We were out at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz yesterday with my big brother, Embry.

I shot some nice photos, using my pocket Canon S90 in RAW mode, and editing the RAW images in Adobe Lightroom. The camera’s RAW images have 14 bits per pixel instead of the default 8 that JPGs have, that is, so RAW images have, I guess, sixty-four times as many possible shades per pixel, which helps, especially in recovering stuff from underexposed or blown-out areas.

This is an interesting shot of scattering gulls, although weakened by being a detail of a larger shot. This is where having your four-pound SLR along could kick it up a notch. But I don’t geek it that hard most days. A flock of maybe a thousand gulls were sitting on the beach, all their little stick legs parallel lines above the sand. Caw, skirl, skree.

I’m still getting used to using Lightroom, it’s a different paradigm than I’m accustomed to with my old Photoshop workflow. In Lightroom now, I shoot in RAW mode, save this as a “digital negative,” or “DNG,” then tweak this image as much as I like in Lightroom, which has a very nice “Developer” module. The original bytes are unchanged, but you see previews of the tweaked image in Lightroom and you can export 16-bit TIFF or 8-bit JPG files as if you were making “prints” from the digital negative.

Here’s your Thanksgiving turkey with barnacle garnish.

Certain of the more heavy-duty Photoshop tweak tools aren’t available in Lightroom, so once in a while I might export a TIFF and do a further tweak in Photoshop. But this isn’t happening as often as I thought it would. I can pretty much live in Lightroom now.

I love Four Mile Beach, it’s a favorite spot, usually fairly uncrowded. On big wave days you’ll see a lot of surfers—the surfers are generally friendly or indifferent to mere beach walkers.

Embry spotted this cute little crab. For crustacean-ovores: the big California Dungeness crabs are in the supermarkets now, we got a bunch of them for a family dinner the other night. Really good.

My son’s chickens are a little uneasy these days, but they’re safe. It’s great so see the granddaughters collecting their eggs.

My father, the first of the four Embry Cobb Ruckers, loved William Saroyan’s book, The Human Comedy, and often quoted from a passage where a four-year-old boy finds a fresh-laid egg. “He looked at it a moment, picked it up, brought it to his mother and very carefully handed it to her, by which he meant what no man can guess and no child can remember to tell.”

The years flow by; the holidays come at us like tracer bullets. We advance towards the dark. And sometimes it’s still sunny.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010 at 11:20 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.