A walk down memory lane

A little over a year ago, my husband and I took a two week trip to California, and it turned out to be possibly my favorite trip of all time. That's no small feat, considering in recent years I've visited the Caribbean, the Florida Keys, Mexico, Barcelona, Paris, London, took a 10-day driving tour of Ireland, and most recently visited Iceland and Sweden. Our California adventure began in Santa Cruz and Capitola, and we worked our way down the Pacific Coast Highway to Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur and San Simeon, cut over to Sequoia and Kings Canyon, up to Yosemite, over to Sonoma and then finished out the trip in San Francisco.

Today, in search of a shot to print for my apartment, I spent some time scrolling through my photos from the trip and had a great time retracing our journey. I felt like I was driving down the PCH again (only in my mind, I was in a convertible Mustang instead of the poor little Focus they rented us), or hiking in Yosemite or sipping wine in the Deerfield Ranch wine cellar. The memories are too many to list here, but here are some of my favorite photos that aren't quite site-worthy:

The Boardwalk, Santa Cruz

Walton Light, Santa Cruz

Walton Light, Santa Cruz

Monterey Bay Aquarium

Monterey Bay Aquarium

Edward Sellers Winery, Paso Robles

The Organ - Crystal Cave, Sequoia National Park

The (terrifying) stairs to Vernal Fall, Yosemite National Park

Tucking in for the night - El Capitan, Yosemite National Park

Stars from our deck - Evergreen Lodge, just outside Yosemite National Park

Deerfield Ranch wine cellar & tasting room (we had it all to ourselves!)

Pinup girl graffiti - Haight Ashbury, San Francisco

Coming in for a landing - California Academy of Sciences rainforest dome (where I met with the amazingly talented Autumn Eden. Do yourself a favor and check out her site!)

To see more, check out my California gallery. I'll be adding more photos over the next few days, and I'm offering 25% off everything in the gallery through the end of September (offer code Cali11).

Well, duh

I don't know about you, but I'm terrible about learning the ins and outs of a piece of software. I take some time playing around and trying a few things here and there, and once I have the basics down that's about as far as I usually go. I've been using Lightroom for years now - I got a copy when it first came out - but it wasn't until recently (as recently as today really) that I've begun to learn to use it effectively. Just a few weeks ago, I figured out that I could (stupidly easily) export shots direct to my site instead of saving them out to my desktop and uploading from there. Duh.

Today I was poking around on Digital Photo Buzz, a fantastic resource for all things digital photography, and discovered some of the tools that have been staring me in the face all along like brushes and the gradient filter. Again I say, duh. These tools make it so much easier to make so many of the adjustments that I've learned to just settle for something "close enough" on. So now here I sit like the geek that I am, spending my Saturday night seeking out images in my catalog that I thought were hopeless throwaways and seeing what I can do to bring them back to life.

Here's a quick example of how I used the gradient filter to correct a shot from one of my favorite series that I'd assumed I'd just never get right. I'd exposed for the amazing sky but lost all of the detail in the land.

Before

After

I applied an exposure gradient to the bottom part of the image and a contrast gradient to the sky, then tweaked the white balance slightly. Still not quite perfect, but for less than 5 minutes of work, it's worlds better than I've been able to get out of this one before. Now I'm just wondering why I didn't take the time to learn a bit more about Lightroom sooner.

Something missing

I know I haven't written anything in a while... I've started several posts, but by the time I'm done writing, I feel more like they belong in the garbage than out in the great World Wide Web. I've felt a bit like that about my photography lately too. I was starting to feel like I was stagnating - taking the same shots of the same subjects over and over. Because I was. All summer long, despite having done some really cool things and visited some amazing places, I've felt like something's been missing. And today I realized that something was time spent on or at the water. I grew up on Cape Cod, and the ocean runs strong in my veins. Today I spent some time at the waterfront in Greenwich, CT and it breathed life back into me and my photography. It's amazing how sometimes all it takes is finding the right subject.