Continuing in my quest to process more photos, I’ve started aiming to do the Active Assignment Weekly challenges on Flickr. I think some of my favourite photos came from doing their challenges, but I hadn’t participated in a long time.

Here’s this week’s, the Pastasaurus:

He normally lives on our microwave so he’s ready whenever pasta needs stirring!

And here’s some from last week, the robots that make our neutral-toned rental less boring:

I also uploaded some older photos from the Flock and Fiber festival, as part of my campaign to get old photos processed, but frankly I wasn’t that thrilled with them. Still, I got to experiment with some processing tricks I wanted to try, so that was cool!

I’m not much of a night photographer for a variety of reasons, such as “wandering around in dark, isolated places with expensive gear and when you are a smallish woman is not recommended” and “I never carry my tripod because it’s awkward and extra weight” but thankfully I have friends who mitigate the first and cars that mitigate the second, so then it all works out.

My photographer excursion to Crater Lake is one of those rare times it worked out. We had a “wait, it’s too nice to go to bed” bit of folly, given that our plan was to get up at 4am to catch the sunrise. Alas, the lake was in cloud at sunrise, so those photos never happened, but the night ones totally did.

Here they are before editing:

This was 30s exposure at ISO 3200, which is still rather noisy for my tastes, even with some post-processing to clean it up a bit. I think in future I might have to try cranking that down a fair bit.

Below is my first attempt at processing the photos base on what I knew to do off the top of my head. They’re not bad, but as I said, I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to practice night photography, and that includes processing as well as the physical taking of photos. You can definitely see some more colour and definition even in the small versions I’ve put here so you can see them all at once:

So I read through a night photography tutorial and these are the images that resulted:

The first one’s maybe not that different from my own attempt, but the second one really pops, no? I guess I need to spend more time reading photo processing tutorials. Processing has been my weak point in terms of just getting it done, but it’s pretty impressive to see how much more I got out of that last image with a little help, I think.

[Note: I somehow failed to schedule this post when I was written, so that’s why you’re getting it so late after the photos were uploaded, in case anyone who follows my flickr stream was wondering, but I doubt anyone actually pays that much attention.]

I take a lot of photos, but haven’t been sharing them much because I never seem to get time to process them. But my friend K is out visiting the area for a photo expedition, so we did some meandering around. He’s much more disciplined as a photographer than I am, so he sensibly carved some time out of the weekend to process some photos, and made me do the same. Thank you!

I reduced my original 230 photos to a much more manageable 37, but that’s still a bit much for a post and I haven’t got my greasemonkey script that gives me a thumbnail photo gallery from flickr working again, so here’s just a few:

Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge

Something about this bridge and the pattern of clouds in the sky was just calling to me. We were wondering how heavy those counterweights are, and thankfully it turns out there’s a whole information page about Hawthorne Bridge. The answer is 450 tons! The bridge also opens a lot more frequently than I would have guessed: they claim 200 times per month. It doesn’t answer the last question I had, though, which is “why would they put the control hut on top of the part of the bridge that moves?” I’m guessing it makes it easier to see the clearance, but that seems like a bunch of extra weight to lift!

Portland Central Library

Since moving out of the desert, I find myself constantly amazed by trees, but actually, we were there to take a gander at the library:

Public Library (Portland Central Library)

Alas, it was closed by the time we went by, but still photogenic! There’s lots of cute details like the author names on each bench:

K on the Charles Dickens bench

From there, we visited Washington Park. Alas, it turns out the bus doesn’t run very late, so we wound up at Hoyt Arboretum instead of the rose garden, but turns out holly is pretty fun to photograph. The holly garden has some really lovely varieties — much prettier than I’d seen prior to moving here, so I was glad to get some pictures. Look at those tricolour leaves!

Tricolor Holly

… although some of it is a bit terrifying at macro distances:

Very Spiky Holly

I got to try out one of K’s extension tubes, which were something I’d never really thought about using. They’re much lighter than carrying my actual macro lens, and while I’ve been managing ok with carrying heavy gear and not pinching that nerve in my leg again, it’s definitely a nicer lightweight option for me to consider. I’m trying to force myself to work on better processing habits before I start buying more equipment, though.

It was pretty cool, though it makes my focal distance so very short that I was a tad concerned about how far I was sticking my face into those spikes. I definitely got my hair stuck on some holly a few times.

Dandelion seeds, half gone with the wind

Dandelions are much safer.

And finally, one photo that I don’t think is technically very good, but I love the way bokeh makes the flowers look like they’re sparkling:

White Blossoms & Bokeh

Want to see the rest? They’re in my “Portlandia” gallery here, along with a couple of older photos.

We did eventually make it to the rose garden on Monday after work, but I haven’t even pulled those ones off the camera yet. I’d better start working on those soon!