Crater Lake National Park (Crater Lake, Oregon)

This past July, my brother and I were able to take a roadtrip across the US.  One of our stops was Crater Lake National Park.  If you ever find yourself in Oregon, I would definitely recommend taking a trip to Crater Lake National Park.  If I recall correctly, it’s about a 5 hr drive from Portland, OR, or just over 3 hrs from Eugene, OR.  You can drive almost all the way around the lake, and there are some great little hikes in the area.

My brother and I hiked down to the water, which is where I snagged this shot.  The water stays close to freezing year round, but that doesn’t stop tourists from jumping into the water from a rocky outcropping. If we would have known, we’d have worn our swim trunks and taken a dunk as well.

If you’d like to learn more about Crater Lake, I’d recommend you check out the wikipedia entry for Crater Lake, OR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_Lake

On Content-Aware Fill:

For most photos, I tend to only use Adobe Lightroom 3 for my post-processing needs.  However, sometimes some photos have distracting elements that just can’t be fixed in camera or in Lightroom.  For times like this, I use Adobe Photoshop CS5.  CS5 has a new feature called “Content-Aware Fill” which allows you to easily select distracting elements, and the program automagically fills in that area helping it blend it into the background.  For the first photo, I used content-aware fill to remove a distracting rock from the foreground (on the lower right side), and some lens flare that I found distracting.

Here’s the original photo:

And here’s the final image, which can also be seen at the top of the post:

So, it’s not a huge difference, but I think it’s something that definitely improves the final image.

Gear:

Here is the basic gear I used to take this photo (Linked to Amazon):

Adobe Photoshop CS5

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

SanDisk Extreme Compact Flash

Nikon D700

Nikon 20mm f/2.8D

Nikon EN-EL3e battery for D700