Upcoming workshop – Eastern Sierra, July 11-16, 2009  Improve your photography skills, stimulate your creativity and have a fantastic time.

I just ran another test on Genuine Fractals.  Here it is.

I’m working on an image for the Orange County Fair and I want to blow it up to 16X24.  It is Kolob Terrace taken with my 10D last year in Zion so the image size is 3072X2048 or 6 M pixels.

I use Image Print to make my prints on my Epson Stylus Pro 4800.  Image Print likes to print at two PPI settings – 180 and 360.  So here is the question: Can I get the same degree of sharpness with Genuine Fractals at 360 PPI as I can get with 180 PPI?

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This blog is going to be quite for a couple of weeks.  Thursday I’ll be heading up to Oregon for the Memorial Day weekend.  Then Tuesday I’ll be off to Alaska with my family for nine days.  We’re hoping to have lots of good images to play with when we return.

Join us for the 2010 Death Valley Workshop.

Space is still available for the 2008 Death Valley workshop.

When: February 20-23, 2010

Where: Death Valley National Park, Furnace Creek

For more information click on Death Valley Photography Workshop

I finally had a chance to perform a test with Genuine Fractals that’s been on my mind for some time.  This test was performed on an image from a Canon 10D with a 6 M pixel sensor.  The image was blown up to 24″ long at 180 ppi.

Now, there’s no way you can get a super sharp image of that size with a 6 M pixel sensor.  So that wasn’t the point of the test.  When I previously blew this image up there were a lot of artifacts that were enhanced, especially when I performed the output sharpening.  I spent about an hour with clone stamp and healing brush removing these artifacts one by one.

So the point of the test was to see how well the smooth areas were enlarged; that is, if GF could enlarge them without creating these artifacts.

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I’ve been having a discussion with a friend regarding the benefits and challenges of JPEG and RAW file formats.  There’s already a lot of discussion on this topic out there but here’s a bit more.

The challenge my friend has with RAW is that the images are not as striking as JPEG.  In fact, she says the RAW images are rather flat and she’s right.

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Thanks to everyone who participated in our survey.  The third submission for the 2008 Orange County Fair has been determined.  The three submissions will be

• Streets of Delphi – Portal
• Battery Point Lighthouse
• Kilob Terrace (the survey winner)

I’ve been really quite on the blog this month.  It’s almost the middle of the month and only one post and that was last night.

There are two exciting trips coming up that should produce some great photographs.

First is a long weekend in northern Oregon.  I’ll be joining my brother Roger Nordstrom and good friend Jack Graham over Memorial Day weekend for some good photography on the coast and inland.

Then the day after returning from Oregon I’ll be heading North to Alaska with my family on my daughter’s middle school field trip.  Our entry and exit point will be Anchorage and the trip will extend south to Seward and north as far as Denali.  That will be two weeks of virtually non-stop shooting.

Looking back a little over a week, I was in Joshua Tree National Park the first weekend of May.  Would you believe it, the spring wild flower bloom was still going strong but now it’s moved up to the high desert (4000 feet elevation).  There are a couple of burn areas in the park where the flowers literally formed a carpet.  In an older burn area the carpet consisted mainly of wildly yellow desert dandelion.  In the fresher burn area the carpet was made up of soft white alisium.  The flowers were so think there was no way you could walk in them without stepping on them. 

A canyon wash I hiked up was vibrant with yellow senna and the cacti were showing off in the most gaudy (and wonderful) magentas.  Oh, and to top it all off the ocotillo boom was still hanging in there although the previous weekend would have been better.  But the sunrise Sunday morning couldn’t have been better.  Spectacular pink and gold clouds hung in the deep blue morning sky above the spindly ocotillo.  It was a great weekend.

The images from these trips will be posted on Nordstrom Fine Arts Landscapes.  Check back to see them.

I have a survey running to help me decide which photograph to submit to the Orange Count Fair photography competition this year.  If you’d like to add your 2 cents worth you are invited to participate.  Actually, it’s fun and won’t even take you five minutes.

2008 Orange County Fair Photography Submission Survey

Thanks in advance for your input.