Dean's Light Box

Warning: Graining Images Will Soon Be Commonplace

As a long-time user of Adobe Lightroom, I decided it was time to try the Lightroom 3 beta.  Wow.  I'm impressed.  But be warned, you will probably start to see a lot more images with simulated film grain like this because Lightroom 3 has this new feature:

  

I get a kick out of this feature because most people that get way into digital photography pay lots of extra money to get a camera that doesn't produce "noisy" or grainy images.  Now we have software that can add it back and make it look like you're using some of that old, ISO 1000 film.

But aside from all of that, the new version is refreshingly faster.  Quite a lot faster.  And, the vignette features are improved too--the old post-crop vignettes often made images look dirty or muddy around the edges.  Now it is more subtle and you have a few choices as to how you want it applied: Giving preference to highlights or to color.

Slideshows can now be exported as videos.  Nice!  Some of you are probably thinking, "It didn't do that already?!"  And that would be a good point on your part.  Nevertheless, now we've got video slideshows which I will gladly take.

It also looks like they've improved the integration with online photo sites like flickr and, with a plug-in, Smugmug.  I'm hoping all I have to do is select the photos and then click the Smugmug button.  That would be cool.

But still, the biggest feature is how quickly you can get things done now with the performance improvements.  The sliders slide so quickly that I nearly slid right off the screen.  Good problem to have.

Autumn in the City, at Last

On my afternoon walk, it occurred to me that the autumn colors are pretty much at their peak down in the city.  So on the way out of work, I stopped at the area where the girls and I enjoyed several lunches this past summer for a couple of shots:

 

Dance Night at the Old Church

DD organized a contra dance that took place at the old church tonight.  Back in the 50s when they built the dam, they moved the church to what is now a state park and then a couple of years ago, renovated it.  Nice venue.

  

Traffic Jam to Tranquility

I left the office at 5 PM. Construction. Gridlock at the intersection leaving the office park. I sat at the front of the line through two green lights and couldn't move. Then I realized that if I went straight through the light rather than turn left to get on the interstate, I could move. More importantly, I could go a couple of miles up Big Cottonwood Canyon and not only escape the traffic madness, but also photograph. This is the result. I feel much better now.

 

Light Painting: Larger Scale

This time we put the same light painting technique to work on a larger scale, both in terms of the subject and the light.  Our primary subject was the tree (probably 12 - 15 feet tall) and I used a largish 6v powered flash light to provide the illumination.  A 30 second exposure ensured that we got the stars and the light on the clouds on the horizon was happily provided by the moon which was preparing to rise above the Uinta Mountains.

 

Happy Halloween

I couldn't help it.  Halloween lends itself so nicely to spooky lighting so we just had to do more light painting.  EV did a very nice job designing the face for our jack-o-lantern and also made an impressive haunted mansion:

  

 

Light Painting: Rocking Chair Detail

One more light painting for now and I promise to move on to some other things for a while.  This time a little detail of the rocking chair that DD's folks gave us when we got married:

 

Light Painting: DD's Books

Tonight we had a go at light painting DD's books.  I changed things up a little because the room with the books was not totally dark.  This time we made a 15 second exposure at f/22:

 

Light Painting: EV's Drawings

Camera Club last week featured a talk by legendary sports photographer David Black. And while his sports resume is quite impressive, I was most inspired by his more recent work with light painting. The main idea with light painting is to take a long exposure (e.g., 30 seconds) in the dark and "paint" in the details you want to highlight with a focused light source.  In this case, I experimented with DD's tiny flashlight and some of EV's drawings on the floor of the closet.

This closet has also been used for recording podcasts.  I guess closets lend themselves quite nicely to creative pursuits.

  

Not surprisingly, we have an aerospace theme going with EV's art.  And obviously I need a little more practice to get the complete effect but I am pleased with the texture and aged feel this gave the paper.  More to come.

Navitunes

A group of my talented friends at work volunteer at the customer conference each year as entertainment for one of the nights as a band.  They're named the Navitunes (after the name of the company), though I believe this name was imposed on them and is not necessarily their name of choice.  In any case, they make a good cover band with the ability to manage a wide range of genres:

 

I also experimented with a little time-lapse sequence of the band setting up and running through sound-check: