Clouds

So coming back from the San Diego trip that I discussed in my previous post, I passed through some weather. It gave me a great opportunity to shoot some interesting clouds. As I learn about photography, I learn more about the differences between the way our eyes and brain interpret the world and the way a camera captures the world. Let's just say our eyes and brain kick ass. Cameras can only "see" a portion of the tonal range that our eyes can see within a particular scene. Ansel Adams developed an approach called the "zone system" to explain the 5 or 6 tonal ranges or zones that a camera can capture depending on the settings. Our eyes and brains can see 10 to 12 tonal ranges.

Clouds can sometimes create great challenges to the photographer, for what the eyes sees can sometimes never be captured by a digital sensor. I was pleased that I caught some of the essence of the weather that I passed through on that ride back. It was really fun to see.

San Diego Weekend

I spent the last weekend of February in San Diego floating around taking one of the Mentor workshops. I've taken a couple of these workshops before and I have enjoyed them a great deal. Not only can you learn from the professional photographers/mentors but the quality of photographers in the workshop provides for another body of collective knowledge to draw from. We had rain on the Friday and Sunday, but had a sunny day Saturday. We had five shoots in all, Balboa Park, sunset shoot from Catalina Island, a wildlife park on Saturday morning, surfers Saturday afternoon and the USS Midway on Sunday morning. I got some decent shots but had a minor personal snafu, when I deleted all the photos off my hard drive after I had returned home. A hard lesson but certainly one that will make me more careful about my workflow. I did have a couple that I had saved on Flickr which I have link to here.