Picture of the Day (Dial-up internet users enter at own risk!)

[swift]

Kristin, I love the one taken in the early evening!!! Beautiful!!!!!

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Monterey, CA Boat Harbor

California wild poppies go well in almost any photo.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Lovers Point Park - Pacific Grove, CA

Another one from last week in Monterey

 

[swift]

A local vineyard that I pass everyday on my route. It is beautiful on the mornings we get a glowing sunrise. It can take your breath away.

 

[KristinB]

Kristin, I love the one taken in the early evening!!! Beautiful!!!!!

Theresa,

Thanks!

P.S. Actually it was taken at oh-dark-thirty, otherwise known as sunrise, LOL!

 

[KristinB]

A local vineyard that I pass everyday on my route. It is beautiful on the mornings we get a glowing sunrise. It can take your breath away.

Wow, you're so fortunate to see such beauty each day -- I'm glad you don't take it for granted! Lovely photo, thanks for sharing...

 

[ciscogizmo1]

Okay... thought I join you...

The Disney ship docked in Ville Franche

Another one of the beautiful port Ville Franche

 

[easyrider]

plant we like

 

[easyrider]

bar we like

 

[dmharris]

Tarpley's Store at Christmas Tide - Williamsburg

The shops and houses are decorated for Christmas with natural elements that ideally reflect the purpose of the building.

 

[dmharris]

Close up of the decorations - Shells, boxwood and pomegrantes

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Footbridge at Ruby Lake Resort

Ruby Lake is on the Sechelt Peninsula, north of Vancouver. I took this picture the same day as the Howe Sound photo I posted a little over a week ago.

I shot about 20 pictures at this location, trying to capture the calm of the water and the misty mountains above the lake . None of the pictures really captured the mood..

Then I decided to try converting one of the better images to black and white. When I added an orange-yellow filter to the conversion, the mountains suddenly came out of the mist, the lake picked up a dark color, and the wood bridge brightened up. I think the black and white adds to the ethereal mood.

 

[Blues]

Lovers Point Park - Pacific Grove, CA

Thanks for the pictures of Monterey and PG, Steve. Lovers Point Park is where DW and I were married, 23 years ago on Valentine's Day. Almost where the couple in your picture are standing -- actually just toward the camera and to the right. It was a beautiful sunny day in Feb; out of character for coastal CA, but someone was watching out for us.

Thanks for the memories.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Thanks for the pictures of Monterey and PG, Steve. Lovers Point Park is where DW and I were married, 23 years ago on Valentine's Day. Almost where the couple in your picture are standing -- actually just toward the camera and to the right. It was a beautiful sunny day in Feb; out of character for coastal CA, but someone was watching out for us.

Thanks for the memories.

Thanks for the note. I enjoy those little tidbits of connection. I have some more photos of the Monterey and Pacific Grove, as well as some Big Sur shots, that I will post as I finish working on them.

 

[Denise L]

Can I post an old photo?

I couldn't resist. This is one of my favorite photos, taken at the Beijing Zoo in November 1987:

 

[geoand]

Thanks for the note. I enjoy those little tidbits of connection. I have some more photos of the Monterey and Pacific Grove, as well as some Big Sur shots, that I will post as I finish working on them.

Steve,
DW and I took Big Sur Highway back from Palm Springs in Mid March. She had not done this before. Between our 2 camaras we have over 500 photos. It only took us 11 hours to drive the Big Sur! Next day we took about 10 hrs to continue on Highway 1 up to near Eureka. We have many pics. Will be posting also. I haven't worked on them yet.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Steve,
DW and I took Big Sur Highway back from Palm Springs in Mid March. She had not done this before. Between our 2 camaras we have over 500 photos. It only took us 11 hours to drive the Big Sur! Next day we took about 10 hrs to continue on Highway 1 up to near Eureka. We have many pics. Will be posting also. I haven't worked on them yet.

We did a half day trip last week - went a bit beyond Point Sur then turned around and came back. I had more than 100 shots, but since I now do bracketed exposures on most shots, that was more like about 40 actual photos. I've now winnowed that down now to about 15 that I think are worth keeping. I've got a similar backlog from my trip to Canada the week before - but I haven't done much cleanup on those.

Then I've still got some left from my February trip to Minnesota - those are almost entirely family photos, not "travel" pics. From December I've got some Puget Sound pics from Magnolia and some Deception Pass. The conditons weren't too good at Deception Pass so I'll only keep three or four of those.

After I do those I'll be caught up!! I want to get caught up before we leave for Hawai'i this summer.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Davis Bay Beach

Near Sechelt, BC on the east shore of the Georgia Strait. The land across the Strait is Vancouver Island, near Nanaimo and Pacific Shores resort.

 

[geoand]

Searching through our collection of 260 gigs of photos

Found a series of shots taken from Alaska Air flight on our first trip to Alaska in 2004. Took off in the evening from Seattle and landed at Anchorage around midnight. DW was fascinated by the clouds and colors. This was our first experience with dslr's.

For first couple of years, we always bracketed our shots. Then we went to taking photos in RAW format and decided that bracketing was not necessary. (adding clarification- we don't bracket everyone of our shots as we did when shooting in jpeg format. There are a few times that we think that bracketing is still necessary but those are rare.)

 

[cindi]

Could one of you guys explain bracketing? I am still trying to learn all this stuff.

Thanks for the gorgeous photos. It is my favorite thread of all.

 

[easyrider]

Wow, Is that the real colors of the clouds or is it enhanced ?

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Could one of you guys explain bracketing? I am still trying to learn all this stuff.

Thanks for the gorgeous photos. It is my favorite thread of all.

Bracketing is taking multiple photos of the same scene, but with the light exposure settings changed in each photo so that the primary light exposure is bracketed with darker exposure and a lighter exposure. Many digital cameras have a bracketing setting.

With bracketing, if the camera doesn't read the lighting properly, one of the bracketed photos will likely give a better picture.

Bracketing also helps in situations where there is extreme bright and dark contrast in a photo.The tonal range of a camera sensor is not as great as that of the human eye. In some high contrast situations a mid-range setting (what the camera usually selects) will result in a photo in which all of the bright tones are blown out to pure white, while many dark tones are rendered as complete black. You see this often in landscape photos with bright clouds in the sky and shadows in the landforms. Pictures of snowy mountains often suffer this way as well. With bracketed exposures and a robust photo processing program, you can create an image that captures the tonal range by combining appropriate elements from the bracketed exposures. Here is a Corel tutorial on High Dynamic Range (HDR), as this process is known. It's not as easy as the tutorial makes it seem. Actually, the combining of images using the HDR feature is easy - what's difficult is shooting images that an automatic HDR function can combine without resulting in ghosts or fuzziness. If the pictures can't be handled in an HDR function, then the combining has to be done manually using selections and blending.

The picture of Davis Bay beach above is an example of a high contrast setting. The shadows in the foreground are very dark, but if I used a brighter exposure the light on the water in the left side of the photo would blow out to pure white and the glints of the wavetops would disappear. In making that photo I cropped the photo to remove an even more brightly illuminated area of water on the left side of the photo. In the exposure that I used for the photo some of that water area that I cropped out was blown out to pure white. I did have a bracketed exposure with a lower exposure in which the detail remained in the water in the directly lit area, but in that exposure the shadow areas in the foreground were even more black. I selected the exposure and cropped the photo as I did primarily because I liked the composition of the cropped photo more than the original, but the reduced dynamic range of the photo after cropping was also a consideration.

****

BTW - the bracketing option on many digital cameras uses a default setting of ±0.3 EV. That range is far too small to be useful in most cases. I suggest using a setting of at least ±0.7 EV. I shoot at ±1.0 EV.

 

[geoand]

I know what bracketting is but durned if I could explain it in any understandable fashion! I saw Steve's explanation and would never have made it as understandable.

All the photos that I have posted have never been touched by me. DW does all of the touchups. I am the village idiot on this subject. DW showed me how to check to see if the photo has been enhanced in any way on the Aperture program. There is a slight exposure change and a slight contrast change. No colors were changed at all.

 

[cindi]

Bracketing is taking multiple photos of the same scene, but with the light exposure settings changed in each photo so that the primary light exposure is bracketed with darker exposure and a lighter exposure. Many digital cameras have a bracketing setting.

With bracketing, if the camera doesn't read the lighting properly, one of the bracketed photos will likely give a better picture.

Bracketing also helps in situations where there is extreme bright and dark contrast in a photo.The tonal range of a camera sensor is not as great as that of the human eye. In some high contrast situations a mid-range setting (what the camera usually selects) will result in a photo in which all of the bright tones are blown out to pure white, while many dark tones are rendered as complete black. You see this often in landscape photos with bright clouds in the sky and shadows in the landforms. Pictures of snowy mountains often suffer this way as well. With bracketed exposures and a robust photo processing program, you can create an image that captures the tonal range by combining appropriate elements from the bracketed exposures. Here is a Corel tutorial on High Dynamic Range (HDR), as this process is known.

The picture of Davis Bay beach above is an example of a high contrast setting. The shadows in the foreground are very dark, but if I used a brighter exposure the light on the water in the left side of the photo would blow out to pure white and the glints of the wavetops would disappear. In making that photo I cropped the photo to remove a more of the brightly illuminated water on the left side of the photo. In the exposure that I used for the photo some of that water area was blown out to ure white. I had a bracketed exposure with a lower setting in which the detail remained in the water, but then the shadow area in the foreground were even more intense. I selected the exposure and cropped the photo as I did primarily because I liked the composition of the cropped photo more than the original, but the reduced dynamic range of the photo after cropping was also a consideration. I still left some deep shadows in the foreground. I could have selectively lightened those areas, but when I opened those areas up I thought I lost some of the moodiness of the photo.

Wow, thanks for the detailed explaination!

I am going to have to sit down and read this about 5 times before I get it all.

Man, do I have a lot to learn.

 

[cindi]

I am the village idiot on this subject.

:rofl:

In spite of all you say, your photos are spectacular.