I took this photo using my Sony NEX-7 with a brand new 10-18mm f/4.0 wide angle zoom lens. I used two exposures to create this image, the bright (+2EV) one showing the interior of the house along with Joe and Tiger was at 10mm, f/4, 1/8sec, ISO 1600. I used a darker, -2EV exposure for the parts visible through the windows. This ended up being still at 10mm, f/4, but with 1/60sec and ISO800. I was perhaps two feet away when I took this shot and still had to crop portions of the image away.
Darrick and Mara sent me some Thanksgiving Day Photos.
This one is from Darrick of the table set for the meal with Anna reading in the background.
This is a photo of Mara (in the pink top) running in the Turkey Trot.
Mara, Tom, and Katie:
Mara with Erin:
Darrick sent me this one later in the day:
Here are two photos from our Thanksgiving meal:
More photos from Mara:
Tracy sent me this photo – Darrick is in this one:
Mara sent me this photo of Katie trying on costumes in an attempt to look like Gottfried Leibniz for Halloween. I’m not convinced that Katie’s friend thinks this is a good idea
Marie is working on the pumpkin in the photo below just as Callisto escapes the house. Molly is looking on from Marie’s left.
Tiger ran outside too. Joe caught Tiger and made him pose for a photo.
Photos of Marie just prior to leaving to meet her friends for trick-or-treating. (I’m very happy with the way the first photo turned out. I’m less happy about the second due to it not quite being in focus.)
Mara sent me another titled “Leibniz after a Long Day”:
The pumpkin that Marie was carving earlier in the day…
Below is a simpler version of the above photo. It’s the -3 EV layer only. The only thing I did to it was run unsharp mask on it. The photo above was made from four exposures and three tone layers. I ended up interposing yet another gray (partially transparent black) layer on top of the tone layers and masked it to show just the pumpkin since the rest of the scene ended up being too bright and distracting. That mostly grey layer ended up darkening the non-pumpkin portions of the scene making them less distracting. The nice thing about it is that, using the opacity slider, it’s possible to make it as light or as dark as we want.
Joe reads while waiting for trick-or-treaters. It must have been a very good book because he hardly moved at all during that 30 second, f/10 exposure at ISO 100. (The exposure for the pumpkin was only one second.)
Below are a few photos from our 2011 trip to Arches National Park.
Joe points the way to Delicate Arch:
A family photo in front of Delicate Arch. Karl took this photo.
A roadside view in Arches National Park.
A view from Devil’s Garden, in Arches National Park.
Joe, Marilyn, and I went out late Sunday afternoon and hiked out a ways on the Dixie Mine Trail.
There were several contrails that hung around for the duration of our hike. Here’s a photo where they seem to form a “V” emanating from behind one of the McDowells.
Weaver’s Needle is off in the distance in the photo below. You can also see a part of Dixie Mine Trail in the foreground. It’s a nice trail in that section. There’s not a lot of elevation gain or loss, but numerous small hills and washes give texture to the terrain.
The half-moon and a nearby saguaro:
A particularly scenic section of the Dixie Mine Trail:
Mother and son hiking together just after sunset.
Another view of the contrails as the sun was setting:
A short while later, we turned to see that the setting sun had turned the contrails a brilliant reddish orange:
Another edit of the above photo using the Mantiuk ’06 contrast mapping algorithm. All of the above photos use the Mantiuk ’06 contrast equalization algorithm. In the tests that I’ve done, contrast mapping seems to produce more realistic looking results, but I often like the look obtained using contrast equalization. The sky in the photo below is fairly close to the image obtained out-of-camera, but the out-of-camera foreground detail is very dark; so dark in fact that it appears to be mostly black.
This photo was taken last June during our trip to the Moab area. On our way up the Moab Rim Trail, we saw two dogs bounding up the hill. In this picture, Marie has stopped to take a photo of one of the dogs.
Marilyn and I hiked Lousley Hill late in the day on Sunday. At the top, we saw a fellow flying remote control gliders. We didn’t stick around too long because there seemed to be biting gnats around.
On the way down, I took this photo of Marilyn at the overlook.
Well Wishes from the AZ Buettners!
Minstrel came by for food a short while ago. I got a photo of her as she was leaving. One of her ginger kittens came with her, but ran off as soon as I unbolted the door.
When I went back inside, Marie held Minstrel’s daughter Molly for a photo. Molly didn’t want to sit still for the photo. Even so, you can see the resemblance between mother and daughter.
On Saturday afternoon, Marie, Marilyn, and I visited the Fountain Park. I went with the intent of scouting a good location to set up the tripod for taking a nighttime photo of the fountain. I wasn’t sure whether I would get a chance to do it on Saturday, but I brought along my NEX-7 and the tripod just in case. I brought a small point and shoot camera, the Sony RX100 for my scouting. All but the last two photos shown here were taken with the RX100.
We got there shortly after 5:00pm, but before 5:15. The fountain was not running. It normally starts on the hour and runs for fifteen minutes. It does not run, however, if it’s excessively windy. It was fairly windy when we got there, so perhaps that’s why it wasn’t running. You can see the wind blowing her hair in these photos of Marilyn:
I took photos of the fountain lake for a while and of some of the plants along the Overlook Trail. When I got back down to the car, it was 6:00pm. So I hiked back up the trail and took some more photos. Here’s one of the fountain.
When I got to this cactus, I knew I had found a spot from which I wanted to try to get a photo of the fountain at some point. The sun was mostly behind the clouds, but was still pretty bright. My Sony RX100 was in auto-HDR mode for this shot. The HDR images that it produces are often fairly bland, but they often contain enough detail for what would normally be either overexposed or underexposed areas for me to be able to do something with the image later on. That was the case here.
As I walked back down the Overlook Trail, I got this shot where it appears that the sun is trying to split the clouds.
When I got back down to the grassy area near the lake, I found that Marie had found a tree to play on.
When I was done taking these photos, it was starting to get dark. We were only about twenty minutes away from the seven o’clock fountain. The sky still looked cool, so I grabbed my NEX-7 and the tripod and headed back up the Overlook Trail to the spot next to the saguaro that I had identified earlier. I took a bunch of bracketed exposures of the fountain. I messed up on the first few sets because I had forgotten to take the camera off of auto-ISO. Fortunately, I still had some time left, so I set the camera on ISO 100, and was able to take the exposures which formed this photo, below. I took eleven exposures total, ranging from +5EV to -5EV in one stop steps. I only ended up using seven of them because I didn’t see anything useful in the top two and bottom two. I describe more about how I created this image in an earlier post. (Note: I’ve since re-edited the image and have put a new one here in place of the original. The original is still available in that earlier post.)
Here’s another HDR shot of the fountain. This was from one of the sequences shot using auto ISO.
I’m still going through the images that I took that day. If I find anything else worth showing, I’ll add it to this entry.