Category Archives: Photos

Arboreal Analysis

Today I drove down through northern California. And there’s something that everyone says you should do when you’re driving through northern California: go and see the giant redwoods.

CarRedwoodLeggettNow, I was interested in doing this, but mostly just to make a change from the other scenery I’d been driving through this week. After all, I had seen some pretty big redwoods elsewhere, and, dash it, we have some rather substantial oaks back at home. Still, it was only a small detour, so I turned off Highway 101 into the ‘Avenue of the Giants’.

And I was awestruck.

I mean, I knew they were big: I’d seen pictures since childhood of the ones you can drive cars through. And other friends and family had taken photos on previous visits, which might look something like this:

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or this:

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or this:

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But I think I’d never really caught on to just how staggeringly large these things are because, compared to most other species, they are remarkably tall for their width, and that’s very hard to capture in photos. You can put things near the bottom of them, like people, or my small rental car:

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But that only shows you the scale of the very bottom bit of the tree.

But to give you an indication, this is Founders’ Tree (admittedly taken with a wide-angle lens):

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Now, this fellow is over 12 ft across, which is pretty impressive… but it’s over 346 ft high! If, like me, you find the raw numbers hard to grasp, that’s taller than the Statue of Liberty or Big Ben. It’s over twice the height of Niagara Falls; in fact, you have to go noticeably higher than Niagara before you get to the first branch.

These trees are, quite literally, awesome.

And yet, put a few of them together, let them grow for a millennium or so, and you get a remarkably peaceful and beautiful place.

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If you get a chance to see them, do so.

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Vulture culture

Turkey vultures aren’t too keen on being rained on. When the sun comes out, they spread their wings out to dry.

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On the Rogue River, Oregon, this morning.

Paddling in the Pacific

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Removing your shoes isn’t required when visiting Cannon Beach, but it does make it more enjoyable.

Golden fishing

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A small fish-processing depot in Astoria

By the dawn’s early light

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The Columbia River this morning

River lights

River lights, Astoria, Oregon

I’m at the mouth of the Columbia River, in Astoria, Oregon. It’s quite a river. The bridge that crosses it here is about 4 miles long. Here’s a little bit of it:

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Click for larger versions.

I had a surreal experience as I drove across the lower sections. Several species of birds were enjoying the updraft that the bridge and vehicles provided. I looked out of my car window at one point to see five large pelicans hovering, almost stationary, just a few feet from my wing mirror.

That’s when you wish you didn’t have to concentrate on the driving.

Runway

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Mistress of all she surveys

Tilly at Wimpole Hall

Or so she believes, anyway…

Shiny

We visited a fine Berkshire hotel at the weekend, and I did like this natty little Lagonda in the car park…

Vintage Lagonda

Standing guard

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Post-processing RAW for Fujifilm cameras

One thing for which the Fujifilm cameras (such as my beloved X-Pro1) are known is their impressive on-board JPEG converter, which can produce sufficiently yummy images that many people who would otherwise shoot RAW just stick to JPEG with these devices.

I, however, want to stick with RAW, and I found that getting the best out of it takes rather more initial tweaking with the Fuji cameras than it did, say, with my Canon. I eventually settled on a small boost to the saturation (+13), and quite a large amount of sharpening (+60), and saved that as a Lightroom preset which I now apply as I import any images coming from the X-Pro1.

However, the biggest improvement came, I think, when Adobe Camera Raw (the engine behind Lightroom & Photoshop imports) was upgraded a couple of months ago. One of the easy-to-miss features was the inclusion of Fujifilm camera profiles which mimic the film emulation modes found in the camera. Even when I had upgraded and knew it was there, it was still a little tricky to find, but it’s under the Camera Calibration section of the Develop module:

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(click for full size)

I’ve found that experimenting with these profiles, and particularly using the VELVIA emulation while reducing my previous saturation setting a little, can bring much more richness to the colours.

Green

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Wandlebury, this morning.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser