May 2012 Challenge Photo

OK folks, I am off to San Francisco tomorrow and will end up in Yosemite National Park at the end of the week for some fun and relaxation with Donna. In honor of the trip, I thought I would post my very own picture of the famous painted ladies of San Francisco from Alamo Square Park. I took this photograph last month while in the city on business. It was about a three mile walk from my hotel and worth every step. The park was full of people gawking at the painted ladies and folks letting their dogs run amid the amazing views that only San Francisco can offer. I have given you a lot to work with in this photo. Take as little or as much as you like, but most of all…have fun! Please submit your work for posting in the galleries through the end of the first week of June. Thanks as always for participating. I love seeing your work and enjoy the artist and human connection on the blog!

Please use the form below to submit your painting. Your picture should be a high-quality jpg image that is at least 480 pixels along its longest dimension at 72 pixels per inch.

DOWNLOAD the Original Challenge Photos (2,000 pix for your painting pleasure)

Thanks as always for participating!
Lee

Click here to see the gallery of submissions for this month

Copyright notice: This photo may be used to create derivative works in the form of drawings or paintings. The photo may not be used in any other commercial or non-commercial form without permission.

May 2012 Challenge Photo

You have arrived upon the gallery submissions for the May 2012 ADNW painting challenge. Past challenges and associated galleries can be found by clicking the “Painting Challenge” tab at the top of the home page. Thanks to all that submit their work!

Please take the time to click on the artist’s name and visit their website. Words of encouragement are powerful sources of inspiration!

(Click painting for larger image)

My Garden Poppy

I have written before that I love our garden. Its beauty is amplified every year as plants mature and its natural canvas becomes more complex and vibrant. We have been very lucky this year to have had an early start to the growing season. We live at 7300ft above sea level where the conditions are more harsh than they are in town a mere 1000 feet lower. We need all the help we can get.

It’s almost Mother’s Day and these photographs remind me of a gift I gave Donna a few years ago on her special day. It was a book on gardening written by authors that live near Colorado’s front range. I bought it not only for its beautiful photography but also because it had a wealth of information about growing lavish gardens in Colorado’s harsh soils and arid climate. Fortunately, Donna is a fast learner and she created the garden you see in the photograph below. Interestingly enough, my gift to her has now become a gift for me and my camera’s lens!

Orange poppies screaming for attention

The long evenings of summer present a ripe opportunity for me to relax in the garden with my camera. The scene is ever changing and the potential compositions are endless. Especially with a macro lens. While admiring the garden last night, I saw our orange poppies calling out for attention and grabbed my camera. Since the skies were overcast and the daylight was waning, I decided to use my Canon Speedlite flash to create the light I needed for the photograph. With my Canon 5D Mark III equipped with a Canon 100m f/2.8L macro lens on a tripod, I composed my shot and used wireless radiopoppers to fire my Canon 430EX flash remotely off camera. I just set the flash to manual, dialed it down to 1/64th power, and held it with my hand at various distances and angles until I got the lighting effect I wanted. I paid particular attention the the direction of the cast shadow and how it added a three dimensional look to the poppy.

As for the camera settings, the wind was blowing gently so I used a shutter speed of 1/200th of a second to freeze the detail of the poppy as the flash fired. The depth of focus is very shallow with a macro lens so I used an aperture setting of f/7.1. This allowed most of the center of the poppy to be in focus, which was my intended center of interest for the photograph.

Watch your step!

As I mentioned in my bluebird post, I have become more aware of the beauty around me since taking up photography. While walking on our property this evening, I noticed these little white wildflowers nestled in the prairie grass. Yes, those are blades of grass projecting between the petals of the flowers. In much the same way as I did with the photograph of the poppies, I grabbed my camera and used my flash to kick light onto the flower. I was careful not to use too much light, which would blow the detail out of the soft white petals. My goal was to capture the intimacy of the flower’s relationship to the grass and call to attention something that may easily go unnoticed.

Bluebird in flight. Same bird two moments in time.

(Photo details: Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 300m f/2.8 telephoto, 1/2000 sec, f/9.0, ISO 400)

Photography has opened my eyes. Not just to a new art form but but also to the importance of preserving what is naturally beautiful. From fleeting scenes inspired by the coming and going of ever changing light to the seemingly impossible colors on the back of a bluebird, I am a committed observer to the beauty that surrounds me. It is everywhere. Once tuned, our eyes consume so much more than appears on the the surface of our everyday lives. So many of us rush through the day with our eyes on the finish line – a pillow at the end of the day upon which we rest our head only to start it all over again the next morning. I too have been guilty of this.

Nesting bluebirds

I freely admit that I initially built and installed a bluebird box for selfish reasons. I simply wanted to make photographs of them. After installing the box within an eye shot of our study window, I was disappointed that it remained empty for months. What appeared to be a safe haven from the harsh winter elements turned out to be a place birds of any sort found undesirable. Until now.

Our male bluebird

While working in our garden last weekend, I noticed that the roof of the bluebird box had warped. I dropped the rake I was using, pulled the box off of its post, and took it to the garage for repair. Then I thought, “Why bother, the birds don’t appear to like it anyway.” So I put the box on a shelf in the garage and went back outside to tend to the garden. As I was turning mulch, I noticed shadows rapidly swirling on the sidewalk below me and a frantic chirping sound in my ears.

Female bluebird building her nest

As I looked up, there they were. A male bluebird up on the gutter and a female perched on a spruce tree just beyond the pole without a bluebird box. They seemed to be saying, “Where the heck is the house? It was here yesterday!” I thought, “Holy smokes, they’re moving in!” I quickly dropped the rake, grabbed the box from the garage, reattached it to the pole, and secured the warped roof with a bungee cord. Within minutes, the female bluebird was busy gathering mulch from the garden and building a nest. It is hard to express the excitement that I felt at that moment. Not only was I going to get my photographs, I was now personally attached to these little creatures of nature.

Bluebird nest

After roughly a week of gathering, her nest is almost complete. I made a new roof and improved the latch to make sure predators would not be able to get to the eggs. While observing behaviors, which ultimately leads to better photographs, I noticed a pesky tree swallow lurking about. So far, the male has been able to keep him a bay. I fear that he will continue to be an issue and I plan to take all precautionary measures possible to protect the nest.

A competing tree sparrow

What was initially a selfish act is now a calling for preservation. My temporary inhabitants piqued my interest. I have learned that the growing use of pesticides and the clearing of dead trees in developed areas has left the bluebird without many options for propagation. The bluebird population has plummeted and they desperately need our help. They cannot create their own shelters and their natural alternatives are dwindling. Bluebird boxes are available for as little as $20 and they serve an important role in helping to increase their numbers. Consider contributing to their preservation by picking one up if you live in an area that attracts bluebirds. It will help them out and it may the first step you take in slowing down to take in the beauty around you!

5/4/2012 – Update! Just found two eggs in the nest!

Finally, a couple of eggs have been laid

April Painting Challenge Photo

You have arrived upon the gallery submissions for the April 2012 ADNW painting challenge. Past challenges and associated galleries can be found by clicking the “Painting Challenge” tab at the top of the home page. Thanks to all that submit their work!

Please take the time to click on the artist’s name and visit their website. Words of encouragement are powerful sources of inspiration!

(Click painting for larger image)

Isabelle Gaillardon - Visit website

Horst Hittenberger - Visit website

Irit Bourla - Visit website

Jenni Twiddle - Visit website

Lori Quarton - Visit website

Mico - Visit website

Terry Freemark

Nancie Johnson - Visit website

Lydie Pieplu - Visit website

Rebecca Wang - Visit website

Renate Arends - Visit website

Sylvia Young - Visit website

Gloria J Zucaro - Visit website

Janeen Nance - Visit website

Erik van Elven - Visit website

April Painting Challenge Photo

Wowzer! It’s been a while. So sorry for being so late in getting this up this month. Since I am late, feel free to take until the end of the first week of May on this challenge. Truth is, I have been really busy lately and, well frankly, feeling a little uninspired. Enough of that I say! I am getting really excited for some trips this summer including a visit to Yosemite, New York, Rocky Mountain National Park and Ireland, which will give me a ton of new photos for the challenges.

I have been contemplating putting this photo up for the challenge for a while. This photo was taken in a square in Florence, Italy a couple of years ago. I think it provides an opportunity to test drawing skills and your ability to render a pretty well defined 3D form.

Please use the form below to submit your painting. Your picture should be a high-quality jpg image that is at least 480 pixels along its longest dimension at 72 pixels per inch.

DOWNLOAD the Original Challenge Photos (2,000 pix for your painting pleasure)

Thanks as always for participating!
Lee

Click here to see the gallery of submissions for this month

Copyright notice: This photo may be used to create derivative works in the form of drawings or paintings. The photo may not be used in any other commercial or non-commercial form without permission.

Our first flowers of 2012 shot with a Zeiss Distagon 21mm lens

I admit that taking a close up of our first spring flowers is not quite the broad sweeping landscapes I usually like to shoot with my wide angle lens but it proves an important point. It proves that the extra $1,000 I spent on my new Carl Zeiss Distagon 21mm f/2.8 wide angle lens was worth the money. Why? Because it allows me capture higher quality original images that can be output at larger sizes without having to jump through flaming post-processing hoops. Although the issues I cover in today’s post are not likely to bother anyone that publishes web resolution images, they will rear their ugly heads when images are displayed at higher resolutions.

My stock wide angle lens is the Canon 17-40mm f/2.8L. At $779, it is a very capable lens that I have used to capture some very nice images. What’s more, it is relatively light and is built to last. So what is my beef with the lens? Well, I have become increasingly frustrated lately with  image quality when creating large format prints. In addition to minor vignetting and distortion issues, the chromatic aberration introduced by the lens is irritatingly problematic. What is chromatic aberration? In a nutshell, it is a type of distortion in which there is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point. Chromatic aberration makes itself evident in photographs as “fringes” of color along boundaries of dark and bright parts of an image. What does it look like and how do you control it? Read on.

The Zeiss Distagon 21mm f/2.8 and the Canon-17-40mm f/4.0L

To illustrate what I am trying to overcome in image quality, I took two photographs of the lovely crocuses in our garden. One photo was taken with the Carl Zeiss 21mm and the other with the Canon 17-40mm. The images were recorded with the white balance set to daylight and the f-stop at 8.0. Since the Canon is a zoom, I set it to 21mm to mimic the focal length of the Zeiss prime, which is fixed at 21mm.

Starting at the left, look at the first two image slices below. The slices represent the original images that were captured by my Canon 5D Mark II. As the labels indicate, the Zeiss image is on the left and the Canon image is in the center. Even without clicking on the image to see more detail, you can plainly see the problem. The Canon-based image has a garish purple fringe around the crocus petal that I can assure you does not exist in life. As shown in the image inset, at lower resolution you cannot see the fringe. But at a 400% magnification as shown below, or even 100%, the fringing is quite evident and would need to be addressed if the image is to be printed in a large format.

Chromatic aberration screaming on the Canon 17-40mm f/4.0L

The Zeiss-based image contained no chromatic aberration whatsoever. I also noticed that the overall image is “warmer” than the Canon image and contained a much richer spectrum of color and contrast. Frankly, this result should not be all that astonishing. The Zeiss lens is a prime lens. Primes are known to exhibit higher image quality than zooms. And, at over $1,000 more than the Canon, the Zeiss should be better!

So what if you don’t want to pop another grand for the Zeiss? Well there are options. If you shoot your images in RAW format, which I highly recommend, you can use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plugin to remove the Lion’s share of the chromatic aberration in images. ACR works in tandem with Adobe Photoshop and other image software programs like Adobe Lightroom to help you “develop” Camera RAW images.

ACR contains lens profiles that can be selected to correct for optical and chromatic distortion. As you can see in the image below, I was able to remove the chromatic aberration in the Canon-based image by simply selecting “Enable Lens Profile Correction” in the Lens Correction tab in ACR. ACR automatically picked the right lens and applied the profile correction!

Correcting chromatic aberration with Adobe Camera RAW

Despite the miracle of ACR, I still prefer shooting with the Zeiss lens to control chromatic aberration. Simply put, I would rather start my post-processing workflow with the cleanest image possible. Although ACR does a great job of correcting for chromatic aberration, the base image still suffers a loss in quality. If you look closely, the remnants of the purple fringing are still present in a desaturated form. There is a light grey outline around the petal. Now look at the petal in the Zeiss-based image. There is a much nicer and color-rich transition between the background and the petal. Plus, the overall color representation is much more pleasant in my opinion.

Ok, I know I am splitting hairs here but that is part of the fun for me. I am interested in the entire process of photography. Sure, making great photographs starts with the eye of the photographer, but it cannot be denied that the quality of the equipment and post processing techniques carry a fair amount of weight in the the final quality of the photograph being made.

March Painting Challenge Photo

You have arrived upon the gallery submissions for the March 2012 ADNW painting challenge. Past challenges and associated galleries can be found by clicking the “Painting Challenge” tab at the top of the home page. Thanks to all that submit their work!

Please take the time to click on the artist’s name and visit their website. Words of encouragement are powerful sources of inspiration!

(Click painting for larger image)

Horst Hittenberger - Visit website

Rajalekshmy Usha - Visit website

Mico - Visit website

Sylvia Young - Visit website

Nancie Johnson - Visit website

Janeen Nance - Visit website

March Painting Challenge Photo

Simplified March Painting Challenge Photo

Let’s try something different for March. I am giving you two photos work work from. One is an original photo and the other has been digitally simplified to give you some ideas about how to simplify the subject matter. I sometimes use this method to help me sort through the clutter. Look at the trees for instance. I think the simplified version provides a reasonably accurate method of simplifying them. My personal preference for this painting would be to apply detail around the boat house and render the remaining portions in a more abstract way. That’s just me though. I really look forward to seeing how you handle this challenge for yourself!

This beautiful scene is located in France’s Loire Valley in the village just outside the Chateau of Azay Le Rideau.

Please use the form below to submit your painting. Your picture should be a high-quality jpg image that is at least 480 pixels along its longest dimension at 72 pixels per inch.

Please tweet or post to Facebook using the buttons at the top if you like this challenge. It would be awesome to get more folks in the gallery!

DOWNLOAD the Original Challenge Photos (2,000 pix for your painting pleasure)
DOWNLOAD the Simplified Challenge Photos (2,000 pix for your painting pleasure)

Thanks as always for participating,
Lee

Click here to see the gallery of submissions for this month

Copyright notice: This photo may be used to create derivative works in the form of drawings or paintings. The photo may not be used in any other commercial or non-commercial form without permission.

Hallett Peak (left) and Flattop Mountian (right) as seen from the frozen Dream Lake

Photo details:
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L, ISO100, f/8.0, 1/640th, handheld)

I could not wait to share some details about our awesome President’s Day weekend adventure snowshoeing in Rocky Mountain National Park. As fate would have it, a long time friend owns a house in Estes Park, which is right on the doorstep of Colorado’s own Rocky Mountain National Park. With accommodations and good company in tow, Donna and I threw the camera gear and snowshoes in the car and headed out for a weekend surrounded by 360 degrees of natural beauty.

Beautiful it was and the weather was fantastic, making the whole trip that much more fun. Average temperatures during our hikes was around 30 degrees Fahrenheit. The balmy temps, combined with the exertion of hiking uphill to just over 10,000 feet, motivated us to shed our down coats and stuff them in our packs!

All of pictures you see here except the one directly below are from our second day of snowshoeing in the park. The first day, we hiked to Mills Lake, which was a six-mile round trip with a 700 foot vertical gain. Unfortunately, the orientation of the sun and the time of day prevented me from making satisfactory pictures. The sun was very harsh, causing a good dose of flare through my lenses. Despite the less than ideal shooting conditions, we still had a great time. In fact, it left us wanting more.

Mills Lake - Less than ideal shooting condiitons

Compare the shot of Mills Lake immediately above with the one of Dream Lake at the very top of the post. The sun at Dream Lake was off to the left at about 45 degrees and the sky was nice and blue with a few clouds thrown in for good measure. This, in my view, creates a much more pleasant balance of light and shadow, allowing colors to and detail to come through. In the less than ideal photo conditions of Mills Lake directly above, the sun is high and behind the mountain, creating very harsh contrasts between the light and shadow. When you are out shooting, constantly look at the quality of light and determine how you can capitalize on it to make nice photographs.

Snowshoeing to Emerald Lake via Dream Lake

The hike highlighted in today’s post is a relatively easy one. In the summer, the hike from the Bear Lake parking area to Emerald Lake can be very busy. It is only 1.8 miles one way and you only have to climb a modest 600 feet over that distance to get there. Fortunately, most folks are fair weather hikers, which made our winter snowshoeing adventure a less crowded. Everyone we saw though was very polite and quite happy to be out among nature, letting folks by when traffic increased.

Donna (middle) and friends making their way up to Dream Lake

The trail all the way to the lakes was fairly well packed so we could have gotten away with shorter snowshoes, or even crampons for that matter. My shoes, which are 30 inches long, work best in deeper snow but also perform well on a packed trail. We did venture off into the powder from time to time for fun where the longer snowshoes came in handy. I would not recommend doing a winter hike like this without something on your feet to gain purchase into the snow. The cleats on the bottom of the snowshoes are great for maintaining a steady footing in almost any condition we encountered.

Snowshoeing across Dream Lake toward Emerald Lake

After meandering the trail among the trees for a while, we finally met the big reveal of Dream Lake. What an awesome view! This time of year, the lake is frozen over, making it easy to walk across to reach our final destination at Emerald Lake. If you have a concern about whether the lakes are safe to walk across, just ask a ranger at the trail head and they will be glad to give you sound advice.

Cresting the last hill to Emerald Lake

A short distance after crossing Dream Lake, we climbed a little more and finally reached Emerald Lake. Here, there were even fewer folks around, making it a great spot to drop our packs and indulge in a small lunch. Below are me and my better half posing for a photo. The lake, which sits at 10,800 feet above sea level, is down behind us just beyond the trees.

Me and Donna at our destination on Emerald Lake

As we sat an had our lunch on the frozen banks of Emerald Lake, the Clark’s Nutcracker below flew over with a couple of Grey Jays and politely asked for peanuts. I have seen Scrub Jays at our house in Monument at 7300ft but no Grey Jays or Clark’s Nutcrackers. According to my Peterson’s Field Guide, the Clark’s Nutcracker is typically found in the high mountains around conifers at tree line. Sounds like he is exactly where he should be!

A Clark's Nutcracker looking for peanuts at Emerald Lake

I plan to go back up to the lakes when the they thaw but before the snow completely melts. To make nice photographs I often have to visit a place more than once. Besides the effect of ever changing seasons, it is nice to document how the light behaves for subsequent attempts to make the best photograph possible.