Sunset over the Bahamas aboard Celebrity Equinox sailing toward Fort Lauderdale
I’m a few hours early, but here is my wallpaper for February. I generally shy away from sunrises and sunsets for my wallpaper, but this one looked pretty nice and I thought it was a photo someone wouldn’t mind looking at for a month, so here it is.
This photo was taken on the last night of our recent cruise. The land is one (or more – it’s hard to tell) of the Bahamas islands. I don’t often get to include land in the foreground when we’re on a ship, and while it doesn’t add a lot it is an extra element of interest. Great sunbeams and color make this a special sunset.
Here in the south we’ve survived our 72 hours of “winter” and will be soon looking forward to spring flowers and buds on the trees. For those of you in the colder climes – sorry! 🙂 I hope everyone has a wonderful February, wherever you might be!
Downtown Davidson, North Carolina under a nearly full moon and some amazing clouds. 5D Mark III w/50mm 1.4. Hand-held at 1/30 @f1.4, ISO 6400.
Kathy & I went to Davidson for dinner last night, and decided to get there early to have a little time to walk around town so I took my camera along. The clouds and moon were quite dramatic, and I thought this was a decent result. I’m playing with a B&W version but haven’t struck on one I like yet.
Sunset aboard Celebrity Equinox, somewhere in the Atlantic
I’ve been away for a little while, but it looks like everyone has behaved. Kathy & I just returned to Charlotte from Fort Lauderdale, disembarking our cruise ship this morning after 10 days in the Caribbean. Sitting in the airport this morning, I looked at the weather forecast and thought seriously about hopping the flight to San Juan instead. 🙂
I’ll have some photos to post once I get them downloaded and processed, but for now here’s one I took with my tablet and processed with Snapseed. The Nexus 10 has a pretty decent camera, but it’s a little tough to hold a tablet still in the breeze on the deck of a moving ship. The colors are a little juicy, but that’s the whole point of Snapseed, right? 🙂
I had intended to post this from the airport this morning, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the photo into the post from my tablet. Strange. I guess I’ll need to do some research.
“Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!” (Attributed to Alfred E. Neuman, but who knows?)
The Weird Sisters Visit Skagway
I was doing my usual morning headline scan the other morning and came across one that read:
“Top 10 things to worry about in 2013”
Huh.
So, it’s not enough to just live my life, plan for the future, eat right and exercise. I have to read lists to tell me what to worry about? Please. And actually, none of the items on that list are things that even affect me. Maybe in some distant way, but will they impact my day-to-day life? No. I realize that it’s not good to completely ignore current events, and I don’t. I’m far from oblivious. But why do the media think we need things to worry about? I suppose it provides better ratings or page views, but that’s just one more thing to get in the way.
It’s bad enough that we can’t trust any information we get these days. But then we get these people who feel the need to tell us what we need to worry about? No thanks! If we want to spend our days running around like Chicken Little I guess that just adds fuel to the fire, but that’s not how I prefer to spend my days. Especially the preciously small portion of my days that I get to spend actually doing something I want to be doing!
As I sit here on a beautiful North Carolina day, middle of December, trying to decide whether I need a coat to take a walk this afternoon, I thought I’d post a few more photos from our Thanksgiving weekend adventure to eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. These were all taken in the vicinity of the Kidd’s Mill Covered Bridge near Reynolds, PA.
Image processed in Lightroom from a single “-2 EV” RAW file
On my previous post, Monte asked about how the HDR version of that image came out, and as it turned out I didn’t do an HDR series on that particular photo so I didn’t have anything to compare. Just for kicks though, I went back and found an image where I did do a bracketed series including an in-camera HDR file.
HDR Image from 3 bracketed frames, blended in Photoshop and finished in Lightroom
Most of my readers know that I really dislike futzing around in Photoshop, so I probably didn’t do the HDR version justice. But while there are things I like about it, I’m really a fan of the contrast you get from a single file. While the HDR version perhaps shows more “detail” I’d rather see the contrast. Of course I’m a fan of rich, dark tones in my photos and HDR kind of defeats the purpose for me.
In-camera HDR from the same 3 frames used for the Photoshop version. Unprocessed, it’s a little dark for my taste.
I’ve made these files a little larger for those who want to pixel peep. But please don’t criticize my Photoshop skills. Because, especially for things like HDR, I’m really out of practice.
Walking around the inside this covered bridge last weekend, I knew that it was the perfect subject for some HDR. I’m not a particular fan of HDR as a rule, but knew that this would be a good place to give it a try. I took a series of bracketed shots using the in-camera HDR feature in my camera. But when I got to playing with it in Lightroom, I decided to see what it looked like without actually blending the frames. As it turns out I think that I actually like it this way. I’ve had to make some pretty extreme exposure adjustments and it’s as noisy as my neighbor’s dog, but I think I’ve got the final result that I envisioned when I took the photo. And ultimately, if I get the result I’m looking for it really doesn’t much matter how I get there, does it?
Here’s a “before” shot just to see where I started:
Joy of Christmas light show at Firestone Park, Columbiana, OH
Our Thanksgiving visit to Ohio and Pennsylvania, despite not being a “photography trip” per se, resulted in a number of decent photographs, one of which I liked well enough to use for this month’s calendar. I like to keep with the holiday theme for December whenever possible, and I’m usually able to come up with something.
Firestone Park, named for Harvey Firestone (the tire guy), is located in Columbiana, OH. Kathy & I lived here before migrating south to North Carolina. And a late November visit reminded us why we moved!
Firestone Park has an annual “Joy of Christmas” light festival, and we had a chance to pay a visit one evening while we were there. I didn’t take a tripod with me, figuring I wouldn’t do a lot of photography, but who can resist Christmas lights? And with ISO 6400 or higher, who needs a tripod, even at night? 🙂
I hope everyone has an exceptional December and a warm and joyous Christmas holiday season!
Kathy & I spent a quiet and relaxing (except for the drive home) extended Thanksgiving weekend in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania visiting family and friends. As is my usual habit, I spent minimal time perusing the interwebs or watching television, so I enjoyed a blissful 5 days away from all of the messages telling me what I was supposed to be doing, buying or worrying about. Fortunately I returned to work today, so I was able to get my 5-minute daily dose (aggregated from all my visits to the break room during the day) of television “news,” so I am now up to speed again. Fiscal Cliff, blah-blah, Black Friday, blah-blah, Cyber Monday, blah-blah, Petraeus (or not Petraeus), blah-blah, Egypt, blah-blah, football, blah-blah, William and Kate, etc.
Somehow all of that stuff pales in comparison to cherished and overdue time with loved ones. I hope you all had time to spend with yours.
I’m getting back around to working on some photos from earlier this fall. In no particular order, just whatever my attention span allows me to concentrate on!
Hotel Roanoke and Railroad TracksCorned Beef & Company
I had mentioned in a previous post that Kathy & I had decided to spend our fall weekends differently than we have the past few years. Rather than chasing color up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway (something we enjoy but have grown a little weary of) we spent a weekend in Florida at a jazz festival, a weekend in Roanoke, VA visiting friends, and a weekend in which I took photos at a recreated pioneer village and photographed some kids. That was a different fall for us, indeed.
Steven
Kathy & I have had an attachment to Roanoke since spending a single night there very early in our marriage. I don’t even remember for sure what we did, where we stayed or where we ate, but we’ve always had good memories of our short time there, and have wanted to go back and spend some time. This year we got to go to Roanoke twice. Of course it was made easier because we have good friends there. We go to see Steven and Cheryl, and just like us, they enjoy wandering around town, taking random photographs, shopping and eating. What a deal!
Free!
We’ve found a nice historic hotel right in the downtown area that is walking distance to just about everywhere. We can literally park the car and enjoy the weekend without having to drive. Although this visit we did spend a little time exploring the countryside, visiting a winery and one of Steven & Cheryl’s favorite restaurants, which is now also one of our favorite restaurants!
Bright yellow leaves of Ginko Biloba trees celebrate fall in downtown Roanoke, VirginiaOrange!
One of my objections to the constant driving we have done in previous years is that I get tired of driving. And I get really tired of traffic. Kathy drives sometimes, but my creativity seems to suffer when I view the scenery from a moving vehicle, regardless of who is driving. And the addition of crowds just makes it harder.
Missing shutters
The other thing with fall is that it’s often very hard to find really interesting scenes. Fall color gives the impression of being interesting because everything is a different color, but in actuality it is much harder to make an interesting photograph in the fall because of the color. Much of what we see in the fall is just as boring as it is in the summer, it’s just a different color. My opinion, anyway.
Open and Shut
Fall happens everywhere, not just in the mountains. And it’s not just colored leaves that make up fall. The air is crisp and cool, the light is warm and contrasty, and a lot of interesting things happen in the fall, such as festivals, concerts and farmer’s markets. So my goal was to find and photograph fall in different places. I think it was a successful approach, and in many ways I think am happier with the results than I’ve been from those in previous years.
