Swampfrog's Oregon Photography Tour

[swampfrog]

Quite a few more from around The Painted Hills. Actually pulled that saturation down on a few of these.

[swampfrog]

More varied Painted Hills

[Northwestcoug]

Yes, we couldn't stay quite as late as would have been ideal (other party members needed to get home), but it was a beautiful late afternoon with scattered cloud cover. Lovely yellow flower ground cover in many locations (which is unusual I believe?) Lots of HDR pics to come.

I don't recall lots of flowers there, but I've only been there once.

[swampfrog]

Beautiful shots. Chance favored you with an overcast day at the Painted Hills. We were there with similar conditions and the colors were great.

Yes, we couldn't stay quite as late as would have been ideal (other party members needed to get home), but it was a beautiful late afternoon with scattered cloud cover. Lovely yellow flower ground cover in many locations (which is unusual I believe?) Lots of HDR pics to come.

[Northwestcoug]

Beautiful shots. Chance favored you with an overcast day at the Painted Hills. We were there with similar conditions and the colors were great.

[swampfrog]

Heading back home across Oregon on day 8. Stopped by several places of interest.





Found an eagle on the way.





The painted hills--stopped and took way too many shots.

[swampfrog]

Did she adopt? How common could it be for an antelope to have quadruplets?

I suspect this is part of the behavior for the herd. A single female escapes with the young while the rest of the herd acts as a decoy. I don't know enough about their behavior. Not likely the young are all from the same mother.

[swampfrog]

I dont like this last batch so much, too much bokeh smearing in the background. I get that you want to emphasize your subject, but I would try to do that naturally, with a short focal plane at the subject, or lighting, rather than introducing fake bokeh in post production. And your bird shots never need this kind of post editing because your afinity with bird subjects is remarkable, and you naturally are able to emphasize your bird subjects.

Also, the previous set of photos, of quaint French Glen (i think), you found some great subjects. Instead of taking the photos head on, maybe you can practice picking an object in the foreground, with the subjects of your pictures in the background. This can sometimes feel more evocative of a mood. Here are some examples:

The Hotel with the aged wooden picket fence in the foreground
The street with the old fashioned phone booth in the foreground
The old commercial space with the rusty gas pumps in the foreground
The outhouse with the ceramic toilet in the foreground
And I dont know if I would be so gutsy, but drag out that old horse carriage from the garage and take a shot of any place on the horizon with the carriage in the foreground

There is no manipulation of the bokeh specifically in post processing. It's an artifact of the fact I was shooting 840mm at f/13 to keep as much depth of field as possible. They all turned out soft (heat was also involved again), so I added a larger radius to the sharpening. This had the odd effect in the background that you are seeing. End result is they are lousy images so I didn't take the time to put the distant background on it's own layer and not sharpen it. I also should have been shooting at f/7.1 or f/8 given the distance they were from me. The f/13 was for depth of field from the previous opportunity of shooting the 3 males at a distance, I didn't dial the aperture back to more open when I quickly switched subjects to the female and youngsters when they emerged. Heat of the moment kind of thing.

I normally sharpen with a radius of .7 to 1.3, I think I was close to 4.0 for these images. Whenever sharpening that heavily, it usually benefits when only applied it to specific subjects. I'll post the results in the before and after thread. It's a look into saving a soft image to at least presentable in a smaller web format.

This is the only image I bothered to smooth out the background again and it still looks like crap. I'll try processing it correctly using layers, sharpening the back layer and then using a layer mask to paint the sharpening in on just the foreground elements. I tried to fix it post-sharpening using Gaussian blur, and you can tell.



I was shooting the town as quickly as I could before taking off for the morning, I don't think the owners would have been keen with me moving stuff around, but I should definitely be more patient in composition.

[Katy Lied]

I dont like this last batch so much, too much bokeh smearing in the background. I get that you want to emphasize your subject, but I would try to do that naturally, with a short focal plane at the subject, or lighting, rather than introducing fake bokeh in post production. And your bird shots never need this kind of post editing because your afinity with bird subjects is remarkable, and you naturally are able to emphasize your bird subjects.

Also, the previous set of photos, of quaint French Glen (i think), you found some great subjects. Instead of taking the photos head on, maybe you can practice picking an object in the foreground, with the subjects of your pictures in the background. This can sometimes feel more evocative of a mood. Here are some examples:

The Hotel with the aged wooden picket fence in the foreground
The street with the old fashioned phone booth in the foreground
The old commercial space with the rusty gas pumps in the foreground
The outhouse with the ceramic toilet in the foreground
And I dont know if I would be so gutsy, but drag out that old horse carriage from the garage and take a shot of any place on the horizon with the carriage in the foreground

[mtnbiker]

Did she adopt? How common could it be for an antelope to have quadruplets?

Some more midday variety of middling quality.


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[swampfrog]

Some more midday variety of middling quality.

[swampfrog]

The angle of the bird's bill in this picture looks so strange, like someone stuck it under a door and gave it a yank.

Not sure what God/evolution was thinking with this one. There are several species with the long beak, some straight, some curved. The avocets are striking.

I don't comment much, but I love these pics. Keep them coming.

Still have thousands to go through, who would have thought ~12 days of shooting could be so much work?

[mtnbiker]

The angle of the bird's bill in this picture looks so strange, like someone stuck it under a door and gave it a yank.

[Jeff Lebowski]

I don't comment much, but I love these pics. Keep them coming.

[swampfrog]