Camera’s View

While visiting Northern Oregon and Washington State last month, I was able to capture several lighthouses along the way.

Lewis and Clark may have been disappointed, but we were not. Despite the rumors, the weather during the time we were in Oregon was perfect.

Across the Columbia river from Astoria is Cape Disappointment, Washington.

In 1788 an English Captain named John Meares missed finding the Columbia river and named the nearby headland Cape Disappointment.

These images are renderings of the Cape Disappointment Light at the head of the Columbia River. In 1848 a lighthouse was recommended to be built at Cape Disappointment. Built at a cost of $53,000 the first lighthouse in the Pacific Northwest was completed and operational in 1856.

The base image was a merging of several virgin RAW exposures combined into an HDR image using Photomatix Pro and then tone mapped and saved as TIFF for further adjustments in Lightroom.

The first rendering is “normal” development of that TIFF file with Adobe Lightroom ….

and the second rendering is a virtual copy of the first with some added effects applied …

As always, your comments are welcomed and appreciated.

The color of water in Crater lake ( Crater Lake NP ) is hard to describe in words and taking a picture at high noon doesn’t make it any easier to capture the way it really felt in person.

I have been following various blog writings about the advantages of HDR Imaging. One of the possible advantages mentioned was the ability to allow a greater range in the time of day for shooting.

Based on the comments made on various blogs, recommendations from NAPP members and after using a trial version, I purchased a copy of Photomatix Pro 3.0.

This image was bracketed as 0, 1, -1. I did not have a tripod so there was some misalignment.

(click on image for larger view)

I processed the image using the tone mapping option and as suggested in several readings on the subject of HDR Imaging, I did some further refinements in Photoshop.

Those who have been to Crater Lake will realize that the lake color is a very deep blue, much as in image.

Happy Birthday to the United States of America !

My ancestor originally came from France to New France in 1756 and his children and grandchildren were not part of the original founding and subsequent struggles of this nation. Then as many others, some of his decedents came to the United States during the late 1800’s seeking work and opportunity.

Here, they found that life of opportunity and it’s because of sacrifices made by them that I and my family enjoy the life we have today.

But if it were not for those in the image below and the many other men, women and children of that period, all of us who followed would not have had the freedom to pursue those opportunities.

Yes there have been many inequities on the journey and as a country we do have some faults.

However, we always seem to come together to resolve those issues peacefully and democratically due in part to the  principles of our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence made 232 years ago on July 4, 1776.

(image was capture in the rotunda of the US Capital during a recent visit, click on image for larger view)

Seems as if I just can not leave well enough alone.

I just returned from a two week trip around the beautiful state of Oregon and have been going over some of my images.

I no sooner got to an image of the Yaquina Head Light when I started to play around with it inside Adobe Lightroom to see what effect I could apply that would make it different than just another lighthouse picture that I captured before.

Anyways here is the results of the experiment -

(click on images to see larger view)

Original Image

And here is image with Lightroom adjustment applied

I created a Lightroom Develop Module preset that may or may not work on your images. The preset can be downloaded here -neutral-tones.

In the previous post I referenced a preset created for draining all colors except red.

It’s actually easier than you might think.

Here are two images of butterflies where I drained out most of the color.

Technique

In the Lightroom Develop module -

• Perform your desired tonal adjustments
• In the HSL/Color/Grey scale panel, select Color
• Drop all the saturation levels to zero except for the color(s) you want remaining. (you may also adjust the luminance and hue as desired)

In the top example I left Orange and Magenta and in the next image I left only Orange.

One issue I did run into was what to do with the extraneous hints of color away from your focus point ?

This would be easy to correct in Photoshop by making selections around the unwanted items and then to desaturate these items. Not as easy a task in Lightroom, until Lightroom 2.0 anyways, the only option is to clone out these areas, resulting in the image below.