Uvas Canyon

We visited Uvas Canyon State Park near Morgan Hill last Sunday with the Cousins. Was in two minds to go on Sunday as there was an early flight to catch on Monday morning, but went anyways.

We walked around for 5+ hours through the park and covered multiple waterfalls and walked along creeks. It was a very pleasant day and we thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon enjoying nature.

This was my first trip with the Canon 5D Mark II with the L series lens and most importantly the Manfrotto tripod.

The pictures have improved by leaps and bounds compared to the old broken tripod and the 400D + sigma lens combination. Not that those were bad photographs but yours truly has learned a lot of tricks since that trip two years ago..

Here are a few pictures.. (the second and fourth Images are HDR composites of 5 images taken at -2.0, -1.0, 0, +1 and +2 Exposures respectively and then tone adjusted in Photoshop)

Seriously thinking of getting a photo site..

Any suggestions?

A trip to Sausalito

Last weekend we decided to drive to Sausalito, thanks to NPR. Apparently the storm had moved over the bay area and it was supposed to be an extremely good visibility day to see the golden gate bridge and also the road down to Sausalito was going to be kept open over the weekend.

So off we drove and had a great time. Got to take some pictures of the bridge, then the kids spent two hours at the Kids discovery museum and we ended up driving around the cute downtown in Sausalito and had some great food at a Nepalese restaurant called "Taste of the Himalayas"

It was an afternoon well spent with something for everyone in the family!

A few photographs from the trip.

Separate posts on the museum trip and tiffin experience later...

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Pu'ahi crater

Before..

After edits

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First Portrait touchup attempt

After going through many a Photoshop video tutorial on how to make any woman look like Aishwarya Rai, decided to use those techniques to make my Angels look their best.

Wishing one and all a belated Tamil New Years day!

We had some nice food today (all done by San with no help from me) and after going through what has been a series of unfortunate events between the little one's cold and fever and my intestinal infection, went for Yoga after almost two weeks!

Was very weak but still managed to stay put the 90 minutes and do all the poses and came home to eat some good food without having to think of side effects or consequences. It has been a curd rice, bread, milk and gatorade routine for two weeks. Now that is behind us.. back to photoshop!

Here is the yummy vadai that San made in all its glory!

The girls were dressed up today to celebrate New year and clicked a snap. Then decided to play with it for more than an hour..

Raw Image from Camera..

After almost an hour of playing with it..

remove dark circles under eyes - Check
smooth skin tones - Check
whiten teeth - check
sharpen eyes - check
make jewels sparkle - check
eyebrows - check
hair lighting - check
background - double check!

Needless to say, more practice is required to perfect portrait touching up. For a first attempt happy to just be able to transform images without making it look way too artificial.

The Tamil New year in this house has started on a good note.. Wishing everyone good health and prosperity in the year ahead

இனிய தமிழ் புத்தாண்டு நல் வாழ்த்துக்கள்!

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More from the tide pools..

Double processed to bring out the glow!

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