On the second anniversary of Katrina hitting New Orleans, I thought I’d post some photos I made there (prior to the flood).
World famous New Orleans fried chicken
Lynn and I have been twice. The first time was in March of 2001 to visit Loyola University (which Mary was considered attending). Our second trip was in June of 2004, when Lynn won the eBay “Crazy for Collecting” contest.
New Orleans was a very interesting and photogenic city. I’m not sure what these places look like now, but I’d like to find out.
Lynn and I were in Indianapolis last weekend for the Midwest Sad Iron Collectors Club convention. Lynn did a presentation on trivets and got to meet a lot of her collector friends. I helped with the presentation, and did some tourist type things around Indianapolis while she was busy.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we both visited Mary Kate in Cincinnati. Tuesday night we went to the Prima Vista Italian restaurant where we had a wonderful meal overlooking the city’s skyline. Make sure to bring your camera. On Wednesday, we visited the Newport Aquarium , Hofsbrauhaus , and Skyline Chili . The Newport Aquarium is a nice place to make photographs. They have a large tank that you walk through, with fish of many descriptions swimming beside and over you and you can linger as long as you want. A fast lens with a polarizing filter to reduce reflections would help get better photos through the glass. The beer at this Hofsbrauhaus is just like I remember from the one in Munich.
Thursday, while Lynn went to the auction, I drove quite a distance (~3 hrs each way) from Indianapolis to Bowling Green Kentucky to visit the Corvette museum and factory. Along the way I went through Louisville, Ky – where they were holding a National Street Rod auto show – so there where some very interesting vehicles on the road with me. Factory tours are only $5, and the assembly line is fascinating, especially if you like cars. You can’t take pictures inside the factory, but the ones I took at the museum are here .
On Friday morning, we both went with other members of the MSICC on a tour of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and museum. My Brickyard pictures are here .
Friday afternoon Lynn was busy, so I drove over to Rockville, Indiana. Rockville is located in Parke county, about 50 miles west of Indianapolis. Parke County, has more covered bridges (30) than any other county making them “The Covered Bridge Capital of the World”.
Marshall Bridge, J. A. Britton, Builder, 1917
There is quite a bit of information about Parke County here . I wasn’t there at a good time of day (I had to be back at the convention for dinner – so I couldn’t wait around for sunset) but I made a few photographs anyway. If you go, you should plan to spend a day or two so you can scout out all the bridges and pick some to photograph at dawn and dusk. The tourist map they hand out isn’t the most useful. It was hard to locate some of the bridges. And some of them are way out in the country on narrow dirt roads. My bridge photos are here.
In January of this year, we spent a weekend in St. Augustine, Florida, which is on the east coast of Florida about an hour north of Daytona Beach. It was founded in 1565 and is the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European origin in the United States.
There are a lot of scenic opportunities there. We’d visited before, so I looked for some of the less obvious ones.
An HDR shot of the interior of the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, Florida
This photograph is a high dynamic range capture of the interior of the Lightner Museum courtyard in downtown St. Augustine. I didn’t have my tripod with me, so I braced my camera on the railing. It has been processed through Photomatix.
Here are a few of the photographs I made. Details are in the captions.
Here is a gallery of three more pictures from our recent Denver trip.
The first image in the gallery is a colony of cliff swallows nesting under an overpass near my Mom’s place. Lynn first noticed these birds during our frequent trips in and out. They’re very hard to photograph since they seem to be in constant motion. When I tried to get close on foot, they grew very agitated and noisy. I finally got a not very good photo by using the car as a blind and taking the shot through the sun roof. I was zoomed in all the way with my 70 – 300mm, but didn’t have enough light to stop the motion, even though I upped the ISO to 400 to take this at 1/250 sec. Lesson learned: It’s better to get the shot, even with some noise in it – so up the ISO as much as you need to stop the action.
This old log cabin is just off the backroad between my sister's and my Mom's house.
I saw this cabin along the side of the road between my sister’s and Mom’s places, and really wanted to make a photo of it. I didn’t have time to go by at sunset, but this late afternoon shot captures the mood pretty well. I had to play around with curves in Lightroom to bring out detail in the clouds without losing it in the trees and cabin. I also cloned out a TV antenna on the roof and a power line on the right side. With those gone, it’s more appealing to me and could almost be a high definition window into the past.
The final shot in the gallery was taken from the balcony of my Mom’s place. The sunsets weren’t very colorful while we were there, since late afternoon thunderstorms covered the mountains to the west nearly every day. We finally saw a little color and this shot, especially the cloud shadows on the lower left, turned out pretty well.
Lynn and I just returned from helping Mom move into her new place. She’s now in a unit at Windcrest in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. We flew out on July 4th and returned on the 11th. She had quite a list of chores for us to do, including painting, hanging curtains / blinds / paintings, unpacking boxes, chopping tables in two, installing media centers, programming phones, and numerous shopping trips (yes, Home Depot won as the most visited store). Lynn and I both had fun and enjoyed spending time with Mom.
At the end of the trip, we had to leave before she had everything unpacked and put away, but the place was starting to come along nicely. And Sis and Dean said they would take care of the rest on Thursday.
Mount Evans is about 35 miles west of Denver. We left early (before 6) and were up on the mountain by 9, but we stopped quite a few times on the way. It could take you more or less time depending on how many stops you make and what the traffic is like. since we went up on a weekday, we saw very few cars. To get there, take I70 west out of the city, to the 3rd exit for Idaho Springs (route 103 south).
Summit lake, clouds and flowers on Mount Evans
The Mt. Evans road is the highest paved road in north America and is 14,200 feet at the top. I’ve been to Denver many times but hadn’t heard about it before. I’ve been listening to the Nikonians Image Doctors podcast and they recommended this place a couple of times (ID#39 adn ID#45) so I wanted to see it while I was out there. It is very much worth the trip! If you go, try to make it on a weekday. The weekends are supposed to be very crowded. This Mt. Evans website has a lot of helpful information.
Our drive was quite spectacular. It started out very cloudy, with some light rain, but the top was above the clouds and on the way down, it began to clear. We saw a lot of wildlife and July is apparently a very good time for wildflowers.
Elk herd near mile marker 8 on Mount Evans
Lynn and I are both flat-landers from Florida and we were out of breath at the top at even the slightest exercise. You’ll want to plan carefully and prepare for any hikes you want to do. There are some very spectacularly fit people out there. We saw several riding bicycles all the way to the top.
You’ll probably use a wide angle lens the most. A long lens will be helpful for some wildlife, although you can get very close to the goats and marmots.
Lynn and I were at the mall yesterday and noticed some new flower beds. I just got a 60mm f2.8D micro Nikkor lens for my D80, so I went back this morning to see how well it works. This is the first true macro (1:1 magnification) lens I’ve ever had. I like it a lot, but it will take a while to get used to.
Macro flower
Some observations:
– Focus is very critical at high magnification ratios, since the depth of field is so small (even at f16 or f22). The auto focus works well, but it’s difficult to get it exactly on what you want. The D80’s ability to select which focus sensor to use helps.
– Camera shake is worse at high magnifications, too. I took most of these handheld, and using a shutter speed of 1/focal length (x1.5 for the sensor size factor) wasn’t fast enough to freeze my motion. Luckily, it was bright enough that I could use a fairly high shutter speed at f16.
I listen to the Digital Story podcast . The June 2007 photo assignment is “Before and After”. The idea is to submit two images showing how you “developed” the final photo.
I also just bought the book Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs , by Ansel Adams. He writes about how he re-visited his negatives over the years and was able to make better prints with additional effort / technique.
So these two things inspired me to go back to a photo I took in March, reprocess it and submit it to the Digital Story. Here are the steps I went through:
This view looked interesting from the road, and I talked Lynn into stopping (_DSC1423: 3872 x 2592 Pixels)
The first photo is the scene as I saw it from the road. Lynn and I were driving to an auction up in Ocala Florida and this looked like it could make a good image. It was a bit cluttered, and the composition wasn’t good, so …
I took this shot after stepping inside the gate. A little under exposed, no detail in the clouds and the road into the trees goes dark. (_DSC1425: 3872 x 2592 Pixels)
The second photo was taken after I stepped inside the gate. Better composition, I think. This is how it appears with no adjustments after importing it into Lightroom . I had underexposed it a bit so that the clouds would show up well. As a result, the road into the trees was pretty dark (and there still wasn’t enough detail in the clouds). I played around with it in the Develop module, but still couldn’t get the exposure quite right. So …
I exported two images from Lightroom. One at +2 exposure and the other at 0. This is the result after processing in Photmatix. (_DSC1425d-_+: 3872 x 2592 Pixels)
Photo 3 shows the result after I exported two 16 bit TIFF versions of the image from Lightroom and combined them. One with an exposure bias of +2 and a second with it set at 0. Then I used Photomatix to create a High Dynamic Range / tone mapped version. Much better exposure and detail both in the clouds and trees. This was pretty good, but I still wasn’t happy …
I loaded #3 into Photoshop Elements, cloned out the distractions (lights, signs, houses, rags, fire hydrant, wires) and then re-imported it into Lightroom …
I loaded the previous image into Photoshop and cloned out distracting features (powerlines, etc) then imported the result back into Lightroom. This is the final version after converting to B&W. (_DSC1425-_+cloned8bit: 3872 x 2592 Pixels)
Photo 4 shows the final result after using Lightroom’s wonderful B&W conversion tool. You can play around with different color channels to emphasize different things in the picture. It’s like being able to use color filters over your lens after you’ve taken the picture! I think the final result is much better than the original.
Here’s a link to my gallery with all of the images in sequence.
You can see all of the entries in the Digital Story June photo assignment here .
Tendai asked me about camera settings for shooting space shuttle launches. Rather than write them down, I looked through my photos and posted the ones I’ve taken, along with the EXIF data (where available) giving the settings I used.
Space shuttle launch as seen from Orlando – 1/160 sec @ f/8, ISO 100, 300 mm, Cropped 1936 x 1296, Nikon D80
I took a new set of pictures yesterday. I’m really pleased to be able to see the Solid Rocket Booster sequence from my front yard. (We’re 35 – 40 miles from the launch site). I used my new Nikon 70 – 300, F4.5 – 5.6, IS lens and mounted the camera on a tripod on my driveway. I really like the lens.
I had heard about Orlando Wetlands Park and finally decided to go see it one morning. The park is near Christmas, Florida off of highway 50 east of Orlando.
I got there right at dawn and hiked along the dike through the park. I took several bracketed landscape sequences to combine into HDR photos. There were quite a few birds, and a pair of bellowing alligators courting in the swamp. Near the end of my hike, I came across a family of river otters. I was quite surprised (they were too) and they were moving pretty fast, so my handheld 300 mm shot is a bit blurry – sorry.
