There was some nice clouds on Friday, some remnants of a tropical storm, so I setup on the roof and shot a few panos of the setting sun. These are 5 sets of image in portrait orientation with 3 exposures per frame to capture all the details and the available light. Processed in PTGUI and Photoshop. Shot in Laguna Beach and within about 5 minutes of each other. Shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and a Samyang 14mm f2.8 lens. Click on the thumbnails to see larger versions.
A few shots from Crescent Bay Park in Laguna Beach, it was a heavily overcast/foggy day. A bit of drizzle. All shot with a Zeiss 21mm f2.8, the first two single images were taken using a Lee Filter big stopper. I need to experiment more with this filter. The panorama was taken without filters, and is 5 shots in portrait orientation.
An image of star trails taken in the Alabama Hills in the Eastern Sierra. The curved star trails are the edges closer to the two poles, and in the center the trails are more or less straight the closer to the ecliptic plane. This is a stack of 99 exposures of 30 seconds each using a 14mm f2.8 at f2.8. Towards the end of the run the moon was coming up and that is what illuminated the mountain range. The tall peak just to the left of center is Lone Pine Peak, and off to the right slightly of center is Mt. Whitney. Mt Whitney is actually a taller peak but it is further back in distance relative to where I took the images. The lights down at the bottom just right of center is the Mt. Whitney Portal area, Mt. Whitney is just above those lights.
I used to go fairly often to the Huntington Library, located in San Marino California, just below Pasadena. However lately I have only been able to go every so often, and in fact I had not been there for about a year or more, until now. I had a chance to go with my friend Greg, who got us in early in the morning, before the general public. Being able to get in early is really nice, first the earlier the better for me, and with the summer “June Gloom” going on made for some nice diffuse overcast light, which is great for flowers. The gardens always have a lot of flowers and they are very well maintained, so a target rich environment! I was hoping that the ponds would have some nice lotus blooming. I really miss the large lotus blooms at Echo Park lake, it really is too bad that people saw fit to steal the roots and not let others enjoy them, and I know they also had a disease issue, but it really was a combination of the two factors. The bloom there was really spectacular and now there is nothing, I sure hope that it can be restored at some point. Anyways back to the Huntington, there was some pink lotus flowers at the lower pond and some yellow lotus at the Chinese Garden, so that was really great. Also I can’t miss a chance to visit the large cactus garden there, always a treat to get some abstracts of the different cacti. So here are some shot from around the Huntington Library gardens. Hope you enjoy them.
Here are a few shots taken from a small private plane at night over downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood. It was a really fun trip and an interesting experience, the pilot Fei, was great and very accommodating. We were in a Piper Cherokee, which is a low wing plane, so that meant we had to roll the aircraft for me to get a shot without the wing in the way. You can see it in a few shots. The night was rather pleasant and we took off from El Monte airport. This was on Friday night, May 20, 2011. I have to say this was extremely difficult photography, the subject is dark with a some really bright highlights, the plane is moving at about 100mph and was constantly moving (which was a good thing for a fixed wing plane!). So I had a lot of images that showed rotation, and also movement. Shots were taken with a 21mm f2.8, 85mm f1.8 and a 50mm f1.4, all wide open and very high ISO, which varied depending on the overall brightness, even with the fast lenses and high ISO it was tough to get the shutter speed high enough to not show motion blur. This is something I definitely want to try again and I think I will have a lot better success. Some of the shots, especially the close ups over the building reminded me of ‘Blade Runner’. Click on any thumbnail to see a larger version, thanks for looking!
After visiting Secret Canyon, on May 11, Greg and I decided to visit Horseshoe Bend. This is located not too far from Secret Canyon, and is a quite popular spot now, located south of Page, AZ and just off highway 89. This bend on the Colorado River is quite large and the depth of the canyon walls is quite difficult to gauge unless you have been there. The first images were taken with a Samyang 14mm lens on my Canon 5D MarkII, the second image is a conversion to black and white. To give an idea of the scale there is a small boat, which looks like a small white dot, on the bend at about the 4 or 5 o’clock position. This boat had two fisherman who were slowly drifting down the river. The next shot was taken with a 15mm fisheye lens, and shows the distortion from the fisheye projection, I think it works rather well in this image, and also I converted it to black and white. It was a nice day and the clouds drifting through made for some interesting skies. Click on any thumbnail to see a larger version.
My friend Greg and I decided to do a whirlwind trip to Page, AZ to do some photography on May 10 and 11. In particular we wanted to shoot some slot canyons. Greg had come across a relatively new and not well publicized slot canyon called “Secret Canyon”. After some discussion and review of our schedules we could not make a prolonged trip to the area, so we left on a Tuesday morning and drove the 8.5 hours to Page. Once there we had some time to kill and did some shooting around Wahweap Marina overlook and in an area near the Glen Canyon dam. The following day we headed to the slot canyon, to be documented in my next post. Here are some shots that were taken on the Tuesday late afternoon. Hope you enjoy them.
Here is a 5 shot HDR shot bracketed at 1EV steps taken with a Canon 5D MarkII using a Zeiss 21mm f2.8 lens. Taken in Joshua Tree National Park, a fun day with lots of clouds streaming through, we even got snowed on briefly. Too bad there were not more flowers out, some years are better than others. Still a fun day.
Here is another shot from the Aliso Beach point, about 9o seconds exposure with a variable ND filter. I like this composition because of the channel leading out.
90 second exposure at ISO 100 and f22
Tried something a little different, I have seen pictures before with the ocean looking all misty, created by doing a long exposure, so I wanted to try it out. So went down to Aliso Beach and down to the point and tried it out with the variable ND filter. Here is one of the better images. Hope you like it.
