After the Out Breath, by and © monkeytime.

I posted this before learning that today a Christian, right-wing terrorist murdered Dr. George Tiller inside a Christian church in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Tiller was truly a hero, having risked his life for years (and nearly lost it in a previous terrorist shooting) to provide abortions to women in an area of the country that has been under enormous pressure from people who want to control women’s bodies and restrict women’s access to reproductive medicine.

I’m leaving this photo up because I like it and there’s not necessarily a direct connection between guns/gun culture and the sort of terrorism practiced by the forced-pregnancy crowd. Indeed, society’s protectors must use most of the same weapons used by its enemies. But Dr. Tiller’s murder can’t go unremarked, nor can the link between significant parts of American gun culture and other elements of right wing culture that are violently reactionary and seriously, dangerously unhinged.

Ave atque vale, Dr. Tiller – Hail and farewell.

Athena and Golem Zeus: Today in Herstory, by and © Michael Zara.

A recent Strobist post involved how to shoot a person who’s not too keen on “having my picture taken,” and discussed the use of a shoot-through umbrella combined with on-axis fill flash. So, after dinner Saturday, we tried out some lighting ratios in a loose and, uh, eccentric atmosphere.

This is lit from about 45° camera left and high, using a Canon Speedlite 580EXII with a shoot-through umbrella. I added some fill on the right side using the 580EX on-camera (but off-axis to the right, camera vertical) with the Omnibounce, dropped 2 stops.

After reading Mark Alberhasky’s post on not missing great shots because of either waiting for the greater shots just around the bend or putting off shooting until one has one’s best gear in hand, I made sure to have my beat-up Canon SD450 charged and in my bag before leaving today for the office. (H/T to Imaging Insider.) Lucky that I did, because the skies over Santa Monica were damn near photogenic at quittin’ time. This view from my colleague Jackson’s window was made with the SD450 on full Auto mode.

Get my good side!, by and © monkeytime

Over at Strobist, David Hobby cuts through the non-essential numbers (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) and focuses on the core of balancing ambient light and flash. 

Lloyd, above: I dropped the ambient two stops and shot on flash, ungelled. Nyahhhh!

Ranier from Maury (HDR), by and © monkeytime.

Last Thanksgiving, I visited the Seattle area, staying on Maury Island (Vashon Island) in the Puget Sound with friends whose house had the back-porch view of Mount Ranier seen in this image. I shot this at about 5:15 p.m. The foreground was in deep shadow, while the mountain was still in relatively bright sun.

I bracketed several exposures with the goal of combining them into an HDR image. In Lightroom, I applied the LR/Enfuse plug-in to the RAW files of two of the bracketed exposures, importing the resultant TIFF back into Lightroom. I then applied an exposure increase, fill light and a graduated filter to further increase exposure in the bottom 2/3 of the image.

I haven’t been a fan of HDR because so many of the HDR images I’ve seen on Flickr look cartoonish or surreal. An image of the Los Angeles River by cinemafia, however, was so natural looking that I’m coming around.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass, “Meditations at Lagunitas”

Telegraph Hill and Tower, by and © monkeytime.

The 5D kit did not lend itself well to traipsing around San Francisco this month – or maybe I just didn’t lend myself well to carrying the load. At times I wished I had only my little Powershot, but, then, there would have been shots I couldn’t have gotten, like this one. I shot this just a few minutes short of Noon, against significant glare, which was compounded by shooting through an office building window.

In addition to shooting with the polarizing filter I made the following major adjustments in Lightroom:

• Preset: Punch (which, among other things, pushes Clarity to 50),
• Increased Contrast and Point Curve set to Strong Contrast,
• Increased Color Saturation, and
• Blue channel Luminance set to zero.

Beyond general improvement of the image, the primary reason for these adjustments was to bring out the blue/gray of the sky and the contrasting whites of the clouds. Of course, I could have held a polarizing filter in front of the point-and-shoot, but mine shoots only JPG, and I suspect that only in RAW could I have so easily drawn down blue luminance.