Marathon High School Class of '63 Reunion

This is a photo of my Marathon (Florida Keys) High School graduating class. We got together last month to celebrate our 50 Year high school reunion. Interestingly, our class was small with only 26 classmates. I think that a showing of 33% was pretty great. Our short time together was wonderful. We shared so many terrific memories.  I took the picture...time delay on a tripod.  (Camera: Olympus OM-D E5...Olympus 17mm 1.8 lens.

My New RSS Reader is Feedly

I have been a fan of RSS feeds forever.  I added Feedler Pro Reader a few years ago.  Feedler was fed content by Google Reader.  As most of you already know Google Reader was discontinued on July 1, however they gave subscribers until July 15 to remove their subscriptions and move them to another reader. I loved Feedler Pro, but they were a victim of the Google Reader departure.   After a bit of research I decided to move my subscriptions over to the free app, Feedly. According to Wikipedia  "If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout."  I followed their advice after adding Feedly and then unzipping and loading the file created by Google Takeout.  I was up and running in minutes.  I checked my PC, my iPhone and my iPad and all of the subscriptions were on all devices.  

I am a happy camper.

Quiver Trees and Impalas - Namibia

This is the ghostly Namibian desert in southeast Africa. During our 3 week driving trip in Namibia in 2011 we drove as much as 300 kilometers at a time through landscape just like this...gravel road, few or no other automobiles.  My interest in this photo was to feature the threatened Quiver trees in the foreground.  I accomplished this with the new Radial Filter in Lightroom 5.  I will be interested in your thoughts.

 

This is one of my favorite photos from my 2011 trip to Namibia.  A pair of Impalas are sparring in the wilderness in Etosha National Park. It is always fun to go back and take another look at photos that you have taken earlier to see if you can give them a new treatment.   This was the first time that I have converted this photo to monochrome.  What do you think?

Red Square Photo Retouch

Isn't today's photo technology great?  I find that it is always fun to go back through my drawer of old images and retest them with today's software.  I am a particular fan of all of the Nik products.  This building is the State Historical Museum in Red Square in Moscow.  I took the photo in 2010.  I decided to convert it to black and white in Nik Silver Effects Pro 2 using a bunch of the sliders in the palette on the right side of the plug-in.  I really like the look of the black and white.  I think that it emphasizes the drama  of this very  historic area. What do you think?

My daughter, Heather, has just painted her house in Colorado.  She sent me a few iPhone photos of the job. But, like her Dad, the house was caddywampus in the pictures.  So, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to demonstrate the Lens Correction Tool in Lightroom 5.  Here is the process - Select the photo in the Develop Module.  Then select "Lens Correction" - Next click on "Enable Profile Correction" and "Remove Chromatic Aberration"  You will instantly see changes to your photograph, but you are not done yet.  Now select "Level" at the bottom of the same panel..and Voila, your photo should be perfectly level.  See my Before and After shots here.

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

First Hair Cut

Our shih tzu, Gabby at 9 months old.  I thought that I would share this photo to demonstrate the quality of my new Olympus 17mm lens shot wide open at 1.8 on my Olympus OM-D EM-5.  I was not more than 2 feet from the dog when I took this picture.  ISO 1000, 1/25 sec, EV +1.0. No flash. I am having so much fun with this micro 4/3 camera.   What do you think?

Tahiti and The French Society Islands

Lynn and I recently returned from a 2 week trip to Tahiti and The French Society Islands.  I thought that you might like to see the slide show that I produced from this exotic trip.