Recount

I realized after my last calculation that I miscalculated. My camera's numbering turned over twice during the trip - once up at Crescent City and again down in La Jolla with the harbor seals. Instead of the 16,947 photos I thought I had taken, it is 26.947 photos. Henry made some calculations as to how many cards per day . . . I went back and double checked.

Ok, I started the trip with 2- 4 gig cards and 4-1 gig cards. If I was in a great area I photographed until I ran out of cards. But some days I did not photograph, and some days I only shot one or two of the 4 gig cards. But even so . . . . the math says I must have shot an average of one and a half 4 gig cards every day.

Now part of that was what I was trying to do. Once I had some success with the shooting out the window







and "artistic" motion blurred photos - that technique uses up a lot of shots, because most of those shots are worthless, but you get a few that end up amazing you.












And then I was fascinated by wave action against the rocks. I've got a sequence of shots with three very roundish rocks with the surf action.


I also took a number of shots of this rock, trying to catch the waterfalls as the waves hit the rock and receded.



You'll notice the black and white nature of these shots, not done in photoshop - rather the natural black and white that the ocean becomes on cloudy days.


Most of these wave and rock shots will probably not end up being used for anything but "practice." But every now and then one of them really works.

The last aspect of my shooting that uses up a lot of frames is bracketing. I bracket several f/stops in both directions of what I think is the "right" exposure. Part of that is that each scene requires slightly different exposures. I find that under exposure works best when shooting waves, because it is so easy to "blow out" the highlights on the waves. Forest scenes also seem to do better when under exposed. But white shots like snow tend to need over exposure.

I also bracket with the intention of blending images for high dynamic range photos. The theory here is to capture an image that ends up more like what your eye can see rather than the limited range that the digital camera can process.

But . . . with all of my efforts, I now have many shots that must be sorted, discarded, and processed. I know where a good part of my time will be spent once we get home. I've started on it while we're visiting my inlaws.