Mike Huber » Photography

The Desert Is In Bloom

Mike — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:44:11 +0000

I hiked West Wing Mountain trail this morning at sunrise. What a treat. I saw a large owl and was able to get some shots of the desert in bloom.

Desert Flowers 1280
Desert Owl

Julian, California

Mike — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:09:09 +0000

The fun thing about shooting with a digital camera is the serendipity in finding photos on your hard drive that you hadn’t yet processed. Wendy and I spent a few days in Julian, California for our last wedding anniversary. We stayed in a cabin that faced the West. The first photo is from the back deck. There were a couple of days where we could see all the way to the ocean. This was taken just before sunset and is actually 4 photos merged to an hdr.

This second shot is of a turkey. The State of California introduced wild turkeys back into the environment and they are doing quite well as we saw about 100 of them on our trip.

Click here for full size images:

Julian Sunset

Julian Turkey

Another Shot of the Wave

Mike — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:57:19 +0000

Here is another shot of the Wave. The Wave is just north of Page, Arizona on the way to Kanab, Utah. This is a 4 shot panorama Wave formation. Click the image to see it full size.

Click Here for the Full Size Image

The Wave

Mike — Sat, 09 May 2009 14:31:06 +0000

The ‘Wave’ is about 45 miles north of Page, Arizona. It is an incredible sandstone formation that is shaped like….a wave. I took a few HDR photos of the Wave during our hike. This is a shot of the ‘approach’ to the wave. There are no signs or trails to the actual Wave formation. Fortunately, we had GDS and were able to find the Wave by following stacked stone markers.

Click here to see the full size image.

Horseshoe Bend

Mike — Sun, 03 May 2009 00:59:09 +0000

This is a REALLY cool place. Just south of Page, Az is a turnoff to Horseshoe Bend. This is what you’ll see after a 15 minute hike to the edge of the canyon. The photo is 1280 pixels wide so you’ll need to click on the image to see it full size.

Click Here to see the full size image.

Sedona, Arizona

Mike — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:36:41 +0000

These are photos of Sedona, Arizona that I took recently. Most of the shots are from Oak Creek. It snowed a few days before I was there and the landscape was covered just enough to make the photos more interesting.

Click on the thumbnail images to see the full size shots. The 5th photo actually started out as three separate photos that I stitched together in Photoshop. Click the image below to see the original three shots. Then click the 5th photo in the gallery to see the finished version.

[Show as slideshow]

Using Filters in Photoshop

Mike — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:10:28 +0000

One of the things you can do in Photoshop is to take a photo and add a filter to the final image. One of the more popular filters is blurring. Use the blurring tool to give your image a soft focus look.

Here are some of my favorite filters in use. The first two photos are of the Yellowstone River in Montana. The color image is the original cropped image and the second is a black and white using the ‘graphic pen’ filter. This gives the image a ’sketched’ look.

The second set is also of the Yellowstone and uses the Artistic cutout filter. This gives the image almost a comic book look.

The third set uses the diffuse glow tool.

The last photo uses the neon glow filter.

All of these filters can be adjusted in various ways to achieve the desired effect.

Editing Digital Photos

Mike — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:08:39 +0000

I’ve been involved in photography a long time. Such a long time, in fact, that I can still remember using a darkroom to tweak a photo. Digital photos are so much easier to manipulate.

Like me, I’m sure you have many digital photos that look washed out, dull and flat. The colors aren’t what you remembered when you took the photo and photo just seems lifeless. Photoshop and other editing programs can help you render these kinds of photos into ones that you would be proud to show on your site.

Let me show you an example. The first photo is the original. The only thing I did was size it to fit this page. The second photo is this same photo manipulated in Photoshop. Which one do you like better?

Grand Canyon photo before Photoshop.

This same photo after a digital darkroom session.

This second photo is much more dramatic and the colors ‘pop’. All this was done with Photoshop. You can double click the photos to see a larger version.

Taliesin West

Mike — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:06:25 +0000

Here’s an interesting photo of Taliesin West, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed school and studio. The photo is actually 5 photos that have been stitched together using Photoshop. It had rained the previous day and cleared the air and the clouds cooperated for a nice background. Photoshop does a good job of blending a number of pictures together for a panoramic. The 5 shots were taken with a tripod.

Click on the photo to see it full size.

More HDR Photos

Mike — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:31:59 +0000

I put together a couple more HDR photos (high dynamic range). These are a couple of shots from around the house. I posted the best exposure one-shot followed by the HDR photo.

Single Shot

HDR Photo