One more from my recent Santa Fe trip. We wanted to visit this museum in Santa Fe but it was closed when we arrived. Instead we visited the nearby art fair and had a wonderful time. This was a grab shot made by sticking my camera through the fence.

Tip: When traveling by air, do not leave your Allen wrench for your tripod in your carry-on luggage. Mine was confiscated in Albuquerque.

This is a small section of the ancient Pueblo village of Tyuonyi located in the Bandelier Monument National Park. This section is located on the flatland below the cliff dwellings. It is a circular village forming 400 rooms. Each root was maybe 4×5 feet. Too little to laydown and fully stretch out.

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Tonite, Chip took me to downtown San Jose. I was anxious to visit the newly opened Guadalupe River Walk. We had to park at Adobe because the Sharks were playing at the arena. We will have to return and bring the girls. It is a great place to walk dogs.

Tonite, went back to Henry Coe State Park. Instead of going to the main entrance, went to the Hunting Hollow entrance instead. I have been consistently whipped by the incredibly steep hikes at this park. One of the docents told me that Hunting Hollow was a flat road along a creek. It is flat but the creek is gone for the season.

This is from Sunol. It has been fiddled similar to Kathleen Connally’s style. She has a beautiful photoblog, A Walk Through Durham Township, PA. Her pictures have a rich, saturated style that is very distinctive.
Here is how I got a similar look.

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This is a high dynamic range (HDR) panoramic. I bracketed by 3 f-stops with 5 separate exposures. There were gusts of wind that you can see moving around the leaves and tree branches around while taking the individual shots. Everything was a little too brown for my taste so I cross-processed to pop the green. My biggest surpise is that the blue of the sky is peeking through the branches.

This is another shot from Hakone Gardens. Because there were dark green leaves with a white flower, I used one of my favorite techinques for dodging and burning. On the layers palette, hold the Alt key and click on the new layers button. In the pop-up dialog, select mode of Soft Light (or Overlay for stronger effect). Check the fill with 50% gray checkbox. Now, you have a neutral gray layer that does not affect the image. To burn, select a black brush with 10% (adjust per image) opacity and lightly paint the areas. To dodge, select a white brush and repeat. If the effect is too strong, you can always change the gray layer’s opacity.

With this image, I used one of the most overlooked filters in Phothshop, Lighting Effects. For this shot, the sun was getting low and lighting of the duck’s rear and rock well. But, the duck’s head and background bamboo were too dark. I ran Lighting Effects three times. Each acted as a very small amount of fill flash on the head and various places in the background bamboo. The key with using Lighting effects is to experiment with the settings. Use Spotlight when you have directional light and the Omni for diffuse lighting. Also, remember to make a duplicate of your flattened image and mask the Lighting Effect. That way, you can paint on the fill light just where you need it.

While C and I were at the gardens, we chatted with a few wedding photographers. They were getting setup for a wedding photo shoot as soon as the gardens closed to the public. After comparing a few equipment notes (they were Canon users as well), one of the guys confirmed that the Canon 5D is real. I had heard a rumor about it and seen a photo on DP Review. However, I was a little skeptical because the picture could have been a Photoshopped 20d. Here are the specs…

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