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2013-06-02 21:31:52 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Special Event!!   Guest Critiquer +Eric Leslie

So, I've got something coming up for you!

We are going to have a GUEST critquer!!

+Eric Leslie  is going to join us for 3 days - June 9th, 10th, and 11th to give some spot critiques!!!

https://plus.google.com/103216887847401478447/posts

Eric is a photographer who calls the rolling hills of northern California home. He shoots both landscapes and portraits with a focus on mixing the two. Creating environmental portraits  that mix the beauty of a landscape with the humanity of a portrait is a difficult challenge. He loves hiking through forests exploring nature and photography is simply an extension of this. There’s nothing like setting your eyes on a scene few have seen and capturing that moment in a photograph. He’s always looking for strong compositions first and great light second.Gettin... more »

2013-06-02 21:27:41 (18 comments, 1 reshares, 64 +1s)

This is what happens when you're willing to get up to a waterfall at 7:30am and break a little sweat climbing over slippery rocks in dress shoes. Magic!

2013-05-30 06:30:48 (5 comments, 2 reshares, 61 +1s)

Tonight we had a small 4H meeting. We met at the newly developed Coyote Pond which has a nice picnic area, vault toilet and a pond stocked with fish. 

We stuck around to catch the sunset and we were graced with a pleasant sunset. It feels to good to shoot a Landscape. It feels like it's been ages :)

2013-05-27 15:36:36 (21 comments, 0 reshares, 46 +1s)

Never again! I left my phone at home to find this!

2013-05-26 04:57:07 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 51 +1s)

Oh snap!

2013-05-24 15:33:30 (33 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

Hey SEO experts and website maestros, I need your brains.

For the last two years my website has always had what I consider a high bounce rate. About 70-85%. Last month when I launched a new website, this happened. It has almost dropped to zero. The numbers don't lie, but isn't this drop really drastic? (For those that don't know, a low bounce rate is good. It means that people are not leaving after they land on the first page. They are going to two or more pages.)

This is with about 200 visitors per day. My pages per visit seems to reflect this as well. It has more than doubled from 1.5 pages/visit to 3.5.

Have you ever seen a bounce rate this low and have you seen it drop so drastically with a new site design?

2013-05-17 05:12:29 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 39 +1s)

I've seen several amazing photos of the thunder cloud as seen from Redding. Here's what it looked like from underneath in Red Bluff. I've never seen light like this before. The air was just glowing. It also looks like a funnel cloud tried to form in one shot. Lightning has been striking on all sides of our house continuously for the last two hours. Hail, wind, very heavy rain. Intense!

2013-05-16 03:17:39 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 13 +1s)

Another Discovery
When I jumped into my saved search for the hashtag #WaterfallWednesday to see what that stream looked like, I was pleasantly surprised to the "People and Pages" tile listing +Leon Turnbull and I. We happen to be the curators for this theme so I think it's great that Google is figuring out people that are related to various searches somehow. I checked some other themes and it didn't the correctly list the curators every time, but it would also list the theme page. 

+Vic Gundotra and the team, kudos! I love finding useful information when I wasn't looking for it. 

2013-05-16 00:12:03 (19 comments, 8 reshares, 99 +1s)

Have you noticed

how freaking awesome vertical photos look in your stream now? They really jump out at you. So in honor of this, I found an older shot of Mossbrae and cropped especially for all of you :) Enjoy!

#WaterfallWednesday curated by +Eric Leslie +Leon Turnbull

2013-05-15 22:13:26 (6 comments, 8 reshares, 52 +1s)

To Be Honest

I was starting to feel a bit disenfranchised by Google+ and to be totally honest, all this great new schtuff is gotten me excited again. More on all off that on another post. Sharing a photo previously uploaded some time ago.

I'm trying to understand the whole high resolution file limit thing. They increased the limit to 15GB, but is that referring to images that are backed up from your phone? Does that include images uploaded from the web? If it's from the web, does it only count against your 15GB if the image is above the previous 2048px limit? If you're a GDrive subscriber, does your limit change to match how much space you're subscribed to?

Looks like I have some learning to do :) 

2013-05-15 20:22:17 (29 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

Google Hangouts without Nexus 7 Support?

Is it possible they would launch this w/o support for their own Nexus line? Tell me it's just a matter of it being in the middle of I/O. 

Can anyone else confirm this?

Download it here > http://goo.gl/6B49F

2013-05-15 19:50:41 (6 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

The new Hangouts Chrome App is Live

I love how much work Google is doing to unify messaging with the Hangouts merger.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts/nckgahadagoaajjgafhacjanaoiihapd?hl=en

2013-05-09 15:43:20 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 18 +1s)

Feeling stuck in a rut, I felt inspired this week to boost my Photoshop skills. See, most of my processing is done in Lightroom which is great for quickly processing a great number of images. What I felt was missing was slowing down on some images to explore more creative processing. Think of it like continuing education for a Doctor where they go take a short course to keep their skills up to date and current. 

So I set out to try adding some lens flare to this shot of Jenneca Johnson. I used a speedlight through an umbrella off-camera left. So to give this light a source, I thought this look would work here. Is this strict photography? No. It moves into photo-manipulation. Underneath it all, it's art. So what?

2013-04-30 00:31:16 (20 comments, 0 reshares, 30 +1s)

Big Update

Everyone participates in the daily themes and there's no secret why. It's one of the best ways to interact with a community of like-minded people. So I started a curated list of themes with +Melanie Kintz. It was the wild west back then and everyone was starting themes faster than I could keep up with them.

Fast forward to today and I have a new feature that makes participating in the themes SO much easier. +Yves Goergen brought to my attention a cool G+ feature I didn't know about. Normally You can + mention someone by typing + and start typing their name to see a list of names that match what you've typed. Sometimes it doesn't always match who you're looking for. Sometimes they have unusual non-english letters on their name. At the very least it's time consuming to type out all the names for the curators. 

So thei... more »

2013-04-22 22:27:16 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 31 +1s)

Before we went out chasing the milky way, +Joe Azure's pup Jax was the center of attention. +Michael Bonocore finally got him to sit still long enough to take some shots. It was pretty hilarious watching everyone chase the pup around. Thanks Joe for the invite. It was sweet getting to hang out with and meet you. With +Natalia Stone and +Casey McCallister 

2013-04-12 04:48:41 (20 comments, 0 reshares, 34 +1s)

I don't know about you but I crave feedback from my clients. I really like knowing I met their expectations. Really I want to go above and beyond just making then happy. So today, I got this in the mail, a complete surprise. A client of mine left a note saying that just saying thank you didn't really convey how she felt, so she got both +Crystal Leslie and I a lens coffee mug. How cool is that?! I'm so glad they loved their wedding photos :-)

2013-04-10 05:00:02 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 26 +1s)

Reflections, Chowchilla River - Mariposa County, California (2013)


#ministractmonday  by +Tom McLaughlan 
#mirrormonday   #mirrorsandreflections  +Mirrors and Reflections +Gemma Costa +Elizabeth Edwards 
#landscapephotography  +Landscape Photography +Margaret Tompkins +Carra Riley +David Heath Williams +Bill Wood +paul t beard +Jim Warthman +Ben T 

2013-04-01 05:44:59 (6 comments, 1 reshares, 20 +1s)

My Hat Goes Off

...to those that can take great live band photography. It's a huge technical challenge. It's mostly dark, so it's tough to auto-focus, it being dark, you're working with big apertures which compounds auto-focus even more working with narrow depths of field. You're cranking up the ISO, so managing noise is an issue. The stage lights are going on and off throwing the camera's meter for a loop. It doesn't know the right exposure and things are changing so fast, shooting on manual is impractical. Don't get me started with color balancing a shot that's half filled with blue stage light, mixed with yellowish sky-lights and green metal-halide lighting. I didn't even mess with the color. 

Needless to say, it was a ton of fun. I can't wait to do it again. Those of you who do this a lot, do you trash a lot of your frames?

2013-04-01 03:23:33 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 35 +1s)

The Boys
As many of you know I've got a family of five boys and today we went out to shoot their school portraits. I wonder would someone random walking by would think of these shoots. They all love to goof off and do silly poses. Luckily a few in between turn on. We also try to do a group shot and this is what we came up with. Good times :)

This was our compromise because this ladder went up to a three story cat walk that every one of them wanted to climb up to.

2013-03-30 16:41:49 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Hey everyone, I'm doing some design exploration. I'd love to hear what your favorite photographer websites are based solely on the design. I'm trying to think way outside the box here. Definitely no flash sites and not your typical portfolio site and blog. That's "been there, done that." 

Part of my reasoning is my recent desire to possibly integrate my web development into my photography. I'm encountering more and more people that both want a great website and they also need great photography of their products and staff. I don't ever think I've seen both of those things marketed on a single website.

2013-03-26 17:01:35 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 29 +1s)

I've been working for a local magazine (Enjoy) for the last couple months and I got my first cover shot for the April issue. 

This shot has a big stretch for me creatively and I will do a longer blog post explaining the journey this shot took me on. A funny tidbit, this is also a selfie :)

Check out the whole magazine at enjoymagazine.net

2013-03-25 04:52:05 (15 comments, 0 reshares, 80 +1s)

Hey Birders! I need your help. I was out shooting a new waterfall in Scott Valley called Shackleford Falls when I noticed these cute little birds (about the size of a baseball) were very active in the water around the waterfall. This guy hung out here several times so I put on a long lens and waited for him to come back. I have never shot much wildlife, but I thought this shot was interesting. 

Can someone ID him?

2013-03-21 01:53:17 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 24 +1s)

This awesome cloud is on the horizon tonight. Stay tuned for a nice shot later.

2013-03-19 05:43:18 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

While this interview is with an unsigned musician who's most recent album beat Justin Timberlake's. I think much of Alex's experiences and lessons fit perfectly for a photographer. 

2013-03-19 04:13:38 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 68 +1s)

Passing it Along
A couple of my boys are in 4-H and they're going to try to to submit a shot into the photography competition coming up. So we turned out them out to try a few things. Here we were trying to teach Caleb the value of perspective. He got really low trying to shoot horses on the other side of the fence out of the frame on the right. 

I don't know if they'll get into photography like I have, but it's fun to see them explore with a camera. 

2013-03-16 01:57:11 (18 comments, 0 reshares, 28 +1s)

Upgraded from the 50mm f/1.8D today. Fewer out of focus images for me.

2013-03-10 00:55:10 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 102 +1s)

Hi G+ Friends

Man, I've been so busy lately I've totally been neglecting everyone over here. While out on assignment for another shot, I grabbed this cool foggy shot of a very old trestle bridge in Tehama County. It's call Jelly's Ferry Bridge and it crosses the Sacramento River north of Red Bluff. The fog added some interesting mystery to the bridge. I need to shoot me some more architecture, there just isn't that much of it in my neck of the woods.

What has everyone been up to? 

2013-02-16 19:28:31 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 27 +1s)

Exploring the Yana trail on the Perry Riffle side of the Sacramento River. I found a couple new vantages of Lassen Peak I want to shoot.

2013-02-08 15:07:11 (14 comments, 0 reshares, 21 +1s)

It looked super promising this morning. Then this stupid later of low clouds rolled in. So I practically ran two miles in the dark with all of my gear to get this sunrise only to get skunked again. I'm pretty grumpy right now....

2013-02-08 05:44:59 (9 comments, 2 reshares, 73 +1s)

Fresh Reminder

So I've been working on an assignment for a client and I have been getting skunked left and right with terrible light. Last night the sunset looked promising 180 degrees away from what I needed to shoot, so I stayed home and shot the sunset across the street. 

I walked away from this shot after processing and then came back thinking that it was way too colorful, but that's not the photo's fault! The sunset really was spectacular. It was a nice reminder that it still was possible to get an amazing sunset like this. Tomorrow I'm going to back on location in hopes of a good sunrise as a thunderstorm rolls through. Wish me luck! 

2013-02-07 03:44:24 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 59 +1s)

After getting skunked for an assignment the last four times out, it was bittersweet to get this awesome sunset this evening at home. Oh well, at least I got a reminder that it's still possible to get nice light.

Shot on my Galaxy S3 and processed with Snapseed.

2013-02-01 15:35:43 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 28 +1s)

Here's what I'm working on this morning. The clouds are on each side of Lassen, so I may have to try again tomorrow. Think warm hands!

2013-01-25 05:54:19 (16 comments, 2 reshares, 57 +1s)

What comfort-zone
This shot is the result of stepping way out of my normal comfort zone. I set out to shoot Mount Lassen from the point of view of Red Bluff, at night, all lit by the moon. Having almost no idea if this would work, I set out at 11pm (way later than I have ever set out before) and went to this place where I thought I could get the shot. It failed miserably. Too many clouds and the moon wasn't bright enough meant I could not see Lassen.

Not one to waste an opportunity, I walked around the area and tried shooting some architecture which I also know nothing about about. I was alone shooting in the middle of the night standing in the middle of streets, all stuff I never do. I kept looking over my shoulder seeing everything that moved thinking it was going to eat me. 

Then to wrap this whole adventure up, I processed this as a HDR in Photomatix which is... more »

2013-01-14 05:22:12 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

I've spent the evening doing some writing and like so many of my creative processes, music normally feeds it. I've had this song on loop this evening because it just has the right balance of energy and lack of distraction. It's also a beautiful song! I love these guys. All of their work is phenomenal. 

2013-01-09 03:27:33 (7 comments, 1 reshares, 13 +1s)

Just passing the #AdobeLove along

Adobe is giving away its CS2 suite of applications. So if you've always wanted to have the full Photoshop and couldn't afford it, now it's available free of charge. It is 7 years old now, but the core of Photoshop with all of it's power is still there. Both the Mac and PC versions with their serials numbers are available. 

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

2013-01-04 04:10:48 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 12 +1s)

These are my Best of 2012 Photographers (in no particular order).
Thank you for putting so much incredible beauty on my screen (through G+) this past year. Looking forward to seeing what you create in this new year.
I wanted to take some time to thank a few of the people on Google+ that have continued to be excellent (and consistent) sources of inspiration and creativity.
Each of these extremely talented photographers should be on your own person 'Watch List' circle, so I invite you to follow them - their adventures, their personality, and their talent deserve it. 
I'm not sharing a circle here - despite that being the popular means of sharing a group - simply because I'd like you to click on each one individually.
Take your time getting to know these photographers, it's time well spent. It's not about the frequency of posts, but the quality per... more »