Mono Lake / Eastern Sierra

On my way to Death Valley I stopped one night at Mono Lake. Here are a couple shot at dawn, using the the Lee big stopper to slow the exposure. 

The filter lets through 1/1000 of the light allowing for the ten second exposures I used here. It also gives a blue cast, most of which can be removed in post if you shoot raw. I left some of it in though as I like the look.

This one was shot on the route to DV. It's from where the 136 meets the 395. That's Mount Whitney beyond the trees.

Death Valley #2

Three more from my Death Valley trip. First, Badwater Basin:

The Mesquite Sand Dunes just before sunset:

 Zabrinski Point at sunrise. This is known as "The Manifold" for obvious reasons:

See the rest of my Death Valley Pictures.

Death Valley #1 - Cottonball Basin Sunrise

I just got back from a three day trip to Death Valley in California (with a one night layover at Mono Lake). Four mornings of getting up at 5am went surprisingly quickly. With over 500 photos and spectacular scenery it's almost hard to know where to start, so I'm just going to post a few at a time from each location. These were sunrise shots at the Cottonball Basin.

Experimenting With The Big Stopper

Lee's 10 stop "big stopper" filter allowed me to photograph the above in broad daylight with a five second exposure time. This exposure time smooths out the motion in the water, giving it a misty effect. Shot at China Camp State Park, San Rafael.

Mono Lake

A couple of pictures from last year:

See the other Mono Lake pictures.

Sonoma Barn at Sunset

I had photographed this barn before but never with a sunset. The day before the Mare Island shots was also a rare night with a sunset. As this barn is less than a mile from where I live I shot out at the last minute and caught the setting sun lighting up the clouds. HDR, obviously, with HDR Efex Pro this time.

Mare Island

Mare Island, near Vallejo California, is the home of the first United States Navy base established on the Pacific Ocean (now closed). It’s also the home to many dilapidated buildings that I’ve been trying to photograph well for some time. Usually the light is too harsh and the sky too plain and boring to make interesting photographs, but last Monday we actually had some clouds in the sky approaching sunset, so I shot round there before it was too late.

This is the building I’ve been eying for some time. It always looks to me as though someone has sculpted the holes in the windows to be pictures of things: people, bats, sea lions, whales, a rabbit – but that’s really just pareidolia. I like the effect though.

About half a mile away is what looks to be a burnt out warehouse or factory. The wreckage and the light makes it look like a scene from a dystopian sci-fi movie.

Inverness, Tomales Bay California

Abstracts - San Francisco

Rowland Plaza

Another building owned by my employer - Rowland Plaza, Novato California.

Santa Cruz

Last weekend I went on a Sea To Summit half day workshop to shoot the waves at Santa Cruz. It was good experience and I learned a lot. For one, I wouldn't have known how to find the great locations. And for two, I would never have thought to be standing in the moving water taking pictures. I also learned that I need more filter power. Five stops ND wasn't enough to slow down the exposure enough to capture the moving water effect in the day (curse Olympus's base ISO 200). But I did manage to capture two reasonable shots near to sunset:

Each exposure at one second. (The above shot is level btw. The "sloping to the right" look is an optical illusion probably caused by the cloud on the right.)

Unfortunately, not a lot of cloud, so no interesting sunset shots. Luck of the draw.

Tomales Bay

I went on a drive to Tomales Bay - about an hour from where I live - amongst other things, to photograph the fishing boat wreck off the coast of Inverness. It's easy to find - visible from the road and a minute's walk from the parking lot of "The Inverness Store" Deli. It wasn't great light (I was hoping for some pink clouds at sunset - no such luck, just gray), but at least not boring. Topaz managed to extract something interesting from the sky.

I really need to come back when there is better light. Probably at dawn, as the hills to the west would block the sun at dusk, but that would require me getting up an hour before dawn, so that's not going to happen.

On the way back I stopped to shoot the reflections in this pond that I drive by each time I go to Tomales. I applied one of Trey's Lightroom presets which rendered the scene pretty much as I pictured it at the time:

Cherry Blossoms and Mustard Flowers

It's spring. All of Sonoma looks like this now:

Sonoma Morning

I finally got the will to get up at dawn to take some photos. All within a couple of miles from my home. First there's this old barn with the mustard fields in bloom:

Local fruit and veg stand:

And the usual junkyard truck. I've shot this at sunset before, never at sunrise, so from the other side:

Petaluma River

I haven't taken many photos for a couple of weeks - none I've been especially happy with anyway. I was looking at some pictures I took two years ago underneath the Petaluma Bridge, between Novato and Sonoma. Here's the first one:

Someone asked me if I had used Topaz. I hadn't heard of Topaz then, I was just learning Lightroom, but I did recently get Topaz Adjust, and so I thought I'd try it out on that old picture. The new Topazed version is this:

Over processed? The Topaz version certainly has something extra, although it also has more chroma noise (see the white superstructure of the boat). I'm not sure which one I prefer. Opinions?

Here's one more from the same day - just basic LR:

Sansome Street, San Francisco

One Sansome Street is a building owned and managed by my employer, Barker Pacific Group, in partnership with Prudential Real Estate Investors. It's hard to get realistic pictures of these tall financial district buildings without them all looking like they're falling over, so I gave up with the attempts at realism and turned the wide angle lens directly up. Here are a couple:

The first was processed in Topaz Adjust to pull details from the building in shadow. The second was made from five bracketed exposures shot handheld in burst mode, combined in Photomatix.