David Griffin Photography » Environment

May 2012 Wallpaper

Dave — Wed, 09 May 2012 22:41:05 +0000

I know, it’s almost a third through May already… Hey, it has been a busy month with more madness ahead.

I started up the pond last week and was rewarded with watching one of the local Orioles take a bath. This year they are numerous and quite vocal. Here’s a shot from a couple of years ago at our pond.

If you like the above image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop or tablet wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here. (Perfect for your iPad)

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Technical Stuff: Canon 40D, 500mm f/4. Processed with Lightroom 4 – basic exposure and sharpening – nothing fancy.

April 2012 Wallpaper

Dave — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:07:41 +0000

Two years ago this April we we’re listening to the river pounding its way through our backyard (and part of our shoreline was, bit by bit, relocated to Concord). Two years later and we’re in a bit of a drought. I pulled this image from 2006, when the weather conditions were a bit similar. Instead of a “Spring Freshet” we have a babbling brook…

If you like the above image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop or tablet wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here. (Perfect for your iPad)

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Technical stuff:

Canon 1D Mark II, 24-70mm f/2.8 at 24mm and f/18. 8 second exposure. ISO 100. (filtering not recorded, likely a polarizer)

Processed with Lightroom 4: Moderate contrast enhancement, dust spot removal and some clever tweaking to hide some drops of water on the lens (one removed by cropping, see if you can “spot” the other spot.)

March 2012 Wallpaper

Dave — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:25:15 +0000

March arrived hear like a lion (it’s still snowing as I write this) but until yesterday it felt a lot like Spring here and I suspect that feeling will return soon enough.

This is a photograph of Nashoba Brook in Acton taken a couple of years ago. There is a small mill building next to the brook — perhaps a pencil mill (they used to make pencils along the brook).

I’ll use this opportunity to also plug an upcoming film festival — OARS, our local river stewardship organization, is hosting the Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival on Wednesday, March 7th at the Fine Arts Theater in Maynard. Come to town, grab a little dinner before or after, and enjoy a wide range of short films featuring people working to raise awareness of our environment. To learn more and reserve tickets (this show often sells out) visit the OARS website.

If you like the above image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop or tablet wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here. (Perfect for your iPad)

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Technical stuff:

Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70mm f/2.8 at 24mm and f/16. 1/8 second exposure. ISO 1600. (filtering not recorded, likely a polarizer)

Processed with Lightroom 3: this is a pseudo-HDR image: essentially compressing the shadows and highlights and stretching out the mid tones. The goal was to keep the shadows of the stream while not losing detail in the trees/sky. Consequently a fair amount of fill light and black point to restore contrast, clarity +44, vibrance -21, saturation -15 (restoring something closer to natural color saturation). A bit of dodging was done in the lower left-corner for this rendition so the calendar wouldn’t be lost amongst the rocks.

Barred Owl at ARNWR

Dave — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:48:36 +0000

I had posted a quick snapshot this beautiful bird on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, but forgot to post the edited version here. We were leaving the Assabet River NWR and spotted this fellow on a fencepost just off of the driveway. We backed up slowly and it hung around while I contorted myself to get the camera out of the back of the car. Shot a few seconds of video as well (just propped on the car window). After admiring and photographing for a few minutes we left him/her in peace to find dinner.

Technical: Canon 7D, 70-200mm f/2.8L at 200mm, 1/320 at f2.8, ISO 16oo, semi-handheld. Lightroom 3: tiny bit of fill, clarity +20, aggressive sharpening/masking, dodged the eyes a smidge, burned the background 0.7 stop just to pop the subject a bit more.

February 2012 Wallpaper

Dave — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:39:40 +0000

When did February arrive? Where did January go? Yikes!

Here’s an image taken a couple of weeks ago in the backyard. Not a big departure from January’s I admit but I can’t help stare at water…

If you like the above image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop or tablet wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here. (Perfect for your iPad)

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Technical stuff:

Canon 5D Mark II, 100-400mm f/4.5 at f/9 and 250mm. 0.6 second exposure. ISO 160. (0.9 ND and polarizing filter)

Processed with Lightroom 3: bit of fill light and black point, clarity +43, vibrance +0. (And I just noticed some dust spotting might have been useful… sigh!)

Sudbury River Sunrise

Dave — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:04:49 +0000

Didn’t get out last Wednesday (the weather was pretty awful) and the previous week’s exploration yielded little in the way of images but I did continue my weekly attempt to photograph something new – in this case the Sudbury River in Sudbury (not far off of Route 27). Nothing special here, especially considering what I could have done yesterday with the wonderful fog we had — but unfortunately the business of having a business prevented me from getting anywhere near a camera until long after the sun burned off all of the good stuff… Sigh.

Anyways, in a rush to get out of the house I forgot to bring my graduated neutral density filters (and my hat) so when this scene began to present itself I had to go to “plan B”. Consequently these first two images are HDR composites from 3 separate exposures. I wasn’t sure if I liked the B&W version better so I posted both here. Other than the HDR, which manages to keep the dark ice and the brilliant rising sun all within the exposure range, little was done to the image beyond the usual tonal tweaking.

I’m not what you’d call an expert with the HDR tools, but I’m still trying to figure out if the halo around the trees is an optical illusion or a processing artifact. When I zoom into the image in Lightroom, I don’t see the halo… Something to ponder on a rainy day…

A rising sun doesn’t give you much time to find good photographs. The image below is the first of a few exposures I made trying to capture the warm glow of the sun rising on the ice. Unfortunately by the time I managed to get a better composition lined up the sun was too bright and lacks the warmth and evenness that this, admittedly uninspiring, version does — but it’s always a challenge to race the sun.

Ice Hats

Dave — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:36:26 +0000

A quick study from this morning on the relationship of rock, ice and water…

Just missed it!

Dave — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:21:38 +0000

Taking a break from an editing session I walked into the kitchen to get a drink and saw what is a very rare sight in our neck of the woods: a nice sunset. The only problem was the good part was probably about 5 minutes before I saw it. I grabbed a camera that had a lens attached and a tripod (taking no time to find a jacket, but the weather here is back to unseasonably mild), ran out to the river and grabbed a few exposures.

Oh to have been there a few minutes earlier with another lens or two in hand! There are so many good photographs hiding in these frames…

Anyway, as Dewitt Jones says, celebrate what nature gives you – and I do. So here’s a little “fire on the water” from our little corner of the world.

You might be asking “No sunsets?”. Nope. I live right next to a river and, for all it’s beauty when you are next to a river you are, by definition, at the bottom of a valley. To the west from where we are the land rises up, so the sun drops below the horizon a good 30 minutes before it “sets”. Only when the clouds are in the right configuration do we get anything resembling color in our sunsets — and believe me that doesn’t happen very often (like maybe a couple of times a year at the level that these photos are at). Over the past 8 or 9 years I think I only have one other set of images with similar conditions. And now you know why I wish I was thirsty a few minutes earlier!

Sudbury River – Cold Winter Morning

Dave — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:43:57 +0000

Now that I’ve begun my photography project for 2012, the temperatures suddenly drop to around 10 degrees F… Sigh!

January 2012 Wallpaper

Dave — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:22:15 +0000

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a “typical” photograph of January here in Massachusetts. Today we took our grandson to a nearby playground with temperatures close to 50 degrees (F). Last year we were buried in snow and in 2009 we were in the single digits with the temperatures dropping below zero a few days later…

So here’s a mixture of water and ice of the Assabet River flowing through our backyard, “way back” in 2005. Even with all of that ice, you can see a little green below the water’s surface – a reminder that Spring is coming.

My best wishes to you and yours for a great 2012. My goal is to have a lot more photography posted here this year – perhaps not all of it that great, but I need to work on getting out more and so I’ve decided to focus on the Sudbury and Concord Rivers this year (in addition to my usual haunts). Of course the wallpapers will continue.

Happy New Year,

Dave Griffin

If you like the above image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop or tablet wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:

Download the 1024×768 version here. (Perfect for your iPad)

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Technical stuff:

Canon 1D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L at (gulp) f/25 and 90mm. 1 second exposure. ISO 100. (Almost certainly a polarizing filter — just looking at the water.)

Processed with Lightroom 3: bit of fill light and black point to bring out the subsurface details, clarity +30, vibrance +20, masked sharpening, and plenty of dust spotting.