What can I say? That title pretty much sums up my yesterday.
We had decided earlier in the week that, weather permitting, we would head down to the Jersey shore and visit some of our favorite lakes and ponds in search of wintering ducks and such. Yesterday’s forecast was the better of the two days, so yesterday it was. So far, so good. Actually weather-wise, it wasn’t terrible. Cold… yes, particularly in the early morning but it did warm to the upper 20s by early afternoon. Windy… oh yeah! But it was sunny and the sunshine felt good beating down on us.
When we got there, the first thing we found was that the lakes were all about 90% frozen over. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In years past, a frozen lake just meant the ducks were gathered into a much smaller area. It was like, dare I say, shooting ducks in a barrel. Except this time, unlike years past, there were very few ducks to shoot. It seems to be a very bad year for wintering ducks along the Jersey coast. Don’t know why. Anyway, I did get a few images (Cormorant, Hooded Merganser, American Wigeon) before moving on in search of other non-avian subjects to photograph.
Switching cameras (to the 30D from the 50D) and lenses (to the 24-70 and 70-200 from the 300 w/ 2x TC), I was off making images for sandwiches, blurs, multiple exposures, etc. Things seemed to be progressing well.
To make a very long story a little shorter, I got home and started to import the images. The few bird images uploaded into Lightroom fine. Then I moved on to the images made with 30D and the memory card went rogue on me again, corrupted and locked up Lightroom. This was exactly what happened a month ago. Same camera, same card (I had reformatted it and it seemed to be working fine) and even the same kind of shots (multiple single images for a 10-image multiple exposure). This time, I lost most of the images on that card and had to spend most of the evening trying to get Lightroom up and running again. I did. It is. But what a pain in the backside.
Anyway, this is one of the few images that actually imported (I have since tossed the card) before the corruption set in.
As we walked through this area along Shark River Inlet (Belmar, NJ), we saw these pine cones and were really taken by their beauty and by the light at that particular time of day. I ended up doing a digital sandwich with the image as I described a little while back in this blog. Then I processed the sandwiched image using Nik Dfine for noise reduction. Nik Viveza 2 for color and brightness control. And Nik Color Efex Pro where I used the Darken/Lighten Center filter to brighten the center even more while darkening the surrounding areas and finished by adding a black vignette which further served to draw the eye to the cone’s center. The effect, I believe, is to create the appearance of a spotlight shining on the single cone.
Anyway, the image above is what I came up with. Your thoughts/comments are always appreciated.
Hope today is much better than yesterday! The image is beautiful, I really like the warm tones.
I had a memory card go bad on me before and decided to just replace it than taking the chance of it happening again.
Well it is nice to see a nice flower like this when one know th weather conditions all around!
It’s a pleasure for my eyes to see such warm tones when all I see looking out of the window is a world in a grey scale, mostly in white
I’m not sure if it looks like a spot light shining on the single cone but it definitely looks like you had a wonderful warm sunny day!
To the card problem – Do you import your photos directly from camera into Lightroom? I suggest to try to use a card reader. With the reader the card should appear to your computer as just another connected medium and you should be able to copy/move your files without any additional software, just by dragging them in the file system manager (Explorer in Windows).
Then you can try to import them from your hard disk into Lightroom. If you connect your camera directly to the computer and import directly into Lightroom, there might be a problem in Lightroom or in camera firmware or with a card and it’s hard to distinguish where the problem is. Using a card reader and importing to a HDD first should minimize a risk of camera firmware or Lightroom failure. If the problem still persists then it’ll be very probably a card problem.
Good Morning Tomas. I am using a card reader so the problem is, no doubt, a bad card. In any event, I discarded the card as I have plenty of back-ups. Hopefully this solves the problem.
Too bad you lost your photos, Ed. But this one is beautiful, and a showing of beauty for this time of year. Funny, until I got my computer, I used to think pine green was a dull color.
Oh! Too bad about that dang card and all the trouble you had as well as losing your photos. I really like the bright and detail pine cone!