This week Amy suggests that we share images focusing on the topic “Magical Light”. A photographer strives to know light and to be available at the best time for a given outdoor subject. Given what he or she knows about lighting conditions and their ability to change moment by moment throughout the day, being in the right place at the right time can capture that magic. You can read Amy’s challenge post here. The photo above, for example, features a fisherman on his way home with his catch as the day begins its journey into night, or does it? That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. That’s the image I saw in my mind, but what happens when there is no fisherman arriving home late in the day? What if my visit to the location is only during the day? From where then is to appear this magical light? What can I do as a photographer to make my vision happen?

I can use a trick long known to motion picture photographers from the earliest days of Hollywood ‘B-movies’, stars not under contract to work at night? Shoot during the day and reduce the exposure. That’s what I did for this shot of someone heading back to shore. Yelapa is a stop on a cruise excursion. It’s only accessible by boat having no roads leading to the village. Posted below is the photo I started with, cropped and prepped. Obviously, it was captured at mid-day, a time when available light is probably the least magical.

I didn’t actually shoot the image at a reduced exposure, I adjusted it in post using Lightroom and Nik’s Silver Efex 2. It’s always fun to tweak the challenge theme a bit. In this case, even when the light isn’t “magical” in the sense we want it to be, our powerful digital processing tools can help to create that magic.

John Steiner

This week, Cheri Lucas Rowlands challenges us with the single word, Face. Reading the challenge reminded me of our trip through the Panama Canal and the one photobomb we encountered on the trip. You can read the entire challenge post here. The photo above was taken by a nice lady we asked to help by taking our picture in Yelapa. I gave her my camera (the fancy Nikon with the big lens and all the buttons) and told her not to be surprised that it takes three photos when you press the shutter. No doubt unsure of how the big fancy camera works, I’m sure she never noticed the guy behind us who was ready to photobomb our shot. We didn’t discover the “bomb” until I was going through photos back at home.  I don’t know if he was even with our tour group, but he was having a laugh at our expense, no doubt.

Initially upset that this guy “ruined” our shot, I decided to have a little fun and share the photobomb on my Facebook page. Then playing with Photoshop Elements one day, I faked up another of our couples photos and put our friend the photobomber in it as well, commenting on how this guy seems to be everywhere. 

This is a good time to share our souvenir collection with you. In 2002, my wife, Lynn, and I went to Albuquerque to a family reunion and took a hot air balloon ride. While souvenir shopping, we saw this goofy photo frame, realized it was perfect for the photo taken of us on our balloon ride. That started our collection of crazy photo frames and a tradition that chronicles our travels.

The tradition makes souvenir shopping easy for us. Whenever we go someplace new, we go looking for the crazy photo frame that documents something about the area. If it has the name of the location in the frame, so much the better. The souvenir adds little weight to our travel load and, wrapped carefully, has always arrived home safely with us. We always ask someone to take our picture before we leave, knowing that it will go into our frame. Our only disappointment about the hobby is that some locations simply are too “classy” to have a crazy frame collection, or the ones they have are generic and clearly don’t relate in any way to the location. I close this challenge entry with a shot of one of the bookcases we have filled with memories of our travels.

John Steiner

P.S. I didn’t get a model release from the gentleman who photobombed us. He obviously wanted to be published or he wouldn’t have stuck his face in our picture. (grin.)

Yelapa, Mexico

In the spring of 2013, my wife, Lynn, and I completed a bucket list item, crossing the Panama Canal. Along the way between Miami and Los Angeles, we stopped at several interesting places. I recently purchased a Nikon D5100 and been reacquainting myself with photography after a many year hiatus. One recent invention, the high dynamic range (HDR) photograph, attracted my interest. In anticipation of possible projects in this area, I picked a couple of stops on our cruise to set my camera to bracket exposures.

Playing with HDR in the version of Photoshop Elements that I used at the time wasn’t entirely successful. The program could not line up and stack images if there was the slightest camera movement between shots. Handholding shots works, but not so well from the deck of a moving boat. Recently I upgraded to Lightroom 6 and looked back at these first bracket images I’d taken in Mexico. Lightroom 6 not only knows how to “stack” the images, ending up with minor cropping in the final image as it automatically aligns objects despite their slightly different locations in the frame. The deghosting function takes care of other anomalies like wave and tree movement. After seeing the results of the HDR conversion in Lightroom 6, I set up my current camera, a Nikon D7000, so that when I put the camera into U(ser) 1 mode, it automatically  reconfigures for a 3-exposure 4-stop range bracket.

I recently released shots of Cabo San Lucas in HDR. You can view those images here. At our stop in Puerto Vallarta, our excursion took us to Majahuitas for snorkeling and then on to Yelapa for an afternoon of Western Mexican fun and relaxation. Yelapa is only accessible via water transportation. No roads more developed than cart tracks are available in the area. You can read the details about our excursion here.

The skies were gray much of the morning, improving some in the afternoon. The hazy, cloudy weather did not work to my advantage in creating HDR images that really stand out. At the time I took the shots, I knew I should have three exposures, one each over, under and just right. What I didn’t know for sure was how wide in latitude the exposures should range. I set the camera up for -1.3 ev, 0 ev, and +1.3 ev bracket shots. I’ve since learned that -2, 0, +2 is a better range to use.

Not all the shots I took at Yelapa were bracketed exposures so I could not reproduce all of the images in the original article in HDR. To make up for that, the gallery includes several HDR shots that were not published in the original article. I am not a fan of the super-grunge HDR look that many HDR images demonstrate. One advantage of the narrower exposure range is that the extra strong HDR effects are missing. In a sense, I consider the gallery of images here to be HDR-lite. Lightroom’s HDR mode brings to life images with more “snap” and realism. I hope you enjoy this gallery of HDR images from Yelapa and Majahuitas. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico

*True confessions department: I stole this quote from a Yelapa tourism website.

For all of our previous stops on our Panama Canal cruise, we opted for land-based excursions. At Puerto Vallarta, the excursion we chose was called “Yelapa & Majahuitas”. The online brochure promised our choice of snorkeling, kayaking or both at Majahuitas (pronounced Ma-ha-weet-as) and of hiking or hanging out on the beach at Yelapa (pronounced Jel-a-pa). Our last snorkeling adventure was in 2007 in Hawaii. It’s time we got wet again. And we love to hike, so this excursion promised to be ideal. It didn’t disappoint, well, maybe the hike was a bit overblown… more on that later.

Our excursion boat held maybe 30 passengers or so, there were folks of all ages aboard. The two places we visited are only accessible by boat. Majahuitas is a hot snorkeling area along the coast, maybe a one hour boat ride from Puerto Vallarta. Majahuitas, about 40 km south of Puerto Vallarta, is located in the Bay of Banderas, however it is not accessible by automobile. The nearest road, Highway 200, passes inland on a route between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo.

Once we arrived at the bay, the snorkeling was fabulous. We saw more ocean wildlife than we saw on our Hawaii cruise by a long way. It didn’t hurt that the tour guides chummed the water with bread. That attracted many small, colorful fish. We also saw a handful of larger fish, and having accidently separated a bit from our group, I happened upon a manta ray swimming maybe 10 feet below me along the bottom. Unfortunately, I have no photos of our snorkeling adventure. I don’t have a waterproof housing for my camera. Next time, I will have a digital camera rated for under water use. It would have been put to very good use.

Many people chose to kayak as well as, or instead of, snorkeling. Once we got back on board, we watched some of the last kayakers getting a few last minutes on the water before having to reboard to head for Yelapa.

As the snorkelers and kayakers reboarded, one of the tour guides brought on board a companion of the deep. The little fellow was not as attractive as a parrot on his shoulder, but it was certainly unique.

After the show and tell with the baby octopus, we were soon on our way to Yelapa. The bar was open and they served a very good salad and sandwich bar. All refreshments were included in the price of the cruise. A photographer from the ship wandered around taking random photos. At the end of the tour, passengers could purchase a CD with all of the photos taken included.

Less than thirty minutes south of Majahuitas lay the fishing village of Yelapa. Accessible only by water taxi or tour boat, the town promotes itself as a real getaway from the hustle and bustle of the city. The only road in or out is used by delivery vehicles mostly. There are no cars in the town. The only personal transportation I saw were burros and a couple of 3-wheel ATVs.

There are many resorts and rooms to rent, some operated by American expats who came, liked the laid back lifestyle and opened their own resorts.  There are few phones and only a few places have Internet access. Pay phones are still a fixture here, and you can expect a difficult experience if you want to send or receive a fax. If you would like a cerveza or margarita, expect to pay with cash. Very few places accept credit cards.

The promised hike on our excursion turned out to be about a kilometer walk through town and up into the hillside through the tropical forest. Of course, many of the residents of the houses we passed by had tables set out with arts, crafts and souvenirs for sale. The town isn’t much for hiding the infrastructure. Their communications and electrical cabling was everywhere. Even water lines were visible running along streets and into the forest beyond.

As it turned out, our destination was a beautiful waterfall. The trip was worth the walk, though it was mostly uphill and not at all equipped for those with disabilities. We backtracked along the same path we made to the waterfall and spent the rest of our time on the beach awaiting the return of our tour boat.

We settled in for the hour ride back to our cruise ship at Puerto Vallarta. The crew provided some entertainment, a much shortened version of “Grease”, the musical. Of course, one of the all-male crew had to take the part of Sandy, costume and all. It was pretty cheesy.

Shortly before our arrival back in Puerto Vallarta, the boat suddenly slowed a bit to allow lots of time for passengers to view and photograph a school of dolphin that decided to accompany us back to port. They followed along, sometimes beside us, sometimes surfing our wake for at least twenty minutes. It was a fabulous and fitting end to a great excursion, one of the best on our cruise.

John Steiner