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Archive for the ‘California’ Category

Linda and I went on a photo outing with the Placer Photo Club thanks to an invitation from Mike Schumacher, their president. We went looking for some fall color, but found that a lot of the trees were still green. We did find some Aspens that had turned yellow, but for most of the foliage, we were a bit too early.

However, we had a wonderful time. Met some fellow photographers and after breakfast toured up Hwy 80 towards Truckee and took Hwy 89 north to Henness Pass Rd.

Today’s shot is taken on the shores of Independence Lake. A wonderful secluded lake tucked away in the Sierra Nevada foothills and one that is only accessible via a windy and bumpy dirt road. Not the kind of road you want to be found on in wet weather – unless you have a 4×4 of course in which case it would be a lot of fun!

As you can see, the weather was just beautiful. Warm, blue skies with some clouds. This is an HDR of course, 3 shots taken 2 stops apart and blended in the all new Photomatix 4. This new version of Photomatix has finally addressed the issue of noise, which was mainly the reason I hardly ever used that application. It is now much, MUCH better.

I just love what the HDR process does to the look of those rocks.

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The more I look at this picture, the more I love it. I shot it through the glass of an old door in Bodie, a ghost town on the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada (but still in California).

Looking at the details I see a lot of beauty. Check out the patterns of the wall, the wood ceilings with crown molding or the wooden wainscoting. But my favorite is the detail in the lion shaped legs of the pool table. Magnificent!

However, I cannot but wonder about what violence took place here. Bodie was notorious for being a “bad place”. There were no less that 65 saloons on Main Street, which was only a mile long (you read that correct – sixty five). Murders, shootouts, barroom brawls and stagecoach holdups were apparently very regular occurrences! Sounds like a genuine spaghetti Western, but this was real. So, I wonder what kind of activity this saloon has seen?

I can just imagine walking into this place, colt slung to my hip, walking over to the bar with all eyes focused on me and saying “gimme a whisky” and the barman says, as he pours me a shot, “what brings you to town, cowboy?” I answer “I hear there’s gold in them thar hills”.  And all the folk in the saloon sigh and relax and go back to whatever they were doing. Just another prospector, like all the rest, no bounty hunter looking for some outlaw.

he he he . . .

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I just got back from the annual Reno Balloon Race. What an awesome event. Last year was my first visit and thoroughly enjoyed it so I decided to return this year. And I was not disappointed!

While getting up at 3:30am is painful, once you are out on the field among all the activity and spectacular colors, the horrors of that alarm clock are quickly forgotten.

The event starts with a Glow Show, where several balloon are inflated in the pitch black. The burners light up the inside of the balloon like a lightbulb, providing a spectacular view. Then there is the Dawn Patrol where a few of the balloons ascend in the dark. Apparently you need a special license for this so there are only a few balloon that go up at this time.

The shot below is of one of those early risers that had drifted off towards the rising sun. In between bursts of the burners, I liked how it silhouetted against the sky with the hills forming an interesting line along the bottom of the frame. Whil eI realize this shot contrasts what I have just been saying about the spectacular colors of the balloons, I find this shot portrays the sense of peace and quiet that hot air balloons seem to exude. There is no sound other than the odd “whoosh” of the burner. It’s very peaceful.

Colorful Reflections

Last year I had seen some pictures of balloons reflected in water and I was determined to find out where those had been taken. Turns out there is a pond nearby that provides the perfect mirror-like effect, if the conditions are right! When I got there, there was a family of ducks floating around, seriously disturbing the water, causing more ripples than one can imagine and totally destroying any chance of nice still water for reflections! I seriously debated whether or not to go and fling a few rocks in their general direction to scare them off, but thought better of it. I do like animals and the poor ducks were just doing what ducks do. However, no sooner had I resigned myself to the idea of no reflections when the ducks upped and left, leaving the pond to settle into a glass-like state.

Colors Galore

So here is the shot with the colors I was alluding to earlier. Just spectacular reds, greens, blues, golds and purples.

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Spent a day nosing around the Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park, in the Sierra Nevada foothills in California. You might be interested to know that this is the site of the USA’s very first environmental law, it was issued by the federal government.

Malakoff Diggins was home to the country’s largest hydraulic gold mining operation. Using high pressure jets, huge sections of the country side were literally washed away, in an effort to get at the gold. The subsequent release of the mud, gravel and debris clogged streams and major rivers all the way from these foothills to the San Francisco Bay! Sacramento farmers complained and filed a law suit and in 1884 a law was passed declaring hydraulic mining to be illegal. Today, there is a mighty big “hole” in the cliffs, which has, thankfully, been reclaimed by Mother Nature.

Malakoff Diggins can lay claim to another first. In 1880, electric lights were installed in the mine and the world’s first long distance telephone line was developed to service the mine.

What you see in today’s picture is one of the few buildings left of the old town. It is the main office of the Historic Park.

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Today’s post is also from Joshua Tree National Park, but this one actually has a Joshua Tree in it!

As you can see, Joshua Trees are strange looking things. It is a plant from the Yucca family and is also known by the name of Yucca Palm, Tree Yucca or Palm Tree Yucca. When you touch the tree, you will be surprised at how “solid” it feels. It is a very “dense” and heavy wood and you can tell when you touch it.

The tree seems to only grow in the Mohave Desert parts of the park, in the higher (northern) elevations.

The other thing that stands out in Joshua Tree National Park are the large number of rocks and boulders. This picture shows a typical cluster. Those rocky cluster make excellent rock-climbing areas and when my son and I were there we saw a large number of rock climbing groups throughout the park.

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At the end of the Salton View Road in Joshua Tree National Park is a lookout called Keys View. No it has nothing to do with the Florida Keys, they are clear across the country no where near here. In fact there is barely any water here as Joshua Tree National Park is desert. There are two types of desert actually: Mohave Desert in the northern, higher elevation part of the park and Colorado Desert, in the southern, lower elevation parts.

The only body of water in the neighborhood is the Salton Sea, which you can see in this pictures just beyond those mountains. Like Mono Lake, it has a high salinity level. The Salton Sea lies directly on the San Andreas Fault and, like Death Valley, lies below sea level.

Joshua Tree National Park is quite beautiful although hot. My son and I visited here to go do some hikes and take photos and went in May thinking we’d beat the real heat. Well no such luck, it turned out to be the hottest May in years and we got temperatures around 100F (37.8C). It is a dry heat which I find infinitely more bearable than humid heat, but one sure ends up drinking a lot of water!

This shot is my usual HDR shot with 3 bracketed shots and processed in Dynamic Photo HDR followed by some tweaking in Lightroom.

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Sand Harbor is a piece of Lake Tahoe’s North Eastern coastline. There is a sandy beach there, but it is of particular interest to photographers because of the boulders that lie around in the water. They can make for some fantastic photographic subjects.

This shot was taken just about at sunset, which had the sun disappearing over the mountains on my right. It caused these rocks to be bathed in beautiful soft light. I was quite happy with this as I had to scramble down to this area from the road. Not particularly smart when carrying tripods and some expensive gear.

Anyway, I made it without a mishap and got this picture for my efforts.

As usual, it is an HDR comprised of my usual 3 shots. I used Photomatix (with some “gentle” setting to minimize noise), then opened in Photoshop and blended it with a layer that has some Topaz Adjust treatment to it. This all let me get great detail, nice color and minimum noise. The little noise that was there, I got rid of with the new noise reduction tool in Lightroom V3, which I find very good.

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As promised, here is a shot with the wonderful fluffy clouds that were so abundant on this trip. As I said in my last post, previous trips to Mono Lake had all been cloudless so this was a real treat.

The reflections were SO intense they almost look fake, but I can assure you they are not. This shot was taken about 6pm, which was 2 1/2 hours before sunset. Linda and I actually went here to scope out where to be at sunset, but the conditions were so nice we pulled out our cameras and took a series of shots. There was no wind at all which is why the reflections are so intense, the water was like a mirror and because it was still quite light, the overall effect is quite spectacular.

Linda and I actually did come back at sunset, but there was nothing going on, wind had picked up and there was no color whatsoever. Conditions were so “blah” we didn’t even get out of the car, so were happy we got these shots a few hours earlier.

This shot is a single picture with some treatment in Topaz Adjust. I applied Topaz to one layer, then blended the other, original, layer to get the look I wanted. I find this lets me control noise pretty well.

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Linda and I managed a quick visit to the Lee Vining area and got to visit Bodie and Mono Lake.

My previous trips to Mono Lake always seemed to coincide with rather uninteresting weather and I never really got the shots I had imagined could be had in this wonderful location. This time however, the weather was much kinder. As you can see from the shot below, there was no wind and there were clouds. I’ll post another shot tomorrow where the clouds are more pronounced, but today’s shot is one of calmness.

The time was about 10 minutes before sunrise (which occurred at 5:37am that day). I have this cool little iPhone app that tells me when dawn starts and when sunrise (and sunset) occurs. So I knew exactly when the sun would appear and I was ready.

This is actually an HDR, comprised of 3 shots. Processed with Dynamic Photo HDR, which produces much more “natural” photos than, say, Photomatix. It also produces a heck of a lot less noise, one of the real problems with Photomatix I find.

While I would have liked to have seen a little more of the clouds, I am happy with this shot. Everything came together for me. The composition, the reflections, the colors and, perhaps most importantly, the overall “mood” of the scene.

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Isn’t flowing water fascinating?

I remember as a kid, growing up in the Netherlands, I loved to go visit places like Scotland where creeks and “bubbling brooks” were a must see for me. I could waste away considerable time mesmerized by the flowing water.

Now, living in California, with a wealth of rivers and creeks, I still love visiting places like that. As a photographer, catching the sense of movement is an easily accomplished trick. By slowing down the shutter speed, the movement of water creates blur which gives us that “look”. Often, in forested areas or in deep canyons, this is really easily achieved as the amount of light will be less so selecting a slower shutter-speed will be not be hard. In bright sunlight though, it can be a bit more of a challenge simply because there is so much light, you cannot slow down the shutter enough to get the look without over exposing the shot.

This is where a grey filter can be indispensable as it simply darkens the scene without affecting the colors.

In the following two shots I was lucky enough to be get the look without the need of such a filter.

The first shot is of the Yuba River, just a few miles north of Nevada City in California. After spending a few hours exploring Nevada City, a photographer friend, Ken, and I were all hot and bothered (it was a 105 degree day, or 40 degrees Celsius) and decided to continue going North on the North Bloomfield Rd and see if we could find some relief near the Yuba River.

We got some great shots of the water rushing by, as you can see in this picture. There was a quite a lot of light, but by stopping down to f/22 I could slow the shutter to 1/8 of a second, just slow enough to get that feeling of “flow” in the water.

This second shot is of the Merced river. It was taken late in the day so light was already fading. The metering was 1/3 of a second at f/6.3 – a lot less light!

So which is the better shot?

Personally, I like both, but for different reasons. I believe the top picture conveys a sense of “speed” while the bottom pictures gives me sense of “volume”. Both work.

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