West Coast Tour

January 2, 2015

So having been back from our three week tour of the West Coast I have finally got round to process all the photos and video and picked out a few of my favourites.

In San Francisco we checked out the Ferry Building Marketplace one morning and I was trying to figure out away to capture all the movement that was going on. I tried a bunch of different shoots hand held but nothing was working, and then noticed an upper level looking down on the stalls. Knowing I wanted the motion blur of the people below I set up the tripod and started experimenting with some manual settings. This is my favourite shot which is fact a composite of two pictures at shutter speed of 1 second, f/22, ISO100 and 28mm.

We went walking through Land's End park and Denise (the Mother in Law) spotted this Harris Hawk (I think) I captured some straight forward shoots which I knew I would have to crop to get the Hawk big enough in the frame, so I kept shooting and moving closer and closer. Then I noticed I could compose the photo with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background and luckily with the last shoot I captured this at shutter speed 1/1250, f.6.3, ISO 800 @210mm.

Driving through Cambria on the way back to our B&B we spotted a family out surfing and started taking some shots but I kept missing the focus on the surfer so I stepped up my aperture for a bigger depth of field so it would give me a bigger margin for error. I finally managed to capture something I was happy with at shutter speed of 1/400 second, f/6.3, ISO 200.

This was a shoot I have always wanted to take since picking up camera and had been picturing it in my head for weeks before. I knew I would only have one free evening during our time in San Francisco so I had researched where I wanted to take the shoot from using Google earth and a bunch of other photos. So after checking the weather forecast I picked the best morning and headed out at 5am ready to be set up for the 6am sun rise. I knew I wanted to capture the light trails going across the bridge so I knew the shutter speed was going to have to be around 10 seconds so took a bunch of test shoots to get the exposure right at a shutter speed of 10seconds, f/4.5, ISO200.

Whilst in Yosemite we visited the Ansell Adams gallery and it was the first time I had even seen his work close up and was really taken by the composition and processing techniques used. So I started to drop my horizons for the next few days during our time in Death Valley and was surprised how quickly it changes the mood of the sky and the picture as a whole when you compare it to the standard rule of third technique. Shutter speed 1/800, f/6.3, ISO100 and 28mm.

I carried on the dropping my horizons whilst out shooting some star trails in Death Valley. So we went out to Mesquite Sand Dunes and set up the camera on the tripod for some time lapse photos with a shutter speed 8 seconds, f/3.5, ISO800 at 28mm. After about an hour and 200 shots later I stacked them into Photoshop, selected the "lighten" drop down to bring through all the brightest part of each picture through to show the star trails.

We got a helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon after three days of solid cloud in Las Vegas. I knew that shooting from a helicopter would mean I would need a fast shutter speed so in my head I knew I would need a minimum shutter speed of 1/800 of a second to avoid too much blurring and based my other settings around that. I ended up with a shutter speed of 1/800, f/5.6, ISO800 at 50mm.