Yosemity

Aaahhh, take a deep breath and smell the air.. the Yosemite Valley air…
With rain the first couple of days came the promise if inclement weather and not the awful beautiful blue sky’s I have had on my last two trips. The trips with not a cloud in the sky that make for such boring photos.

I met up with my good friend David and my 20 year old nephew Austin for 4 days of photography, camping and bonding… and we did all of that.

We arrived to the valley on Sunday as the crowds were heading out so we were not surrounded by millions of tourists and finding a camp site was easy. After setting up camp it was time to sit around the camp fire and make plans for the next couple of days.

We hit a few of the usual photographic sites such as the valley floor and the Tunnel View and got some great shots complete with heavenly clouds and fog lingering on the tree tops.. Simple magic.

We took a nice long hike down a river bed and got some fun shots of just about everything that was in front of us. Here is David looking down after getting some shots of me. Austin was playing around with my point and shoot as the camera I was going to let him use, my Nikon D300 took ill with a broken mirror but he still got some good shots and had lots of fun using the pano mode on the Lumix ZS20.

And here is Austin “Hamming it up” with some Japanese tourists who wanted to bring home a photo with a good looking American boy.

Here is David Barpal showing us how he really get’s into his work.

The vistas, colors, clouds, and fog made for a wonderful photographic opportunity. The views were to die for and I feel I came and got the shot I wanted… I look forward to printing many of the images and will remember these moments for a lifetime.

So long Yosemite, see you next time.

Rich Baum Guest Speaker @ PPSV

Last night I had the honor or speaking in front of my fellow professional photographers at the PPSV / Professional Photographers of the Sacramento Valley monthly meeting. This was a short presentation of HDR tips and technique.  My emphasis was on how HDR can be many things to many people. It’s not just a fun way to produce cool artistic images but it can be a powerful tool when dealing with very dynamic lighting situations and can often be the solution to a properly exposed image when the use of lighting and filters is impractical.
My talk only lasted about 30 minutes but the feedback was very positive and complimentary.In addition I was able to secure a 25% discount code for Photomatix for everyone who attended.