2013 Utah Trip - Days 1 thru 4...

Old Faithful, in Yellowstone National Park, at the tail end of an eruption (click image for gallery)

This is the first in an upcoming series of posts with image galleries from my trip down to Utah in May, 2013. This gallery has images taken during my drive down to Yellowstone in Wyoming, my first time visiting the park since I was a child where I only had a plastic squirt-gun shaped like a camera. I really wanted to take photos, just like my parents were doing, but was far too young at the time to have a real camera. The squirt-gun was the next best thing my parents could think of at the time and they got me one on that trip. I really enjoyed pretending to take photos with it!

Being a child with a short attention span though, I recall uttering the phrase "You seen one geyser, you've seen them all..." at one point during the trip, which really annoyed and disappointed my parents, especially my mother. At the time, I really did not appreciate all the traveling and exploring I did with them during every summer vacation, but it obviously rubbed off on me. Today, I can't picture a year going by without one or more major trips where I go camping, hiking, and explore new areas, taking lots of photos along the way.

At some point, either during that visit to Yellowstone with my parents, or perhaps a day or two after when we continued on our way, I left the little black plastic squirt-gun camera in the parked car, and with closed windows and the hot sun beating down, it melted into slag! I was absolutely crushed at the loss of the camera and was totally depressed and upset. One of the happiest moments of the trip came when somehow, my dad was able to buy another one in a different store and surprise me with a shiny and perfectly, miraculously, intact new toy camera. In retrospect, that generosity makes my impatience and "attitude" at the time all that much more regretful...

Road-trip! Brand new 2014 Subaru Forester 2.0XT...

View into Succor Creek Canyon in Oregon (click image for gallery)

Sorry for the long delay, as this is the first update in a few months. A few people have already asked me if I had stopped blogging! Nope, I was just really busy at work and hadn't been doing all that much shooting. Mainly lens tests in fact, including the new Nikkor AF-S 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5G and the Nikkor AF-S VR 70-200mm f/4G... both of which I bought actually. The brand new 18-35mm replaced my AF-S VR 16-35mm f/4G and the 70-200mm replaced the bigger and heavier f/2.8G VR II. I find both these lighter, less expensive lenses to generally perform as well (or even better) for my needs than their heavier and more expensive counterparts. For example, the 18-35mm is actually more flare resistant than the costlier 16-35mm! I also tested the new AF-S 80-400mm Nikkor zoom and although it is excellent, it has a zoom range that I don't often need, so I cannot justify its expense at this time.

Anyway, in mid-May I left on a solo road trip to the Southwestern US again, this time making my way through Yellowstone National Park and Dinosaur National Monument on the way down to Utah. I also visited Fantasy Canyon southeast of Vernal, Utah for the first time and it truly has some bizarrely eroded sandstone formations! Watch for more blog posts in the near future with some additional photos from the trip.

This "off-topic" blog posting is mainly all about my new vehicle, a brand new 2014 Subaru Forester 2.0XT, the Canadian "Touring Edition" model. It conveniently arrived (barely) in time for my trip and after being shod with some proper off-road rubber (four 18" Yokohama Geolandar A/T-S tires), and after a quick 900km break-in drive through the Fraser Canyon where it proved fully functional, I was off and heading south. An image gallery with twenty shots of the new Forester on my trip can be accessed by clicking on the above photo, which was taken on the way home through Oregon. Many of the photos were shots of various backcountry campsites where I stayed (not official campsites, just nice out-of-the-way spots on public BLM lands) and a few just show the Forester within the spectacular scenery I was driving through.

X-Trans Raw Files in Lightroom 4.4 RC

(Above, the left side shows the old conversion and the right side, the new)
Open full image: LR44_train_full.jpg

Yesterday, Adobe posted release candidate updates to Lightroom (4.4 RC) and Camera Raw (7.4 beta) on the Adobe Labs website. One of the key improvements, apart from some solid bug fixes and new camera support, is an update to their Fujifilm X-Trans raw conversion code. In their words: "...a correction to the demosaic algorithms for Fujifilm cameras with the X-Trans sensor." Well, the word "correction" doesn't do justice to all the improvements. Virtually all of the complaints I had about Adobe's X-Trans conversions have been addressed.

I have prepared some side-by-side comparisons of various images (Lightroom screenshots), converted with the previous Adobe X-Trans algorithm in Photoshop CS6 and ACR v7.3 (the left-side 100% crop), and Lightroom 4.4 RC (the right side 100% crop), which uses Adobe's new code. At 100% or 200% pixel-peeping zoom levels, the differences are clearly visible, if you know what to look for. Below each image is a link to open a 3000 pixel version of the full image in a new window, processed and output with the new Lightroom 4.4 release candidate. When you click on the side-by-side comparison screenshots, make sure you zoom to 100% on the window that opens to see the differences more clearly. Or save the shots to your computer and open them up in something other than your browser. The screenshots are from Lightroom sized to a 27" display, so they are 2556x1418 in size.

I have purposefully chosen images that look particularly bad, the worst ones I could find when viewed at 100% zoom, in order to illustrate the sometimes dramatic changes in this new update. In a few instances, the problems were serious enough that you could even see them in substantially downsized versions for the web, for example the "can" (compressed air can) image, the "railing" image and the "grass" image.

SFU with the Fujifilm XF 14mm f/2.8 R

Gallery: SFU with Fujifilm XF 14mm f/2.8 R

On a beautiful Sunday yesterday (finally a nice day on a weekend!), I shot some images with the new XF 14mm f/2.8 R at Simon Fraser University. The gallery contains some more comments on this lens as well, but to summarize, I'd say that since it's such a stunningly good ultra-wide-angle lens, it would actually be worth buying an X-E1 body just to be able to use it, even if you don't have a Fuji X system yet! Well, in my humble opinion anyway. Can you tell I like this lens?

Fog & Fourteen: Fujifilm XF 14mm f/2.8 R Review

I was at the Port Mann Bridge on a foggy night yesterday and captured some shots with my X-E1, including a bunch with the superb new XF 14mm f/2.8 R wide-angle lens, the latest addition to Fujifilm's excellent X-body lens lineup. This lens has a focal length equivalent to a 21mm on a full-frame camera. Many years ago now, back in 1984 in fact, I was shooting with my brand new Nikon FE2 and I remember being impressed after seeing the full arc of a rainbow in a Nikon brochure, and that was taken with a 20mm lens. If I had to choose any one ultra-wide-angle focal length, it would indeed be right around 20mm mark, so this new lens is exactly what I had been waiting for. Quite simply, the optical quality of this lens is stunning, one of the very best ultra-wide primes I have ever shot with. For a variety of initial images shot with the 14mm, see the following gallery...

Gallery: Fujifilm XF 14mm f/2.8 R - First Tests

The above gallery also has a condensed review of the 14mm lens, but see the rest of this blog entry for further details, clarifications and sample images.

X-E1: Van Dusen Festival of Lights

Gallery: Van Dusen Botanical Gardens - 2012 Festival of Lights

Season's Greetings!

2013 Rocks of the Southwest calendar...

Well, it's that time of year again... time for a new calendar for friends and family. This year I was drawing a blank for quite some time, trying to get inspired to do another calendar. I didn't really want to do "normal" southwest landscapes calendar again, mainly because my trip in the spring of 2012 had very little in the way of interesting weather or light, the above shot being one of the few exceptions. I didn't find my shots compelling enough to enthusiastically put them into a calendar, although I suppose it should have been easy to do one. I had mulled over the idea of making a "Vancouver at Night" calendar, but while I have taken tons of night shots in the last few months, inevitably, they were from the same three areas around Vancouver and I couldn't see myself making a calendar from those either.

Just the other day, I decided to take advantage of a sale from Topaz Labs and bought a couple of their plugins that I did not yet own. I rarely use plugins, but I find Topaz makes some of the best around. I bought their convolution sharpening plugin "InFocus", which I haven't really used yet, and also their B&W conversion plugin, simply called "B&W Effects". I was fiddling around with it on some images and suddenly came across an interesting toned look. After more fiddling with an opacity slider, allowing some of the underlying original colour to show through, I actually rather liked what I was seeing as far as muted colours, boosted micro contrast and overall austere tonality. The plugin's own grain effects were pretty dismal I thought, so I decided to modify the grain action I had created myself for my digital B&W infrared shots. Bingo... suddenly an interesting look that I started to like and the more I played around with it, the more it grew on me.

I'm not sure if I'll be so fond of this look after a few months of having a calendar on the wall myself, but since I was in an artistic funk and couldn't decide on what to do, well, this was a quick way out, almost an act of desperation! Now I only hope the people I'll be giving the calendar to don't look at it and think to themselves "...WTF is that? Did he scan some old, faded, grainy colour film or something...?!" Actually, all these shots were originally taken with my Panasonic GH2. Anyway, the twelve months of images appear after the break...

X-E1: High ISO and XF 18-55mm Review

Gallery: Fujifilm X-E1 & XF 18-55mm Samples

I recently picked up Fujifilm's excellent "kit" zoom for the X-E1, the XF 18-55mm f/2.8-4.0 R LM OIS. It uses a new linear-motor for AF (the LM in its name) which is fast and silent when focusing, and it also has an effective optical image stabilization system (OIS). For a reasonably compact kit lens, the f/2.8-4.0 range is quite bright and with the fairly large APS-C sensors on the X-Pro1 and X-E1, you can get decent subject isolation, especially at the long end, when shooting wide open. From an overall image quality standpoint, the lens is impressive with surprisingly sharp results corner to corner, even at wider apertures. For an extra $400 when bundled with the X-E1 body, this lens is a bargain as far as I'm concerned! The gallery linked above was all shot with the X-E1 and this new 18-55 zoom. In addition, there are many high ISO samples too...

X-E1: A Beautiful Sunday in November

A gallery, shot a week ago with the Fujifilm X-E1: A Beautiful Sunday in November