Gallery: Death Valley National Park, CA - Day 6 / 2010

Gallery (55 images): Death Valley - California 2010 / Day 6

Day 6 of my California trip was spent first Rhyolite, Nevada and then in Death Valley. The weather clouded up in the afternoon, which put a damper on my photography. However despite the grey skies, I shot a fair bit in Mosaic Canyon, fascinated by the highly eroded canyon walls. Sunset was at the ghost town of Skidoo, where I photographed the old rusted car above...

All posts from this trip: California 2010

Gallery: Joshua Tree National Park, CA - Day 5 / 2010

Gallery (70 images): California 2010 / Day 5

A second day in Joshua Tree National Park, March of 2010. I love photographing the long planar layers of rock that run through the park in spots, like in the above photo. Colourful cacti and more fascinating rock formations abound in the Day 5 gallery...

All posts from this trip: California 2010

Gallery: Joshua Tree National Park, CA - Day 4 / 2010

Gallery (40 images): California 2010 / Day 4

After leaving Anza-Borrego in the morning, on the way north to Twentynine Palms I stopped at the side of the road a few times to photograph some nice patches of wildflowers. After a bit of grocery shopping, and a much needed shower, it was back into Joshua Tree National Park for an afternoon and evening of hiking around the park. Compared to Anza-Borrego, there was virtually nothing blooming in Joshua Tree yet, probably a bit too early in the year or perhaps there hadn't been enough rains further north? The last two photos in the gallery, one of which is the above image, really shows some of the park's vistas nicely, with the piles of huge weathered boulders and vast numbers of Joshua trees visible when you open the larger version of the images. There's something almost otherworldly to those views...

All posts from this trip: California 2010

Gallery: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, CA

Gallery (100 images): Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, CA

More catching up on photo processing! This is the first gallery from my March 2010 trip to southern California. It encompasses some photos from my drive down through California and then two days of shooting in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

It was an amazing year for blooming wildflowers and cacti, so I made the long run down to SoCal for a quick eight day road-trip. The above photo shows one of the abundant ocotillo shrubs in Anza-Borrego, with clusters of red/orange blooms at the ends of long spiny stems with lush green leaves. The park was exploding in bloom and the local papers were giving tips on the best places to see all the wildflowers. Well, it turns out I had to avoid those places, since the ones mentioned were packed with people (see photo 86!), many of whom were just lounging in the fields of desert wildflowers, off to the side of the road with folding patio chairs and coolers of beverages! Then there were all the other photographers in those spots too, zigzagging through the fields of blooms. Well, after visiting a few areas like that, I decided to explore the backroads myself, well away from the spots mentioned in the papers, and had a much more pleasant and fruitful time photographing away from the crowds...

All posts from this trip: California 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 18 - 20

Gallery (25 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 18 - 20

This final set of photos from my 2010 trip include a hike through the windy and dusty Bisti Badlands in Northern New Mexico, then some shots on the drive home through Colorado (the above being one of them), Lake Coeur d'Alene in Idaho, steaming in the cold morning air and finally, a shot of the Columbia River at Vantage in Washington. That is the last "daily" gallery from this trip... coming in the near future will be a best-of with highlights...

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 16 & 17

Gallery (115 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 16 & 17

This large gallery has a few images of El Malpais at the start, but the majority consist of the amazing ruins at Chaco Culture National Historic Monument, sometimes just called Chaco Canyon.

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Day 15

Gallery (45 images): Southwest 2010 / Day 15

Three interesting places, visited in one day! Firstly, the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Preserve (with lots of basking turtles as above), next the Very Large Array (VLA) facility, a part of the NRAO, or National Radio Astronomy Observatory and finally, an evening photographing the bluffs at El Malpais National Monument.

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 13 & 14

Gallery (40 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 13 & 14

The above photo was taken at sunset, near Chisos Basin in Big Bend National Park. The gallery contains images taken in the park, along the Rio Grande River and then also further north at McDonald Observatory, featuring the huge 10 meter Hobby•Eberly telescope.

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 10 - 12

Gallery (50 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 10 - 12

The above photo was taken in Big Bend National Park, however the gallery starts with two more observatory visits. Day 10 saw us first visit Sacramento Peak Observatory and then Apache Point Observatory. We decided to take a back road out towards the south to return to the campground near White Sands, however this proved a very rough and long route, pretty much killing the rest of the day. In addition, we ended up accidentally driving through a military range and at one point, a convoy of Hummers and other military trucks came up behind us, thankfully just driving by when I pulled over to let them pass. The next day we did more driving than photography, first over to Carlsbad Caverns and then, at that point, we made the decision to head south towards Big Bend National Park. The next day was mostly driving as well with some gorgeous evening light and storm clouds which greeted us, once we reached Big Bend NP...

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 8 & 9

Gallery (90 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 8 & 9

Two major National Monuments in New Mexico comprise this new gallery of images from days 8 & 9 of our trip, the first being Gila Cliff Dwellings, the left image above, and the second White Sands on the right. For more info on White Sands, see the description in the gallery.

The dynamic range of photos taken at the Gila Cliff Dwellings was a challenge. The ruins were in the shade under a deeply overhanging cliff and yet the beautiful exterior landscape was often visible in wide-angle shots, with lovely blue skies and trees that would be a shame to let blow out. I remember working on these images back in 2010, with a much older version of Adobe Lightroom, and found it challenging to get anything that looked decent from many of the shots. The sky was often bleached white and the lifted shadows were noisy. I must say, Adobe has come a long way with its image processing in Lightroom over the years, and while I am not a fan of how it handles my more recent Fujifilm X-Trans raw files, it does do a pretty good job of my older Canon EOS-7D raw files with their standard Bayer-pattern pixel layout...

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 6 & 7

Gallery (50 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 6 & 7

On day 6, we travelled east from Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, over to Kitt Peak National Observatory, with an interesting view of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope shown in the above shot. This was a trip of visiting observatories and there are many more photos of telescope domes to come in the following days. After Kitt Peak, it was over to New Mexico, where we camped at City of Rocks State Park...

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 4 & 5

Gallery (65 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 4 & 5

The next two days of travel took us through Arizona, from Yucca and Wickiup in the northwest, to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, bordering on Mexico. There was lots blooming; cacti, shrubs and even Giant Saguaro.

At the backcountry campsite in Organ Pipe Cactus NM, there was an opportunity to photograph a time-lapse of a Saguaro blooming at night. I set my Canon 7D up with a 430EXII flash, and photographed the Saguaro for a few hours, with the blurred stars moving in the background. Photo 62 in the above gallery shows a wide view of the cactus I photographed. It is hard to tell, but if you rapidly sweep the movie slider back and forth, you can see one bloom opening. Click below to open the time-lapse in a new window (you will need to have Quicktime installed)...

Finally, since it was so warm and dry, I decided to set up the camera to do an overnight time-lapse which captured the Milky Way rising behind a lone Saguaro, all the way through until morning...

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

Gallery: Southwest 2010 / Days 1 - 3

Gallery (65 images): Southwest 2010 / Days 1 - 3

I may have mentioned before how far behind I am in processing trip images? The last big trip I completely finished editing and processing was Germany in 2011 and now I am going back even further, starting on my US Southwest trip from May 2010 with my friend Bill. We made it all the way down to Big Bend National Park in Texas that year, on the Rio Grande river at the Mexican border. The colourful lizard above is one of many I saw at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve on day three.

All posts from this trip: Southwest 2010

The last fully processed set of trip images were those from my Southwest 2009 excursion, and that one is still on my sublimephoto.com website, which ends with galleries shot in 2009. I actually have one more earlier trip to process, a solo one down to southern California in March of 2010. However, I decided to work on this one first since I may be heading back down to Texas, this year in spring, so I wanted to remind myself of the locations I visited last time.

I thought this might be an opportune time to mention some of the gear transitions I've been through in the last few years...

That May 2010 vacation is actually the last major photo trip I did with my Canon system, even though I didn't switch to Nikon until late 2012. I had been shooting with Canon digital SLRs since 2004, starting with an EOS-20D, then moving to a 30D, 40D, 50D and lastly the 7D. On this US trip in 2010, my Canon kit was comprised of an EOS-7D body and an IR-converted EOS-20D (my original 20D), with a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, then the Canon lenses, a TS-E 17mm f/4L tilt-shift, the EF-S 15-85mm kit zoom, an EF 24mm f/1.4L II, an EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro, an EF 70-200mm f/4L IS and finally an EF 400mm f/5.6L.

This was a substantially big an heavy kit, which is why I decided to lighten my load for my trip to Germany in 2011 with a combination of Panasonic and Fujifilm gear...

Handheld at night: Canon's EF-S 15-85mm IS Zoom

Canon EOS 7D - EF-S15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM - ISO 1600 - 1/6 sec at f / 4.0 - handheld

Gallery: Granville Island Night

When I tell people what a great lens Canon's EF-S 15-85mm "kit" zoom is (introduced along with the EOS-7D in 2009), I often times get some pretty skeptical looks. After all, while Canon makes many superb 'L' lenses, they don't necessarily have a reputation for high quality kit lenses. Well people... take my word for it, the 15-85mm zoom rocks! The above gallery contains all images taken with this lens the other evening, all handheld and most are wide-open at f/3.5.  I did some perspective correction on several shots in Adobe Lightroom v3.3RC to square up the buildings when I wasn't quite shooting level and please note that LR v3 now does do some automatic distortion corrections for many lenses too, although even without correction it really is not bad. I have included 2000 pixel images as well so you can better see how sharp this lens can be. Images were shot raw with my EOS-7D, all at ISO 1600 and at shutter speeds ranging from a very long 0.4 seconds, to an 1/8 of a second with a handful being slightly higher. EXIF data shows below each enlarged image, so you can see the camera settings.

Wide! Sigma 8-16mm F4.5-5.6 DC HSM Lens

Gallery: Sigma 8-16mm F4.5-5.6 Lens Test Images

I recently had a few minutes to quickly shoot with a very interesting new Sigma lens, the ultra-wide 8-16mm zoom. This lens is only for APS-C crop digital cameras and on my EOS-7D, which shot the test photos in the gallery, it equates to a (rounded off) 13-26mm zoom, in 35mm full-frame equivalent terms. Very very wide indeed!

Gallery: 2009 Abbotsford Airshow

Canadian Snowbirds Demonstration Team - 2009 Abbotsford Airshow

Nearly a full year late (just a day shy), I finally finished editing my 185 selects and posted photos from the 2009 airshow at the Abbotsford International Airport. This year, it looks as though I will have to miss it due to other commitments, but after the 1800+ photos from last year, amounting to 35GB worth of images, maybe it's best that I take a year off!

Gallery: 2009 Abbotsford International Airshow (4 pages)

Gallery: Zombies!

I have updated my website with a few new image galleries finally, one of which contains the stills I shot last year on the set of a locally produced zombie flick, H1Z1.  I am not sure if that will be the final name for it, but in any case, that is what it was called when I was working on set.

Be warned that the gallery contains a few images with graphic special effects makeup, so if you are a squeamish type, you might want to use caution!  The vast majority of the images are "safe" however and should not be unsettling!

Gallery: 2009 / H1Z1 Production Stills

Olympic sights and a gallery tweak...

One of the many art pieces on Granville St. in downtown Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics

Well, I have tweaked the look of the TTG Highslide gallery plugin one more time and improved how things render in Internet Explorer as well. I might go live with some new galleries on my website - soon I hope! Here is the latest version, showing some images I took downtown during the Olympics...

Gallery: 2010 Olympics: Downtown Sights 

For more information on these Lightroom gallery plugins, see my last post from Sunday.

Lightroom 3: Web module plugin compatibility

A note about web-gallery plugin compatibility with the latest version of Lightroom...

(Shortcut to the gallery mentioned: 2010 Olympics: February 22nd Festivities)

Adobe is finally shipping boxed copies of Lightroom 3, and we now have upgrades and full versions in stock at Beau Photo.  I have been using the beta version of LR3 ever since it came out, and one very obvious improvement is in image quality.  The new "Process 2010" raw conversion algorithm is vastly improved over the previous one, which Adobe has tagged "Process 2003".  Much better noise reduction (very near the quality of third party programs like Noise Ninja) with detailed control over luminance and chroma settings, including the ability to essentially turn NR off completely if you want to handle noise using third-party software. In any case, what I want to mention here is compatibility with third party gallery plugins, specifically those from The Turning Gate.