Going with the Flow

An image can still be good, sometimes you just can't force it.  That's what occured with this photo, shown in two flavors below.   I'd done some street shots, late in the evening - essentially after the sun was down - at Boise's Basque Festival (Boise has a large Basque population and has a festival each year) and did some post-processing to cleanup the images.

I do most of my post-processing with Adobe Lightroom, which is a great cataloge application, which also contains a lot of powerful editing features.  If you don't need to do multiple layer work, you may never need Photoshop.  I like to have several programs, since I usually find things that one does better than the others (or exclusively).   I'm also playing with Topaz's suite of applications like "Adjust" and "DeNoise", and will probably get a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements one of these days.

Both Lightroom and Adjust have presets built-in, and you can find a wide variety of presets on the Web, which makes your workflow a lot faster.   I frequently make my own from scratch or based on other presets that might be close but not quite perfect for a particular photo (or batch of them taken at the same time, in similar conditions).

On to the photos - the light was low and I was using Shutter-Priority and Auto-Iso which caused the ISO scaled up to 1600, and with an f2.8 lens, I was still able to get a decent shot without using Flash.   One thing I don't like about my Canon EOS 50D is the higher noise it seems to generate at these ISO's (even at 400 ISO, I have to do more cleanup than I'd like, and sometimes at even lower ISOs - but once cleaned up, I get some very sharp images most of the time).   I attempted to take the noise out of this photo, but there was enough noise that it didn't look that great, so in "Going with the Flow", I used some Lightroom presets and made them into more classic-looking street scenes.

Here's the exposure info:


Canon EOS 50D
Tamron 17-50mm
ISO 1600
1/500 @f2.8 (+2EV)
Shot at 21mm and cropped.

Boise - Basque Festival 2010

Boise - Basque Festival 2010

The Many Faces of Zoey

On a recent trip to Idaho, Zoey the cat friended me.  Not in the somewhat impersonal way of Twitter, Facebook, et al, but rather every time I walked by her as she sat in her spot on one of the side counters, she'd stick her head out and want some lovin'.   

It's funny, I've never been particularly attracted to cats, partly stemming from allergies to them from time to time, but they always seem to like me, and I've grown more fond of them as I've gotten older.  They certainly are one of the most photogenic subjects around.  Zoey has a beautiful face and eyes.

Captured these with my EOS 50D, Tamron 70-200 f2.8 zoom, handheld.  Processed with some favorite Lightroom presets to give some sightly different looks.  I like them all, really.  

Motion

Sometimes a little blur can bring more out in a photo. The backyard was fairly dark, so I had a fairly low shutter speed, ranging from 1/4-1/60th of a second, but it captured the motion perfectly.

Equipment:

- Canon EOS 50D
- Tamron 90mm f2.8 Macro (doubles nicely as a medium-reach portrait lens on a crop-frame camera)
- No flash, which caused the slower shutter speed and motion blur. Using flash would have been too static for these shots.

Oh, and I updated my site header and the colors of the site, using a custom template I got from a template site. The site header photo is a texture shot that I just took in Yellowstone National Park - I don't remember which geyser basin offhand but it had some incredible colors and textures.