Monsoon has come to a pause this week, but last Saturday, Shuwen and I went up to the Laguna Mountains again, to dive into this weather and its potential for drama one more time.
Clouds
This post tag is used only when clouds play a dominant role in the photos.
Monsoon Impressions
I guess some of you would not really have expected it anymore but, despite all the “throwbacks” and “cleaning out the vaults”, I actually do make new photos, still! Just last Sunday, Shuwen and I drove up to the Laguna Mountains together with our friend Tracy because the “monsoon forecast” sounded pretty good.
Sunrise Above The Clouds
Photographing the sunrise above the marine layer, with tech notes on how the photo was made.
Halloween Sunset, Bernardo Mountain
The skies looked promising yesterday in the late afternoon, so I went for a quick walk to “that new/old spot” overlooking Lake Hodges again. I knew that the direction probably wouldn’t be “perfect” for a sunset photo so this was more to still my curiosity.
Bust
In my older post with the photos from a nice monsoon event in the Laguna Mountains I mentioned how thunderstorms often occur in the afternoon and most recently, the National Weather Service often had “a chance of thunderstorms after 11 AM” in the forecast for the area.
Filters or Blending?
A recent Twitter conversation about the pros and cons of graduated neutral density filters (often just called GNDs) made me think about my own approach towards handling high-contrast scenes. I’m not using GNDs anymore, rarely did so in the past, and I prefer exposure blending on the computer, or even just using “software GNDs” in a single exposure. I find it far more flexible* and prefer to have “pure data” without the (unalterable) effects of the filter in my original/initial exposures.