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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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Weekly Photo Projects, Week 17

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Night Lights. Literally 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.
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Through the Arch

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The Archway 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.
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Quick Post

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The IR Path 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.
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Weekly Photo Projects, Week 16

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Searching for aliens? No, searching for something to watch on TV 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.
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Toning Fun

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Black Cerulean Tea Rocks 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 ...
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Babbling Brook Before and After

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Baseline Single Exposure and Final HDR photo 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.
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Weekly Photo Projects, Week 15

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Babbling Brook 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.
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Popular posts from this blog

Running... Again?

Image
  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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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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