Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
I was busy working last week and something caught my attention outside, out the corner of my eye. I spotted this gorgeous barred owl in a tree in my backyard, and rushed to grab my camera to take a quick photo through the window.
I decided to take a chance and dash outside and hope to get a better shot. The owl gave me a quick glance, let me snap 3 photos, and then was off, deep into the forest.
I love when beautiful creatures like this decide to make a stop in my yard 🙂
Mother Nature has certainly not been cooperating with my plans to get out and shoot at night. While I still have images from Joshua Tree that I would like to work through, I thought I would switch it up this week and edit some old images instead.
Whilst in Namibia on my last visit, I travelled for a couple of days in the Etosha area. Being in the park itself is quite different to being on a private reserve, since there is no off-road driving allowed, but there was still a lot of great game viewing when driving around the park.
We were fortunate to come across a group of 3 young lion brothers, likely ejected from their pride within the past few months, as they had gotten to the age where they needed to be on their own. They still had the energy and playfulness of cubs though, chasing each other around a water hole. We were even more fortunate to be the only vehicle to being viewing these lions for the majority of the time that we spent with them, allowing us to get in a great position to watch them going about their day.
The weather this week wasn’t conducive to getting out and shooting at night, so I have worked through a few more of my images from Joshua Tree. When editing, one of the things the workshop instructor mentioned really stuck with me, and that is to really watch the saturation of star images. I really tried to keep things as natural as possible, although it can be fun to crank things up to 11 and see what happens 🙂 Maybe next week.
While I was shooting with my main camera, I had set up my Panasonic camera on the hood of my car with a gorilla pod, and set it to take a series of images to make into a time lapse later. It didn’t turn out quite as planned, but I’ve included it here as it shows all the traffic from the parking lot, as well as other photographers. Since I was doing a time-lapse series, I didn’t have the long exposure noise reduction turned on, and I think the still images from the Panasonic really would have benefitted from having that done in camera.
Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.
For this week I worked on a few images from my time in California. Compared to my trips to Africa, I took relatively few photos, but I have a good number that I am interested in playing around with to see what happens.
One of the things I picked up while away was an infrared filter for my camera, and I took it out and started playing around in Joshua Tree when my photo workshop was over. I have so much to learn about all the nuances of infrared photography, but even without doing the proper things, like setting a custom white balance, I am still happy with what I was able to come up with when converting the images to black and white.
I decided on the topic of the night sky for November, mostly because I spent an evening during my holiday at Joshua Tree National Park at a night sky photography workshop, and I have images I want to work through. Also, November may have some potential for night sky photos at home (since it isn’t too bitterly cold yet, and night is falling quite early, which is good for an early bird like me).
Just getting to the workshop proved to be quite an adventure. The night before, a rare thunderstorm rolled through the desert with heavy rain, and there were a lot of road closures due to small local mudslides. In the town of Joshua Tree, the main highway through town had over 6 feet of mud (and a buried Mini Cooper car) in the middle of the highway. When setting off in the morning, I headed toward the Cottonwood gate, planning to head up to the Oasis visitors centre through the park, but that gate turned out to be closed (and would remain so for several days to get everything cleaned up). Then there was a substantial backtrack to get back on the interstate and head to the other gate in Twentynine Palms, but through there I encountered more detours and terrible road conditions. I made it there in the end, albeit rather late and after the class had already started.
Despite the crazy weather the night before, and threats of potential storms during the day of the workshop, the weather couldn’t have been more beautiful, with clear skies and just a few wispy clouds leftover. Besides the driving conditions to get to the park, the other downside to the weather was as the evening cooled, there was a lot of moisture still in the air, causing dew to form. I wasn’t worried about my camera (some of the people that were local, and not used to the moisture that I am, were quite alarmed) but it did mean that images started to appear soft and fuzzy later in the evening. Everyone packed up by about 9:30, because by that point it became impossible to get any clear images. Looking through my images, I can see a definite deterioration in sharpness as the evening draws on, but I still like the images from later in the evening, despite the softness.
Here are a few of the shots I have edited so far. I haven’t broken the habit of working in multiple editors, so I have images done in all of my programs.
Another month has come to a close. I think I am a bit like a broken record now, always saying I don’t know where the time goes and how the days pass by so quickly. There’s a chill in the air though and several windy days have rid the trees of all but the most persistent leaves. Autumn is on it’s way out.
Over the month of October, I worked on using all three of my editing programs – On1 Photo Raw, Topaz Studio and Luminar, to compare and contrast the different programs and try to get a good feel for the strengths and weaknesses and in which situations the different programs shine. I didn’t really come to any strong conclusions, except for images shot at very high ISO, in which case Topaz is my clear choice (specifically being able to use Denoise 6).
I had the chance to get away for a week and a half in the desert of Southern California, and opportunity to relax and recharge my batteries, and do a little bit of photography as well. While I was there, I took a night sky photography workshop in Joshua Tree National Park, and look forward to sharing images. I also had a chance to play around with my new infrared filter. There are a lot of nuances to infrared photography that I need to learn, but it was fun just meandering in the desert taking photos of cactus and seeing what happened.
For November, I am going to focus on the night sky. I have some images that I would like to share from California, and hopefully it will stay warm enough that I don’t have to bundle in too many layers to get out at home and capture a few images. Fingers crossed!