Merry Christmas!

So with it being the eve of Christmas Eve, this will probably be my last post for a few days. I wanted to keep my mini-streak alive by posting and what better way to say Merry Christmas AND post something photography related than to post a picture of my favorite dog in the whole world. That's right...Hudson has come to the blog!

Hudson will normally ignore the TV entirely. That is until we ask him where the puppies are then he'll look at it to see if there are puppies. If there are? He goes a little nuts. He was barking at the TV just after I shot this.

So from Hudson, me and my wife -

Merry Christmas!

Revisting images

Have you ever had an image that was pretty good, did your processing on it and then left it for months? Have you come back to that photograph and tried new processing techniques out on it? That's one of the things I love about Lightroom. I can create a snapshot of an image and start my processing over again from scratch and compare the two images to decide which I like more. And revisiting your shots is always a lot of fun.

Take this image I shot this summer in Banff National Park. When I first looked at after getting home there were a few problem areas. I was shooting into the sun somewhat and it was hard to keep the highlights from blowing out. I did try bracketing and then using Photomatix to create an HDR image but I didn't really care for the results.

Tonight I tried good old fashioned dodging and burning. I've also download a bunch of camera profiles for Lightroom and the Camera Landscape profile really punches up the colors.

If I had one book on photography....

If I had could only have one book in my collection of photography books I would have to go with Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. Your camera does a pretty good job with focus on its own. Composition can be learned but its hard to teach it. Exposure however is something that can be taught and a good creative exposure can make the difference between a snapshot and something you would hang on the wall.

Star Trails - Second Attempt

I tried some star trails this summer with not really the greatest results.  Its hard to gauge what your exposure should be and takes more luck than skill to get a good result. I went out last night on Highway 40 west of Cochrane to try again and the results, while varied, were more satisfying. My first attempt was a 30 minute exposure which was far too long for the aperture I had chosen. This attempt was a 7.5 minute exposure at f/2.8 and ISO 200.

I tried some shorter exposure times (1600 ISO and f/1.8) and still had about a 24 second exposure. Its astounding how much the stars move even in that short of time. (The larger size really show the motion)