Fundy National Park - June 2012 (Part 1)

I'm drowning in pictures! My family and I spent a week in Fundy National Park (amazing park, one that I still greatly enjoy after 20 years).  Came back with 12GB of pictures and videos.  Birds woke me up real early in the morning (5:30am), so I got many sunrise and quiet time exploring the park and taking many pictures.  The only problem with this trip is that it didn't last longer!

With my limited equipment, I think I still got some great shots (at least some that I like!).  Here are a few (kids processed in Picasa, but other two processed in LightRoom).  Let me know what you think!

Bennett Lake was incredible that first morning.  I returned many times again throughout the week and couldn't get anything like the first morning.  Glad I was there and didn't miss that amazing morning!

Many sunrises were amazing in the park.  Some were more dramatic with clouds or fog.  However, without a gradual neutral density filter, there's only so much I could do.  My cheap eBay circular polarization filter ($8 CAD!) seemed to help in some cases.  For the most part, I didn't like longer exposures using my decent Hoya ND8 filter .

The kids had a blast, and I'm happy they enjoy the same things as I do.  We hope to return again at some point!

2012-05-27

My father and I decided to take a few hours for a photo expedition.  This is the first time we do that - take time just to take pictures.  It was a lot of fun.  It was very windy when we got there, which made long exposures just about impossible (tripod or no tripod).  We however managed to get quite a few shots in the few hours we were there.  Hope we get to do something like that again at some point.

The following images are a selection of the many I took.  There were all edited in Google Picasa 3: so quality is not great.  I really have to learn Adobe LightRoom 3 (which I already have purchased and own), because the resulting images are of much higher quality.  But for now, because of time constraints, Picasa will have to do.  I may post some of the same images below processed in LightRoom at some point - it's interesting to compare the difference (it's obvious!).  The one big thing with LightRoom is "noise control" - there is nothing like that to my knowledge in Picasa, which really affects end results. 

Anyways, let me know what you think!  This is very low budget... images taken with my Nikon D60 and all of them were taken with either my father's 100mm lens or 300mm lens. Thanks again dad! :)