Air, fire, water, earth

volcano-2010-01-12
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

They all came together in a moment of time...

See more pictures from out Hawaii volcano trip at http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnon_moscona/sets/72157624193778690/show/

Island characters

volcano-2010-01-1
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

Tropical islands have all kinds of colorful characters dipping into your bowl... :-)

Adam is born!!!

Adam is finally out!

8 lb 2 and healthy... Shay will send pictures when he can. Mom and baby are happy and healthy. It ended up being a C section, but no problems at all. Proud Daddy is smiling from ear to ear and says that he's a beautiful Mosconinio (or Mosconinho in Portuguese spelling).

More news soon

Study of reclining nude (after J. Collins), graphite on paper, 8.5x11"

Recently I've been getting back into drawing. I decided to challenge myself and start a series of figure studies following the French acadmie tradition and using Tony Ryder's book as a guide. This is the first small drawing coming out of this attempt.

It took about 4-5 hours of work, using the sight-size method and no mechanical tricks of any kind. I think it's an OK start. We'll see where I go from here.

Lots of fun!

Still life drawing

8 hourse of drawing on Painter (Pencil)

Garden chair

oops, I think I got the measurements for this one a little off.

The construction crew at work

Liam, Shay and Adele working on Shay's back yard. Rumor has it that there are yields better than Wall street.




Liam is not spared the heavy lifting either...

Another photo from the Yosemite series

yosemite-2009-1
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

Half dome on a clear winter day. This took 6 exposures and quite a bit of work - and all that can be achieved is barely sufficient to do justice to this incredibly beautiful place.

San Francisco Bay

San Francisco Bay
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

I took this picture on the way back from Tahoe in January.
More recent photos I uploaded this morning on Flickr are available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnon_moscona/sets/72157614036375376/

Impression of Yosemite valley

Impression of Yosemite valley
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

We were at Yosemite. A large snow storm was approaching and the morning mist was thick. You cold barely see the valley from the entrance of the tunnel leading to the south of the park.
The sence made me think of watercolor washes immediately, so I came back home and tried dit out...

A larger version is available here (less than full size): http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnon_moscona/3468704570/sizes/o/

More flowers for Mom

Mom - Narkisus and Dafodil is the same thing...

Flowers for Mom

Here are some garden flowers...

A new painting on Flickr

mendocino-1
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

This pt. Cabrillo light house in Mendocino.
See more detail at http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnon_moscona/
A more detailed image is available here. (this is 1/3 original)

There are a few new HDRs there too.

Enjoy

Mendocino weekend

mendocino-1
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

In the Mendocino botanic gardens there's a large out door train model with lots of funny bits of scenery. There was a little guy there (2" tall) taking pictures of the visitors.

This is my first post from this trip. There will be many more. I'm so behind. Didn't finish last years Mendocino (barely started working on those) and just touched a tiny little bit on all the good material from Yosemite and Tahoe. And these are just photos - paintings will take even longer...

Aftermath

tahoe-1
Originally uploaded by Arnon Moscona

I looks like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, but it's just another sunset. I guess that was a good shooting day.

See more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnon_moscona/

Tahoe at new year's

tahoe-4
Originally uploaded by arnonmoscona3

The sun continues to set at the western shore of lake Tahoe opposite Heavenly ski resort....

Lake Tahoe Dec 31st 2008

tahoe-1
Originally uploaded by arnonmoscona3

One of a few Tahoe pictures I just posted on Flickr. These were taken just before new years in lake Tahoe.

See more on my photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnon_moscona/

HDR workflow

To those of you who asked, here's some brief description of my current HDR workflow:

An often neglected topic in HDR discussion is the source image alignment problem. I like the freedom and spontaneity of working with the camera hand-held. So most of the time I don't carry around a tripod. This can make for a challenge with HDR.
Photomatix can only handle slight registration between the shots. Photoshop does better (with auto layer alignment) but still leaves a lot to be desired when there is serious registration.
What really works for me for alignment (and sometimes even for HDR and tone mapping) is PTGUI - this panoramic stitcher does a fantastic job with alignment (Windows only). And so I end up with a workflow like:

1. Import RAW into Lightroom (or photoshop raw)
2. Export the shots to 16bit TIFF images (preserve all information, and keep exposure data in EXIF)
   
3. Load them into PTGUI and align
4. Export the "panorama" in separate layers into new 16bit TIFF files
5. Load into Photomatix, generate HDR and tone map
6. Save processed image to a 16bit TIFF
7. Load into photoshop or lightroom and post-process

It takes much less time than it sounds...

Sometimes, I can get decent HDR tone mapping straight in PTGUI, and then all I need to to is export the final tone mapped image from PTGUI and then Photomatix is not needed. However, PTGUI is not nearly as flexible as Photomatix for the tone mapping step.

Also, it is possible to generate the HDR from PTGUI and then do just the tone mapping in Photomatix, but generally I got better results with Photomatix when generating the HDR in Photomatix and tone mapping in the same session. There was a mention in some article that Photomatix remembers some information that is generated during the HDR generation that it can use for better tone mapping. This info is not saved in the HDR, and that's probably why tone mapping in the same session seems to work better.

There are several good articles on HDR workflow by Uwe Steinmueller on his site, outbackphoto.

HDR sources example

Here are some of the source images for one of the HDR images I posted last week...

Test image post...