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Ever since catching up on naming all my digital images, I’ve been meaning to go back through them and set aside the photos I especially like.  The first choice was an easy one because Oksana made it a part of a montage of honeymoon pictures that hang on our bedroom wall.  Every night I’m reminded that I should quit procrastinating…

One day on our honeymoon in St. Thomas, Oksana and I went on a day-long sailing excursion.  It was a beautiful day (as most days in the Caribbean are) and we passed the time lounging on the deck, sipping frozen rum drinks, and snorkeling at various spots along the coast of St. Martin.  We were under sail at one point, moving fairly fast, when we passed this skiff anchored in the deep, clear water.  I didn’t have time to frame my shot, but I managed to take two quick pictures as we sailed by.  Looking at them later, I decided that neither was well composed.  The first framed the boat and its shadow, but it was the second that caught the shoreline and a piece of the sky.

After looking at both pictures, I decided to see what Autostitch would do with them.  Turns out, nothing at all.  Understandably, It didn’t see them as photos in a panorama.  I decided to trick the software by cropping out just the upper portions of the photos, rotating them both 90 degrees, and trying again.  That gave me a tiny “panorama” of just the shore and sky.  I took that into Photoshop and laid it over the first photo.  A little bit of soft-edged eraser here, some cloning of the sky there, and voila; a new composite photo with only the best parts remaining!

(I think the horizon still looks off, sloping down a bit to the left as it does.  I tried rotating it back to the horizontal, but for some reason that looked even less correct.  Maybe it’s a curved-peninsula-perspective thing.)

Canon Powershot s30
Date: 4 September 2002
Focal Length: 7.1mm
Shutter: 1/1000 second
Aperture: F/2.8
Photoshop: Merging of two photos, Cloning sky (upper left), Minor color correction

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On our last day in Moscow – but still three days from home, because, you know, Moscow is, like, on the other side of the planet – Oksana and I returned to Arbat to have our portraits painted.

Earlier on the trip we had walked the length of both streets known as Arbat – Old and New.  New Arbat was a four-lane highway bordered by loud neon, bright casinos, and TGI Friday’s.  Old Arbat was pleasantly pedestrian with souvenir stalls, outdoor restaurants, musicians with hat-pushing assistants, and dozens of portrait and caricature artists.  It was these artists’ work, photo-realistic and painted while you wait, that captured my attention and imagination.

While Oksana put her Russian to good use comparison shopping for prices, I wandered among the painters.  I stopped behind one woman who was painting a portrait of a young boy.  To my eye, the monochrome image was almost photorealistic.  Watching her perfectly recreate his eyes, I decided that if the price was right, she would be the one to paint us.

It seemed as though most of the artists on Arbat had agreed to set their prices uniformly: 700 rubles for one person, 1500 for two; doubled again for color.  You could either leave a favorite photograph and pick up your portrait later, or sit still for an hour while they painted from the source.  It seemed incredible to me that anyone could paint so well, so quickly, but on this street in Moscow, that particular talent was in abundance.

Oksana’s cousin, Vanya, was with us that day and because he was planning to wait around with us, I convinced her to ask our painter if it would be alright if we videotaped her process.  I could tell that our selected artist, Lena, thought it a rather strange request, but she was polite enough to rearrange her easel for the camera, anyway.  I set the camera on the ground, against a wall and out of the way of Arbat’s foot traffic, and started recording in LP mode.

We sat down and began our suspenseful hour-and-a-half wait.

(Don’t want to wade through more prose?  Here’s a link straight to the video.)

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Last year Oksana and I observed Memorial Day with a few of our friends on the bank of the Taku River . It was a great weekend spent hiking, canoeing, and hiding in the cabin from bloodthirsty mosquitoes. My toy for the weekend was a new digital SLR that arrived in the mail just hours before our departure; I barely had enough time to charge the battery. I put it through its paces that weekend, though, coming close to filing the 1GB card.

On our second day there, our group decided to hike up the side of a mountain. Our goal was to have lunch on the shore of a beautiful lake where we would reward ourselves for navigating the steep, pathless trail alongside some raging river. It became a murderous death march of a hike that only gets worse with each retelling.

The mosquitoes denied us any rest breaks and the lake was still so full of snowmelt that there was no accessible shoreline — the water came right up to the trunks of the encroaching trees. After that legendary climb, new camera in hand, I wouldn’t be denied. While everyone else helped construct a tiny, smoky fire to keep the mosquitoes at bay, I fought my way down to the edge of the water and sacrificed a dry hiking boot so that I could step out onto a partially submerged rock.

I quickly set my exposure and focus points and started taking pictures. It took 40 frames to cover the entire lake, and if the mosquitoes hadn’t found my near-motionless arms and face around shot #10, I probably wouldn’t have missed the extra coverage on the bottom right. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to see the results when I stitched all 40 photos into a panorama.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 28 May 2005
Focal Length: 18mm
Shutter: 1/640 second
Aperture: F/5.6
Photoshop: Autostitch for stitching, cloning in upper left to fill in tree branches

More on the software I used after the jump:
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My luck in photographing lightning seems to be improving.

While in Moscow, Oksana and I hooked up with Vika, an old friend of hers who used to be a fellow Russian exchange/international student in Juneau. She and her boyfriend, Vanya, took us out to a restaurant on the 22nd floor of a university building. As the sun set, all of Moscow was laid out before us.

Just before dinner arrived, at Vanya’s insistence, I attempted to capture a lightning strike from a fast-approaching thunderstorm. Only three shots into my attempt, Oksana called me back to the table; dinner had been served. “Last one,” I called, just before a bolt shot down.

During dinner, the storm built in intensity. As soon as I finished my meal, I excused myself for another attempt. The very next photo, the one pictured above with two almost-simultaneous strikes, was the result. Seconds later, the wind and rain chased us inside.

By the time we settled the check and made it downstairs, a good-sized pond had formed in the building’s courtyard and doorway. Vanya and Andrey bravely sacrificed their aridity (but not their shoes) in a mad dash out to the car for the umbrellas stashed within.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 15 July 2006
Focal Length: 18mm
Shutter: 25 seconds
Aperture: F/20
Photoshop: Minor color correction, minor cropping
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To me, this photograph represents patience. As a thunderstorm brewed around us on the beach in Nags Head, NC, I sat on the porch and snapped photo after photo, trying to capture a bolt of lightning. I took seventy photos in all, each one exposed for 30-seconds. This was lucky number 57.

I didn’t have a tripod (I used the railing on the porch), and the strong gusts of wind meant that I had to hold the camera down with my hand. That, or the multiple flashes of lightning, must have been what caused some strange blurry artifacts along the right-hand edge of the house. They were easy to Photoshop away, though, plus it gave me an excuse to remove some telephone lines on the left and level the horizon while I was at it.

After looking at all the other pictures, most of which have nothing but black clouds, I find it amazing that this lightning bolt struck so perfectly in the frame. And to think I almost gave up and went inside around picture #45…

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 29 June 2006
Focal Length: 18mm
Shutter: 30 seconds
Aperture: F/3.5
Photoshop: some cloning, wire removal, minor rotation and crop

Just for fun, two more variations can be seen after the jump.
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Despite going to bed relatively late after the night dive, our next day in Hawaii started very early. We didn’t realize it at the time, but it was to be the longest, most tiring day of our vacation.

I wanted to spend some time in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, but didn’t know what to expect. Would the park be crowded? Would it take more than one day to see it all? Would the active steam vents – as our guidebook said – lose their grandeur as the day warmed up?

We were staying in Kona and the points of interest were on the other side of the island, a three-hour drive away. We left at 5:30am, hoping to pull into the park early enough to see the steam while the air was still cool.

The drive from Kona to Kilauea was nice, if rather long. The traffic was sparse and the road alternated between long, straight stretches and Hana-like curves that slowed us to a crawl. We drove through arid, almost desert-like regions, soggy hillsides thick with vegetation, barren black lava fields along the jagged southern coastline, and finally into the rolling hills of the park.

We paid a $10 fee at the gate and drove straight to the visitor’s center. A park ranger had just opened the doors and was going about the business of posting the daily activity reports. We had a quick look around, asked a few questions, and drove off on a road called Crater Rim Drive, which encircles the mostly-dormant craters of Kilauea.

We skipped the first point-of-interest, Sulfur Rocks, for the steam vents that were just a quarter-mile down the road. There was only one other car in the parking lot – getting up early had paid off for us. I dug out our cameras as Oksana changed into warmer clothes; it was windy and the early morning mountain air was still cold.
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The same attitude that worked so well for us there, gave us some problems in Hawaii. After the first three days, we spent too much of our vacation time fretting about where we would stay. While I was never particularly worried, Oksana let the stress build up whenever our internet searches and phone calls for the next hotel dragged on too long. I can’t argue that it would have been nice to know, before we ever stepped on the plane, where we would be staying each and every night.

On the other hand, one of the best things about vacations is the unexpected discoveries. While at the B&B in Maui, we met up with a couple who raved about an exciting snorkeling excursion on the Big Island. Had we been locked into hotel reservations, we might not have been able to take advantage of their suggestion to pay for a night dive to swim with manta rays. As it was, we were able to plan our Big Island stay around that tour.

As soon as we checked into our Kona hotel, I called the company they had suggested, Big Island Divers, to get the scoop. $70 per person gives you a 1-tank night “dive” with sightings of mantas almost guaranteed. I asked if it was worthwhile to go as a snorkeler, and the woman on the other end of the line proceeded to describe the underwater wonders we would see. Prices seemed non-negotiable, despite the fact that we wanted to use our own equipment and wouldn’t need a tank of air. Still, it sounded good enough to reserve a spot for Oksana and me on their boat for the following day.

When the time came, Oksana and I drove to the dive shop. We paid for our trip, got fitted with wetsuits, and waited around while the rest of the divers on our boat readied their own equipment. We drove to the harbor behind the boat trailer and, once all 20 or so of us were on board, cast off just before sunset.

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