jeffmcbride.net

Telescope Peak, 11,043′ above sea level, looking out over bad water at 282 below it. This is from November, when I got the idea one Friday evening that I would drive up to Death Valley and climb it. I camped Saturday night in a chilly 22F, and headed up the trail first thing in the morning. Had to camp at Thorndike Campground, since the Prius was not quite able to make it up the last couple miles to Mahagony Flats; at least not comfortably.

*I’ve discovered a significant flaw in my javascript pano viewer: You cannot run the same script on two different images in one page. Just click through to the post to see/pan the image.
(more…)

I am frequently amazed at how much better photos can come out when I process the RAW sensor capture myself instead of letting the camera do it. Usually, it is just the extra bit depth that allows me to gain up an image after the fact. I hate overexposure. Highlights drive me nuts; that’s information you’re never getting back. Fortunately though, when you have 12-bits of dynamic range (which I do with a raw, as long as the ISO is relatively low), you can afford to gain the image up quite a bit after the fact. End result: I tend to underexpose and fix it later. It’s safer.

Sometimes though, there is more too it than that. In tonight’s example, frankly, I have no idea what the camera is doing to screw up this image so badly. Sometimes the color processing is right-on; tonight it was way out in left field. I had the camera set on the “Vivid” mode, and I have a feeling that just didn’t work out well with such a saturated image. In any case, I’ve taken to shooting RAW+JPEG all the time. JPEGs give you a quick preview, and a quick upload, on any computer. The RAW is there if I want to post-process, which I almost always do with the good ones. It certainly slows down the capture speed and eats up storage though.

JPEG from the D90:

JPEG from the RAW:

Now if only I can get the shot framed right. It looks like that MIGHT have been a nice crown in the splash, but it is awkwardly cropped out.

This was a royal pain in my ass to get working, and frankly, it’s not that interesting. I’ve been scouring the net for a way to display large panoramas recently. I was looking for a flash app, initially, but I couldn’t find anything I didn’t have to pay for. I finally decided to try out a javascript approach from here.

Getting it running in a stand-alone HTML file was not too bad. But I just killed a good chunk of my evening getting the stupid thing to display correctly in the post. Eventually it got to the point where it was actually working, except that I somehow triggered chrome’s cross-site scripting detection. I still have on idea why. But, it seems it only happens in the preview, sooooo….here you are. Aguereberry Point, in Death Valley:

Higher-res version of the shot is on flickr.