From a couple weeks ago, our Seward trip. One of the resurrected photos from the messed-up sensor:
Peak near Portage
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A peak near Portage Glacier
Saturday, July 4th, 2009Motivation found, then lost again
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
A view from the Johnson Lake trailhead
I wrote yesterday’s post knowing that there would be a great opportunity for me to find motivation. Yesterday we took a nice, long trip down to Seward – that’s 120 miles (more or less) each way. Ostensibly, our goal was to visit the Seward Sea Life Center, which was great in its own right.
One thing I was hoping for, however, was to get that strike of inspiration back. It kinda struck a few times – the pic to the right is a good example. The clouds and sun creating something of a chiarascuro effect. Look at it closer up (click on it) – it’s a fairly neat photo. All the more impressive if you consider that it’s a 9-frame HDR. The technique was similar to the one outlined here, except that it was completely hand-held.
After getting home and starting processing, I now realize that I let my sensor get beyond dirty. It’ll take hours to recover most of the pics – this one is a lucky pic – the dirt is mostly obscured by the tones in the photo.
As you can guess, I’ll be writing about sensor cleaning soon enough.
A Black and White image from Monday
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
I think this is Bradley Peak, on the far site of Turnagain arm
Monday, driving home: had spend dinner with my folks at the Bird Creek campground (it’s all of 20 minutes south of Anchorage).
It was about 9pm – golden hour was just beginning. For some reason, the color version came out extremely blue and flat, despite the angles and the shadows. So I dropped it into Photoshop and opened NIK Silver Efex. A basic conversion, but I added some noise, burned in the top edge a little, and slapped on a red lens conversion.
Instant drama.
It was interesting, this reminds me of Ansel Adam’s famous shot of the half-dome. In his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, he mentions that he used a red filter on that image.
A note on abstracts
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Indian Pass - a hike to the south of Anchorage on the New Seward Hwy
When I originally started this blog, I had a stated purpose. I believe it’s on my “about” page right now: to learn. Well, I’m learning. For example, I’ve learned that I like to take abstracts. I never really thought about it before, but they’re always there. Even when I take landscape photos, it’s not about the obvious subject, but the way the subjects trace lines in the picture frame.
For example, when I took the photo to the right (in hindsight), I was seeing the sloping lines to the sides of the photo. Blame it on my (old, long in the past) background in economics. I like graphs, and I saw one in this photo.
I just didn’t know it until I started this blog.
Pics while biking
Monday, May 4th, 2009
Eastbound Northern Lights blvd.
The photo from yesterday’s post and the one to the right here are both pics that I took yesterday while out on a bike ride. This is one that I took towards the end of my trip – it’s no more than a mile from Goose Lake.
It’s supposed to range between mostly & partly cloudy for the rest of the week, so I suppose I’ll need to enjoy the memory of this for a few days.
At any rate, this is a prime example of why I like the sd500. I can shove it in a pocket & run around, stopping when I feel like it to take snapshots.
On that note, you can look forward to the rest of my posts this week being populated from my Sunday bike ride’s pics.