Old Shack

I found this old shack on a hill, not too far from Crested Butte, Colorado. Actually it’s near Taylor Park Reservoir, situated about equi-distance from Crested Butte, Gunnison, and Buena Vista.
At the time, I was just too lazy to walk up closer so I used a telephoto lens for this shot. The “unplanned” result was this compression of distance, making the clouds look like they’re right on top of the shack.
This is a single-image HDR using Nik HDR Efex Pro.  The processing in HDR Efex is what helped to really bring out all of the texture in the image, especially the clouds.

Hope Town Lighthouse – A Beacon in the Dark

The Hope Town Lighthouse is located on Elbow Cay near the island of Abaco in The Bahamas.
It is one of the few operational kerosene powered light houses in the world. It is also one of only three “manual” lighthouses in the world, requiring someone to use a hand crank to rewind the spring that drives it.
Besides being an important safety beacon for sailors in the area, it is obviously also very picturesque. Plus, you can tour the lighthouse and go clear to the top where the view is pretty amazing!
The lighthouse sits next to a very protected harbor that offers a great place for sailors to weather that next storm.
So, what are you waiting for? Head to the Bahamas for some “fun in the sun”!

Photography 101…The Missing Piece

Sony E-Mount 16mm f/2.8

First, if you think you might learn something here, you’ll probably be disappointed. Sorry about that. 🙂

This is a camera lens. It sucks in the light from in front of the lens, flips it around upside down and backwards, and focuses it on a small area behind. We’ll call this area the sensor (could be digital – could be film).

Now, in this photo, you may notice that something is missing . . . you got it, the camera! More specifically, however, the missing piece is my “next” camera, the Sony NEX-7.

I used to have the NEX-5N and loved that camera. Like new lovers, every time I saw it I could hardly keep my hands off of it. ☺ It is very small and takes wonderful images, but I found I can’t live without a viewfinder. After using one for about 50 years, I may not be able to adapt to just using the screen for all of my photo work. . . but that’s just me.

Unfortunately, I had to sell the 5N to begin to raise money for my “next” camera. If you’ve known me very long, you would also know that I do that quite often. I’m sort of a borderline compulsive switcher when it comes to camera gear.

So, that brings us to my next camera, the NEX-7. There are several reasons I decided to do this upgrade:
    •    The viewfinder – electronic, but very well done.
    •    built in flash (plus a hot-shoe)
    •    better camera controls – Sony calls them “Tri-Navi”
    •    24 Megapixels
    •    Size – slightly larger than the 5N, but still very small

The sad news is – I probably won’t get this “new toy” for another month. I’ve been looking since before Christmas and was finally able to preorder it about 10 days ago, but still have some time left to “anticipate”.

Having Options

I’m always a bit nervous when I’m in the car while my wife drives … I have to be REALLY tired to sleep. 🙂 And I shouldn’t be that way because she really is an excellent driver (well, mostly).

Today, I was looking at my computer keyboard and it occurred to me why I might be like that. I flew airplanes for 33 years and for about half that time, I was the guy in charge. Many times in the Air Force, I would be the leader of a flight of four F-4’s. Then, with Delta, I was the Captain for the last 12 years. I made the decisions.

So the keyboard made me think, “Having options is a function of being in command, i.e. in control of your situation.”

So, “Honey”, please don’t get mad – it’s just a lifelong habit. I really do trust you . . . really. 🙂

Redstone

Redstone, Colorado, is a tiny little town just a ways outside of Aspen. The whole town is only 3 or 4 blocks long and about 1 block wide, yet here is this sign showing directions to each little shop in town. Kinda cool, actually.

At one end of town is the Redstone Inn – a great place to spend New Year’s Eve. They throw a fun party there and serve a fine meal, too, all in a spectacularly scenic setting.

Perfect Photo

No, of course this isn’t the perfect photo. However, it was processed with onOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite 6.

I’ve had the software installed for a couple of months, but this is the first time I’ve taken a close look at some of it’s capabilities. Still, I only used one of the six modules, the Perfect Effects.

This is a perfectly white pitcher with no defects in the finish. So, using the Perfect Effects module, I selected the Textures tab and picked the “Cracked Paint” preset. The beauty of Perfect Effects is that it not only has over 300 presets available to you, but those presets are very flexible with options to change several of the settings.

As the name implies, Perfect Photo Suite 6 is a suite of six modules:

  • Perfect Portrait
  • Perfect Layers
  • Perfect Effects
  • Perfect Mask
  • Perfect Resize
  • Focal Point
These various modules give us photographers some terrific tools for solving some of the processing problems we face with different images, plus a huge variety of creative effects to take those photos in new directions.
Check it out – I think you’ll like it!
Sony a65 w/Sony 16-50mm

My Favorite Tools

These are great tools, amazingly accurate and completely mechanical – nothing digital here. The micrometer (on the left) is supposed to be accurate to 1/10,000th of an inch! But, I digress.
The “favorite tools” I’m talking about are photography tools. Of course, my true favorites are whatever camera and lens I’m using, but this changes about as often as the weather, so I’ll talk about processing tools.
For me, the “Big Dog” is Adobe Lightroom. It’s where I do all of my organizing, placing images in appropriate folders and tagging them with keywords. But more importantly, it is just an amazingly powerful image editor. It is often where I start and finish my post processing.
However, another feature of Lightroom that I love is it’s ability to easily export an image to something like Nik Silver Efex Pro (used for this image) and then automatically reimport the changes when you finish.
And, Nik Silver Efex Pro is another of my favorite tools, but only one of several in the Nik stable of editors: Color Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro, and Viveza are also incredibly useful programs and I use them all frequently.
They are a bit expensive, but for me, well worth it.