Since it’s a holiday (President’s day), we had the chance to do a little hiking up in the hills of Tilden Regional Park. Not exactly wilderness, but not like the city, either. I’m glad that I can maintain a relatively small ecological footprint by living in an urban area but still have places close by to which I can escape. Now only if there was better bus service so we didn’t have to drive the car.

I’m finally feeling like some of my photography is moderately worthy as art. I spent the first 2 or 3 years after I started photographing just pointing my camera at things I thought were beautiful and then wondering why pictures of them never seemed to capture the beauty I saw. Thanks to the vast amount of information on the internet about photography, some of it even good (particular thanks to the folks at the RadiantVista), I’ve been able to slowly grow in artistic skill. I’m beginning to understand the nature of translating a 4 dimensional experience into 2 dimensions and how the typical human brain moves through that 2D representation.

I’m drawn more and more to black and white photography. It’s more honest, in a way–because most people see in color it’s more obvious that a black and white photograph is not a small captured bit of reality, but a representation. I’ve been using the beta of Adobe Camera RAW 4 and the recently released Adobe Lightroom v1.0 software to do black and white conversions from my digital RAW files. It’s amazing how much faster one can work with a refined user interface, with results that would take 3 to 4 times as long in Photoshop.

Click on the picture to see the rest of the photographs from today on my Flickr page.