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.)
I had a number of interesting candidates for this month’s wallpaper image but this one resonated the most for a couple of reasons. First it’s just a fun fall photo and second, it was taken at Camp Wabasso during the 2009 Girl Scout Great Escape. Betsy and her friends are there again this weekend for the 2010 Great Escape (enduring even heavier rain than last year) and I thought of them when this popped up in Lightroom. I’m pretty sure I’ve used this photograph on this blog before but felt it was right for representing October.
If you like this image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:
Download the 1024×768 version here.
While up in New Hampshire I visited with my friends Peter and Marty Hurley who have a place in the Lake Sunapee area. It was a pretty dreary evening but Peter offered me a tour of some local viewing spots and I was happy to accept. Sadly no bursts of light onto the landscape, but the autumn colors were beginning to show.
This is a 9 segment panorama looking towards Lake Sunapee. That’s Sunapee Mountain on the left – you can see the ski trails. I placed the leftmost tree so that it lined up with the radio tower on the mountain directly behind it. I understand that if you have $600,000 burning a hole in your pocket, you could own this view (there’s a well in one of the foreground bushes).
Peter and Marty have a wonderful Japan-inspired garden, complete with bridges designed and built by Peter. They have a little online tour if you are interested.
Technical Stuff….
Captures: Canon 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm f/2.8L lens set at 32mm, exposure: 1/13 sec at f/16, ISO 200. Expose to the right technique was used — not all that hard considering how flat the light was.
Processing: Lightroom used to set consistent white balance for the segments and then exported to 16-bit TIFF / ProPhoto colorspace. Stitched with the Photoshop merge automation gizmo. (I used to be able to do this directly from Lightroom, but for some reason that stopped working recently. Not sure what’s going on there.) Resulting stitched image imported into Lightroom where a variety of tweaks were applied:
Because the original files were intentionally exposed slightly higher than you normally would, the exposure was dropped by 2/3rds of a stop to bring the overall brightness back to “reality”.
Dust spot removal was particularly fun because 1 dust spot on the sensor = 9 in the panorama — and I had 4 or 5 spots to clean up… Ugh!
A 1/4 stop graduated filter was added to darken the sky slightly and, since Lightroom can do multiple things in those filters, I also lowered the contrast (-52) – which, somewhat counterintuitively, provides more definition to the clouds.
