Death Valley

My company (in my day job of Software Engineer) decided to have a furlough this quarter due to the ailing US economy. We could use vacation days, so at least I was paid, but I really did not want to waste a vacation week just sitting around the house like I did over the Christmas break. But where could I go in February that wouldn't 1) cost a fortune and 2) get the wife mad at me and 3) have to risk bad weather. Ultimately I decided to do a trip I nearly did a few years ago - fly into Vegas (and using miles this cost me nothing) and drive to Death Valley for a few days. (A few years back we flew into Vegas and then went to Zion for a few days instead in Winter).

I'd seen some incredible images from Death Valley and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for to take my photography to the next level. Lots of interesting shapes and colors to do some more abstract landscapes than some earlier work. I knew going in that most of time would be spent at the Dunes and at Zabriskie Point. I was also hoping for some good shots of the salt flats and of the Racetrack, plus some sweeping vistas and some canyon shots.

I flew into Vegas on a Sunday and then immediately drove the 3 hours to the park. It was well after midnight when I checked into my room at Stovepipe Wells. And, of course, my body was still on East Coast time, so I was pretty exhausted. I would get up at 5:30 am every day to make it to a prime photo shooting destination. My first of this would be the nearby dunes (Mesquite Springs). The first morning would be something of a dud when it comes to light (the most important ingredient of photography), but I did wind up with a few I liked. No real sunrise though, and things soon turned to a rainy day. I was hooked by what I saw though and knew I would have to return to the dunes later in the trip. I ended up returning for late afternoon the next day and then for another sunrise my final day. Although hiking up and down the dunes with a full bag of camera gear was exhausting, it was well worth it to this all three times. As you can see by some of the images.








I could go on and on posting incredible images just of the dunes. But I'll refrain. Check out the gallery at http://rodneyboles.zenfolio.com/deathvalley for more.

While the Mesquite Springs Dunes were my favorite, Zabriskie Point wasn't too far off. It has been shot and shot and shot, so finding that image that really says something is a bit more difficult. I did end up with some pictures I loved and some I liked an awful lot though.




Again, more in the gallery.

After those two spots, a lot of the rest is anticlimactic. I had some good hikes (including a fun ranger-led hike in Mosaic Canyon learning about the geology of the park) and enjoyed just driving around in the middle of the day with the windows open and music playing taking in the massiveness of the park. I enjoyed walking out to the salt flats. Sadly, the combination of rain on my first day and the midday sun made for less than ideal photographing of the Badwater salt flats. And forget about getting to the Racetrack on muddy roads, as it was flooded anyway. So there remains plenty to see and do the next time I visit.

I did get some interesting Canyon pictures. I'll post just one here in the blog and save the rest for the gallery. This one is of Golden Canyon, which connects to the bottom of Zabriskie Point. And, yes, it is an HDR, although I've been careful to make it as realistic as possible to capture what my eyes were seeing.


The trip was too short, especially with the first day having so much rain. I returned to Vegas and had a quick overnight before an early morning flight. My time in Vegas mainly consisted of walking across the street from the Flamingo (where I was staying) to the Bellagio for the Buffet, but I did venture out a bit and snapped a few nighttime pictures of the Strip.




A few takeways from the trip:

1. Shooting RAW (NEF), using Mirror Lockup and Photix Wireless cable release on a solid tripod was essential to getting the best image quality. The RAW files gave me a lot of leeway in the digital darkroom to get the look I wanted (which were often quite different than the default that Apple's Aperture applied to the file).
   
2. Getting up well before dawn and getting out there for the shot more than paid off. The distances were always further than the looked. The light changed incredibly fast. I was often disappointed just how little of a shooting window I had.
   
3. Patience, grasshopper. Instead of just shooting because I felt like I should be shooting something, I really took my time, especially at the dunes, to find the right shot.
   
4. Lens selection - I was a bit surprised to analyze my "keepers" when I got home. Nearly all of them were shot with my 70-200mm. Oftentimes you think about landscape photography being wide angles, but the distances in the West are so vast it really took a long lens to isolate the interesting subjects. And this was on a DX body (D300). On further review, the 70-200mm on an FX body like the D700 would have been absolutely perfect for this trip as most of the shots were at the short end of the 70-200mm on the D300, and most of the other keepers were at the long end of my 17-55mm.
   

I think I got possibly the best pictures I've ever taken on this trip. Certainly up there among the best. And I also got probably the best ratio of keepers to shots taken. It was just a resounding success and really makes me all the more dedicated to this great hobby/artform/etc.

Thanks for looking (and don't forget to check out the gallery).

Snow Day!

This week was the first time in years that we got a decent snow in the Raleigh area. No way I was driving in it, so I worked from home that day. But over my lunch break, while the rest of the country was watching Obama flub his Inaugural Oath (thanks to the Chief Justice), I grabbed my geat and heading out for some shots (I did get the DVR to capture the historic moment).

I'm in a fairly new neighborhood in the middle of what used to be farmland. There isn't too much left in the way of the old life around here, but I'm lucky enough to be a short walk to several farms. One old farm was recently bought my the town and going to be converted to a park focused on the agricultural heritage of this area. But the town has done nothing yet, so I was still able to capture the beautiful old buildings in a great snow storm.




I decided these pictures would look great as B&Ws, so used the Alien Skin Exposure 2 software I talked about in my previous post. They have a "Fog" option for the B&W exposures, and it gave the pictures a beautiful effect - blowing out highlights a bit to make the snow whiter and making the tree look like it is in fog.

Alien Skin's Exposure 2

I recently discovered that there was a software company here in Raleigh that did some pretty nifty photography software. As a photographer and software engineer, this was pretty interesting to learn. Then I discovered I actually knew the wife of one of the engineers. I decided to try out one of the companies more interesting offerings, Exposure 2. The program is available as a Photoshop plugin that takes a digital photo, with its typically flat curve and often "blah" colors, and lets the user mimic the effect of various classic films. They've profiled Velvia, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, T-Max 100, and tons and tons of others. Whether Color or Black & White, Slide or Negative film. The software tries to match the contrast, the color, and even the grain.

Pretty cool stuff. And I am happy to say that it works. And the plug-in offers plenty of tweaking on top of all the different film presets. The only downside to this program is that it is damn expensive. Is it worth it? If you are making money with your photography, it may be. It does a fantastic job and it simplifies stuff you might otherwise be able to do in Photoshop. For me, in this economy, with this just as a serious hobby....I think I'm gonna pass for now. But I've still got a few weeks left with the fully functional demo. So we'll see.

More in a future posting.

Finally!! (Zenfolio offers comments)

For several years I used PBase as my photo gallery (in fact, the gallery still exist at http://pbase.com/rboles). One of the things I really liked about PBase was the ability of people to leave comments about a photo or a gallery. I loved the feedback from family, friends, even total strangers who stumbled onto my work.

The feature even led to my first "published" work. The prestigious Field Museum in Chicago used one of my images of the Betatakin ruin in Arizona for an exhibit they have been running on Native American tribes. (It was a great thrill for me to visit the museum during a business trip and see my work there).

When I signed up at Zenfolio a year ago, the comments feature was not available, but was listed as Coming Soon. It was an issue with me that this feature was not yet available, but based on the status I went ahead and signed up. Zenfolio had a lot of things going for it over PBase - the biggest being unlimited storage sizes. I could keep full-size images there, which provided extra piece of mind. I back up my work to protect from a harddrive crash, but in the event of a fire/flood/etc I would be screwed. Now at least my best images are available somewhere else (even if they aren't the original files). I also really liked the look and feel of the galleries and slideshows, and the integrated printing with Mpix.

My 1 year subscription with Zenfolio just ended a few days ago. I reluctantly renewed, but was very angry that the promised comments feature was still not available.

Today, Christmas came early! Comments are here. I am thrilled. Now I just have to wait until someone leaves me a comment. Cue Jeopardy music. (and cue it for this blog as well).

-Rodney

More HDR

Earlier, I posted an HDR photo taken at Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse near Acadia National Park. This was not actually my first attempt (in post) to create an HDR, although that picture was taken first. When I was shooting at Bass Harbor, I didn't set out to create an HDR. It wasn't until I was leaving the site that the thought hit me. I mistakenly thought I'd taken enough varying exposures of the same scene to get an HDR. It wasn't until I started looking at my shots that I realized that while I had several shots of a properly exposed sky and several other shots of a properly exposed lighthouse and cliffs, I did not have any framed the same way suitable to creating the effect I wanted just with the Photomatix HDR software. More on that in a bit.

I arrived at Pemaquid Pt a few days later, anxious to do things right. I scouted the site and found a couple of vantage points I liked. I then waited patiently for sun to "do it's thing". I was a little worried about the sky. It looked like it might be a complete dud. But luckily it kept changing and changing. The biggest challenge after that became all of the damn people. I got so tired of waiting for folks to get out of the shot that I decided to go ahead and take a few shots with a person in them.

In the end, the shots with the person created my favorite picture of the scene. I love the texture and the lines in the picture. And unlike many HDR pictures, it still remains faithful to reality.

I tried a different angle, which I ended up not liking quite as much. And the sky decided it wanted to start showing off. While I love the result, I can't help thinking that it just doesn't look quite as realistic as the first picture. Still, I really like the result, and have had some people tell me it is their favorite of the two.

After getting back home, I downloaded the (free) Photomatix trial. I don't think I lasted 24 hours before I was hooked and sending them payment for the key. I was slow to post -process the rest of my Maine and New Hampshire trip. I just have to be in the right mood to sort through hundreds of pictures and do the digital darkroom thing. But slowly it was coming together. I was really frustrated with myself that I hadn't gotten what I wanted at Bass Head. I tried to create an HDR with what I had. The results for the lighthouse and cliff was stunning. But the sky was blown in all the original shots, and the HDR of that was gray with weird lines in it.

I decided to turn to Photoshop. Now, I'm not very advanced in PS. Until Aperture came out, I used it heavily, but only for Adjustment layer sorts of things. Never anything complex. But I did a bit of research and decided to apply what I'd learned. (I also decided to sign up for an all day class in the new year).

I started with the tiff file output of Photomatix, then extracted the lighthouse, trees, and cliffs. Then I tried adding a dramatic sky from another picture I'd taken. It just didn't work. The trees on the left are heavily backlit and there was just no way to make things look natural. So I started over. I got a much better extraction the second time. And most importantly, I decided to use a sky exposure from the same shoot. It didn't match up with the picture, but that turned out to not be a problem. Using the free transform tool in PS, I was able to adjust the sky picture to the image. The sun matched up to the backlit trees. I adjusted the brightness slightly to match the trees on the right (and had to do a tad of burning in one spot).

I was very pleased with the result (see the earlier post). To me, the sky (as it should) looks very natural. And that helped make the overall HDR look more natural. Yeah, it may not be an overly dramatic sky, but that is probably for the best, as that could overshadow the lighthouse and cliffs.

All in all, the entire experience has been extremely educational for me. I can't wait to do this more. Really makes me want to travel back to the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley and try the HDR thing there.

-Rodney

Off-Camera Flash and Connor's First Solid Food

My wife called me the other night at work and told me she wanted to try to feed our son his first solid food. She wanted to know if I wanted her to wait for me to be home. I said "Of course!" and rushed home.

I decided I wanted a good picture of it. I haven't been happy with the flash pictures of him using my speedlight attached to the hot shoe of the camera. His eyes are always open way too much in those pics. I grabber my umbrella and stand and threw the speedlight (a Nikon SB-600) on it. Selected my "Flash" custom setting bank on my Nikon D300 and snapped a few shots while the little one made a mess with his rice cereal.

This one is my favorite. Flash is off to the bottom right, shot into my silver reflective umbrella. Lens is the exceptional Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 (the perfect match to the D300 for portraits).

Hopefully he'll get used to all this camera gear. I've started him young.

Ron's Wedding

My friend and former coworker Ron got married this past weekend. I decided to bring my camera and speedlight and take a few pics. At the ceremony I was going to try to get a few shots with my 18-200mm VR (image stabilized) lens indoor without flash. I had bumped the ISO up to 1600 for this. Then the preacher informed us no cameras. No problem.

Except that I forgot to change my ISO afterward. Shot a bunch of flash shots at ISO 1600. Stupid, stupid. Oh well, it happens. At least the camera has much, much better ISO performance than my old D70s.

Full gallery at:

http://rodneyboles.zenfolio.com/p519528035.

- Rodney

Maine and New Hampshire

Back in October we traveled to New England for a vacation before my wife had to return from maternity leave. So many beautiful things to see. I've been slowly getting pictures post-processed and uploaded to the gallery. Not quite done yet, but getting close. Pretty excited by some of the images. This was my first time doing any High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, and I'm quite excited with the outcome, such as the attached picture.

The full gallery (well, galleries - one for Maine, one for NH) available here:

http://rodneyboles.zenfolio.com/f992603041

-Rodney

Yay! My first blog post.

This blog is a companion piece to my online photography gallery:

http://rodneyboles.zenfolio.com

Enjoy!
-Rodney