New Seascapes

I spent the last two Sunday evenings down at Crystal Cove doing some sunset practice.  Been so busy with work lately that I haven't had much of a chance to really take time and focus on landscapes.  December is always great in Southern California for colorful sunsets, plus it gets dark early so I can still be home for dinner.  Below are some of my favorites from both nights.

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Crystal Cove Sunsets

In the RAW

Since I started with digital photography I was mixed on the raw vs. jpg wars.  RAW is clearly superior but such a pain to deal with huge files when compared to the compressed jpeg renderings.  Such a pain, that is, until the advent of Lightroom.  Lightroom leveled the playing field by making dealing with either file type a seamless operation.  Since that day I have switched full time to raw and never looked back.

Life was good, load all my .CR2s into LR, convert to DNG, and very light processing in LR to get them ready for the web.  Since installing Lightroom I had always kinda fudged my way through the develop module tweaking and turning different settings until I got something that roughly resembled a good looking image.  For any heavy lifting I would always turn to Photoshop, of course then I not only had a 10mb raw file to archive, I now had a 40ish meg PSD file to keep track of.  Even with cheap disk space that seemed wasteful and because my computer is in desperate need of an overhaul, the less time I spent waiting for Photoshop the better. 

So I finally broke down and bought a book, it has turned out to be the best purchase of my insanely successful photographic career (aside from Lightroom, of course).  The book is Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3.  This book has filled in the pieces to the puzzle that I never knew existed in my mind.  It takes you step by step and simplifies each section of the all-powerful ACR4.  I now do 90%+ of my post processing directly in Lightroom and PS is reserved for special cases like panoramas & HDRs.  The LR & ACR combo is unbeatable.

From one hand it can spit out technically impeccable jpegs, sure to appease even the pickiest of istock noise & artifact nazis.  On the other hand you are free to make your creative vision come to fruition with the entire suite of adjustments available at your fingertips. 

Below are some of the more "artsy" images that I have created solely in LR (click for larger view).

I especially like the control you can get into with the grayscale conversion, makes it possible to give the photo a real textured feel that has eluded me in the past.

US Open 2008

One of my all time favorite photography-for-fun outings is going to the US Open of Surfing that's held every July in Huntington Beach.  I managed to get there around 6:30am and find plenty of free parking, which is nice as by early morning the place is positively packed.  This was the first time shooting any sports with my 40D.  While squeezing the shutter and firing off 6 frames each second is fun, I made an effort to shoot single frames at the peak of the action.  I still managed to fill up 8 gigs worth of CF cards in a few hours and called it a day before I got too scorched.

Local HB'er Brett Simpson was the crowd favorite, made it all the way to the semi finals but Tim Boal managed to just squeak by 12.0 to 11.93.

The final heat had Tim Boal and Nathaniel Curran with Curran pulling off the win.

Full gallery from Sunday can be found here:

US Open 2008 - Hutington Beach, CA

San Francisco Trip

Just got back from a long weekend in San Francisco and had a blast.  Got to break in my new 40D and 24-70 2.8L glass.  This was a non-working holiday for sightseeing and hanging out with family, still managed some good shots in the limited time we had.

 
This was the view out our hotel room window.  We stayed at Villa Florence on Powell right by Union Square, nice rooms but pretty noisy.

Fort Point lighthouse right underneath golden gate bridge.

 

A 7-shot panorama stitched together in CS3.  Full-size file is roughly 81 megapixels.

3-shot vertical panorama.

My absolute favorite panorama.  Thinking about getting a 60x10 canvas print for my big empty wall.  I think it would look best on a fotoflot but at such a thin ratio they only go up to 30x5, which is too tiny.

I took a variety of these around union square one evening and this is the best by far.  I really like how still the people are in the center with the craziness around them.  6/10 @ f22