Archive for the ‘Andrew’s Favorites’ Category
Road trips are amazing things. You could jump on a plane and pay to check three duffels… or you could pile ten duffels into a sedan and enjoy the drive across the country. I’ve made the LA/ATL drive twice now and each time has been a complete adventure. Two very different adventures, but two nonetheless. Unlike our first marathon-style 3-day trek two Decembers ago, we opted to turn it into a more leisurely vacation. I’ve been to Yellowstone twice before, but each was well before I was anything much into photography. This time, though, I was able to appreciate it in a whole new way. One thing I’ll always remember is getting to do the Lake Yellowstone Hotel “photo safari” one morning with my mom. She had done it the first time we visited Yellowstone (back when I was nine, I think) and it was really special for her to get to do it again but this time with me tagging along.
At some point during our stay in Yellowstone, we found ourselves driving through the Lamar Valley at sunset. (Typing this now I realize I’d like to “find” myself there a little more often.) We pulled off for a minute to climb a foothill and had no choice but to enjoy the stunning view the valley’s still water offered.
Yellowstone is definitively NOT on the way from Atlanta to Los Angeles… but I'm so glad we made silly plans and came back to YNP anyways: Yellowstone National Park, WY
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, Sunset, Yellowstone NP | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Yellowstone is an oddity. The geysers and bizarre geothermal features are the big ticket attractions but you find yourself forgetting about the “tamer” brand of landscape features that one comes to associate with National Parks. Really awesome waterfalls and crazy big yellow canyons would be examples of such. The next day, I went back to this lookout with a longer lens and punched in to see a bit more of the brink in a *gasp* non-HDR shot of the falls and the start of the gorge. Frankly, I’m appalled that none of my stuff from Yellowstone has made it onto the site yet so I will be working in the coming weeks to get more National Park material out of my Aperture library and onto TAG. Also, I’m working on putting together a ghosting walkthrough that should hopefully help you make sense of how to solve movement-heavy scenes in HDR (or at least how I like to do it, I’m sure there’s half a dozen different ways that work). Until then, enjoy the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone National Park.
At the backend of the canyon lies the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, clocking in at a healthy 308-foot drop. If you view the image at full resolution, you can make out the specks of color just above and to the right of the brink — park visitors who have braved the treacherously steep switchbacks down the far side of the canyon wall: Yellowstone National Park, WY
A more traditional take on Lower Falls… this is by no means the first time this exact angle has been taken, I'm afraid.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Landscape, Outdoor, Yellowstone NP | 3 Comments »
Haven’t posted anything for a while! Now that my computer has caught up to me in LA I finally have some time to sit down and look back at the last month or so of my life: Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Las Vegas, Disneyland. Needless to say, I’ve got a lot to sift through. This first one I’ve chosen to share is easily one of my favorites and it comes bundled with plenty of neat historical relevance. In case there was any confusion out there, NO I was not the first person to take a picture of the Teton Range from this convenient little pull off. Most notably, perhaps, would be Ansel Adams’s work from the Snake River Overlook, though his most famous image from here was framed to only include the Grand Teton (the largest and most golden mountain in my picture below) and the strip of the Snake River right in front of it. Adams is a fun topic of discussion by himself – actually, I like to think of him as one of the pioneers of the HDR mindset. His Zone System allowed him to measure the range of exposure “zones” within his frame, useful for determining the number of stops between the darkest and the brightest parts of the image. Based on that, development times could be tweaked to stretch a fairly flat image (with a small zone range) into a more contrasty image via careful overdevelopment or to compress an image with unavoidable over/underexposure into a smaller and more manageable zone range via underdevelopment. I have no intention of judging myself against Adams but the mindset and final goals are similar: tweak an exposure after you’ve taken it in such a way that the greatest amount of detail can be simultaneously shown in the highlights and shadows. He used darkroom magic, we use software magic.
Enough about him though, let’s talk about me.
We left the Jackson Lake Lodge about 5:15am and sped up the road a few miles to get to the overlook. Over the next 45 minutes or so, the mountains began to glow as the sun cleared the eastern horizon directly behind us. Half an hour later we were all asleep at the lodge again. It was summer after all and I was determined to get unhealthy amounts of sleep.
So what does "Teton" even mean? The early French who explored this area named the range "les Trois Tétons," or "the three breasts." Surprised? Grand Teton NP, Wyoming
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Last weekend, Karl and I took a quick jaunt out to the Fiordlands to see what we could find. I’d been maybe 5 or 6 weeks earlier but the weather then was on the unremarkable side so I was hoping for a little bit of sun. What we found was rather stunning.
It’s a pretty amazing place in and of itself and it’s very easy to lose your scope of how huge it actually is. Simply walking around near the car park, you’re thinking, “wow I’m surrounded by these big mountain things jutting up out of nowhere.” So you walk over closer to the smallish harbor where they have 3- or 4-story cruise boats designed for touristy day trips. But, it’s only when those boats head out onto the sound and draw up even with the cliffs that you realize that the large boat from earlier was now a minuscule little dinghy in comparison to the mountains. It’s helped along by the fact that on each of the two times I’ve been, the mountains rise up and disappear in thick cloud cover, giving the very believable impression that they extend upwards into infinity. All in all, it’s one of the most surreal places I’ve ever seen and I’m happy to say I was able to return with a couple images that I’m very pleased with. Though it would be physically impossible to fully communicate how awesome this place is, I certainly had a decent attempt.
Though not as readily apparent as many of the other panoramas, this was made using our panorama technique but the final crop didn't take on a super widescreen ratio. Someday when I have an unhealthily large amount of money, I want to upscale and blow this up for a monstrous print for my home: Milford Sound, NZ
In light of a recent birthday around here, I’ve been thinking about where I’ve come from in terms of ability. I shall now wax philosophical for a little bit. How would the above have looked if I had processed it last May when I thought Photomatix’s “grunge” preset was a really cool place to start at with my brackets? If I recall, the first thing I ever posted on T.A.G. was a cramped shot of a staircase outside the Disney Concert Hall in LA — how would that have turned out if I had worked on it last week? Recently I’ve noticed that, whether I’m meaning to or not, I’m taking a great deal of time during processing to try and steer the final “look” of an image in a more and more subtle direction. Sometimes it’s fun to do something crazy every once in a while, sure, but making the software fingerprint more and more invisible can be a very rewarding challenge. It’s no secret that HDR doesn’t exactly have a good track record in terms of respectability and I would be the first to admit that most of the first shots I was happy with came out looking like the exact same stuff I find today when I Google search “flagrant misuse of HDR.” A lot of people unfortunately came to associate the worst of HDR as the best that HDR had to offer. I think it’s taken me a year to figure this out, but I definitely think that it has its place in the toolbox of techniques. And, like any technique, it can either be used to improve or overused to detract from the image.
I was working on another picture a few days ago when one of my friends who was in the shot dropped by and saw the work-in-progress HDR right next to the 7D’s original image. After looking at it for a few seconds, he concluded that even though the original image had a “truer” feel to it (in terms of the camera’s capabilities, complete with blown out skies and murky foregrounds), the HDR was much closer to how he actually remembered the scene. With the Milford Sound shot, my intention was to recreate the scenario as I saw it, how I remember it.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Landscape, Milford Sound, Nature, New Zealand, Outdoor, Panorama | 1 Comment »
Well it’s about time I shared this one. It’s been in the works since we got back from Mt. Cook and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. In fact, it’s definitely my favorite panorama I’ve ever put together. From Mueller Hut we went about 20 minutes further up Mt. Ollivier’s ridge to get to a suitable vantage spot to see the sunrise at about 7am. One of the most utterly jaw-dropping experiences of my life. This panorama represents 11 bracketed sets, processed and stitched together to form a single 86 megapixel image.
Next week is our mid-semester break and I am spending it on the North Island. Can’t wait to see what they’ve got in store up there…
Couldn't have asked for a finer way to start the day: Mt. Cook, New Zealand
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Landscape, Mt. Cook, Nature, New Zealand, Outdoor, Panorama | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Greetings once more from NZ! I had a few images from a few weeks ago that I’ve been working on and was planning on posting… until we returned from a fantastic weekend in Mt. Cook National Park. So while I do a bit more housekeeping with those older pictures, I’ll throw up a brand new (literally, this shot is from this morning) Mt. Cook image to make up for the 19-day delay since my last post!
Mt. Cook… the tallest peak in New Zealand. It’s only four hours away from Dunedin and is absolutely stunning. Intending to stay overnight in Mueller Hut near the summit of Mt. Ollivier, we arrived at the Mt. Cook National Park Visitor Center at 8:15am to secure four bunks in the first-come-first-served-style system. However, there was already a throng of people waiting for the doors to open (even though we’d left Dunedin at 4:15am to get over there!) and we were within two people of the cutoff. Undaunted, we brought a 4-man tent to the top of the trail and camped under the hut — It was easily the most difficult hike I’ve ever attempted and I wasn’t even carrying the tent!
Beyond the hut, the ridgeline continued up to the summit. Looking back towards the hut shortly after sunrise the following morning offered the below vista…
Mt. Cook is the tall peak in the upper right area with an icy Hooker Lake in the valley beneath. If you can't find the hut, then, well… Mt. Cook, New Zealand
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Landscape, Mt. Cook, Nature, New Zealand, Outdoor | 2 Comments »
Once a year, New Zealand holds the Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika, a small (and I mean really small) town on the west coast of the South Island. It is probably the one day all year in which more than 100 people are within 3 miles of the place. And, as is usually the case in New Zealand, the fewer people there are the more spectacular the scenery. The festival itself was amazing and there were many strange things being eaten… and worn. After everyone had had their fill of ridiculous stuff, the crowds flocked to the beach to watch the sunset and later set their own fires to huddle around. The Tasman Sea lays between New Zealand and Australia and though I’ve seen previous images of the Tasman at sunset (like this one from last August), I tried to come at it with my own idea of how I wanted it to look. I rather like how it turned out so I’ve made seven different flavors of it available over in the desktop section. After the festival we took the scenic route back to Dunedin, heading south down the coast through Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers and then cutting east across central Otago. Suffice to say, there were plenty of other gorgeous places to stop along the way back so I’ll have my hands full of things to process for quite some time to come…
The nearly 30 beach fires that followed produced enough smoke to almost suffocate us but it was absolutely worth it! Hokitika, New Zealand
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Hokitika, Landscape, Nature, New Zealand, Outdoor, Sun in frame, Sunset | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Well, it’s about time I get some of these up… I’ve lately been working on panoramas of different places I’ve gotten to go to and it has been eye-opening. I’ve been sitting on the raw files for maybe four or five different pans now, trying to tease the best possible results out of the sets, one of which was composed of 11 shots to be combined, or a total of 33 raw images with the minimum 3-shot bracket for each of the 11. Yet, some scenes have been begging for a 5-shot bracket but the amount of work necessary for that is questionable… whereas normally if I’m 3-shotting a scene I will elect for a simple two stops in each direction, for the pans, if a 5-shot is needed I’ve just been skimping and increasing the bracket size to 2 2/3 or maybe 3 and going from there. Anyways, enough numbers — suffice to say that this is one of my favorite end results and quite possibly the image that does the best job of capturing a mood that I think I’ve ever managed. When I see this (and skirt around in its 15,612 x 4,834 pixels worth of real estate) I am very vividly drawn back to this exact moment in time, about 5 seconds before the only battery I had on me went completely dead in the middle of taking the would-be 7th bracket for this scene (on the far right). More so than other posts, I really encourage you to click through to the full 17MB file so you can really get a feel for the view from the Botanical Gardens Terrace. As the Kiwis say, cheers!
Few places in the world like this. Here's hoping I can find as many as I can while I'm here for such a sort period of time: Dunedin, NZ
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Dunedin, Landscape, Nature, New Zealand, Outdoor, Panorama, Sun in frame | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
I have the extreme misfortune of being housed within 200 yards, er, metres, of Dunedin’s Botanical Gardens. Sadly, the weather is only allowed to have one clear day/week over here but it just means I have to take advantage of them when I can. Yesterday was one of those days and happily included a trip up the Taieri Gorge Railway complete with all you can eat BBQ. I’m still sifting through the hundreds of pictures from the train ride through the countryside so I will be adding one or two of those onto T.A.G. soon. For the most part, shooting from a moving train tends to be unhelpful when it comes down to setting up tripod brackets (who would have thought?) so I will do my best to handle a few single-shots in the next few days. As we walked back home from the train station, I decided that even though I was already quite tired, I had to take advantage of the visible sunset and veered off towards the gardens. Spectacularly, they are spread across a small, level area that then sprawls up the side of a large foothill. Finding a clearing in the trees, I set up shop just as the sun found a gap in the sparse clouds…
The gardens are stunning this time of day if you're lucky enough to see sunlight. The University Clocktower is actually visible down the hill: Dunedin, NZ
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Dunedin, Landscape, Nature, New Zealand, Outdoor, Sun in frame, Sunset | 1 Comment »
Where to begin with this one… Never have I ever received more weird looks than I did while arranging this shot. Although the families next to me had been waiting in their prime viewing locations since as early as 3pm, I didn’t feel too ridiculous spending 6 hours standing in my spot. I think I saw three parades go by and the standard 9pm fireworks while I was twiddling my thumbs up on the Main Street train station back balcony… At any rate, this final image is the result of a 5-shot bracket taken about 15 minutes before the actual fireworks started. Then, trying my very best to not let the throngs gathered up on the balcony to jostle the camera, I took stills of the fireworks going off (alas, I absolutely need to dish out the 99 cents for a cable release) and composited it as best I could into the HDR. This may very well be my favorite picture I have ever worked on, but that owes mostly to the memory of the scene this picture takes me back to. It is also my first entry into our desktops section, so on the off chance you’re feeling like a new background is in order, head on over to the desktops section and figure out what size fits your monitor best. If not, then that’s cool, too.
I feel like there are so many good places to be when midnight strikes on New Year's Eve. Right here is definitely pretty far up that list: Orlando, FL
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Disney, Night, Orlando, Outdoor | 3 Comments »
As I investigate the issue I’m currently having with Photomatix 4 I am left with little option but to whip out the old 3.1 in order to continue processing. The New Years trip to Orlando brought with it a TON of fun stuff to shoot and manipulate and it’s going to be showing up gradually on the site. Naturally, DisneyWorld was a must but the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure was also on our to-do list. It is an incredible recreation of exactly what it claims: it’s a veritable WORLD of wizard- and magic-related items from the books and has such attention to detail that you’d swear you were actually inside the book. The area comprises about a dozen shops named after their literary counterparts including Ollivander’s Wands and the Three Broomsticks, but the real piece of art is the castle. The ride it houses is a nausea-inducing motion simulator that takes you through most of the Harry Potter canon as you ride aboard an enchanted piece of levitating furniture. Amazing accomplishment, a requirement if you call yourself a true Harry Potter aficionado.
The sign advertises a 10-minute wait, made possible by the lack of crowds on New Year's Day thanks to the three bowl games being played in the neighboring areas of Florida: Orlando, FL
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Architecture, Night, Orlando, Outdoor | 1 Comment »
We crunched through 750 miles on Day 1 and 825 on Day 2 but just as the sun started to set behind us making our way out of Amarillo, TX, I leaned out the passenger window to check out the view. Definitely one of my favorites. The absolute nothingness along the New Mexico highway was behind us and things would gradually become more and more populated the farther east we got. Highlight of Amarillo: we kept seeing billboard advertisements for “FREE 72oz. STEAK” with a picture of a sketchy cowboy holding a dinner plate.
The west is great but you never get clouds like this in L.A. Amarillo, TX
Posted in 24-105mm f/4L IS, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Outdoor, Sunset | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
I feel like there has been a severe lack of posts recently. The problem is that this is busy season for schoolwork and outside projects and as everyone winds their way towards a well deserved Thanksgiving break, any extra chunk of spare time you find often ends up turning into a nap. Nothing wrong with that of course, unless you’re supposed to be contributing to a photo blog on a regular basis. Regardless, on an afternoon not too long ago I decided that in my two hours before my last class before break I would steal up onto the roof of a building and see what I could see from there. It rained just a few days ago so I knew the sky would be uncharacteristically clear-ish… fortunately, the stars aligned and there were also some interesting clouds hanging in the background. This never happens. I was more than happy to record a copy for myself. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Downtown from the direction of campus, about 150 feet up: Los Angeles CA
Posted in 24-105mm f/4L IS, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Architecture, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Los Angeles, Outdoor, Sunset | 1 Comment »
Today was a first… a legitimate effort to set aside time to go out with the sole purpose of shooting some new material. Well, almost. My photography class has me lugging a 4×5 view camera around (which is an amazing piece of equipment to play around with if you’re like me and have never handled large format stuff before) the city and I’ve chosen the Mulholland Overlook as my vantage spot for a final project in the class. I arrived there this morning maybe 20 minutes too late because I only just managed to set up the shots on the view camera before the sun got too high. I felt a little rushed but we’ll see what happens when I develop later tonight. Before I left though, I slapped the 7D on a tripod and let it soak up some of the view for a few minutes. It’s a fairly surreal image, but not as surreal as I could have processed it. Typically I dislike having the sun in frame but I rather like how it’s borderline overpowering on this one. The dusty path on the left, the line of bushes that jives with the lens flare, the Hollywood Bowl down in the valley on the right and the city and sun in the right and left upper thirds all combine to make me rather pleased with how this came out compositionally.
Pretty cool spot. Climb up the stairs from the parking lot, hop the little railing, and scoot past the ugly outpost thing and you've got a pretty awesome spot to watch the sun come up: Los Angeles CA
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It’s called the Mist Trail for a reason. If the wind is in a disagreeable mood when you get to this part of the trail… you will get soaked. Fortunately we found a not too windy nook where we could set up and look down on the basin. The sun’s position in the sky afforded us a convenient double rainbow to liven up the shot and we sat here for what felt like hours taking variations of this angle on both cameras and in several video formats. Giacomo already posted the Bokeh Edition of this angle so I will add the wider version that lets you see the entire basin and where it becomes the stream of water that eventually reforms into the Merced River. Pretty spot, huh?
Though it was merely a happy accident that the rainbows were present for this shot, I think they may actually steal the show… Yosemite CA
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, Yosemite | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Yosemite: Mist Trail Steps
Purple.