Well, it hasn’t really felt like days off at all.  Busy would be the best way to describe things.

Yesterday I let myself rest a little in the morning.  A late start to the day, but then lots of running around.  The first big errand….well, not really an errand…..but it did involve running around.  Sadira gave me a call to let me know that an Arts and Crafts style event was happening on the square.  I had to go.

See, last year I noticed that there was a regular Bonsai dealer at the shows.  I’d been thinking about adding a little tree to the Airstream, and finding out the first big activity on the town square was happening I jumped in the truck and stopped by Sadira’s.

She was under the weather yesterday.  Sinus infection done, food poisoning in full effect.  One thought here gang.  Shrimp & Arizona….don’t do it.  Just don’t!

We hit the show and sure enough, bonsai trees were available.  I looked around, then wandered the square for a while deciding on what to do.  Finally we returned to the little tent full of trees and I picked my Airstream’s new resident.  You’ll see photos soon enough.

I once had a wonderful little bonsai for years.  High school.  It thrived.  Then I went to MA for a few weeks and my mom watched over the tree.  One night on the phone she told me she’d accidentally killed the tree.  She thought it could use some fertilizer (NOOOOOOOOO) and the tree went brown pretty quick.  Whoops!  Still, she was the best mom I could ask for and I still miss her.  Happy Mother’s Day mom.  A new little tree is along in the Airstream now.

I dropped Sadira off and headed for home.  Quick lunch and then I ran up to the Rodeo Stadium.  Yes, I got to photograph the rodeo.  No, I’m not satisfied with the shots.  I needed a 1.8 lens for this stuff, and I didn’t drag one along.  The rodeo started at 7:30, and even with the lights in the stadium the action was so fast that the lenses I brought didn’t cover it.  A few interesting shots that I’ll play with in Photoshop.  Maybe you’ll see them down the road.

I didn’t get home until almost 10, and I was starved.  So I sat up and made a late dinner.  Didn’t get to sleep until nearly midnight.  Ah yes, restful!

This morning was an early rise.  I headed out to the north side of Sycamore Canyon with Sadira, Tom, & DaNece.  2 hour ride in on the super bumpy roads through Perkinsville.  Nearly a 3 hour hike toward the canyon (no water already, lots of dry beds), hot sun, winds with some type of eye irritating  pollen, and a generally wonderful time!  Glad to have shared the adventure.

Our “haze” has returned to the skies, and the blues were really washed out today.  I’ve heard it’s hazy from here to Georgia, so who knows what is up.  So, many of the landscape shots today were sub-par to say the least.  But there was one thing that caught all of our attention.  The flowers heading into the area.  Blues, powder blues, oranges, and purples.  The purple really got me.  Cactus flowers once again (hey, they’re not red).

As we made our way in we began seeing new (to us) flowers that really stood out against the red rock background.  Small green cactus with purple flowers.  One here, one there.  As we neared our destination clusters of the flowers.  Big clusters.  They seemed to be everywhere.  Even along our hike we found more of these wonderful cactus (I’ll look them up in my book tomorrow).

I have dozens of good shots.  They’re all slightly washed out, but I’ll deal with them in Photoshop tomorrow.  High afternoon sun, even with haze, yields less than brilliant results.  But the shots here are currently unedited.  And they’re still stunning flowers in my opinion. 

Finally, after hours driving in, hours hiking, and hours driving back we returned to Prescott.  Sadira wasn’t feeling too well, and I was a little off.  Hot hike, lots of dust, lots of exertion, etc.  Plus I got too much sun.  So we basically crashed on the couch for a while, and finally got enough energy to get moving again.  Sadira headed off to Costco, and I went to do some shopping at Fry’s.  Groceries you know.

After some rest this evening I decided to head to downtown Prescott to try setting up a few exposures for doing an HDR (High Dynamic Ratio) photo.  My intention was to get Whiskey Row and the St. Michaels Hotel.  I’ve gotten many exposures this evening, and only started toying with them.  I only took one set of exposures of the Courthouse, and the result was the photo at the start of this post.  My first satisfying HDR photo (to me at least).  I only tone mapped it after feeding the 3 exposures into Photomatix.  No real tweaking beyond their basic tone mapper.  I like it.  There are places for HDR to be used……more will follow.

That’s it for the evening.  10 p.m. here and I’m beat.  Tomorrow, laundry, errands, and who knows what else.  Wonder if I can fit a 3 hour nap in somewhere?

Ah, time off. No racing around this morning. No radio on to find out the news of the day. Just a slow and steady start to the day.

Oh yeah….I slept in until 8 a.m.! I did wakeup around 5, some light coming through the vent cover, but I strategically placed a pillow and went back to sleep. Sometimes light can be overcome by the common pillow!

After getting up I made a few calls back to New England. Mostly I reached nobody! They’re all out doing stuff, after all they’re 3 hours ahead of me and I woke up late.

While I made my phone calls I did a little organizing in the trailer, and charged up all my camera batteries. Re-stuffed the new Crumpler bag, got the 30 & 40D cameras ready, and charged my flash batteries as well. The rodeo is tonight you know.

I also messed around with a series of photos I shot weeks ago. Remember my mentioning HDR images? Yeah, they’ve still been on my mind, but I’d been doing the 7 Point System. One major project at a time. The next major project is coming up. I now want to really learn about HDR. I’ve got a few ideas you see……

So, this morning I gave Photomatix Pro a whirl. I also tried the HDR setup in Photoshop once more. The image you see here today was done with Photomatix. I’ve only started experimenting, so cut me a little slack on this first true venture into HDR. I used their default settings, and didn’t get far into tone mapping.

Why?

Time for breakfast & a shower. Then to start the day. Plus I had to pop a post up you know.

I’ve played with Scott Kelby’s 7 point system for a while now. Still, I’m only in the “Photoshop Experimentation” mode. It’s hard choosing photos to edit. Looking through my favorites I find myself saying, “I don’t think I need to edit that…..do I?”

Well, today I decided to apply some of the techniques.

The original photo I picked was one of Bert Gildart. You remember him, don’t you? Well, on our hike into the Promised Land I got a few interesting shots of Bert & Janie as we hiked around.

One favorite was Bert at the edge of a small cave we explored. I liked the photo right off and never adjusted it, just posted it onto the blog. You’re looking at the photo right now.

Unfortunately the lighting wasn’t the best. The sun was above us and slightly behind the rock formation. The plus was we weren’t staring into the sun, the minus was a lack of good light shooting into the cave.

Looking at the shot I thought a little more and found everything to be slightly bland. Except Bert of course, he’s just not a bland guy. The rock edges didn’t have the greatest contrast, Bert’s blue jeans looked even more faded than they truly were……I think you get the gist.

So, this morning I set about trying my hand at being “artistic” with one of my photos. I wanted the rocks to have more contrast, and I wanted Bert to stand out from the scene. I’m not sure if I achieved it or not. Then again, I spent about 6 minutes on the edits.

As you’ll see immediately, the colors have changed dramatically. That happened almost immediately. I shot this picture in RAW. That left me a lot of room to work with the photo after the fact. The first step I took was resetting the white balance. The original seemed a little too far into the blue range. And it was. I simply sampled an area that should be white to set my custom white balance. The white I sampled from was the piece of paper sticking up from Bert’s pocket.

After resetting the white balance I revealed some more detail from the shadows behind Bert. At first I revealed too much and it looked far too artificial, so I toned it down a bit. All of those changes were in the RAW editor in Photoshop (it always pops up when you bring a RAW image in).

I opened the image and created a new layer with adjustments. At the tone curve I set it to Strong Contrast. That really brought all the edges of the rocks out. It also over did it on Bert, so I created a mask and got Bert out of the strong contrast.

Finally, when resetting the white balance in the beginning I thought Bert’s jeans faded way too much. So I created one more layer, jumped into Hue & Saturation, and pumped up the blues a touch. Bert’s jeans became “new jeans”, and I touched up the blue pattern around his hat. Basically, I got the blues back to where they were in the original shot, while keeping a warmer yellow to everything else.

So, there’s the first real official edit attempt. I understand all the concepts from Kelby’s amazing book. The thing that he can’t do for you in the book is teach you what the correct lighting and colors should be. Sure, in his book he walks you through getting that great image, and he’s made all the decisions. Doing this one I kept asking myself, “Is that closer to the real color?” I guess in time I’ll get better with that as well.

I can say, I love the 7 Point System. It’s been a lot of fun. Now it’s time to really play with applying the techniques and get creative!

I don’t know how many times a month I tell people about my favorite little book, “The Digital Photography Book.”  Guess I’ve helped the author bring it to the point of being the “Best Selling Photography Book” of all time.  Wow!

Glad to see a favorite read / manual is getting the type of credit that is due to it.

Now, how many times a month is the Digital RV recommended?  Hmmmm…..?  I wonder if every one of my readers talked about it with other RVers 10 times a month how many books would go out the door?  Better yet, I wonder when I’d catch up with Kelby’s book (that’ll be a long way off).

Playing with the 7 point system

As I’d mentioned the other week I started into another favorite book, “The 7 Point System for Adobe Photoshop.”  I’ve basically finished all of the lessons and I’ve got to say, I really do understand Photoshop.  I can take photos and fix flaws now.  Changing lighting, color, etc., are all within my reach.

Now it’s time to try one of my own shots.  Too bad I can’t make up my mind on what to edit!

If you want to understand Photoshop, check out the 7 point system!  That simple!

Unfortunately I haven’t been taking many photos lately.  Busy is an understatement.  Beyond that, I’ll be very busy over the next 8 days.  Then I’ll have a few days off.  The weekend of the 10th I’ll be free for 3 days.  A planned rest period.  Also, I’ll be shooting a rodeo in town on the 10th!  That should be fun.  Maybe I’ll create a few photos I want to edit!

So, today was a relaxed day.  Extremely relaxed, and that’s a plus in my mind.  Sure, there were plenty of errands this morning, but by 11:30 I was home doing some minor tidying.  That was it.

I did take the time to do another lesson from the 7 point system book.  I’ve got to say, it’s worthwhile if you really want to come to terms with Photoshop.  As a guy who only used Photoshop to crop and resize photos, and correct glaring color issues, what I’m learning is amazing me.  Really, amazing me!

I’ve now learned how layers and masks really work.  And the truth is you really can take a mediocre photo and make it a good one.  And you can take a good shot and make it great.  The examples in today’s post fall somewhere between moderate and good.  Not great yet.  However, I spent only 5-7 minutes editing to get a few changes.  I’m sure you see them.

The sky and surrounding areas in the photo are the same.  The Airstream has improved, and almost looks like a fill flash was involved.  You really get to see more of the trailer in the second shot.  Literally, this adjustment took well under 10 minutes.  It’s not a “great” photo, but it’s interesting how easy it is to alter the image and make it look like additional lighting was available.

Whether or not you think it’s super cool is irrelevant.  The technique is super cool.  And I spent no time on the edit.  Sometime this weekend I’ll see what I can really do with this image (I like the image, but wonder if more can come out of it).

On other notes…..

I realized, it was about this time last year that I started climbing again. Nice to think back.  Nicer yet, I’m looking forward to another season with Andy & Brooke.  Hopefully we’ll keep adding friends to the climbing schedule.  Oh, and I’d like more available time to climb…..we’ll have to see about that…..all depends on book sales I suppose…. 

You’ll have to look back to yesterday’s post and photo to see what I’m talking about.  While out shooting with Bert & Janie I took a photo that I knew I’d like.  A cactus with a dead tree behind it, and behind that Bell Rock.  I posted the photo last night without a super once over.

Remember, I was very tired.  Still a little tired this morning, but that’s ok. 

If you look at the prior post you’ll see the differences.  The original shot was “a little dark”.  Alright, it was extremely dark, and that was my fault.  I accidentally rolled my exposure down to a -1.  Whoops.  Hard to read the screen with sunglasses on, and I noticed a few shots after.

Rather than walking back and reshooting, I used my Photoshop Lightroom quickly today.  One simple fix.  I upped the exposure by +1.  That simple.  Take a look at the old photo, I think you’ll see the difference.

Photo sorting has come under control.  Several hours of work, but in the end I know what I like and don’t like in my collection from the past few days.  I’m happy to say, there were many shots that went into the “like” category.

One shot that I really like is the one you’re looking at today.  But here’s the thing…..the rocks were a little washed out.  Ok, they were extremely washed out.  Direct sunlight, whitish rocks, dark plants.  Hmmmmm……

So, I did a little retouching to see if I like it more.  The photo wasn’t put into Photoshop CS3.  That would be too much.  Instead I did simple developing work in Photoshop Lightroom.  It’s got a great develop module.  In that module you can alter tone curves, add clarity (I did that), punch up the colors, etc.  It’s a slick interface to say the least, and I finally really know how to use it.

Alright, here’s the after photo.  I punched up the clarity, and contrast of the rocks.  While they’re still super white, you can see along the left edge that the rocks have more definition.

Beyond that, little editing at all.  I just wanted the over bright rocks to have a little more texture, and I think I brought it out well.

See, doing edits doesn’t mean extreme changes to photography.  Instead in this instance I corrected a problem with my shot choice in harsh lighting.  I think while the improvement is slight, it still does a lot for the photo.

Often I’ll get questions from readers regarding photos that appear here at the Chronicles.  “Those photos are edited, aren’t they?”

The answer on 95% of the shots is a simple, “No.”

Really, no?  The bulk of the photos showing up here aren’t edited? They look like they are.

Often those blue blues are achieved with a circular polarizing filter.  That’s it.  Pretty simple photo technique, no fancy programs.

Currently my edits are simple.  Shrink the photo for the web.  Ah, that is an edit, isn’t it?

The photo to the left has been edited.  It was resized for this page.  It was also enhanced.  I popped the clarity up (making the edges more noticeable) and I increased the vibrancy of the photo (more blue than the original shot).  I didn’t have a filter on the lens that was used shooting this photo.

So, editing is bad?

Absolutely not.  And more might be done on shots here at the Airstream Chronicles.  It’s not that I refuse to edit for some goofy purist reason.  I don’t edit because Photoshop is so complex and kooky that I wouldn’t know where to begin.

Really, Photoshop is that hard?  Well then, why do so many people buy it?

Photoshop isn’t hard.  It’s something I haven’t personally worked with a lot.  Sure, I’ve owned it for years.  I crop photos, occasionally punch up a good photo to make it even cooler.  But I don’t know all of the ins and outs of the program.  Most people who own it don’t, and they don’t realize what a powerful program they have.  But I’m starting to learn more.  I want to, as I know I’ve had some great shots that can go well beyond great with a few minutes of work.

So, how do you take good photos to great?  Pick up a book.

Aren’t books the reason this guy is running out of space in his Airstream?  Where will he sleep?  His bed is probably piled with books……. (close, but not there quite yet).

Not too long ago I stumbled across “The Digital Photography Book” by Scott Kelby.  This guy is a prolific writer who does how to guides that will blow your mind.  No, he doesn’t write any of the “For Dummies,” books (thank god).

Just as an aside.  I can’t stand the For Dummies label.  Because you don’t know how to run a program or computer doesn’t make you a dummy.  It means you haven’t learned yet.  You’re not dumb.  Personally I know how to run giant wireless switches.  You might not know how, but that doesn’t make you a dummy.  It makes you a person who does something else.

Scott’s books don’t start out calling you names.  Instead his books start out joking, being a little goofy, and then telling you he’s going to help you get more out of what you have.  How nice of him.

After finding the book, reading it, and reading it again something happened.  Friends and family alike asked me what changed with my pictures.  People noted that my really good photos were becoming great.  New camera?  New lens?  New shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer?  Honestly, I do use a new shampoo, but it’s totally unrelated. The answer was simple.  I read a book, understood more about lighting (huge) and realized how much more I could get out of my camera.  Simple.  Maybe the shampoo helped too.

After my exposure to Kelby’s book I went out and grabbed his book on Lightroom (a photo management program), and learned how to organize my photos in a better way.  I’m still re-reading the book as there’s so much in it.  Over flowing with information.  A friend had sent a copy of Lightroom for me to try, and like Photoshop, it had so many features it was overwhelming.  Enter the Lightroom book.

So, things have improved, and I want them to improve more.  I own Photoshop because it came with a package of other software that I needed and use more often.   The Adobe Creative suite (what I laid my book out with).  Now I’m ready to get even more out of that purchase, and use the one program in the suite that I’ve avoided like the plague.

I’ve talked with many folks who take pictures around here.  Most say, “I don’t edit, I want the shot I took.”  I understand that, but there’s a fun undertone.  The honest answer is, “I’ve got no idea how to edit, so I’ll say something along the sour grapes line.”  Hey, I’ve done it too….but no more excuses.

Earlier in the week I picked up Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop.  I’ve done a few of the exercises in the book.  In total there are 21 lesson using the 7 point system.  I’ll probably finish the book next week, and then do it all again.  I can already see how improvements in my shots can be made.  And I’m thinking about a few of my “great” photos becoming spectacular.  It’s nice.  I’ll let you know when I start putting edits up, and I’ll probably provide before and afters to clue you in.

So, keep watching over the next few weeks.  I’ll show you what I’m up to in the creative zone.  And if you’d like to start improving your shots I’d suggest checking out Kebly’s books.  I’ve got links throughout this post, so start clicking.  Or just check out his blog.  I’d suggest the Digital Photography Book, Volumes One & Two.  They’re cheap, and you’ll see changes immediately in how you shoot.  From there, you’ll have to see what else you need to learn.

And no, I don’t work for Mr. Kelby.  Just passing along information on books that have really helped me improve on something I enjoy.  Hey, I even put a link to my book in the post, so you can go buy it too if you’d like……:)