This Old Blog

I went ahead and purchased the Lightroom 5 upgrade last week when it finally hit the store shelves. I could have gotten a copy earlier than last Friday, but I'm old fashioned in that I want physical media if I can get it. I'm not happy about getting just a digital download, especially if it costs any amount of money. The LR 5 upgrade cost $79, whether I purchased it direct from Adobe and downloaded it or purchased the physical boxed copy from B&H Photography (which I did). I'm trying to decide if the upgrade was worth it with regards to new features, so I've been experimenting with what are some of the advertised features, such as the radial filter. I used the radial filter to darken the background around Lucy's head to better separate her head from the background. The center of the filter is slightly to the left, almost to her right tear duct. I then darkened the shadows around Lucy's head as well as desaturated the background. I kept the color the came...

I was supposed to go to the spring Fiesta in the Park at Lake Eola today. My wife went downtown to the Bob Carr to watch Madama Butterfly with a friend. On the way back I intended to stop at the Fiesta and walk through, looking for photographic opportunities. But as I drove near where it was being held I found no place to park except for all the little spots near apartments and other small parking lots where local folk had set up for-pay parking starting at $5 a pop and up. That pretty much killed any desire I had to visit. Instead I drove on down to a Burger King on Orange, near Michigan, and spent $5 on a basic lunch. What is interesting about the current Burger King stores are the new, nineteen-fiftyish style the stores are all adopting. Lots of bright colors, primarily bright oranges, with vinyl coverings on seat bottoms and backs. I don't know why they'd choose this particular design motif, but it reminds me of older places I used to eat at when I was a kid living in ...

There are times when you're walking about and photographing the world when you make a photograph that doesn't fully "expose" itself to you until you're well and truly home and looking at your images. No amount of pre-visualization or chimping will show you what you have until you start to work with in in post. Even then it's a bit of a hit-or-miss experimentation. This is one of those photos that ended up showing its "true" value in post. The post work on this one came in two steps. The first step was to punch it up a bit in Lightroom 4.3 with Preset: Direct positive, and then dragging the highlights slider to -100%. Then I ran it through Silver Efex Pro 2, selecting #17, Full Spectrum. That dropped all the blue to black, especially the cloudless sky. It may not appeal to you, but I love it. And now that I've discovered this bit of post-processing hackery, I think I'll work even harder to duplicate it in the future. This is the time of y...

I stopped by Rouse Cemetery on the way home, a small modest cemetery that has residents born over 100 years ago (see Paul W. Rouse above, who was born in 1906). The cemetery is located at the north end of Rouse Road, right before it turns due east and becomes McCulloch Road. It's surrounded by heavy woods and has a simple chain-link gate at the front. When I arrived around 5:30 this afternoon it was still open. I assume it's locked up during the night and is reopened in the morning. Based on what little I've been able to discover via Google, the Rouse Cemetery is also referred to as the Drawdy Rouse Cemetery. I'm assuming that this cemetery was started long ago when this section of Orange was heavily rural, far more than it is today. All that's left are bits and pieces of the old forest, such as the section that surrounds this cemetery from where Corporate Blvd dead-ends into Rouse and north up Rouse until Rouse ends at McCulloch Road. I've started an informal...

The worse time to walk from the office to the sub shop is mid-day in the height of summer. Either the rain is beating down on you, or the sun is out and the heat is beating down on you. Either way, you come back wet with rain or sweat, but you come back wet. I suppose if I had my druthers I'd prefer the days without rain, except if rain is absent long enough we wind up with dry conditions and wildfires. We need the rain. And lots of it. When the rains do come the vegetation (trees, grass, shrubs, flowering plants) thrive and turn vibrant colors. Grass and other green leafy plants seem to glow green. New growth can come out almost any color, such as these little oak sprouts (suckers) coming out of the base of this small oaks trunk. Even the works of man can show subtle shades of color, especially when it's been broken down and mixed about. Consider this small section of debris on the site of the former arena where they're constantly demolishing it. Shattered concrete, met...

Based on some comments and a few posts from Wolfgang ( starting here ) I tried to pick up a few tips and adapt them to the way I shoot and mess with the results (referred to more formally as "the process"). In particular I switched the E-PL1 from sRGB to AdobeRGB. I know what I've read that there's little to no difference between the two, and that some colors (reds and blues interestingly) can get washed out converting from AdobeRGB. Whatever. I just know that I appear to be getting a better range of mid-tones, and in particular, I'm getting the black blacks I want and first saw in Ming Thein's review of the E-M5 . My "process" is to do some slight desaturation of the highlights, tweak the sharpening, maybe do some trimming (like the 1:1 image in the middle), then finish processing in Silver Efex Pro 2. Now, more than ever, I'm either selecting underexpose or low key 1 to start and tweaking that as needed. I've also gone back to using the M...

My wife and I attended the Palm Sunday service at First United Methodist in downtown Orlando. While there we also partook of communion. It was a good Sunday for us both, as we haven't been to a Palm Sunday service in a number of years. The scripture lessen was 1 Corinthians 13, of which the first three verses are always powerful for me: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. 1 Corinthians 13 verses 1-3, 21st Century King James Version I think of this every time I hear a conservative candidate make claim to his Christian faith in one sentence, then lash out at his oppone...

I am no Lightroom expert. Even though I've owned it and used it since August 2009 (nearly three years ago), I've used it basically as a Raw converter with the ability to do some minor tweaking. In the right hands Lightroom can produce some remarkable results. Unfortunately my hands aren't that gifted. Perhaps, now that Lightroom 4 has gotten my attention, I'll work to improve my game a bit using this tool. I enabled ISO boost on the E-1 and set ISO to 3200. I then turned the camera on poor old Rex and played a bit with the results. The first image is basically a raw conversion with exposure adjusted +2 to get the histogram back towards the middle. I don't know why the E-1 underexposed as much as it did. Highlights were adjusted -100 to open up detail in the light areas, while whites were adjusted +50 to lighten up the rest of the image. Color noise was adjusted to +100 to remove any color noise, especially in the shadows. Base Image The base image shows the ...

Olympus E-P2 and Panasonic 20mm This has been a very busy week at work. I always carry a camera with me, the E-P2 with a prime on the front. Zoom use with the E-P2 is now a rare exception with me. All photos in this post were taken with primes. My wife's Mac had to go back to the Apple store because the WiFi was still malfunctioning. While we were turning it in for a deeper inspection and possible repair we also noted that the screen's backlight was intermittent. We left it to fix that problem as well as look at the WiFi issue. On the way out I happened to see this particular father-and-son tableau (I'm assuming it was a father and son), with the son up on the table and playing with an iPad. The adult seemed transfixed by either another device or something else equally small. He's clutching his wallet at the same time he's concentrating on the other item next to his wallet. Is he thinking of buying the little one an iPad? The week was spend with me visitin...

Today was St. Patrick's Day. Lulu was on duty looking for leprechauns, lest they sneak in the house and practice their mischievous ways. Lulu with her green eyes has a special gift for spotting leprechauns. Right. This was taken with the Olympus E-P2 and the MZ 45mm, aperture priority and auto ISO. The camera chose both the shutter speed (1/100s) and the ISO (400). Post was done with Lightroom 4. I used LR4 a bit more aggressively this time: Highlights -100 Clarity +50 Shadows -50 Sharpening +25 Exposure -1 White Clipping +25 Orange Saturation and Luminance +50 Yellow Saturation and Luminance +50 Green Saturation and Luminance +50 The goal was to bring back all the detail hidden in what appeared to be the over-exposed hightlights around the mouth, while loosing distracting detail in the shadows, and make the overall image more dramatic. The change in the orange, yellow, and green channels was to accentuate the eyes and the the nose, especially the eyes, which have a ...

In the midst of tooling around downtown Orlando I stopped at various random locations and grabbed a few photographs of the city, two of which I decided to post here. The top photograph is both lanes of I-4 over South Division Avenue. I parked a short distance away at In Bloom Florist 's parking lot, leaving the engine to  the Prius running and my wife inside in case she needed to make a quick getaway. I walked back down Division looking for a good spot and quickly found this one, on the south bound side looking north. I knew that the E-P2's sensor wouldn't have the full dynamic range necessary to show detail in the outside light, so I exposed for the underside of the bridge and in post pushed the highlights to full overexposure. I rather like it this way in black and white; it adds something ominous to the overall atmosphere. On the way back east on I-4 to Colonial (on the way to the Nissan dealership) I passed what I now think is the back delivery to Nitesol , "...

Last year it was the "free" concerts at Universal. This year it was the "free" concerts at Sea World Orlando. I qualify the word "free" because in order to get in and see the acts you had to buy a year pass, both times at a discount. When the Universal discount passes expired, something funny happened; the prices went up significantly (not so funny) and the quality of the acts went down (still not so funny). Then Sea World Orlando started advertising their Bands, Brew, and BBQ series, with park pass prices that were considerably less than what we would have had to pay to renew at Universal. We finally broke down and purchased them for the Doobie Brothers  Saturday show. We signed up at the tail end of the promotion just to see the Doobies. There aren't that many shows left, and I doubt we'll go and see them because we've got commitments on those weekends when the final acts come to Orlando. But at least we can go back to Sea World and enj...

I went back again to the Citrus Bowl and Tinker Field for another afternoon session. This time I concentrated on the southwest corner of the Citrus Bowl where Tinker Field is located, and arrived a good hour earlier than the previous evening. The light was more neutral. I used two cameras this time, an E-1 with the ZD 50mm and the E-P2 with the Panasonic 20mm. Both were used at base ISO; 100 for the E-1 and 200 for the E-P2. Because the light was bright the lenses were both stopped down at least three stops from wide open. Oddly enough, the 50mm was stopped down to f/5.6 (E-1, ISO 100) while the 20mm was stopped down to f/4 (E-P2, ISO 200). you would have thought it would have been the other way around, but I believe it was my subconscious training taking effect; I have gotten into the habit of closing the 50mm down as much as possible because I want maximum depth of field, especially in macro mode, while for the 20mm I've gotten into the habit of opening it up as much as pos...

There's a camera store on Mills, on the south side of the intersection of Mills and Colonial in Orlando. Colonial Photo and Hobby has been in business at that spot since 1954. Colonial Photo was one of the first stores I learned about (after groceries and gas, so you know where my priorities were) when I moved down to Orlando in 1984. At that time I was shooting film with my OM-4 and I went to Colonial to buy film and get it processed and printed. Over the years I found other spots to get my film processed, but I always went to Colonial to "do it right", and to pick up the odd but always important accessory that nobody else in town seems to have. It was at Colonial that I purchased my Nikon N90, and it was Colonial where I took it to get it repaired when I fell into a North Carolina river with the camera around my neck one summer while on vacation. I had no intention that day of tripping over a tree root, rolling down the bank with $2,000 worth of camera and lens dea...