It's taken almost a month but I'm finally able to get through the day without falling asleep. Not sure what was wrong but it seems to have passed. I'm working on my images (and videos) and learning a whole lot of new stuff. I've got a ton of new software which is both a help and a hindrance to getting things finished. I now have 3 new packages dedicated to video ... DaVinci Resolve, Fusion and Nuke ... and they are lots of fun and a huge challenge. I've been working especially with Fusion which is a high-end compositing program for making really impressive sequences. The first project was to take the Point Vicente Lighthouse in LA and combine it with a sunset taken at the same location to get a really stunning sunset behind the lighthouse. It took me over a week to get everything as I wanted since I had zero experience with the software and not much experience with compositing. It was a lot of work to get everything finished. I had to make a series of masks in Photoshop that isolated the lighthouse and a palm tree from the sky background ... 136 to be exact ... one at a time. That took 3 days of careful work. I also had to work around some limitations in the free version of the software. They limited 'output' to UHD (3840 x 2160) but I was working with DSLR frames that were much bigger. Despite trying to output UHD at the end, the software kept refusing to render the final images because at intermediate stages in the node processor the image size was much bigger. So I had to downsize my base images to UHD and even then had to do some fancy footwork to get the final images to output. Forcing me to downsize my initial images is really a bummer for me as I want to work with maximum resolution up to the very end. I'm not the only person upset by this and there's some griping on the forums about this limitation. I'm sure they will eventually change as getting this software into the hands of many amateurs who will say good things about it is important for them to compete against Nuke, the current standard.
Anyway, that sequence is almost done. I'm just tweaking things a bit to get the best video I can. I want it to be spectacular as it will be one of the lead sequences in my video. Only the best make it as I'm hoping this is a showcase for my work.
Death Valley from a different perspective
I was in Death Valley twice this trip. First time, in April, I wanted to take some astro sequences but the moon was full and not many stars appeared. To get the best star shots you need absolute dark and a full moon isn't going to get you there so I left and went on to LA. A few weeks later I came back to a new moon and things were much better. I spent a few days in the valley, sleeping in my truck and letting my camera run unattended. Not too many people wandering around in the desert at night although the hazards aren't all that bad so the equipment is very safe. No big, nasty animals out on the salt where I took my milky way shots. I did see a small coyote in Furnace Creek (he was walking down the main road in the morning, just ambling along at his own pace and didn't give me a second glance as he walked by) and a small red fox out near Bad Water but he was too hot to give a damn about me. Biggest problems are on the sand dunes with sidewinders and scorpions at night.
Last night in the valley I wanted to get a panorama of the entire valley from Dante's Overlook. You basically leave the park heading east toward Vegas until you see signs for the overlook to the right. Take a narrow, twisting, steep road 13 miles or so, passing several commercial mining operations and a very steep final climb of 15 degrees, until you get to the overlook. The whole valley is spread out below including the salt flats. It's a very impressive sight. As usual I waited until near sunset and then found a good spot for my pano. The sky had some interesting clouds but it was pretty obvious a red sunset was not in the offing. So I did what I could and took several sequences at different locations. This particular image shows the north end of the valley, from the salt flat to the sand dunes. It was a blue evening so what you see is what I saw. I could have warmed the image a bit but that's not true to the colors that were present and it looked fake.
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| Death Valley - 24mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0 |
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