Matthew's web log

With a friend from college in town, I went up to Napa Valley for some food and wine tasting.  Traffic was light getting there.  After a lunch stop, we made it to two wineries.  Visiting Rustherford Ranch the wine was good and very moderately priced.  We both bought some to take home.  The lovely girl in the tasting room asked where we had been and where we were planning to go.  We said we had no specific plan and asked if there were any places she recommended.  She kindly provided a map of the Silverado Trail and recommended a visit to Sterling.  I had heard of Sterling, but she told us they had a cable car up the mountain where you can tour and taste wine.  We were sold on it and made the short drive over to Sterling.  We paid for the tram ride and tour and it was well worth it.  The wine was good (although Rutherford Ranch was better), but the views were great.

View the photos from Napa. 

While the parents were visiting, we explored Big Basin State Park in the Santa Cruz mountains.  Dad was able to break in his new camera, I could again use my camera back home, and Mom could enjoy a windy mountain road.

View the Big Basin photos.  

The NVIDIA photo club had its first photo shoot at the Alviso Marina.  With just a short time during lunch, we only explored the area right near the parking lot.  I've posted my best shots here :

With an action packed weekend as usual, I squeezed in a hike this afternoon.  My first time to Almaden Quicksilver park in South San Jose.  This park is huge with lots of trails to choose from.  Since I didn't have that much time, I settled for a couple mile loop and hiked for around an hour and a half.  With mostly an uphill start, I got my exercise in for the day.  I discovered I need to read my camera's manual as I couldn't figure out how to set both the shutter speed and aperture when in Manual mode.  I need to do this for panoramas to work.  I was able to get one panorama, but with a much wider f/stop that I had hoped. 

Here's the photo album :

I'm learning more about the post processing software that comes with the camera.  "Digital Photo Professional" by Canon is a very handy program for working with RAW pictures from the camera.  It's amazing what some simple changes can do to a photo.

Here's one original pic from the camera.  Not bad, but it doesn't have that "wow" factor:

Here's the after shot (increased color saturation, sharpness, and set to "landscape").  Much better.   

Another pair of before and afters is here:

Before:

After:

  Not a dramatic difference, but the colors are better, the distant scenery is clearer, and the photo is improved overall.

I finally gave in to the reduced prices and increased performance of recent digital SLR cameras and picked up a Canon Digital Rebel XTi camera.  I had used an SLR in the film days so I wasn't afraid of the additional complexities of the new camera.  I was quite pleased that even moving to a heavier and bulkier dSLR, I'm still much smaller and lighter than I was with my old Minolta SLR camera.  I've started with the kit lens which gets mediocre reviews, but it's nearly free with the camera.  I wanted to use that as a starting point to see what I will want to move up to in terms of lenses. 

I was a bit time crunched on Saturday and Sunday so I shot right round the corner at the Rose Garden and Los Gatos Creek trail.  Monday I went to Hakone Gardens in Saratoga which I have been meaning to visit for awhile.  All of the pics can be found here

http://www.sanjoseabrams.com/photos/RebelWeekendMay2007/index.php

From what I've read most serious amateur photographers shoot in the camera "raw" format.  With prior cameras I always shot JPG.  On day one of the new camera I shot both JPG and RAW since I was not familiar with the software to convert RAW to JPG and did not want to lose all of my work.  Once I learned the RAW converter, I now shoot only in RAW.  The biggest downside is that I'll need a lot more memory cards to have equivalent capacity; fortunately, memory cards are dirt cheap now.   This puts a slight kink in my workflow of making albums, but it's still fairly straightforward. 

Last week was my semiannual trip to the East Coast. Spending most of the week in Florida and finishing the weekend in NY resulted in a fairly busy week. Most meals were eaten out and friends and family were happy to see me (and I them). The major photographic activities resulted from a day trip to Fairchild Gardens in Miami, some photos of the always adorable Whitney, and NY views of midtown and Central Park.

The photos can be found here and a few previews are below:

http://sanjoseabrams.com/photos/FlaNYApr2007/index.php

Enjoy and comments are always welcome.

After a rainy day yesterday, today was another sunny day. I took some photos at a local garden in the East San Jose Foothills called Nola's Iris Garden. The full album can be found here:

 http://sanjoseabrams.com/photos/SpringBloomsApr2007/

 Let me know what you think by leaving me a comment.

Another weekend shot.

One of the better shots from earlier this year.