Catalina Channel

Taken from the cliffs of Palos Verdes on a Christmas Eve (day) walk.

The small boat tooling across the bottom of the image is important - adds another horizontal line element to get that peaceful landscape look.

Image file df101224_1417

Farmers' Market

This image reminds Lisa of the painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte" by Georges Seurat.

Note how everyone is looking away from the viewer except for one person at the bottom of the image. I think the umbrella is very important, as are the conflicting strong vertical and horizontal lines.

Image file df101218_1362

Brenda's

This image and the next one are from a visit to the Torrance Farmer's Market, in the rain, on December 18, 2010. It was near the end of the morning, and the two proprietors at this peanut stand were looking a bit bored and damp. This woman came along sporting a flowery umbrella that clashed nicely with the checkerboard table cloth, and there it was.

The peanuts, by the way, were quite good. I bought a $2 bag, and they were still warm.

Image df101218_1359.

Waiting

I am still not quite sure how I saw this image, but I am glad I did. I am getting to like it more and more. I did not expect the white hat to play such a large role. This image belongs on my office wall.

This was taken as homework for the November class of Advanced Photography. This image is intended to illustrate the following quote:

"The content of art must go beyond the presentation of the individual objects of which it consists. When I project my strivings and forces into nature I do so also as to the way my strivings and forces make me feel... To miss the metaphorical and to see only the literal is to misunderstand the expressive aspects of photographs..."  -- Terry Barrett

Image: df101107_1329, 7 November 2010, Panino Restaurant, Solvang, California

Fritto Misto

This was a homework shot for the Advanced photography class. The assignment was to illustrate a selected quotation from an artist or photographer. This image was intended to illustrate this quote:

 "It is astonishing how little most people know about their feelings... Their lives pass by as a featureless stream of experience... As opposed to this state of chronic apathy, creative individuals are in very close touch with their emotions... They are aware of their inner states without having to become self-conscious." --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I picked this out of this month's images because of its emotional overtones. Taken with the Hasselblad, Fujichrome 100 film. Rather haunting, no?

Night Joggers, Hermosa Beach Strand

October 3, 2010; Hermosa Beach Strand: This image was taken as a homework assignment. The assignment was to take an image that illustrates the following quote:

"Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not at all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks." -- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cartier-Bresson was a master at street photography, and excelled in capturing 'the moment' in very well composed images. He worked in black and white. To attempt to capture an image in his style, I went 'hunting' with tripod and camera on the evening of October 3, and sat at this spot for almost one hour. I took 30+ images, and liked this one the best. Since I disagree with his quote in that I do care what happens after image capture, I processed this one to get a nice range of tones. The image was already noisy, having been taken at ISO 1600, but to enhance the grittiness of the night shot I added a bit more noise of my own.

Sea Stack 2, Second Beach

September 8, 2010; Second Beach, Olympic National Park: More nice sea stacks. This one is a color  image, the previous one was black and white. Not much difference, but there is some. Again, the lighting was very soft with fog in the air.

Of the two, this is my slight favorite. The foreground rock adds nice depth and more texture to the image, and the sea stack in the far background is in the haze. This image file is df100908_1193

Sea Stack 1, Second Beach

September 8, 2010; Second Beach, Olympic National Park: It was a one mile walk from the parking area down to second beach. The weather conditions were the same as at Rialto Beach, but the sea stacks here were very impressive. The tricky part of working on this image was boosting the contrast enough to get an interesting image. The lighting was very very soft. I added quite a bit of mid-tone contrast.

Let me know what you think about this image and the following one. This image file number is df100908_1189.

Rialto Beach #1

September 8, 2010, Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park: These three stark naked trees are hard by the path right out of the main parking lot at Rialto Beach. You can just feel how harsh the environment must be on these beaches. They face the winter storms that come in off the North Pacific. The fog was thick that day, and the ceiling must have been only 50 or 100 feet off the deck.

There was almost no color in the original image, so I made a slightly tinted black and white image. I think it works. File is df100908_1160.

Hoh Rain Forest #2

Here is another forest detail image from the Hoh River Trail on September 7. Growths of this white fungus were numerous. I liked this one against the small plants and the red trunk. Tricky to hold detail in the fungus (don't overexpose) and yet hold some detail in the dark trunk. But, it worked, using a bit of photoshop work to compress the dynamic range. File df100907_1149.

Log Detail, Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park

On the seventh of September we hiked the Hoh River Trail in the Hoh rain forest. It is a very interesting area for a hike, with a lot of plants and trees representative of a temperate rain forest. It is also very difficult to capture the mood of it with photographs. I decided to work on small details part of the time, which is sometimes easier. I liked this piece of log. Something in the red cedar log created the nice crosshatched pattern. The green plants in the lower left offer a nice contrasting color. Used a tool to enhance local area contrast, and then blended in a bit of NIK's midnight filter, especially around the edges. File is df100907_1130.

Marymere Falls

This is a vertical panorama, consisting of three images merged into one. I decided to convert it to black and white, and I think this works well. A computer screen does not do it justice - I printed this 18 inches high by 5+ inches wide and that was nice.

This falls is at the far end of the hike that we took on September 6, 2010 out of Crescent Lake. I like the long skinny log sticking out of the top of the falls, and the semi-transparent look of the top part of the falls. Exposure time was 1 second per frame.

Red Cedar Log, Hike to Marymere Falls

This one is for Lily. She suggested this shot on our way back down from viewing the falls. We were amazed at the bright red color of the wet cedar log. It was raining on and off (note the wet rocks).

This was a fairly straightforward image to process. A little burning and dodging, and a touch of Glamour Glow (yes, Lisa, that is how Nik Filters spells the name of that filter...).

The 0.3 second exposure time also added a nice blur to the creek in the background.

Wreckage of a Western Red Cedar, trail to Marymere Falls, Olympic Nat'l Park

Found the remains of a giant Western Red Cedar on the trail from Lake Crescent up to Marymere falls. This is a difficult shot, and I have been struggling to make it work. The challenge is to separate the main object - the cedar trunk - from the background. I used masks to help lighten and increase the saturation of the red trunk, and inverted masks to darken and reduce saturation of the forest background. I may have overdone it, and would like comments on this one.

The red cedars were everywhere, and many of them had fallen like this one. I think they decay very slowly, but are really nice to look at.

In answer to Rika's comment, here is an image that is approximately where I started (although this image already has some processing done to it in the raw image processing function of Photoshop).

Abstract #2, Fort Worden State Park, 5 September 2010

A second abstract from inside one of the concrete bunkers beneath the gun emplacements. Probably an attempt to cover up graffiti, ironically making more graffiti. Looked to me like an abstract form of Japanese Katakana or Hiragana.

Processing: Again, not much besides working to increase contrast significantly. Applied the NIK pastel filter and that really helped.

Update: for those of you following along, note that I have now inverted the image. I like this much better. It reminds me of ice skaters under a dark blue sky with a moon. Fascinating what can happen when you flip an image. This is a long journey from a photo of painted over graffiti in a concrete bunker to this image.

Abstract #1, Fort Worden State Park, 5 September 2010

Fort Worden is located at Port Townsend, Washington. The fort was an artillery installation guarding the approaches to Puget Sound in the early 1900's. We wandered the site, and I found this nice rusty steel door, among other things.

I have been working on abstract images this year, and this is another example. Not too much processing in Photoshop, but probably the most significant processing steps were an increase in saturation to bring out the color and the application of Nik's Midnight filter.

I see a world map in this abstract. It also reminds me of fractal images. I do not think I would hang it in my living room, but it was fun to work on.

Hurricane Ridge, September 5 2010

We had just arrived in the Olympic National Park area, and were encouraged by park staff to head immediately for Hurricane Ridge while the sun was out. On arrival saw wisps of cloud moving over the ridge. This shot is from near the parking area, and the lodge is just off to the right. The local time was about 5 pm, and this shot is generally southwest, so the sun was lighting the clouds from behind.

The tricky part of this exposure was to retain enough detail in the foreground while maintaining cloud detail.  I exposed for the cloud detail (this being the most important part of the image) and hoped to retain detail in the foreground. This mostly worked. In photoshop I added contrast to the sky only, and that helped a lot. Also used glamour glow to more punch, as well as lightening the second hillside to get alternating light and dark horizontal bands to add depth.