Tonight’s edition of Trey’s Variety Hour (Episode #34) is hosted by my friend Doug Kaye. The topic of the show – totally unrelated to gear for a change! – is “How do you learn and improve your photography?” A great topic – and one I’m sure I can learn from.

As I think about the topic before watching the show, it’s caused me to do a little reflecting back on what has been important to me as I’ve been learning and exploring photography over the last five years or so. I happened to get back into photography in a big way about that time when my first granddaughter was born. That gave me a great excuse (!) to go out and buy a decent digital SLR. Since then, it’s been mostly about practice – but sometimes new inputs are very helpful in lifting you from plateau to a new level!

So, unlike the show topic, let me first talk about my experience with gear – because that’s been an important part of my learning of photography…

Gear

How did I decide which DSLR to buy? Well, I happened to come across a blog post by Doc Searles – he had taken a memory card into a camera store and shot a bunch of images using both a Canon and Nikon body. After looking at his results, he decided to buy the Canon EOS 30D DSLR. It took me about three minutes to read Doc’s review – which caused me to then pull the trigger on Amazon.com and order my own 30D! Amazing how social recommendations can be so powerful! As any DSLR photographer knows, that first camera body decision effectively locks you in – since once you start adding “glass” (lenses), you’re committed to that manufacturers system.

My 30D was a great DSLR to get me back into photography. When I bought it, I didn’t even know what a crop (APC) sensor was – I learned that after the fact when I bought an additional lens. I’ve got many images on Flickr shot with that 30D – see some of them here. Mostly snapshots of family and local environs.

About a year later, Canon introduced the 40D – and for no good reason I decided to upgrade to it – selling my 30D to help pay for the new camera. About this time, I became acquainted with HDR – High Dynamic Range photography – and some of my images from this period have that “over the top” amateur HDR look. I remember one of my first attempts at handheld HDR at Stanford – the rapid fire bracketing of the 40D was just right for my early experiments. Heck, I didn’t even own a tripod then!

Then, in January 2009, I upgraded again to the Canon 5D Mark II – again selling my 40D. I listed the 40D for sale used on Amazon.com – and the buyer ended up being another local Menlo Park resident. We met at my office to give him the camera – small world sometimes!

The 5D Mark II has been my main camera for serious work over the last three years. Along the way, I’ve added some additional lenses – including the Canon 70-200MM f/2.8 L and the Canon 24-105 f/4 L lenses – both of which have been my workhorse lenses. I’ve also got a few primes – 28mm, 50mm f/1.4 and the 85mm f/1.8 which see less frequent usage.

Along the way, I had a serious rotator cuff injury in my right shoulder such that I couldn’t even lift the 5D for shooting. That’s all been fixed – but, along the way, I bought a Canon PowerShot S90 to allow me to continue to shoot pre-surgery. Since then, I’ve upgraded my tiny camera twice – to a Canon PowerShot S95 and am now using a Canon PowerShot S100. These are great tiny cameras! On most of my serious photo sessions, I’ll have my 5D Mark II over my shoulder (thank you Black Rapid!) with the PowerShot in my jacket pocket. I’ll always also have along my iPhone which, now with the iPhone 4S, also takes some amazingly great images! So, I’ve got three cameras with me in the field! Go figure!

Learning

On to learning. So what’s been my learning process? Of course, since I’m an avid online reader, I’ve soaked up a bunch of articles, etc. that have taught me new things. My early infatuation with HDR was fueled by Trey’s own Stuck in Customs blog – and his tutorials. Trey also taught me about the use of textures to enhance images – and I’ve had fun with that for a few of my shots.

I’ve taken several photo workshops along the way including one with Ken Rockwell and Dave Wyman that was a lot of fun out in the field. Perhaps the most valuable workshops for me have been the two I’ve taken with Derrick Story at his studio in Santa Rosa. Derrick’s a great teacher and these workshops with seven other colleagues were very helpful to me – highly recommend what Derrick does.

But I think, as is so often the case, the real learning takes place by just doing it – trying new things, experimenting, and pushing myself. The best approach for me is a combination of regular solo shooting – photography really is mostly a solitary pursuit – along with regular venue shoots that Doug and I have been doing over the last couple of years – here’s a list of my posts about our adventures.

I find a two person photo walk with a good friend to be very rewarding – we see through each others eyes in new ways, things we might otherwise have missed. We slow down, we work a venue – and things just open up for us in the process. After the shoot, we each go home and independently work on our images – and then slowly share them. It’s so much fun to see what we each pick to work on first, how we approach post-processing, and then sharing our comments back and forth. My son and I also did a one day workshop in Yosemite with Michael Frye – a very similar experience. These sessions have definitely been the most valuable learning opportunities for me.

More

As I’m finishing up an already too long post, I realize that I’ve skipped over the post-processing learnings that have also had a big impact on me (including an amazing 2 hour 1:1 Skype workshop last year with Jaime Ibarra). I’ve also unfortunately overlooked the learnings from the late Chris Gulker – my good friend and walking partner who taught me so much about the power of black and white photography in the short time that I knew him. I’ll have to share more on those later. One final learning – in 2011 – was the begin curating what I thought were my best images – you can find them in my gallery here: http://photos.sjl.us – I’d love to hear your feedback on them! Click on the Contact link in the nab bar above to email me your thoughts.

Note: see also my 2011 wrap up post: What I’ve Learned about Photography in 2011!

After being reminded by a friend that we’re in the peak of rose blooming season here in Menlo Park, I headed out this afternoon with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a Lensbaby Muse to see what I could find. Here in Menlo Park, St Raymond Church on Santa Cruz Avenue has a beautiful rose garden on its property – and that’s where I headed.

The Lensbaby is an unusual accessory for photographers – it’s a low cost add-on that provides a very sharp in focus area combined with seriously out of focus areas in the same image. I first bought my Lensbaby Muse about five years ago and did a bunch of shooting with it at the time – including several fun visits to the nearby Filoli estate in Woodside. But since that time, my Muse has mostly been in the bottom of my camera bag.

I was stimulated to pull it out today after listening to one of Nik Radio’s podcasts earlier this week with Kathleen Clemons. Kathleen does some amazing work with her Lensbaby gear and stimulated me to pull mine back out and go shooting today.

The picture of the rose above is classic Lensbaby style. It’s been tweaked a bit in Photoshop using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 to adjust the color and provide a vignette. This image was shot handheld at a high ISO on my 5D Mark II to stop the movement of the rose in the gentle breeze blowing at the time.

I really enjoyed my 20 minutes in the rose garden this afternoon – getting reacquainted with my Lensbaby and its unique style of photography!

I continue to be amazed at the beautiful photography that’s possible using just the iPhone 4S and a few of the photo adjustment applications that run on it.

This is my latest example – titled “Mad Men – Chicago – 2012” – an image shot with my iPhone 4S inside the Sixteen restaurant at the Trump Hotel in Chicago. Tweaked using Nik’s Snapseed application on the iPhone, it features a lovely contrast between the old city landmarks outside and the sleek windows and diners inside. A bit of tilt-shift treatment also added in Snapseed adds just enough blur up top and down below to keep things interesting!

A friend commented: “I expect Don Draper to walk in at any moment!”

Photography on the iPhone 4S is just so much fun!

In January, Doug Kaye and I headed out for some photography along the Half Moon Bay coastline. We headed first for the beautiful trees of the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve – and, as we were heading back, I shot this image looking down on the beach at Moss Beach. The image above is straight out of the camera – a Canon 5D Mark II with a 70-200mm f/2.8L lens. This particular image was shot at 1/800 sec at f/7.1 at a focal length of 135mm.

The final image – after post-processing – is below – titled: : Windswept – Moss Beach – 2012.

The steps from the original image out of the camera to the final result involved some tweaking first in Lightroom 4 – mostly about alignment – and then exporting the image to PhotoShop CS6 for some tweaking using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2. In Color Efex, I used the Detail Extractor, Tonal Contrast and Glamour Glow filters to enhance the color image. I then opened it in Silver Efex to convert it to monochrome – and tweaked the brightness, contrast and structure settings to enhanced the layered image effect. A bit of selenium color was added along with a subtle vignette – before saving it and bringing it back into Lightroom.

A few final tweaks in Lightroom included final alignment and cropping, and an additional subtle vignette. I also updated the keyword meta data and added a title/caption.

Hope you enjoy it!

Yesterday, Doug Kaye and I headed out for another one of our duo photo walks. These are always great fun – as we get to catch up and chat while having a fun time photographing things that we see. We usually pick a venue and work it pretty thoroughly – but this time we tried something different.

The weather forecast looked like it might be a nasty day to be out and about – so Doug suggested we try hopping on BART and then getting off at a couple of the more interesting stations to just see what we could find that might be interesting.

Sounded like a plan – we agreed to meet at the Powell St. BART station – me arriving from Daly City and Doug from North Berkeley. We both got there within 5 minutes of each other and could see some blue sky up through the exit. So, instead of staying underground, we headed outside to Market Street and began taking pictures.

The one above is of the Muni cable car turntable at Powell and Market Streets. This image was shot with my Canon PowerShot S100 and post processed using Adobe Lightroom 4. Because of the weather and our original plan of mostly being underground, we both left our big cameras behind and just brought along small cameras – the S100 in my case and a brand new Fujifilm X-Pro 1 that Doug had rented for the weekend.

From there, we walked down Yerba Buena Lane to Yerba Buena Center where we explored “puddle photography” – taking pictures of reflections in puddles of water, glass reflections, the kids’ carousel, and more such as this game board.

After lunch at Mel’s, we walked back to BART and headed toward the Glen Park station – apparently known for its architecture.

After that, on to SFO Airport and the Aviation Museum there. I’ve been to that airport hundreds of times – but never to the museum! We had fun talking with the curators there and were able to have some fun taking photos of an Italian motorcycle exhibit in the large International terminal. From there, we headed home – to begin looking at what we had captured during the day – some 115 images in my case!

It’s always fun to see what we each captured and what (and how) we choose to interpret our images in post-processing. You can see some more examples on our respective Google+ pages (Doug’s and mine)!

Why this 11-inch MacBook Air? I decided I wanted a “killer” writing machine – something I could just use for writing. This little Mac was going to be it. And, it is!

I happened to swing by the Palo Alto Apple Store one day and it turned out they had the max config of the 11-inch Air in stock – amazingly – so I decided to just go for it. (I suspect Apple’s gotten very smart about stocking their top of line configs in their stores – just for folks like me!)

What’s the max config? Currently, it’s a 1.8GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 with 4 GB RAM and 256 GB Flash storage (instead of a hard disk).

I bought it, brought it home, quickly configured it, installed some essential software and was quickly up and running – quite seamlessly. By the way, today, I mostly live in Chrome – using it for email, calendar, etc. Chrome screams on the Air. For that matter, Safari does too. Most things do – even PowerPoint!

I couldn’t be happier with this little Air. It’s an amazing machine – no spinning beach balls, super fast performance, and a delightfully tiny form factor – and a beautiful display. This is the future – these amazingly fast, Flash-based machines – a great way to “fly”!

But, then, there’s also the new iPad…

This is another image from my photo walk with Doug Kaye in San Francisco last Thursday. Doug noticed that this section of street across from us wasn’t blocked by parked cars, trucks, etc. He shot several shots that he put together into a panorama – and I did the same.

Mine were shot using a Canon 5D Mark II – three handheld images taken with a bit of overlap – and then merged together using PhotoShop CS5. I post-processed the image using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex 2 – adding sharpness, sepia toning, and a slight vignette to make the image appear a bit aged. Click on the image to see a larger version.

I took a day off from work today to join my good friend Doug Kaye for a delightful photo walk in San Francisco’s Chinatown and North Beach neighborhoods.

We met at the Portsmouth Square Park/Garage – with handy underground parking that launches you right into the heart of Chinatown. It’s pretty amazing how your senses are soon overwhelmed when you emerge from the underground parking elevator into the park’s plaza. This park teems with energy – lots of folks, kids, etc just having a great time – even on a workday Thursday morning!

After exploring the park a bit, we headed out – up to Grant Avenue, over to Stockton St. and then across Broadway to Washington Square Park and North Beach. We stopped for a great lunch at Cafe Divine before heading back – up to Grant Avenue, back across Columbus and down Kearney to Portsmouth Square. That’s Doug out in the middle of Columbus Avenue shooting the Transamerica Pyramid!

Total mileage for our loop was 1.4 miles. We spent about 3-1/2 hours exploring, absorbing the many neighborhood smells, and having a great time shooting some fun images. Below is the map of our loop.

This is one of those weekends that provokes a look back. As I wrote last year, these two days in March will never be quite the same.

I spent some time tonight looking back at my photo archive and ended up settling on a few shots taken in 2008 – from a trip to Sausalito and Fort Baker. These were both taken on the same day in March 2008 with my since retired Canon EOS 40D DSLR (a really great camera, IMHO!) – and I processed them for the first time tonight. Most of the processing was done in Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 and Lightroom 4.

Up top is a shot taken at Fort Baker of a woman fishing out in the Bay. I chose a traditional monochrome view for this shot.

Below is a San Francisco bay and skyline shot taken from Sausalito. This one, while also monochrome, has different toning applied – appropriate to the sky/water elements in this image.

I love both of these images – they bring back lots of memories of that day! Hope you like them! Click on either image to see a larger version.

Khan’s images remind me of another of my favorite local artists – Pep Ventosa. Pep is another master of this kind of multiple image compositions – in color.

Both of these artists obviously spend a lot of time both working their subjects in the field and in Photoshop as they compose their art.

I love ‘em both!