Triple Threat

After a heavy rain storm the night before, the well site I was working on was full of puddles.  During a down time I looked for some interesting reflections after seeing what Eli Reinholdtsen's e-book demonstrated.  Her book is called Chasing Reflections and its a new e-book from David DuChemin's Craft & Vision site.

This shot I got the wind turbine, the sun and the water all in one frame.  I call it Triple Threat as it shows three of the renewable energy sources in one frame.  Now I cannot see wind, solar or hydro really overtaking fossil fuels any time soon, I am interested in what the next 5, 10 or 20 years will bring.

Cavern Cascade

This is the first amazing waterfall at the Watkins Glen State Park.  It is called Cavern Cascade and to get up to next level of waterfalls you have to walk behind the waterfall.  It is a 60 foot plunging impressive waterfall! 

©Matt Graham 2010 - Cavern Cascade

Watkins Glen Canyon

Well first off it's my birthday! I'm 28 years old now. Holy Crap!  

I recently visited the Watkins Glen canyon while on my stay out East.  I always thought Watkins Glen as the place for crazy endurance car racing from my days playing car racing video games.  What I did not know is that Watkins Glen State Park in New York State was a big tourist attraction too.  The canyon is a 400 ft drop and has some amazing waterfalls. In this picture you can see the scale of the canyon with the people climbing up the stairs! Over the past couple days I will post some of my keepers from the trip!

©Matt Graham 2010 - Watkins Glen Canyon

Adobe Photoshop CS5 magic - Content Aware Fill

I was lucky enough to be a Beta tester for Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended since February.  I am so amazed at how cool some of the new features are.  One of them is Content Aware Fill.  I found it great for filling up empty space created by the Panorama merge. 

Here are the two pictures I took of Maligne Canyon and the deadly icy water hole.  In fact, when I was here with Darwin Wiggett, two teenagers who were drunk out of their minds decided to test their fate and climb past the hole with out crampons.  The boys were eventually rescued with a rope that our other guide, Alan Ernst had.  Funny thing was that when we were coming back to the parking lot, the boys were going back to try conquering the canyon again!!

Anyway, here is what Photoshop CS5 came up with.  As you can see there is white space that the merge algorithm created to take into account the change in perspective as I tilted the lens.

After playing with Content Aware Fill, the white space was magically filled! This feature will be fun to try out when I do more panoramas.  Later this week I will show how the new HDR Pro module works.

The Duo Dynamic

On the Saturday of our tour we went to the "Galleria" which is an amazing ice climbing venue.  The Cline River flows by in the valley and with the frozen ice and flowing water, I find this an great duo.  I used a 5 Stop Solid Neutral Density filter by Singh-Ray to blur the motion of the water, while keeping the 3.2 second exposure decent. And OK, I realize that the "Dynamic Duo" is Batman and Robin, but I felt naming this the Duo Dynamic is well suited.

©Matt Graham 2010 - The Duo Dynamic

Endless Chain Ridge

On my photo tour with Darwin Wiggett and Alan Ernst, our first day was driving up the Icefields Parkway towards Jasper.  After the Columbia Icefield, the Endless Chain Ridge comes into view. It was named by Mary Schaffer, one of the first non-native women to visit Jasper National Park, when it opened in 1907.

A great resource for mountain names and history of the Canadian Rockies is Peakfinder.com.  When I looked up the history of the ridge, it quoted Schaffer wrote:

"A short distance beyond the rock-slide and on the river''s right, begins a low, rocky ridge, which for length and unadulterated ugliness cannot be beaten. We trailed it for a day and a half and then named it ''The Endless Chain'' well named too, for on reaching the Athabasca shores, we found that it still stretched on in an unbroken line for miles down the river."

©Matt Graham 2010 - Endless Chain Ridge