While heading out to Point Reyes last Saturday, I took a couple of shots along the highway through Inverness. The first stop was the FV Point Reyes – run aground behind the Inverness Store. See my post “Photography Explorations: Filling the Frame” for more about that shot.
The next step, just a bit further west, was to take this shot of the Launch for Hire building and pier on Tomales Bay. I have a large version of an image of this building that I bought from Chris Honeysett years ago – it hangs in my home office. It’s a beautiful image taken from the other side of the building.
For this image, I used by Canon 5D Mark II and my 70-200mm f/2.8L lens – at 70mm. The image was post-processed using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro with the final toning added in Lightroom 4.
I love the circle of rocks in the lower left hand corner, the pier at low tide and the contrasty clouds in the sky. There are elements of layers in this image that cause my eye to wander back and forth within the frame – trying to take it all in.
This image of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse was shot on January 13, 2012, during shoot with my photo buddy Doug Kaye. We started out at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve near Half Moon Bay and then headed south along US 1 to Pigeon Point. The light was very special that day – this image was shot about 1 PM but you can see the sun angle is still not very high.
The new version of Lightroom 4.1 has 32 bit HDR Tiff handling support – so I used Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop CS6 to blend three images together (taken on a tripod using +/-2 EV exposure bracketing with my Canon 5D Mark II). I brought the image back into Lightroom and make a few final tweaks – love how this version turned out! Click on the image to see a larger version!
On Saturday, I took a drive up to Point Reyes – motivated by the Open Studios held this weekend. There were a few photographers having open studios – including my friend – and black and white photographer – Marty Knapp. Before heading to the open studios, however, I stopped by a few of my favorite sites in Inverness and at Pierce Point Ranch out on Point Reyes.
First stop was the FV Point Reyes, a popular site just behind the Inverness Grocery Store. Many photographers have shot this forlorn fishing boat over the last few years. I made a quick stop here – spending at most 10 minutes – shooting hand-held with my Canon 5D Mark II with the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L lens – and my iPhone 4S.
I first captured the usual iconic shots of the boat – from about a half dozen angles as I walked around the bow. As I was about to leave, I noticed how lovely the light was on the cabin of the boat itself – and that motivated me to go in closer and to “fill the frame”, not worrying about capturing the whole boat itself.
This image turns out of be one of what I consider the best of my recent photos – with the beautiful light, the great detail of the boat’s “grunge”, the bokeh and moodiness in the sky behind, etc. I titled it “Derelict”. A great example of one of the basics of great photography: “fill the frame”! The major point about filling the frame is that our minds will deal with the missing elements – it’s certainly easy to see that this is a fishing boat – and, given it’s tilt, that something’s amiss!
Here’s another image – one that was more heavily post-processed including a texture overlay – of the FV Point Reyes that I posted last summer.
PS: If you’re in the US, hope you’re having a great Memorial Day weekend! We had one of our grilled tri-tip dinners last night that was wonderful – a bit more more on that later once I update the menu on my Scott’s Kitchen web site.
PPS: Here’s a straight out of the camera shot of the FV Point Reyes – taken with my iPhone 4S. Sort of sets the scene for the closeup shot above!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Late this afternoon, I headed over to Half Moon Bay – specifically to Montara and the Point Montara Light Station – to join up with a small group of Google+ photographers. I tried several HDR shots – none of which worked very well given the continuous movement in the ocean. But this image grabbed me – primarily because of the vanishing point effect of the clouds merging at the lighthouse.
I shot this with my Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod – using a Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 lens. I shot it at f/11 at 1/50 of a second and post-processed it in PhotoShop CS5 using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 and Color Efex Pro 4 filters. I particularly like the wide tonal contrast around the lighthouse in this image.
Yesterday, Doug Kaye and I headed out on a glorious January morning for some photography shooting over on the coast. We headed first to one of my favorite spots – Fitzgerald Marine Reserve north of Half Moon Bay. This county park has an iconic row of trees that offer a beautiful setting for us photographers. On some mornings, you’ll get fog – on others, a mix of fog and sun. Yesterday we had a glorious bright sun – but with that low sun angle this time of year.
I call this image “Tunnel View” – mimicking the Yosemite shots of that same name. I just love how these trees frame the path – and provide their own tunnel. The sun and shadows add layers to the image.
I shot this with my Canon 5D Mark II with the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L lens – and post-processed it from a single RAW file using Lightroom to export 0/+/-2 exposure JPEGS for processing in Photomatix Pro. I imported that result into Photoshop CS5 and further tweaked the image using Nik’s Viveza 2, Color Efex Pro 4 and the amazing Silver Efex Pro 2. I did a final blend in Photoshop before importing back into Lightroom for some final tweaks, noise reduction, a touch of vignette and a bit of love (!).
This morning I met up with Doug Kaye over on the coast – for a morning of shooting – of the photography kind. We started at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve and then headed south to Pigeon Point Lighthouse before heading to Pescadero and Duarte’s Tavern (DOO-arts they say!) for a great cracked Dungeness crab lunch.
I’ve really come to appreciate these photo shoots with a friend – especially one who, like Doug, is pushing new frontiers and trying new techniques. As we explore a venue, we see through each other’s eyes – and see things we otherwise wouldn’t see. Try it sometime. It’s great fun!
This image is of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse on the San Mateo County coastline south of Pescadero. The light this morning was beautiful – and this black and white treatment features it!
This image was shot as a 3 image handheld HDR with my Canon 5D Mark II. I post-processed it first with Photomatix Pro (using undeveloped JPEGs exported from Lightroom 3 and Photomatix alignment by features), and then opened in Photoshop CS5. In Photoshop, I first adjusted with Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 – specifically, tonal contrast and detail extractor. Then I brought the image into Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 before finally bringing back into Lightroom for final tweaking, noise reduction, and uploading.
I’ll always remember this day and our time coasting the San Mateo coast! Beautiful!
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