Today, Chip and I went up to the city to visit the Conservatory of Flowers. The orchid show is on until the first of the year. The whole trip turned into a fiasco. It was raining heavily off and on. Chip had directions to the Botanical Gardens not the Conservatory of Flowers. It was a case of cannot get there from here. After crawling through traffic around the edge of the park because there are a tree down. We still could not find the Conservatory of Flowers. Finally, we parked the car and walked on the blocked off roads and found it. However, they were closed because the power was out. I took this shot peering from the outside in. The windows were fogged causing the fuzziness.

Today, I planned on visiting Sunol for some new photos. I got a late start and realized I would get to the park with only about 20 minutes until closing. Plus, it was raining and nasty all day. I know that bad weather makes good photographers but I passed today. Here is an infrared shot taken last month at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens.

This is another shot from my archive raid. This started as a fisheye shot bracketed by 4 stops and merged into an HDR. I did not like the resulting color so it became a B&W. Next, I gave it a heavy crop on stairs to remove some clutter. I like how the stone lantern is circled in light but the shot was not read well. I did a flip horizontal and voila a much better entry into the photo.

Another shot of the Zulu Daisies from my visit last month to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. Hopefully, I will go out shooting soon and can stop raiding my archives.

This is the Bay Bridge as seen from Treasure Island. At the time, I thought that the sunset was bland. This was taken during twilight and the long exposure makes the colors pop.

This is another shot taken at Hakone Gardens on Sunday. I intended this shot to be black and white but did not find a conversion that I liked. Instead, here is the color version.

Whenever I talk about shooting infrared photography with my friends, one of the first questions is “So, you do nite photography?” Of course, I have not until the recent nite photography class. We were at a shopping center to shoot water droplets on mylar. Instead, I decided to try out the infrared camera. My initial conclusions is not great. The street lamps caused a ton of flair. I tried shading the lens but that did not help the flare problem. The infrared camera is not very sensitive at nite. I had to shoot at ISO 400, f/2.8, for 10 seconds. It was underexposed by a stop but I did not want the flare to blow out too much.

Visited Hakone Gardens this Sunday. The gardens were fairly busy. They filmed “Memoirs of a Geisha” there and I think more visitors came out with the release of the movie. I really liked the shape of the tree. I tried color, color converted to B&W, and infrared looking for the best separation. Turns out infrared was the best choice although I wish I could have found a way to minimize the background even more.

Another from my nite photo class in San Francisco. This was actually my first shot of the nite.