Redwoods and tomatoes

I woke up not feeling so great this morning. But it was warm outside, one of those days where you have to go outside. So Alison and I drove over to the East Bay to visit Redwood Regional Park, somewhere that I have previously biked around, but never through.

It was good enough to make me feel okay about not doing anything too productive today.

Processing photos of forests with sun-dappled sunlight is very difficult! I don’t think I’ve ever found a way to make these images look acceptable, let alone close to the beauty of the real life situation.

Fundamentally, it’s a contrast limitation, and there’s a tradeoff between making an image look HDRy/over-processed, blowing out the nice highlights, and letting the fern-y shadows fall into black oblivion. The above were done with shadow pushing and highlight pulling in Lightroom, and strike approximately what I think the best balance could be. I would be curious to see other photographers’ approaches to this surprisingly difficult lighting challenge.

I finished uploading the final presentations from the 2016 San Francisco Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon.

It’s gotten harder to shift my car into first gear. Now I need to shift into second gear before beging able to push the selector into first almost all of the time. I might try to change the transmission oil sometime in the near future, pending being able to find some jack stands. Internet research seems to suggest that another likely cause of this is misadjustment of some of the shift cables.

Bought some tomato plants in the afternoon, going to try to fill the Great Dead Spot of the 1611 backyard with them tonight or tomorrow.