.

The nice thing is that this isn't just for mobile devices. On occasion I'll import, at the max resolution for free storage (2048 pixels on the long side), all the photos of a recent shoot just to see what Google+ gives me back. The above shot is supposedly based on 22 shots from my G3, whic…

As I mentioned yesterday+The Patch - PhotogrAphy Themed CHallenge theme for last week was Water and Landscapes, and I shared some of what I ended up doing in getting some shots for the project. When we first came up with the water and landscape theme I wanted to stay away from my most photographed waterfall in the area unless I felt I could do something different with it. After a river and creek excursion, and with a little daylight left I went to the waterfall to just see what could be seen.

I don't know if I was feeling more adventurous than usual, but I found myself scrambling over some rocks to get a unique for me perspective of the falls. I setup on a rock not much bigger than the base of my tripod and had to compose the shot through the awesome fully articulated viewer, which at times was frustrating. You try composing a shot with your back to the subject and needing to rewire right and left in your head while trying to beat the sun from setting so you can hopefully climb b…

A longer post today. Over on +The Patch - PhotogrAphy Themed CHallenge we're doing a month of Landscapes, and this week our sub-theme is Water. Occasionally as a primarily landscape photographer you have to get off the path to get a shot. For this challenge I found myself balanced precariously on a rock in the middle of a stream while my camera, on a tripod, was balanced just as precariously on a fallen tree trunk.

As you can see, I need different shoes for this shot. Thankfully no feet were harmed, or soaked, during this shot.