Just Next Door

In the search for fall color I have driven around a bit, but it turns out there was some great subject matter right next door – well more like the other side of the hill. David Hill Winery is just a couple minutes from my home (I live on part of the hill). A while back I asked the owners about being able to photograph there outside of their regular hours. They said sure, no problem. So the last couple of days I have taken them up on that – late evening and early morning. It has been great fun shooting in and around the vineyard. All the vines are bright yellow and seem to glow after sunset. Unfortunately the grapes have been harvested, so no grape images but I am more than happy with what is there.

What do you have next door waiting?

Blog Images:

1) This is just a straight shot taking advantage of the evening glow just after sunset. The quality of light was exceptional.

2) This was taken the next morning just as the sun was starting to light up the tops of the vines. This is a 0.4sec pan where the camera is moving along the angle of the vines.

Fall Again

It is fall again and the effort to find new and exciting images is well underway. While color has been sparse in some areas, there is still great color to be found in others. I visited one of my favorite fall locations again this year – the Portland Hoyt Arboretum. There is one particular group of trees at the arboretum that tends to have the best color and groupings. I have shot there multiple times now. The blog image is a 0.4sec pan with a branch from the front tree close to the camera on the left and around the top. A wide angle (17mm) let me get this perspective. The image has only had tonal, color saturation and touch up work done in the post processing. The rest of the “look” comes from the camera panning action.

Sunburst

Now and then we are fortunate enough to witness a sunburst in the fog - where the sun breaks though a span of trees and magically we see sun rays shooting off in every direction. That was the case Friday morning this past week as I was driving to work. The phenomenon actually went on for quite a while as I stood there with my tripod trying different compositions as the sun rose up the trees creating various sunburst patterns. Sometimes I kept the sun behind a tree trunk and in others I let it peak out as in the image above. As with most back lit shots the exposure had to be adjusted off of that indicated by the auto exposure. I also used auto bracketing to generate HDR image data. This image was processed with Nik’s new HDR Efx Pro – keeping it very natural.