My favorite game is “I wonder where this road goes?”. Sometimes it just dead ends in some unremarkable spot. And then there are times when you hit the jackpot. Yesterday I hit the jackpot.
It all started with a pretty gnarly thunderstorm moving into the valley from the Sierra. And as is evident in much of my work I really love stormy weather. As I have been working on my petroglyph collection lately I thought it might be good time to go out to the Red Rock petroglyph site. I got some good images of the storm and the main panel. I then headed south to the Chidago site where I met two families out on an adventure drive through the Volcanic Tablelands. At the Chidago site there is a road (dirt and rough) that headed east into what looked like a canyon. So I started my game. It quickly became a narrow and steep canyon. The road wasn’t too bad, though it was a little narrow in places. It bottomed out in a dry wash and the road disappeared. I thought “Oh, oh. This isn’t good.” It looked as though there had been some type of vehicle traffic quite some time ago. And as I didn’t really fancy driving back up the canyon I put the car in 4wd and decided to give it a try. I followed the wash for some distance and it finally returned to a dirt road. After a short distance and to my surprise I came upon a new (to me) petroglyph site. I was elated.
I have now learned that this is the Chalfant Petroglyph site. It spreads out along a bluff from the parking area to the south and the north. I’m guestimating it is about 3/4 of a mile total. The south side has been badly vandalized. I was going to insert a virulent rant at this point but have decided to follow my own guidelines……no politics or religion or bashing. Still I found some unique and beautiful glyphs in this section.
The posted image is of the north section. It is really beautiful. There are some of the largest petroglyphs that I have seen. Two of the largest can be seen in the image. They are close to three plus feet in diameter. One can only wonder at what these mean.
All in all, another great adventure in wonderland.
Busy day today. FYI you need to book a tour through the Matarango Museum in Ridgecrest, Ca. to gain access to Little Petroglyph Canyon as it is situated on the Navy’s China Lake Weapons Station.
If you are interested in ancient Native American art you would be hard pressed to find a place that is richer or has higher quality petroglyphs than Little Petroglyph Canyon. It is the Louvre of desert art.
I have been working on a pet project now for awhile. Hence the lack of posts. I have been fascinated by archeology and history from childhood. The first time I saw a petroglyph I was hooked. I knew that I wanted to do something that incorporated these magic images into my work.
I will be posting more images soon and will be offering a folio before the end of the year. The first series will be from the Little Petroglyph Canyon, Little Lakes and Fish Slough sites. The series will consist of color, grayscale and tinted images.
If things go well I hope to get back over to Utah to explore the wealth of sites there soon. There is no real consensus as to the meanings of the petroglyphs and I will not try to interpret or inflict an opinion. I’m only approaching these images as a individual that is totally awed by their simplicity and beauty.
At times nature can be very visually complex, almost confusing, and at other times very focused and singular.
This is part one of three short essays on matters that I have come to understand as very important in my work as an artist. You are probably questioning “What has prudence to do with photography?”. I hope that I can clarify this. The following is the definition of prudence from the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
pru·dence
Pronunciation: \ˈprü-dən(t)s\Function: nounEtymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin prudentia, alteration of providentia — more at providence Date: 14th century
- the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason
- sagacity or shrewdness in the management of affairs
- skill and good judgment in the use of resources
- caution or circumspection as to danger or risk
I think one of the real drawbacks to digital is the illusion of the actual cost of each image. While film itself was a major cost in photography, the processing, whether by lab or in your own darkroom was substantially more. The time that color film users had to wait for results was also a factor. The mind set was one of judicial use of your resources. You just didn’t want to invest in bad images so you were likely to be more selective in your work.
When I made the move to digital I loved the freedom from being shackled to a lab or a darkroom. Well, actually Photoshop has become my new darkroom, it just doesn’t smell quite so bad. I no longer had to financially account for the images that I was accumulating. Bits and bytes are free and “The more you shoot, the better you get”. More is better. Right? So off I went merrily filling up CF cards and accumulating thousands of images.
It didn’t take long until I realized that I had a growing crisis on my hands. I was filling up my hard drives and I really didn’t have any real control over what I had on hand. If I wanted to find an image I sometimes spent hours looking for it. This was worse than waiting for film to be returned from the lab. This issue was compounded by the fact that I was running on a pretty old computer. It just wasn’t up to the task of working on files that were ballooning to the hundreds of megabytes.
So I bit the bullet and invested in a fairly high end work station with ample hard drives and backup storage. End of crisis? Not really. I still had this problem of having absolutely no idea of what I had and where it was. All I really knew was that I had a lot of it. What to do? I had to find out what others in this field were doing to address this problem. I ended up with Peter Krough’s, The DAM Book, and I purchased a good asset management program and started to address this issue. I was also becoming painfully aware that what I had just invested in this new system would have bought alot of TMax 100 and DK-50.
I was out one evening trying to get a good sunset shot and was sharing this particular spot with a fellow photographer who happened to be using a 4 x 5. As we waited for the light we talked of different areas that we had both been to and had photographed. He related that on his last three day pack trip into the Sierra he had taken only six film holders with him. I thought to myself that that was one of the disadvantages to large format and film. As the light began to change the conversation slowed as we busied ourselves with the task at hand. I was busily clicking away bracketing my images to make sure I got the sunset just right. When I would pause to check the LCD I would notice that my fellow photographer was patiently checking the light with his spot meter. He finally inserted a film holder and took his one shot. We packed our gear and headed out as darkness set in.
As I drove home I kept thinking about what had transpired that evening. It was not only a very beautiful sunset, nor the congenial company of another photographer. It was the epiphany that I had just experienced. More, certainly was not better. In fact it was a curse. I had been substituting quantity for quality. Three days in some of the most beautiful scenery on earth with only six film holders. This was Zen like.
I came to the realization that I had accumulated a huge amount of totally unusable images. My rationalization for most of these was that I could fix them in Photoshop. If I sat at my work station everyday for ten hours a day and did nothing but fix these sub par images I would never get caught up. So I began a campaign of ruthless review and grading of my work. This required a very substantial investment of time but resulted in a collection of a manageble size and images of proper quality.
I am pleased to see that my work is improving. It hasn’t gotten better because of the volumn, because this has been steadily decreasing, but, because I am becoming more selective again. I now shoot about a tenth of what I used to and still feel that this can be refined. I find more joy in my work now. I spend less time sorting and cataloging images. I haven’t had to upgrade my hard drives for quite sometime. As to my time in the digital darkroom……..I think that I am one of the few that really loves working in Photoshop. I get as much joy from this as I do from the actual photography. And now I don’t waste time trying to fix images, I spend that time in perfecting my images.
“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” Ansel Adams. This has become my creed.
A lot of you are old enough to remember that ad tag line. It was whether or not a woman used some product to color her hair. Well this is just a little something about HDR. It seems that anything new in photography always creates a whole bunch of drama. And HDR has like the rest of the country divided itself into to two camps……love it or hate it.
Being a registered independent, I have a foot in both camps. I have seen some over the top HDR that I really think works for an image and then there are images that you really can’t tell if the process has been applied. Maybe at a later date I’ll open up a discussion as to what is “photography” and what is “digital art”. I’ll need to be wearing asbestos underwear for that one….:0)
Back to todays image. What’s your guess…..is it? Or isn’t it? It is. And here is the why and the how.
This is a composite of two images. Both were taken with a split ND filter. I exposed one image for the clouds and sky and the second for the foreground and mountains, actually that is the Tungsten Hills in the foreground. Well, you are thinking that that is no real revelation. It isn’t except for the fact that I had to increase the ISO setting to 1600 on the foreground shot because the wind was blowing at a constant 20-25 mph with gusts to over 40 mph and I wanted a fast enough shutter speed to freeze anything in the foreground. I opened the images in Camera Raw, processed them and exported as Smart Objects into Photoshop. In PS I dragged the foreground document into and above the background document. Then I used the “Blend If” sliders in the Layers Style panel to blend the two layers. I won’t go into detail about the “Blend If” functions in Photoshop because all you have to do is search Youtube and you will find quite a few video tutorials on this process.
I didn’t have to bracket four or six shots. I didn’t have to use an expensive plugin. I just tweaked the rules a little bit, mainly because I can get away with the higher ISO with my Nikon D700, and used a simple process in Photoshop to get a nice image. There are so many ways with the tools that we have on hand to do what we want that I now think twice before plunking down my dollars for an expensive piece of software. Yes, it is easier to just buy something to do what you want, but you miss the experience of really learning the tools that you already have and the satisfaction of doing something yourself.
So I think my next series of articles is going to be about what I call the “Three P’s”. Prudence, Patience and Perseverance.
The first is Van Lieu Photography. Their specialty is the Nantucket area and they offer some really stunning images.
The second is Tony Kuyper Photography. His stomping ground is the Colorado Plateau. Not only does his site showcase his great images but he offers really great tutorials and Photoshop actions. One of which I use in a great majority of my images is “Luminosity Masks”. I find this one to be invaluable. He has also started a blog that is now on my list of blogs that I regularly follow.
Last but not least. The best way to describe this blog is to use David’s own description” A Blog For the People and By Them: For Wilderness Lovers, Photographers, Collectors, Environmentalists, Monkeywrenchers and Peaceful Revolutionaries.” David Leland Hyde is the son of the renowned photographer Phillip Hyde. Landscape Photography Blogger is a worthwhile read.
So, check them out. Meanwhile I’m busy redesigning my website. That means boning up on html, css and blah, blah, blah.
Lately I have been fortunate to find some noteworthy Blogs. So I thought I would start adding links to them. The first is photographer Guy Tal’s. I highly recommend this blog. I really like his writing style and if you read back through his posts you will find that he has the ability to engage his readers in an intelligent and civil way. Something that is sorely missing in todays era of anonymous bashing and baiting. His articles are well written and informative. I hope some day to get this blog to that level. So please check out his blog, and while you are there you will also find that he is one of the better landscape photographers of today. Enjoy.
Winter is not leaving us willingly. I drove up to Mono Lake on Sunday as I was expecting the leading edge of an incoming weather front to generate some interesting clouds. On the drive up I hit some blowing snow and almost totally gray skies around the Mammoth area. I almost turned back at this point. As I approached the Lee Vining area the cloud formations I was hoping for were taking shape. I’m glad I decided to continue. Tolkeinesque would be an appropriate word to describe Mono Lake at times.
But there a lot of items that can serve more than one function. An example was from my trip to the Eureka Sand Dunes the day before yesterday. I had climbed about a third of the way up the dunes and the wind picked up and the sand was blowing. I had my 24 mm PC lens on and needed to change to my 28-70 mm. Not something that you want to do in a mini sand storm. I remembered that I carry a couple of 10 gal. plastic trash bags in my camera pack for emergencies……like rain. More that once I have been caught in the mountains and drenched by a sudden thunderstorm. When it starts to rain I just pull out a bag and slip it over my camera pack…….I get soaked, but the gear stays dry. I know, where is your pancho? I now carry one of those also. Back to the sandstorm. This time I used one of the plastic bags for a changing bag. It worked like a charm. Changed my lenses and went on taking pictures.
The nice thing about these bags is that they fold flat, weigh almost nothing and are easy to stash in your camera kit. I also carry a couple of sandwich bags. These are great as replacement filter cases or lens covers. I like to collect pebbles and small rocks when I’m out hiking. And the smaller bags are great for putting these in.
So if you have any neat alternative uses for items…..why not share?
And then I went outside and saw that there were cumulus clouds building to the east. It looked like they might be building over the Eureka Valley. So, I did what any good photographer does…….it now became Summer House Cleaning……I loaded the car and off I went. The drive from Bishop to the Eureka Valley is a very enjoyable experience. Twisty road through the White/Inyo Mountains, then through a very large area covered with Joshua trees. To me the desert is a fascinating place. I stopped at the base of the mountains just passed where the pavement ends and decided to walk south a little ways to see if there was a good perspective for a panorama of the southern Eureka Valley. As I walked I was amazed at the number and variety of wildflowers in bloom. I realized that I couldn’t step anywhere without stepping on some delicate flower. So I back tracked to the car deciding that it was much better to enjoy the view from the road.
When I arrived at the dunes there were a few clouds. At first I was disappointed because I had driven all this way and the clouds that I had hoped for had formed further to the west. There were just a few clouds passing through on the brisk wind that seems to be ever present in this valley. As I climbed the dunes these few clouds began passing between the sun and the dunes and proceeded to put on a beautiful light show.
Yesterday we got hit with some pretty big winds. But it looks like Mono Lake to the north and the Ownes dry lake area to the south really got hammered. Check out these videos. After seeing these I was curious to see if fellow photographer Cory Freeman had any video on his site, Sierra Impressions Photography (see links). He has a camera set up to record the local weather. He has posted quite a few time lapse movies that are really worth watching. It is amazing to see the changes that take place throughout the day.
Well, the day started off pretty badly. I tried to do a simple update of the blog……and totally nuked it. What a disaster. After many hours of frustration and no little swearing I have it back up on line. On the upside I have made a few tweaks that will help and found some new stuff that I will be adding soon. So the day wasn’t a total loss.
I believe that I have found the perfect example of “A picture is worth a thousand words”.
I am fascinated by the way coastal fog tends to mute colors.
I have been working on a process involving multiple layers of color and grayscale with different blending modes for some time now. With some images it really works well, and others….eh! Basically it is just getting your color image where you really like it and then converting it to a grayscale with whatever method works for you,(I get the best results using a B&W adjustment layer). Then duplicate the color layer, move it to the top of the stack(above the grayscale layer), and set the blend mode to color. It really opens up a lot of possiblities.
Here’s one I think works.
It’s hard to stop when you really love what you are doing. I love the almost monochromatic nature of this scene.The fog had started to roll in on a very brisk wind. It is hard to focus with scenes like this. I find myself just getting lost in the moment, yet wanting to try and capture it. I think I got close with this one.
Lighthouses have held an attraction for me for a very long time. I’m not to sure what it is. I guess if I sat and thought about it for a while I would probably find something profound to attach to this attraction. But for the meantime I think I will just enjoy them.
I really do love the slot canyons of Arizona. Hope to make it back again this year.
Nowhere special that’s for sure. After months of problems with my system I finally have it replaced. I have also been going through five years worth of photos, sorting, keywording and cataloging. Now that all the drudge work is out of the way I am working on getting some new stuff online. The nice thing about going through all of your photos is that you find some really good stuff that you forgot about. So here is some of that stuff:
Recently I went to a lot of trouble to figure out a problem that I had encountered when trying to open multiple “Smart Objects” in Photoshop into one document. I tried the “click and drag” method, “copy and paste”, “paste into”. I tried waving a dead chicken over my head and reciting ancient Druid incantations. Nothing worked. But I was determined to solve the problem. And I did……and posted a very detailed and laborious tutorial.
Moving forward. My son and I attended the “20th Anniversary of Photoshop” celebration in San Francisco. It was a great gathering. Lots of notable Photoshop gurus in attendance. This was a retrospective of Photoshop from the very beginning to the present and some insight into the future. The evenings presenters would demonstrate all the advancements made in PS. When it came to the “Smart Object” segment I was paying close attention as I really like to use this function. The first thing the presenter (I don’t remember who) did was to open multiple “Smart Objects”. I thought, very smugly to myself “Only I know how to open multiple Smart Objects into one document”. Then the presenter(my memory has not improved, so I still don’t remember who) proceeded to “click and drag” the multiple “Smart Objects” into one document. I was stunned. When did they make this function work. Did they do this just for this “fancy smancy” get together. I left that night feeling like a betrayed lover. My one shot at Photoshop stardom dashed.
Well, it looks like the secret to this move is to “click and drag” one “Smart Object” up to the tab of the target “Smart Object” and hold until the tab highlights and the target document is visible. Now the final trick to making this work. You then have to drag the outline of the “Smart Object” you are moving into position in the new document window and then release it. Voila.
So what did I learn from this experience? You can do just about anything in Photoshop in different ways……just some are easier than others. I think I will use the easy way.
Oh, and as to the look into the future of Photoshop. There is some amazing “Content Aware” capabilities coming in CS5. It will just blow your socks off. Also, and this is from Jeff Schewe himself, Photokit 2.0 will be released in conjunction with CS5. He says that all the sharpening features except “Creative Sharpening” are incorporated in Lightroom 3.0.
I have managed to get out a few times to take pictures recently when the weather cooperated as we have been having a pretty good winter so far. On the bad days I have been sorting, rating and cataloging a serious backlog of my work. This brings me to a couple of new sites that I have found to be extremely helpful. One is an online weather station for the Eastern Sierra……Dennis Mattinson’s Eastern Sierra Weather Center. This is a great resource and I am adding a permanent link on this blog.
The second site is one funded by the Library of Congress. It is dpBestflow.org. It is a series of videos on the management of digital libraries and is hosted by Peter Krough. His books on digital asset management(DAM) are standards in the industry. This is an area that a lot of photographers have problems, how to handle all the files that we generate with our digital cameras. I know this has been an ongoing problem for me, as I have had several tries that failed after a lot of hard work. I am in the process now of re-cataloging my library so that my workflow will be more productive.
One of the benefits of forcing myself to do this is that I have gone back through and have gotten rid of a lot of stuff that I will never use. Images that I saved because……oh, someday I might want to do something with it. I have a general rule about my analog housekeeping, personal belongings and such, that if I haven’t used it in the last six months to a year, I get rid of it. While going through my digital library it dawned on me that I wasn’t carrying over this rule for my business. So what do I have? Several HDD’s full of “stuff”. With this re-cataloging I am getting rid of anything that I have rated lower than 3 stars and these are being reevaluated with a very critical eye.
I found this to be a little difficult at first, but then I realized that it was really freeing me to concentrate on the very best that I have. So, ever onward and upward. So far I have gotten through 2009. Next up, 2008. And with the new system I am hoping that I won’t have to go through this again.
I have found some really great blogs lately. I hope to have links to them up soon. Two were on business……that nasty thing that seems to stump so many of us.
Update: It was late last night when I posted this. I have been having a terrible time with my system. I have been working with both Apple and Adobe engineers trying to figure out what is wrong. So I had been working late. I just found Seth’s Blog. I really find his writing refreshing and very insightful. Highly recommended. The second was an article from Kevin Kelly’s blog. I haven’t had much time to really go through his writings, but this article ” One Thousand True Fans” was an eye opener.
Well, here is a new look for the images that I will be posting. It took a little while to work the kinks out of the process so that I could create an action in Photoshop to do all the hard work. If anyone would like to download the action it is available HERE, it is called “Photo Matte”. The action resizes the canvas to add a 4″ matte around the image, offsets the image by 3/4″, adds a stroke, resizes the layer to 95%, adds a new full size layer underneath for the drop shadow. You can look through all the steps in the action to see what is being done. The action can be easily modified to suite your own needs.
Also there is another action that I created based on the B & W conversion in “Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers” by Schewe and Evening. Hope that you find them useful. If so drop me a line and let me know.
Well it certainly has been stormy lately. I really love the way the storms come in over the Sierra and the way they linger. It puts on quite a show. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is winter, spring summer or fall, they are all spectacular.
In the September/October issue of Audubon Magazine is an article that afficianados of fall color will learn a lot from. There is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that with the increased levels of CO2 the colors will get more intense. The bad news…..with increased levels of CO2 the fall displays will start later with the rising temperatures. This dilemma is the focus of several scientific studies.
If we don’t change the way we live on this planet……Nature will change it for us.
This weekend was an interesting trip. I have tried on two different occasions to make the tour of the Little Petroglyph Canyon that is sponsored by the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, California. I got bumped twice. Once, because the Navy canceled the tour and the second was due to weather. They were expecting tempuratures in excess of 120 F. This weekend was my lucky weekend. The weather was great and the Navy wasn’t blowing stuff up.
I left Bishop with plans to stop off and check out Fossil Falls and then proceed to Ridgecrest. All I can say about Fossil Falls is……I will definitly return. When I arrived at Fossil Falls it was just past mid day and the light was really harsh. So I hiked around the canyon and scouted the area. This is an area that would best be photographed in a subdued light situation because of the reflections from the basaltic rock that is worn smooth by water erosion. So I figured that as soon as we get some really nice overcast or stormy days I will return.
After arriving in Ridgecrest I checked into my motel room. It was a little after 3:oo p.m. I figured that I had at least another 1 1/2 to two hours of light left so I headed east to the Trona Pinnacles. These formations are “tufas” like the ones found at Mono Lake. Only much bigger and in a dry lake basin. This was well worth the drive as they are really spectacular. I imagine that with some stormy weather this area would be great to photograph. I will be watching the weather for this area this winter.
Sunday morning was the start of the tour. I won’t go into all of the details of what goes into the tour but it entails a very thorough search of your vehicle and all the contents by a well trained security team. The reason for this is that the Little Petroglyph Canyon is on the China Lake Naval Weapons Station. Because this area has been under the control of the Navy since World War II access has been very restricted. Consequently there is very little vandalism to the rock art. It is too bad that we can’t restrict the rest of the sites in this country in the same manner.
The canyon is really incredible. Over a mile long it is lined with basaltic rock. This was the canvas for the early native Americans. And did they ever use it. There are over 6000 petroglyphs in this one canyon. Date estimates are that some are over 10,000 years old. If you are the least bit interested in primitive art or archeology in general, I would recommend this tour. It is very well organised and the tour guides are first rate. Contact the Maturango Museum for information.
I really do love exploring this part of the country. There is always something new and fascinating around ever corner.
Went out today to get a cooler out of the storage shed as I am going to Little Petroglyph Canyon on Sunday. As I walked along I noticed a wonderful collage of leaves that had blown up against the fence at the back of the yard. It looks like they have blown in from all over the neighborhood. Luckily the gardener missed this area. His crew is usally very thorough in their work.
The colors and patterns were very intriguing and I spent the better part of an hour just studying and taking it all in. Nature has a way of giving us these wonderful little gifts. This gift was a gentle reminder of what a wonderment the fall is in this beautiful valley. Everyday I find something to be grateful for. Here it is not too hard.
