Vancouver Cityscape
I like the look of HDR processing with cityscapes. With landscapes, I like to keep it well controlled and not go past a certain natural look, but with cityscapes I allow more latitude as the gemetric shapes and color seem conducive to this treatment.
These two images were taken from my hotel room overlooking Granville St.
Vancouver Cityscape
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Emily's Covered Bridge, Vermont
When Built: About 1844
Builders: John N. Smith
Description: Also known as Stowe Hollow or Gold Brook Bridge, it is off of Route 100 on Gold Brook Rd., just a few miles south of Stowe.
There are various legends about this bridge, all involving the death of a girl named Emily. There are a number of accounts of Emily’s ghost haunting the structure.
This is part of a series on Vermont’s Covered Bridges. You can find an index here.
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Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana
With a name like Spiderwort, you may not have a lot of expectations for the look of the flower but you would be in for a pleasant surprise. The Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana, is a gorgeous flower of vivid blue set off by long yellow stamens.
Like Day Lilys, each flowers last but a day.
Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana
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Lightroom Rating
One of the best of Lightroom’s features is the means of quickly and easily rating and sorting your images. It offers the following three methods.
Three methods of rating
You can rate each image as per the number of stars. I think most people who use this method tend to rate with either 4 or 5 stars and leave the rest unrated. You click one star with your mouse to set the rating. A click on the fourth star sets the image to four stars.
Rating the images by flags, involves clicking on Flag (Pick), No flag(No Pick) or leaving it unflagged.
Rating by Color involves picking a color by mouse for an image. You cannot pick more than one color for each image.
At the far right edge of this toolbar is a small icon you can click on to bring up a menu which allows you to choose any or all of these systems to appear on the toolbar.
Sorting Your Images
Below the toolbar, you will see a duplicate set of each of the three rating systems. Clicking on this set sorts your images by choosing all images which match the value you’ve picked here. You can choose by more than one of the systems, for example you can choose all flagged items rated green. The star has an equal or greater than icon which allows you to pick all starred items in this manner.
In fact this system is only part how you can sort. You can also sort by keywording (which will be covered in a separate post), by metadata, by folder, and by any combination of these things. For example you can sort by the folder 2008, by all images of ISO100, by all images tagged Yellow. You would be wrong to think this would not be useful, as in my own setup, this would nicely pick out all of the images I have applied HDR treatment to in 2008, and not yet processed.
My system
You can see that there is a great variety of rating and sorting methods available to a user.
My own method is very simple. After uploading a new folder to Lightroom, I go through them and rate them either Red for items I will trash, or yellow for items which will be processed first. After this run through, I select all red, and right click-delete them. I can then select all yellow and begin processing them. After processing an image, I change the rating for it and any processed copies to green. When I do this, it also withdraws them automatically from the group rated yellow.
At any time I can go back to unrated items to pick further candidates, remove candidates yellow ratings, etc. As I often don’t process all images immediately I can return anytime and readily pick up with my sorted images.
I will often use other colors where I want to make a special collection. After an overseas birding trip, I often assign another color to bird images where I am unsure of the identification.
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The photo is one of the finest ever produced, and it came to symbolize an era.
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Great Blue Heron and Red-winged Blackbird
This Red-winged Blackbird was upset by a Great Blue Heron nears its nest and made a determined effort to drive it off. The heron stood its ground as it seemed to have found a productive fishing spot. In between forays, the heron grabbed a number of small fish.
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While I’m away on holiday, I thought I would share a few interesting videos with you.
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Long Point Tip
The Long Point Bird Observatory is one of North America’s oldest banding organizations. They operate a couple of banding stations including one at the tip of Long Point, a spit of land which attracts migrants who are weary from crossing the Great Lakes.
The tip banding station is an amazing place and I was lucky enough to be invited there a few years back. One of the first things that struck me was how quiet it was, it is not easy to find a spot where the noise of cars isn’t present.
The images are from the old Banders cabin where we stayed with sand, dry grasses and Indian Paintbrush in glorious flower.
Long Point Tip
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The last time I was in the Orkney Islands, I found that one of the world’s largest Arctic Tern colonies was deserted due to the failure of the local fish stocks that was their food supply. Unfortunately the above National Geographic video describes a similar story.
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Moth Mullein, Verbascum blattaria
Most people are familiar with the Common Mullein plant, a large spiked plant with yellow flowers seen by the roadsides. There is a more delicate Mullein as well called the Moth Mullein, Verbascum blattaria, which flowers from June to September. It can have yellow or white flowers.
Like the Common Mullein, it has become naturalized in North America, originally from Europe.
 Yellow flowers |
 White flowers |
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