California – Jeanne Hoadley Photography

Death Valley

DeathValley1

I’m a couple of weeks behind on the image of the week. The trip kept me busy and a little burned out so now that I have recovered I can revisit some of the photos from the trip. I stopped in Death Valley for the first time on my way home and two things were immediately obvious. One, I didn’t allow enough time. I went in with the attitude that it was going to be boring desert and not my kind of photography at all. But I was struck with the stark landscapes and colorful rock formations. All of which lead me to number two, I need to go back and spend a week. This image was shot in late afternoon along the Artist’s Drive. Another thing to note about Death Valley is that it is a dark sky park so a good place to go and shoot starry skies. Yep, I think I will pencil it in for November of next year…. it was still pretty hot in October.

Old Car, Bodie, California

OldCar

I had a fun morning shooting the old cars and buildings in Bodie, California, a ghost town I have wanted to visit for some time. I’ve seen this car in my pictures of Bodie so I was on the lookout for it. Shot with the Canon M3 and an 18-150mm zoom. I was shooting most of the interiors with my Lensbaby Trio28 because it came with a polarizing filter which made it easier to shoot through the windows. You can see more of my Bodie shots on my travel blog at http://jeannehoadley.com/Travel. Enjoy.

Ferns

This is a digital art piece I created using 5 different image of ferns. I was trying to emphasize the curly cues unfolding in different ways. I started out intending it to be more photo realistic but as I worked on it, it seemed to want to go in a more artistic direction.

California Poppy

Poppy2

Sometimes I wonder why I keep going out to photograph poppies. I have so many gorgeous ones in my files already. But this one is gorgeous too so I guess you can’t have too many. I used the 180 mm Macro lens on the Canon 7D Mark II for this one. It was so windy last weekend I hardly had a chance to get it out. But there was a little bit of calm in the morning and I’m glad I took advantage of it.

Post processing was minimal. Just adjusted the exposure a little, denoised a little, and sharpened a little.

Avocet

Avocet1

I went to California looking for wildflowers, which I found, but it was so windy it was hard to get any closeups and it was cloudy so the landscapes were dull. I finally retreated to the wildlife refuge where I found birds aplenty including a pair of American Avocets. Sadly I did not realize until I got home that my depth of field was too shallow to get them both in focus at the same time. So I settled on this individual portrait.

Shorebird

Shorebird2 Well, this week I spent most of my time working on a slide show to use as a demonstration in a PowerPoint class I am going to be teaching. I was using my California trip as an example so I chose this photo from the group for the image of the week. It’s bordering on the abstract f you don’t know what you are looking at. It is the shadow of a pier on the beach with waves coming in and a shorebird looking for something to eat.

Pier

Most of my photographic efforts this week have been directed at editing and processing images from the C Pier alifornia trip. It seems that every beach town in the state has it’s own pier. This one is in Cayucos just north of Morro Bay on Hwy 1. One thing about travel photography is that sometimes you are there when you’re there and the light sucks as in this case. I decided to try to make lemonade though and went for a serious grunge look using Topaz texture effects (they really should be paying me for all the times I mention them but they are not). Then I added a grungy border just to finish it off. I like it.

Sea Otters

Sea_Otters

Sometimes you just know you’ve got the image of the week even though it is still early in the week. This was one of those times. I cropped a little but not too much, they were really close and I had a long lens. Some detail and saturation and maybe a little extra brightness on baby’s face.

Elephant Seal

Elephant_Seal

Touring California’s central coast brought us to an elephant seal rookery yesterday. There were many great pictures but this one won for cuteness and the soulful look on the face of this young male seal who is perhaps dreaming of the day when he will be beach master and have a chance to mate.

Post processing was about as usual, a little detail, a little saturation and a little darkening of the corners.

Grapes

grapes

So, on my mission to find my 2nd Great-grandfather’s grave in Lower Lake, CA last week I suddenly realized I was only 30 miles from the Napa Valley. While I should have planned better to spend a whole day photographing there I couldn’t resist the temptation to at least poke my nose into the north end of the Valley. Most of the grapes had been harvested, of course, but there were a few clusters left for show near one of the winery parking lots. Backlighting from the sun gave some of the grapes a stained glass look.

I actually had to do a lot of work in post processing because of the backlighting and some very distracting spectral highlights. A combination of cropping, content-aware fill, and clone stamping got me to this point. I also did my usual tricks in Color Efex Pro; detail, saturation, and brightening the center while darkening the edges.