a sunny weekend in puna

I enjoyed a sunny weekend in Puna and Hilo this weekend with my daughter. Mum was away having fun with her girlfriends so it was just me and Mira. We went down to Puna on a beautiful Saturday to collect some water samples, for Mira’s science project, from the hot ponds at Ahalanui Park and from the tide pools at Pohoiki. These are great places and we always enjoy them when we go, but for me the highlight is always driving through the countryside and especially the tree tunneled road.

The images here have been hdr processed (4 images, each 1-stop apart). I used LR/Enfuse for the top one and Photomatix for the one below. But the soft and glowing look I gave to the images comes from filters within the Nik Software Suite (Color Efex Pro). That’s some cool software!

photography from around the net

No, I’m not going to do all photography from around the interweb – ya think I got time for that?! Here I have just two links (both of which I stumbled upon on Rob Galbraith’s blog) which I found interesting for different reasons.

The first is from Time magazine: The top 10 doctored photos. They show the before and after. Normally this wouldn’t attract me – people do this sort of manipulation in Photoshop countless times every single day. But each of the photos shown have a historical importance which makes them worth looking at. Two things which I found fascinating. First, is how good the “art” of photo-manipulation was more than 100 years before Photoshop. The older photographs are the ones which interested me most. Secondly, I can’t believe that we have modern-day governments still doing this sort of thing (see the last image)!

The second is from the Smithsonian: The 6th Annual photo contest. There are 5 categories and you can see the finalists and category winners from each. The overall winner is from the travel section, and although I think it is a great image, I do not think that it is the best one. And therein lies something else to learn about photography, it is very subjective.