Sometimes Cloudy in Virginia

Piazza San Pietro, originally uploaded by vsacker.

First of all, this is my first attempt to post straight from Flickr, so we’ll see how this goes…

A little later in the week than I would have liked, I got around to processing an older image. This is actually four images stitched together with software from Canon, then roughly cleaned up in Photoshop. Far from perfect, but much better than the first attempt I had made years ago. I enjoy the photo even for its obvious flaws.

I came back to this image as I’ve been catching up on some podcasts that piled up while I was home with our new baby. One of those shows in the Daily Breakfast, hosts by a Dutch priest, Father Roderick Vonhögen. He recently traveled to Rome and the Vatican and has been talking about his trip in great detail.

Visiting the Vatican was one of the highlights of a trip to Italy my wife and I took a few months before our daughter was born. It was a little rainy that day, but my wife held an umbrella over me as I shot these images from the right, rear end of the piazza. With the clouds staring to yield to the sun, I thought the light was kind of nice on the wet stones.

Keeping with the late-week posting of an old photo, I found this shot of a goldfish cracker lost by my daughter outside the house on the way to the pool this summer.  Within the short time we were down at the pool, the ants came out to play and went to town on their unexpected snack.  By the next day, the goldfish was completely gone.

I took the picture with a wide open aperture to get the very narrow depth of field and enhanced the effect with a strong vignette.   Comments/critiques would be appreciated (click for larger view).

In keeping with my attempt to process an old image once a week, here’s my latest blog photo.

Back in March, our nephew came to visit and we all took a trip to the Udvar-Hazy annex to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum.  I took a few pictures, but never got around to doing much with them.  One of my favorite items on display was the SR-71 Blackbird, built by Lockheed’s Skunk Works team.  They have a fascinating history; from the official Skunk Works site:

Many times a customer would come to the Skunk Works^® with a request and on a handshake the project would begin, no contracts in place, no official submittal process. Kelly Johnson and his Skunk Works^® team designed and built the XP-80 in only 143 days, seven less than was required.

What allowed Kelly to operate the Skunk Works® so effectively and efficiently was his unconventional organizational approach. He broke the rules, challenging the current bureaucratic system that stifled innovation and hindered progress. His philosophy is spelled out in his “14 practices and rules” that he and his team followed. Many of these “rules” are still considered valid today.

It’s not really the Ironman way of doing research, but a semi-autonomous group of incredibly smart scientists and engineers building advanced systems in the dark is pretty cool.  Plus, they have an awesome logo for their team.  With that background, I already like the SR-71 before I even got a chance to walk around the plane, and this photo was one of my favorites.

The lighting isn’t great inside the Udvar-Hazy Center, and I wasn’t using a very fast lens.  I was able to brace myself along a railing and take this shot at 1/6 second.  I had another version of this shot that wasn’t so lucky and was quite blurry.  In post-processing, I tried to knock down some of the really bright windows in the back ground, set a true black point, and really pushed the contrast.  Some of the colors are very saturated, but I really like the detail in the skin of the Blackbird.

As before, leave a comment if you like/dislike the photo (click for larger image).

I’ve never been great at keeping up with a blog, photo or otherwise.   Because of that, I refuse to promise any kind of regular photo posts, but I’m trying.  My ultimate goal would be to post two photos a week – one new capture for the week and one old one that I never got around to processing.

The photo below was taken just this past weekend.  I was hanging out with my daughter in the basement as she was arranging her crayons on the table.  I decided to snap a few pictures, and liked this one the best.  I shot it in low light without a flash, leaving it a little grainier than some photos, but I like the effect.  I performed a little color corrections, levels adjustment, and added a little vignette.  Finally, I sharpened the end result and added a border.

Please leave a comment if you have an opinion or reaction for this picture (click for full-size view).

I’m late to the game on this trick, but I just learned it today so I think it’s pretty cool.  I’ve been sharpening images with Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask for quite a while.  It has worked pretty well for me, though it isn’t terribly easy to selectively apply or adjust after the fact.  Enter the Hgh Pass Filter sharpening method… I first heard it this morning, catching up on an old podcast from TWIP.  I did a little searching to find out more and found two nice tutorials on the method at Layers Magazine and PhotoshopSupport.com.  The basics are:

1. Create a duplicate layer from your image
2. Apply the High Pass Filter (radius somewhere between 1-3 pixels seems to work well)
3. Change blending mode to Overlay (optionally Soft Light or Hard Light)
4. Adjust opacity of the layer to your sharpening needs.

Read the linked articles for more information and sample images.  The advantage is a layer whose opacity you can adjust to increase/decrease the effect, as well as being able to easily mask the layer to selectively apply the filter.  Very cool.