Today's Flowers #65: Napa Valley

Even at the end of October, when most color is coming from the autumn leaves, we can still find some beautiful planted flowers at sunny California. This picture was taken at Castello di Amorosa at Nappa Valley, a 20th century stone castle and vineyard.

Not only the trees, the leaves of grape vine also changed to brilliant color.

We spent a day in Napa Valley after out trip to Yosemite and Eastern Sierra. The weather was absolutely beautiful. We visited several vineyard, but did not drink much. What every we did drink was very good.

It was also the harvest season. It seems that 2009 has been a good year for the crop. Unlike the old days, when the year was good, the wine was good and they sold at better price. Now a good year produced too many grapes. We then have a grape glut and the price of wine goes down. I hope that is true, we did not see that was very evident on the price tag of wine in the restaurant.

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Camera-Critters #83: Raven at Yosemite

They are everywhere inside the Yosemite National Park and not afraid of people. They will come right close to the tourist and begging for food.

Here it was flying high in the valley.

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Skywatch Friday No. 69: Half dome of Yosemite

Half Dome is the quite essential element of Yosemite. It symbolizes the National Park and can be seen almost at any location inside the valley. However, the best place to view this amazing giant boulder (or half of a boulder) is from the Glacial Point where we come almost at eye level with it. But getting to the Glacial Point is only half of the story, the other half is getting there at the right time. The view is most dramatic during the sunset of a clear day. The first picture was taken just before the sunset.

This one was taken during the sunset. The whole dome was bath in the golden light, but it lasted only a few minutes.

This one was taken after the sunset. You can still see some sparkles of golden light on the rock.

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Cliffhangers

I thought that we should put up this blog for our blogging friend "Spiderama". We were looking up on the giant boulder on the side of El Capitan in the late afternoon when Ken Rockwell showed us on his Leica M9 two cliffhangers on the surface of the boulder. It had been a day of vary variable weather in Yosemite, started by some misty morning sunshine then followed by an early afternoon downpour. I took the pictures with my D700 and 70-300 VR lens. If you click on the photo to enlarge it and know where to look, you can find the two of them.

If you enlarge this photo, you can see the fissure that they attached themselves and their equipments. Apparently, after a hard day work, they already tugged themselves in for the night. I wonder did they have portable TV up there.

The next day, we saw the helicopter came by, we assumed that they have reached the top and were picked up by the chopper.

ABC Wednesday: P is for Photographers

Grace and I were at photographic tours for almost 10 days in California. The first part of the tour was at Yosemite National Park, the second part was at Eastern Sierra. We have many fellow photographers in our tour. Here is our leader Dave Wyman in front of the Half Dome of Yosemite.

Grace photographed this photographer photographing a group of photographers at Merced River, Yosemite. She is a young pharmacist and a ethusastic photographer from California.

This is actually a reflection from a small water pool of one of our fellow photographer. I turn the picture upside down.

The amazing golden light reflected from the Twin Lake near Bridgeport, California is the reflection of morning sunlight shone on a nearby mountain. She is a professional photographer from Haiti.

Can you see the reflection of both of us in the window. It was shot at the ghost town of Bodie. It is the best preserved original mining town in the West.

You can see more of our photos of Yosemite here and Eastern Sierra here.

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Big Basin Redwood State Park

Grace and I started our US photographic trip on Saturday, October 17. We have arrived the previous afternoon at San Francisco. We would drive to Yosemite on Sunday to start our one week trip in Sierra. But on this day we just have an easy drive ourselves from South San Francisco to the Big Basin Redwood State Park. The above pictures was taken at the Skyline Boulevard on our way to the state park. The early morning mist from the Pacific ocean just rolled in through the mountain. The highway provides magnificent view to the West towards Pacific ocean and to the East towards Silicon Valley.

The weather was very warm and magnificent. We took the short loop around the park, normally should take less than one hour, but it took us 3 hours.

I have always wanted to have a picture like this facing the sky. I finally got it.

It is hard to appreciate how big the redwood is, unless you put a person in it to give a better prospective.

Here is another view of this incredible beautiful giant.

Today's Flowers #64: Aspen Tree at Sierra Mountain

Unlike the Fall color of the East Coast, the color of autumn at the Sierra mountain mostly has only one color, yellow. Grace and I were traveling in the Sierra mountain last week with two photographic groups. One was for the Yosemite National Park and the other one was at Eastern Sierra around Mono Lake. For me, the yellow color is one of the most difficult color to capture in a digital camera. Over saturate it, it turns to brown. Underexpose it, it turns to brown too. That means any yellow leaves in the shade tend to have a brown tint.

Landscape photography is also a testing of image's resolution, it is hard to keep every leave sharp when we blow up the images to 100%. I took two pictures of this Aspen tree at the prime of its yellow color then merged the images together in the Photoshop. I think I got the color right this time. Click on it and you can almost see every single leave.

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Camera-Critters #82: Chipmunk

We photographed this brave chipmunk at Tuolumne on the Tioga Road when we drove from Yosemite to Mono Lake at Eastern Sierra. It shows how men and wild animals can live peacefully together in a perfect nature environment such as National Park.

It eventually braved itself and came close enough to a tourist to pick up a cherry from her hand. This probably break the National Park rule of not feeding the wild animals. But, it is so cute!!

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The Making of a Panoramic Picture

This is the giant boulder, El Capitan at Yosemite. The day started with a very misty morning followed by a downpour in the early afternoon. The sky finally started to clear up in the late afternoon, on the way back from Tunnel View, we were presented with this amazing sun light shined on El Capitan. Grace snapped three shots that she mean for me to make a panoramic image. The proper way of shooting images for photomerge into panoramic image requires that all images be shot at exactly the same condition and preferably on a tripod with special panoramic platform. This was not the case for these images. The pictures were shot at WB set at A (automatic) and Aperture Priority. Thus both the With Balance and Exposure were different for the three images. Fortunately, the pictures were shot in RAW.

I first opened the three images in Nikon Capture NX2 and set the WB into Direct Sunlight. I then adjusted the "Picture Control" to "Landscape" to give them added contrast and sharpness. I adjusted the exposure compensation to decrease the middle image by 0.87 stop and the left image by 1.67 stop. The three images are now all in exactly the same condition. I then saved them as non-compressed TIFE files. Because I knew that I would do several further modifications of the images in Photoshop and Capture NX2, repeated compression in JEPG format would certainly degrade the quality of the images.

I opened the three images in Photoshop and photomerged them into a panoramic image. The merged picture showed clearly a prospective distortion, since she shot the image from an upward position. The distortion was corrected using Filter>Distort>Lens Correction of Photoshop. I re-cropped the image, the center upper part of the sky had a gap, I refilled it with the Stamp tool. I now saved the panoramic image in TIFE and reopened it in Capture NX2.

I used Shadow Protection to give the forest at the lower left side of the image more light and played around the Curve to further improve the overall contrast and saturation of the image. Now it is almost done, I saved the image, reopened it in Photoshop and applied the final Smart Sharpen (141%, 0.2 pixel, lens blur, more accurate) step as recommended by Ken Rockwell. When looking at 100%, there is some noise in the shadow area, since we did not use any noise reduction either in camera or during the post-processing. It is typical for the the Nikon D90/D300. The full-frame D700 would be better. But I doubt that I will see this noise in the final print.

The final image in non-compressed TIFE is 176.3 MB or just over 30 MP. I can make a non-interpolated print of 300 dpi at 24.7 x 13.9 inches. If not using the Photomerge and the computer softwares, we would need a medium format digital camera with a PC lens to get an image with such detail.