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The Farallons
9 December 2020
From the hill we live on we can see the Farallon Islands 20 miles off the coast on a clear day. But getting a clear picture of them is not easy.
The Farallons. Nikon D200 with 43-86mm Nikkor at f8, 1/750 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw 13.1.
For one thing, there are always overhead wires in the way. Or utility poles. Or some tree. Of the roofs of a few buildings. There's always something that spoils the picture.
But the other evening around 4:30 we were walking under the overhead wires and in front of a utility pole and just beside a tree when we looked out over the ocean and saw the bell tower of St. Cecilia's and, to the right, the Farallons.
The sky had turned golden by then and the sun glinted off the bell tower and the buildings next to us. We thought for a moment we had been transported to the Ligurian coast, perhaps back to Tellaro looking out at Tina instead of the Farallons.
We thought for a moment we had been transported to the Ligurian coast...
So we took a photo.
We didn't get around to processing the Raw file for a whole day, though, because we spent that night burning DVD backup images to 12 discs. We'd been putting that task off since February.
And when we finally got to it, our internal DVD burner didn't like the discs we were using. Instead of burning at 8x, we could only get through a burn at 2x. So it not only took us a long time to get to the task, but it took us a long time to get through it, too.
When we finally did get to looking at the image and working it over, it was the next morning. But we were swamped with updates. So it wasn't until the afternoon, after the dust had settled that we were able to revisit the Farallons.
We'd reported earlier in the day that Adobe had released v22.1 of Photoshop. We'd been disappointed in the initial release, which crashed on launch or shortly after on both of our machines. So we wondered if v22.1's bug fixes had addressed whatever problem we'd bumped into.
We were able to massaged the Raw file in Adobe Camera Raw 13.1 (also just updated), even using the Crop tool to automatically straighten the horizon by double clicking on the Level tool. And we also cropped the image, but in the program itself.
We did our usual resizing and sharpening before exporting three images and Photoshop didn't hiccup.
That's not enough of a test to draw any conclusions. But we thought we should report the improvement.* It felt like being able to see the Farallons on a clear day.