In a new light

Image: from 2010, 5D Mk II, 16-35 f 2.8 IS L, 25 mm at f 11, 1.6 sec, -.7 ev.

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Image: from 2009, 5D Mk II, 16-35 f 2.8 IS L, 16 mm at f 11, 3 sec, -.7 ev.

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The Pergola at the Seattle Center, a great place to shoot, new much brighter lighting was installed over the last year some time, making for better contrast at this iconic Seattle location.

Strange though, I don't see a lot of people shoot here, the center has lots of options, but I seem to be drawn here, its great at sunset but dusk is the best time to shoot here, light from the setting sun lingers while the Pergola is light up by its own lighting.

This time I wanted to incorporate the space needle and not shoot as wide as the last time, I didn't get the clouds but the new lighting helped out with the contrast.

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More Fall at Rainier

Image: 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L, f11, LV, 3 stop GND filter
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Image: 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L, f11, LV, 3 stop GND filter
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Image: 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L, f6.3, LV
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Better light prevailed on this trip to the mountain, the fall colors are fantastic. Every trip to Mt Rainier, the mood is different, the light never the same, that's one of its best features.

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Fall at Mt Rainier National Park

Paradise Valley
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Paradise
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Paradise Valley
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If you have time in the next week to visit Mt Rainier, I highly recommend you do so. Mt Rainier puts on a fall show that's hard to beat, rivaled only by the spring bloom, in ways as good as the fall show in New England.

The color is coming mostly from Blueberry bushes that grow all over the Cascade range, the bears go through this like harvester machines, fattening up for their winter long sleep and can be seen at the park stuffing their furry faces full of over ripe blueberrys.

Black Bear fall 2009
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It was overcast for my visit but I hope to be back for some good weather this coming week end, the color should last another week.

You may also get to see a black and silver phase Red Fox I have seen on a couple of recent shoots at Mt Rainier.

Winter 2009
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Lightroom 3

Image: 5D Mk II, EF 300 f4 L IS, f 7.1, ISO 3200, 1/250 sec.

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Lightroom 3, on the surface you wont see a lot of change, where Adobe worked their magic is under the hood.

The new engine for processing noise and sharpening has improved immensely, one of its biggest draw backs since Lightroom was first released, I prefer to do my noise reduction and a small amount of sharpening in RAW format and then complete it in 16 bit TIFF format in PS.

I went back to this image I took in Costa Rica of the of a Chestnut-Mandibled Toucan in the rain forest near Vulcan Areal, I could not believe the improvement in noise reduction that Lightroom was able to do on this ISO 3200 image, detail is maintained while almost completely removing all traces of noise, the image was cropped to about 60% of its original size.

One other big improvement is the lens correction, LR now has lens profiles that can fix distortion and fix it well. I have heard more profiles are coming, so soon you will be able to fix most lens aberrations, a nice feature.

I have always liked LR, but now it really is a great tool to have.

If you have been waiting for an improved Lightroom, now is the time.

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Diagonals

Image: 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 L IS, 200mm at f16, 1/25 sec, -.5 ev. LV. The Painted Hills, Or.

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Diagonal lines and curves make for interesting compositions. The light where I was standing was coming across the top of the hills and highlighting the grass, if I had shot wide at this time I would have ended up with massive flare, so I put on my zoom and isolated the diagonal curves across the scene to come up with this image, again using live view to do the final composition and exposure, no filters used.

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New Work

Mt Rainier
5D Mk II, 24-105 f4 IS L at f22, 47mm, LV.
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Mt Adams
5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L at f16, 200mm, LV.
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Wow, its been a busy summer of working on my house and doing my day job, I have not had much time for photography, but at last my house is done and I can get back to making images, the mountain snow has cleared out and I can get out and do some hiking and get some needed exercise and do some image making.

Spent Sunday up at Mt Rainier National Park, hiking up to higher elevations to also escape the 90 degree weather we are having in Seattle, no clouds or great sunsets, but still a beautiful place to be, even with out a camera.

I hope to do a trip almost every week end, now through mid October. A trip down to Cannon and Ecola beaches maybe Shi Shi beach, Mt Baker (Kulshan) the Columbia river Gorge and back to Rainier of course and hopefully a trip up to the Enchantments.

Get out and shoot, hope to have some new images up soon along with my article on live view (LV).


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The truth about banding

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

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Banding has become an issue for a few people with the 5D2 and I want to set the record straight. Canon has produced an excellent camera that when used correctly will produce some of the best images you can get from a digital camera and in my experience blows away 35mm film. Digital still needs correct exposure to produce a good image, although you can expose for different parts of an image and blend them in PS or you can use GND filters to correct the exposure in camera. Images can only be pushed so far before they fall apart with any camera. Now I'm not trying to protect Canon but when I see people say "wow the 5D2 has banding issues so I'm going to brand X", well that just cracks me up, is it a perfect camera? no, of course not, if it took perfect images every time where would the fun be in photography ? is there room for improvement? of course and we'll see that in the future.

The image above was taken midday with a 5D2 and a 16-35 2.8 II lens using live view, image 1 as you can see is not well exposed, the shadows are very dark and I could have done better with this image. The 2nd image was corrected in Lightroom, I brought the Fill Light up to 24 and adjusted the curves up extensively to brighten the shadow areas. Normally for a correct exposure I would not even touch Fill Light. Image 3 was then adjusted in CS3, first I brought the Whites to 236 and then I masked the shadow area and brought the Whites to 210, this is a huge adjustment for the shadows, a lot of images from many cameras could not have taken this much adjustment. The final image is a 100% crop of the shadow area, shrunk to 1000 pixels. Is there noise there in the shadows? sure what would you expect when you bring up the shadows 3 stops, is it bad ? no, is there banding ? no, would I go further ? no, there is no need.

So if your thinking about getting this camera and you hear about banding issues, take it with a grain of salt and don't miss out on this fantastic image producing machine. You can produce great HDR images also, but just remember if you want to make bad images you can do that also by pushing the images 4 or 5 stops and looking at your image at 500%.

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More Warbirds

British Supermarine Mk.Vc Spitfire
Image: 5D Mk II, 300mm at f10, 1/400 sec

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Curtiss P-40C Tomahawk

Image: 5D Mk II, 300mm at f10, 1 /800 sec

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Image: 5D Mk II, 300mm at f10, 1 /1000 sec

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"One of the world's rarest collections of flight-ready World War II warbirds" is located at Paine Field in Everette, Wa. Paul Allens famous The Heritage Flight Collection. Every other weekend in the summer he has free fly days with the Historic Flight Foundation now getting involved. Better conditions and my second venture in to this type of shooting led to much better images, still working on getting that shutter speed down to 1/250 of a sec, pretty hard panning airplanes with that slow a shutter speed, hopefully next time I'll nail one. Check out their calendars and get up to Paine field if you can, they let you right out next to the taxi way.

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War Birds

Tallahassee Lassie, wheels down
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Grumpy and Impatient Virgin fly over Paine Field
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Shooting classic war birds is a challenging type of photography, the key is to get as much blur in the props as you can to give the image a feel of movement, the problem is, you have to shoot under 1/500 of a sec while panning an aircraft moving at 200+ mph and that is not easy, as I found out. The lower image was at 1/500 of a sec and in difficult light, metering is also a bit tricky, I usually get by with spot metering, but on these small aircraft its easy to miss. More aircraft here. Grumpy and Impatient Virgin's home, can be found at Historic Flight at Kilo-6.
We shot this event for Historic Flight here are the images
Grumpy B-25 Mitchell
Tallahassee Lassie P-47 Thunderbolt
Impatient Virgin P-51 Mustang

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Silhouette

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Image 5Dmk II, 70-200 f4 IS L, 1/200 sec at f11, iso 400.

Silhouettes are an interesting subject, here it creates an abstract of these people conversing during a nice sunset in Gasworks Park. Simple composition, yet tells a story.

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Old Images

Image: Seattle, 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L, 200mm @ f11, 5 sec.

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The weather has pretty well sucked the last few weeks, so I have not been out shooting much and some times it pays to stay home on those rainy days and go back over old image files, this one I took in Feb 2009 and didn't do anything with it, however I decided to process it this time and turns out it makes a great print, some times you can go back and re process old images with new software and it can make quite a difference, maybe you have learned some new tricks or got some new software, try it, it may pay off.

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Selective Focus - Blur tool

Image: Seattle docks, 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L
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This image was shot normally and then the out of focus area was added with CS4, using a gradient mask and the blur filter, this can also be accomplished in camera with tilt shift lenses.
These are fun images to put together and give the impression of models or dioramas.
Simply create a new back ground layer, add the filter>blur>lens blur
edit in quick mask mode and choose the gradient tool of your liking
finally bump up your curves to soften the edge contrast.

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WWII over Mukilteo this summer

Image: P-51B, 5D MkII, 16-35 f2.8 L at 16mm

The Historic Flight museum opened the other day at Pain field and the flights they will have this summer with Paul Allens group The Flying Heritage Collection will be a feast for the senses for WWII vintage plane fanatics, P-51's, Spitfires and B-25 bombers will be flying out of Paine Field on a regular schedule, it will offer up some great opportunities to capture some very unique images and be next to these historic aircraft. Paine Field is becoming a world renown location to see these aircraft. Also the opportunity to see new build Me 262's from Storm Birds, that is a sight to see. More on Paine Field flight attractions. Museum of flight restoration center

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Flash Photography

Image:Lake Louise, 5D, 17-40 f4 L., 3 stop GND filter and B + W CPL.

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I came across a great site for learning about flash photography, its mostly for Canon, however I think any one could learn quite a bit from this site. Speedlite.com

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Implied Motion

Image: Rush Hour, 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L, 85mm, f9 for 13 sec.

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Seattle from the south, this 13 sec. exposure allowed the car lights to streak, giving this image a feeling of motion or activity, a nice change from very static images. Some times you can benefit from longer shutter speeds. Single exposure, no filters used.

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747-8 First Flight

Image:5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L at f5.6, 1/1250 sec
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Image:5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L at f5.6, 1/1600 sec.
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Image:5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L at f5.6, 1/1000 sec.
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First flight, on final with T-33 chase plane escort. So why f 5.6, I wanted a pretty fast shutter speed, because I was hand holding on a fast moving subject and I knew at this distance f5.6 with the 70-200 would give me the depth of field I required to get the aircraft in focus.

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747-8 High Speed Taxi Test

Images: 5D Mk II, 70-200 f4 IS L

The 747-8 Freighter made its debut high speed taxi test this week end, look for first flight Monday the 8th, this is what I have been working on for the last 4 years and I'm looking forward to seeing her fly. Boeing still knows how to design and build pretty cool aircraft.

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CS4 Color range selection

Image: Snake River, 5D, 70-200 f2.8 IS L, 3 stop soft GND, B + W CPL.
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A very handy tool in CS4 is the color range selection for selecting large areas by color, this can be used to selectively lighten, darken, adjust color or sharpen by selecting a color. From the menu 'select > color range' in the dialog box adjust 'fuzziness' to desired level, (watch the preview) around 20-60 will work, then select the '+ eyedropper' to add more of the color range to be adjusted, say OK and select the adjustment layer from the pallets menu, ie. levels, color balance, etc... and adjust your image. In the above image this allowed me to adjust just the yellow in the trees to the levels I needed. Nice little trick and well worth trying.

Same in this image.

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Take advantage of Puddles :)

Image: 5D Mk II, 24-105 f4 IS L, 45mm, f16, 20 sec 2 stop soft GND.

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Take advantage of element's that can add to your image, here a simple puddle after a rain storm gave me the opportunity to add foreground interest to this image of Seattle, I took a few images and the one with the planks leading into the puddle proved to add a little more than just the reflection on its own. Simple little things can mean a great deal to an image. B and W conversion done in Lightroom and CS4.

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The Rule of Thirds

Image 5D Mk II, 16-35 f2.8 L II, 30mm at f 16, 1/4 sec, 3 stop GND soft

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Although I don't really try to hard to work with the so called Rule of Thirds it does work. When an image can be divided in to 9 separate portions of equal (or close) size by 2 horizontal and 2 vertical lines and placing points of interest at the intersections it meets a certain balance that is more pleasing the eye, if any one took art in school maybe you will remember this. But it is one more thing to think about when composing an image, I have found composition to be easier for me when I set up my equipment and do a quick composure through the viewfinder and then use live view to make adjustments, that 3 inch screen is a lot easier to see than the peep hole of a viewfinder. Only a few images work where the point of interest is centered in the image, most of the time you want the primary subject off center.

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Pre Dawn Light

Image: Bandon Beach, 5D Mk II, 70-200 F4 IS L.

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Early morning just prior to sunrise, totally overcast sky's, no filters, 2 sec at f16, slight adjustment to white balance from 6250 to 5250, who says you can't shoot in bad light, live view was used to expose and focus.

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Back Light

Image:5D Mk II 24-105 f4 IS L, 3 stop GND soft, 93mm @ f16, 1/50 sec

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Back light can kill an image or make for a strong composition depending on how it is used, here the light was so strong I needed to reduce it far beyond a filters capability, so I walked towards this sea stack at Bandon beach until I was standing in the apex of its shadow and composed an image that included the shadow of the sea stack.

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