Photoblog 2.0

Strawberry Fields, photo by Harold Davis.

Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout.
Strawberry fields forever.

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out, it doesn’t matter much to me.
Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout.
Strawberry fields forever.

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can’t you know tune in but it’s all right, that is I think it’s not too bad.
Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout.
Strawberry fields forever.

Always, no sometimes, think it’s me, but you know I know when it’s a dream.
I think I know I mean a ’yes’ but it’s all wrong, that is I think I disagree.
Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout.
Strawberry fields forever.
Strawberry fields forever.

Julian found this strawberry in our garden–probably among the last of our harvest for a couple of months, but still great to be eating from our garden’s bounty in mid-November.

First I photographed it, then I ate it!

Lily Sea Anemone, photo by Harold Davis.

This photo and the one below remind me of an alien landscape, or perhaps of a lily forest!

Sun and Golden Gate 1, photo by Harold Davis.

The sun was setting behind the Golden Gate Bridge. I was on Indian Rock, with my camera on a tripod and my new 70-200mm zoom.

For this photo, I double-processed the Raw image as I explained in an earlier story.

The photo below used my 2X teleconverter to achieve a 400mm focal length (or 600mm after multiplying by 1.5 to get a 35mm equivalence). It’s pretty much straight as I saw it, without much post-processing other than the standard levels and sharpening stuff.

Here’s what the scene looked like a little after the sun had gone down behind the bridge:

Above Us Only Sky, photo by Harold Davis.

Imagine there’s no heaven,
It’s easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today…

When I looked through my fisheye lens at this scene, it instantly reminded me of the lyrics from the John Lennon song Imagine: “Above us only sky.”

What a wonderful way to end the day, lying up and watching the clouds, above us only sky.

Pretty Close Lily, photo by Harold Davis.

When you look at things close enough, they become another country–like this decorative lily petal. Are they bumps, or hills and craters? Or an abstraction?

Here’s another close view of this lily:

Storm over the Golden Gate, photo by Harold Davis.

I made a point of picking up Nicky at Step One today, even though Sarah (our nanny) could have done so. Nicky has been making it clear that he’d like a little more time with me.

Nicky’s pre-school, Step One, is hard by the top of the coastal range a/k/a the Berkeley hills. As Nicky and I happily strolled down to the car, looking out over the Bay, I saw storm and rain lash across the city and the compete with the sun over the Golden Gate.

“Nicky,” I asked him, “Do you mind if I stop by the house and grab my camera kit before we do our fun thing together?”

“I don’t mind, Daddy,” he said, “But I’ll wait in the car. After you take your pictures, buy me a cookie.”

It was a deal. We went to Indian Rock. I photographed the oncoming storm. Nicky made friends with a stranger, Elizabeth, who helped him examine the contents of the puddles on top of Indian Rock.

Here’s the storm reaching the city:

Golden Gate Sunset, photo by Harold Davis.

Heading home from a meeting yesterday afternoon, I looked up to see a wonderful sunset sky.

When I pulled into the garage, I ran upstairs and grabbed my photo kit. From our roof, we used to get an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge, but not anymore. Trees have grown up so you can see part of the bridge, but not all of it.

Disappointed, I went back downstairs without taking a single picture. Company was coming over for dinner, and a frazzled Phyllis had just got off the exercise machine. I helped her unload the dishwasher, all the while “sniffing” the incredible light outside.

Finally she said, “Why don’t you try Indian Rock. Don’t forget, our guests will be here in half an hour.”

I drove over to Indian Rock, about ten minutes away. It was getting darker. I had trouble finding a parking place.

I climbed the rock, carrying my big VR zoom lens in its own bag. On top, someone cheerily called out to me, “You are ten minutes too late!”

Oh, well! I think I was just on time. The photos above and below were processed twice from the Raw. Bottom exposures and top exposures were put together using layer masks and a gradient, as I explained in my last post.

Bay Light, photo by Harold Davis.

It rained hard over night, but this morning it looked like it was going to clear.

On the morning drop-the-kids-off-at-school run, I grabbed some photo gear. After dropping Nicky off, the view from Grizzly was great. I wanted to stop and take some pictures, but Phyllis said we didn’t have time, so she dropped me off to do my thing–with plans to pick me up on her way back from dropping off Julian.

A fresh wind was blowing the cloud cover away and it was cold–but as you can see, very beautiful.

I double-processed the Raw image for this photo, exposing it once for the sky and once for the foreground. I combined the two partial photos using a layer mask and the gradient tool, as explained in a nifty new book by Rob Sheppard Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only.

Double processing means opening the RAW image twice, in this example once for the sky and once for the landscape. Each time you open it, you can expose it properly for the subject (the hills have a quite different exposure value from the sky).

The two open images are the same size and can easily be combined, best with a layer mask, resulting in a final image with a greater range of exposure values than would normally be possible in a single shot.

Native Morning Glory, photo by Harold Davis.

These wonderful bush morning glories are California natives. Of course, they are small and fragile flowers.

I photographed them over the weekend in the Tilden Park Botanic Garden. The kids were running around like wild kids, my camera with macro lens and extension tubes were on the tripod, and it was hard to have the patience to wait for a lull in the breeze amid the cacophonic cries of “Daddy, Daddy!”

Still, you got to love glory morning or evening in whatever form it comes!

Bridge Beneath, photo by Harold Davis.

I like this photo of the Golden Gate Bridge–because it’s from an unusual angle. Unless you are on a boat, you can’t normally see underneath the bridge.

This photo is the last I’ll post for a while in a series of entries about photographing the bay and bridge from a catamaran using my new 70-200 VR Zoom lens. I took Phyllis, my wife, and Julian (my eight year old) on the trip, and as Phyllis said, “There are four of us here, you, me, Julian, and that lens.”

The other posts in this series include:

• X Marks the Spot
• I’m Being Followed by a Bridge Shadow
• What a Wonderful Bay!
• Bridge Shadow

Regarding the AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 G IF-ED (to give the lens its mouthful of a moniker), here’s my description from the post that I originally discussed it in:

This is a preposterously expensive, heavy, big, and magnificent lens. If I saw a photographer strutting down the street sporting it on their Nikon dSLR, I’d think they were compensating for something.

I still think this is essentially correct. Even apart from the cost, this isn’t a lens for everything or everybody. For example, I wouldn’t want to take it backpacking.

In terms of weight and size, according to the specs it is about three pounds and about 9″ long–although it seems longer and heavier to me. It’s got four toggle switches on the lens barrel: to set focus to manual, to control the auto focus range, to turn VR off and on, and to set the VR mode (there’s a special VR mode for panning from a vehicle). Folks, you’ll have to read the lens documentation to use this one (and who actually ever even looks at those things, normally).

Ken Rockwell has a very thorough review of this lens posted, which helps to place it in the context of other Nikon versions of their 70-200mm zoom lens.

It is awesomely sharp, and the vibration reduction feature does seem to work well, as you can see in all these pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge taken from a very moving sail boat on choppy water.

Downsides: besides cost, size and weight I’m a little unhappy that vibration reduction should be turned off when you put it on a tripod. Also, both automatic focusing and automatic metering don’t seem to work very well when the lens is coupled with the Nikon 20E 2X telextender (supposedly designed for this lens). Sharpness when combined with the telextender also leaves something to be desired.

Still, I think I can compensate for the exposure and focus issues at extreme focal ranges.

So how expensive is the lens? Count on paying at least $1600.00 (this price may take a bit of haggling) less any rebates Nikon is offering (currently $150.00).

It was fun the other day playing with the kids and my new zoom lens with vibration reduction! Here are some of the photos:

You can see a larger version of my favorite photo in this series in an early blog entry.

Golden Gate Freighter, photo by Harold Davis.

It’s a wonderful day, I mean a wonderful Bay, I live near–with its great, always changing light, clouds, and wonderful hills…how great it is to photograph!

Bridge Shadow 3, photo by Harold Davis.

I previously blogged a photo I took of this incredible shadow on the clouds off the Golden Gate Bridge tower.

These pictures were taken from the Adventure Cat using my new vibration reduction zoom lens with a polarizer. I think the shadows look like a cosmic ladder of some sort!

So many photos in this set, it is hard for me to know which to post, but these are a couple more of my favorites!

Under the Bridge 3, photo by Harold Davis.

I’m excited about these pictures from under the Golden Gate Bridge because the angle is unusual–and the patterns are interesting!

Weaver, photo by Harold Davis.

Before the kids left for school this morning, Julian found this spider on the backyard play structure.

I got the spider to crawl onto a leaf, while Julian ran into the house for a jar.

Once inside the jar, the spider started spinning.

Julian wanted to take the spider to school for show-and-tell, but I preempted him with photographer’s privilege!

In order to get the spider to stay still enough to photograph with my 105mm macro and 6X worth of extension tubes, I had to put the jar in the freezer for a while–elicting murmurs of sympathy from Phyllis for the poor spider until she actually saw what the spider looked like up close.

What I like about these pictures is that you can actually see the spider weaving and spinning, and the thread the spider is hanging on to.