Balboa park

Spent most part of Saturday at one of San Diegos most famous attractions, the Balboa Park. Anyone visiting should absolutely spend at least a day at the park, which also includes the San Diego Zoo requiring a day by itself. The botanical house, pictured below, is most likely one of the most photographed objects in San Diego and well worth a visit. Make sure you don't forget your camera. This was the first time I attended a Meetup.com activity, ut absolutely not the last time. I came home with about 700 images that took me about an hour to edit in Lightroom and a few more hours to make the necessary improvements. Thanks to Adobe Lightroom you can shoot as much as you want without be buried in images after a day with your camera. There are tons of colorful views, historical buildings and interesting people to shot in Balboa park (click for slide show).

Archive photos

Though I would dig into my 70 GB photo archive. This is the Las Vegas Stratosphere hotel with the tower in the background, taken in April 2007. It was one of those quick snap shots. We were at the parking lot about to leave the Stratosphere and go back to our hotel when I saw the hotel and the tower against the total black sky.

Here is another shot from the same trip to Las Vegas with the Sfinx at the Luxor hotel and the laser light from the hotel in the background. It took a little while to get to the right place to align the Sfinx and the laser.

Poor conditions?

Why not use incorrect camera settings and awful photography circumstances to your advantage? This shot was taken with incorrect white balance settings, minus 1/3 of a stop exposure compensation, the flash was fired and I shot through the rainy window of my car, all while waiting for the green light. I think it came out pretty cool. The blue color cast makes the photo feel even rainier and colder. The photo was taken with the Canon SD850 IS. What's up with that spring I was talking about in my previous blog post? Today was very windy, rainy and cold. What's up with that here in San Diego?

Spring is here

Finally, the spring is here. The last couple of days really brought nice weather. For a change rain and cold weather was gone and we're back to sun and today we had about 78F (26C). My short hike was very hot, but sooooo nice. Thought this photo kind of represents the warm weather coming and the winter going away. The old leaf is slowly falling off the tree as a new one is coming.

The grass is so green and fresh too. The back lit green grass really gives hope for spring and warm weather. However, we all know that the green grass will very soon turn brown here in southern California as there is very little rain and a lot of sun.

SD850 IS

Was playing with the new family member, the Canon SD850, which Fredrik got from Santa Claus this Christmas. The camera's vivid color mode really made this photo pop. It is a truly amazing camera. Small but yet so full of nice features. The image stabilization really helped here as well as the conditions was somewhat difficult. This is the football and track fields at Eric's high school. Football season is over, so no more games for Eric and his friends to watch this season.

Hiking

Caught this shot during a short hike I did with my wife on Christmas day. I know, that is some time ago and I should have posted it earlier. Nevertheless, here it is and I'm pretty happy with the result. It is always nice when you actually catch that view that appears in front of you. I think it is a pretty nice Christmas view. :-) Don't you think?

Here is another image from that same hike that also turned out pretty good. The bark on the tree was really glowing in the sun rays finding their was through branches and leafs above it. This was one of those split second shots, where we were on our way home and I shouldn't really have stopped for another shot. Luckily I went in close to the tree and quickly grabbed a few images. This image needed increased saturation and light to get closer to hat I actually saw, as I had to underexposure to not blow out the highlights. It might be a good candidate for a single exposure HDR.

Worth mentioning is that I've totally reinstalled my PC. After two years it was badly needed. I took the opportunity to add 500 GB hard drive as an extra backup. I'm currently evaluating SyncBack for the backups, it seems like a very good program. I easily run backs every day now, which feels a lot safer than those cumbersome manual backups I use to do every week. I will also add two monthly DVD backups, one stored off-site, to make it closer to waterproof. I highly recommend you to do something similar, I sleep better at night now.

Restoration

I was asked to help restoring a photo from the 1940s. This is how it turned out, and I felt good about being able to help saving both the memories of that person and preserving a bit of the history.


It took a lot of efforts matching the missing parts of the hair and the forehead. I evaluated several different methods and ended up using several of them for different parts. I copied parts from the chin to the forehead and used both the healing brush and clone tool before I was happy with the result. Finding the correct tones in the gray scale for the different parts of the photo was also combersome. It took several dogde and burn-layers. Actually I didn't use the actual dodge and burn tools, but a 50% gray layer in overlay mode which I painted with black or white depending on if I was "dodging" and "burning". A fun and satisfying project that actually lead to more work for the customers neighbor.