3/31/12 Sand Lake Pictures

Dude totally. I think it was the highlite of the trip for me

 

Warm and toasty in there! Even enjoyed a nice movie before I went to bed! Shit I even made a sandwich!

 

I thought it was a couple movies

 

I thought Ben's friend got a picture of us all lined up on top of the bowl?

 

You can't have an outing without a group shot.

 

Too much Edward in one weekend is dangerous

 

Aight pics just finished their upload, incoming....

 

Pics of right front tires on small logs incoming????

 

ANTICIPATION

 

OMG PERENNIALS!

 

How? You burned all the logs, the pallet, beer cans, water bottles, plates, two shoes, and made glass art of the bottles. Ain't nothing left to drive on top of anymore, lol.


Anyway, had a great time riding down as a group and hanging with the hardcore camping group. literally proved neither rain nor hail nor snow nor dead of night can keep us Olympians from a wheeling trip (Steve has the snow pic).

there's still a jump contestant no one's seen yet - the ninja jump pic hasn't been uploaded yet

 

Well we needed to keep warm

 

Joe - I keep seeing better and better pics from you. Doing steadily better!

advice from my amateur shooting:

First off, I'm saying that Steve beat me on some real simple techniques:
1. He wasn't afraid of letting the camera do the work, freeing him to concentrate on getting in more clicks and framing up. He had his camera set in Sports mode the entire day and his stuff came out sharp. I went for P Mode with some tweaks, and I had more washed out skies and fuzzy motion.
2. He took a shit ton of photos. 3 photos of the same thing usually means you get at least one right.
3. He tried weird angles and shot odd things. He took pictures focusing on textures, vehicle parts, and he got down low.

The one thing that I managed to do a bit better is I got in close. When everyone was jumping, I kept walking in closer prior to each jump. Fill the screen with action and detail - just don't get run over, heeh!

From the pics that are uploaded, I've deleted half what I took. Blurry, boring, poor cropping, duplicates.

Cropping is about 80% of the work.

I had to touch every photo in lightroom. I'm lazy as hell, though. I start with hitting the auto exposure button and seeing if I can tweak from there most of the time. Note that as you go down the list, you are getting into finer and finer tuning. I rarely venture outside the Tone settings. Most of my tweaks were bumping the exposure a notch or two, but I did play with a bit of black levels and brightness.
My biggest trick was working on the sky by adding graduated filters. I barely know what I'm doing with them, but basically the idea is to darken the sky while leaving the ground at the right exposure. This causes the sky to go more blue and give it substance.

I know Derek can take you beyond that

 

Thanks man, i did my best to keep up with you around the dunes haha. We'll have to build you a tube bumper when i get to portland this summer and get rid of all your zip ties

 

Poor truck is in need

 

Ain't complaining.

On a serious note, a huge thanks for use of the tent. Sleeping bag and me stayed dry all night, both nights.


Still, you can't beat an electric blanket and a real bed. Goodnight, you princes of sand.

 

We live in wilsonville so not to far from Portland

 

Steve took a shitload of pictures (391) so it will take a while to sort through and pick the keepers. Probabaly set him up with his own TW account, and get 'em up on Flickr.