Hardly Harley

Over at the Google+ 12 Rules of Photography community led by +Levi Moore, our monthly theme for March was patterns. In keeping with my goal to find the theme in a genre of photography I enjoy doing, I was looking for patterns in landscapes. I at first wanted the rocks to be the pattern, but in looking at the definition of pattern:
: a repeated form or design especially that is used to decorate something : the regular and repeated way in which something happens or is done : something that happens in a regular and repeated way I came to the conclusion that the rocks weren't a pattern, but the waves were. As is typically the case when I'm shooting with waves I had a gazillion shots to go through to find the one that had a good number of waves and developing waves and a little drama with a wave crash. The photo was edited in Aperture (yes, still Aperture. My Lightroom migration has stalled out at the moment) and in the +Topaz Labs suite of plugins, most notably Clarity.

The North Pacific is known for it's rocky and treacherous shoreline. Some of these "rocks" are more like small islands, that on bright sunny days like the day this shot from my archive was taken, make it seem like a great place to build a small island house. But then you have to remember just how bad the storms and waves can get. Photographically, obviously, these shores make for a more interesting photography session than stereotypical sandy beaches.

About the shot itself there's nothing really special about it. It's not an HDR (which I'm realizing I'm utilizing less and less these days) and was processed with Aperture and +Topaz Labs.

The nice thing about tackling a website move/overhaul/redesign and a photo library software migration is I get to go through old shots and find some that I might have missed. In my case I'm finding a lot of shots I've missed. It happens to me because I get so focused on maybe 2 or 3 shots good shots of the primary subject I want to shoot that these filler shots just get thrown by the wayside after I finish processing what I think are the jewels of a particular shot.

This is just your run of the mill, every day, ho hum sunset. This is not an HDR shot, and is really a failure for what I really wanted. With a 4 second shutter speed and f18(!) I wanted to get more streakiness in the water to play out, but it just wouldn't work for me. So I cropped that part out and had the focus be on the sky.

Another street photography shot. I've already mentioned that I'm not very comfortable with shooting random people on the street, so this was an exercise to get over that. It didn't work. With this shot I was zoomed in all the way so I could be as far away as possible from my subject. The timing worked out great that I caught her looking back over her shoulder, making this a far more interesting shot, but I immediately felt uncomfortable having taken the photo.

In terms of photo processing I elected to go with a mostly black and white look. The light was strong golden hour light, but it was hitting the background cars and building so I wanted to minimize that distraction. I then brought some of the red back into the shot.

Beaches in the middle of the day aren't my favorite places to photograph. Unless I'm in a black and white kind of mood that is. Most beaches under the harsh noon day sun have their colors overpowered, or are too subtle to really notice. Not this one. After getting over some hills this line of rocks drew my eye. I took a number of shots of them, mainly from the opposite end looking out towards the sea, but I found this view to be more interesting. The shot itself is an HDR shot to try and better pull out the details of the rocks in shadow and the cave like feature in the cliffside.

Blog move update. The honeymoon effect, as they say is over. The excitement of a new platform, themes, plugins, and it being, more or less mine (Wordpress still owns the basic platform, and GoDaddy owns my hosting) has given way to the cold hard reality of what moving my blog will take. There are over 450(!) posts here that first have to be imported into Wordpress. Thankfully there's a plugin fo…

For the 12 Rules Photo Project I'm taking part in over on Google+, our rule or theme for February was Texture. Now one of my goals for this project was to try and shoot photos that interest me and meet the monthly theme, as opposed to shooting something that matches the theme but I have little interest in. For Texture most people think macro or close up shots to get detail in things like fur, skin, or textured walls. Those are all excellent texture shot ideas, but I was looking for a landscape style shot.
For my shot we have the texture of the hills, if you think on a larger scale, the different textures of the grass and trail, and even the calm and smooth water. It may not be an obvious texture shot, but it works for me.
As I mentioned yesterday my blog is now in transition to another blogging platform home. One feature I'm evaluating on this post is mobile app ease of use. Blogger offers an app that allows me to write and edit posts, but little else. I'm disappointed wi…

So after posting about how unhappy I was with Blogger, and realizing it's been a long time growing, I've decided to do something about it. I decided to take advantage of some GoDaddy hosting that gave me a year of their Economy hosting for $12. Ideally I would have had a production ready site ready to go at the time of hosting purchase, but I don't. So now I feel a little pressure to get going on the production of the site. So, I spent my Saturday downloading and installing MAMP, the set of tools needed to run a web server environment on my MacBook Pro, then install and setup Wordpress and Drupal. Also, I feel a little weird talking about how I'm going to be leaving Blogger on Blogger. I feel like I'm cheating on it, or something.
What am I wanting from my site? A more customizable and responsive theme is top of the list. This theme should show off my photos in the best way possible no matter what size screen they're viewed on. The theme should be modern looki…