Back in 2004 a friend of mine, Erica called up and asked for some photos of redwoods.  She wanted to use them for a project – for a corporate client I believe.  I had already planned to take a day off from work just to relax and this gave me a fun project to work on during my 3-day weekend.

I started by heading over to Marin county on Thursday evening, to take some quick shots along Sir Francis Drake Blvd.  I grabbed my camera, several rolls of slide film, my tripod, and a couple of lenses and loaded up my motorcycle.  And this is how I spent the next several days.

Marin was the first stop, followed by the Santa Cruz hills early Saturday morning.  That pre-dawn ride on the motorcycle was c-o-l-d.

I wasn’t sure about the shots I was getting so after Santa Cruz I went back home, packed up some more equipment and rode out to Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park.  I arrived in the evening, set up camp and the following morning was out taking shots of the Giant Sequoias.  I drove home later Saturday evening.

This being 2004, my first stop was the photo shop where I dropped the film off for processing.  I had shot 4 rolls I believe.  It’s amazing how far we’ve come.  Up to this point I had no idea how my shots had turned out – couldn’t tell of the exposure settings, whether I was getting the shots I wanted or not.  There was no immediate feedback like there is with today’s digital.

This photo is from Santa Cruz.  It’s a bad scan but it’s all I’ve got left – after getting the film processed I sent them along.  I had low res scans that the shop made so that I could give Erica more immediate access to the images and that’s all I’ve got.  The greens are a little saturated in this shot but I think that’s just the scan.  I like the arrangement of the trees starting in the near left and curving off to the right with the trees shrinking in size.

I came across this photo while looking through images to post and it made me think of getting out on the motorcycle and going for a good ride.

This is a photo from last year. My parents were visiting town and we took the opportunity to check out the newly redesigned Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.  The building is really great to look at from the outside, including it’s living roof.  It’s not your typical science academy with its columns and marble..

Underneath that living roof is a large 4-story rainforest that reminded Meghan and I of our trip to Belize.  It’s a great exhibit with a huge variety of animals roaming about; from frogs to birds to butterflies.

I had my Canon G10 with me, not the larger Nikon set up but that little camera does a pretty good job considering how easy it is to carry it around compared to the larger DSLR with flash, macro lens, etc.,

For these indoor shots I had the lens wide open, both in an attempt to narrow the focus but to also bring in as much light so that I could freeze the action with a faster shutter.  I also bumped the ISO up to 400 which introduced a little grain in the image (this is one area where the Nikon beats the compact Canon hands down).  This all resulted in a shutter speed of 1/250 which was enough to handhold the shot and capture the subjects.

I like the bright colors of the butterfly but the focus does appear to be just a little off, just forward of the butterfly’s position.  I chalk this up to being in a hot, crowded space working with small objects darting around.  That and having to rely on the Canon’s autofocus unchecked, as it was not the conditions to muck around with small focus adjustments.

After this trip I decided I want to go back with my bigger setup but as of now it’s still on the future list.

While walking around on the beach one morning a couple of years ago, I walked past this group of rocks half-submerged in the sand.  The receding water had left little pools around each and had left a small channel back to the ocean.

By shooting this into the direction of the sun I obscured a lot of the details in the photo, leaving only the basic forms and some texture in the sand.

A wide angle lens added some perspective to the foreground, elongating the sand near my feet.

I just like the simple forms and the textures in this image.

I took this photo 2 years ago while walking around San Francisco.

I had a new lens attached to my camera – the Nikon 105mm macro lens on my relatively new D300 camera.  I hadn’t had this lens for too long at this point but already I was excited about the image quality that it produced.  The most obvious aspect is the out of focus area (bokeh).  Because of the lens’ design, the out of focus regions of the image are rendered in this dreamy smooth texture.  This photo demonstrates that when you look at the areas of color contrast – look in the background at where the yellow center of the flowers (stamen) touches the whiter petals – or more obviously white meets the dark green.  These exchanges are very broad yet well defined.  It’s this dreamlike state in the background that makes the in-focus areas of the photo pop.

I shot this image with an aperture of f/4 – just down from fully open to give me a broad enough depth of field to get the stamen of the front flower mostly in focus but at this aperture the petals that are protruding out closer to the lens are starting to lose focus (especially at the tips) and only the petals that are lying flat on the plane along the yellow stamen stay in focus.

This was all shot hand-held and as I recall there was enough of a breeze to make a good shot challenging so I was happy with the results.  I would have preferred to have the entirety of the stamen in sharp focus, and with a more stable setup, I would have played around more with the aperture to see if the image would be improved with the entire flower in focus or not.  But, as I was just out walking around the neighborhood, I was happy with what I got.

This was the scene we awoke to while out snowcamping in the Echo Lakes basin near Lake Tahoe, California.

The evening was pretty mild and the previous day had been sunny and near cloudless but these skies, first thing in the morning, were a sign that weather was approaching.  We decided to pack up our camp and head out, and it turned out to be the right decision as a storm did head in and bring snow and cold into the region.  On our trek out we were under heavy clouds the whole way and the snow started as we neared the car.

I exposed this photo for the clouds but I didn’t compensate enough and still managed to blow out some of the brighter areas.  I was shooting for a silhouette of the trees and mountains so I wasn’t concerned with losing details in the shadows.  The dead tree on the right was my main point of composition – I wanted to give it enough space in the frame (on the right and at the top) while still capturing just enough of the distant horizon to give the clouds the majority of the frame.  I also liked the cut-off tree in the left of the frame to help hold down that side.  Looking now, it would have been nicer if I would have been able to capture more of the trunk along the edge.

I didn’t do much in post production other than bring down the blacks deeper and punch a little color into the sky to better represent what we saw, peeking out from our tent.

Last year Meghan and I went for a weekend snowshoe in the Sierra Nevada just outside of Lake Tahoe.  It was one of those great Sierra spring weekends with blue skies and warm weather.  Which was good as we were going to be camping out on the snow.

We hiked along the trail until it lead us to Echo Lakes where we had to decide whether we would walk around or directly atop the lake.  Given the warm weather we were a little hesitant but the snow covering proved to provide enough insulation from the bright sun and onward we trekked.  Besides, the conditions were definitely better than the last time I had been in this area where the lake was really starting to thaw..  (That prior trip pre-dates this site so I don’t have any photos to link to).

I snapped several shots of the surrounding wilderness and stitched them together once back home in front of photoshop.  This shot was a little tricky to put together as there’s a lot of dynamic range from the bright white clouds and snow to the dark pine trees.  I had to compress the brightness a bit in order to keep the photo from blowing out the whites or losing detail in the darks.

What I like about panorama shots like this is that it really helps represent the breadth and grandeur of the scene that was in front of us.  Yes, the far end of the lake really looked that distant.  And yes, the view really was that expansive.

For this shot I used my Canon G10 -  I was trying to pack light for this trip as the winter camping gear is enough to carry.  I’m satisfied with the resulting image (and the other images from this trip) and continue to think this is a great camera, even though I’m starting to covet something new..