So I am still dusting off some old files and found some from back when I was up in Alaska.  This first shot and my favorite Bald Eagle shot of all time was taken out in Dutch Harbor, AK.

These next four were all taken downing Homer, AK.  Now when I say these needed during off, they really did.  When I went on this shoot my Mark IIn was all of about 4 days old ( I was still reading the manual the night before the first day of shooting ) and like any new camera it was plauged with what I call break in dust.  Every small bit of dust that was shaken loose in that new body found its way to the sensor.  At the time I had no earthly idea how to clean a camera, so most of these shots originally looked like the Balds were flying in a volcanic fallout.  But thanks to some time and the healing brush said dust be gone and now I have some images again.

Jan 302012
 

 

So as I mentioned a few posts back I have been sorting and re-sorting and filing and categorizing all of my old files.  Something that was long overdue and greatly needed…  One thing that I found while comes through the files was thin image above.  Granted it looked nothing like this when I started because back then I was all about experimenting and tweaking Settings and White Balances and when I looked at this shot when I got back to the computer IT SUCKED!!  It was a drab mess of a white balance that was set so cold that the whole image was a lovely shade of purple :)  So back when I first saw this image I said forget it, and it has sat for the better part of 4 years on a hard drive taking up space.  Now 2012 roles around and I am sitting at my desk and I see a file that says Lessons Learned..  A file that I started a long time ago with images that were pretty much the bottom of the barrel, I screwed something up somewhere, or I was temporarily insane at the time of shooting.  But, I kept this file around so I could look back and see where I have been and what mistakes I had made so that I wouldn’t repeat them again.

Long story short I come across this images and think to myself:  This was shot in RAW I can change whatever White Balance I want!!  Ok, before the jabs come out with the “DUH josh you could have done that back in ’08″ I was younger and not so level headed (or at least that is going to be my excuse at this point)

So long story even shorter.  I dropped this into Lightroom 3, adjusted the White Balance to something I liked.  Even then the color image just didn’t work for me so I went with my favorite tool of choice Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.0 and went to town on this image.  A few sliders here and there a touch of structure and BAM!  an image that I though was at the bottom of the barrel is no one of my favorites and is already sitting on my wall in a nice 24×36 frame.

So lesson with all of this rambling?  Keep your images, hard drives are cheap and you never now what you will find when you go browsing…

 

Apr 302011
 

So I got to do something I hadn’t done in a while and that was teach my method of how to do panoramic shots. On the last day of shooting we went out to Guadalupe State Park and were photographing the Cypress trees in the area. So I set up my equipment just like I instructed the folks on doing and took the shot below. It was a total of 13 images all together and then combined into Photoshop. I did so many captures because I wanted to make sure that there were not going to be in anomalies in the images from too little overlap. I think it turned out looking really sharp and even money says that this will make a great canvas once I get the APC guys to print it for me. There is just one problem…

Should it be in Color???

Or in Black and White???

Let me know what you all think…

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