Backyard Creek
Rainy Day Creek
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 3.2s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200
Rainy Day Creek
Category Archives: landscape
Little Cascade
Pixley Falls State Park
Little Cascade
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 3.2s, 17mm, f/16, ISO 200
Picnic Time
Delta Lake State Park
Picnic Time
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 1/80s, 25mm, f/16, ISO 200
Low Flow
Buttermilk Falls State Park
Low Flow
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 5s, 15mm, f/16, ISO 200
Highlights
Delta Lake State Park
Yesterday was a short work day. My company offers summer hours which allows us to work four, nine hour days and then only have to work four hours on Friday. With this being a long weekend, and it was a very long week for me in which I had unintentionally worked nine-plus hours all week, I allowed myself to take advantage of the summer hours offer. It isn’t something I regularly participate in but I needed it this week.
Of course, I never did mention to Mother Nature that this was my plan so she decided to hit us with a little rain in the afternoon. It was OK with me though, I did some reading and I am not afraid to say I took a cat nap too! By the time dinner rolled around I was ready to go again.
We actually had a tornado watch in affect most of the evening up until 9:30pm. As far as I know a tornado never did make an appearance. With me being the adventurous kind (not really) I decided to catch the sunset but chose to stay close to home for my exploration. I drove to Delta Lake State Park as the clouds started to roll in. The earlier rain had basically cleared the beach area and I found I had the sunset to myself. I was running back and forth along the beach capturing images for over an hour. It was a good way to end my work week!
I found an interesting composition which included a small, water filled depression in the sand. I aligned myself with this small water pool and the setting sun which created a very nice line of highlights. By including the sun I had to be careful about lens flare and as you can see in the first image I wasn’t able to remove it all with camera orientation. I ended up using my ‘finger blocking the sun’ trick to get a second image without the flare and used Photoshop to combine the two images.
After processing the image I felt there was empty space on the left which was not adding anything to the composition. I regretted not turning the camera into a portrait orientation while I was at the beach. It is a practice I typically follow but in my enthusiasm over the empty beach I forgot. I decided I still liked this image but needed to change the orientation through a drastic crop in Photoshop. I basically threw away over a third of the pixels I had captured but the end result is the image I wanted to have.
Highlights – Start
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 1/8s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200
Highlights
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 1/8s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200
Hinckley in the Morning
Hinckley Reservoir
Sunday morning was the perfect day to get up early and catch some pre-dawn images. I finished reading Below the Horizon by David Delnea (you can see more about the eBook here) and was inspired to drag my butt out of bed. This book talks about light at the edges of the day. I spend a lot of time getting photographs during this time frame but David’s book still provided me with great information. I truly enjoy the authors and books you can find on the Craft & Vision website.
The two pictures in this post were captured only 4 minutes apart. As the sun approaches the horizon the light is changing drastically. You can see this in the color tone shift between the two images. The first image is cooler in tone with blue hues being the most dominant. The second image is starting to get warmer as more of the sunlight is crossing the horizon and lighting the sky above the reservoir.
This was another chance for me to play with my filter set. Not only did I have the circular polarizer working for me but the first image also has the 2-stop ND graduated filter. It is a soft edge filter which means the transition is gradual. That zone is centered on the horizon. By using the graduated filter I was able to get a single exposure image without any areas being too dark or light.
For the second image I added a 4-stop ND filter which allowed my to get a full 1 minute exposure time. This allowed the slow moving clouds to blur as they worked their way toward the horizon. It also allowed me to show the slight breeze with the blurring of the lake grass as it swayed.
I’m going to keep my eyes open for more opportunities like this… 🙂
Hinckley Pre-Dawn
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 15s, 17mm, f/16, ISO 200
Hinckley on the Move
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 60s, 12mm, f/13, ISO 200
Down the Drain
Buttermilk Falls State Park
Down the Drain
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 3.2s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200
The Pools
Buttermilk Falls State Park
The Pools
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 2s, 15mm, f/16, ISO 200
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