Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Chasing waterfalls


Well, I got through the first couple  hundreds pics from my trip.  Only 1000+ more to go.  Normally, I take all my pics from a shooting session and view them all one by one.  I immediately delete the ones that are really badly shot. This usually amounts to about 15%.  You know, the ones where you forget to take the lens cap off, take a shot of your feet, etc.  After that I go through them again and look for the specialty shots.  Sometimes I take 3 different exposures of a scene to later combine the 3 and create a High Dynamic Range Image (HDR).  Sometimes I take 6-9 shots of a wide area moving the camera a little across a horizontal plane and create a panoramic shot and then stitch them together to create a large panoramic view.  As you see, these two techniques alone can create a large number of shots.  The hard part is recognizing while going through all these shots which shots were meant to be used for these two photo techniques.  These pics will usually amount to about 20-25% of my shots.  After that, I go through them again and look for the best of the rest,  the ones that really came out about the best that they could be, the ones that need little to no post processing i.e. cropping, exposure changes, etc. This usually is about 25% of the remaining 60%.  The final 35% are the ones that could go either way.  They, with the help of some post processing, like Photoshop, Lightroom, or some other editing program, could turn out to be a great shot.......or they could end up in the trash.The goal always is to get the best shot you can out of the camera.  But, it don't always happen.  That's where you can
work magic with a marginal pic.  The best two words to explain it, though, are "Time Consuming".  The beauty of digital is: You can take as many pics as you want and it ain't gonna cost you a penny more(unlike film), and you can often fix a lot of little things after the fact (Photoshop).  The bad part of digital is: You can take as many pics as you want, but they all could be bad pics and you can spend alot of time fixing a lot of the little things after the fact (a bad pic out of the camera will usually remain a bad pic no matter how many hours you put in trying to fix it).  Also, I love photography and I love viewing and sharing my shots, but going through them all one by one several times and really critiquing them..... well, you get my point.  Even I get sick of seeing them.  So far, I have been pleasantly surprised at the low number of automatic deletes I have seen  while going through them.  Let's keep our fingers crossed that this continues for the next 1000
Here is one of my favorites so far.  It is a shot of the Munising Falls.  If I remember right these falls are about 50-60 feet high.  I didn't attempt it myself with all my gear, but there is a walkway behind the falls that gives you a really neat view.  In winter,the falls freeze into a column and it becomes a popular destination for ice climbers which I guess are like rock climbers.

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