Red Rock Canyon

White-tailed Antelope Squirrel

The area is 195,819 acres.

Red Rock Canyon

If you would like to see a few more of my pictures from the Red Rock Canyon follow this link. Hopefully these pictures will inspire you to get out and see the world.

Based on the above a friend and I decided to send some slides to ScanCafe and see what they could do.  I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about shipping costs or wait time. That is posted on their site and has been commented on by a few people. I read all of the ScanCafe site very carefully and read a couple of reviews. I was not surprised or shocked by anything that occurred, and I didn’t go bouncing off the walls with wild speculation waiting on the delivery of my photos and DVD. The slides and a few prints were processed and returned in less than 2 months. In total we sent just under 600 slides and prints. It was their $130 plus S&H box that they provided to ship everything in. We bundled the slides into groups of 50 and numbered them. When they were returned they were still  in the bundles of 50 that we had sent, and all fit onto a single DVD. Each numbered bundle was on the DVD under a directory with the same bundle number. That made it very easy to identify each bundle and what it contained. I did not see anything that was damaged and the scans were well done. The 4×6 paper prints looked about what I typically can achieve and unless I had a lot of prints with no negatives, I wouldn’t have any prints scanned. A few slides had some scratches and dust that had not been removed, but most were in good enough shape that not much repair work was required in my editing apps.

Some people will probably be concerned about their photos, negatives and/or slides being sent to India, but regardless of where your photos are sent, there is always a chance of them being lost or destroyed. Even if they never leave your house there is a chance of them being lost forever. A real world example dates back to the 70′s when my friend worked for a well known department store. A courier would drive to each store and pickup the film that had been dropped off for processing. One day the courier accidentally left a bag of film in a restaurant and it was mistaken for a bag of trash and was thrown into a dumpster. It was never recovered. My friend was instructed to tell the customers that their film and the courier had been killed in a fiery car crash to keep their customers from pursuing the matter further. It actually worked. So there are no guarantees with anything you do.

Seeing is believing and so here are some examples of slide conversions done for me by ScanCafe. The photographs of the bridge were taken on the July 4th weekend in 1977. The trio is a lounge band called “Something Different” and was photographed around the same time period. They were filmed in the basement of my friends house and the yellow cast is how the slides looked back then. All were stored in plastic cases that were provided by the processing lab.

From a Slide

Processed in Lightroom 3

From a Slide

Processed in Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5

From a Slide

Processed in Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5

Most of the digital versions of my slides were color balanced properly, had low noise and minor spots and marks on them. Next time I will try out there pro services to see how they compare to the standard service. ScanCafe offers a great value when it comes to digital transfer of slide film. Next up will be some negatives as well. Give them a try and be patient. It takes a few weeks to get your photos back.

Aruna at Breakers Resort

Breakers Resort

So here are the two pictures that I started out with. My sister-in-law is standing in front of the resort and I took her picture. However I couldn’t get the full name on the wall so I took a second picture of just the Breakers Resort name by itself.

I dropped the above two pictures into ICE and the result was almost perfect.

Breakers Stitched with ICE

Notice the shadow from the roof has a slight shift where the picture was stitched together. Not worth fixing because the slight shift could be something real.

Now let’s look at the results using Photoshop CS5 Photomerge.

Breakers Stitched with CS5

Note that both applications stitched the photographs together almost exactly the same. The left 2 fountains are from the left picture and the other fountains are from the right picture. There are three barriers that can be seen in the foreground. The middle barrier is from the left picture in both examples. The “Breakers Resort” is from the right picture. Notice the roof line shadow is different thought. In the Microsoft ICE software the shadow from the left picture is lower than the shadow from the right picture. In the Photoshop CS5 version the shadow from the left picture is slightly higher than the shadow from the right picture, and it is in a different location. So Photoshop did a little better in the shadow area of the picture. However, the big difference is in the amount of data Photoshop was able to keep as compared to ICE. To do the stitching in ICE the left picture has more zoom applied to it than the right picture. Photoshop was able to keep more data from both pictures and did a slightly better stitch as well.

But is this a fair comparison? Could ICE do better? I decided to try to use the other stitch options that ICE provided. Using the Automatic feature it used “Planar Motion 3″. I decided to try other camera motion options provided, and I found that the automatic feature did indeed select the best setting. This is a very high level compare of the two products and of course Photoshop allows me to do a lot more with the picture once I have created it. Using ICE you may need to go to your photo editing program of choice and get more creative.

The above CS5 examples were created with “Blend Images Together” checked. Let’s take a look at the results of a photomerge without checking “Blend Images Together.

Breakers Stitched with CS5 no blend

The results were cropped based on the usable image created. Notice the shadow of the roof line has been resolved and the objects used from each of the pictures has changed. The stitching no longer takes into account shadows or color matching. Since the two images are almost identical in exposure and color, turning off blending in this case produces good results, but a small amount data from each picture is lost compared to the CS5 blended version, but still more data than the ICE version.

Just for fun I selected the Geometric Distortion Correction in CS5 to see what the results would be.

Breakers Stitched with CS5 using GDC

I love panoramas because they really help the viewer better understand the environment where the picture was taken. A picture of sand could be a beach or a sandbox, maybe it is quicksand! Help the viewer understand what they are seeing by providing a perspective. Remember to think panorama the next time you go out to take photographs. Make sure your photos overlap by as much as 40%. Too much or too little overlap will prevent the automated panoramic features from performing the stitch. Remember to that GPS GEO tagging can add an even higher level to the viewers perspective!

First Christmas

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Taken Christmas 2010

Let’s take a look at the picture of the squirrel.  I was out for a walk to get some fall color pictures. I love the curiosity of squirrels and some of the crazy stuff they do, and I never fail to take a picture of one when I have the opportunity. In this case I wanted to get the picture of the squirrel with the fall colors. To do that I had to place him to the left of the picture. I didn’t place him to the right because the background wasn’t as good. So in this case the picture was driven by the background and color. If I centered the tree I felt it was too drastic, and almost created a split in the picture. The anchor point to the picture is the tree and the subject is a squirrel on a fall day. I got the photograph I felt was composed the best and there it sat in my picture folder for 5 years before I did anything with it.

The Spy - Before

I really liked the picture so I kept it and filed it away. While I was going through my picture folders confirming that all was backed up (very important) I ran across the picture and thought I need to get this published on my photo site. The problem was, although the picture was composed just perfect (to my taste), it needed to be more dramatic. The tree needed to be the anchor of the picture but understated. The squirrel is obviously the star of the show and he needed a rich colorful background to offset him but not overpower him. The theme is that he was watching my every move and the setting is a fall day in a dark wooded area.

The Spy - After

I changed the lighting of the picture to draw your eye more to the squirrel by darkening all the edges and applying a gradient to the left side of the picture that reduced the exposure and brightness. I didn’t take the pictures based on any rule, I took it based on all the natural elements of the area.

Rocking Chair

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Now let’s look at the picture taken in Hawaii. The elements in the area forced me to take the picture as you see it. Placing the subject to the right brought in more of the junk sitting on the porch of the hotel, as well as people I didn’t want in the shot. Placing her more to the left brought in the door to the lobby which was open, and that didn’t look all that great either. So the picture is composed based on the arrangement of those things around the subject. For both the pictures in this post, I took the photos based on the factors of the area and not any type of rule that I had memorized.

The Painted Stone is the Subject!

What I try to do when looking through the lens is check for distractions in the view finder, and compose the picture in the frame the way I feel it might look best in print or on the web. If the background is great the rule of thirds should work, but not if the background is a distraction.

The stone placed by the road side is painted from time-to-time with a new subject incorporating the shape of the stone. The stone stands on it’s own, and dead on center is great for a picture. I liked the blue sky and wanted to see more of it in this shot. None of this matters if first you don’t take the picture. Get out there!

The Lake at Gervasi

I started out having photos on my website using a flash album. Unfortunately I quickly discovered that a flash album wasn’t really what I wanted. It was OK to display a few pictures, but I have thousands of pictures that I share with family from four continents. To accomplish what I wanted would take months to develop, and I wouldn’t come close to all the features that several websites already deliver. Once I realized that I needed to look elsewhere, I jotted down a few requirements. I was looking for a photo hosting site that gave me:

• Presentation Options
• GPS Support
• Clean Look
• No Advertising
• Video Support
• Affordable Packages

I looked at several of the popular photo websites options, and after a few days of reading and visiting the various sites I decided on SmugMug. I did a trial run on SmugMug before I signed up for the Power account. I liked what I saw and have been uploading pictures ever since. Take note that you need to think through how you want to build your galleries. In mid July 2010 I ended up doing a complete re-org of my site including reloading most of my pictures. I did this after purchasing Lightroom 3, but that is another post for another day.

For me, my photo website is about my life and experiences in pictures and video. Since all of our lives are touch by many others, the site cannot help but also include the lives of my family and friends. A feature I like, that SmugMug provides, is the ability to “Collect” a photo. For example, I have a gallery on my 2009 safari in Kruger Park, South Africa. That gallery contains pictures of animals, but also pictures of family, friends, buildings, rivers, etc. Through “Collect” I am able to create a subset of the Kruger gallery containing just the pictures of the animals. Strangers can enjoy the pictures of the wildlife without looking at my pictures of the evening cookouts. That is a great feature and I use it a lot.

BVP Photo Gallery Structure using SmugMug

Since SmugMug provided the essentials that I needed to create and organize my photo website, the rest was up to me to decide how to organize my photographs. I knew I needed the flexibility to organize my site, but I didn’t know exactly how to do that. I have thousands of photographs of all sorts of things. How do you break that down into a few categories? It took me almost a year to really evolve to the structure I have today. Since I am a big nature lover I knew that I needed a master category for Nature. I do a lot of traveling so I created a vacation category which I later regretted and changed the name to Travel (I did this in my big re-org).  I also love cars so I created a category just for cars. The Movie category I added is dedicated to the videos that I have created over the years. This structure process shouldn’t be overlooked or down played. It is very important how you organize your photographs, otherwise no one will be able to find the pictures they are looking for, including yourself. The big thing is to know who you intend your audience to be, and what you want to accomplish. I have two messages. Get out and see the world and capture your interests and loves so they can be remembered and shared for years to come. Your photo site may be to sell pictures and therefore organized completely different than mine.

Category and Sub-Category Structure

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Photo Galleries Available under Mammals Sub-Category

Regardless of your intent, SmugMug can provide the tools you need as an amateur photographer, or a professional displaying or selling their work.

Save $5 on a SmugMug subscription by using my personal coupon code (PKCMh9ndQs5rA) in the Coupon field at the end of your trial. Or, you can use this link to try out SmugMug: https://secure.smugmug.com/signup.mg?Coupon=PKCMh9ndQs5rA