Today, we are leaving on a bike trip from CDA, ID to Seattle, WA.

I will be updating my blog with photos and such from the trip as we progress.

We plan on taking around 6 days to make the 350 mile journey.

I have posted a link to a map of the progress, so you can stalk us, or something. I will update it rather frequently, or so I hope.

I got a new phone or something. I can’t really describe it… so I made a diagram to explain my feelings toward my old one.

Maybe I’ll have an iPhone post soon…

–Scott

Every year, I shoot photos at an “Pet Blessing” put on by Summit Northwest Ministries, a local Seventh Day Adventist church. The goal is to get photos of people and their pets, as well as photos of the various events. Last year, it was kind of a flop, so we decided to promote it a lot more during the event, so I made fliers/postcards to pass out to promote the service (which is free).

I wanted to design something eye-catching, so that it would grab peoples attention, so I wanted to include several colors. I was able to use photos that I took last year, as well as recycle old photos which seemed to fit it. That truly is the benefit of archiving old projects.

Anyway, above is the card I designed. I will post some of the photos later this week. I have had a drought of blogging since school got out. I really need to post some stuff soon, I feel behind.

At the 2010 SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, my brother and I placed 6th out of 45 competitors in the nation.

This past week, my family and I traveled to Glacier National Park, in Montana, for a vacation. While there, I found plenty of prime opportunities to get great photos. Glacier is an amazing place to photograph, and despite the overcast weather the whole week, I got great photos.

The first photo, shown above, is of Avalanche Lake, which is north of Lake McDonald in West Glacier. It is a HDR composite of 15 RAW exposures. I processed the image using my trial of Photoshop CS5, and each time I use it, I grow more and more obsessed with it. I almost feel that it is compulsory to upgrade.

Anyway, the first image was taken at f/22, 1/2000^th sec, and 200ISO and took 15 more until I reached .8 seconds (with the same aperture).

I took a few others of the lake, but this one seemed to turn out the best.

While driving, we took a pit stop in Missoula, MT and my brother decided to go to the skate park, so I took some photos at the park there. It looked like a storm was coming in, so the clouds looked really cool, and everything was very green, so it made quite an interesting photo.

The next day, while driving into the park, we stopped at Lake McDonald, and we took some photos. I walked off the side of the road, and down to the lake and took some photos down near the lake. It was perfectly smooth, so it made a great photo to have the reflection of the mountains in the lake.

While driving on the “Going-to-the-Sun” road, we stopped and took some photos. It was a very rainy day, so as you can see in the photo, there were a lot of clouds. But this sums up nicely what the weather was like while we were there.

While we were there, we hiked to “Avalanche Lake,” as stated earlier at the first photo. There were plenty of waterfalls and streams just waiting to be photographed, so I got some great photos doing that. This is one of my favorites.

When hiking, we decided that it would be awesome if the lake was called “Salamanche Lake” instead of Avalanche. So we started calling it that. Below is a definition of what a “Salamanche” is. Quite interesting to say the least. I would be pretty stoked if one occurred.

Salamanche (SAL-AH-MAN-CHE)
Noun
A mass of salamanders rapidly falling down a mountainside.

• A large mass of salamanders moving rapidly downhill
• A sudden arrival or occurrence of salamanders in overwhelming quantities

Hyundai 2012 for US senator. Just kidding. We stopped at “Goat Lick” while driving around, and there happened to be this train stopped on the tracks near where we were, so I photographed it. I didn’t expect much, but the photo turned out pretty cool. I realized later, during processing, that it said “Senator Hyundai.” I realize that these are two separate containers, but it still looked funny.

Glacier has been getting a ton of snow at higher elevations recently, and that caused an Avalanche to go across the Sun road just before we got there (see Salamanche). After a few days, they managed to get the road mostly open, and we drove up as high as we were allowed. There was a roadblock in place, so we stopped and took some photos. There were a few squirrels that decided that it would be fun to be fed by my brother, so while they were doing so, I got a few photos of them eating. Above, you can see a squirrel eating with its paw, and his (her?) mouth slightly open.

When I was taking photos of the squirrels, we saw a Marmot come waking over. He got within a few feet of me, and I was able to get some great shots of him eating, and looking around. A crowd quickly gathered around, and everybody and their DSLR started taking photos. It’s interesting that everybody seems to be migrating to DSLRs nowadays vs. point-and-shoot’s.

© Connecticut News

While I was taking some of the photos, someone near me decided that the marmot was a bobcat, and stated this quite loudly. I don’t think he knew what a bob cat is.

“Is that like a bobcat or something?”

–Random tourist who doesn’t know what a bobcat looks like

Above is another photo of the marmot. In this one, his mouth is open, and he was starring directly at me. He (she?) was quite fascinated with my camera, and as I was just a few feet away, I got his attention. But alas, he soon scurried away into the bushes.

On our last day, we went on a hike just off the sun road. There were a lot of waterfalls. Everywhere you stepped, there was water running. On the side of the path, there was really cool rock textures, above is one of the rocks with water running over it.

The image above, is quite possibly my favorite from the trip. I got in the river, and shot looking up the river. The composition and exposure seems nearly perfect in this image, possibly why this is my favorite. I love the way the water seems stopped in it’s tracks near the camera.

Anyway, those were the photos from my trip. I hope you enjoyed viewing them, as I feel they turned out great. If you have any comments, please feel free to post them below.

Lastly, I just wanted to note the new copyright bar at the bottom. I changed it up a little to include my url, as well as the year in it. It seems like every week I change it up, but this seems to be one that I will keep for a while. Tell me what you think.

Promotional Bulletin Board

You thought that you could get through a post of mine and not hear about the Promotional Bulletin Board for SkillsUSA. Well, on my vacation, I couldn’t seem to avoid it. As there is only one week until nationals, I figured that it would be in my best interest to practice my speech, and make changes according to some of the contest updates posted by the organization.

Map

Salamanche Lake, Glacier

Oh, I forgot to add that I want a Vuvuzela.

–Scott

The other reason it took so long is that once the image is done, Photoshop takes a century to save the image as a tiff — First there is “Generating Full Resolution Composite,” then it has to generate preview, then it has to prepare to save, and lastly it has to “Save Large Document Format.” LDF is a format like PSD, however it doesn’t have a 2GB cap on each file, so you can save enormous images to the file container. In this case, the document was 9.5GB.

After saving the document, the upload took a very long time as the final compressed Tiff file was 1.3 gb. I uploaded the panorama to GigaPan.org using their uploader while I was staying at a hotel, and as a result, it took quite a long time using their insanely fast 120kbps connection.

Anyway, the panorama turned out nice, and I am happy to have it finished as it took so long to complete.

–Scott

This is my first post to this blog, out of High School, without being graded, without any of that.

Yesterday, on my way downtown, as I was leaving my house, I spied, not 1, not 2, but 3 rainbows in the sky (you can only see two in this photo). I happened to have my camera handy, so of course I had to photograph it. I decided that since I had just finished my final on HDR, this would be a good chance to utilize it. I took three bracketed exposures on AEB (auto exposure bracketing) handheld -- that was no easy feat.

Although I did get several photos, I only chose one that was great (the one above). I edited a few more, but they didn’t turn out as planned.

I have decided that it may be a smart move to invest in Photoshop CS5, as this trial won’t last forever, and I seem to be using it quite a lot. But that is for when I actually have money to spend.

I have also started using a new border on this image… I’m not sure if I will keep using it, but it is different, so I thought I would try it out. It consists of enlarging the canvas by .5in, creating a solid color layer of a dark grey, adding a pinstripe white border to the image, as well as a drop-shadow to give it “pop.” I also have included the stripe copyright. Tell me what you think in the comments if you have any opinions toward it.

Technical Information

Anyway, here is the exposure information of the photos

• Shutter: 1/30, 1/125, 1/500th sec.
• Aperture: f/8.0
• ISO: 100
• Focal length: 28mm
• Canon 50D with 28-135

The images were shot on Manual, with Auto-Exposure Bracketing and motor drive mode so that I could get the three exposures in nearly the exact spot -- it’s easier to use AEB as you don’t have to change anything while shooting.

Map

Rainbow Google Map

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI

--Scott

High Dynamic Range photograph of a sidewalk in downtown Spokane, Washington

Throughout my years photo class, I have attempted to perfect the “art” of High Dynamic Range Photography. I have tried, slightly unsuccessfully, to master this, and eventually gave up. But recently, with the release of HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5, I decided to give it a final try, for my final project — it seemed like a “final” thing to do.

For my first project this year, I tried HDR, and for my final, I am also attempting the style.

I have had multiple sources of inspiration for this project (as well as in the past), as there are many photographers who like this effect. I do realize that it is way overused, and overdone. But I wanted to give it a try for myself, and do it correctly.

I made a valid attempt, when editing my photos to make the images not over edited, but still look like the effect, but unfortunately some only looked good slightly overdone, so I think that I overdid a few.

What is HDR?

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It is an “effect” when multiple exposures are combined together so that all parts of the image are exposed correctly, and there are no blown highlights, or dark shadows. When combining the exposures on the computer, many people choose to give the images a really contrasty look.

Here is a definition from Wikipedia that explains it:

In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods.

The Project

Our photo class, for our final project in Advanced Photography, was to shoot 8-12 images that have something in common. This allows for a lot of freedom in the creativity department, so as a result, most of us chose different topics.

Personally, I chose to do mine on HDR, as I felt that it would demonstrate what I have learned throughout the year. Lastly, this is the last photo project that I will do in High School (the last project for all classes as well), so I thought that I would make it epic.

The Images

Below are the eight images I chose as my final images for the project. They were shot in downtown Spokane, Washington (shown below on the map).

This image was taken in an alley in Spokane. As I walked by, I saw this guy smoking in the alley, and I thought that it would add something to the image to have a subject in the image. I stood around the corner, set up my camera, put it on a tripod, and then moved it around the corner and fired off three quick exposures using the Auto Exposure Bracketing feature on my camera.

Exposure Information:

• Aperture: f/5.6
• ISO: 100
• Shutters: 1/60, 1/250, & 1/15 of a second

Below are the three exposures before I combined them:

In order, these images are EV -2, 0, +2.

Processing

With these images, I put them into photoshops new plugin “HDR Pro.”

From there, there are many options and sliders. I tended to keep it on the “Photorealistic” side of things, as they have some pretty crazy options, including “Surreal” and “Monochrome.” Below are some examples of other types of editing.

Next are some more images that I did for the project, to get more practice in the style of HDR.

The editing process was slightly different for each image, but the start was the same for each, which involved the conversion to 16bit HDR.

This image was actually the least amount of editing, but the HDR effect is visible in that every aspect of the photo is exposed properly, even the relatively bright sky. So other than HDR and a little bit of Unsharp Mask, there is nearly no editing. I like this, as it demonstrates one of the important parts of HDR. Most people see HDR as the over-edited imaging, but it also serves the purpose of having no blown highlights.

In this image, I desaturated most of the background slightly, and gave it a hint of brown. This goes with my sub-theme of urban decay, as it really is a color that I think of with urban decay.

This image, unfortunately, was slightly over-edited, but at the same time, it has a cool look when blown up. So thats why I chose to do it that way.

This image is kind of cool as it shows the motion of the biker crossing the street. As there are three exposures involved in HDR photography (you can do more if you want), motion will look “ghosted.” Photoshop has an option to auto-correct this, but I thought it demonstrated motion, and looked cool, so I kept it.

This image, the one at the top of this post, is one of my favorites, as it has really cool colors (or lack of colors), and the editing is pretty good, so this is one of my favorites.

Below is a contact sheet including the images used in this project:

Inspiration

As stated earlier, there has been a lot of inspiration for this project, including my past projects, but here are some images that I looked at for reference, and inspiration for this project.

INTO THE ABYSS, by hotpasta on DPChallenge. This image incorporates many cool aspects of HDR, including beautifully saturated colors, and an urban decay look, which is tied for first on most used subject matters for HDR.

Exposure Fusion on Digital Photography School. This is an article explaining the various techniques of HDR and what it means to photographers.

Any of the “interesting” HDR photos on Flickr. When on Flickr, you can’t browse without seeing at least 100 HDR photos. This is just one example of how it is insanely overused, but still, it is a really cool effect, and I wanted to try it.

View these images in the gallery

I have created a gallery in Bridge to show my images in style.

Google Map

I went to Michaels, and was disappointed to find out that the next size up of foam core was extremely large, and I had to get multiple sheets of it, so I ended up spending quite a bit of money on the the boards.

Nothing actually changed in the images, we just decided to make it larger, and do a better job of cutting out and gluing the pieces together. It took me two days to cut out, glue, and package the board up. Friday night, I glued the images to the board (I found that if you spray both surfaces and allow them to dry, they stick better). This took quite a bit of time, as we had to be careful to not ruin any of the images.

The next step was to cut out the individual pieces. I actually tried a bandsaw, but ended up not using it, as a surgical scalpel allowed me to be more precise.

Finally, we packaged up the board in multiple protective layers, to prevent it from being crushed in transit to Missouri. I used two bed sheets, and tons of corrugated cardboard to create the box.

Anyway, the promotional bulletin board is most likely in Lewiston, Idaho right now, getting ready to be shipped off in a few weeks.

–Scott