Hiking date: September 12, 2019
We’ve had a very wet beginning of September here in Portland. Last Thursday when it was just overcast we wanted to go out for a walk somewhere other than our neighborhood where I walk at least 4 days a week and Carla walks all 7. But then we didn’t want to go too far in case the rain moved in while we drove. Tualatin Hills Nature Reserve on Millikan Way in Beaverton is the perfect spot for needs.
Of course I took my camera! Our first stop was the meadow/marsh at the end of the first trail. The leaves are just starting to turn. 
I tried a few close ups of some leaves. By this time in my life I should know what Poison Oak looks like. There are signs along the trail to look out for it and I thought this might be a sample until I noticed the thorns when processing the image. And I don’t think the leaves are serrated quite like this. Probably wild blackberry; but if I’m wrong, please let me know in the comments.
Next I found a leaf that is getting a head start on fall with it’s change to red.
In advertising, nature shows, and books leaves are usually pristine. But this is how they look in real life along a trail. They wilt around the edges and little bugs – I’m guessing – make a meal of parts.
The views from the trails are beautiful, but the area is heavily wooded and shady making it hard to get dramatic pictures. But the sun poked through a couple of times and I worked on getting some of the contrast I saw. I try to pay close attention to my f/stop, aperture, and ISO in my photos, but I don’t usually do much with metering, leaving it as “Multi” which take a look at the middle of the subject. I wasn’t happy with the results of those shots the contrast was lost. Luckily I assigned a function button to allow me to change where to meter the light. My best results were when I chose “Center” or “Spot” where it would meter from the I was focused on. I really enjoy when I experiment with camera settings to get closer to the picture I want.
There is also a “Highlight” metering option that I just saw as I was refering to my camera to write this post. I need to play with that.
We took another trail which was darker but the sun was just peaking through some of the upper branches. I played with my f/stop to see if I could grab an image of the sun rays. This was shot at f/18.
I think the number of “rays” is determined by the number of leaves on the aperture apparatus.
After our hike we stopped by a nice little coffee shop Carla knows about – coffee shops are not in short supply in Portland so we have plenty of options. I had to have a cinnamon roll if for no other reason to troll my buddy Jay who loves cinnamon rolls with a passion. We usually text each other a picture of our pastry with “Hah! I’m eating a cinnamon roll and you aren’t”
A note about the pictutres and this post. All the nature pictures were taken with my Sony A7R3 and Sony 24-105 lens. This is my go-to combination for most of my pictures. The cinnamon roll was taken with my iPhone.
I did 95% of the post-processing on my iPad. It’s a long, laborious process. The iPad “sandboxes” apps so if one app crashes it won’t corrupt the other apps. Good reasoning but it sure makes it harder to share things from one app to another.
- Import the pictures from the SD card into Appe Photos.
- Create an album in LightRoom Mobile
- Import pictures from Photos to LightRoom
- Delete the pictures from Photos – I don’t want duplicates
- Edit the photos in LightRoom Mobile – which is not as robust as LightRoom Classic CC on the Mac.
- Export the photos back out of LightRoom to Photos so I can easily access them from my blogging app. It turns out I might be able to export to my Google Drive in step 5 and load into the blogging app from there – but using Photos is a bit easier during the writing.
- Write the blog post, importing pictures along the way
- Delete the photos – AGAIN – from Photos.
I used the WordPress iPad app to write this post. On LightRoom Classic CC I have an export preset made up especially for blog pictures so they fit well in the theme I use. I can’t figure out how to do that in LightRoom Mobile. As a result, I’m not sure how the pictures will look when they are published. Finally, I can’t figure out how to load a banner image as I usually do on my posts. Scratch that – I found a way!
But in the long run it’s a better solution than hauling my heavy MacBook Pro around on long trips. And a brand new iPad OS is on the way at the end of this month that may solve some of the interface problems. We shall see.
