A photograph can only do so much justice..

It was a great idea to go work today instead of doze off at home. No pills, visited the hot room and now feeling a lot better. 

So the thought of visiting those 3000 odd photos from last week came to mind. 

After spending 2 hours on just 6 photos calling it a night.

At the end of the day a photograph even if done in Photorealistic HDR doesn't recapture the wonder of Death Valley!

This one photo below is of the Ubehebe crater. This is a composite of 7 shots stiched together. The individual shots were taken at 17mm in portrait format on a Canon 17-40mm L lens using a ND filter in manual mode with manual focus, then cropped and adjusted. I tried pulling the whole thing off with auto exposure bracketed shots in HDR and that did not work. Guess even my Mac quits at some point..

Sure there are not that many pictures like this of Ubehebe out there. We are on a rim of a crater which is around 100 feet! you get a feel for the size of this by looking at the people on the right edge.

The ND filter kit was part of the birthday present specially for this trip. Made a big mistake. Like a person who wears spectacles for the first time forgeting the specs at odd places, I left the ND filter kit on the crater rim. 

If you happen to read this blog and fate has it that you were on that crater rim between 11/21 or thereafter and you happen to have found it.. please email me.. 

Was almost in tears when we realized this at our next stop later that evening. By that time we had already driven a good 60 miles away from the crater and visiting it again in hopes of recovering filter kit was moot!

There were few good shots with the filter in the 24 hours of use like this sunset over the freeway. We didn't realize the sun sets before 4:30 in death valley! A lot earlier than the previous day when we were out of the valley. The valley is below sea level and the lowest point in the US is right here.. should have expected that!

or this one from Mosaic canyon..

These two photos en-route to Darwin falls at Panamint area..

and finally a butterfly that was everywhere in the desert.. they were even there in the salt flats. Don't know how they survive the harsh environment. 

Learned one more thing in the editing process. The canon photo stitch utility does not work on photos taken at 17mm! So figured out how to stitch them in Photoshop. Starting to really love Photoshop now. For all that Adobe hating because of Flash Player.. there is a new found love for Adobe because of CS5!

More photos tomorrow...

Finished Bangles

San is sick and that meant engaging the kids "quietly". When faced with such challenges, daddy always capitualates to doing whatever the kids want in order to satisfy the "quietness spec".

We finished the Banlges project in a little under 2 hours. 

Here is the final result in HDR..

It is sunny outside but downright chilly to the point where we might be starting serial art projects today.

Here is to a happy Deepavali to everyone!

My darling daughters, may Art, Math and Science light up your life the way the diwali lights and firecrakers light up dark and cold November nights! 

One of my favorite subjects

The Moon..

When we were enroute to Joshua tree last friday, learned that it was a special night. The "blue moon" as it is called is a rarity.

Once in a while there are two full moon days in the month of August and this second full moon in the same month is also refered to as blue moon (However the real blue moon reference was created by the moon becoming blue under a volcanic ash cloud somewhere in Europe in the middle ages.. that I remember from the good old quizzing days in school)

Digressed as usual.. coming to this special moon.. 

Stopped on the side of a freeway exit on Route 5 someplace near Panoche Road and took a bunch of shots with the 70-200mm using the 2x extender. Tried the HDR stuff but it doesn't work. Maybe there are some manual tricks that need to be done to get rid of the blue and red ring that comes up in PHotoshop when using the merge to HDR option.

See for yourself. The default shot is not bad as my family was oohing and aahing over this photograph.

However when you do the HDR merge on three shots you get this..

Granted the detail in the highlights and shadows pop out but the edge is now off. There is a ring around the edge that has blue on one side and red on the other. Have a dozen shots of the moon in sets of three and it happens on all of the triplets no matter what the default setting was with respect to shutter speed or aperture.

f8, f11, f13, f22 all end up with same ring! Does the moon move that much within two seconds to cause this? Technically this was on a stable tripod shot and even if there are miniscule shakes thanks to the trucks on the freeway, the software is supposed to align the moon based on features in the photograph anyways, right? There is not much to align in three photographs which have a moon in the middle of a black background. So what gives?

Have to pore over a few internet pages from expert moon photographers to figure this one out. Not going to get a blue moon anytime soon. But if you know of ways to fix this in HDR, do let me know.