David Griffin Photography » Staring

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.

River Abstracts

Dave — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:45:04 +0000

OK, maybe not true abstracts, but bending in that direction. I spent a bit of time this afternoon looking to do some long-exposure work with the river – in broad daylight…

My goal is to continue to explore the boundary between the surface and what lies below and that requires some interesting lighting conditions and ways of visually working into the water column without getting too wet in the process.

The really cool part of these images, for me, only appears in good-size prints. The water’s surface is inscribed with patterns of light so as you pull back you see what is below but upon closer inspection you can tell that there is a layer of water above (see zoomed inset below).

Technical stuff: Canon 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm f/2.8L, exposure times vary but generally around 10 seconds, f/18 to f/22, ISO 100, 3 stop ND filter stacked with 2 polarizers. I believe the first image was done with the ND filter, polarizer and a 3-stop graduated ND filter running left to right. Lightroom processing varies slightly between images but generally fill +10, black +9, vibrance +5-+15, strong contrast curve. Some of the images pulled down the saturation of the red and orange channels to remove some color casting caused, no doubt, by the mass of filters piled up in front of the lens. (That these photos work in color at all was pretty amazing. I was expecting a lot more skewing of colors.)

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!

Photowalk at Danforth Brook

Dave — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:55:09 +0000

On Saturday I “led” our local meetup group, the Metrowest Photography Collaborative, on a photo walk in nearby Hudson, at the Danforth Falls conservation area. This is one of my favorite local spots to photograph year-round and I enjoyed sharing it with my fellow photographers. Here are a few selections from my short visit there. (I shot a bit of video as well and may put together something in the next few days.)

August 2011 Wallpaper

Dave — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 02:22:55 +0000

As you probably know most of the wallpapers come from my archives, although from time to time I do try to create something new for the upcoming month. I had that in mind for a late July camping trip we made up near the Canadian border in the Great North Woods of New Hampshire. I had several candidates in mind but this one sorta edged the others out…

In this particular case, the photograph was made on August 1st (well perhaps a few minutes before). Unfortunately (?) I was well out of range of the internet so you had to wait until August 2nd to see it… August’s image is the Milky Way setting over Lake Francis in northern New Hampshire.

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, 16-35mm f/2.8L at 16mm, 25 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 1600.
Processed with Lightroom 3, WB 3300K, +1.5 stops, clarity +30, vib -20, lens profile corr, luminance and noise filters.

March 2011 Wallpaper

Dave — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:09:28 +0000

This is one of those “forward looking” images — dreams of a languid ice-out along our local rivers towards the end of March. Exactly one year ago, you might recall, things were a wee bit different (see below)…

Anyhoo, 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.

Blue and Gold

Dave — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:49:07 +0000

A scene from the Concord River in Billerica a couple of years ago (you can tell it’s not this year because there’s not 5 feet of snow on the shoreline). I have to admit that I was a bit let down by how this renders in the browser’s colorspace — the blues are much more vibrant on my monitor in Lightroom. That single leaf trapped in the ice also appealed to me a bit.

Technical: Canon 1D Mark II, 24-70mm f/2.8L at 28mm, 1/125 second, f/13, ISO 200. Filter configuration unrecorded.
Lightroom 3: Lens correction applied, exposure +1/4 stop, fill 48, blacks 35, clarity +37, vibrance +7, sharpened to taste. White balance was set to 6300K – which probably isn’t far off from “reality” (such as it was). This was one of those images where the white balance dramatically affected the intent of the image. Keeping it around 6000K balanced the warmth of the setting sun with the cool ice reflecting the sky.

Stow Stream Scenic

Dave — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 19:12:59 +0000

A tiny stream that feeds the Assabet River in Stow — probably 100 yards from busy Route 62. Sometimes color adds to a scene and some call out for no color — and as I was working through this image the color just kept getting in the way.

Technical: Canon 1D Mark II, 24-70mm f/2.8L at 70mm, 5 seconds, f/16, ISO 100. (Probably a polarizer.)
Lightroom 3: lens profile correction, WB to 9960, Exposure +1/2 stop, fill 60, blacks 19, brightness +65, clarity +25, highlights -45, sharpening 40/0.8/39/14; burned the snow in the lower-right 1/3 stop.

River Abstract 3

Dave — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:56:46 +0000

There’s something about how the shape of the ice seems to radiate out — even though the water is moving right to left — that makes this just interesting enough to share with you all.

Technical: Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L at 150mm, 3-stop ND filter + polarizer, 1/5 second, f/16, ISO 100.
Lightroom 3: Recovery 20, Fill 25, Blacks 20, Clarity +30, Vibrance +43 (brings out the blue in the ice).