January 2009

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The Elph strikes again!

January 30, 2009 in Avian, Camera, General, Landscape, Photography | 1 comment

Okay, I’ll admit it, I was slightly bored today in class.  So I got to thinking about the different modes on the elph and wondered if they had a portrait mode, a beach mode, a stiching mode and a sunset mode why didn’t they have a nighttime mode.  So I pull it out of my bag at lunch and lo-there it was Nighttime mode (no MypoicJoe, not Nightmare mode!)  So after a bite to eat with some old friends I had to walk off the Filet and so I wandered around the city along Atlantic Ave which allowed me to shoot my favorite Boston Landmark-the Boston Custom House.  I shot it from many sides, even getting the moon as it peaked out from the clouds in a few but none struck my fancy as much as this one:

The Boston Custom House

As I wandered further I came across one of my other favorite winter landmarks-the walkway behind the Marriott Long Wharf that leads to the North End (must go to Mike’s and get rainbow cake with marzipan before I head home, if you’ve never been to Mike’s Pastry the next time you go to Boston it is a must-it’s always packed and for good reason, it is some of the best Italian cookies, canoli, pastry and marzipan to be found.  Anywhere)  As I was saying, the walkway is almost always lit up, but I guess this year it’s been so cold they haven’t wanted to take down the wreath:

Behind the Marriott Long Wharf

Both of these were taken on Nighttime mode and I think it is a big improvement over the one of the Park Street Church from last night there is still appreciable noise but it was much more easily handled in photoshop.  The only processing I did other than using Noise Ninja was some exposure control to bump up the black and a bit of clarity increase (both done in LR2)

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The little Elph that could

January 29, 2009 in Camera, General, Image Processing, Landscape, Photography | 3 comments

Mike bought me an awesome gift for Christmas, a little Elph880, or as I like to call it the little Elph that could.  The reason is that it is the Elph that could is because it is there to do it.  The idea is that I keep it with me at all times so when I don’t have a “real” camera and something strikes my fancy I can still try and get the image.  It takes a bit getting used to, no viewfinder being the worst part, I’m still getting nose prints all over it, and it doesn’t play well with winter gloves.  All that aside it’s fun!  I took a few pictures with it tonight walking back from the BCEC (the Boston Convention and Expo Center) to my hotel. The first was taken from the bridge over I93 just before the sun was beginning to set:2009_01_29_boston-8sm

This next was taken walking down Tremont street towards Park Street Station, I liked the way the Moon and Mars were juxtaposed near the Park Street Church:

2009_01_29_boston-12-editThere is a lot of noise but that’s because I needed to use the flash since there was no way I could hand hold this without it.

This last one surprised me with the lack of noise, again I needed to use the flash but it’s much less noisy:2009_01_29_boston-20sm

All and all a fun camera and great to have it with me at all times.  Thanks to my wonderful husband.

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A few 5DMII images

January 27, 2009 in Avian, Camera, Canon, General, Image Processing, Landscape, Photography, Uncategorized | 2 comments

I had an awesome weekend playing with my new 5D, I used it just for landscape images on Thursday down at the wildlife refuge and used my 30D for wildlife images.  Then on Friday I went back and tried it for everything, wondering if the file size would compensate for the “loss” of focal length.  I didn’t use it on the full RAW size because I forgot an extra card but I thought it did pretty well.  All of the below are crops to 30% of the original image size except for the sunset, that is full frame.  The image information is in the exif data,  I’ll take more time next week with some other images but I’m off for a convention for the weekend and just wanted to get these up:

Short Eared Owl – hunting:

Short Eared Owl

Brandts watching the surf:

Brandts

Brandts deciding the surf was high enough, B&W:

Brandts B&W

(Almost) Sunset, Sachuest NWR:

2009_01_23_sachuest-513

And I really do want to thank my friend Terry because without his constant reminding me of how awesome his 5D was I probably never would have gotten mine.  I was vacillating between the 5DM2 and the 50D and although I do alot of  wildlife where that 1.6X factor is awesome the full frame is incredible.   So a belated thanks again!

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Seeing the small in the big picture

January 18, 2009 in Landscape, Photography | 1 comment

So it was freezing, literally, Saturday morning but I felt inspired for the first time this year to get out and shoot.   Got up and started to bundle up, looked at the thermometer and it was -1F so I added a bit more clothing, grabbed my 30D, 24-105 and a polarizer and headed out.  I went to a small stream and dam behind a house off a main road near me.  The trick with this was that it there is no shoulder there to start with and with the piles of snow there’s even less place to stand, at Mikes suggestion I wore my orange hunting season vest to be visible, which got me a thumbs up from a passing officer.

It was COLD!  After about 10 minutes I forgot I had toes but it was alright.  I was right up on the guard rail and wishing I could go over and down towards the stream bed but that is (I think) private property and I didn’t want to take a swim.  The sun was just getting high enough to light the little dam and the rime ice that had formed on it during this week of relentless cold.  My eye was drawn to the corner of the dam and the way the ice and water were mixing.  I’m a huge Moose Petersen fan and he’s been really enthused lately about the D3X he tried and how he could get fabulous image subsets from the huge files it gave him (and it doesn’t hurt he’s a totally awesome photographer).  Now I use a Canon 30D and it’s not got the oomph that a D3X does and since I only took my 24-105 (no way I was changing lenses in the cold and on the side of the road, and ditto for carrying an extra body and lens) I had this to work with:

Zoomed in to 105 of the ice and dam

I played around with a few crops, this was one I liked but it still didn’t do it for me:Vert crop of the ice and water

Then I played some more and finally ended up with this:The final crop

Maybe not quite the intricate detail of a tiny portion of a huge file but still, it’s seeing the small detail in a scene and it’s still pretty sharp.  Almost as sharp as the pain in my toes that took about an hour and a hot shower later to finish thawing out.

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When bad things happen to good files

January 15, 2009 in Camera, Photography, Photoshop, Vacation | 1 comment

The keyword to protecting files is redundancy.  Merriam Webster defines redundancy as “superflous repetition” or “an acto ro instance of needless repetition” which is true but essential in file management.  How many times have you heard people say they lost documents, files, images because they forgot to backup, or they never backed up because they didn’t have a problem?  Way too many, and I’ve always winced when I hear those words “oh, I don’t have anything important so I don’t backup”  Well, nothing important until you miss it…

I’ve always thought I had a great system for backing up.  I actually don’t import my images to the hard drive on my computer, I used to do that then spin them off onto a external drive as a backup then to a second drive when I had to delete them off my C: drive because of space requirements (redundancy, redundancy redundancy).  But when I started to use lightroom I realized that wasn’t going to work well since I would have to then reassociate the files with the catalog when ever I moved them off the C: drive.  I have a 1TB drive with a firewire connection so I decided to use that as my image drive and then use another 1TB drive that is USB as my backup.  With the firewire connection I never noticed a delay in processing with CS4 or in LR2 so that was great, and I had plenty of room to work with. I use Beyond Compare to check that folder against the other image folder in my other external drive to make sure things are up to date and all revisions are reflected in both drives.  When I’m actively working on a project I don’t compare as often as I do when I do small shoots, which could be daily.

Which brings me to the title.  In the middle of working on the photos from Antigua in Lightroom2 I suddenly had an urge to look at some images I took earlier in the year and post them up to flickr (I’m not really ADHD, I just needed a break from culling and grading images).  Easy-peasy I use the import tool, selected the folders that hadn’t already been imported into LR2 and poof there they were.  Did what I wanted, then went back to working on the Antigua images.  Finish the Antigua images, port the .jpgs I wanted to Mike and then review some more images from earlier in the year and then 2 days ago remembered I hadn’t backed up the Antigua folder since I had started working on images.

Bell of Doom starts ringing here…

I go to beyond compare to copy the sub folders from my Sandals Antigua folder over to the backup drive, then start doing something else.  A few minutes later I look over and it says “35 minutes remaining 2500files” or something similar.  Huh?  So I stop the compare and start looking…It seems that when I imported all of those folders to LR2 I did not fully go through all the menus and I imported and copied those folders as subfolders in my Sandals Antigua folder instead of importing the files at their current location.  Well, no worries I’ll just delete all … those … subfolders… which I did, all … those … subfolders.  Including those subfolders that contained all of the exported PSD’s and DNG’s and .jpgs that I had been working on from the Antigua trip.  All .. those… nicely … nestled … subfolders …

Which, because they were deleted via beyond compare, are not in the “trash” or anywhere to be found.  So all of those .psd’s that I had with their nice layers, the HDR’s and photomerges I  had done that I hadn’t finished … yet … will not be finished unless I go back through all of those images and re-do them.

So what do I bring out of this.  a)  I’m lazy.  If I had imported the files to start with on my C: drive and worked on them there then exported them to my Image drive I would have somewhere along the way had a copy of the subfolders because I backup my whole C: drive every week to (yet another) drive.  Yes I have a drive farm on my desk, some day I’ll invest in a Drobo. b) no matter how good I try to be and how good my backup systems are there is still room for error and I am very human and make very big errors.  c) I have to think twice before hitting delete, or only deleting via explorer, not using the back-up software to do it.  and d) When I go to bed I will have a good cry over all that work, gone.

At least the good news is that my 5DMII has been shipped, and to continue to prove just how human I am, I see that somehow my shipping address is very very wrong.  This has been a long week.  I shall call Adorama in the morning, right now I will play some Titan Quest and slay some poor, unsuspecting Gorogons or Satyrs, then I shall go to bed and dream of lost .psd’s

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2 cool iPhone apps for photographers

January 11, 2009 in Photography | 4 comments

I love my iPhone, I still have the original one with no complaints about speed (even though I live in 3G area).  Now there’s a reason to love it even more-there are a few really cool apps out there for photographers:

My friend Terry talked about the HearPlanet Application in his blog, which of course meant that I had to go and get for my iPhone immediately, although I don’t do too much urban photography it’s a great app for learning about great places to shoot almost where ever you are (although why anyone would want to learn about Valley Falls is beyond me but it comes up when I use my current location)

Scott Kelby the photoshop genius and guru talked about Focalware by Spiral Development in his Friday News Stuff blog.  Focalware tells you sunrise and sunset times as well as lets you use the azimuth for determining the best time of day for shooting a scene depending on what time of light you want falling on it.  Focalware is $8.99, a bit steep for an iPhone app but for the landscape photographer it’s a really awesome app.  I’ve already used it to help plan our trip to Hawaii this fall (gotta love having a convention there to make the trip possible (and partially tax deductable)).  Because of it I was able to find out when the full moon will be and shift my trip forward a week so that we will be able to do some full moon photography of the lava flows at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.  Well worth the price already.

So two pretty cool iPhone apps for photographers, I’ll post more as I find or hear about them

The Antigua vacation website is up!

January 4, 2009 in Vacation | No comments

Mike finished the vacation website this afternoon and as always it’s a great job, we each poured through about 600-1000 images (me being the high end one) and tried to pick the best to post.  You can find it here:  Sandals Antigua 2008.  We hope you enjoy.

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Second Guessing (or why in some good respects 2009 won’t be all that much different than 2008)

January 1, 2009 in Avian, Photography, Photoshop, Vacation | 8 comments

2008_12_16_sandalsantigua_0152b

I’ve talked with quite a few photographers about their work.  When do they consider an image “done” and most of them feel when they’ve watermarked the image, posted it or printed it they’re done with it.  Unless they learn something new they pretty much leave it hang, so to speak.  I find it hard to do that unless I’m working on a new project and even when I’m doing that and I’ve finished a number of images I still review the ones I’ve finished as I pick a new one to go forward with.

Case in point:

One of the first images I worked on when we got back from Antigua was one of a pair of Royal Terns fighting for a spot on a piling.  When I finished the image, reduced and sharpened it I went to save it as a .jpeg and it was pretty large-over 290mb.  We try to keep images for our website under 150mb so I took the easy way out and did a “save for web” function in photoshop.  I didn’t look at it again for a few days but when I did I didn’t like what I saw:

Royal Terns fighting for position

Royal Terns fighting for position

A second look showed it was oversharpened, some of the whites were blown out and the image just wasn’t as exciting as it had seemed.   So I did a bit more work, I’d saved both the original .dng that I had exported the image from Lightroom as and the .psd that I created after I worked on it in Photoshop.   Back in Lightroom I cropped about 20% of the image, used the adjustment brush to reduce the brightness and the exposure on the blown out feathers (bringing out some feathers that were actually standing away from the bottom Terns’ body).  I actually did exactly the same sharpening I had done originally (highpass only on the terns and the piling and adjusting the opacity) but this time I just saved it as a jpeg at the same resolution but did not use “save for web” the results were, in my mind, much more pleasing.

Back in the begining of Decemeber I try to think about what New Years resolutions I wanted to start implementing before the New Year rolled around.  The first was that I wasn’t going to be so self critical.  I guess I broke that one before it got a chance and I don’t feel so bad about it.

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Happy New Year

January 1, 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

Just a quick post to wish everyone a happy, healthy and hopeful 2009.