Starry Night at Yosemite

Photo from June 24, 2005

We arrived at Camp 6 late in the evening and without a reservation, but Mark found someone kind enough to allow us to pitch tents at the edge of their campground. I stayed up late, set up my tripod, and took 30 second bulb exposures of the night sky in Yosemite. I had never seen a night sky so bright, even when I drove 40 min from Champaign to see Comet Hyakutake.

I had no trouble picking out the Milky Way and you can even see part of it in this photo.

Starry Night at Yosemite
Camp 4, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, California

Nikon D70, 50mm f/1.8D
30 sec at f/1.8, iso 800, 50mm (75mm)

To get a wide field of view and maximize light coming into the camera, I used my 50mm f/1.8D wide open and the sensor gained to iso 800. IIRC 30 seconds is the longest exposure in the Nikon D70, which, because it is a CCD and heats up isn’t the best astrophotography camera around. An earlier photo of the star field told me that I needed to have something in the foreground for the photo to seem other than noise.

Even just 30 seconds, you can see the earth rotates so fast that the star streak is clearly noticeable.

If you look at this version of the same image, you can see that processing and noise-reduction has improved a lot in the last 10 years. However I did like that the colors of the bark and leaves of the evergreen were visible in the gained up version I made back then, so I masked that part back in, even though I’ve long since lost the photoshop file I had of it.

It’d be nice to take photos with a wider angle lens and a more modern sensor that can be gained even higher. I’d probably also use a flashlight to light the tree a bit in the future as it turns out you can’t do an HDR of the night sky if you have foreground interest.

Doorway to the secret beach

Photo from January 28, 2003

There were so many great photos taken this weekend even though it was a 2.5 megapixel camera purchased in the previous century! Little did I know these would be among the last exposures ever taken with this camera.

I’ll definitely have to stitch and post some more photos fro this trip.

Sighting the doorway to the secret beach
Sculptured Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore, California
Olympus C-2500L
(8 exposures, 1/1000-1/10000 sec @ f/2.8), iso 100, 9.2mm (36mm)

It was the morning of the second day of a hike along the Pt. Reyes National Seashore. From our campsite we took a short hike down to the Sculptured Beach and walked along to the south end where we sighted the arch doorway to the Secret Beach.

It was not yet negative low tide so we were going to have to prep a bit to get down to the beach before sprinting through the doorway. That was a lot of fun. Getting almost stranded (again!)… not so much.

On the next day, a wave would smash me against the rocks and destroy the camera that took this photo.

Because I knew it’s nearly impossible then to stitch a panorama with moving waves, this was actually intended to be two separate panoramic stitches. Unfortunately, my overlap wasn’t as good as when I started using dSLRs and there’s no optical distortion formula for such an old camera so PTGui couldn’t fix the horizon correctly. It’s especially bad around my friend Sean (I kept the exposure of him looking at the arch doorway).

I tried fixing the mask as much as I could in Photoshop and then added a crop, color saturation, sharpness, and noise reduction in Lightroom CC, in addition to some last minute cloning out of some ghosts. The noise reduction is pretty strong and smooths out some of the rock detail that’s actually there in the photo because Olympus CCD cameras of the era were notoriously bad with blue channel noise.

Here’s a crazy thought. The stitch ends up being 8.7 megapixel. Today I could get the whole scene in a single wide angle photo on my camera and still have better resolution. I should revisit these beaches, even though some are now inaccessible.

My South Bay Uniform

Photo from August 27, 2007

In the fall of 2007, my friend Megan McCarthy wrote an amusing article on valleywag on the wardrobe of Silcon Valley: a blue oxford button down dress shirt and khaki pants. It’s basically a safe bet at tech meet ups that you’ll see more white guys in blue button downs than anything else.

Later that month, I hadn’t ironed my clothing in a while so all that was usable in my closet were those aforementioned blue button downs. So this particular day, as I was wearing “the uniform,” I took a self-portrait to show I’m as original as all the west. Granted, it’s a little bit different, but that’s because San Francisco is a bit colder than valley 40 miles to the south.

My South Bay Uniform
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/4 sec at f/4.9, iso 200, 23.2mm (103mm)

I actually took and processed this image a long time ago for a blog post I never did.
Continue reading about how this photo was taken and processed after the jump

Sake

Photo from October 7, 2011

I think I had just gotten a close-up filter to replace the on-loan Canon 400D. We went to some Thai restaurant in nearby whose name I’ve since forgotten. When Marie’s sake order game, after staging it onto my side of the table, I used it as an opportunity to test out the new filter on my camera.

Sake
The Richmond, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G, Hoya Pro1 Digital MC Close-up +3
1/50sec @ ƒ2.8, iso 800, 29mm

Continue reading about how this photo was processed after the jump

Sapphire Martini

Photo from November 11, 2006

I had recently broken up and moved away from my girlfriend so I was spending time in a still-unpacked new temporary apartment, so I decided to take up some hobbies besides running or cycling. This meant cooking and drinking.

I decided to start mixing drinks again. It was best to start with the basics, and nothing is more basic than a classic dry martini. While my parents gin of choice was Beefeater, I’ve always been a fan of Bombay Sapphire—mostly just because of its distinctive blue bottle. If I start there and understand that presentation is the most important part of a drink, getting just the right martini glass to go along with it immediately follows.

I was toasting the close of an old life and the start of a new one. Odd that I had to down this drink alone at this watershed moment in my life, something I never do.

Sapphire martini
Mountain View, California

Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/20 sec at f/2.8, iso 200, 6.3mm (28mm)

Continue reading about this photo after the jump

Morning fog hits San Francisco

Photo from December 7, 2005

I drove before sunrise from the South Bay to San Francisco this early morning in order to accomplish two things. One was to photograph a Christmas card to send to friends because of my newly-launched, just finished eCards for Plaxo. The other was just to see the legendary view from the east peak of Mt. Tam.

On the drive back, I pulled over to the side of the road and took some handheld photos of which this is one. I liked this angle because from here you can see both the skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge in the frame, while still having enough foreground to show the distance and frame the photograph.

Morning fog hits San Francisco
Mt Tamalpais, Marin, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G VR
3 exposures @ f/13, iso 800, 70mm (105mm)

While I did make a christmas card, I never processed the other photos until this project came up on my Aperture to Lightroom migration list.

Continue reading about this photo after the jump

Granny G’s Burger at the Boxing Room

Photo from July 27, 2013

Granny G’s burger with egg
Boxing Room, Hayes Valley, San Francisco, California

Apple iPhone 5
1/20sec @ f/2.4, iso1600 4.13mm (33 mm)

This was after going to the symphony. I guess I was hungry because I asked for a fried egg to be put on top of it.

Since this project came up and only had iPhone images, I thought I’d use a non-Camera+ iPhone image as as an opportunity to investigate Lightroom CC’s de-noise and sharpening routines (in the Detail tab of the Develop module). While it is very convenient, I dislike the artifacts it generates when working on underexposed JPEG images.

Surprisingly, a simple application of basic processing, seems to oversaturate the reds in image, which I had to pull down using the HSL controls. I guess Adobe engineers are Canon photographers.

In Lightroom’s defense, the lighting was terrible, so I should be happy anything was usable, as there’s only so much you can recover from a high ISO photo camera shot. Should learn to bring a real camera out when I eat.