Palace of Fine Arts

Click on an image to see a larger view.The photography club held a shoot-out at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Photographing buildings does not usually interest me, but I saw this as an opportunity to practice night photography. We arrived around 4:00pm to catch the late afternoon sun. Shooting up with a wide angle lens will distort tall structures, making them lean in toward the center. This can be fixed in post processing, but for this photo I choose to make the columns lean even more to emphasize the enormity of the structure.

Our real goal was to photograph during the magic light hour near sunset, after the lights come on, but while the sky is still blue. This is a 13 second exposure (f16) taken 45 minutes after sunset.

This is my favorite:
a 30 second exposure (f22) taken 1 hour after sunset.
Click on the image and you will see a few stars.

This 15 second exposure (f16) was taken over an hour after sunset.
I straightened the pillars this time.

This was just one of the many beautiful and interesting places
to photograph in San Francisco.
More photos from this shoot are on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/suebrazelton/

Happy Easter

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I have been collecting small characters and objects for an ongoing macro project: to arrange them into scenes as if they are full size. The blue & yellow rabbits are the newest to join my plastic menagerie. Seated, they are 4 inches tall.

If you've been following this blog, you may remember that last December, Woody & Buzz got into a snow fight in Virginia: http://visual-journey.blogspot.com/2010/12/playing-in-snow.html

"You've got a friend in me."

Don't you just love group photos?

I ate the chocolate rabbit and peeps. There are a few more Easter photos on my Flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/suebrazelton/

April Full Moon

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The full moon has be elusive for the past several months... so much cloud cover. And its rising time has not been the most conducive for photography; rising 90 minutes before sunset on the night before the full moon (too light in the sky), and several minutes after sunset on the night of 100% fullness (which results in a darkened sky).This month a few members of the photography club and I decided to be ready for whatever appeared. We were tired of waiting for perfect conditions. The first night we met at the edge of a Guglielmo vineyard which has a clear view of the eastern foothills. As expected, the sky was light and the moon pale. In this second photo I brightened the moon so it would stand out more against the sky.

The next night (100% fullness), 3 of us trekked up the road to El Toro and were rewarded with a bright, orange globe.

Clouds in the west blocked the sun so the sky darkened quickly. We had only a few minutes to shoot before the sky was too dark to get a clear moon exposure. This last photo is a composite of two stitched together in Elements.

Not the exact photos I was looking for,
but sometimes you just have to work with what nature presents.