Pics from my California/Oregon road trip.

[Blazer88]

I'm finally getting through a bunch of processing from the tons of pictures that I took on my road trip and I thought I would just consolidate them into one thread. I'm not really processing them in order that I took them so I'll just post batches of pics when I can. I first stopped at Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast(which I've already posted), then to Napa Valley, over to Yosemite for a day, then over to the California coast, and finally up the Oregon coast back to Seattle. My wife was nice enough to carry a book around to keep track of all the names/places we photographed.

I finished up most of the pics from Patrick's Point state park in California. It's about 25 miles north of Eureka in Northern California. It's a large state park with cool rocky beaches, nice viewpoints, and an Indian village that is intact from the original natives who first lived there. We stayed here for a night and caught a pretty nice sunset. I was running around frantically trying to get as many shots as I could before the sun was finally set. I was pretty much dead from running up and down trails to catch different viewpoints. I feel it was worth it though. Enjoy!

These were all taken from relatively the same area of the park.

Palmer's Point:

These were taken from Agate Beach after the sun finally went down:

Some from Semug Village before we finally headed out from the park on our way to Oregon:

More to come later!

 

[zenya]

Exellent! Thanks for the treat. :thumbsup:

 

[edwing206]

Amazing pictures! My favorite would have to be the second one.

 

[hyperfocal]

Beautiful work. You've got a flair for shooting sunsets!
I think the levels on the foreground on PatricksPoint20.jpg are a bit too high though -- it looks unnaturally bright to me considering the time of day and angle of the sun.

Have any tips on shooting sunsets?

 

[RHagemann]

Pics

Pics

I'm sure California & Oregon's state tourism boards would love to get their hands on those pictures Rick. Thanks for sharing more breath taking pictures !

 

[Blazer88]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10212146#post10212146 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by hyperfocal
Beautiful work. You've got a flair for shooting sunsets!
I think the levels on the foreground on PatricksPoint20.jpg are a bit too high though -- it looks unnaturally bright to me considering the time of day and angle of the sun.

Have any tips on shooting sunsets?

Thanks for catching that about the foreground. I've been editing so many pictures lately it's real easy to miss stuff like that. About tips on shooting sunsets, just take a ton of shots and see what comes out. I made the mistake of shooting a few shots directly into the sun with my CPL attached and it caused some flare/ghosting.

Here are a few shots from Napa Valley. This place was beautiful and very "story-book" like with all of the old buildings. I was a bit mad and distracted since I blew out a tire earlier that morning and was driving around on my spare, so I was a bit rushed in many of the places that we stopped at. Anyways, enjoy these!

Happy wine tasters:

 

[jwedehase]

Rick, very nice job, especially on the exposures! How did you get such even lighting across the entire photo, especially outdoors, when it was obviously not overcast?

 

[hyperfocal]

More great stuff! Markham1.jpg really packs a punch; thought about trying it in B&W?

 

[Blazer88]

jwedehase, all of these are a blend of exposures (HDR) to get this type of look. I try to not to go overboard with this effect to where the picture looks extremely fake, I just want it to look more to what my eye actually saw. And hyperfocal, I think it would look pretty cool in B&W. I'll see if I can edit it up that way. Thanks for the comments guys!

 

[jwedehase]

I had considered that they were HDR, but it wasn't blatantly obvious, like most of those images are. Good job!

 

[hyperfocal]

Are you using your camera's built-in bracketing functionality? If so, what +/- EV setting are you using in the pics above?

I'd like to play around with this technique a bit, the results are impressive.

 

[Blazer88]

Yep, I'm using the auto-bracketing feature. I generally shoot five exposures, from -2 to +2 and then merge. I take multiple exposures of every shot that I take since I'm generally on a tripod anyhow. That's probably why I managed 1400 pics in five days, lol. It takes quite a while to get used to this effect and how to use it, or at least it did for me. Some is good but that doesn't mean more is better. It's very easy to go overboard which will lead to strange lighting effects and halo's around high-contrast areas. I try to keep the HDR very low (I rarely go above 15 on the scale of 0-100) to try and make it look more real to the eye. None of the first pictures I posted were HDR's though.

 

[raddogz]

Awesome pictures.

I have never heard of HDR before, what an interesting technique.

This will be come in hand when I try my hand some landscape photos up at Lassen State National park in a few weeks.

Thanks a ton!!!!

 

[Ebn]

Love this set. Great job on the blending!

 

[Blazer88]

Thanks for the comments guys. Here's another one from Napa that I liked, it's the wine cellar at Markham Vineyard:

And moving onto to some more coast shots, here are some from Oregon now. The last decent sunset I caught was at Cape Blanco. The clouds moved in quickly right as the sun was setting so I didn't get exactly what I wanted but I still liked how these came out since they have a soft and calming aspect to them.

After that we headed up the coast and stopped at a few places along the way. Lighting couldn't really be much worse since it was fairly clear and extremely bright out. I wish I could have been here around dusk or dawn but the timing can't always be perfect.

 

[Lpabsolute]

These pics are GREAT !!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[reefman13]

All the pictures are amazing, but the volcanic beach one is pretty sweet.

 

[slant77]

Thanks for sharing your pictures of the west coast.

 

[Blazer88]

Thanks for the comments so far guys. I hope I'm not boring you too much with pics from my trip, lol. These next four are from Tioga pass in Yosemite. The pass itself is right around 10,000 feet in elevation, there were some spots in the shade that still had some snow. Very beautiful area.

My wife spotted this cute little fella in a meadow so we pulled over. As evening grew near, there were tons of deer and elk out and about.

 

[Xirxes23]

im sure you've posted a thousand times, but what camera/lens and what is the quick and dirty to get such even lighting in photoshop?

Shooting bracketed on tripod, then merging with what feature?

Thanks!