Headquarters of the evil genius
This weekend I finally got around to uploading some pictures from our trip last fall to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas (no pics), Death Valley, and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.
The cave pictures at sequoia national park are from crystal cave.
Since we are going on a small vacation tomorrow I wanted to get a couple picture galleries up before I start filling my drive up with new pictures. These are all from small trips/excursions we took over the summer. Unfortunately no pictures from the canoe on the st. croix river.
[Not a valid template] [Not a valid template] [Not a valid template]A few weeks ago I stumbled across this recipe for making a cookie in a skillet http://www.sophistimom.com/one-pan-skillet-cookie and shared it with a few people because I though it looked cool. My wonderful wife then put “skillet” on our shopping list because she knows I can’t resist cookies, and yesterday we tried out the recipe. It was easy and tasted wonderful 🙂
Below are some pics of the treat.
[Not a valid template]A few weeks ago we traveled a bit west and visited the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, I’ve finally gotten around to sorting through the pictures and uploading a few (well, actually a lot).
[Not a valid template]I didn’t get around to editing and stitching the panorama photos together yet, or doing anything interesting with the GPS data of our hikes yet. If I get that done I’ll probably update this posting.
Monday we headed over to St. Anthony Falls here in Minneapolis (Mississippi river). There is a Heritage Trail around the falls that gives you a nice view of the falls and surroundings.
[Not a valid template]We visited the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum last week, here are some impressions we captured with the camera ….
[Not a valid template]Some more pictures from around here. Let’s start off with the local zoo ….
Now some pictures from our state capitol
And last but not lease somce pictures from the Saint Paul Cathedral
Yesterday Steffi and I went geocaching, I took some photos while we were underway ….
I never got around to posting it, but a few weeks back the hard drive of my PC with Windows on it died … a little bit. Technically a large chunk of the harddrive is simply unaccessable. after poking and pushing I at least got windows to boot up again, but a large part of the software was dead. I bough a new drive and went through the fun process of installing a fresh windows, patching it, and then installing all the software again.
I didn’t get around to installing my video and picture software on the new windows until this morning, and it turned out to be lots of fun. Due to pure luck I found the license key for sony vegas (it is shown in the splash screen when starting up, shortly before it crashes due to my harddisk malfunction). Any Photomatix was where I keep most licenses stored. But my Photoshop license was more of a challenge. Adobe only allows 2 activated copies of the software per license, activated copies are bound to hardware … you probably see where this is going. I couldn’t deactivate the old installation since the harddrive was kinda dead, and the new installation says “different hardware (new harddrives), must be a different computer”. Yay, fun. The bright side was that the support was easily contacted and they could reset the activation counter (after lecturing me about using it on “2 computers” and deactivating, bla bla bla). I learned one thing: the more expensive the software, the more problems you have with licenses. A shame I never liked Gimp for photo editing.
We shot over 600 photos on our cruise. Anyone who missed it on Facebook: we visited Savona (Italy), Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca (both Spain), Tunis (Tunisia), La Valletta (Malta), Cantania and Rom (both Italy). Anyway, here is a selection of some of the photos. Took me the better of the day to sort out which photos were worth while posting, and then post-processing them.
I always shoot in RAW + JPEG. For normal point-and-shoot vacation stuff I’m generally satisfied with the JPEG the camera spits out. But I would never shoot only JPEG. The additional information of RAW shouldn’t be underestimated, and to be honest I often tweak around. It makes a difference if you are working on the original RAW data, or if you are working on the JPEG copy the camera has already processed.
Up till now I’ve been post-processing my images with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3. Since I was planning on post-processing a whole load of pictures I decided to see what software there is out there to streamline the work flow a bit (Bridge and CS3 do the job, and the raw converter in CS3 does offer a wide variety of options, but it is still tedious switching to be switching between both programs and working on multiple RAW images at the same time). While I was away, Adobe released Lightroom 3, so I checked out the reviews and it sounded good. I downloaded the 30 day trial version and to sum it up my experience so far … I’m impressed.
I haven’t worked with Lightroom previously, so I can’t say how much has changed in this version. But I really like the details that make life easier when handling collections of images. Being an Adobe product it also offers interfaces to various Photoshop functions (I only own CS3, I could imagine it offers more options if you have the current version CS5 installed). I could go on and on with things I like about it, but I’ll just sum it up and say: It really streamlines the work flow of post-processing photographs from import to print/upload/web/presentation and if you are shooting RAW it has a whole lot of fun stuff to play around with directly built in.
Since I shoot with a Nikon D80 that tends to produce a fair amount of image noise if I go past ISO 400 I liked the noise reduction features of Lightroom, both color and luminance noise can be reduced greatly with sliders for fine tuning.
It’s a good piece of software, and when the 30 day trial ends I’ll probably go buy it.
I haven’t posted anything here in a while. Mostly I’ve been busy preparing a photo-shoot and -documentation of a wedding of friends. As a photographer you will always notice things, when looking at the finished fotos, where you say “hmm, maybe a differnet aperature/iso/flash/exposure setting would have produced an even better result”. but all in all I’m satisfied with the results.
Spent a day this week driving around and taking random photos ….
A few weeks ago we were in the Schwarzwald for a few days, and since we got a fair amount of snow while we were there I took some pics. I’ve uploaded my 30 favorite here ….
We went for a walk through the snow and some sledding today, here are the pics i shot ….
I made some of my cookies this evening and used the opportunity to take some pictures. The lighting wasn’t perfect, so everything has a slight yellow tint. I decided to leave the pictures that way instead of trying to correct the problem in Photoshop.
