MyDigitalDisorder

Balastrea’s photostream

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:15:50 +0000

Testing flickr photostream auto post to blog. I may try to post images to flickr first then share to my blog if this works out. Much easier to post one time and share the link to my Facebook, Twitter and blog rather than post from each individually.

A Bandon Emotion

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:28:05 +0000

Overcast dreary day in Bandon, Oregon. One of my favorite places to take pictures. The lighting this particular day didn’t do me any favors but I think that by using the Rogerspark filter in Lightroom 4 I have created an “Emotion”. It brought new life to this once dreary, flat beach scene.

Lost but not Forgotten

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:38:52 +0000

Back in Sept of ’11, I was driving to an unknown location to find a new place to take some sunset pictures. It was a hazy late afternoon and I was hoping for some really nice pictures. Somehow I ended up on some back roads west of Salem, Oregon and if it wasn’t for my mobile GPS I would have considered myself “lost”. The sun was setting fast and I was getting the feeling that I was never going to find a very good sunset vantage point until I came across this Oak tree on the side of the road. It was across the street from an old farmhouse which I tried to include in my first clicks of the camera, but the images just didn’t look right. I dont think I had the right angle from the road and I didn’t want to wander onto private land, so I pulled a bit closer to this Oak tree and began shooting. I shot several images and by looking at what was apearing on my camera LCD, I was somewhat dissapointed. For some reason they looked nothing like I had envisioned them to look. So as the Sun set further into the horizon I headed home, hoping for another vantage point to shoot before it was too late, but nothing else caught my eye. Once I got home I put my camera back and went about my evening forgetting about the pictures I had taken.

As time went by I took other pictures and made a dent in the 16GB SD card and eventually dumpped the images onto my computer hard drive. Never even going back through all the images I had taken except for maybe the most recent at that time.

So now here it is April of 2012, and I finally broke down a while ago and bought an upgrade to my Photoshop CS2 to CS5 (and downloaded CS6 Beta to play with until they release it and let me upgrade to that for free) and upgraded my Lightroom 3 to Lightroom 4. Since then I have been searching for old images to play with and try some of the new features of the new software. In doing so, I ran across these Oak Tree pics, buried in a RAW folder – That was inside a September 19th 2011 folder – That had images of my youngest daughter playing in a park, which I must have taken earlier that same day. When I pulled them up in Lightroom 4 I remembered the shoot, but wondered for a moment why I had never pulled them up before as within Lightroom 4, many of them were amazing. I hardly had to tweak anything and even left the white balance in the “as shot” mode to keep the stunning warm glow effect that was created. Needless to say I was quite pleased with how these three turned out! So I continue to dig though my zillions of image files looking for more lost masterpieces. Haha

My guess is that I am not the only one who has lost or maybe even misplaced images within the files and folders of their hard drives. May we all find those lost little gems, forgotten or not!

Christmas Ornament Reflection ….. In April?

admin — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 01:36:09 +0000

Not really timely but none the less one of my favorite photos to go back and edit. This time I think I was able to use what was already done years ago, but add a little more “Pop” to it, in Lightroom 4 and some border effects in CS6 beta. Originally the image was taken with my Minolta 4mpx point and shoot that you see mounted on the tripod in the image. The house I lived in at the time, created some great lighting. Now that I have a much better set up, camera wise, the house I live in now does not even come close to the lighting of this place. Someday I would love to try and re-create this idea, but until then I will probably keep coming back to this image for more tweaking.

Photo fun after work

admin — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:19:27 +0000

My 3 year old daughter has a job once a week at Hanna Andersson in Portland, Oregon – trying on clothing their designers have created. A typical day for her would be trying on several different outfits and having her picture taken wearing each one. Some outfits she will keep on longer than others as the designers discuss what alterations might need to made before the final product is approved. She does this for up to an hour once a week. For my daughter this is actually a dream job as she loves to try on clothes. Especially pretty dresses which Hanna Andersson has her try on many. On this particular day my Daughter had picked a favorite dress (*Not a Hanna Andersson*) that she wanted to wear to her “job” as she calls it.

After work … er her “job” we typically walk on over to the coffee shop in Powell’s Books, which is only a couple blocks away and grab a hot coco. Usually on the way over there I have been using my phone camera to take snapshots of my daughter along the way. On this day I happened to have my DSLR and was able to get a couple shots with that. Unfortunately it was rainy (as usual haha) and I didn’t want to keep the camera out of the bag much. But here are some of the results from this day.

The first image was my favorite but I think I might have over done the Pink border. Too wide maybe. But I love the image. I processed it a little in Lightroom 4 and CS6 beta. The second image (Just above) I loved the blurred hands but the face was also a bit blurred so in my attempt to save it I tweaked it much more. Below is the same image only converted to B&W. Which do you like best? I still can’t decide.

2004 revisited

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 05:50:45 +0000

It’s been a long while since I posted anything here. It seems I go in spurts at times. Posting allot then dry spells of several months at a time without anything. I think the thing that has discouraged me the most lately is all the SPAM comments I have been getting. I want to apologize to anyone that has left a legitimate comment here in the past and it has not been approved. It’s just that I get so many bogus comments that to mee seem to have been dropped by bots and not anyone who has actually been here. They remind me of Horoscope readings in the sense that they are so generic and vague. Anyway I thought I would bring back a photo from 2004. I took this back then and may have posted it here before but this time I have used the new Photoshop CS6 to remove an unwanted forest service sign that was in the background of the image and was never able to remove it by cloning manually. This CS6 is absolutely amazing with it’s “Content-Aware” filter. I also used Lightroom 3.6 to make a few other adjustments as well. I quite like the effect that was given but I do admit it may be a bit “over done” to some critics taste.

This was taken somewhere NW of Horseshoe Bend, Idaho while on a family drive exploring.

Sunset Grunge Crossing…

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:25:25 +0000

I was able to sneak away last night even though it wasn’t a super killer sunset evening. (My wife owed me a few hours of “Me” time and seeing as she was headed out of town on business for a week, I thought I best take her up on it!) So I took a drive to explore a lake I found on Google Maps called Morgan Lake just North of Dallas and Highway 22 and West of 99W. I was hoping that it would be a new place that I could take the family fishing however once I got there it looked to be a wildlife preserve of sorts. It wasn’t anything spectacular either but it was nice to get away from the screaming kids for a while and just walk around looking for photo opportunities. After deciding I probably couldn’t walk around the lake to get some sunset pictures, I walked back to the van and headed further North on highway 99W when this row of Oak trees and the setting sun (adjacent to an orchard) caught my eye. I knew this was where I needed to camp out as the sun set further beyond this road into the horizon. I took several images here and this one I used the HDR effects in Photoshop CS5 (trial). It totally reminded my wife and I of something that you would see on an album cover.

Powerlines

admin — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 04:21:07 +0000

Finally another day with some clouds here in (Normally cloudy ….. and rainy) Salem. I have been jonesing for another sunset picture break. I had to run the store just in time to snap a few images tonight and my only regret was that I had turned off the RAW settings on my camera and was only shooting in jpg. Ugh!

Oh well, it was nice to get out for a few and enjoy the beautiful views – and I did get a few “ok” shots.

iPhone coming to Sprint??

admin — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:17:41 +0000

I have been a long time Sprint customer and have upgraded to the latest and greatest phone every year for the last 4 years now. This time however since the HTC EVO 4G, there has not been much that really got me excited. There was the HTC EVO 3D that was a bit tempting but I had been hearing rumors that Sprint would be getting an iPhone sometime soon after Verizon did, and so I’ve held out on my upgrade. And now rumors are sounding more and more like Sprint will in fact be getting the iPhone 5 come October (fingers crossed)! Don’t get me wrong. I love my EVO but I am on my second one and I really think that the battery life sucks and the OS as a whole is buggy. At least for me it is. My wife has had the Droid and Droid 2 and for her they have also been buggy. We both have the iPad 2 and totaly love them. We also had the first gen iPad when it first came out and we loved those too. The iPads were our real taste of iOS and it has never been buggy nor has it been a battery hog. So my thought is iPhone! Bring it Sprint please! You need it to get back into the game and I need a new gadget fix real bad haha. Oh and even though I haven’t been a real Apple “fanboy” as they call it, I am sad to see Steve Jobs go. You have to admit even if you hate Apple, Mr. Jobs has been an inspiration to all, and has kept us all in awe, as to what technology can do for us.

Sun encounter ….

admin — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:11:42 +0000

On my way to find another great Sunset location I came across this scene. The sun was just getting ready to set low into the horizon and I passed this field with a few sheep in it and this really kewl tree with the sun behind it an dust from the fields behind it pushing past and through the branches. The farmers out this way were harvesting their crops and the dust was a flurry behind this tree line. I had to stop and as it turned out the sun dropped low and behind very heavy cloud cover so I am glad that I stopped here. It was worth the trip!