Daily Image - Dec 2012 Archive

03 Dec 12. I began work on this image last January about the time we were thinking that if I didn't do something quickly, the plant would be too far past its prime to be worth shooting. Being the time of year that it was the plant was obviously something with a Christmas theme, and what better says Christmas than a poinsettia. This was to be a desktop effort with the idea that I wanted to make the living plant look like a fake silk one. Kind of a 180 from when I was a kid and the fake flowers were so bad you didn't want them in your house, now they are so good that they often look better then the real thing and never need watering, even if dusting is a regular requirement. I think I did a pretty good job of achieving my original goal, but it never felt sharable for some reason. Today I decided to see if I could make it something I'd like to share. After looking it over for a bit, I decided that if I could bring out some of the detail in the petals it might render it presentable. All I did was apply a bit of detail extraction which provided just the kick it needed to meet that goal. After the detail enhancement it was sorely obvious that it need a LOT of cleanup so after roughly an hour of fixing hundreds of little character flaws, we arrived at the image you are viewing. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; ISO 200; 1/60 sec @ f /11 with fill flash on a tripod.

04 Dec 12. Now well into our third week of monsoon weather, the front yard, which was looking rather elegant in early August but which took a hit being mostly in the shade and apparently of the needs-lots-of-sun sun variety, first turned to a less than grassy area, then, with the help of two rough housing dogs, has become nothing more than a mud lot. So much for the landscaping. But all is not lost, for knowing now what I do, I have a much better idea as to how it will all be replaced. One of the nice aspects of visiting Sequim each year during the Lavender Festival is to see differing approaches to landscaping. Not all of them are of the top end expense-wise category, and there are in fact more than a couple farms whose landscaping I find very attractive. The image for today is from one of those places, and I'm thinking strongly of redoing the front yard area that has been destroyed in a fashion much like this. The area you are seeing is about 4x the area I have available, so it should be relatively easy to put something like it together and without considerable expense. The original shot was actually 5 frames in the standard - for me - HDR sequence of 2 stops under, 1 stop under, dead on, 1 stop over and two stops over. These were then put together into a HDR composite in which I endeavored to keep it looking pretty close to a "normal" shot. I did push it a small amount to the over textured side just to create the look I wanted for the iron and the rocks. This one was done several months ago and if I were to redo it today, I would still use the approach but instead of applying the "textured" look to the entire image, I would just paint it onto the iron, birdhouse, and the rocks. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/400 sec (middle of 5) @ f/ 6.3.

05 Dec 12. The image for today was taken about a week before we moved into our new home. It was in a large field just outside the garden area where I took the Blue Poppy images. Lupine is among my favorite flowers, and I always like to work with it when the opportunity arises. You may recall a shot last year from my neighbor's yard in Ballard. After working on this image a bit I added it to the ready to share folder but it never quite made it. On Wed Topaz Labs released their latest version of an image enhancement plugin and it is really the cat's meow. It offers selective enhancement for not only small, medium, and large detail but also based on tone (exposure, contrast, shadows, whites, blacks, and color pairs) and individual color as well. I decided to give it a trial run on this image and found it more capable than I. It will become a work horse in my stable of editing plugins. I made some mistakes in using it so I had to try and fix my mistakes after I finished using the filter. I got most of it corrected but if you look closely you will see some small areas of detail in the background that I should have removed, and missed, while I was using the filter. I've left it as is as a demo of what can be done with the inexpensive piece of software. While I seldom recommend a piece of software, this is one I feel worthy of pointing out. D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 9.

06 Dec 12. The image for today was created using several different techniques, but finalized by using the same piece of software I mentioned yesterday but in a different way. As I write this I realize I never told you what it is, so here is a link to it should you be interested. I began working on the photo as a HDR composit which I had hoped would allow me to combine all the elements of a sunset at Mt Rainier while standing across the road from Tipsoo Lake. I didn't get the result I wanted as the storm part was just too harsh and by that I mean it looked more like I had just pasted it in as opposed to it actually having been a part of the night scape. Now, reverting back to the software discussion of yesterday, one of the things that the new programs are starting to employ are controls allowing for the affect to be either additive or subtractive. In both instances you have controls that start at zero and go to plus/minus100% instead of just 0 to +100% as in prior releases. This is a really nice feature and allows for some greatly improved creative control. Not liking how the night scape turned out, even though the HDR approach allowed for my capturing everything my eye could see, I decided to try and do some subtractive application of altering the texture to see what might happen. What I finally arrived at, what you are seeing today, is an image that looks a lot - to me - like the construction paper images we used to make in grade school. If I can find a way to give each layer that torn look that you get with construction paper, I think I might be able to create a few rather interesting photos in the future. Stay tuned. D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 400; 1/25 @ f /13 (middle of 5) on a tripod.

07 Dec 12. Today's mailing brings us up to date on this 71st anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. With such as a historical point of reference (the stretch being something moving in the air), I thought I'd share another of the images in which I've tried to give a third dimension to a flat two dimensional canvas. Driving over Stevens Pass I have found a few select areas in which I shoot every time, and one of them is just a pull off right along side the road. The shoulder of the road slopes down into a tiny valley in which there is a large stand of vine maple. The bright red to red-orange color of the vine maples is always a challenge to accurately record, but this year I was lucky and got it close to right on. One of the trees had a branch jutting out over some rocks with the leaves casting a nice set of shadows on the rocks. Obviously it was three dimensional to my viewing, but to the camera it wasn't as clearly delineated. I took the shot with the hope that the camera might have done a better job than it looked through the viewfinder. It didn't. So I decided to take it on as a challenge to see how well I could make it look 3 dimensional. My approach was as follows: first I duped the base image, cropped off most of it, duped that, and did a detail enhancement on that remaining piece. Then I selected just the background (everything but the leaves) and ran a Gaussian blur on it to make it drop out. Duped that result and then lightened the center and darkened the edges and also applied a bit of warming to the overall image.Duped that layer and did a selective enhancement on specific leaves. The result is what you see. Somewhat 3 dimensional but not quite as much as I would have liked. Just have to keep practicing until I can get the technique really refined. D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 400; 1/1250 sec @ f /8. Hope you enjoy, dave

10 Dec 12. About three weeks back on the evening I was taking the images in the fog of my cousin's farm, I was initially greeted by 6 cows, sisters in a vague sense, who did their best to put their noses into the lens of the camera. It is always a challenge to try and befriend these rather skittish critters, so to have them willingly and with some degree of urgency come right over and make their presence known was simultaneously both a treat and a bit of an annoyance. I stopped taking photos and attempted to stroke a couple of heads but that wasn't exactly what they had in mind and moved away. As I was working with the fog they all lined up at one point along the fence, head to tail, but with some random spacing between them. I took a few shots of that presentation and played with one of them to make a creative image that substantially more than the original depicts how I was visualizing the setting. The original was duped, given a curves layer to increase the contrast, with those two layers flattened. That layer was duped and brought into a filter to give the streaky effect, and then was blended with the layer below it in two ways, first by reducing the opacity of the creative effect layer, and then changing the blend mode to overlay. Those layers were flattened, and then I had to do some specific selections to paint out a few areas that had become overblown in all this processing. That was all flattened and converted to the srgb color space for sharing on the web. D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 800; 1/2 sec @ f /8 hand held.

12 Dec 12. An experiment for today, that worked better in full file size than it has for the images being shared. This is a composite of thirteen 11MB files stitched together to make the complete pano. That resulted in a file 240 MB in size and measured 14,432 pixels wide by 2,924 pixels high. I then had to "compress" that image to 6.24 MB for the large size and roughly 300 KB (1024 pixels wide x 207 pixels high)for the small sized image. The result is that quite a bit was lost in the process. In truth I didn't employ software designed to do that very thing, I simply did a file reduction. While these panos can reveal a great amount of detail, and this one did, working with them to achieve all that with such large file sizes has many drawbacks. Among those are the demands on the equipment; even with a fast processor and 8 GB of RAM, this file brought the computer to its knees a couple of times while I was working on it and using filters required between 5 and 7 minutes to complete the rendering. Taken from the top of one of the trails across the parking lot from the visitor center at Hurricane Ridge, you have a view of a huge Christmas tree lot growing perhaps billions of Christmas trees. D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 9.

11 Dec 12. My graduate school adviser was a computer guru among many things. He often commented that if you have to read the instruction manual for a piece of software it was too poorly written to be considered usable. Although I didn't, and don't, fully agree with that observation, he has a good point. In many respects I find that I tend to follow that approach. So Monday evening (obviously didn't read the bottle) I took an Aleve on the encouragement of a few folks to deal with a sore shoulder which other script and OTC pharmaceuticals have not fully handled. Neither did the Aleve but it did give me some serious vertigo such that I wasn't doing anything much on Tuesday including the Daily Image. Fortunately, like Alice found out, if one drug takes you in one direction, there is another to bring you back. Almost makes me wonder what I missed out in the 60s. Not really! So here you have what should have been received yesterday. It is another shot taken in the dahlia garden in Silverdale. Other than some tight cropping, darkening the background in the URH corner, cloning out the "damaged' section of the petals, and increasing the fine detail a bit to bring out the structure of the petals, this is pretty much a straight shot. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f /9.

13 Dec 12. Breaking THE first big rule of photography tonight and placing my subject right smack dead center of the frame. But as the object pretty much fills the frame, I think we can get away with it. Walking along the harbor in Cabo, we were entertained by numerous pelicans, as well as mesmerized by a few others who simply paddled stately by us as we watched. This bird was cruising about 20 feet out from the pier and just kept pace with us as we walked from one end to the other. I was somewhat surprised by the beautiful colors on its head and did my best to record how the bird looked. I did a tiny bit of contrast enhancement on the image to bring out the detail in the feathers, otherwise, this is a straight shot. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f /13.

14 Dec 12. An area I've yet to shoot, and one I really want too, is the Palouse area of WA/ID states. Earlier this week I received a beautiful Christmas card featuring a photo of the Palouse - thanks Kathy - and it made me want to share images I don't have. So I created something vaguely similar by taking a photo of the haying earlier this year on my cousin's farm, getting it just the way I wanted it compositionally, then duped that and brought it into a filter to create a soft effect plus, and of equal importance, to bring out some detail in the farm building. The over all affect is that of a soft painting, and its style may remind some of you of a particular painter. I did one thing different from what the old painters would have done and made the man and the tractor photographically sharp, which should bring your eye to that point rather quickly. The result is a painting like image with a definite center of interest. Not quite the Palouse by any stretch of the imagination, but at least something pastoral. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/640 sec @ f / 5.6.

17 Dec 12. While we were wandering around Balboa Park in San Diego last January after having departed the cruise ship, we came upon a lovely garden area that included a large conservatory. Among the varied collection of plants was a very nice section of orchids. I'm not much of a fan of orchids, but Jan certainly is and thanks to both a good friend who provides them to her on a regular basis as well as Jan routinely grabbing them off the throw away plant stands at local stores, we now have about 50 of them growing in the sun room and elsewhere. Thus I likely could have taken this shot right at home as opposed to where I did, but timing is everything, and this was in bloom while we were there. I've cropped the original to just leave the flower and nothing else, plus added a wee bit of micro contrast to bring out all the fine detail in the blossom. Otherwise, this is a totally straight shot. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 250; 1/60 sec @ f /11 with fill flash.

18 Dec 12. Today's shot is of a plant that is now supposedly an invasive species. For me it is a plant of singular beauty, and one which holds the land far better than most. When we first planted it in our yard in Grand Terrace, CA, just between Riverside and San Bernardino, I was very skeptical that it could survive in that we (Jan) did nothing more than dig a tiny hole in the ground, stick in a small cutting - literally - and give it some water. In days the plant was spreading over the ground around it. Maintaining it was simple, just bit of water now and then and enjoy. Its bright magenta flowers seemed at times to be glowing, and the pretty yellow center made it a showpiece in our landscape. Best part of all of it was that it held the bank on which it was planted in place even during the occasional heavy rain. The variety of Ice Plant we grew had all green shoots and just the magenta flowers, but it also produces yellow flowers and along the coast of CA red shoots. It doesn't grow here very well if at all, and the few clippings we brought back with us from or cruise last January have all died but one. I'm waiting to see if it survives the winter. If so, my hope is to cultivate a small area of the plant for photographic purposes. I've tightly cropped the original, added a tiny bit of fine detail contrast enhancement, and a very little bit of global contrast enhancement. Otherwise, this is just how it looks. In fact, in bright light, this is pretty close to exactly how it looks. Nikon D330s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f /10.

19 Dec 12. For those of you who like the winter sports, it is time to head out to the PNW rather than to central America. Snowfall here exceeds anywhere in the country and there is plenty of opportunity for enjoying lots of the white stuff, in the mountains, that is. The shot for today would not be possible at present because the road to access it has been closed for almost 2 months and the road itself is under a "fair" amount of snow. But back in the 4th week of September Mt Shuksan was fully accessible, and this was the view directly across from the advanced skill level ski lift. One of these days I want to drive up to the ski area and then just hike up the trails and shoot the area under its white blanket; perhaps next year when this housing project is fully behind me. I've endeavored to add a small amount micro contrast enhancement to the rock to help visualize its texture, something that tends to get lost in the photographs unless you are right up close, which I wasn't. Otherwise, this is right out of the camera. Sharp eyes may notice the early (1700 PDT) rising moon. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 100; 1/25 sec A f /16 on a tripod.

20 Dec 12. Looking for something different for today, I was scrolling through a bunch of images and picked among several one of geese. As our son and his family are visiting the set of geese images brought back to mind their visit almost 4 years ago when I took them to see the geese on Fir Island. Trying to help them get a good picture, I didn't have my camera with me as the entire flock literally flew directly overhead. They stood there mesmerized by the whole thing with me yelling shoot, shoot, shoot as the shot of a lifetime passed me by. I still haven't seen what they got, so I'm thinking it wasn't that lifetime shot! If you've never had an opportunity to be watching a large flock of geese, about 10,000 in this particular flock, all lift off at once and circle around, you have something for which to look forward. In virtually every trip I've made up there I've had that experience, but I know of many folks who've made the same trip many times and never seen one goose. Now there is more to the story than just a group of geese lifting off. At this time of the year, but likely any other time would do, I'm wagering that you've come across a container of some shape holding some unspecified number of objects, the total of which you are supposed to guess in order to win some prize. So, with that theme in mind, how many geese? Since I'm not offering any great prize, I suppose no one will enter the contest, but I thought I'd give it a whirl nonetheless. Go ahead and enlarge it, the birds are sharp enough to allow for the counting. Or, if you prefer, print it out and make a puzzle of it. The original shot has had a little contrast enhancement, some small amount of noise reduction, and the color added in the sky. Otherwise it is a straight shot. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 640, 1/1000 sec @ f /7.1

21 Dec 12. Let's go with a single bird today since I had no takers on the count for yesterday's presentation. An easy answer, by the way, could have been an infinite number, which, while not exactly correct, would have conveyed the idea. But one is an easy count even if there are two different birds in the image. The Whooping Crane pictured here is one of, I believe, 6 such birds that inhabit the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary year round, and as such, are almost tame. While one can't actually walk up and touch, one can put food in the hand and have them eat from it. For those of you who might actually contemplate doing such a thing, may I suggest you hold your hand very steady. The bird's aim is very accurate, but if you reposition it in mid stab, the result may not be exactly what you anticipated. The Mallard in the shot is one of thousands that will let you do almost anything with them as long as you have a ready handout. They are rather comical in their efforts for free food and the cranes were constantly stabbing at them to keep them away from the food we were tossing out for the big birds. I've added a bit of texture enhancement on the crane just to show off the lovely plumage, otherwise, it is a totally straight shot save for some strong cropping. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 7.1.

Christmas Eve . With the rush of the Christmas season requiring her constant presence to insure nothing is removed from the house or the vehicles, plus the invasion of her space on the floor of the house by another who equally enjoys her time crawling around on the floor, Miss Maggie has been feeling the effects of the season. As if having to share her home with visiting family wasn't enough, she simply apparently had reached her limit the other day when Jan's sister told her she wasn't supposed to be lying on the couch. With that, she slowly removed herself from the couch, walked over to where her sister was siting, climbed up and got straight in her face as if to say "if I want your opinion I'll ask for it", then stepped back down and walked back over to where she had been and returned to her place on the couch. Perhaps our non-human family members feel the strains of the holidays as much as we do. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/60 sec @ f /11 with fill flash.

Christmas. I had hoped to have been able to share with you a very special image particular to the day, but my best efforts have failed me miserably. So as a result we'll just go with a very simple image of light piercing through the clouds in hopes that it might pay reverence to the thought of Christ as being the light of the world. A bit of a stretch perhaps, but a thought I felt appropriate for the day. Regardless of your religious upbringing, may the spirit of the season be yours today and throughout the year. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f /13.

26 Dec 12. As we were watching the Christmas DVD this afternoon Jan made the offhand comment that this is her favorite of all the insect photos I've taken this year, so I figured I'd share it with everyone. Always looking to get the perfect insect shot, I shoot them whenever the opportunity arises. This particular shot has a couple of features that are exactly what I'm looking for in the perfect shot, but several aspects that are not. I probably should just crop it really tight, you can do it yourself to see what I mean, to include just the top central third of the shot. In fact, that idea sounded good enough that I did it for you. Now we loose a lot of perspective, but as most of us know the relative size of a honeybee, and probably recognize the flower as a cone flower, some decent perspective remains. I watched her as she crawled up the flower shooting the entire time as she made her way to the top. This is my favorite shot of that series. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f / 8.

27 Dec 12. For as long as I can remember, I have been a fan of dragons, especially the kind one encounters in the movies. So for me the releases of Dragonheart, Avitar, and How to Train Your Dragon have been a delightful "gift." These three just identified are my all time favorites, and each is of equal ranking but for different reasons. The image for today came about as I was trying out a piece of software to see what it might tell me about the subject in the original shot. As I was working with different effects I thought of the Dragonheart movie and its star, Draco, who of course is a dragon with Sean Connery's voice. If you've not seen it I highly recommend it to you and it is the end of the movie that connects with the image I've created. Draco, for those of you who remember the movie, and it is also true for those of you who haven't yet seen it, becomes a constellation in the heavens and my "cancer," in its own way, reminds me of having created my own constellation. It is a bit of a stretch, but then, when looking to the heavens to find the different constellations, I often think that whoever named the groups of stars as they did were often making some very large stretches! Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/100 sec @ f /10.

28 Dec 12. We spent some time today with the cherubs visiting the Poulsbo Marine Science Center. The slide show on the linked page has a number of very nice images which are better by far than what I was able to capture while we were there. Part of the problem had to do with the environment and an even bigger part with operator error. Something along the line of what a good friend's father is fond of saying, "blame the Indian, not the arrow." Didn't realize until I was departing the Center that I had forgotten to check the ISO on the camera and ISO 1000 wasn't what I should have been using. On top of this were badly scratched surfaces on the tank sides requiring significant post processing image repair and very difficult lighting conditions. But in the process I did get a few usable images and the crab I'm sharing was among them. Now this crab is far different from the one I shared yesterday and is of a crab who is displaying very aggressive mating behavior. He was at the very edge of the tank and looking straight at me with both claws snapping, as if he were saying, "put your dukes up biddy." I couldn't resist taking the shot. All-in-all the experience was one which will have me returning often, but with a few additional pieces of equipment to overcome the challenges. If you are in the area it is worth a visit! Nikon D300s; 18 -200; Aperture Priority; ISO 1000; 1/6 sec @ f / 8 hand held.

31 Dec 12. We'll end year 7 of the Daily Image with a piece that I figured I had best wait until the New Year's holiday to share, as it probably needs all the liquid refreshment help it can get. This image is an initial and poor attempt at trying to emulate the work of an individual I first became interest in during my early college years. Maurits Cornelis was a German artist who worked with designs of the impossible, but which always looked correct until you gave them a close up look, or with designs in which one thing morphed into another. His work at times was very intricate, at other times very mathematical, but always very intriguing. There is a young Swedish contemporary who couples photographs with digital manipulation to get similar results, but Maurits did his work by carving the reverse image into a block of material which was then used to print the drawing as originally intended, a bit more challenging to my way of thinking. While I have come to appreciate a large number of MCs works, among my very favorite is one of a dwelling with a waterfall in which the water seemingly runs uphill from the base of the falls to go over the edge of the fall repeatedly. This theme was employed in dozens of his pieces of work and they truly fascinate me. What I tired to do with this image was to create the feeling of an additional dimension which, when studied carefully, clearly isn't there, but which appears correct with only a cursory look. The approach needs a LOT more experimentation, which is why I saved it for this particular holiday, but I think that it holds promise of potentially allowing for the creation of art partially along the line of these other artists. The original shot is, I believe, of the interior of the old Post Office building in downtown D.C. If I'm wrong I'm sure one of the MD members of the list will give me the correct info. D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/25 sec @ f / 5 handheld from a moving elevator.