Redwoods: They are Tall

Shot this on a recent trip to Muir Wood. Old growth Redwood forests are:

A: Really, really dark (the canopy soaks up a great deal of the light, even on a sunny day)

B: Unbelievably tall. Seriously, until you've seen them for yourselves, it's hard to imagine. When you see something taller than a football field is long that's also older than Julius Ceaser, it blows your mind.

Even the above photo doesn't really do it justice -- though the wide angle can pull them all in, you don't get the sense of scale. The only photo of redwoods I've ever seen that captured their size was a huge National Geographic foldout spread, in which the photographer shot a panorama of the tree by winching the cameras up on a pulley system and taking photos the whole way up.

Click to enlarge.

Keeping the Horizon Straight

Keeping the horizon straight is quite a challenge in San Francisco! Click to enlarge.

Sailing

Today's photo is of a sailboat near San Francisco. Shot from Hendrick point on a (sadly) hazy day. Click to enlarge.

Which do you like more?

Both of these images were edited with Photoshop CS5. Which do you like more? Click either to enlarge.

1:


2:


The photos are of the Leland Stanford mansion in Sacramento, California. While I'm not allowed to explain exactly how this image was made, they are composed of 17 images each.

At the Ocean

My wife meets the Pacific Ocean at Rodeo Cove near San Francisco, California. They get some surprisingly large waves out here -- much larger than I remember from the Atlantic beaches I've seen. Click to enlarge.

Corn Silo

Today's photo is a corn silo between Kearney and Grand Island, Nebraska. This is actually a panoramic photo of several photos stitched together in order to boost resolution. Nebraska has some amazing and towering industrial buildings, thanks to agriculture.

Click to enlarge.

Silver Oak Wineries

This is a CS5 edited image of the wine rack at Silver Oak Wineries in Napa Valley, California. Home of some of the darn tastiest Cabs in the universe, they've also got a rather beautiful display building. Click to enlarge.

A few candids and portraits

I was testing out some Provia 400 a week ago in the EOS 1N I found at a flea market in Denver and am surprised how much I like the tonal response and fine grain of this film -- I don't typically think of 400 speed slide film as something that's going to reproduce terribly well. This stuff was great. These are a few candids (and a couple of obvious not-so-candids) of family as they sat around and chatted in our living room.

Which do you like more?

I'm still playing with some new HDR algorithms and going back and reworking old HDR shoots -- between 1 versus 2 and A versus B, which two images do you like more? Click any to enlarge.

Image 1:


Or Image 2:


?

Also,

Image A:


or Image B:

Kearney Bank Robbery

Some jackalope tried to rob the Kearney, Nebraska Wells Fargo today; he took around 30 or 40 hostages for a couple hours with a shotgun. This is a shot of him surrendering (click to enlarge). Article here: omaha.com/article/20100210/NEWS97/100219980

Which is better?

Been messing around with HDR and comparing algorithms lately -- which do you prefer, image one or image two?

Image one:



Image two:

Grain Silo

This is a some what punched up (digitally) panoramic image of the Gibbon, Nebraska Farm Service Center. (The original is around 6,000 pixels by 6,000 pixels; who needs a medium format camera when you have stitching?) This is a massive grain silo -- Nebraska may be short on skyscrapers, but it's hard to believe sometimes how many of these towering monoliths you see dotting the landscape. When you get close to them, you feel like you're in some Western European manufacturing district or something. Click to enlarge.

Late Harvest

Nebraska got off to an extremely late harvest this year, due mainly to getting a lot of moisture late in the season -- so late that a lot of farmers still hadn't cut any corn out of the ground by the time the year's first blizzard came around.

Some, though, made the deadline -- and one thing you can count on right after harvest in Nebraska is haybales. This farmer laid his haybales out in a particularly interesting pattern, at least to me.

Penny's Diner

On our way back from Colorado, fellow photographer Darren Addy took a little detour to show me an extremely cool old piece of nostalgia in North Platte, Nebraska -- a real life old-fashioned highway diner. Click to enlarge.

Green Truck

I just got back from a trip to Pueblo, Colorado with my father-in-law, who was picking up some darkroom equipment there. When we were done with business, we headed west out into the mountains and stumbled into a wild little town called "Guffey" -- population 26. Guffy has, no doubt, one of the more amusing Wikipedia entries out there -- it's definitely a town with a sense of character, even if that character seems straight out of Northern Exposure.

The town was littered (literally) with old vintage trucks, cars, firetrucks, wagons, you name it -- all there to complement the host of buildings still left from the mid 1800's when the town was founded. I think if a Hollywood location scout ever happens upon this place, he or she is going to make it famous. You couldn't dream up a set this elaborate.

This photo has been post processed a bit, as you can see from the sky, mostly by burning it down, down, down until nothing was left but tree silhouettes.

Click to enlarge.

Creepy Crawler

After a long hiatus, I'm finally refiring up this blog.

Today's photo is of a millipede at the Lincoln Nebraska Children's Zoo -- kindly taken out of the tank by an employee. The brave soul handling the creepy crawler is fellow photographer Josh Fiedler.

Zoos are actually great locations for animal photography; you'll find species of animals up close that you'd have to spend thousands of dollars to fly to remote locations and view from long distances otherwise. They're not in the wild, but they're still great subjects for a camera.

Trail Ridge Road

If you ever find yourself out the Colorado way, make sure you take a trip up along Trail Ridge Road -- the highest continuous road in North America. Most of it is above 10,000 feet, and it peaks out at around 12,600. And the views... oh my, does it have nice views. :)

Revisiting HDR 2

This is another HDR photo that I'm revisiting and having another go at with a different algorithm. The previous image was created with Photoshop CS3. Which do you like more? The new one or the old one?

Old one:



New One:


My fear is that the new version might be picking up a bit too much contrast in the sky. I tend not to like "garish" overblown HDR shots.

Snapped this last night when me, Josh, and Lanette went out to shoot the thunderbangers atop the parking garage in Lincoln. Originally, Lanette was also going to do some modelling shots for Josh (thus the dress) but the thunderstorm turned into the shoot of the day. Click the photo to enlarge it.

Revisiting an old HDR

I've been going back and rejiggering some old HDR shots with a different algorithm to see how they come out. The original HDR of this shot (done with Adobe CS3, I think) below the new one. Which do you think is better -- old or new?

New:


Old: