USA
The Mediocrely Dark Tree Near Kent, OR
This shot really made me mad – Photomatix has been letting me down lately as I’ll edit the photo how I want it, and when the process comes in, the shot is very dark. I’ve tried to compensate by brightening the photo before I process it, but I’m just not as happy with the program lately – another sign I spend too much time trying to perfect it. So it is…
Lake Goss Sunrise
I hadn’t taken a lot of shots lately, been busy with other things; but the family and I took a long weekend to the Toivola cabin 8/14-15 which was almost precisely HERE. It was a great time, had some good food, good friends, and mediocrely behaved dogs. All in all, a great weekend. The girls learned how to swim with lifejackets on, they also learned how NOT to swim with one off – they sunk like a ton of bricks when they tried to swim without them. Thanks Ayla for teaching them to swim on Wednesdays, they clearly like it a lot!
Anyway, with the photo itself, it was a unique one in that it was a perfectly clear morning, no texture in the sky and very little on the water. I loved the composition of the shot so I wanted to bring it out. A lot of people ask the process, well for this one it was:
1. It was a .jpg file so I pulled it up in Photoshop and sharpened the image.
2. I then went to the “exposure” dropdown and pulled the gamma down so it’d be darker in the bright spots (better contrast).
3. Opened Photomatix and used the darkened image and the original image to put a light HDR feel to it. Fiddle with the settings here, to each their own.
4. Saved that photo and pulled back into Photoshop, dug into my standard background texture file and pulled out 2 I liked. Created separate layers for them, set the opacity down on them, and set the first one (scratches) to a soft ‘overlay’ and about 35% opacity and the 2nd one (brown mesh frame) to ‘screen’ and opacity to 20%.
5. Saved and popped it into Adobe Lightroom and tossed in a ‘general punch’, and ‘basic bam’.
6. Back to Photoshop to clean up the edges and edit out a few watermarks that showed on my poorly cleaned 10-24mm Tamaron lens.
That’s the long and the short of it, but I do like doing these projects that are a bit off the norm of shooting though. It was a good weekend had by all!
Big Loop Near River
This is another stitched shot right above the Columbia River on the Washington side. We pulled off and I walked back from the road and took 30 or 40 shots of things but when I came back to the car, the lighting and cloud cover was a perfect setup, so I snapped a few more:
BONUS SHOT!
I took another about 210 degree shot of the river with my macro lens just before I left too – if you look at the FULL SIZED image (60MB) you’ll see people on the bridge and across the water – stitching it up makes it look way too small, but a neat concept.
Down To The Columbia River
This one actually is a set of about 10 shots that I pivoted on each step to take. The full size version is HERE, it’s 33MB, but it makes for a pretty sweet background!
There is a turnout right as you go up the hill after Biggs, OR on the Washington side of the bridge over the Columbia that had a nice cloud cover that day that I wanted to capture.
Additionally, I wanted to test out the photo stitching capability of Photoshop CS5, and I must say that seems pretty similar to CS4. Not a bad thing, but does eat up a lot of memory in completing.
Barbed Wire Tree
I wasn’t going to keep this one in the mix to process because the whole point of getting the post of the fence in the picture was to be able to get the texture of the grain in it, but I under exposed the shot and wasn’t able to pull any of the texture or color out of it. I’m a fan of the barbed wire shots and it’s clearly cut into 3rds, and was easy enough on the eyes that I decided it could still fly anyway, here you be…
Yellow Flower Above the River
There weren’t many things growing in the rocks above the Columbia at the i84/highway 97 interchange at Biggs, OR – but these flowers seemed to be growing just fine. Toss in a dramatic background and bam, you got yourself a shot. I’m not usually a flower guy, but I DO like to take shots of landscapes, and this one fit.
Crooked River Ranch, May 2009
When we were in Bend earlier this year, I remembered that I had a bunch of photos that I hadn’t processed from the LAST time we were there. I remember I took a handful on the golf course. Jay and I played with these guys that were very into the game, but very horrid at the game. They had bad tempers.,
We also have some shots of the windmills along the Columbia River, and some snapshots at Grampa’s house. Lilla and Chloe and their rabbits. I don’t remember what they named them, but one was like “Lollipop Johns” or something.
One shot in there is a an abandoned house I found. I want to say it is of this one HERE, but I’ve been wrong before… 
A Dying Tree
I always like stumbling onto these trees – the downside is that it is usually on the highway somewhere and I’ll need to pull over fast or else turn around at the next exit; either way makes Heather ask what the hell I’m doing. To my side of the story though, I don’t ever do it if there are cars right on my ass behind me. This is along highway 97 also just past the Shoe Tree (that is no longer there because some chump burned it down) – it’s not got any shoes in it, but still makes for a pretty dramatic shot.
Another Old Barn in Oregon
If you are a watcher of any of my shots, I really like to photograph old rundown barns and structures. This one I think was outside of Shaniko around HERE somewhere. Heather wanted to get home quick, but we’ve driven by this place like 283 times without stopping. Thought it’d be a good stop; think it was.
An Old Gas Station in Kent, Oregon
Heather’s dad always said that he wanted to stop by this gas station and shoot a couple of shots of the old gas pumps. I thought I’d do that for him; coincidentally the site had a few other really good shots in it. Again the bane of my existence is photo processing. There always seems to be one more thing I want to change up, or a color I’m looking to find, but I think I found most of the big ones in here on these shots.
A Taste of Spring
Matt Amberg is a pretty stellar photographer (see his stuff HERE) and he sent over this photo to kick around a little bit. I gave it a honey tone overlay to take out some of the contrasting background blues and did a little cloning work on it. I did 2 versions of the edit taking out another bee in the photo that was messing with Matt’s chi. Give it a whirl to see if you can tell where the cloning edit took place, or don’t and just enjoy Matt’s mastery of his new lens!
A Lovely Shot of My Ladies @ the Cabin, Montana 2009
A cute shot of my ladies in the creek…
…as well as Brick, the Wild Circus Dog of the West. 
Railroad Track Bridge Near Three Forks, MT – Nov. 2009
We parked HERE and I walked about 50 yards down to that bridge you see there and now see here. I remember there were some dudes fishing on the other side of the river when I pulled up in the Suburban; they probably don’t see a lot of people stopping around to take photos, and it almost looked like I was taking the photos of them. They left about 2 minutes after I started; peculiar, no? 
Off One Bridge And To The Next – Biggs, OR
This is along the Columbia River, right about HERE. I was thinking of hacking off the right side of it, but the pillar was supposed to be a key piece of it, but the clear days make for some crappy halo’ing effects around it. The left side of the photo is far more interesting anyway, right?
Another Shot Along The Way To Bend, OR – 2009
Found another few I’d like to toss in this mix. It’s funny how many photos you find after a while that you realize do have some merit, just not at the first glance maybe because you’ve got a handful on the subject you already liked; case in point…
The Hairy Wolf Spider
We have these spiders around our house all the time. I want to say they’re wolf spiders, but I have no idea. They’re extremely hairy though and they do a good job of scaring my kids as they can run at speeds that seem like that of a small car…
Fields of Gold – Bozeman, MT 2009
I think this was probably right around HERE. Again I had the kids in the car and maybe even Heather’s mom was in there. I remember it was pretty windy out so the clouds were moving pretty quickly and that usually makes for some decent shots of the clouds. I took a 180 degree shot of this with my wide angle lens, but those never stitch well together from what I’ve seen. This one stuck out in particular as my best one of the batch. 
Barn Near Jens, MT – 2009
I could search along the I90 route for hours trying to find this, but I swear it is right outside of Jens, MT somewhere. We drive by it every trip to Montana and I never actually get any photos of it, but always say that I should stop. So I did this time, right on the freeway and pulled off to the side or the road. There wasn’t a lot of traffic and I remember I just pulled behind the guard rail. The car was at a pretty steep angle too; Lilla didn’t like not being able to tag along. This shot has been my background on my work machine for about 3 months, I like it.
The Old Creek – Near Elliston, Montana 2009
I’m always intrigued by a colorless photo. It was getting dark, but snapped up a little extra light to get this one. This is on the other side of the first branch of the creek about HERE. I remember at one time there used to be a lot of frogs in here that we’d catch, but that was back in the 80s. All those frogs must have grown up and taken jobs in the city though, because I didn’t see any more there…
Abandoned Church on The Way To Bend Oregon
Another shot of the old abandoned church in Grass Valley, OR. You can see it from the highway HERE, look in the back-middle of the Google map to see it. 
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Grass Valley Methodist Church – Oregon 2009
We’ve driven by THIS old abandoned church 3 or 4 times and finally decided to stop and take a few shots – will post more later, but this one was my favorite from the mix and is one of the first I’ve used Adobe Lightroom for. It’s definitely a program that I’m going to keep in the arsenal going forward – Thanks Christine!
Pumpkin Hunting 2009 And The Girls Playing in The Leaves
The girls had their costumes on and we had a need for some leaf raking anyway, good photo ops. I don’t think I had a shot with the dogs in it yet. Welcome to the shots doggies.
The other ones were when Tanner and Lydia came over for the festive occasion and we spun out to the pumpkin patch to pick our own for the Toivola Pumpkin carving party. I carved a fairly shotty Patrick, Spongebob’s best buddy…
Our Cabin on The Little Blackfoot Near Elliston, MT – 2009
We’ve had THIS cabin for my entire life but I haven’t been to in much since moving to Seattle, maybe 2 or 3 times in the past 10 years at best. We seem to be gaining land as the creek has eaten into the opposite shore over that time. It’s amazing how fast it can change the contour of the land in that short amount of time. We played a lot of lawn darts, shot a lot of target practice with a laundry list of guns, road a million miles on snowmobiles, hiked, caught loads of fish and buried a few animals (Toby is buried HERE, and FatCat is HERE).
It’s funny to think back to what we did before this technology age; there was always “something” to do there. We were always excited to get to go to the cabin for the weekend…
I’ve always been a fan of the “Aged” look of a photo, and the memories here certainly take me back – I couldn’t decide on what I liked more so I whipped up one with a bit more time to it. They both make me miss Montana a little bit…
Old Truck Overgrown With Bushes
I half hesitated to even put this one on – HDR always looks good with old rust and tall grass. The color has so many different colors for the grass. However, this is a pseudo-HDR as I took in in RAW format, but just did tone-mapping on it. What’s that you say? It looks blurry? Yea, that’s because it was. I’m a bit upset with the way it turned out because I didn’t use a tripod because we were on someone elses land. Still “alright”, but that’s all I give it, personally…
