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6 July 2018
Last weekend we returned to the Bay Trail, which we have previously praised for being flat and well maintained. This time we walked between the Brisbane Marina and the Oyster Point Marina at Oyster Cove.
The Cove is a remnant of the ship building industry during both world wars and a few pilings still remain. It was also an oyster bed until it was fished out and today a business park hugs the shore. There are designated public access parking spots behind the buildings where you can leave your car.
As the map below shows, this is a bit inland from the bay itself. There aren't any expansive views across the bay to Oakland or south to San Jose. Our walk is highlighted in yellow.
But there is quite a bit of interesting plant life. We wish we knew the names of the flora that posed for portraits for us but we can't pretend we do.
We had a problem with the light (which we discuss below) and a problem with the wind, which was gusting rather briskly. So we had to use pretty high shutter speeds to freeze things, although we were able to remain at ISO 200 for these images.
LIGHTROOM AGAIN
We endured more grief with Lightroom Classic CC. Version 7.4 to be precise.
We complained last week that our display was flashing all sorts of peculiar color renderings of our images with no more encouragement than simply running the mouse over the image in the Develop module.
And it happened again when we launched Lightroom this week.
A trip to the Preferences Performance options revealed the GPU had been turned off at launch. Turning it on let us get back to work with credible color rendering.
Somewhere along the line quite recently (June, it seems), Adobe decided to no longer support the eight-year-old NVidia GeForce GT 330M and then went to the trouble of disabling our GPU processing on startup.
The 330M doesn't have the 1-GB of VRAM (just 512-MB) and support for OpenGL 3.3 (2.1 was it) that Lightroom 7.4 requires. Although the 330M still passes Adobe's OpenGL test. Is Lightroom just testing for OpenGL, regardless of version? (And yes, our main box is an eight-year-old 17-inch MacBook Pro.)
Oddly enough, the next day we had to turn GPU processing off to work with color reliably in the Develop module. Without, that is, the sudden shifts and flickering. We could live with or without GPU processing -- if only the display would stop flickering and shifting.
COLOR SHIFT
And, yes, we had some work to do with the color on these DNGs. They were shot with a Nikon D200 and an 18-200mm Nikkor with just a Hoya UV(0) filter on it. No circular polarizer, which tends to warm things up a little.
But the images were quite warm. Sickly so.
That's because the wild fires to the north were raining ash down on the Bay area and the sky had a peculiar yellow tint. So all of our images looked aged.
We made just a very slight change toward blue to the color Temperature in Lightroom's Develop module to get rid of the yellow cast. The cast may have been accurate, but our minds adjust what our eyes see and in the field we really didn't notice the yellow cast.
So the images in the slide show appear more like what we saw than the captures.
BAY TRAIL
The Bay Trail is one of the Bay area's secrets, a real pleasure whether you're walking or biking. We'll be back to explore more of it, no doubt.
Not before the air clears, though. And hoping to keep the adventure on the trail and not with our GPU.