OK you can’t call your self a San Diegan and not occasionally post a photo from the zoo. I tend to like the bird photos.
Blue Bird
Poway Park in perfect light
I planned to go to the gym at lunch but when I went out to the car saw the most amazing sky. Strong dramatic sky with crisp side lighting. I had to go take some photos, so I went to Poway Park.
Balboa Park Sunset
I worked this shot for hours in the computer. Started out doing an HDR. I wasn’t quite happy with the results. Seemed to introduce too much noise in the photo. I tried using Dfine and DxO to remove the noise and it was still there. I thought that if a sharpened everything but the noise it would make it less visible. Finally gave up and just took the dark & light raw files into Photoshop as layers. Added a mask & used the gradient tool to show some of each layer. Oh, I did use Viveza 2 to brighten the tower.
Looking out to Sea
Another shot taken at Wind and Sea Beach. It is possible to take multi shot HDR’s with people in them. You can either layer a single file to the HDR and mask in the person without movement. Or you can yell “hold still for a minute.” That’s what I did this time.
Abandoned Mine
On Saturday we went up to Julian and decided to Hike the old Banner Grade. Along the way, there was a car crashed over the side. I’ll bet it’s from the 40’s. I wish I’d had a rope to do some close ups. After a mile or so, there is an abandoned gold mine. What’s left of the mine is interesting. Again it was hard to get real close, because most of it is over a ledge.
For this shot I did an HDR in Photomatix, then tweaked the colors slightly in Nik Viveza, then went into OnOne Photo Tools. After that I sharpened it with Topaz Detail.
Geotagging using Garmin Vista HCx
One of the things I need to do before my trip to Yellowstone is prepare my 1st Geo Tagging workflow. I’ve recently found that you can Geotag using a handheld GPS (like the Garmin Vista HCx that I recently bought.)
You turn on the GPS while you’re out taking pictures. You set one of the GPS defaults to create trip logs. You need to make sure the camera & GPS are set to the same times. Once in the field, you just turn on the GPS and it starts to create a log automatically.
When you get back to your computer you load the RAW pictures & the trip log into Microsoft’s free “Pro Photo Tools”. It assigns the geotag and (if you want) an address to each picture.
You should do the tagging in Pro Photo Tools before you start working on your pictures in Lightroom. That’s because the metadata is updated and would overwrite any Lightroom work done before the update.
Anyway, I need to change the map on my GPS to the Garmin National Parks West so I’ll have the right level of detail for my upcoming trip.
Trip to Yellowstone coming up
I’ll be traveling to Yellowstone next Friday. Hope to keep a running blog of the trip. Letting you see a few of my photos, and how they came about. I’ll also let you know about the very best photographic opportunities I come across.