Garibaldi, Nairn Falls, and English Bay at Dusk

Wow, 2 months since my last post. Embarrassing. No excuses, just got a bit lazy. My interest has increased a bit over the past few weeks as I picked up Tom Ang's Fundamentals of Photography again. Also, last week I attended a meeting of PhotoClub Vancouver. Unfortunately, I did't get my act together enough to prepare a photo for their monthly theme (April Showers), but I did meet some people and learn some things.

Moving on, I have 3 unrelated photos to share in this post.

The first is a photo I took while snowshoeing in Garibaldi Park on New Year's day this year. I can't remember the name of the trail, but there's a few spots where a view opens up onto Squamish, and the light spilling through the clouds was just amazing.



I don't really have much to say about the capture. For post-processing, I did a ton of spot removal (didn't realize just how filthy my lens was), upped the contrast a lot to cut through the haze, applied a bit of luminance noise reduction to eliminate some of the grainyness in the clouds, increased the color vibrance/saturation a bit, and applied a slight vignette to make the tree-frame less distracting.

The second photo was taken at Nairn Falls (just North of Whistler) about 3 weeks ago.



I was experimenting with different shutter speeds to see which one would make the water look the most violent. I ended up going with 1/160. Any lower, and the water loses its shape and tends to look more flat. It was a sunny day, giving the rock some nice texture. Here, I was also extra mindful of focus accuracy and camera stability, which Tom Ang's book emphasizes as being essential to high quality image capture. At this level of magnification though, I'm not sure how much difference my efforts made. I did very little post-processing.

The third and final photo is for PhotoClub Vancouver's May theme: 1 second. I was driving to a friend's house just after dusk and noticed the lovely cloud patterns above me. My intention was to shoot the clouds and skyline, but once I arrived at a park overlooking English Bay, I noticed the sky's reflection in the windows of the waterfront mansions.



Again, I made a conscious effort to focus accurately and not jar the tripod. I think it was a mistake to focus on the clouds though, as the overall image would appear sharper if I had instead focused on the mansions. For post processing, a bit of luminance noise reduction, contrast, and fill light. I also increased the saturation and lowered the luminance of the reds, oranges and yellows to bring out the sunset.