Last one for a while. I think. Fake tilt-shift of the garden at the Getty.
My copy of Built to Spill's new album came in the mail today with an autographed copy of the liner notes, signed by "Dug" and the rest of the band. I've always seen people refer to him as "Dug", but for some reason I found it really funny.
A couple months ago I came across a link to this guy's work. He flies around in a helicopter and uses expensive lenses to create this effect of aerial landscapes as miniatures. I'm not positive this Olivo Barbieri character was the first to utilize this effect, but he seems to be the most linked to (and extreme) purveyor of this effect. In my search for more photography in this style, I came across Miklos Gaal, Frank van der Salm, Jorg Fahlenkamp and Toni Hafkensheid. Obviously this is something more than just a few people find intruiging.
Thus, it doesn't take long for someone to figure out how to replicate the effect in Photoshop for all of us without access to helicopters and thousand dollar lenses. Following this tutorial by Christopher Phin, I made the faux tilt-shift effect photo above. Here is the original.
I made a bunch more out of some existing photos I have in my library, and I'm sure I'll post those soon, but I'm most excited to get out and takes some pictures with this post processing in mind.
West Coast Built to Spill tour dates were announced today. Four San Francisco dates in June at Slim's. I already purchased tickets for the last two dates if anyone is interested in joining me. I'll probably also want to go to one of the first two, so let me know what your plans are people.
The picture is from Garrapata again. The weather was gorgeous all day, but those puffy white clouds were precursors to the second night in a row of thunder, lightning and large amounts of hail.
Check out the newly released trailer for the already legendary Samuel L. Jackson movie, "Snakes On A Plane". This could quite possibly the best worst movie ever.
The picture is from Garrapata State Park in Carmel, CA. About a mile hike in from the coast, through the chaparral and over the river a few times, a dense redwood forest opens up in a steep valley. The ground is covered with ferns and clover, old redwoods are toppled over, and everything is cool and moist. It was a short hike, but had some fun river crossings and was overall very worthwhile.
Here's another view of the same log.
Don't have much to say, but I thought I'd try to keep posting pictures. This one is from Guerneville, early in morning. I don't know why these people had their woodburning stove going as it wasn't cold out whatsoever since the sun had already burned away all the moisture in the air. This allowed the smoke spread out, and it caught a light breeze right into the sun's rays.
Taken during a break in all of the rain here in Northern California. Enhanced, for full effect of the god beams.
Here is a composite shot of the bay, made from eleven or so separate pictures. The shot encompasses Angel Island on the far left, the Golden Gate Bridge on the far right, and Berkely, Oakland and San Francisco in between. I haven't exactly figured out a quick, realistic, foolproof way to normalize the blue of the sky, but it is fun to put these kinds of shots together.
This is from a couple weeks ago, during what amounted to only two weeks of Indian summer. Since May it has gone about like this like: ~5 months of fog, then two weeks of beautiful, clear & warm days, and now mist/sprinkles/cold weather.
However, the chance of seeing a sight like the one above pretty much negates all the typical San Francisco fog.
Update: After posting I discovered that even clicking the picture doesn't make it much bigger, so you can find a decent size view of it here.
Update 2: So after screwing with this crap for a while trying to figure out how best to display this panorama, I've decided to just post the unadultered file here. It's around 11 mb, but worth looking at and zooming in on for the detail it provides.
