Monthly Archives: July 2013

Travel Preparations, Troy's Blog

Only a Short Time to Take it All in?

Boston

Finally, our vacation has arrived. Better hurry and pack because the flight is early tomorrow and we need to get going in order to avoid missing the plane. Once you’ve arrived at your destination it’s time to find a hotel and check before deciding which sights to see. It seems that the fast pace at which our lives move, the trips we take have become shorter. How can you take in all of the sights with very little time? With only a few days to relax and see the sights a little planning will help.

It took a little time to make to flight arrangements or a driving plan to arrive at your destination. Doesn’t it make sense to spend a little bit of time to figure out what you want to do and where you want to stay once you’ve arrived at that destination? I understand that it’s no vacation if you have every hour of each day planned. That is not what I’m writing about here. Let me go through an example of planning our adventure to Boston.

Our very first objective was to look over transportation cost to Boston. Since we were leaving from Minnesota and time was a factor flying was determined to be our best choice of getting to Boston. After figuring out we would be flying, it was time to pick the dates.

*Money saving tip: flying on a Tuesday or Wednesday can save a significant amount of money. Often times we save enough money to stay an extra night in a hotel and then some.

I use sites like Expedia and Kayak to find which airlines and which dates are the most affordable. Sometimes I will go directly to the airlines website if I’m trying to use rewards to help reduce our overall flight costs. If you fly frequently enough, signing up for rewards programs either through credit cards and/or the airlines can really help keep costs down especially in these times of higher airfares. Yes, it does require some extra time to sign up for and earn these rewards as well as use these rewards but it can be worth it.

The USS Constitution - 'Old Ironsides'

Let me provide and example: on our trip to Boston in 2011 we were able to get 4 airfares from Minneapolis for $500. Without our rewards programs it would have cost us almost $400 per airfare for a total of $1600. That’s over a $1,000 in savings! This required us to use 2 different rewards programs which can be a little tricky when booking the flights if you want to get everybody on the same flight. You need to first check each program and which flights are available through each to find which one match and then go through and book them selecting seats next to each other. This is some of the extra time required to use these programs. For those that are saying sure you could do that in 2011 but costs have gone up since then, We recently booked 4 fares from Minneapolis to Seattle for $500 this summer so it’s still possible.

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Photography Experiment, Troy's Blog

JPEG and RAW

Unedited

Whenever possible I shoot in both RAW and JPEG. This has a couple of advantages for me. First, I can immediately view JPEG on a laptop or tablet to make sure the camera settings are what I’m looking for and to view the images I just took a little faster than bringing up the RAW images. I use the RAW images when I want to edit a photo. Is this necessary? That’s what I wanted to find out by taking a RAW image and a JPEG image of the same shot and see how much of a difference there was in editing it.

The photo above is the original picture as shot by the camera. It’s a little over exposed as I was using a slower shutter speed in an effort to get that silky motion in the water. That’s why this image was chosen. I wanted to see if the RAW image and all its information would provide a better picture after it was edited due to all that information. You can see the edited RAW image below.

RAW

I’m certainly no expert at editing photographs but I am attempting to improve in an effort to bring out the beauty hidden in most pictures so that others can get an idea of what that photo was intended to show. After a few tweaks the photo above did not turn out all that bad. The water is still to bright but much of that information was clipped from the photograph making it impossible to retrieve.

This next photograph is the JPEG version of this shot. I attempted to keep as many of the edits the same as possible between these two photos to see how they would turn out. As you can see, there is not much difference between them on this post. I will confess that the JPEG took more time to edit in an attempt to make both pictures look the same. The difference becomes more noticeable at 100% resolution.

JPEG

Here you can see a portion of the images at full resolution. Can you guess which one is the JPEG and which one is the RAW photograph?

100% size JPEG image

The JPEG version is above and the RAW version is below. At this magnification you can see the RAW version is a little more clean and crisp. Admittedly some of that has to due with the sharpening I applied to each one. The JPEG version likely has a little higher sharpening applied than the RAW version accounting for some of the difference.

My conclusion: JPEG is a perfectly acceptable format when using smaller size images. If I wanted to use a large print of this shot, I would definitely go with the RAW format after editing. To see Peter’s article which is the basis for this post in the photography experiment series, check it out here.

100% Size RAW image

Photography Experiment, Troy's Blog

Chasing Waterfalls

 

High Falls - Baptism River edited

 

I did it. I went chasing waterfalls. And I did a fairly poor job of it in my opinion. One of Peter’s rules about waterfalls, which you can view here, is to avoid shooting in mid-day. I think every waterfall I photographed was mid day. Unfortunately there were time constraints and photographing waterfalls at another time wasn’t much of an option. This was an attempt to get the silky motion with shutter speeds of 1/10 second but it was just too bright out and I wasn’t able to change the aperture and ISO enough to prevent over exposure. Using editing software I was able to get most of the picture back from being over exposed but the waterfall is still to bright to really get the full effect of motion. You can see the picture before editing below.

High Falls - Baptism River unedited

When looking at the original, it is surprising how much you can do to improve the photograph.

This next picture was taken using the auto settings on the camera. Since it was so bright out the shutter was able to move fast and essentially stop the water motion. Fortunately there is enough water volume going over this fall that stopping motion works in this case.

High Falls with Motion Stopped

Here is perfect opportunity to try the silky motion by slowing down the shutter as the light likely would have allowed for it as well as the lower volume of water cascading over the falls. Unfortunately, this was taken before reading the ‘Shooting Waterfalls’ post by Mr. Carey with a point and shoot camera. Guess I’ll have to try it again another day.

Gooseberry Falls

This photo is of Pigeon Falls at the Minnesota – Canada border. Here is another case where silky motion would have been interesting. Although using a slower shutter speed may have altered the rainbow between the falls reducing its effect. Again this picture was taken before reading the waterfalls post and with a point and shoot camera. Hopefully I’ll have another opportunity to photograph these falls. Will the lighting bring the rainbows again next time?

Pigeon Falls

While enjoying a creek I decided to play with a slower shutter in an effort to get the silky motion and this was the best I did. There was no tripod so this was 1/10 second shutter speed while hand holding the camera. In fact none of these waterfall pictures were taken using a tripod. Not bad for holding the camera if you ask me. Taking more time I would set the camera where it would be still and take a longer exposure photo to get even more silky motion.

Definitely room for improvement in shooting waterfalls. I will most likely get the opportunity while visiting Alaska later this summer. I suppose getting out for more practice might be a good idea before then.

Silky Motion Rapids