Pixel 6/Snapseed
World Photography Day 2022
California Vacation Part 5
Stanford was just a short walk away from where we were staying. These photos were taken by my husband with his Samsung something or other.
More to come…
California Vacation Part 4
The next day we drove an hour and a half from my husband’s aunt’s house to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey. It was very cool especially the Into the Deep area.
After that we went to Santa Cruz and shopped on the boardwalk.
More to come…
California Vacation Part 3
During our first full day we took a cruise across the San Francisco Bay to tour Alcatraz. The tour was really cool especially if you follow along with the audio they provide.
Alcatraz
One Hour Cruise
We took a relaxing, guided tour around the bay and saw many cool sights including the Golden Gate Bridge.
Pier 39
We walked around and shopped at Pier 39 in between the two cruises and also headed back there for dinner at the Crab House.
More to come…
California Vacation Part 2
Palo Alto
We stayed in Palo Alto for our entire trip at my husband’s aunt’s house. She was gone on a trip herself out of the country so we had the whole place to ourselves! Sure beat living out of a hotel for a week! Wish we could have seen her though.
I took some pics of her beautiful backyard garden. She has chickens and a bee hive along with a full vegetable garden, fruit trees and bushes, various flowers, a waterfall feature, and many areas to sit and relax. We got to take care of the chickens and feed and collect eggs all week.
She also has a cottage in her backyard that is set up like a studio apartment. She has rented it out before but currently is not.
Click here for Part 1 of our vacation
Linking up with Cee’s FOTD and Whatsoever is Lovely Challenge
California Vacation
I’ve been sort of putting off writing this because it overwhelms me to think about how much stuff we did in California a few weeks ago and how many pictures I have of our wonderful vacation! But I want to share them and also have this next series of posts be a kind of log of our trip. Hope you enjoy them as I walk you through the sights and stories of our get-a-way.
All pictures were taken with my Pixel 6 unless otherwise noted. I was too nervous to bring my expensive camera equipment with me since we were flying. Plus, my camera with its lens is very heavy to carry around and I knew we would be doing a lot of walking. Boy, was I right! We walked miles and miles everyday.
On Our Way
We took off from St. Louis at 5:30am and arrived in Las Vegas prepared for a one hour layover that turned into 6 hours! (Our plane got stuck in Ohio in bad weather.) We tried to fly standby on a different flight that left earlier than ours was expected to arrive, but no luck.
I people watched for 6 hours while my daughter and husband sat on their phones. I think my daughter slept quite a bit, too. I wish I could fall asleep anywhere like her!
Finally made it to California!
We arrived in San Jose airport with plenty of the day left since California is 2 hours behind our time zone here in Missouri. We were ready for dinner and so we went straight to In-N-Out burger to see what all the hype is about. Sorry to say, we were disappointed! It wasn’t bad but nothing special like we were expecting.
Half Moon Bay
Next we went to a beach in Half Moon Bay because we had to get a look at the Pacific Ocean! We were there as the sun was going down so the view was lovely.
The landscape in Half Moon Bay was beautiful everywhere, not just at the beach.
More to come…
Comparing Pics on My New Phone
To me, the image shot as jpg looks almost identical in each photo editor. I think Snapseed did a slightly better job with the colors tones.
It appears the jpg images in each editor came out much more saturated than the RAW ones in their respective editors. Any ideas as to why this happened? I thought raw was supposed to capture more info than jpg. The only thing I can think of is many phone cameras have HDR processing baked into their software, which would maybe process jpgs more saturated but leave the raw as is since it is technically not processed yet???
Overall, I almost prefer the Snapseed jpg over the Snapseed raw because of the increased saturation and the Snapseed raw over the Capture One raw for the same reason, although Capture One did a better job at preserving the details of the raw than Snapseed did, so if I had to choose between the two for sure for a raw file I would probably go with Capture One.
To sum it up, for jpg I would go with Snapseed over the phone’s built in editor and for RAW I would go with Capture One over Snapseed. But what would I choose between Snapseed jpg and Capture One raw? I think it depends on how saturated I want it and if I am willing to give up some detail for that saturation.
What do you think?
Images taken with Pixel 6
Edit:. After I posted this and was looking at it again, I actually think I might prefer the jpg edited in the phone’s built in editor because it preserved the highlights where the sun was hitting different areas much better than Snapseed did. 😩
Rainy Day Part 2
I recently upgraded my editing software to its latest version (Capture One Pro 22) and it has the added function of merging images to form one HDR (high dynamic range) image. Below is, first, a single photo I tried to expose in camera as best I could for the highlights and shadows. I then made edits to it in Capture One.
The second photo is a merge of three separate images, one exposed the best I could for the entire picture, one exposed correctly for the sky where most of the highlights are, and one exposed for the shadows in the landscape. I then made edits to the MERGED image in Capture One.
The differences aren’t huge but the merged image appears to have a slightly bigger range of highlights and shadows. I tried my hardest to edit the single image to look as balanced as the merged one does but I couldn’t achieve it in post processing. Like I said, the difference is subtle but I think big enough for me to play around with this technique again.
Sony a7 III/ Capture One
White Flowers
“Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.” – John Lennon
Sony A35
Signs of Spring Gallery
Sony A35/ I forget what I edited with originally. These are from 2012! I touched them up in Capture One, but barely.
Offshoots Photography 