I was at work looking at the photos Ipublished yesterday. One of them looked horribly dark on my work monitor. On my home monitor I had liked the look of that photo. But at work the shadow areas were unrecognizable. I decided that I would take the photo into Photomatix & tone map it. It is definately a brighter image. Still fond of the original photo but want to see which version looks better on a variety of monitors. So any comments are appreciated.
I have a bit of a cold today. Was talked into doing a walk about at the harbor and downtown. Tried out my new Sigma 10-22 3.5 lens. These are my favorite 3
images from the day.
To be honest I want to try out Photo Galleria, so thought I’d publish a second gallery of San Francisco photos. Hope you enjoy.
I was only in San Francisco for a few days. I’ve been there several times before but was lucky to find plenty of new things to see.
I hiked from Fishermans Wharf to the Golden Gate bridge in on again off again rain. (My favorite weather for photography.) Did that section before, but beyond the bridge, I hadn’t spent much time at the battery. Nor had I hiked down to Marshall Beach. Highly recommended.
I also went to the Sutro Baths. The ruins of a old bathhouse, right on the cliffs by the ocean. I’ve always been a big fan of ruins, and ruins in such a beautiful spot was fantastic. Once done with the baths, we hiked back towards the Golden Gate bridge from the other direction.
I tried my best to not have too many from any one site. The problem was that the Golden Gate bridge was involved in 2 different shoots. But it is an amazing bridge.
I took this photo twice. Once with the bridge in focus & once with the ice plant in focus. I loaded both into Photoshop as layers. Then I did Edit / Auto align layers. Then Edit / Auto blend layers. The resulting file had both of the in focus sections merged together. Results were OK but I noticed that there was a small out of focus “edge” between the 2 parts. I ended up having to clone the edge to get rid of this distraction. I’m wondering if Helicon Focus would have handled the blend better. (I’ve lost my license of this and don’t know if I want to buy it again now that PS handles merging multiple focus points.
Trying another option taught by Kelby Trainings RC Concepcion (Word Press Basics part 2). This time I’m going to use zoomify with my large pano image of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I went to the Japanese Tea Garden a few years ago, and my camera died. Didn’t get any photos. So I was determined to make it there while I was in San Francisco. Camera held up this time, but my Wide Angle lens finally fell apart. Not a big problem for most shots. But I really wanted to get a shot of the Pagoda with the waterfalls below it. What to do? I took an HDR pano. This one was a double vertical pano (top to bottom left, top to bottom right.) 8 slices, 24 photos. I got it all in, but there is some major slant in the pagoda. Guess that will motivate me to buy a new Wide Angle lens.
This is how much I could take in at 17mm:
And this is the pano:
Currently watching Kelby Training’s Word Press for Photographers part 2 with RC Concepcion. I didn’t realize that you can take your Flickr Collections and publish them to WP. Seems to work ok with my Atahualpa theme, but wasn’t working right with Auto Focus. UPDATE: Realized that you always have to include a photo for the Auto Focus theme to work. So I added one after the Flickr link.
(Click on the lower right to make this full screen.)
While putting together my last post (lessons from the zoo) I decided that it would be good to do a “best of” zoo photos for 2009. To see the PDF of this just click on the below image.
Lesson 1: Be sure and save you WP draft on your Iphone before leaving WP (Maybe I went to music in the middle to change albums, who know… but I lost the entire blog I wrote.)
Lesson 2: Rainy days are the best times to go to Zoo’s. That’s where I went on Saturday. On a rare San Diego rainy day. The crowds were gone, the animals were active, and the photos were plentiful.
Lesson 3: Better use a higher ISO if the light is lower than normal and you want to use a long lens. The increase in speed (and steady shots) is worth the small amount of noise.
Lesson 4: DxO Pro as a Raw processor, is the way to go if you have some noise. It took 3 hours for DxO to run… way slow. But the results were worth it. There was a real reduction in noise, with no loss in sharpness.
