Santana Row

Santana Row in San Jose, California a modern outdoor shopping center with a European theme. I took several pictures with a Leica M-9 with a Leica Summarit 35mm lens. The photos run the gamut from flowers to people enjoying the warm sunny day.
I thought that I would work a little on my street photography and found with this first picture that I was some what out of focus as I didn't gauge the distance as well as I might have. I'm sure I'm not the first person to have done it so in post processing I decided to tweak the photo in Topaz Labs filter Simplify 3. The result is a image that looks like a colorful painting and rescued this shot. 

Artistic view of outdoor cafe seating.

Father and son playing chess in a courtyard

Entering a wine shop

Sunday Brunch

Hotel Entrance

All of the above photographs were processed in Adobe Lightroom 2.7, Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Topaz Filters.

Gymnastics

Over the weekend I attended a friends daughters gymnastics meet where I used both my Leica M-9 with a 35 f.2.5 and Nikon D300 with a 70 to 300 zoom. Today I'm sharing two pictures taken with the Leica, both in low light conditions. I set the ISO at 400 for picture number one and ISO 1250 for picture number two as the lighting conditions varied greatly in this arena.

 

In this first picture little girls scurry to find the scrunchy that best matches their outfits under the watchful eyes of the vendors. Lighting conditions were good in this area of the gym and it shows in the results.

In this picture the lighting is problematic the area behind the girls is well lit and the girls are standing in a darkened area. I metered for the well lit area behind them to eliminate any blown out areas and in Adobe Photoshop CS5 I brought the girls out from the shadows. I used Topaz DeNoise 4.1 to reduce the noise that shooting in ISO 1250 in combo with the subjects of the picture having to be brought out of the shadows had caused.
The rest of the event was shot with the Nikon D300 and I will share some of those pictures with you later on as I have not processed them as of yet.

Into the Valley

Thought I would share a few shots taken with the Leica M-9 on a recent walk into the valley. Spring is waning here Northern California and even thou we have gotten the occasional day of light to moderate rain fall the colors are changing. In this post you see one of my favorite areas to shoot landscape photos. There are interesting backgrounds and unusual objects available all within easy walking distance from the house.

Photo was processed in Adobe Lightroom 2.7 and Topaz filter detail 2. There are two old sheds in this grassy field that make for interesting subjects along with the high grasses and changing colors.
Not far from the above photo sits a house with several old tractors that have seen better days. As they age and the paint drops away a rust appears everywhere that makes for a great photographic subject.

Photo was processed in Adobe CS5 and Topaz filter Detail 2 to enhance the natural patination that has occurred through many years of weathering .
In this last photo I wanted to show the color and texture of this spring time flower with a soft bokeh background.

Photo was processed in Adobe Lightroom 2.7. Simple subjects like this flower abound in the valley and there always seems to be something new to photograph.