Victor Solanoy

A few weeks ago I decided to take a random family trip to Yosemite. It’s about 3.5 hours away from where we live. Surprisingly, most people thought Yosemite was a lot farther. While not an insignificant amount of time, it’s well worth the time.

I saw a photo at the store the other day, a tree silhouetted against the sky. I live just over the hill from Joseph D. Grant Ranch, close to San Jose where similar trees stand perched on top of small hills. I’ve tried taking photos of them in the past with little success. Today, we went for a short hike with the family and had my Canon PowerShot G9. The photo above was one of the more successful attempts. I experimented with a sepia treatment, but the contrast between the tree and the blue sky was so much more striking and less cliche than the silhouette.

Taken a few years ago on our way to Virginia City, Nevada. The city below is Sparks, Nevada.

People have been dressing for Halloween for a long time now. Here are some photos of folks in the Halloween best from a long time ago. There are some great ones. http://bit.ly/2nZzUF

I was trying to give my photos that “Leica” look and was able to find a technique that allows me to do this. You can find this technique in a pretty old article on leica-users.org.

This reminded me of a bunch of Photoshop actions I had discovered a few years back that allows you to mimic different types of film, including Fuji Velvia and Kodak’s now discontinued Kodachrome. For a set of free actions, they’re not too bad. One word of warning, if you’ve got a camera that produces fairly noisy images, the noise may become more pronounced by the actions. Go to Pierre Bize’s Photoshop Actions site to find them.