29 Mar 11. The alluded to wildlife shoot on Friday morning was done at Mercer Slough in Bellevue, WA. For the first 5 years of my 14 year employment as a barber, I passed by this area twice daily, both to and from the barber shop, but never took the time to actually visit it even though it was the site of a major ruckus in the early 70s when a developer wanted to put in a business park in the middle of it. Eventually he got to do it and it was a great success in that it damaged virtually nothing but provided a wonderful oasis for a work environment and lots of opportunity to commune with nature! After it was completed it became a model for other such efforts. Looking for something new to photograph, we elected to give it a go and see what was there. As soon as we entered the boardwalk we noticed a large raptor off in the distance and initially thought it to be a Bald Eagle. But when we got back and I had an opportunity to look more closely at an enlarged view it readily became obvious that it didn't look like any eagle I'd ever seen before. So I got out my bird books - all 1 of them - and unsuccessfully scoured the pages looking for anything that resembled this bird. So I leave it up to all you viewers to decide exactly what I shot. As for the day shoot, there was a lot more for the camera to capture, but I leave that for another mailing. ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 8.
30 Mar 11. As I've written many times prior, I grew up next door to a B&W darkroom, my bedroom door about 10 feet, if that, from the door to the darkroom. We both shared the quiet and solitude of the basement, and to this day I still feel that a house sans basement isn't a whole house. Many were the hours I shared with my father in that small, crowded (for two of us), dark, room, and to this day the smell of fixer brings back those memories. Apparently I'm not the only one who has these memories as the next version of Adobe's Lightroom will be renamed Photoshop CS6 and dedicated to just photographers. Photoshop, as we presently know it now, will be called Adobe ImageReady, and dedicated to graphics designers of all kinds. Upstart new manager at Adobe, April Fulson Yu, has stated: "We discovered that photographers long for the days of real photography with film and smelly chemicals so we wanted to reinforce that memory. We can't actually make the new Photoshop smell, but we're doing what we can to make photographers feel at home." Well now, if we are really going to bring back all that nostalgia, perhaps a big push will have to be in the arena of B&W photography. So to get a jump start on this new approach, here is a shot from the Fisherman's Terminal workshop in B&W. I started with three images, converted those to HDR as a mid point, and then the HDR to B&W. The seagull in the image flew to the mast top and just sat there for over 30 minutes while we snapped away. ISO 200; 2.5 sec @ f / 10 on a tripod.
31 Mar 11 Well. I must admit, I didn't know there was such a liking for B&W images with the group. Perhaps we need to resurrect Ansel. In any event, after reading all the comments, I'm sharing another B&W image for today, but this time I've come at it from a more standard approach and limited my work to a single image. In the process, it is becoming very obvious, at least to me, that B&W HDR is an area that has tremendous possibility and overlooked by just about every expert out there. I spent over 30 minutes working on this image as opposed to perhaps 5 minutes on the one for yesterday. To my eye the image shared yesterday has far greater detail and a much fuller complement of all the tones in Ansel's zone system than does the one for today. After working up this shot I did another in HDR and am pretty much convinced that I will start doing a lot more work with B&W HDR. I do believe I see a future magazine article on the topic. This was taken on Friday evening around 1900 as we watched the storm roll in. ISO 200; 1/800 sec @ f / 11.
