Forest Grove

I'm in Forest Grove, OR at the moment visiting my twin who goes to Pacific University there. I arrived early afternoon today, and we've just hung around all day eating food and meeting her friends.

I took some pictures of flowers earlier today, but I think I'm going to wait and edit those when I get back to the island. Or maybe later tonight. We'll see how tired I am....

Tonight post if from a lake we visited this evening. It was about 20 minutes out of town, and we got there just as the sunset was ending. However, I soon discovered that the lights of Portland and Forest Grove combined make a nice orange low in the sky which looks exactly like a sunset! Only it's from the wrong direction but who could tell?

So I set up my fake sunset shot with a tree and it's reflection in the water in the foreground, and the beautiful "sunset" in the back ground. I shot at f10, ISO200, and 46 seconds. I used an introvelometer to control my camera. For how cheap you can get those things now, there's no reason why you shouldn't have one. Basically, it lets you control the exposure time for the camera, how many shots you take in a row, holds it open in blub mode, etc. Used for timelapse or uber long exposure photography.

Tonights photo was originally set up on a 50mm lens (on a 1.6 crop camera like the 7D that's like 86mm or something like that?), but I decided that was too telephoto and switched to my 18-135mm. I had it at full wide (18mm), and shot landscape.

The original image looked like this right out of the camera.

No too bad, but pretty flat and uninteresting. The crops kinda weird and the sky isn't that dramatic.
The first thing I did was crop it to a square and pump up the exposure about a stop and a half.

That resulted in overexposure in the sky though, so I brought down the highlights and whites a ton. I also raised the shadows and blacks. Basically, I compressed the tonal range in Lr and made an HDR. Finally, I raised the clarity and the contrast a lot to bring it back from being super flat.

When I get back home a settled in, I'm going to try some luminosity mask editing on this to see what I can come up with.

That's about it though, it turned out to be a pretty quick and easy shot to do, but still came out looking really cool!

See you tomorrow!