Hardly Harley

The Redwood Coast I've had this shot sitting around Aperture (yes, still Aperture) for almost a year now. I took this on my way up to Crater Lake. I like the shot, 101 (and yes, only 2 lanes, a far cry from the 4 or more in the Bay Area) literally hugging the coast and going in and out of Redwood forests with the ever present fog found in the area. I sat on this for awhile because I didn't like it as much as a quick, almost accidental snap I took with my Moto X which I ended up liking the composition more. Moto X Capture of 101 101 is more prominent in this shot, which is untouched by any kind of editing, except the auto editing Google+ photos does. The lines are stronger here, but the colors are muted. More muted than I remember them being, but also not out of the question for this area of the coast. I like the more prominent coast line in the top shot, which would have cut down on the road in the bottom shot. So between the two maybe there is no "better"...

Cape Mendocino Lighthouse, on the Lost Coast A little south of the Black Sand Beach I photographed earlier is Cape Mendocino Lighthouse. The lighthouse is located in a small community called Shelter Cove, on Point Delgada at Mel Coombs Park. For you lighthouse aficionados out there, here  is a write up on it's history. The area itself is an interesting mix of what I would assume are large vacation homes with great views of the ocean, a golf course, and a runway. The runway is in the middle of the community and looks to be about one of the craziest places I could think of to land and take off. The golf course is right next to the airport. Or it's part of the airport. I didn't really see much to divide the two. The timing for the shot wasn't the best, strong mid-afternoon sun. And I sadly forgot to switch from JPEG only to RAWs, which annoys me. I almost think of all these shots (over 200) as second class shots based on the fact they were shot in JPEG form only. ...

Leading Line (and Arches) Ah, the first photo post of 2015. I'm taking 2015 easy, as far as photo projects go. After 3 years of participating in, and/or running a weekly photo project, and all the associated deadlines of that, I'm relaxing with a monthly photo project. The project is called the 12 Rules of Photography Project, and deals with primarily 12 compositional rules. For January the rule was leading lines. My goal for the project was to have a number of photographs to choose from when selecting my final shot. I wanted quality shots. Possible gallery shots. Well, I started off on the wrong foot. The Black Sand Beach shown above is located on the Lost Coast of California. It's not exactly easy to get to, but I was excited to check it out. Unfortunately my camera was set to shoot just JPEGs for the previous postings on here. The JPEGs came out ok, but didn't give me the flexibility in post processing that RAWs give. After having played around with three or fo...

The Real Trinidad Lighthouse The Trinidad Memorial lighthouse has been featured often on these pages. Probably one of my favorite photos of the Memorial Lighthouse is this one that was used as a holiday card recently. Apparently though there is a functioning lighthouse out on Trinidad Head that the public can only see and access one day a year. Well, this was that day. Lighthouses As you can see the functioning lighthouse is not too far from the memorial lighthouse, and is a nice 20 minute hike from Trinidad Harbor, though the trail to the lighthouse is closed for most of the year. The lighthouse is the same size as the Memorial one, meaning quite small, but is fully automated. Two people on/in the lighthouse proves to be cramped, and the entries are a little tight, but you get an excellent view of water. From the lighthouse, looking inland, you can see a cabin right on the edge of the Head where the fog horn is. Fog Horn Cabin The trail leading down to this cabin is r...

Pewetole in Silhouette I don't know what it is, but this year just isn't the year of photography for me. I've not felt as motivated to shoot, and it shows not only in the quality of my shots but in the numbers when I compare just raw numbers of photos I took in 2013 and look at where I'm at now, at about the halfway point of 2014. Not to mention noticeable by how often this blog gets updated. I'm annoyed with myself on that. Last year was a banner year as far as number of posts and page hits were concerned, probably because I was posting 2-3 posts a week. I don't think I'm posting an average of 1 a week this year, so all that work has been flushed. So the photo. One of my favorite subjects when I get the chance to shoot it, Pewetole "Island". I was going through my archive of this year when I came across this. I had actually already processed it and had it ready to post, but it got lost in the cracks. Which brings up another post regarding A...

Trillium Falls Waterfalls. I love finding them and photographing them, so here's a new one, for me; Trillium Falls. Named after a flower that blooms in abundance in the surrounding area. Located in the Redwood National and State Parks, just north of a tiny town called Orick, the falls are easily accessed by a short hike or about a mile or so. If you've never been in a redwood forest it's really a very different kind of place. It's very lush, humid, and green with all kinds of ferns and plants on the ground and towering redwood trees. Sound doesn't escape the forest it echoes inside it. For an outdoor place there's a definite feeling of being indoors. The falls aren't the most exciting waterfalls there are, it's maybe ten feet high, but there are lots of little cascades that make for interesting mini-falls shots. The above shot is taken from a foot bridge and as you can see it's very green. The shot is also an HDR shot. "Upper" Tri...

Brookwood Covered Bridge Our theme for  +The Patch - PhotogrAphy Themed CHallenge  this week was Bridges. I had a couple in mind at the beginning of the week, but these were bridges I had already shot before and I was struggling with how I'd shoot them in a fresh light. I shot some and thought I was done. When I got them into Aperture and started working on them I wasn't exactly thrilled with them. They met the themes, sure, but they looked like retreads, or worse, exact copies, of shots I had already done. Actually because of the weather recently these shots were worse than the original shots I had done. Basically I would have rather submitted 2 year old photos over these. So I asked Google if there were any covered bridges nearby. Oddly Sure enough there were three, but time and weather limited me to only getting to one of them in time for the project's deadline. Built in 1969 the Brookwood Covered Bridge is the longest of the three bridges at 66 feet and crosses J...

Carson Mansion This is the Carson Mansion in Old Town Eureka. I can't imagine the work that must be done in hanging all these lights on the house. The shot is a 7 shot HDR and will more than likely grace Christmas cards next year, so act surprised. I find shooting houses with lights like this to be tricky. You wouldn't think it, but those little lights can easily overwhelm a photo. And waiting for complete darkness is a mistake. The HDRing does a decent job of keeping them in check while bringing out the other parts of the house. The large star was actually the moon, but it didn't come out very well, so a little star burst was added. I think it worked well since it will probably be made into a card. The lighting of the area was with some horrible, but probably historically correct, yellow lighting that was a challenge both in shooting and in processing. RAW files help a lot, and the ability to paint in white balance corrections, especially in the walkway, really helped ...

Samoa Coast Guard Station, Humboldt Bay For me when I was taking this picture the clouds were the subject, the Coast Guard Station a nice supporting actor. Located on north spit of the Humboldt Bay, this unit sees a lot of search and rescue action throughout the year. Though the main house is a nice house on its own. This was a 7 shot handheld HDR shot.

Elk at recess Shot this awhile back and really liked how it came out. The fog, the school house (now a museum) and a herd of elk just chilling out and feeding. Processing this photo was a little difficult. I wanted to keep the fog, bring out the school house some, and capture the nonchalance of a herd of elk just roaming around. Infact I processed two versions of this shot, this color shot and a black and white shot and liked them both, though I chose the color one for the schoolhouse.

Streaky cloud sunset I've said it before, but I enjoy panoramic photos, even if they are troublesome to put together. I do panos so sparingly that I often forget why I don't do them more often, until I get to doing another pano. Though to be honest it's when I decide to try for an HDR pano where I really get into trouble. This shot is not an HDR panorama, but does include some new for me techniques for shooting. For those keeping track, this was taken on the same day as this . The clouds give it away. The first of these techniques was to shoot my shots with the camera in the portrait position. This didn't make sense to me at first as my camera covers more area horizontally than vertically so it would take more shots to cover the same area, meaning more chance of my stitching software to mess up. So I tried to take shots with more overlap to help the software out. The main benefit I saw with this is that the I had more excess photo to crop for the final shot. I was...

Pewetoll Island just  off the coast of Trinidad Barely off the coast of Trinidad State Beach is Pewetoll Island. Actually, I'm not really sure this can be called an island, that's how close it is. I imagine Pewetoll must be a Native American Indian word or name, though the Internet is failing me, or my Googling skills are getting rusty. This is a 7 shot HDR that I initially thought wouldn't be of much use because of it being a generally bright day, but the HDRing brought out details in the deeper shadows that I hadn't expected to notice. Funny thing about this shot, for me anyway, is that when taking the photos I wasn't even looking at the reflection in the water. So when I got to looking at these photos I had a nice surprise and it instantly improved the photo. Probably shouldn't have mentioned that part and just played it off like it was all part of the plan. Oh well, hope you enjoy it.

Have I mentioned I really like black and white? This is the Victorian Inn at Ferndale. It's a 5 shot HDR that looked quite good in color, but as I'm considering posting a weekly black and white shot thought I'd see how it looked in monochrome. The clouds, which were ok in color, just really jumped and the intricacies of the hotel architecture were more apparent. And since the building is from a time when color photographs were a rarity the black and white treatment seemed to fit. The process: HDRing in Photomatix Pro, then taking the color version to Topaz Labs Adjust. Did some levels and other work in Aperture then finished off in Silver Efex Pro II. The Victorian Inn

Not exactly sure why I took this shot. I think it's because I liked the boat  and the cages on it. I can't say what this type of boat is used for, and the cages don't look like the crab cages I'm familiar with, but I'm no fisherman. Everything just looks ready to go. This is a 5 shot HDR taken during the Kinetic Grand Championships. In the background with the flags was the starting point for the water part of the race. Pier Scene

Old town Eureka has some great specimens of Victorian houses north of San Francisco, and 2 of them are right across the street from each other. The Carson House, named after the owner and big time lumber tycoon, is an odd green on green affair. The Carson House is now home to the Ingomar Club which looks to be a very private mens club devoted to keeping the mansion in pristine shape. There are no public tours of the inside of the mansion. Across the street from the mansion is the slightly smaller Pink Lady, a house Carson had built for his daughter. Click to see larger Click to see larger Both are HDR shots, just gone about in different ways. The Ingomar Club is made from one RAW shot that I then made two other exposures from, under and over exposed. Because RAW files carry so much more data in them (14 megs vs 3-4 megs for JPEGs for my GF2) I'm able to pull a lot of the shadow or high light detail out of a single RAW exposure. Which is good when I forget to chan...

For the most part the GF2 feature wise is a minimum step up over the old Canon. One area though that I find it lacking in is in the ease of tacking panoramic photos. The Canon has a shooting setting where after taking the first photo it would show the right edge of the previous shot photo so you could line up the next shot. This aided in making sure you didn't miss areas. The GF2 has no such setting. In a segment of cameras where the competition has a cool sweep panorama (press the shutter and slowly sweep across the scene) I find the lack of a panorama function to be annoying. Shooting a panorama is obviously not impossible; try to frame shots with a marker on the edge to help line up the set shot. And of course USE A TRIPOD. Photoshop Elements 8, which came with my extremely useful Wacom Bamboo tablet, did an excellent job of piecing together the 5 shots. This is a shot of Trinidad Bay. Click to see larger

Still going through the break in period of the new camera. I'm finding it to be far more sensitive than the Canon, which is both great and infuriating. Today's shot is one I took while just trying to get used to it. Possibly the smallest lighthouse (though not in service, I believe) located in Trinidad, CA up in Humboldt. Click to see larger

I was hoping today's post would be about my new camera with at least a photo of the new camera, but UPS has deemed Friday to be delivery day. Today's photo helped hammer home to me the demise of my Canon. I had originally planned on taking some HDR brackets of Battery Point Lighthouse, but when I looked at the shots it quickly became apparent I was going to have to use the brackets to get a somewhat decent shot. The original, non-HDR'd shot, which showed on the LCD as well exposed, came out looking very under exposed, making the bright sky look dull, and the shadow areas a black hole. When I got home and saw these on my computer I was really disappointed. I had really high hopes for this, and other shots I had taken, but unless it was in direct bright sunlight, all my shots turned out under exposed. I initially thought I had a setting wrong on the camera, but then I saw some shots taken at the same time by another camera using about the same settings and it was much ...

Today's shot is from a highway side tourist attraction in what I call Way Northern California. Usually I write these chintzy attractions as third rate stops that happen to have something a little more than your average rest stop. I use their restroom, check out the overpriced giftshop, then it's back in the car. Then I saw the Trees of Mystery . Well actually I saw Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox. Just to be clear, that is a full sized Toyota Camry on the left. So just how big are Paul and Babe? Their plaques answer those questions: Aside from these big things, Trees of Mystery boasts some trails showing off some very large and very old Redwood trees, and a gondola ride to a ridge some 500 feet up. Admission for a place as out of the way as this is is admittedly steep, but it's not something that will leave you feeling ripped off. 

Today's posting is a 3 shot HDR of a mausoleum located in a cemetery that I happened to see over the Labor Day weekend. The cemetery itself was located in Ferndale where a lot of the movie Outbreak was filmed. It sits on a plot of land that starts off flat but quickly raises up to take up a hillside. I tried to take shots of the who plot of land, but they didn't really capture the steepness. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with this shot. Initially I put it through Silver Efex which gave it a more Halloween like look to it, but it didn't feel right for a shot taken in the middle of the day. I think a cemetery during the day has a much different feel than at night and the monochrome look didn't look right for a day shot.