This one is again at the i84/hwy 97 interchange between Oregon and Washington. I’ve always really liked how infrared photography has worked (example 1, 2, 3) but I’ve never taken the time to actually hammer one out. This is certainly not by the book, but does a very good job of capturing the moment.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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…

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!

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…

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…

Lilla and Chloe got their new backbacks and thought they were pretty cool! They get along really well so that’s an absolute benefit!  We’ll see if they treat their little sister this nice when Millie gets old enough to play with them!