Category Archives: color

What a difference a day makes

One waterfall, two flavors. The shot above was taken in the rain last Friday. The one below, barely over 24 hours later on Saturday.

I like each for different reasons but I expect the second one will have more value as a stock shot as I’ve found that tourism folks love those blue skies. Myself, I like the feathery nature of the water on the first shot and others from that day. By Saturday, Friday’s rain had made its way into the stream and the falls were much heavier. Still nice, but a different look.

Lightroom tidbits

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I’ve been giving Lightroom 3 (now 3.2) a real workout for the last few weeks. I’ve been importing my back catalog in massive chunks and making a quick pass at adjusting the original RAW files rather than importing the images that I had already tweaked previously in Adobe Camera Raw. This is a pretty big-stroke process right now — I’ll come back later and expand keywords and tweak the highly ranked shots — but it’s been a really interesting process to see the images improve. I’d like to think that the improvement is due to my own advancing skills in RAW processing, but the fact is that much of it is really due to improvements to the software over the years. Better processing algorithms and better controls.

I’ve been importing my 2006 images from Chile most recently and have noticed a couple of major advancements. One is Lightroom’s much improved ability to get rid of noise in high-ISO shots. Images that have never seen the light of day will now be going into my stock files because the noise that would never have passed Quality Control is now all but gone. Amazing. I’ll share some examples in the coming posts.

The most noticeable change in the images from Chile, though — especially Valparaiso — is how much more control I have over color now. Valparaiso is a city that is all about color. Colors you never thought you would see together, you’ll see in abundance in Valparaiso. Capturing some of these colors on film would have been frustrating. Sure, Velvia would have made that row of multi-colored row houses really pop. But then you’d round the corner to find a weathered, grey facade with the most subtle hues and you’d be cursing yourself for having 20 more exposures of that super-saturated film in your camera. One of my most favorite things about digital is just that — you can make decisions on a shot-by-shot basis and not be stuck with a film decision you made 10 exposures ago. Did you pop in a roll of ISO 800 film to shoot that dark church interior? Too bad now that you’re out in full sun and all kinds of contrast. No, being able to adjust ISOs and saturation levels for each individual image is a game-changer.

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And that flexibility doesn’t stop with in-camera controls. Lightroom (as well as all other image processors, really) lets you tweak color and contrast in ways that film selection alone never even came close to. The Vibrance slider in the Presence panel has become one of my favorite tools. More subtle than the Saturation slider, it affects the blues and greens more than already-saturated reds and yellows. Very nice. And the sliders for adjusting the hue, brightness and saturation levels of individual colors take that control to another level.

One other set of controls that I find myself using more and more often is the new perspective correction panel — actually the “transform” controls in the lens correction panel. While I still prefer the “distort” controls in Photoshop, it is nice having some of this ability in Lightroom. The controls take some getting used to but they are a welcome addition.

I’ll go into more detail on each of these and other Lightroom features in future posts and show some examples.

Bo Sang, Thailand: Umbrella Village

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Post-processing images from a trip is like replaying the experience in slow motion. A heavy day’s worth of images can easily take more time to process than to shoot. I don’t tend to review my shots on the road that much. I’ll chimp a bit to make sure everything is working properly but I’m a bit of a battery miser and — given the pace that I’m often traveling — just don’t have the time to review thoroughly on the road. That said, I always have a reasonable idea of what’s on the hard drives at the end of the day and I wonder how I ever managed, back in the days of film, to travel for weeks and not have any idea of what my take looked like until slides arrived back from the lab. Digital — how’d I ever live without you?

So this post is the first of several that I’ll write as I relive my recent trip to Thailand. Day one has now been processed and it began with a trip to Bo Sang, otherwise known as “umbrella village”, near Chiang Mai. Everywhere you turn in this town, there are umbrellas. They are not just sold here, but manufactured here. From raw materials to brightly decorated umbrellas and fans, you can observe the entire process. And it’s humbling to watch. This is not a high-tech factory situation but many skilled workers turning bamboo, wood and paper into functional objects, mostly with the simplest of hand tools. And they work incredibly fast with the assuredness that comes with years of experience.

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Much of the manufacturing happens in small, open-air spaces behind homes around the village but the decoration and painting can be seen taking place near the town gate, behind a shop that sells — you guessed it — umbrellas. Freshly papered umbrellas dry on the grass in a central courtyard while painters work in the shade of the surrounding awning. As I photographed these people working, some would offer to paint dragons on my camera bag in just 10 minutes (an offer I now regret not taking them up on). In fact, they’ll paint just about anything for you and I witnessed many people getting their shirts painted right on their backs.

Each January, Bo Sang holds an umbrella festival complete with parades and beauty contests. That, I can imagine, would be a true photo opportunity.

A note on the warmth of these shots: I tend to shoot with my white balance set to “cloudy” to add a little extra warmth much as one would do by adding a warming filter when shooting with film. The warmth in these images is largely natural, however, due to the air quality. Controlled burning of agricultural fields in the area was creating a fair amount of smoke and haze, not unlike what I often experience back home in the Great Plains of the U.S. in the spring. While it doesn’t do much for landscape photography where you want good visibility and blue skies, it does extend those golden hours as the sun filters through the smoke. As with many situations in photography, you can view it as a problem or an opportunity. Here, I think it worked in my favor and has added a cohesive tone element to everything I shot that morning.

Spring

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Since I’ll be on the road for the next couple of weeks, and my ability to post may be hindered, I hated to leave you staring at a photo of my feet. Instead, I’ll leave you with the first sign of Spring in our backyard — the Witch Hazels that we planted last summer are blooming.

See you all soon!

Decade in review: 2008

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

More adventures in Canada in early 2008. This time it was a winter trip to Banff and Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. I had visited this area briefly in 2000 on my way to Vancouver. It had been in the spring of that year and a completely different experience. This is grand country but I think it shows itself best in the winter. Still, I’d like to go back in the summer to see the green waters of Lake Louise.

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Snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, hiking on frozen lakes — I added a whole repertoire of ways I’ve traveled to get a shot. Perhaps my favorite part of this trip was a moonlit hike up the Maligne Canyon. You strap some steel spikes onto the soles of your boots and start walking up a frozen river at night while the canyon walls climb around you and stars shine in the narrow streak of sky above. At frozen waterfalls, your guide can shine his powerful flashlight behind the ice to illuminate the intense blue and green colors. Slippery, cold and dark… but a great experience.

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2008 was another extremely busy year in terms of domestic travel. Michigan, Kentucky, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico and more. All while buying a new house and moving. It was a crazy year. I remember spending election night in a cabin in the woods in Arkansas and going down the mountain to check email at the nearest wifi hotspot. I had received a last-minute invitation to go to China in less than two weeks. I needed to send my passport in for my visa and luckily I had it with me. The next day was filled with driving back and forth across Arkansas visiting various Post Offices in different towns trying to find where I could get additional passport photos taken and get my package over-nighted to Chicago. No one Post Office seemed to be able to do both of these things but by splitting the chore between two (I believe in Harrison and Fayetteville), it got done. Ten days later, I was in Shanghai.

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I’ve posted about the China trip on this blog before — you can enter “China” into the search box at top-right to find more. The trip started in Shanghai and then went up the Yangtze to several water towns with historic districts built on canals. The colors were phenomenal.

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Those last two shots were from an open-air performance in Zhouzhuang. It was spectacular.

The architecture was also fun to shoot. Pagodas were everywhere, including the world’s tallest in Changzhou that had opened just a year before. Over 500 feet tall, it appears through the glow of the morning sun in this shot on the left:

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The pagoda on the right is from Zhouzhuang. I hope to return to China again soon. It’s a big country and there are so many more things I want to see. But that’s the way it is with the whole world, isn’t it? So many things to see, so little time. I’ll continue to do my best to see and photograph as much of it as possible, for as long as possible.

Decade in review: 2007

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

In addition to a plethora of US trips, 2007 had me returning to Canada once again. Canada has always been a favorite destination of mine. The weather suits me, the people are great, and the country offers such a wide variety of locations to photograph.

I had whet my appetite on Eastern Canada in 2004 when we drove across the Gaspe peninsula and down (er… up?) the St. Lawrence. In 2007 I had a chance to do a similar trip again — but this time in reverse and largely by train. I started in Montreal. I had only spent a few hours here in 2004 so I enjoyed having an opportunity to dig a little deeper. It’s a great city and one that Sally’s family has historic ties to so I’m sure I’ll be back again.

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From Montreal, I took the train to Quebec City and enjoyed a stay in the famous Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac — without a doubt the most recognizable building on the Quebec skyline with its green copper mansard roofs. I spent most of my time wandering the old town. The weather was damp but it did nothing to detract from the beauty of the place.

A few days later it was back on the train, following the St. Lawrence toward the Atlantic. Around Mont-Joli, the train crossed the Gaspe peninsula through the same valley I had driven three years before. Much of the journey had been at night but dawn broke as we approached Chaleur Bay and I was able to enjoy the view from the large window in my tiny room as we followed the coastline to the tip of the peninsula at Gaspe.

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I took a whale watching boat out one morning and got to see the fluke of a humpback rise from the water as she dove away from our boat with her baby at her side. I made a rookie mistake while trying to steady myself on the violently rocking boat to get a shot and the autofocus caught the coastline behind the whale instead of the whale itself. You’ll just have to trust me that it was a spectacular sight.

Perce Rock is another landmark that I thoroughly enjoyed shooting on this trip. Maybe it’s because I’m a Kansan, but put a big huge rock in front of me with some nice light and I am one happy camper. I spend a great evening exploring the endless variety of ways to shoot this hunk of geology until the light was gone and I celebrated with one of the better bowls of seafood chowder that I’ve had in my life.

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Decade in review: 2002

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

In 2002 I made my last major trip with with film — to Ireland. By this time I was shooting with a Nikon F100 and was just dabbling in digital with a Coolpix 990 (I’d actually had an Apple Quicktake earlier but never really found a way to use it professionally). I took around 250 or 300 rolls of film on this trip and — in those early post-9/11 days — begged for handchecks in Kansas City and again in Chicago to avoid x-ray exposure. I had already removed all of the film from their boxes but they were still in their transparent plastic canisters and kept together in a giant transparent ziplock bag. The handchecks involved taking each roll of film out of its canister and swabbing it before moving on to the next one. Repeat this process a couple hundred times and you’ll nearly miss your connection.

This was also my first international press trip (although still as a “spouse” to my writer-wife) and it was a whirlwind. We had left our home around 4:00 in the morning to catch our flight from KC to Chicago, then had an overnight flight to Dublin but neither of us were able to get any sleep on the plane. If I’m not mistaken, we were in the last row, center section, where the seats won’t recline because of the bulkhead that separates the cabin from the bathrooms. We landed around 7:00 a.m. and were picked up at the airport for a full day of touring. We ended up in Belfast that night, finally checking into our hotel around 11:30 p.m.

Thirty minutes later (and you can bet I was already sleeping) the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the hotel. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. The next morning we found out that the alarm had been triggered by a member of our group smoking a cigar in their room. They never came forward to identify themselves so the rest of the trip became like one of those murder-mystery trips with everyone trying to figure out who was on floor 7 and who had been seen with a lighter, etc., etc.

It was a brutal schedule but we were rewarded with scenes like this:

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I shot this across the road from our hotel while everyone else was getting their luggage loaded on the bus. Or maybe we were getting off the bus and checking in — I don’t know. I just remember running across a pasture to stand on a fence and get this shot before the fire went out of the sky. One thing about press trips: you can always be certain that the best light will occur while you’re either on a bus or inside a restaurant. If you want to be out shooting in that light, you have to be quick. (I also learned on a later trip that you should always stay by the bus until you’ve seen your own suitcase get loaded… but that’s another story.)

I loved Ireland and we had pretty decent weather during the whole trip. We went into Northern Ireland, up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway, and then cut across the island to the southwest to the Dingle Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. I’ll leave you with a shot from the Dingle Peninsula. This is nice and saturated on it’s original Velvia but I thought I’d knock the color back a little this time and go for something a little more subtle. It’s nice to have that flexibility now, not only with digitally captured images but also with scans from old film shots.

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Decade in review: 2001

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2001 slipped past me with no international travel. I’d had another Canadian trip in late 2000 and would go to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico in early 2002, but the 12 month period that was 2001 was all US travel. The shots on this page came from a fall trip to New Mexico. The one at the top of the post is from Acoma Pueblo and has long been a favorite of mine. I went back to Acoma last year and it was very different. A large interpretation center has been built and many of the buildings on the mesa had been spruced up. Most of these ladders had been freshly painted white and the timeless feeling that I had loved from my first visit had eroded away a little. I’m glad I’d had the opportunity to see “Sky City” in 2001 while it was still a little more rustic.

I also remember another fall shoot in 2001, in the Great Lakes area just after 9/11. It was during the time that all of the flights were grounded and it struck me as I photographed Lake Michigan from the beach near Charlevoix that there were no contrails crossing the sky from planes coming out of O’Hare. A noticeable difference from previous trips to that spot.

On my return home from that Michigan trip, I stopped and shot a little in Pella, Iowa. One image in particular that I remember making may have been the last 4×5 transparency that I shot. It was a twilight scene in a new mixed-use development that had just been built downtown. The buildings were all designed to reflect the Dutch style (Pella has a big tulip festival every year) with a canal flowing through the courtyard. I was using my Tachihara field 4×5, correcting for perspective distortion with its bellows.

The fact that I can’t come up with a digital version of that shot to post here goes to show how much has changed in the last 8 years. I have the transparency, but I no longer have a way of scanning large format film here in the office. I used to use a backlit flatbed scanner — which didn’t give very good results — or I would send images out for commercial scans. This particular image was never scanned for my stock files so it languishes in the “dead film” cabinet. The following year would pretty much see the end of my use of film and everything would change.

Petroglyphs, Santa Fe County, New Mexico, USA

Here’s another New Mexico shot — some petroglyphs near Santa Fe. The New Mexico light was always a great fit for film. I shot a lot of Velvia at that time, along with some Provia when I didn’t want the saturation to be quite so strong. It’s funny, I loved that super-saturated look that I would get with Velvia, but when I try and mimic the look using digital techniques, it looks artificial to me. Obviously, it was artificial on film, too. But somehow it was easier to accept film altering a scene than doing it purposefully in digital. The film choice was purposeful, too, but it seemed somehow more honest than cranking the saturation slider in Photoshop. As time moves forward, I’m becoming more adventurous with pushing reality digitally, though. Something we’ll probably see over the next few posts.

Looking through these images from 9 and 10 years ago is making me realize that, at that time, I was really more of a landscape photographer. My mentors at the time were landscape shooters and it was a gradual transition for me to go from landscape to what I now consider “travel” which is a broader description that can include architecture, interiors, action, people and even food. I’m now shooting fewer pristine landscapes and am incorporating a lot more of the man-made world. It’s a reflection of both what interests me and what is needed in the marketplace.