Hiking Mount Montara (near San Francisco)

Me ^ | 9/28/17 | POF

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Took an 8 mile roundtrip hike up Mount Montara a couple days ago, 16 miles south of San Francisco. This is a fairly strenuous hike going from sea level up to 1,894 feet elevation in four miles. Mount Montara is straight west from SFO and you see it when you take off north from the airport.

I was fortunate to hit a beautiful early fall day with clear blue skies (that'll be changing real soon now). Hiking on a weekday, I passed no more than 20 people over several hours. Mount Montara is frequently socked in with really stiff winds, fog and rain, so this was a perfect day.

The cool thing about this hike is that, at the top of North Peak, you have unobstructed views of San Francisco Bay to the south, east, and north; views of the wild San Francisco watershed on the peninsula; views of San Francisco and Oakland; views of the Golden Gate Bridge; views of Marin County and Point Reyes; and views along the coast from SF to Daly City, Montara, Half Moon Bay and further south. It is probably one of the most incredible viewpoints on the west coast.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Cool! You’re up there right after it opened to the public.

We have a “Spare the Air” day today, so air quality isn’t great.

Umunhum is on my to-do list, for sure. Maybe after the rains start and clear the air. I was lucky a week or two ago to be hiking at Jospeh Grant Park on Mount Hamilton when the storm blew through. The air was SO clear and the clouds were spectacular.

[RegulatorCountry]

Your image manipulation is largely very appealing with the exception of shadow density, in which case distant shadows are weak and a bit unreal looking. I tend not to rely so much upon filters but upon masking layers. One of my favorite tricks is to create a black and white halftone layered directly over the top of the original color image (select all, copy, paste into new document (do not flatten image). Photoshop will size new document to the size of the copied graphics. Then, select grayscale to make black and white. You can play around with detail, contrast, sharpening and filters in this document if you want. Then, in the layers menu, copy the black and white layer to the original file. Once it’s placed, then play with “darken,” “multiply” or any number of other functions. You can even fully or partially erase the overlaying halftone (actually RGB or CMYK when you copy it into a color document but it still looks black and white). Doing this can create a silvery effect, make it look a bit like a colorized sepia photo if you change the color balance in the “halftone” layer, or it can be used to neutralize unwanted color shifts or casts.

Beautiful locations, too, by the way, especially this time of year. I used to love to go up to Muir Woods in late summer/early fall because of the woodsy, spicey scents in the air. Smells awesome, I know the eucalyptus are viewed as something of a pest and invasive but I hope they don’t get rid of them all. I also liked going over to Stinson Beach and beyond, the view of the Pacific driving atop those cliffs is amazing.

[21twelve]

Seeing as FR is a source of knowledge for many - I liked seeing the tech details. Not that I have any use for them, or know what the heck they are - but somebody might! As well as the various software that you used.

Me - I still have the Kodachrome film in the fridge that goes to my old man’s Canon that may or may-not work after 30 years.

[MeganC]

Wow!!!!

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain that to me! I really, truly, and sincerely appreciate that!

Hugs,

- Megan

[Menehune56]

Your Photoshopping skills perfectly complement your photography. Very dreamlike images.

[gspurlock]

Thanks for the information on the enhanced colors in your photographs and for the example of the un-enhanced photo.

I was in SF a few weeks ago and spent quite a bit of time in art galleries as well as a little time traipsing around a mountain. I started painting recently and noted a key difference between my landscapes done from photos on the internet and those that sold in the 4-figure range in galleries was that the colors were much more subdued. In fact, they looked more like the original photograph.

To get high quality oil paintings from enhanced photos requires toning down the colors. Otherwise, they look very amateurish. However, I also find the enhanced photos prettier than the natural colors.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks for the great tips. Being cheap, I use “Photoshop Light” - Photoshop Elements 14, but it has most of the capabilities of PS.

I also use Pixelmator. Newest tools in the stable are Luminar and Aurora HDR. These “Macphun” guys are really developing some great tools and, what you pay once, you would pay in six or seven months of rental payments to Adobe.

Interesting you picked up on the distant shadows. Each image has several masking layers to address various problems including distant trees and shadows. Sounds like I went too far.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

LOL...a few months ago, I rounded up all the partially exposed rolls of film still in cameras, lying around the house, in the fridge and elsewhere. Sent it all off to some processing shop in LA. Most of it was ruined from age (probably sitting around 10 years) and heat, but I did get some usable images.

Just yesterday I took three cameras to Goodwill - an old Olympus film camera with a great zoom lens and two Nikon CoolPix cameras. The auto-focus was so bad on those Nikons that the shutter wouldn’t fire until several seconds after I clicked the button, especially in low light. I finally got fed up and bought this great Olympus mirrorless camera.

Today, I pulled out all of my old Canon glass FD lenses and am going to put them on eBay. It hurts thinking how little they are worth now, especially because the glass optics are SO good. But, it’s time to downsize and I’m never going to use them again. Sob!!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks, Megan! Glad you enjoyed that. The science behind light and photography is interesting...and gets unbelievably technical. Fortunately, you don’t have to know much of the science to be a great photographer.

[RegulatorCountry]

I’ve used Photoshop professionally for going on thirty years. Color-critical apparel and furniture shots, color correction and pixel editing primarily although I’ve “created” apparel and other items from scratch before, sort of visual prototyping.

[Fiji Hill]

Although I have a big Nikon D300 DSLR, I find that most of the pictures I take are with my Canon G12, a high-end point-and-shoot camera. Although it’s about five years old, it still takes excellent pictures. It easily fits in a pocket and its articulated “flip-out” screen is good for situations in which you don’t want to call attention to yourself when taking pictures, such as street photography. This wonderful feature is absent on most follow-on models.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Hello all. Another great hike this week, this time to the top of Montara Mountain (to North Peak). First time up there...what a spectacular place. Pretty grueling, too. Eight miles round trip and the top is over 1,800 feet (and starting at sea level).

Go to the first post in this thread for hike info and three pics.

[NorthMountain]

Please consider continuing to post the technical details. Those who don’t understand or appreciate them don’t have to read them; those who do understand them or appreciate them will appreciate having them.

[dangerdoc]

bump

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Nice!

My college engineering job in summers was at Continental Can where we made flexible packaging. Huge high-speed litho presses making colorful paper bags — color was extremely critical there, too. Customers didn’t want to see their food images in the wrong colors. I sat close to the guys who did all the color separations, color corrections, and made the plates for the presses. It was really fascinating stuff pre-digital. That led me to take a technical elective in my Mechanical Engineering program on light and color, but I then went on to a career in power. I traveled for a couple years outside the US, so bought a good Canon EF and a series of FD lenses in 1978 in Tokyo which I used extensively. Now that I’m retired, I’m spending more time outdoors and enjoying my Oly mirrorless camera.

[nickcarraway]

Did you park near Hwy 1/McNee Ranch State Park? What was your turnaround point for eight miles?

I've been wanting to do this one for a couple years, and every time I plan something comes up. I wanted to make it ten miles, so I was thinking I could hike into San Pedro Valley Park.

[nickcarraway]

Have you ever done Wilder Ranch or Nisene Marks?

[RegulatorCountry]

That likely was flexographic rather than lithographic printing on a flexible substrate. There’s a definite art to getting any sort of quality printed four color image out of flexo. Back then, it was even more of a challenge, the plates were basically rubber, combined with a substrate that distorts and stretches, the tolerances were huge. The big fat halftone dots required looked more or less like a Roy Lichtenstein print. In the hands of a talented art director, that could be made to be appealing. I think a lot of 50’s and 60’s pop art was taking a flexo lemon and making lemonade, turning it into “art” rather than a technical limitation. Cold web newspaper presses had many of the same challenges and limitations, too.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

LOL. I wanted to take "sneak" pictures around the world and bought one of these gadgets in 1978. It's sitting on my counter next to me waiting to go up on eBay. I didn't use it much because it was so darned hard getting used to.

I learned a good lesson about taking unobtrusive photos. Shortly after I arrived at the guest house in Shuifu, China, in 1977, I took a picture of a team of men hauling a boat up the Yangtze River (pulling on ropes). They got REAL mad and started yelling at me. I took off for the guest house and, when I got to my room, I quickly changed the exposed film in the camera out for a new, unexposed roll. In a couple minutes, the Guest House boss was pounding on my room door and was saying the men were really angry because I took a picture of them in their work clothes! They demanded the film, so I opened the camera and gave them the brand new, unexposed roll I had just loaded. I still have the original 35 mm slides (unfortunately, not digitized)!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks for the thought. It wasn’t a lot of detail, so I didn’t think it was very obtrusive.