Jim shared some springtime photos from his Easter weekend Joshua Tree National Park trip. Most of the Joshua Trees and plants were in some stage of bloom. He combined the Spring/Flowers with Before/After, sharing SOOC photos followed by cropped and processed images.
His Safari Park vulture and eagle shots were for Before/After. The eagle shot demonstrated the recent reflections removal AI tool in Lightroom/Photoshop, greatly improving the photo taken through netting with a single click. The eagle image was one of six images accepted into the SD Fair Photo Competition (6 of 9 entries).
The last two images were three minute long exposures of Clouds over Mission San Luis Rey.

Note: Jim was approched by security and told tripods are not allowed on Mission San Luis Rey grounds. So be sure to check the venue’s photography policy before assuming you can shoot without restriction. It is published on their website that tripods are not allowed on the grounds, not just the church. Learned something new – fortunately, he said I could continue “this time” since it was late in the day. Doing a three minute exposure absolutely requires a tripod.

Jim returned from a recent 5-day trip to Death Valley. He was lucky to visit during a fair weather window between rain storms. Much of Death Valley was unusually green and Badwater Basin was temporarily transformed into pluvial Lake Manly. Jim had one clear night to try out the Seestar S50 smart telescope he got for Christmas. This single image is actually a stacked mosaic of 180 20sec exposures. The Seestar iPhone app (also available on Android) makes often complicated astrophotography very easy. The app will stack the images, and denoise them automatically, creating a jpg. But the telescope can also save every (20sec) exposure for post-processing. Jim imported the 180 images into Siril, a free astrophotography image stacker & editor. Although the jpg produced automatically is good, processing the images in Siril can greatly improve the results. This photo is a 1 hour stacked image of the Orion Nebula (M42), a popular beginner’s target since it’s easy to find and visible on-screen after just a couple exposures. The Seestar was configured to track the nebula so stars are not elongated.
After returning to San Diego, he photographed the King Tide Jan 4th at La Jolla’s Children’s Cove. A mainly overcast morning had some sun break through, creating a favorable backlight.

Jim suggested the “nifty-fifty” theme as a challenge (mainly for himself) to not rely on a zoom lens or cropping. When photographing in college (a LONG time ago), he used a dslr with 50mm lens for many of his college photography projects. This theme was a chance to revisit using the limited gear you have instead of relying on a variety of gear. Although it was a struggle, using a prime lens has many benefits such as a faster aperture, shallower depth of field. He’ll continue to use a nifty-fifty or any prime and zoom with his feet when possible. But cropping in the final edit will be allowed cause framing perfectly in camera is often impossible for moving subjects.
Jim participated in both the Nov 1st Old Town Dios de los Muertos meetup and the Nov 5th UCSD Fallen Star moonrise. For the Old Town Dios de los Muertos images, he used a Fujifilm X100VI in 50mm mode to capture the portraits. This camera has a small built-in flash he used as fill flash to reduce shadows especially on backlit shots. This camera has a leaf-shutter so it can flash-sync at any shutter speed, even 1/4000. It has a 35mm equivalent fixed focal length lens, but can “zoom” (crop in-camera) to 50mm or 70mm.
For the moonrise, he used his Nikon Z8 with 100-400mm Nikon zoom. The two moonrise images he shared were exposure blend of two shots taken one right after the other (1sec f8 & 1/125 f8). The images were layered in Photoshop and blended.
Lastly, Jim reprocessed some sunset images from Grand Canyon North Rim he photographed in 2022 & Hawaii 2023. He hoped his improved Lightroom post-processing skills might make better final results.