Focal Links

Antelope Canyon

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Antelope Canyon, which is on Navajo land, near Page, Arizona.  I was with friends on a trip to Lake Powell, and this was one of our day-trips to explore the area.

If you've never been to Antelope Canyon, it is a magical place.  This deep slot canyon, composed of sandstone, has been shaped by wind, water and sand over a very long time.  The shapes and colors in the canyon are spectacular.

Antelope Canyon Light Beam

We visited the canyon near mid-day, so we were treated to light beams which created dramatic lighting.  The place is quite dusty, so I was nervous about exposing my camera to the environment.  I ended up wrapping the camera in a transparent plastic rain sleeve.  

Penetrating Light Beam

Our Navajo guide was very helpful in finding nice spots for photos and for keeping the many tourists from stepping into the frame while we were shooting.  She would also help by kicking up some sand and dust, if there wasn't enough in the environment to highlight the beams.

Hall of Light

The dynamic range in this place was amazing.  The difference between the brightest and darkest spots in the canyon was close to 11 stops!  I tried a few bracketed exposures for an HDR image, but I didn't capture enough range to get detail in the brightest areas of the image, so I never obtained a good HDR image.  Instead, I tried a number of exposures where I could exclude a bit of the brightest parts from the frame.

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The entire region near Antelope canyon is very sandy.  At times, the wind will blow sand into the canyon, which will cascade down the to the bottom.  This can create "sand falls" which I have never seen before.  This is a very cool effect.  

Sand Falls

Although I did get to experience a natural sand fall during this visit, this particular shot was one that was precipitated by our Navajo guide, who threw some sand up the wall to illustrate how it would flow gradually to the floor.

Waves of Stone

A tripod is a must, if you ever visit this beautiful place.  Most of my shots were multi-second exposures, and some used a full 30 seconds to capture enough light at ISO 100 for an exposure.  

Heart Tower

I highly recommend this place to anybody who loves to photograph nature.  The place is one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited.  

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I really appreciate the hospitality of the Navajo people, who make this wonder available to us.

A Night on Paradise Island

Recently, we traveled to Nassau to see our daughter off on her study abroad voyage.  She will visit 11 countries in 108 days aboard the MV Explorer as a student in the Semester at Sea program.

Of course, I brought my camera along for the trip.  I had never been to the Bahamas before, and I was pleased to find a wealth of photographic opportunities.  It is a beautiful place.  One of my practice tasks on this trip was to take some evening photos.  I've not done much with night photography, but I've always wanted to tackle the challenges that come with this type of photography -- large dynamic range, getting the exposure right, and dealing with slow shutter speeds (I didn't have a tripod, so I figured this would be especially challenging).  I was pretty happy with the results.

One of the subjects I wanted to shoot was the MV Explorer itself.  We had the opportunity to tour the ship the night before my daughter embarked on the voyage.  It was an impressive vessel.  As we were leaving, the sun was setting, and I wanted to try to capture the ship in the early evening light.  I really had trouble finding a stable support for the camera, but I was finally able to find a spot on the pier where I could lay down, place the camera on a piece of concrete, compose a shot, and leave the shutter open for a bit.  This is the result.  Notice the other blurred parents to the left who are leaving the tour.

MV Explorer in Nassau at Dusk

There was a nice marina shopping area outside of the Atlantis, where we stayed.  I experimented with some handheld shots in this area, trying to keep the shutter fast enough for a sharp photo, and catching enough light for a decent exposure.  I loved the colors created by all the light sources at this time of day.

Shopping at night

I was fascinated by the boats in the marina.  The people who live on these motor yacht seem oblivious to the shopping traffic in the marina shops.  I took this first one shortly before nightfall.

Many nice boats provide a home away from home

I noticed that some boats had what appeared to be running lights underneath, which provided a really cool lighting effect in the water around them.  Below is one that caught my eye, as I walked along the pier.  There was no way to hand-hold this shot, but I found a section of wall that provided a stable surface for this shot, after climbing over a railing along the sidewalk.

Cool lighting under the boat

There were so many interesting boats in the marina.  These two caught my eye as I was exiting one of the indoor shopping areas.  The stairs down to the boardwalk ran next to a wall that provided a stable surface for this photo.  The exposure was set automatically in Av mode.

Evening on boats

The color of the water in the marina was incredible, with a broad range of blue, aqua and green colors.  I wanted to find a place where I could capture a bit of this color.  This shot across the water towards the boat and house seemed like a good spot.

Peaceful rest for boats

When I returned to my room on the 11th floor of the Coral towers at the Atlantis, I couldn't help but notice the variety of lights in the view from the balcony.  I used a small table on the balcony to stabilize the camera.  The breeze was quite strong, as is evident in the palm trees in this shot.  I did not notice the ship moving when I was taking in the view, but its movement is apparent in this long exposure.

Atlantis grounds at night

I really enjoyed taking these photos.  I can see where night photography could become quite addictive.

Pre-Dawn HDR FoCo

Well, it has taken a long time to get back to this, but Dan had some suggestions for improving the tone mapping for my HDR shot of pre-dawn Fort Collins that I did back in September.  I finally got around to making the change and here is the result.

 

Revised HDR Tone Map 2 - Pre-dawn Fort Collins

 

Thanks for the suggestion, Dan!

Photoshop's Layers - Matt Kloskowski's New Book

Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Powerful Feature

Matt Kloskowski

This is a great book!  It is a quick read, if you want to passively absorb the information on how to effectively use layers in Photoshop, or you can take the hands-on approach with each of the very clear and compelling tutorials.

The book is well organized, starting with layer basics, then explaining blending layers, adjustment layers, layer masks, and then moving into text and shapes.  It also has chapters devoted to photographers, including one on enhancing photos with layers and another on retouching.

Although the book is targeted at CS2 or later, there is ample material devoted to new CS3 features, including layer styles and smart layers.   I really found this material to be valuable, as I'm now doing much more non-destructive work with my photos.

I'd say this is one of the better books I've purchased in the last year.  If you've wanted to learn more about using Layers in Photoshop, this is the book to pick up.

Phoebe is six months old

Our second Yorkie, Phoebe, turned six months old on Valentine's day.  I thought it would be cool to take a few photos and post them here.

She is a pretty shy little girl at times, but she also loves to play.  Belle and her have been having a lot of fun together.  This is a picture of her after her bath today.

I like to feel safe

She is very quiet.  She still naps several times during the day, between intense play periods with Belle.  It is funny to listen to her growl at Belle when they are playing.

Resting in bed

Today was very windy, but it was warm during the middle of the day, so she hovered in front of the door, as if to ask if she could go outside to play.  Until recently, it has been too cold to let her outside for any length of time.  Despite the wind, she enjoyed exploring a bit.

 

It looks nice outside

 

Phoebe peeks outside

My Photos... Shredded

When I bought my new computer, I knew I wanted a lot of storage to hold photos and video.  I had been using a NAS box for backup of machines on my network, but I knew I wouldn't have enough space on the backup drive for the 2TB of storage I planned to have on the new machine.  So, I decided to go with RAID striping and mirroring.  I figured that would give me great performance, and redundant storage, in the event that I lost a drive.  With four Hitachi 1TB drives, configured as a RAID 0+1 array, I would have 1.87TB available for storage.

I have to say, this has worked really well.  In fact, I've already had a drive go bad.  The RAID card degraded my array and reported the bad drive.  Hard drive diagnostics confirmed the problem.  I returned the bad drive, popped the replacement into the machine, and rebuilt the array.  Perfect.  No data loss.  I felt really good about this approach.

I also decided to backup photos, e-mail, and other hard-to-replace data to an external drive every few months.  I figured I was being paranoid.

Last week, while I was using the machine, I saw an ominous pop-up from the system tray, informing me of a RAID access failure.  Uh-oh.  Everything was still running okay, but I decided to shut down the machine, restart, and see if the array was degraded.  Upon restart, I found out that the array had been split in two and degraded.  I initiated the rebuild, as suggested in the documentation.  The system booted, and the rebuild commenced.  Within minutes, services started failing, numerous programs crashed, and finally, a single BSOD.  Argh!

I was not able to recover the array after this point.  The system wouldn't boot, and the array appeared to "rip", leaving a fraction of the stripes intact.  I could no longer boot, couldn't repair the Vista restart, and the damage was pervasive.  I still am not sure what happened.

The important thing here was that I lost all my data since the last backup... December 19th.  In all the years I've used computers, I've never lost data for lack of a backup, until now.  I was sick to my stomach.  I tried to manually recover files from the shredded array, but I was only able to get a handful of files.

I thoroughly tested the hardware.  No memory or disk errors.  The RAID controller seemed to be working fine.  I ran a barrage of tests for 22 hours with zero errors.

I created a new RAID array, restored the original machine configuration, and restored my backup from December 19th.  Among new photos lost were the shots of my daughter's recent award ceremony, Christmas photos, and photos of our newest puppy.

One night, while I was in my office, chastising myself for my blind faith in the RAID 0+1 approach, I glanced over at my camera on my desk.  I thought about my process of deleting photos from the CompactFlash card after uploading the images to my computer.  Then, it occured to me that I may have overlooked a possibility for recovering the photos from the recent award ceremony.

Most file systems don't purge the actual data from a file when the file is deleted.  Typically, the file entry in the directory is removed and the data locations in the file are marked as available, but the data remains on the disk until those locations are overwritten.  There are many undelete utilities available that undo this process, restoring files that haven't been obliterated by subsequent writes.  I hadn't used the camera, since I deleted the files from the event, so I had high hopes that the files were still in there.

The situation is even better with flash memory!  One of the limitations of flash memory is that it fails after a limited number of write cycles to any particular address.  Thus, it is a good idea to spread writes around, evening out the distribution of these writes.  Drivers use this "wear leveling" approach, which increases the chance that recent files, even those beyond the most recent deletes, are still available.

I downloaded RescuePRO and popped the CompactFlash card into a reader attached to my PC.  Within a few minutes I had recovered all of my photos covering the entire data loss period.  Awesome!!!

I've still lost my e-mail and genealogy research from the time period, but I got my precious photos back!

I won't rely exclusively on RAID again.

Lake Powell 2007

A few of my buddies went with me to Lake Powell to enjoy a long weekend of relaxation and photographic opportunities.  I had never been to Lake Powell before.  It is a massive man-made lake, formed essentially by filling canyons with water.  The weather was great, and the scenery was beautiful.

After driving the houseboat six hours out from the marina, we found a nice secluded place to call our home base.

Lake Powell 5-7 Panorama

The rock walls were red and enormous.  The sky was often a deep blue, and the color of the water changed with the time of day.  There were countless canyons to explore.  Some were incredibly narrow and others were expansive.

 

Lake Powell 089

 

Lake Powell 110

It was incredible to see the early morning or late day sky and how it could cause the water to reveal golden reflections of the illuminated canyon walls.

Lake Powell 271

The falling water line from the past many years is revealing old dead trees from the original canyon floor.  In most areas, the water is incredibly deep.

Lake Powell 230

The wildlife is abundant.  The lake is filled with fish, and although we didn't do any fishing, there were plenty of others who did.

Lake Powell 241

The water level is low enough that you must now hike to get to "Rainbow Bridge" (one of the seven natural wonders of the world).

Lake Powell 153-156 Panorama cylinder

Although our weather was fantastic for most of the trip, we did have one day of rain.  The coolest surprise from the rain was when countless spontaneous waterfalls formed on the canyon walls (the rain flows to the lake from all directions).

Lake Powell 080

I took a whole lot more photos, and I left, wishing I had more time to spend there.  The place is vast and filled with very cool areas to explore.  If you've never been to Lake Powell, you might want to check it out.

Another panorama

Here is another panorama from yesterday morning.  I could not get this to stitch together yesterday.  As I read more today, I realized that the white balance on each of the raw files was different.  When I corrected for this in camera raw, the new panorama came together very quickly.

Pre-dawn Fort Collins Panorama

Playing with HDR and pano photos

I got up this morning to try some pre-dawn photos from the Horsetooth reservoir dam.  I've spent some time each weekend coming up to speed on Photoshop CS3, and I've been wanting to play with panoramas and High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos.

There are a lot of pretty amazing HDR images on Flickr.  Some of them look pretty bizarre, but are cool nonetheless.  I wanted to try a high contrast shot, where I could get a relatively natural looking image without the harsh shadows.  I thought the pre-dawn contrast of residential lights, plus the bright sky against the very dark ground would make for an interesting challenge.

According to Kelby, it is important to capture enough range with multiple exposures that you don't have any areas clipped throughout all the exposures.  I thought I'd try 7 images with one baseline exposure, three over-exposed (1-stop each) and three underexposed (1 stop each).  My first test shot from the tripod reminded me that I had image stabilization turned on (I *hate* it when I do that).  I turned it off and shot the seven images.  As I shot the darkest one, I thought that I might still be capturing too much light on the individual town lights and at the horizon, so I kept reducing the exposure by 1 stop and shooting for a total of 11 images.  I combined the images into a single, 32-bit per channel HDR image.  After reducing this to 16-bits per channel by using local contrast and some curve adjustments, I ended up with this.

Pre-dawn HDR Foco

There were a couple of other challenges along the way.  First, because the lighting was so poor, each exposure was long, and I had the ISO up to about 800 -- this caused some interesting problems with noise and stuck pixels.  The HDR process actually reduced the noise across exposures somewhat, and Noise Ninja corrected the rest of it.  I used a healing brush on the stuck pixels.  Also, there were a couple of cars that were moving on the road in a couple of images, but not in the others.  Instead of getting a ghost image, I ended up with some really blown out lights where the cars were.  I used a healing brush on these as well.

I think the result is okay.  I like the fact that I can see a lot of detail in the dark areas of the photo, without having an extremely unnatural look to the photo.

While I was up there, I walked across the road to face the reservoir on the other side, which was receiving some of the dawn (or pre-dawn) light.  I thought this might be a good time to try a panorama.  Using Kelby's advice, I selected a consistent aperature for the shot (f/8 in this case), set my focus to manual, metered for the sky, and then set exposure to manual and overlapped the photos by about 20% or so.  Photoshop CS3 made combining these photos a snap, and I ended up with a pretty nice shot.

Horsetooth Pano

You can see the light coming from behind at a very low angle.  Also, due to the long exposure times, you can see that the water is a bit blurred.  I'm glad I did this.  I need to practice these kinds of shots before my vacation at Lake Powell.  I'd like to use these techniques to get some nice vista shots while I'm there.

Lunar eclipse -- did you see it?

I really wanted to see the total lunar eclipse this morning, but I wasn't too hopeful, because the weather forecast called for mostly cloudy conditions.  Nonetheless, I prepared my camera and tripod, and set the alarm for 2:45AM.

The eclipse didn't start here until 2:50AM, so I had plenty of time to get ready.  I don't think I've ever photographed the moon before, and I had my new 70-200mm zoom lens to deal with as well.  I turned off image stabilization and played with metering the moon.  It seemed like an exposure 2 stops under yielded some detail on the moon.  There was plenty of light to work with.  This shot was at 1/160th of a second, f/8 at ISO 100:

 

Partial eclipse

There were waves of clouds that kept moving across my subject, which irritated me at times, but there were actually some pretty cool moments, where the light of the moon would play off the clouds.  I caught this one shortly before the total eclipse:

 

Partial eclipse interacting with clouds

Although you can't really tell from that photo, the top portion of the moon was alredy taking a reddish cast.  Light was disappearing fast, which created a new problem for me... the shutter speeds were getting slow enough that the movement of the moon and apparent movement of the stars was causing blurriness.  The total eclipse was absolutely beautiful (when it wasn't behind clouds), but to capture it, I had to open things up more than 13 stops, leaving me shooting at ISO 1600, at f/2.8 and a shutter speed of half a second for the last photo.

 

Bright Total Lunar Eclipse

Total Lunar Eclipse

The process took a long time, and I didn't come back inside until 4:30AM, but it was worth it.  If you didn't see it, I hope you take some time to see the next one.