Morning Reflections

Morning Reflections

And it's once again been another month since I last posted an update with a new photo. We're still suffering from less than ideal conditions for photography here in San Diego so I haven't gotten out much. In fact, not at all since I took the last image just over a month ago.

I'm also trying to wrap my head around a few things concerning my site. Chief among them is image sizing. My camera outputs images in a 2x3 ratio, a "standard" size for most cameras. But somehow, this isn't a standard ratio for frames and mattes. Scott Kelby (a Photoshop & general photography guru) wrote about it not long ago on his blog, here & here, and I've had some complaints from customers that they couldn't find frames to fit the prints I had available (sorry Mom!). Anyway, since most of my images are in the 2x3 ratio (8x12) and frames come in 2x2.5 ratios (8x10) it's a massive undertaking to overhaul all my images to fit what is best, and easiest, for customers. I'm still in the "thinking" process trying to figure out how best to deal with it, but in the meantime if you're looking for prints, please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions you have about sizing.

To get back on topic, the nice thing about not getting out to take photos regularly is that I've had some time to go back through my archive and find some really nice images that just got "left behind" when I was shooting more than I could process. It's easy to lose track, especially on a weekend where every sunrise and sunset has near perfect predicted conditions. That's what happened to this image, taken at Lake Hodges. That particular weekend, back in December of 2009, had near perfect sunrises and sunsets and it seems that I never got around to fully exploring my images from Saturday's sunrise. In fact, I only processed one image from that morning and there are a lot more from that morning that deserve some attention.

Stay tuned for some more "forgotten" images as I work my way through my archive!

Panoramas Part 2: Return to the Same Locations

Late Evening Light on Lake Hodges

Another panorama from the shores of Lake Hodges. This one is a combination of 4 horizontally oriented frames, taken back in December (or about 3 months before the other panorama I already posted). Both were taken at sunrise and illustrate why it's possible to keep visiting the same locations time and time again. Don't get me wrong, I love finding interesting new locations, and while it's not a perfect comparison, (this one was taken from a slightly different vantage point looking North instead of East) this image and the previous panorama image could have been taken at two vastly different locations not just different conditions.

In this image, San Diego had yet to receive its spring rains and the water level of the reservoir is much lower, showing more reds in the foreground than in the previous image. The air temperature was much closer to the water temperature in this image than the last, as evidenced by the lack of steam rising from the water's surface. Those are seasonal changes though, and can be predicted with relative ease. The major difference is much harder to predict. The light! Light is building blocks of any photograph, landscape or otherwise. Portrait photographers have the luxury of carefully crafting their studio lighting set up to achieve the desired effect time after time. For landscapes, you can make your best guess at how the sunrise or sunset will turn out based on the natural conditions (temperature, cloud cover, etc) but by and large you just need to be there and hope you get lucky. Good days go bad if the clouds aren't in the right spots and bad days can go good at a moment's notice if there's a break in the clouds in the distance. This unpredictable nature is exactly what makes an image such as this one and the previous panorama so rewarding to capture.
See more of my panoramas here, in the appropriately title Panoramas gallery.

Panoramas: Not Just a Fun Word to Say

Early Morning Light on Lake Hodges

I'm breaking my own post template for this one, and asking you to make sure your browser window is wide enough to take in the full photo above. Go ahead and resize it now, I'll wait...

That's the joy and the problem of panoramic photos. They're HUGE! In fact, it's difficult to properly display them on a website due to their size. This particular image has a wealth of detail, even in the back lit hills, however, due to its overall dimensions, I can't display it large enough for those details to be seen.

In the olden days of film cameras, a specially formatted panoramic camera to be done seamlessly. Now, with the advent of digital photography and the magic of Photoshop, creating a panoramic can be done painlessly and without a special camera. This particular image is actually 6 images, taken in horizontal orientation shot about 20 minutes before sunrise, and then "stitched" together in Photoshop.

Panoramas can be difficult to plan, since you can't see the entire image in the viewfinder at once and minor shifts in camera position can cause insurmountable perspective distortions and, as seen above, the vast scope of the image often encompasses very different lighting from edge to edge. Despite the difficulties, they can be truly rewarding to capture, especially when they turn out like this one!

See more of my panoramas here, in the appropriately title Panoramas gallery.

Coastal Rocks/Wave Explosion Combo |B&W|

The previous 2 images combined.

This image is a combination of the previous two shots. Still no interesting sky, but since the exposures and black & white treatment were identical, it was easy to combine them and use the best of both for one image.

 

According to some folks, this photo is a lie or at least cheating.  I would argue that I didn't create unnatural circumstances in this image and therefore have not cheated and since I'm writing about it, clearly not lying either. Both parts are realistic and this particular image probably occurs naturally. I couldn't capture it in one image when I was there because the waves weren't coming in fast enough. By the time a wave was coming ashore, the previous one had already dried out, leaving no reflections.

 

In the end, whether it's cheating or not, I think the resulting image is greater than the sum of its parts!

Wave Explosion |B&W|

An "exploding" wave.

Last Friday's photo and this photo came just seconds apart at Crystal Cove State Beach/Park. Both were shot about a half hour before and 180 degrees from my Sunset at Mordor Beach image.

These rocks were lit up with a nice warm, golden glow as the sun set behind me, unfortunately the sky was a flat grey due to the cloud cover. Much of our day here at the coast had been overcast with uninteresting skies and despite my previous follies with black & white images (as mentioned in my last post), I planned for these images to be black & white. Or at least solid attempts at it.

Since the sky was so uninteresting in this direction, I slowed down my shutter speed to catch the motion of the waves and create an interesting element in the foreground to draw attention away from the sky. In the previous image, shot as a wave receded, you can make out the reflection of the rocks in the wet foreground sand. In this image, the next incoming wave hit the smaller rocks with a good amount of force. The slower shutter speed caught the full "explosion" of water created by the wave slamming into the rock.

Both images can be found in my Just Black & White gallery.

Coastal Rocks |B&W|

Coastal rocks at Crystal Cove

I don't create a lot of black and white images. There I said it. And if you want proof, take a look at my Just Black & White gallery. (I know, I need to work on the title for that one. It's not very imaginative is it?) There's only 6 images in there. And while there may be a few others floating around my site that need to be included in this gallery, that only works out to 8 or 9 images out of the nearly 500 up for public viewing!

The reason? I'm still trying to figure out how to do it. "But black & white imagery has been around forever! What are you trying to figure out?!" I hear you asking. Well, even though black & white is where photography started, that doesn't mean it's easy and it all boils down to color theory and the contrast between different colors. What shade of gray should this blue be? How about that blue? And this red over here, what should that look like? It's all subjective and entirely up to me to decide when making the conversion.

Photoshop offers a myriad of tools for creating monochrome magic (new gallery title?!) and each allows you to precisely control what shade of gray individual colors should be. And that's part of the problem for me. There are just too many options and I would much rather be out taking photos on a nice day then experimenting in Photoshop.

This image is the result of a fairly quick and easy method I recently invented (and by invented I mean, I thought about trying it only to discover it's been around and on the internet for quite some time now). After checking the various color channels, I found the red channel in the RGB spectrum held the best looking image and deleted the green and blue channels, resulting in a monochrome representation of the information held in the red channel. A contrast adjustment, some sharpening and a little dodging to further improve contrast and the image was done.  For such a simple process, the results are rather nice, if I do say so myself!

Sorry to bore you all with the technical talk, more information about the location will be in my next update.

Lake Hodges Sunrise

Lake Hodges Sunrise

Lake Hodges is a new favorite location for me, especially for sunrise. The lake is peaceful enough in the early morning hours to like a remote destination, and yet is only minutes off the freeway making it a quick enough trip I don't have to make special plans to get to.

This image is from my first visit to the lake and in hindsight, I should have visited during the day to plan out a couple good locations. Scouting locations is almost impossibly hard to do in the pre-dawn darkness. When I arrived, I wasn't even sure where I could park and the delay nearly caused me to miss this special sunrise. I've found that sunrises are best just before the sun actually comes up and as I got out of the car, I could see a few clouds through the trees that surround the lake already lit up with a slight pinkish color. Fearing that was the best color of the morning, I rushed to the lake shore and hurriedly began taking photos. The first few shots were poorly composed and clearly not thought out.

As I slowed down, relaxed and thought through each photo before tripping the shutter, I was rewarded with the brilliant sunrise you see here. Further proof that it's better to slow down and "smell the roses."

Under the Scripps Pier in La Jolla

Under Scripps Pier at night

A recent favorite of mine, this image was taken at La Jolla Shores, under the Scripps Pier and can be found in my ever growing California Coastline gallery. It is actually 3 images stitched together. My current gear doesn't allow me to capture an ultra-wide angle of view, so a relatively small space like under this particular pier is hard to capture in it's entirety with one single shot. (And the gear needed for that runs in the thousands!)

I waited for just the right wave to come in and recede before taking the first shot (bottom of the image). The little bit of water left as the wave receded gave me that nice reflection in the foreground. Once that was in place, I just tilted the camera up a little, took the second image and repeated for the third (top) image. Photoshop did an excellent job of stitching the 3 images together for me, but I had to go in and manually correct some perspective distortion that resulted in the camera being tilted upwards.

Yosemite National Park

A Giant Seqouia in Mariposa Grove

Back in September I left home on an almost two week journey that brought me to Yosemite National Park, Crater Lake National Park, Lava Beds National Monument and Lassen Volcanic National Park. It was quite a journey and there's no better way to learn your camera than getting out to use it!

That's exactly what the trip was for. With the exception of 3 days while I was visiting family in Washington state, I was out in the field with my camera every day for those two weeks. It was really an awesome experience and if I hadn't used all my vacation time up for it, I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

I took nearly 6,000 photos over the course of the trip, and now I can safely say, that's entirely too many. It was good for the learning process, but bad for the processing process. Since I have my camera set to save images in the Raw format, I need to process each image before it's ready for public consumption. Luckily there were quite a few overlapping images of the same subject but with different camera settings, so I was able to pick the best of each bunch and process those.

Yosemite has a number of Giant Seqouia groves. The most accessible for me on this trip (since it was nearby my campsite) was the Mariposa Grove at the southern tip of the park. My camera bag currently lacks an ultra-wide angle lens so it was difficult to capture the full majesty of these enormous trees. That didn't keep me from trying however, and I think this image as the late afternoon sun lit up the tree's bark, comes close.

The California Coastline

The rocks of Sunset Cliffs lit up at sunset.

Califonia's Coastline with the Pacific Ocean stretchs on for an amazing 840 miles. This new gallery on my site, approriately titled "California Coastline," is dedicated to documenting my exploration of this fascinating area.

This image is from Sunset Cliffs, just south of Ocean Beach, just before sunset. As the sun gets low in the sky, the almost sideways rays of light cast a warm golden glow on the sandstone of these cliffs. The tidepools in the foreground held just enough water between waves to reflect the blue sky and clouds from above.

I estimate that I've now explored at least 3 miles of coastline, and with only 837 more to go this gallery is sure to keep growing!