On Sunday, Doug Kaye and I headed out to Point Reyes and a group photo walk at Drake’s Beach. Along the way, Doug stopped briefly at this road – which I call “Radio Road” – heading down to the old RCA / Marconi Radio site. I took this shot with my iPhone 5 looking out the car window – and processed it using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2, Topaz Simplify 4 and Photoshop CS6. It’s a moody, dark lane with this treatment!
For more about radio at Point Reyes, see: Communications at Point Reyes – the home of KPH. The article notes: “The Monterey cypress “tree tunnel” at the Point Reyes station is a signature landscape feature that evokes some of the prestige that RCA placed in this profitable, historic operation.”
Another one of my New Year’s Day explorations at the Golden Gate Bridge was Battery Boutelle. The symmetry of this image is what captured me – shot handheld with my Nikon D600. I converted it to monochrome in Photoshop CS6 using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 – and then brought it into Lightroom and applied another one of Trey Ratcliff’s Lightroom Presents – A Crisp Start – to add this particular tone.
I just took a look back at the most popular web pages here on my blog during the last twelve months of 2012. The most popular pages – based on page views – weren’t written this year – but they’ve stood the test of time – at least as far as Google and the other search engines are concerned.
Here’s the list of top 10 posts based on page views during 2012:
My Life in a Sling! (Nov 10, 2009) – The story of my rotator cuff surgery – and an amazing community of others who’ve also been through this rough surgery.
A Floating Faucet Fountain (Jun 13, 2009) – One of those fun stories that brings back childhood memories of home shows and the like!
Look at that list – no posts from 2012 made the top 10! It’s kinda crazy how long the long tail is. In the case of my blog, the top 3 posts accounted for over 50% of this year’s page views. The remaining 40+% were spread out among hundreds of other posts. I wonder how this distribution might change in 2013?
This morning I had one of my regular holiday reactions – a sort of cabin fever – and headed out of the house to points unknown for a photography adventure. I packed my cameras in the trunk of the car, grabbed a couple of bottles of water, plugged my iPhone into the car stereo and headed up towards 280.
I thought I’d probably head for San Francisco. For the last few years, I’ve had this thing about shooting the Golden Gate Bridge at this time of year – especially if we’ve got clouds in the sky or a breaking storm moving east. We had both today. But my usual Golden Gate day was January 1st. I was a bit early for that.
As it turned out, as I was heading to 280, I was pulled west – over to the coast. I crossed 280 and headed through Woodside to Hwy 84 and up the hill to Skyline. I continued on down through La Honda, San Gregorio and over to Hwy 1. It was a beautiful drive – cloudy light overhead, a podcast on the radio, and nobody else around.
At Hwy 1, I turned left – heading south along the coast. I made a quick stop at Pomponio State Beach – and chatted a bit with another Nikon shooter about how great it was to just be out above the beach enjoying the late December light. The low sun angle this time of year makes it very special – my favorite time of year for great light. I loved the patterns the waves were making – such as the “S curves” below.
After Pomponio, I continued south on Hwy 1 – passing up the other state beaches along the way as I headed to Santa Cruz. My rough plan was to make a big loop over to Hwy 1, south to Santa Cruz, then up on Hwy 17/85/280 to get back home.
But, of course, there’s Pigeon Point on the way – one of the most beautiful lighthouses on the Pacific coast. I pulled off and had a great time walking along the cliff above the ocean leading south to the lighthouse itself. Here’s a shot taken with my iPhone 5 and post-processed using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.
The clouds in the sky and the angle of the light today made for some very special shots – and, on purpose, I was traveling light. No tripod, no serious HDR kind of shooting, just handheld with my Nikon D600 and, when the mood caught me, with my iPhone 5 – such as the shot above. The light and clouds at Pigeon Point were beautiful and I made a number of handheld shots just walking around.
After a great time at Pigeon Point, I headed south – made a detour to try to find the old Bonny Doon Winery tasting room (it’s now in Santa Cruz!) before arriving at Santa Cruz’s Lighthouse Point Park. There’s a surfing museum there in a building that looks like a small lighthouse – but I was captured by the light and skies off the coast.
My loop took over to the coast and back took about four hours. It was great therapy for my cabin fever! Special light, lovely clouds in the skies, beautiful venues – it doesn’t get much better than this. I should be so lucky!
This morning I headed for San Francisco – hoping for some interesting clouds for a break in between the rolling waves of tropical rains we’ve been having.
Afterwards, there was a nice break in the rain and I headed for Crissy Field and then to Baker Beach – either side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I thought the most interesting – stormy – shots were from Baker Beach. (See some of my earlier images from Baker Beach – it’s a dramatic spot!)
Here are three treatments of the same image of the Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach. Immediately below is the right out of the camera (Nikon D600) version. Up top is a black and white version (my personal favorite) created by blending a couple of layers of Nik’s Silver Efex Pro treatments into a composite black and white image. The black and white version was based on the color treatment shown at the bottom of this post – the result of putting the image through a modified version of Lee Varis’ technique for image enhancement.
More details of my Lab-centric workflow can be found on my earlier post laying out that particular process. Just appreciate how this workflow is such an evolving process!
By the way, I started my morning by first visiting my friend photographer Chris Honeysett who’s holding his holiday show this weekend in the Gatehouse at Fort Mason Center. Chris is a great photographer – one of the few that I’ve actually collected over the years! If you have a chance to stop by his holiday show this weekend, it’s very worthwhile. While he was initially known for his black and white photography, he’s recently been doing some amazing work in color.
In the summer of 2009, something happened to the fishing boat Josie C and she ran aground in the Princeton Harbor at Half Moon Bay.
When I originally processed this image, I used a single image HDR treatment which (as is often the case with HDR newcomers!) was a bit overdone. I recently went back and processed the image again – this time not using HDR but more conventional techniques in Photoshop.
Above is my favorite – the black and white version. Below is the color version from which the black and white was created using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.
In August of 2010, I took a photography workshop led by Dave Wyman and Ken Rockwell to Point Reyes and Tomales Bay. Along the way to the coast, we stopped in the small town of Bodega and had shot the Saint Teresa of Avila Church – in the fog. This image was shot with my tiny Canon PowerShot S90 and I have previously processed it this way:
I loved the foggy moodiness of the image – and the amber colors in the grassy foreground. I reprocessed it in monochrome with a bit of a texture overlay to add a bit more drama for the version up top.
The town of Bodega is famous for having been included in Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. The church itself was photographed in 1953 by Ansel Adams.
Earlier this week, one of my images from early in my DSLR photography era went viral on one of the sharing sites. It’s a photo taken from Twin Peaks in San Francisco as a winter storm was clearing out to the east.
Here’s that shot:
It was taken with a Canon 30D and processed several years ago into this color version.
Over the last few days, I’ve been trying some new techniques for black and white conversion in Photoshop, trying to create more interesting images. Here’s a quick version of this same image converted to black and white with a bit of split toning applied in Lightroom.
Both versions are over the top in terms of drama but are fun to compare and contrast.
In March 2011, we were in Sydney, Australia for the wedding of a close family friend. Of course, while there, we spent some time on the amazing Sydney Ferries.
This image was shot with my tiny Canon PowerShot S95 as we were heading back into Circular Quay. I loved this perspective on the Opera House – and processed it in monochrome using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 and Topaz Simplify 4. I love the contrast and composition in this image – and hope you do too! (Click on the image to see a larger view)
