Posts in Category: hdr
Avenue of the Giants
Switching gears from the Gulf Coast of Texas to the coast of Northern Californica, I am in Arcata CA for Godwit Days. I always fly to San Francisco (it is expensive to fly to Arcata) and drive half way up Rt 101, stay the night in Ukiah, and then drive up through the Redwood forests of Humboldt Redwoods State Park the next morning. My yearly dose of Redwoods. There is a road that parallels 101 called the Avenue of the Giants…which winds through the major Groves of the Park in the valley of the Eel River. Miles of huge trees and dappled light.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet for HDR effect. Assembled in Pixlar Express.
Spring Tide HDR
We have had really high tides the past week, flooding parts of the marsh that I have never seen under water. This area along the Kennebunk Bridle Path normally remains high and dry at the highest tides. These high, spring tides, are, I hope, another sign that Spring is finally coming to Southern Maine. Here, with the transparency of the sea water, the wind ripples, and the clear light, it makes an excellent subject for HDR. This is my usual single frame HDR, processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent.
Rainy Day at Winter’s End
On Sunday, it rained all day, sometimes hard, sometimes just a spattering, but always wet. There were aerial and coastal flood warnings from the National Weather Service office in Grey. But, at least in part, because I had only that morning written about finding the wonder in every season and every day, I forced myself to pick up my cameras and head out to see what I could see. If I can’t take my own good advice, well then it is not that good, is it? I took an umbrella, but the wind was blowing hard enough so that I knew I would mostly photograph what I could see from the car. I drove down to our local tidal marsh behind the dunes at the beach, and then down past the Rachel Carson NWR Headquarters to Laudholm Farm and the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, then back up the coast to sit at Mother’s Beach in Kennebunk and shoot gulls out the window of the car. I took a few scenics along the way, trying to capture the wet day/late winter/early spring atmosphere, and hoping for some interesting HDR effects.
This is along the road into Laudholm Farm, where it passes through a thick stand of second growth firs and pines. With the rain, the little brook that passes under the road in a culvert, was brim full. The wet leaves, blown in there from last year, the reflective water, the evergreens and patches of old snow, all framed against a background made soft by the water in the air…well, I liked it enough on the way in to pull over and get out of the car on the way back out, sheltering the camera for a couple of shots. HDR processing and some image tuning in Snapseed brings up the effect very nicely. Or that is what I think.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. ISO 200 @ 1/160th @ f4.5. Processing as above.
Spring Flood: Happy Sunday!
Yesterday was the first day you could really feel spring in the air here in Southern Maine. It got, eventually, up to 50 degrees, but it was not so much that, as the lack of wind and the power of the sun that made the day feel springy. We have two days of constant rain (beginning at mid-night last night) promised now, which should put finished to the considerable amounts of snow and ice still on the ground, and then, hopefully, the winter dam will break and spring will come rushing in. Impatient birds are already moving in and through. I saw a pair of Song Sparrows along the Kennebunk Bridle Path, one lone Great Egret, and an Eastern Phoebe…as well as a Bluebird in the fields leading in to the beach. The buds are just beginning to show red on the maples. Maybe spring will come afterall.
This is a flood tide on Mousam River. All but a tiny bit of what you see here is normally marsh and well above water. I liked the green of the deepest water (backed up against the old dyke and path where an unnamed tidal creek passes through toward the Mousam) in the foreground, the variations of blues beyond, and the wispy clouds over the sea. The Sony NEX 3NL caught it all in this 24mm equivalent view, and HDR processing and image tuning in Snapseed brought it out, so the image is pretty much what I saw with my naked eye at the time.
And for the Sunday Thought: I have had to learn to appreciate the last-dregs-of-winter / before-spring-really-comes time in Southern Maine. It sometimes seems to stretch on for months. Mud season. Each year for several years now though I have found more of interest in that interval. I watch the birds come back. I watch the last drying of the grasses and reeds of last summer, their final turn toward gold, before the new green shoots come out. I watch for the first dragonflies in the pools where the sun warms them in the marsh along the river. And the changing skies of the season have their own attraction. This year we may actually miss much of that, since we stand to pass directly from winter into spring without that long pause. I might even actually miss it.
I have found that the more closely you look at any season, the more intimately involved you are in its development and passing, the more interesting it is…so that there is interest in any season and in all seasons, if you will only look. It requires a bit of discipline actually. You have to make your self look beyond, deeper than, the apparent dullness of the days. And that is, of course, a spiritual discipline that will repay itself where ever you apply it. Dull is what I am when I don’t look. It has nothing to do with the world around me. Certainly the Creator lavishes the same amount of attention and love on each day. There is always wonder to be found. Even in mud season in Southern Maine.
San Diego Under Siege
Or “The View from the Lighthouse Steps”. The old Lighthouse on Point Loma stands, appropriately, high above the bay and the city. What you see in the foreground is the water catchment and the cistern that kept the lighthouse supplied in all but the driest season. What you see in the sky, is enough water to fill the cistern several times over. The storm was still passing there to the east and south over and behind the city. It had cleared the Point about 40 minutes before…but another came through before dark. Several inches of rain over several days. That is pretty significant for San Diego and southern California in this dry year.
What attracts me in this image is the crystal clarity of the geometric rain washed foreground, contrasted with the geometry of the city fading into those amazing clouds. It is quite possibly the most successful shot I have taken from Point Loma, and, over the years of visiting in early March for the San Diego Birding Festival, I have taken many.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. ISO 200 @ 1/800th @ f13. Processed for HDR effect in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Postcard from Rockport MA
Rockport Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Anne, north of Gloucester, is such just about your archetypal picturesque New England fishing village: there are postcard views just about where ever you look. This is one of the fishing piers and lobster boat basins just of the main street. It would have been easy to drive right by it, but we were looking for ducks in any likely spot, so we turned in. How could anyone resist taking a photo here?
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. ISO 200 @ 1/250th @ f16. Processed for HDR effect in Snapseed and Photo Editor by dev.macgyver on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014. Because the lens distortions were distracting (at least to me), I used Perspective correction in Photo Editor to pull the buildings on the side back up straight. 🙂
Gloucester Dawn
Bass Rocks, Gloucester Massachusetts. Dawn. I spent parts of two days with a small group of German birders who had come to Gloucester looking for Snowy Owls and winter ducks. We were up and out at first light, before breakfast actually, and on the rocks beyond Bass Rocks looking for King Eider soon after. This view looks out north-east into the Gulf of Maine past Thacher Island’s Twin Lights. As it happens, the line of cloud along the front was passing out to sea, and we had a few hours of sunshine before the next front moved over us. (We did not find King Eider…but later in the morning and further north, north of Rockport, we did find a nice pod of Harlequin Ducks…which made my German friends happy! For me the sunrise was enough.)
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. Sunset/sunrise mode. ISO 200 @ 1/100th @ f16. Processed for HDR effect in Snapseed and Photo Editor by dev.macgyver on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Yes. This is Maine. That is Snow.
This winter it is: This is Maine. That is snow. This is a moment of morning sun after 10 inches of fresh snow overnight. It is just across the street from the house. By late afternoon we had another squall of wet clingy snow come through that dumped another inch and a half, so my first task of the day (right after finishing this post) is once again snow-blowing. 🙂
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 28mm equivalent. ISO 200 @ 1/100th @ f16. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
All in a Day in the Backyard.
From dawn to dusk in our backyard yesterday. From an awesome -11 degree sunrise to a 5 PM blizzard. We do it right in Maine 🙂 The way life is supposed to be. (And as I get the snowblower out of the basement to deal with 8 inches of fresh snow this morning I am thinking, “yeah, maybe not so much 🙂
Still, it is good discipline to find the beauty where you are, and to celebrate it. Keep those eyes open and those cameras clicking! It is good for the soul.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. Sunrise: ISO 1000 @ 1/160th @ f4. Blizzard: ISO 500 @ 1/160th @ f4. Processed in Snapseed and Photo Editor by dev.macgyver, and assembled in Pixlr Express on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Eldritch Light Over the Sea. Happy Sunday!
I went out yesterday morning, hoping for eagels and Snowy Owls. I had a few moments it one of the adult eagles at Roger’s Pond, but found no sign of owls, though I met a woman by Back Creek Marsh who had seen one there the day before. I drove up the coast as far as Gouch’s beach, drawn on by the strange light over the ocean, despite the dull day. This is Lord’s Point from Strawberry Island with the light behind it.
Though the effect was subtle, there was no particular skill involved in capturing it. I found that Superior Auto on the Sony NEX 3NL did just fine. Processing in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014, using the HDR Scene filter and Ambiance and Shadow from Tune Image, brought out what I had seen in the image.
And for the Sunday Thought: Eldritch is a strange word…literally. It means “strange,” “otherworldly,” “eerie,” “alien”, “from somewhere else.” It is rarely used. It has a Robert Burns, Hawthorne, Edger Allen Poe feeling to it. Old-fashioned. Odd. A shivery, uncomfortable, strange-encounter kind of feeling. I hesitated to use it here, but in the end I could not resist. It fit the light over the sea too well, despite its slightly dark associations.
I find it strange in itself, that we associate darkness with the otherworldly…with the sense that something is from the great beyond. Why does the supernatural come with shivers? Why should the world eldritch come touched with fear?
Because of course, this light is just the light of the sun, which was a good deal higher in the sky and well obscured by heavy overcast, leaking though the thinner cloud near the surface of the sea. The color, like dawn or sunset, is all to do with the angle of the light and the amount of cloud…I assume here the light we are seeing was reflected from the surface of the sea beyond the overcast, or perhaps refracted by the warmer air above the water, and came back to us, skimming the surface, coloring the cloud near the horizon.
And so it is, I suspect, with all things supernatural and strange in our lives. Most often it is only the light of the sprit, unexpectedly reflected or refracted perhaps, and breaking through the overcast of our normal perceptions. Happy Sunday! And keep a look out for eldritch light.