Canon PowerShot SX110

Photo: The very top of the Cana Island lighthouse looking over trees as seen from across a nearby bay.

Another, more closer to Earth view of the Cana Island lighthouse that was featured last week in the Before and After series. I grabbed this shot with my point and shoot after seeing the view from the road on the way back to our hotel.  Didn’t even get out of the car, just opened the window and snap.

I brought out more of the trees and surface of the water with Topaz Detail and the Feature Enhancement preset.

Follow-up to Yesterday

In yesterday’s post I posed the question of which whether the use of Topaz Adjust or Topaz Detail worked better with that particular image. I had a few comments on Flickr with some good feedback, and if you’d like to weigh in, please do.

– Kris

We have yet to make it to the Big Island of Hawaii to see the lava flows in the volcano, but when we were walking around Buckingham Fountain in Downtown Chicago this summer, I watched as the sprays of water changed colors with the lights and thought this one had a familiar glow to it.

In the typical short cycle of winter weather that we’re used to here in Chicago early in the season, the decent dumping of snow we received last week is just about gone thanks to slightly warmer temps and rain.

However, this was the scene outside of my office window earlier in the week. I’d say there were about a dozen Canadian geese outside trying to pick at whatever grass was still accessible while the blowing snow was still coming down steadily. I snapped this with my SX110 since our office frowns on setting up tripods with DSLRs and telephoto lenses on them next to the windows.

Any Relation?

I’ve seen these birds year after year but never really thought about grabbing a shot of one of them. That is, of course, when there’s a whole group of them crossing the street and stopping traffic.

Anyway, it was because we saw their somewhat-related cousins, the Nene bird, last September at the Maui Photo Festival. Here’s another shot of one of the distinct relatives, you can sort of see the resemblance, no?

I find it intriguing that these birds are found about 2,500 miles apart from each other, and how the Nene bird from Hawaii is considered such a rare bird in the wild (less than 1,000 as of 2004 per Wikipedia).

Leave it to me to find reminders of Maui is the oddest places during cold, Chicago winters.

With my new Flickr account, I have renewed my motivation to browse Explore and some of the new groups I have found to seek out inspiration.  As I was doing this late last night, I came across a photo that led me to recall this image from earlier in the year still sitting on one my hard drives.

It was taken back in May when my life felt a lot simpler then, but I digress.

It was from back when I had time for after-work walks with my wife through the forest preserve that’s a 1/2 mile from our home. I was still testing out my Canon SX110 IS as my everyday point and shoot and decided to bring it along on one particularly gorgeous afternoon stroll. The plan was more for just sparking a little creativity than a more serious landscape shoot.

The Image

At about the turnaround point in the walk, we come to this little walking bridge over the Skokie River that we’ve crossed dozens of times. With the weather being exceptional, I stopped to frame up a shot or two when I noticed the sky’s reflection down in the water below.

Again, this was more for creative capture than any type of a technically sound shot. I didn’t have the right gear for that, nor would I burden my wife with my company on her walk if I was trekking around with my tripod and my camera bag, and stopping for 15 minutes at a time. In fact, this wasn’t even the shot I wanted, but I still like it. Hence, the rest of the story.

What I saw and originally wanted to capture was both the sky above the horizon line and part of it’s reflection in the water. This was back before I heard the phrase “expose for the highlights” hundreds of times or had any practice with HDR. Therefore, and given the time of day, my sky was pretty much blown out, and trying to compensate for the lighting would have lost much of the reflection and detail down below.

So, instead of spending a good 15 minutes messing around with everything in Manual mode, I zoomed in a little tighter and brought down the subject of my image to just be the water itself. Again, not the most technically sound photo because it was handheld, slightly rushed, and my pulse was up because of the walking (probably leading to more camera shake).

But still, instead of just leaving with a few shots with a blown out sky, I’ve got a decent image and a better story to share and keep in mind for the next time the lighting isn’t exactly the way I want it.

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving on Thursday. My wife and I did our annual pleasantries with her family, and found ourselves back at the Public Landing Restaurant with everyone, marking the third family get together there. It’s a nice place in a 100 year old building in the historic district of the town of Lockport, Il.

I took this photo back in April when we were there for Easter and I was testing out my (then new) Canon SX110 IS as a “carry everywhere” camera. On Thursday, I was hoping to do at least a half hour of HDR shooting prior to the big meal, but the forecast was calling for rain and we ended up getting a later start to the morning than I had hoped.

What Was Old Is New Again

So, instead I decided to take this old shot (which I originally posted back in April) and reprocess it from scratch using ACR and Topaz Adjust seeing that my skills in both of those tools are much improved since the original post. It didn’t help too much that the SX110 doesn’t shoot RAW and there’s more noise called out in post than I would have liked, but it’s still a nice improvement.

Here’s the original shot from last April reposted (and un-cropped).

It wasn’t a terrible image in the first place, but the newly processed version certainly adds a little something.

Thoughts?