Thursday, September 18, 2014

New Camera time




Pentax K-01. I have a backup body... it has better high ISO performance than my primary camera. Oops. Also it's fun to use!

The rest: http://1drv.ms/1mk7XhV

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Today's hike

Beautiful weather and decent light!

Great Salt Lake

Taken May 31, 2007. My Dad and I have made it a point to go to the various parks around the Great Salt Lake when I'm out visiting. In 2007, we went to Antelope Island, which more or less tops off the Oquirrh mountain range on the west side of the Salt Lake valley. The park itself is home to a fairly diverse mammal population, as well as some fascinating rock features thanks to the shoreline erosion from the old Lake Bonneville. Seen here, Dad's looking out at something out over or on the other side of the lake (I don't remember), though the picture makes it look like he's observing the rock with binoculars.

Note the horrible air quality - I brought down the blue luminance some to make it look more natural; without it, the picture looks like this. It only gets worse over time, as the state doesn't seem to care much about preserving the area for everyone.

Friday, September 5, 2014

return to "form"

I have a fantastic idea for "why do I have blog?" - it goes like this.

Each time I open Lightroom, I'm forcing myself to develop, proof, and upload a photo. I've been just tweeting them, but I think from now on, I'm going to post it here instead and write a little bit about it. Maybe give some context, some insight into the development process, or maybe just recount the day of the shoot.

To go back a couple days:






These doves were my friends in the spring of 2006. I had taken over classroom support management responsibilities and, with them, a desk and window in an office. I brought in a bird feeder, but it quickly became apparent that all I was getting were garbage birds. I tried filling it with black oil sunflower seeds instead, but nothing interesting was coming to eat. Then I forgot about it for a week or two and opened the window to see these two greeting me. They had started to eat the seeds that fell out of the feeder. I took it down and poured out its contents; for the next month or so, I had them as regular visitors. As long as I kept the window cracked about this far, they'd even let me watch them eat.

Photo was shot with a Pentax MX and I'm guessing the M50/1.7. I'd also guess Agfa color film, but I'd have to go find the negative to be sure - this is an old old old old old scan.

Thoughts on Lightroom

Having assembled a new computer this summer to get back into the wonderful world of digital photography development, I've been spending a lot more time rolling around in Lightroom lately. Today, I went to export a picture and I realized that it came out looking a lot better than it went in.

If only it were bragging.

Lightroom, it turns out, can get really fussy about color profiles. I did a color calibration on my monitor and reloaded the Dell driver for color profiles to no avail. Wondering what was wrong, I then quit the program and relaunched it. Which worked.

I guess the moral of this return-to-blogging story is "is it on? turn it off and back on again."