Post needed a photo so…. Squirrel!
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   I am sure many of the photographers that might read this are using Adobe products to do their post processing. Recently Adobe announced that their next iteration of Photoshop would not be CS7, but rather a subscription model called Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud). As one would guess, this has caused some confusion, consternation, and internet rioting over the changes.

   Part of this new setup is due to the high rate of Adobe Photoshop piracy. One feature of Photoshop CC is to have your installation check in with the Adobe servers at least once a month to ensure that you are paid up and licensed. I have no problem with this part of using the “Creative Cloud”. I have legit software, and don’t have a problem if Adobe wants to verify that. Stressing that this is the main impetus for the changes does not seem genuine, however. I think the part Adobe is more concerned with is effectively raising the prices of their software, but under a new system so it is not as easy to directly compare.

So lets compare!

   The last change Adobe made to Photoshop licensing involved the upgrade paths. Previously you did not have to buy every version of PS, you could skip a few and still upgrade to the new version for approximately $200. Then there were some controversial changes to this program that required you to purchase every version or you would no longer get a “discounted” new version/upgrade. There were some changes to this along the way but I think this is how the system eventually was implemented. I recently upgraded from CS5 to CS6 for $200 plus tax (I live in Canada). Lets crunch some numbers without the tax, and assume a customer that had planned on upgrading to each new version on the old 18 month cycle. The new system requires an investment of $20 per month for just Photoshop CC.

This is an 80% increase per year just to use Photoshop.

   I have to wonder if Adobe will stick to this plan, or at least the pricing it released today. Almost doubling the cost of your software for existing users is something any company knows will draw some ire. Hopefully Adobe was just testing the waters today. I’m not against the need to verify a license, nor a monthly subscription model, but a price increase on this scale is going to be rather hard to stomach. I just wish there was a viable alternative…

A winter sunset at Clayton Beach in Larrabee State Park – Bellingham, Washington State (-click to enlarge-)

   In March of 2012 I visited Larrabee State Park in Washington State. Both of these photos are from Clayton Beach and show the interesting foregrounds possible on this sort of sandstone beach.

   One of my favourite features of Clayton Beach was the sandstone along the edge of the ocean. Most of the “beaches” that I know in this region are either sandy or are a rocky beach that is rather slippery. The usual barnacles, mussels, and algae such as Fucus distichus are still present. As they are on a sandstone surface, however, the rocks are not very slippery even when wet. It feels a bit like walking on sandpaper – and it was nice to not have to worry as much about falling on my butt!

Sunset light on sandstone formations at Clayton
Beach in Larrabee State Park – Bellingham, Washington State (-click to enlarge-)

   Other than just providing a non slip surface to walk on, the sandstone provides some great textures and shapes (called Tafoni) for the foreground of a photograph. Both of these images have interesting shapes in the foreground, though the second is more pronounced with more visible pockets of erosion. My previously published photo from Larrabee shows a larger sandstone formation.

   I have a new gallery of Ocean Photos on my website which includes more from my trip to Larabee State park. More Ocean themed photos are on their way…

Tulip Flower
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   Last week I headed into Vancouver to photograph some of the spring flowers at Queen Elizabeth Park. The flowering Cherry Trees were out in full force, but they are so popular each of them had a crowd of tourists, locals, and photographers around them. I chose instead to concentrate on some of the other flowers in the park.

   Sometimes direct sunlight can be a tough condition to photograph wider landscape scenes. These tulip flowers, however, were nicely lit in the bright sunshine. I like how the cup like flowers appear to be lit from the inside when the sun shines on them from this angle.

   A bit of an older image (photographed in 2011) but I found a lot of photography opportunities with my Canon 100mm macro lens and these cucumber tendrils in a backyard greenhouse. I photographed the leaves and the flowers from a few angles but settled on these curled tendrils as the most interesting aspect of these plants.

   More of my macro photography can be found in the Macro Photos Gallery.

Panorama of Mount Cheam in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia
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   This is a panorama of Mount Cheam, a familiar sight to anyone living or often traveling through the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. I made this photo by the banks of the Fraser River in Agassiz just after sunset in January. The time right after sunset is often referred to as “Blue hour” and you can see why. I often like to photograph city buildings in Vancouver at this time as you can still see the outlines of the buildings against the sky (unlike when the sky is darker). I find this is also a great time to photograph mountains – so it is worth hanging around after any potential sunset light or alpenglow has faded. Always wait until the light is gone!

 

   Another one of the photographs I made in October at Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I liked the look of this waterfall (enough water, but not too much) along with the fallen leaves and some Fall foliage in the Japanese Maples hanging over the pathway.

   More of my photography from Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park can be found in my Garden Photos Gallery.

   In October I made another trip into Vancouver to photograph Queen Elizabeth Park displaying some Fall foliage. Most of the colour was provided by various Japanese Maples (Acer Japonica) in the gardens there. I will probably return this Spring to photograph the Magnolia trees in bloom, as well as the tulips and other Spring bulbs.

 

   It always seems that there are either too many clouds or none at all when I have an opportunity to photograph Mount Baker. So sometimes I ignore it in favour of Mount Shuksan or one of the other nearby mountains available at Artist Point in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. This time, however, I like the small accents of light that showed up on the side of the peak, which gives this photo a bit more interest for me than others I made at the same time.

   These are some Highbush Blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) I photographed back in August of 2011. I didn’t get the final editing done until now – but I wish I had processed these when I could actually eat some. Viewing these gave me a craving for some fresh Blueberries! Unfortunate that I will have to wait until around August before I can have some fresh ones again!

   A few more photos of these can be found in my image archive: Blueberries.

Crocus vernus
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   A closeup of two Crocus (Crocus vernus) flowers in the backyard last Spring.

   This photograph was a bit of an experiment. I wanted to have a shallow depth of field that would blur the background. Since these flowers were at different heights, having them both in focus was not going to occur along with a shallow depth of field. I might have been able to get these both in focus with an aperture of f/16 or higher, but this would not have the background bokeh effect I was looking for. So this is a blend of two exposures shot at f/2.8 each focusing on the top of one of the flowers. The two exposures were then merged in Photoshop. I like the effect this created, and it shows that a “focus stack” doesn’t have to have everything in focus through the composition.

   More photos of Spring flowers and gardens can be found in my Garden Photos Gallery.

   I am always learning new techniques in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop, and often a consequence of this is the desire to revisit older photographs and reprocess them. A lot of my older photos were processed using methods that were time consuming and sometimes not that effective. Finally learning to use masks was a gamechanger, for example. There are a lot of these photos where I am happy with the processing, but others that I have started to revisit in order to process them with my current vision of how they should appear. Thankfully my new methods are a lot faster, and the occasional revisit to an older photograph doesn’t take me nearly the time it used to.

   This photograph is a good example of one where I wasn’t happy with the initial processing. I like this photo – but the initial version has a foreground that was too dark, the colours were slightly reddish, and there were a few other brightness issues I wanted to fix. I think this processing balances the colours much more faithfully to the original scene as I remember it, and deals with the darker foreground. You can read a bit more about the things I learned while actually photographing this scene in the original post.

Silver Lake Provincial Park

   Another photograph I made this Fall at Silver Lake Provincial Park in the Skagit Valley near Hope, British Columbia. I was fortunate on both of my trips here last Fall to have a near perfect reflection on the lake – I only wish I’d had even more hours of light to work with all the possibilities!

   I posted a panorama made on the same evening in a previous blog post. I also have a gallery in my newly organized image archive dedicated to Silver Lake Provincial Park you may enjoy.

   This is one of my newly processed photos from Picture Lake in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest – featuring the iconic Mount Shuksan. In October 2011 I again photographed this location and now that I have my website gallery organized I have finished off the processing of images from that trip. This photo (and the horizontal version) has a bit of a different look to it than the others I processed from the same evening.

   More photos of Mount Shuksan and the surrounding area can be found in my Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest Gallery.

Liberty Bell Mountain
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   Both of these photos were made at Washington Pass in the North Cascades of Washington State. I am never quite sure how to label these things – always thinking in the past that this was part of North Cascades National Park. Washington Pass lies outside of the National Park boundaries and is actually part of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, though I think the Washington Pass overlook is maintained and patrolled by National Park staff.

   Back in October I visited the Washington Pass area with Alan Majchrowicz. We first hiked up to Blue Lake which was surrounded by some great Fall needle colours in the Alpine Larches. I’d not seen larches before so this was especially interesting. Next Alan showed me this fantastic meadow near Washington Pass which has great view of Liberty Bell Mountain (top) and Kangaroo Ridge (bottom photo) and a wide array of interesting foregrounds.

Kangaroo Ridge After Sunset
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   The first example of these can be found in the first photograph of Liberty Bell Mountain. There were many small patches of water in the meadows, some even containing small fish – which I found interesting considering how long this area is under snow each winter. There were also numerous long dead tree trunks laying horizontally on the ground which made for some good foregrounds as well. In the first photo above I liked how all of these seem aligned to point right to Liberty Bell Mountain.

   The second example of foregrounds elements I enjoyed were the Narrow Leaved Cotton Grasses (technically a Sedge – Eriophorum angustifolium) which I had not seen before. The small tufts of cotton like seeds on the stems made them a bit more interesting to me. While I think the nice post-sunset “belt of venus” light in this second photo works better, I do have another composition from the same area that shows off the grasses/sedges a little better.

   While I am just beginning to scratch the surface of photographic possibilities within the North Cascades area I think this spot near Washington Pass will definitely be a stop I wish to make next year after the thaw!

   I have spent some of the last few weeks reorganizing the galleries in my Image Archive. Exactly how to organize this number of photos is always a dynamic situation, but I think that my current setup of “Galleries by Subject” and “Galleries by Location” will make it easier. All the galleries are still listed below, but if you want to browse for something relatively specific – this will be an easier way. I also made many new galleries that will work better under this new arrangement such as a gallery for each season of the year and individual British Columbia Provincial Parks.