Monterey Bay on Late Summer Afternoon

Trying out the new video cam in preparation for a wedding shoot next week. This is a JVC camera, and their proprietary file format is NOT user friendly, but I think I have it now. In any event, it was a lovely day, as most here are.

Blue Angels and Lightroom2

I love playing with Lightroom. I did a couple of things here. First i went in with an "adjustment brush" and brought up the yellow lettering and trim. Then I put in a slight vignette to focus the eye on the center aircraft. Lightroom is a wonderful tool. It has many applications which can only improve the quality of the images we produce for our clients.

Adobe Lightroom 2 - A Wonderful Tool for Photographers

This ia just a marvelous tool for processing digital images, and here is an example:


Wild flowers atop the dunes at Monterey Bay.

Can you see what I did here? Look at the cumulus clouds and the coastline of Santa Cruz in the far distance. These were all but washed out in the original RAW file. I darkened the cloud with the brush took and goosed the saturation in the coastline. Bringing up these details greatly increased the "depth" of the image I think.

Click on photos for larger images.

Minolta to Sony - Wonderful Fit

While I hate to see the grief that has come to Circuit City, it certainly presents a lot of opportunties for bargains.

I have had for years a Minolta Maxxum 35mm with four very nice lenses. when I went digital, I got a Canon Rebel (thanks to a good friend in San Francisco named Manu) which has served me very well. I have thought about getting a Minolta, then Sony when they bought Minolta, but they were always more expensive then I thought made sense just for a home for my lenses, flash, remote etc. Then Circuit City went bust.

Well now all that equipment has a home. Thanks to Anita!

BTW, Spring has Sprung! This shot is from our backyard today and is a plum blossom.

Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur - My Favorite Image - and the Rewards of Adobe Lightroom

Of the many images I took at Pfeiffer Beach, this is the one I like best.

As much as anything, it is an exercise in the use of Adobe Lightroom.

The original image was pretty bland to the point of being monochromatic. I used just about every input available in the program to get this result. I darkened the lights, increased shadow, goosed the vibrance to the max (as opposed to saturation which I left alone). Other than the small blowout of the cloud, the result was impressive.

One Minute in Pacific Grove

I recently acquired an HD video camera and today took the opportunity to try it out. I am amazed how much technology and capability can be put in such a small package. This camera is a JVC GZ-HD3. I think that once I have a bit of experience that this will be a good addition to the camera bag and quite useful. With proper software it can produce Blueray discs and shoots at 1080p. A nice piece of equipment.

Shot these images freehand just experimenting. Ran about about 10 minutes of "tape" and a quick edit brought it down to this minute. Put a little canned music on for flavor, and there you are.

Tomorrow I'll get out the tripod and try to do some serious shooting.

Why I Love Lightroom

Today I went over to Route 1 and the mouth of the Salinas River. There is an old railroard bridge I have been wanting to shoot for a long while. The morning light looked good. It was contrasty, but i figured I could deal with that when I got home and loaded the images into Lightroom. that marvelous program did not disappoint me.

Tricky Exposures

A little techy stuff ... shooting in high contrast situations presents some interesting challenges. Here we have the dark rocks, the woman sitting on the rocks and the bright white of the surf that if properly exposed has all sorts of detail in it. If not properly exposed, the white of the water can "blow out," or the details in the dark areas lost to darkness. Adobe Lightroom makes this easier. Shooting in RAW makes it more so.

Fiddling with Google Analytics

I installed Google Analytics on the main web site. It took a while to configure, mostly because of the site building software I used, Yahoo Sitebuilder. But it seems to be working OK now. It provides some interesting data.

I recommend it if someone wants affordable, read: free, site tracking.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Where the fire did not reach ...

Up on the old coast road (see previous post) I found myself in a small valley lined with undamaged redwoods. I came upon a reminder of my Army days when I stumbled upon this Bailey bridge. I have built more than a few of these. They were the creation of a brilliant British Army engineer and can be found all over the world including the famous Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River in Israel.

This image is not all I would like. The blown out section in the middle confounded me. So, what the heck, lemonade from a lemon. I half toned the image to give it a surreal feel.

Do drop by my new web site, I'm pathetically proud of it :)

Yosemite - Half Dome at Dusk -The Magic of Dfine Noise Reduction

I got into my old film archive and was eager to clean up this picture which prior to processing looked like it had measles. It was a shame because it was one of those once in a life time type of shots. Yosemite does no co-operate with shots at dusk all that often.

The high speed film combined with low light really made for a splotchy sky.

I used Dfine, which is a programs for removing noise from digital images to try to do something about the grain. I used the automatic noise measuring mode, and this was the result.

Zoom!

A little more fun with DFine noise reduction.

This image of the Canadian Snowbirds was taken last fall at the Salinas International Air Show. The crystal blue sky was speckled due to high ISO and the clarity of the sky. For that reason it sat in the inventory until I applied the noise reduction software.

Not bad.

One More Flash Gallery

Here is one more. This is the first section from my portfolio and consists of seascapes.

Old Dog, New Trick - MJ Does His Frst Flash Gallery

This is a commercial job I am working on.

You can see it here.

Mini-Studio

We got an inexpensive mini-studio for product shooting. It comes with two two-sided screens ranging from bright white to black. Today I took a porcelain geisha and garden lamp out to give it a try.

Mission San Antonio in Black and White

So now I'm just banging away in the middle of an insomnia attack. 2:30 in the morning and I'm gray scaling photos. I guess there are worse things I could be doing :)

I liked this one for the depth. The light was very pleasing also. What a great location to shoot.

For anyone interested in going up to Mission San Antonio, do it in the fall, winter or spring. There are a few reasons for that. In the first place, the sun being directly over head in the summer makes for lousy pictures, no shadows etc. Secondly, it gets blazing hot up there in the summer.

Mission San Carlos Boromeo, Carmel, California

Playing with Photoshop a bit. This was an image I really could not do anything with as the light was behind the church. It was totally flat. Even when I equalized into a kind of painting it still did not stand out. So, I gave it a background and it popped a bit. I also learned a trick which was new to me.

More Fun with Photoshop

Well, first you need a decent image :)

I have had PS Elements around forever, but I seldom used it as I had CS. However, when my desktop went down (by the way, it's back and running fine) I turned to Elements which is on my laptop. On that program I found something called "Magic Extractor." What a nifty tool!

It is really a pain in the neck extracting a portion of an image in Photoshop. Cutting in on something as delicate as this gull with a 2 pixel brush takes time, lots of time.

Magic Extractor allows you to just click a few points on the object you want. You then use another tool and click a few points on the area you want to delete. You then click a "preview" button and go pour yourself a cup off coffee. The compter does the rest. Miraculous in my book!

You can select any size brush you want from rough to very fine. In this case I used 2 pixels to get a lot of detail on the edges. The results pretty well speak for themselves.

This last image was made using the "Magic Wand" in PS which son Will reminded works pretty well at extracting an image. The Magic Extractor works better, for me, when the foreground and background are more muddled. However, if there is a sharp contrast in color and tone between foreground and background, the Magic Wand is super fast. I just clicked once on the blue sky in this image, and BAM! it was gone.

You pays your money and takes your choice.

Watsonville California Victorian - A Bit of Photoshop Magic

Yesterday while in Watsonville I saw this beautiful Victorian home that has been transformed into offices. It sat in urban clutter and was hard to shoot. Call out Mr. Layers! Once into the layers I started playing around, and well... maybe I overshot the mark but it sure was fun.

The orignal image.

RAW v. JPEG And the Winner Is...

OK, my son (teaching old dog new tricks?) has convinced me about the utility of RAW. I worked on the gazing ball picture and was impressed with what I could do in RAW. I selected this picture because of the wide contrasts and shades. The blue sky, which had been over-exposed white (see post below), popped right up. I processed the image in Lightroom and Photoshop, and was well pleased with what I got with minimal work.