Day 2 - Morning walk in the drizzle

Up early at 5:00am and meet in the lobby at 6:30. Breakfast later consists of a small buffet with various cereals, fruit, pancakes, eggs and the best bacon I have ever had. But for now we head to the shoreline downtown for early morning sunrise shots. There is no sun, only clouds, however, they are beautiful and low, so the mountain shows above the cloud cover.

Walking along the beach, Trey instructs us on different techniques to photograph the scene. His theory is to have three points of interest, foreground, midrange and distant focal point. The best way to shoot HDR is to use a tripod, set bracketing (look it up or watch a YouTube video) on the camera and use a remote to trigger the camera. The first shot is underexposed, mid is correct exposure and over exposed. In Lightroom, the images are adjusted for exposure, saturation and more. Export the 3 images to Photomatix and upon the import, the 3 are merged. Now export the image to Photoshop for some final editing, including the tool to delete things in the photo that you do not want like people, light poles etc

Walk around lake, Queenstown Gardens, take the bus back for lunch. The Queenstown Garden gets a lot of props for being a "do not miss" location, but with Longwood Gardens in our backyard, I get so disappointed when visiting other gardens. Longwood is still the best. The photo with the bridge and gazebo are from this garden.

Trey does some instruction at 10am to share his technique for HDR (high dynamic range) photos. Basically I am lost and confused, so I sit with Trey for some 1 on 1 instruction. Then back to lunch at 12:30. We sure eat a lot of great food.

More instruction from 1:30-4:00. We get all of our gear to go out for evening photos, but it is raining so hard, we decide to go to a local pub called Sherwood and use their wifi and edit photos. Great wifi that could handle 20 people with laptops and phones and some iPads. When the weather breaks, we head outside to take a few photos. No sunset as it is too cloudy.

Upon our return form dinner, most head to their rooms to rest up for our early start at 6:30am. The tv stations here are comical. Letterman is on at noon and the evening is not great except for the comedy channel which has reruns of USA old comedy shows like M.A.S.H.

Sleep by 10:30!
More tomorrow.