THE CENTRE OF FISHGUARD
SEPTEMBER 25, 2026
GOODWICK MOOR NATURE PRESERVE
Wales is a strange and beautiful place. It is so rural that even it’s towns are sort of rural, and resemble hamlets despite their real size. Fishguard is a market town on the Pembrokeshire coast path, with an industrial area and a real fishing harbor with ferry service to some nearby islands and Ireland, weather permitting. Fishguard is a delightful place, with short-term stays much cheaper than its more glamorous and smaller competitors on the nearby coast. We stayed for a week in a croft house about five miles out of town from this location.
When I call this the centre of town I am not exaggerating by that much. While there is a small grid of streets with a few shops and pubs, after a few days we joined dozens and dozens of residents for their afternoon constitutional at Goodwick Moor Nature Reserve, a remnant of the moor that divides the town near the harbor. Often in Wales it appears that there are many more dogs than there are people. Most families include more than one dog, and the resulting packs patrol the open spaces in town, when they are not hanging out with their owners in the pub.
This area is part of the largest dog park in Fishguard, and “the hounds” patrol the moorland every afternoon rain, rain, rain, or shine. There are well-used outdoor showers at each entrance of the park where owners can attempt to clean up their dogs before allowing them to get back into the Land Rover on the way home. Depending on your ambitions and knowledge of the area, you can stretch a short hike past the local rugby ground into a hike of a few miles into deep woodland.
Another reason this area is so central to Fishguard is that the town, like most in Wales, grew organically over a series of roads that led to the harbor, the church, or the railroad station. The tiny terrace houses lined up along a road, no matter how steep, and everyone had access, or at least a view of the common land or wilderness that started just behind the back door. Imagine Baltimore with the countryside surrounding every street of row houses. Fishguard has grown into a town of nearly 10,000 people on probably half a dozen of these hills leading down to the harbor. Each trip to town required Fran to run a gauntlet of almost totally illegal parking along the hilly streets with near misses a constant highlight on a simple trip to the Co-op grocery store. The “town planning” that created Fishguard resulted in a state of anarchy that almost reached Italian levels. Any trip across town required going up and down at least several of these hills. This moorland is literally across the street from a grocery store, and down the block from one of the largest hotels in town. The train station is only a short walk up the hill.
Since our cottage was beyond telephone, internet, and cell phone coverage, Fran deserved many huzzahs for the shortest jaunt away from the cottage. The fact that seemingly every route we tried, no matter in any direction, seemed to travel along the same road, Celtic Way, only increased our level of confusion. Most of the time we somehow arrived at this beautiful scene without any real idea of how we got there. I had to rely on Siri to get us back home, no matter how convoluted her chosen route, knowing that she would abandon us miles from our cottage before we got home.
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ST. PAUL'S STRAIGHT-ON
SEPTEMBER 4, 2026
A FORCED SYMMETRICAL VIEW OF THE DOME
This week I would like to return to London to take a look at a detailed view of St. Paul's Cathedral which is included in my latest book, “Urban Fragments.” I created this image during a trip to London with Fran and Benjamin in 2008. Like most of our trips to the United Kingdom, we had a wonderful time “on holiday” while the world economy took yet another dive.
St. Paul’s is Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, the crowning achievement of his career which included rebuilding of most of London’s historic church buildings. An architect’s career is a combination of artistic genius, political and economic patronage, and shear luck. One of the most important cities in the entire world managed to almost completely burn down in “The Great Fire” of 1666, which afforded Wren and others the chance to rebuild it in a new Classical style to replace the Medieval Gothic that characterized the city before the catastrophe. The Cathedral we know today was finally finished in 1710.
St. Paul’s is Wren’s attempt to crown London with a church that could compete with St. Peters in Rome. It also would assert the importance of the City of London as compared to the Royal precincts of Westminster Abbey to the west. One of the ironies of London is that the separation of church and state is represented by two cathedrals. St. Pauls, modeled on a Renaissance Rome that predates it by two hundred years, was built two hundred years before the completion of the new parliament in Westminster that completed the Gothic assemblage centered on Westminster Abbey. The survival of St. Paul’s during the Blitz became one of the most enduring symbols of the Second World War. Numerous photographs show the building surviving, either through a miracle of God or the extraordinary efforts of the Fire Brigade, while the Luftwaffe succeeds in burning down most of the rest of Central London all around it.
This image is a prime example of my style of landscape photography in which I strive for an interpretation that focuses on the part rather the whole. It is pretty impossible to take a “standard” view of the Cathedral because in order to take the entire building in the frame it is reduced in size to render it a shadow of it’s real impact. Thus I direct my attention to the symbol, the dome itself. The dome is 365 feet tall, and made St. Paul’s the tallest building in London until 1963. As usual in my work, I did not “take” this image on site, but achieved the straight-on symmetry through cropping the original image on the computer. The square crop reinforces the effect.
Two more effects were achieved in post-processing. Conversion to Black and White, even with a pretty monochromatic original scene, allowed for more manipulation of light and shadow to achieve the stark effect I wanted. The blue tone in the final image harkens back to the darkroom in that it mimics the protective cyanotype toning that could protect darkroom images back in the day. I used it here not out of nostalgia, but because the cool tones seemed to reinforce the mood I was after. The resultant image has little to do with the original snapshot from almost twenty years ago, I hope you enjoyed it.
]]>LAFAYETTE SQUARE
AUGUST 14, 2026
A RAIL, ITS SHADOW, AND A BRICK PAVEMENT
This week I would like to describe my process in creating another of the images in my new book, Urban Fragments. This image is an exemplary example of both the strengths and weaknesses of my approach to capturing images in the urban environment.
This image was captured some forty years ago in Lafayette Square across from the White House. The square is a small oasis on Pennsylvania Avenue, notable for its urban qualities and it’s clear view of the White House across the street, as well as a heroic statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback. The square gained notoriety during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations when the President used troops and helicopters to clear the square and showed his respect for religious freedom by holding the Bible upside down. Since then in the general tumult of Trump’s war on D.C., the square has suffered from design depredations that have not gotten the press of larger fights across the District. I have not kept up with its current state.
If you want to know what the square used to feel like, I would recommend viewing “Seven Days in May”, a classic piece of American paranoia about a barely thwarted military coup. In the midst of a classic film, you can see what was once one of the best places in Washington to peacefully petition the government, right on the street in front of the White House.
In any case on a sunny and no doubt too hot day I found myself poking around the square with my camera and captured this image of a small section of the Square’s characteristic railings that divided the paths from the plantings. I was probably intrigued by the resemblance of the railings to the squares that I had learned to love in Bloomsbury in London, and the irony of this most British of squares across the street from the one of the symbols of the historic break with the British Empire. I was mostly struck by the curve of the fence and its accompanying shadow on the brick sidewalk. This is the real subject of this image, a small fragment of urban geometry that I tried to highlight with my camera.
I would daresay that this image of the square is more about shade and shadow, urban materials and geometry than any postcard view of Washington, D.C. Even lifetime denizens the Nation’s capital would be forgiven if they could not place the location of this image, but that is what appeals to me. It is a clear example of my effort to capture an urban fragment that might provide a clearer view of the ambience of Washington than a more conventional overall view. The fact that it might now also be historic says a lot about our country’s ability to ignore its own history.
]]>TINTERN ABBEY
JULY 31, 2026
ROMANTIC RUIN
This week I’d like to describe our last trip in rural Wales. We left Hay-on-Wye for Cardiff but decided to extend the trip by setting out further into the Wye Valley in search of Tintern Abbey.
Search was the operative word. I had long since lost faith in Apple maps, which always got us where we were looking for, but on the most circuitous routes that I couldn’t believe were the most direct way to to get to our destinations. We were driving on one lane roads between ancient hedges on both sides, seemingly on a one-way route to the middle of nowhere. It didn’t help that each time we encountered farm machinery, the farmer looked like he hadn’t seen someone he didn’t know in at least a decade.
I started to try to outfox the application by picking intermediate stops that would direct us to larger roads. This was slightly obtuse since I really didn’t understand where we were most of the time. Fran indulged me until we finally achieved a larger “A” road and then for the first time in Wales crossed a livestock barrier and started sharing the road with dozens of sheep. All of my efforts managed to extend the trip by nearly an hour. Finally we emerged from the Medieval road and somehow ended up at Tintern Abbey.
Tintern Abbey is among the most romantic and thought-provoking ruins that provides some inkling into the society that existed in this part of Wales almost nine hundred years ago. A monastic order somehow thrived in what was even then a backwater. Hundreds of monks and hangers-on lived a very hard existence while they fulfilled their harsh rules of life. But they also built what would be an impressive stone cathedral complex in a market town, much less on the edge of the forest. The large complex that we see today was started by the Cistercian monks in 1269.
Tintern Abbey was closed for business by Henry VIII, whose religious conversions were motivated more by an effort to grab the wealth of the existing religious establishment than a desire for a male heir. He dissolved all of the monasteries, and their wealth was absorbed by the Crown. While it was easy enough to just change administrations in urban England, isolated religious centers like Tintern Abbey instantly lost their reasons for being. In a matter of decades the buildings began to fall into ruin.
But their will “always be an England”, and very soon after Tintern Abbey became a ruin, local efforts began to ensure it’s preservation as a historical site even while it continued to fall apart. For several hundred years this haphazard effort ensured it’s survival, albeit as a romantic ruin without windows, a lot of the structure, and not a roof in sight. In fact, most other the Medieval stonework hides Victorian and even contemporary structural interventions that stabilized the ruin that we see today.
My images do not come close to doing the site justice. I realized within minutes that it would take an extended series of visits to really learn the ins-and outs of the site. Most of the “classic” shots required access to areas where ordinary visitors were not allowed.
In any case we enjoyed our trip to the Abbey, where in Faulkner’s words, “the Past is not even the Past.” Not a dragon or a knight in site, but we got closer to the Medieval world than anything Hollywood has to offer.
]]>JULY 17, 2026
A RIVER IN THE SKY
This week I would like to describe our brief visit to a unique site in North Wales. On our journey out of Snowdonia, Fran and I stopped at the town of Llangollen, whose claim to fame is the site of a masterpiece of Nineteenth Century engineering, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct over the Llangollen Valley and the river Dee. It is a Unesco World Heritage Site.
For a very brief period before the dawn of the Age of Railroads, water transport was the most efficient and cheapest way to ship items, especially heavy items, around Great Britain. Engineers began to create rivers out of whole cloth to connect Britain’s industrial centers. This canal network soon linked most of the sites of the first industrial revolution, but geography through some real obstacles in the way of expansion. Canal locks could overcome moderate slopes, but real valleys presented an obstacle to a system that depended on gravity’s forbearance to allow for transportation on to the flatland.
The solution, albeit an audacious one, was to look back to the Roman engineers of the ancient aqueducts that brought water to Rome. The new waterways would not conform to geography but bridge it. These new aqueducts would not be used to transport water, but would use water to move goods along straight paths that ignored shifting terrain. The canals would now continue in the air when the ground had fallen away, until it reached the other side of the valley.
Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, finished in 1805, spans nearly one thousand feet across the valley, providing a level path which reaches more than127 feet above the valley floor. A waterway that can accomodate narrow canal boats is accompanied by a narrow footpath that allowed for horses to help drag the boats along. While there is nothing to prevent a maritime mishap that would ruin someone’s life along the canal, at least a stout fence protects the chasm side of the towpath. There is no protection for a pedestrian who manages to waver on the other side of the path into the canal itself.
Thomas Telford, who later built some of the world’s first suspension bridges nearby, was responsible for this leap into the unknown. Originally very successful in moving most of the slate and iron ore from the isolated valley to the “Satanic Mills” of Northern England, the Aqueduct has been preserved as an example of Georgian engineering that can still illicit gasps in the TwentyFirst Century. It is the longest aqueduct in Great Britain and the highest aqueduct in the entire world.
As usual in Wales the most difficult and dangerous part of our visit was finding and negotiating the car park. The official maps were clearly wrong, and even the satellite navigation was not up to actually finding the car park. We circled the area three times, and it was only my obstinate nature that allowed us to eventually find our way.
Most photographs, including the one I’ve shown here, present the site as a pristine journey through across the valley with your honey on your side. Reality forced me to admonish Fran that no matter what happened, she should not let go that rail. Hundreds of tourists ran across the path, seemingly blind to the fact that they were only scant inches from plunging into the canal. When we encountered other people who stood white-gripped on the rail, seemingly unable to either keep moving or go back, one had to go hand over hand around them. It was awfully hard not to decry the ravages of tourism while being a tourist, but the experience was still not to be missed.
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JULY 3, 2026
MR. LINCOLN'S VIEW 1984
This week I’d like to take a quick look at another image included in my new book, “Urban Fragments”, which collects images captured in many cities around the world over the past fifty years.
As near as I can tell, this image was captured in 1984 when another unqualified and impeachable President occupied the White House. Fran had recently taken classes from the White House Pastry Chef, who in a very obscure sidebar to Iran-Contra, had supposedly baked surreptitious items into several cakes. I’m not making this up - ask the Google.
So recent events have made this image as timely as well as timeless. The reflecting pool was just a place to walk around the Mall during yet another too-hot summer. It took forty-two years before it became yet another casualty of our nation’s divisions. The present-day controversy includes all of the usual comedic/tragic elements - an unbelievable cast of characters, blowhard calls to action, complete incompetence, and an underlying whiff of corruption smellier than the pool itself. In my house we refer to a new law of thermodynamics - “Everything Trump Touches Turns to Shit”, which seems to summarize the entire reflecting pool debacle.
This image thus comes from what we call a “simpler time” which of course was as complicated as all get out. What I tried to capture here was a long-range view that shows the relationship between the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building as seen from the Lincoln Memorial. The Reflecting Pool does it’s job in multiplying the Monument’s image for the photographer.
Black and White can be nostalgic, but it also can simplify the natural world to show what really is important - the relationship between different symbols of our nation’s past rather than the temporary colors of a too-still body of water. In this view Washington’s beauty is unsullied by politics, heat and humidity, and idiotic debates about color - it’s the reflection, in glorious black and white, that really matters.
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JUNE 12, 2026
THE VILLAGE COMMON, WITH THE MOUNTAINS JUST OUT OF TOWN
This week I would like to take you to a village in the midst of Snowdonia National Park in North Wales. Fran and I were privileged to spend a week in this area, in the very quaint and prosperous village of Betwys-y-Coed, one of the gateways of the park. This village contains 400 souls, and is devoted to serving two groups - “pensioners” like us and mountain climbers of all ages. Half of the stores were devoted to hiking equipment, and we could have probably gotten retail jobs there since a lot of the stock seemed to be right out of Portland stores in the Pearl.
We were blessed to stay at the bed and breakfast which was owned by Chris and David, who went so far beyond the call of duty in accommodating a couple of guests who just barely could manage their traditional property at the edge of the village. They made our stay a week to remember.
One morning David offered to show us some of the park near Betwys-y-Coed. We gleefully agreed, since Fran would get out of driving and get to pay her full attention to the scenery for once. David was game since he got out of cleaning one of the rooms, and off we went on a short jaunt to one of the parts of this incredible park. Four hours later we returned to the B&B, and our delight was only exceeded by David’s pleasure in showing us around the amazing place they called home.
Snowdonia contains most of the mountainous area of North Wales, and even thought mountains are just one fourth the height of the mountains in the Cascades, they are so formidable that England’s Everest expeditions train in the area. Great Britain’s National Parks were inspired by America’s, but they have a very different definition of wilderness than we do. Everything is so old that it would be almost impossible to find an area that had not been inhabited sometime in the last few hundred years. So our definition of a “roadless” wilderness is not really applicable. On the other hand just because a country lane leads to a medieval village in the middle of a forest doesn’t mean that you will find yourself completely alone in an area seemingly devoid of humans just over the next hill. The juxtaposition of what is essentially wilderness with small villages from time immemorial was something very new for Fran and myself as we drove through the park.
We went for some coffee and pastries in one of those small villages in the park. Beddgelert was on the map, and I had even noted it as a place to go, but we would have never found it without David driving us there through the mountains on roads which were not readily apparent to foreigners. Beddgelert was typical only in the fact that it was in the middle of nowhere, seemingly out of some other time period, but had pubs, teashops and stores galore. It seemed to be thriving despite the fact that the roads probably cannot support tour busses to bring the tourists around.
Beddgelert was centered on a common area that seemed to be the social and recreational center of the village. This image is my attempt to capture the atmosphere of one area of that common. An ancient stone wall and an heroic Oak tree out of The Lord of the Rings form one of the boundaries of the common land of the village. Just beyond that wall lie some of the mountains that have defined the village’s isolation for centuries.
This image was pretty much straight-out-of-camera, at least for me. Just a little straightening, since I was comfortably sitting on a bench in the park, but you would be amazed at how eliminating that 1% out of whack can do fro your images. The colors were fine, but I did use three masks to even out the exposure, which was beyond the camera’s sensor, to what I remembered of the scene. Dehazing was necessary to bring out some of the details in the mountains. As usual, the sky was reduced a full stop to balance out with exposure of the overall scene. In this case I used a brush to further reduce the exposure on the middle of the mountains to bring out even more detail. Finally I brushed back a touch of exposure to brighten the lighter areas of the mountain slope. If you can “see” any of this manipulation, even after I have told you about it, then I have failed in my mission to convey the reality of what I felt at the time.
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HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT - PENTRE IFAN
JUNE 5, 2026
PENTRE IFAN
This week I’d like to show you one of the most mysterious ancient monuments in the British Isles. Fran and I had the opportunity to visit the site as the first stop on our long drive from Pembrokeshire to Snowdonia after a week on the coast. I tried to find a few places to stop and break up the drive of more than three hours - about as far as you can drive in Wales, which is about the size of New Jersey, with a lot of sheep and only three million people.
This was our first stop, only about a half hour from our cottage. By this time I had planed that the usual obscure route would take about twice as long as I anticipated. I was very surprised that while the road was single-track for the most part, it was clearly marked and a straight forward route south into the hills. There was little traffic since we were arriving just at opening time, which confused me since this was clearly an outdoor site in the middle of nowhere. I guess the site was closed at night to cut down on Druid sacrifices.
Pentre Ifan was described as an ancient burial chamber, which also confused me since it was clearly out in the open on a typical Welsh hilltop. We found the carpark and proceeded down what was a delightfully short stroll on the border of several fields of sheep and cattle, through a gate, past a single sign to confront a series of stones that had stood there for about five thousand years, as near as anyone can tell.
Pentre Ifan is famous for being one of the few ancient monuments that showed off an audacious structural feat. Three standing stones, along with a few more nearby stone buddies. somehow hold up an even larger stone on three points above your head. The only thing that keeps the faith that it will not come crashing down on your head is that it has not fallen for five thousand years before you showed up today. I’m not the luckiest person, but those are pretty good odds that you will survive the visit.
There were a few families at the site, including a few that were conducting picnics on several of the tipped-over stones in lieu of any picnic tables. One gentleman noisily flew his drone over our heads until he was confronted by another visitor who pointed pointed out the very large sign banning drones from the site.
The biggest mystery for me was how this was described as a burial chamber, when it was clearly open for anyone energetic enough to climb the hill. That is what clearly sets these ancient monuments apart from the merely old castles and churches that dot the landscape. No matter how old the surrounding stone walls dividing the fields over the centuries, and the Oak trees that look like they might predate the American Revolution, nothing we see today has anything to do with the original site of the standing stones. Twenty five generations of 200 year-old Oak trees have lived and died and disappeared since the monument was erected.
The mystery of Pentre Ifan is that for probably the first few thousand years of it’s existence it was buried far underground under a hill of dirt. It was accessible only through a series of tunnels, and used for the burial of local chieftains lost to pre-history. Wrapping my head around the idea that these stones only appeared to modern men because the hill washed away to reveal their presence thousands of years later only increased the mystery of the site.
Welsh time creeps up on you in funny ways. Having lunch in a five hundred-year old pub that hasn’t really changed since people got there on horseback instead of a rental car has a way of elevating the experience. Walking among standing stones in a field nearby only heightens the feeling that we only get a very brief time on Earth. I hope you have enjoyed this brief trip back five thousand years in rural Wales.
]]>MAY 30, 2026
RAPIDS ON THE AFON GWAUN
This week I would like to show you two variants of one image from a beautiful hike Fran and I took on our last day in Pembrokeshire near the coast in South Wales. The fact that we found this hike at all is a testament to our twin and opposing skill sets that lead to conflicts to be sure, but also lead to serendipity on our travels.
This was our last full day in our cottage in the middle of nowhere near the town of Fishguard on the coast. We had gradually gotten used to our rural isolation a mere seven miles from the center of town. We now knew almost every way to get to town, which involved single-lane roads, nearly all of which were named Celtic Way despite leading in completely different directions from our cottage. Inevitably we ended up at the same Tesco, surprised that we had landed back in “civilization.” Since Fran would have to make a big drive the next day, I looked for a place close at hand before we would have to pack up the cottage and head out the next day.
Looking at my list of possible things we could have done in our week in Pembrokeshire (which would have taken a good three weeks, not one week) I noticed an obscure but celebrated hike which promised a pleasant walk along a river a mere five miles on the other side of town. My skill set is doing an inordinate if not obsessive amount of research is to find an out of the way activity in the middle of nowhere - what I call “the middle of fucking nowhere.” What makes for very interesting sidetracks is to use the web to follow rabbit holes to sites that might have nothing to do with ordinary touring. One of my favorites in England is to find motorcycle blogs which explore “unbelievable rides” in the countryside. I have never ridden a motorcycle in my life, but these guys know an obscure route better than any average tour guide, and after a little prodding Fran is usually game to at least try one if I promise that we will turn back if things get too hairy.
So in a little over fifteen minutes we found a place that seemingly hadn’t changed for a very long time. We were again only a few miles from town, but this time we had gone down into a hidden valley after a week of hill climbing with the car. Cym Gwaun is Welsh for Valley along the
Gwaun River, and it was absolutely beautiful but so hidden that we couldn’t even figure out if we had actually found it. Plunging down single-track roads that defied any way to even bail on the trip, we finally arrived at what I thought might be the promised car park that would lead to our hike. Maybe.
It was now time for Fran’s skill set to come into play. She said hello to the only other human being in sight, who was leaving the only other car in the car park. Within a few minutes and a few questions, Ben was not only telling us how to find the path, but taking us across the river to get there. Even though I can now find exactly more or less where we were on Maps, there is no way we would have ever found the hike without Ben. It turned out that he had lived nearby for years. He came weekly to walk through what was obviously one of his favorite spots on Earth, and that he hadn’t found this particular hike himself without a decade of exploration. The idea that we found ourselves there was only challenged by his disbelief that we thought we could find our way to the trailhead. He lead us to the trail, went on his way down the path, and promised to check up on us since he was obviously hiking faster than we were. He assured Fran that I could handle the trail if we took it at a slow pace.
THE BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
This image was taken at one of the bends in the stream where it encountered enough rocks to make for some interesting rapids. As usual in a “woodland” setting, be careful about avoiding the sky to prevent it from overwhelming the exposure and drawing the viewer’s eye fro the subject at hand. This valley was so steep that it really wasn’t a problem, but there was still some work to balance the different light levels in the background and foreground. I had to mask off some areas of the rapids to avoid losing detail in the water. The black and white version is just a matter of taste, trading monochromatic green for grey. But black and white allows for more editing without leading to unrealistic effects. I could highlight the small tree across the way, hopefully in such a way that you would not know what I was doing. In a nutshell, this is what most post-processing is all about. A pretty strong vignette darkened the edges of the image and further concentrate your attention on the river.
The hike was beautiful, following the river that led past several farms in the valley in between a lot of sheep and several rapids on the river. I do not remember if we saw any other hikers, maybe one or two, before Ben showed up again on his way back. What was most delightful about our brief encounter was that Ben got even more of a kick showing us the valley than we had in actually finding it. It’s this kind of experience that makes travel so worthwhile.
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MAY 22, 2026
MR. JEFFERSON'S COLUMNS
I’ve begun to put some of my photographs from our recent rip to Wales on my photo pages on 500pix and Instagram, and encourage you to check those out. But I’d like to take a look this week at an image from my new book, “Urban Fragments.”
This image dates from nearly forty years ago, near as I can tell. The state of my archives is such that its mere existence is something of a miracle. There is no way I can find the “original” snapshot, so this version will have to do.
The Jefferson Memorial is one of my favorite places on earth, not so much for the memorial or its sculpture, which are perfectly fine, but for its site which is extraordinary. The memorial sits on the edge of the Tidal Basin. This is a pretty prosaic description of the portion of the Potomac that allows for some flood control while framing the monument and the incredible grove of cherry blossoms that makes springtime in Washington almost make up for the dreadful summers that follow.
My lifestyle as a self-employed architect allowed me to be one of the few Washingtonians that could enjoy a casual trip to this site. Most other people encountered it in the midst of a horrible morning commute on the way to work. I had no real place to go, so when I found myself by accident involved with thousands of angry drivers, I could bail and find a rare parking spot nearby. A short walk would take me through the trees to the Memorial. In those far away times, there were not even any guards, and I usually had the place to myself.
This image is a good example of what I call an “urban fragment.” It is my attempt to get as far away from the typical postcard as I possibly can. Of course I already had that postcard view, complete with reflection, but it really didn’t make much of an impression, at least to me. My fragment strategy leads to images that require an intense focus on just one aspect of the subject. Here I paid strict attention to the morning light and shadow around a few of the columns of the memorial. These are the simplest of the classical orders - the Doric order relies on strength and simplicity rather than more exuberant details. The bases and especially the simple as can be capitals do not attempt to hide the simple structural basis of the architecture. They easily adjust to the circular nature of the memorial.
A critic of my fragment strategy can always point out the fact that I might have placed so much attention on one thing that I have lost any semblance of context at all. I have made an image of the Jefferson Memorial that does not include the Dome, the Statue, and even the site itself. I would submit that only those who have visited the memorial might have a clear idea of the subject at all. But I think an image like this, for those “in the know” might mean a lot more than the typical postcard. It certainly does to me, forty years later.
]]>MAY 15, 2026
Typical scene in a Cardiff Arcade
Just a quick note today as I am still suffering from jet lag - I managed to make it to 10:00 P.M. last night, which set a record for this week. Fran and I returned a few days ago from a fabulous three weeks in Wales.
We visited four locations in three weeks, which was perfect for our travel style, laid back in the extreme. A week in two spots, three days in another, and two stays in Cardiff the capital which allowed us to adjust for flights across a continent and an ocean.
I wanted to show Fran Wales, which I had visited fifty years ago when I was only twenty and so poor that I tried to look as pathetic as I could at breakfast in the hostel so that someone might share some food that morning. I had a wonderful time in Wales on three pounds a day, which included a pound for one pint at a pub every night.
Wales is a very small place with a very long history. It was the first of the Celtic lands surrounding England - Wales, Scotland, and Ireland - that was successfully conquered by the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman conquerors. The small population, divided by mountains and hills that functioned as mountains, led to a incredible sense of isolation that did not change much from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century. In the end Wales survived as a place apart from England due to this rugged landscape and a stubborn determination to cling to a language that resisted the advance of English.
Wales is a land of great rural beauty, sort of a slightly tamed Scotland that contains rugged coastlines and mountains in a very small area. It is about the size of New Jersey, but with 170 miles of continuous coastal paths and mountains that while only a few thousand feet in height are so rugged that they served as trials for expeditions to Everest.
The sense of history is overwhelming. If you listen to Siri you will soon find yourself on roads that no one but a local has visited for a long time indeed. And these roads are hundreds of years old. We ate in more than one rural pub that had served travelers since Shakespeare’s time - the only thing that was different was that we now drove there instead of of arriving by stagecoach.
The biggest revelation of our visit was that while the countryside was almost exactly as I remembered it from 1976, urban Wales was totally transformed. Wales only has one real city, but the Cardiff metropolitan area contains almost half of the country’s population. In 1976, I didn’t even bother visiting the city, which was a relic of the industrial revolution with little charm, and a reputation for danger. Today Cardiff is a small city with one of the most vibrant downtown areas in all of Great Britain. Say what you will about lotteries as a tax on gullible poor people, but at least the British have used lottery funds in the last fifty years to spread economic and cultural development far from London. Almost every building of any value in the hinterlands since 1976 has been built with lottery funds, from theaters to museums to government infrastructure, so that cities throughout Great Britain have benefited and multiplied this investment many times over in the private sector.
The space pictured in the image I’ve shown you today is an example of this renaissance. Cardiff’s downtown was organized around a series of urban arcades, Victorian shopping streets that were tailor made for a city with a climate similar to Portland. These arcades were pedestrian streets, one or two stories tall, that snaked throughout downtown and allowed for sitting and moving outside but out of the rain. Over a century they rose and declined and rose again as an incredibly civilized way to arrange what are very small shopping malls. Stores and cafes and pubs and restaurants, some almost a century old, have interiors and outside seating in the street under these skylights. During our short stays in Cardiff Fran and I established daily routines centered around these arcades, much like the natives around us. The sense of scale, the light, and the allowance for both movement and malingering made for a wonderful urban experience.
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WASHINGTON AND THE CAPITOL
MARCH 27, 2026
WASHINGTON AND THE CAPITOL
This week I would like to begin a series of essays discussing the images included in my new book, “Urban Fragments.” It has finally gone to print, with only a few remaining typos, and I am very proud of it’s realization. This new book is more of a traditional photography book than my past efforts, It contains a short introductory essay, but no discussion of individual photographs beyond a title and as close a creation date as I can remember. I will attempt to use these blogposts to tell some of the stories beyond these images.
ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT AFTER CROPPING
This image dates from some time in the early 1980’s. It began as a color image on film, which I converted to black and white after I scanned it and did some post processing. The original snapshot’s dimensions are lost somewhere in time. What remains is my square crop which focusses on the relationship between the Washington Monument and the distant Capitol Dome.
My crop eliminates most of the blue sky above the Monument, and most of the surroundings on each side. In this way almost all of the attention is placed on the low, (almost on the bottom edge), horizon line. The image becomes a juxtaposition of one horizontal line and two archetypal shapes - the triangular monument and the round dome in the distance. These two shapes are so recognizable that they are easily discerned even if they are just fragments of the entire buildings.
My telephoto lens has foreshortened the distance between the two so that they appear to be right next to each other, instead of the mile that actually separates them on the Capital Mall. This particular foreshortening also completely disguises the actual geography. Only a Washingtonian realizes that somehow Capital Hill has completely disappeared so that the dome at the top of the Capitol Building now appears as if it is on the same ground plane as the base of the monument. Most of the height of the Capitol, it’s hill and the gradual slope down from the Monument to the Congress at the other end of the Mall has been removed in this perspective.
This unreal geometry removes the image from the documentary realm. It is almost as if this view in Washington now more resembles the 1939 Worlds Fair’s “Trylon and Perisphere” than our national Capital. My conversion to black and white reinforces both the timeless nature of the scene as “sometime in the Twentieth Century” as well as removing the color distractions of the green grass and the red, white, and blue of the flags at the base of the Monument. Black and white forces the viewer’s attention on the geometry and the texture of the stone that makes up the Capital.
FINAL IMAGE
]]>MARCH 13, 2026
This week I would like to announce the impending arrival of my new book of photographs, “Urban Fragments”, which is a compendium of more than one hundred images created over fifty years as an explorer of cities around the world. This is my fifth book of images, and breaks my usual mold in that it is closer to a traditional book of images with limited commentary. I let the images speak for themselves, if you ignore some of the puns in their titles. I have always abhorred the appearance of “untitled” in a caption, as if that is not a title in and of itself.
I will take the opportunity in many blog post this year to briefly comment on these images, their origins, their modification beyond the original capture, and why they have come to represent important examples of my particular photographic vision. I have chosen these images not as a “greatest hits” collection, but as examples of what I have come to call “Rich Photos” - those that I feel exemplify what I do best with a camera and a computer. It is okay if they do not follow the accepted imagery of their locations. In fact, because of the overwhelming amount of imagery assaulting our eyeballs these days, I consider it a victory if my attempts to capture a city do not conform to what is expected.
I have had the privilege to visit the nineteen cities that make up this collection. It took many years for me to realize that the initial sensory overload did not represent my best efforts. It was only when I became comfortable making the kind of images that I was used to making at home that I found that they seemed to come from me rather than the collective brain found on Instagram.
The process of creating a photo book is a joyful collection of images, some of which I have even “lost” over the years, and the eventual trial of culling them so as to allow for a book that at least doesn’t cost me far more than I can reasonably charge for it on the open market. It was only when I explored the publishing world that I realized how delightful it was to just create images and sell them as a photo artist. In the short time I have written these five books, the entire market for photographic books has completely collapsed. The most popular titles, by world famous photographers, rarely sell even two thousand copies around the entire world. After production and sales that saddled most photographers with losses in the thousands of dollars, and untold numbers of unsold books costing them even more money renting storage lockers, most people abandoned the effort. These days when a “book” is offered for sale, it is almost always an “e-book”, which I admit is a category I really don’t even understand. A collection of photographs should occupy even a little space on a bookshelf rather than as just another forgotten download on a hard drive, in my humble opinion.
Only the advent of publishing on demand allowed authors like me to produce printed work that was close to a “real book” without paying for print runs that would never possibly be sold. None of my customers has any idea that the short stack of books that I display at the market represents the totality of the existing copies of each work. I only need to print more when I am close to selling out a particular title. Even though I make far less selling a book than a print or even a coaster, it is undeniably a boost to the ego when someone graciously decides to purchase a collection of my photographs as a keepsake.
I use a company called “Blurb”, like an author’s recommendation of a book on the back cover of a paperback, as my printer of choice. Their particular combination of quality printing, customer service, and reasonable pricing works for me. I am sure that some of the other companies could also fit the bill, especially if you never could conceive of actually selling your work. Most of these outfits allow you to try out their software and products for very little cost, and then email coupons incessantly to reduce the real outlay once you eliminate that last typo in your trial copy. While making money by producing a photography book is another example of a “fool’s errand”, any of you could produce a coffee table book of your work that would outshine any photo album that you could produce in the past. It will elevate your work in the eyes of anyone who sees it - and they do not have to know that it is thew only copy that exists in the entire world.
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FINAL ABSTRACTION
This week I would like to explore one image that I captured in a rainy walk on Division Street last month. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a month and a half since the New Year, but you know how it has been going in the world. Every day a new outrage, and it has been getting harder and harder to concentrate on art. Fran and I managed to get tear gassed for the first time in our lives a few weeks ago. Believe me, that tends to focus the mind, but not towards photography.
ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
This image is typical of my work in the sense that it’s not exactly an image that leaps off the page as a document of a rainy walk in the neighborhood. It is another example of a momentary observation that certainly didn’t stop me in my tracks - and if someone else had observed my interest in this scene, I would have forgiven them if they wondered what the hell I was doing.
At the almost certain risk of ruining this image for a lot of people, I will begin by admitting what this is in the real world. I’ve found that a lot of viewers don’t like “feeling fooled” when this photographic magician gives away the goods, but here goes. This is really a close-up of a bus shelter on Division Street. Our local transit agency discovered that the instant reaction to putting up attractive glass bus shelters around town was that they became transparent canvases for particularly nasty graffiti artists intent on ruining them. It was one thing to apply the usual spray paint, which come off pretty easily due to special coatings, or to try a rock, which can destroy the glass but doesn’t lend itself to any measure of personal notaraity. But then vandals realized that they could scratch musings into the glass, and more creative solutions were required. Using graphic art to fight graffiti has become the go-to strategy. The graphics cannot remove the graft, but it can so obscure it as to render it pretty hard to find. The transparent nature of the shelters is mostly preserved, and the graffiti “artists” seem to realize the futility of their efforts by mostly leaving the modified shelters alone.
INITIAL ABSTRACTION - CROP TO A SQUARE, ATTEMPT A CERTAIN "STRAIGHTENING", CONVERT TO BLACK AND WHITE
The initial snapshot is obviously not exactly closely observed. The proportions are all wrong, the graphics are nowhere near being “straight”, and the colors are a pretty grim gray. The first thing to do was to try to move the image towards abstraction by removing it’s relationship to “real life.” Graphics were emphasized by cropping to a square. I used the leveling tool to try to straighten the image to some extent, but the perspective shift of each “line” of leaning books or what ever these scratching call to mind made that pretty impossible. If you think my efforts are not very convincing, you should see how much worse Lightroom’s perspective tools failed.
ADJUST THE BLACK POINT
It remained to convert the image to black and white since whatever colors were present didn’t seem to contribute anything at all to the image. Finally I adjusted the Black point so that the exposure was seriously under exposed and the emphasis given to the white graphics on a very dark background. The raindrops are still there to give serious observers some clue that this is a piece of glass.
FINAL IMAGE - ADJUST EXPOSURE TO DARKEN THE BLACKS AND LIGHTEN THE WHITE MARKINGS
So there it is - another example of my attempt to make something out of nothing, to create some magic on a simple walk down the street. It is okay if you don’t particularly see the point, but maybe you do, and since it’s my art, it doesn’t really matter to me if you do. Try something like this on your next walk to liberate your art from the “subject” to your own observations of the world. I feel these are much more important
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JANUARY 23, 2026
CALATRAVA'S POETRY, MY ABSTRACTION
As is my custom at the end of every year, I’ve spent the past few days taking a hard look at my images from the past year in an effort to determine a very subjective selection of my “best” images from 2025. This list is an attempt to discover what images best fit the criteria of a “Rich” image that captures my unique view of the world. These twenty images meet no other test than that - and while I hope you find them at least interesting, this is my list, so your opinions will not sway me in the least.
A TRAIN TERMINAL TAKES WING AT GROUND ZERO
The subjects vary considerably, and like most photographers I will pretend that the strength of an image has nothing to do with the “subject” but is based on my interpretation alone. Of course this a bald-faced lie, but what I find interesting might mean nothing to a viewer. My job is to convey my fascination with what I found in my viewfinder, even if you wouldn’t have noticed it, or might swear that it bore little reference with the actual scene I encountered that day.
MY OLD FRIEND T REX AT THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
It has been said that if you want to take more interesting photos, then it pays to go more interesting places. This year Fran and I got to go back to New York for the first time in years, and also spent three weeks on the North Carolina coast visiting Benjamin, Margaret, and Isaac. These trips provided about half of these images. What I discovered as usual is that the excitement of travel is tempered after a few days with the realization that your best images are the ones you usually take no matter how experimental you are trying to act, and that there is nothing wrong with that result.
A BAKERY PORTRAIT
I’ve been working on my next book, and two of these images from San Francisco have been rescued from my archives, which suffered a worse than usual computer debacle as a result of my mistakes and the combined idiocy of Apple and Adobe. It is delightful when you discover a forgotten gem from a trip that you took decades ago. On the other hand it is frustrating in the extreme when you need to use Google to solve a problem with Apple or Adobe’s software. It doesn’t help when my IT advisor, Fran, declares that that was the obvious solution, second only to her eternal admonition to “shut it down” as the answer to any computer mishap.
"BLACK ROCK" PORTRAIT - I WAS SHOCKED TO REALIZE THAT CBS HAD GIVEN WAY TO CHARLES SCHWAB
The balance of these images were created on walks in the neighborhood. I spent a good part of the year facing a steep learning curve with my new old camera. Even though it was ten years old, it was leagues ahead of the nearly twenty-year-old camera it replaced. My attempts at mastery of this new old technology gave me all the excuses that I needed to just go out and see if I could even make this strange new tool work for me. While I marveled at some of the advancements, I gradually concluded that it would best serve me if I continued to use the new camera in pretty much exactly the same way that I had used the old one.
NYU SHADOWS
I also realized that while I loved the Fuji’s mechanical excellence, I was not particularly interested in the myth of “straight-out-of-the-camera” that seemed to thrill my fellow Fuji fanboys. All of these images are so much better having seen a few minutes in Lightroom than they were on the day I captured them on the street. Some of them bear little resemblance to what the Fuji saw that day, as it should be - these are my images, not my camera’s.
ABSTRACT PIER PANORAMA, NORTH CAROLINA COAST
My success, or lack thereof, in actually selling these images at Saturday Market, constituted the other half of the Art/Commerce equation. After adding it all up, my business results were more or less equal to last year’s, which were no great shakes. I did stick to my guns as a “fair weather vendor”, so there were no days sitting in the rain, wind, and cold. I was surprised to realize that I actually attended four more days in 2025 than I had last year and somehow earned less money. The trouble was that my average was down a good $50.00 each day I spent at the Market, no matter how much fun I was having there. It also didn’t help that I had five more days in 2025 than in 2024 when I actually lost money by attending the market that day. It doesn’t take much business acumen to realize that this is not a winning strategy. The sad fact is that even if I subtracted those seven bad days, my average take was still less than last year’s.
SHADOWS AND SURF
I don’t think that I did much worse than most of my fellow vendors. At our annual meeting this year I was not the only one surprised that the number of Post-Covid vendors is now almost equal to the old dinosaurs like myself. While there are certainly people at the Market who sell much more than I do, on my walks around the Market I can’t for the life of me figure out how most of my fellow vendors make a go of it.
ALPENGLOW WITH SEAGULLS, NORTH CAROLINA COAST
ALPENGLOW WITH MOONRISE, NORTH CAROLINA COAST
As usual I made most of my money being a “coaster monger.” This despite the fact that I now sell less than half of the coasters that I did in the last years before Covid, and way less than in my peak years. In fact the coasters I sold this past year constitute about 1% of my total coaster sales in my fifteen years at the market.
TELEPHOTO JUXTAPOSITION AT SAN FRANCISCO'S SOUTH OF MARKET NEIGHBORHOOD
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ATRIUM SHADOWS
My second “magic bullet” at the market, my metal prints, continued to decline. They are just too expensive a product, despite my attempts to discount the price on the theory that I paid for some of them more than a decade ago. I’m almost to the point of considering them as just my own prints, except that my house is too small to display them, and my wife objects to any change in the “collection” that she has gotten used to seeing in her own home.
STROLLING THROUGH LAURELHURST PARK, LOOKING FOR SOMETHING NEW
AN EXPERIMENTAL, AT LEAST FOR ME, WOODLAND PANORAMA CROP ON MT. TABOR
A MULTIPLE FLORAL PORTRAIT, WHICH I STARTED TO PURSUE WHEN SINGLE FLOWERS BEGAN TO BE MUCH TOO EASY
My third “magic bullet” is my “miniature” line which resulted from my customer’s inability to imagine that coasters could be displayed on a wall. These thicker panels continue to sell despite the fact that they cost more than twice as much as the nearly identical coasters. I might try expanding the line this year. Telling tales out-of-school, the vagaries of the international supply chain have now brought down the price of these small wood panels below the inflated price of the coasters! Go figure.
MAYBERRY RFD, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS DIVISION STREET
VISUAL CACOPHONY ON DIVISION STREET
SHADOWPLAY ON DIVISION
I’ve almost abandoned framed prints this year, as the amount I can get for a frame is pretty much exactly what it costs me to buy them wholesale. This doesn’t even include the waste each time I have to get the broom to clean up yet another shattered art work which has met it’s end on the concrete.
A HALLOWEEN DISPLAY IN AN APARTMENT ON DIVISION STREET
THE END, A NEW BAR ON DIVISION STREET
I’ve reached the point on my Market journey where I have reached the enviable position that I don’t really have to make money as an artist. I still have to get up way too early, and spend far too long outside, but the conversations and generally good time I have with the visitors to my little gallery more than make up for it. This year I placed art in 84 more places all around the United States, and in 15 more places around the world, most which I have no right to think that Richard Lishner would have ever made even a minuscule impact in a million years. My art which I have sold in 62 countries around the world now includes artifacts in Delhi and Pune, India; St. Etien and Angulem in France; Halu in Sweden; Brzeg in Poland; Christchurch in New Zealand; and Hotienheim and Ladenburg in Germany. Not bad for a boy from Queens.
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NORTH CAROLINA
JANUARY 16, 2026
MOONRISE OVER THE COAST
Happy New Year to everyone. I’ve been away for awhile, mostly due to the press of world events. It is difficult to focus on photography when there seems to be a new outrage every day on the front page which exhausts my attention span. Even though I have been reasonably successful in getting angry instead of being reduced to despair, it’s been difficult to work on my art. In addition I had another software situation which seemed to wipe out four years of blog posts and took a month to resolve. If you want to read any of these posts they now contain the images that had somehow disappeared, and we are back to square one.
Fran and I had the privilege to visit our son Benjamin and his family in Wilmington, North Carolina for three weeks in October and November. We stayed in a rented condo right on the beach, which was delightful and only twenty minutes from Benjamin, Margaret and Isaac’s apartment in near Downtown Wilmington.
These four images I will share with you today bring out a few truths about travel photography. While it is my belief that return visits will improve your images of a place, it is also true that smaller places have only a certain amount of subject matter available for image making. It is easy to have the feeling that you are just duplicating the images that you created several visits before, and lose a certain amount of energy. One of the solutions to this dilemma is to concentrate on lighting and weather conditions and ignore the fact that you seem to be taking the same photograph again and again. You are not, and of course unless you show a selection of these images like I am doing right now, your audience has no idea that you have duplicated your efforts, since they usually see only one image.
OCTOBER 30 : CLOUDS OVER THE HORIZON
Another problem with the coast of North Carolina, as well as the coast of almost anywhere in the world, is that it pales with the coast I am most familiar with just an hour from my house. The Oregon Coast is so spectacular that it is easy to find every other shoreline a little disappointing. I had to learn how to appreciate what was in summary a small, flat shoreline that held little interest beyond the horizon.
OCTOBER 30 : FISHING IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
I thus started two play with that horizon, and to concentrate on the different, but subtle weather conditions that greeted me each late afternoon when I sat down on the balcony with my camera and my novel as I waited for the sun to go down. I decided to crop these images to a panoramic 2:1 ratio to emphasize the breadth of the beach and to ignore most of both the sky and the foreground which faded into boredom the farther you looked away from the horizon. I placed the horizon in my panoramic frame depending on which half, the sky or the sea, held more interest that day. Most of the time the sky was a clear winner since the beach was so flat and uniform and the surf so gentle.
NOVEMBER 1 : ALPENGLOW WITH SEAGULLS
The other attraction to the East Coast is that of course the sun is in the wrong place, and sunset is out of the question. Now you can shoot sunrise, but it is not quite the same, and I’m not getting up that early in any case. But you can still explore the light qualities of alpenglow, even though there are no mountains to light up on the horizon as the sun goes down behind your back. Each day the ten or so minutes near sunset would provide a slightly different version of the bands of colors that appeared above the horizon. And depending on the day, I found a band of clouds that could reflect the light or something, anything, that could add interest to the never ending seascape below.
NOVEMBER 3 : ALPENGLOW WITH MOONRISE
You can judge how successful I was in getting something out of what was generally exactly the same scene each day. I literally took these photos from the same chair, at about the same time, over a week. The first view was one of the only days that had a little cloud formation on the horizon. Almost every other day of our three weeks was either total blue sky or total cloud cover, neither of which are very conducive tor landscape photography. The next day I finally actually saw a boat in my field of view and turned it into a silhouette in a field of bright sunshine. A couple of days later some birds finally showed up to provide a little foreground interest. And finally the turn of the month brought on a rising moon to add some interest to the late afternoon.
All of these images received only a modicum of post-processing, since the initial interest was the exposure and the colors in the original snapshot. The most important decisions I had to make to create the final image was to crop them to a panoramic ratio and then to decide where to place the horizon within that frame. The colors are very true to the actual conditions, with only a little darkening of the upper sky to focus the viewer’s attention back toward the horizon.
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OCTOBER 3, 2025
THE FINAL BLACK AND WHITE VERSION OF MY VIEW OF THE SUMMIT OF MT HOOD
This week I would like to take a close look at the summit of Mt. Hood. Or rather a second look, since the original photograph dates from 2012. In case you are worried, this view was taken a short distance from Timberline Lodge. Anyone, including me, can easily reach this spot after driving up a little more than half-way to the top. The biggest hazard one faces is your fellow drivers on the road up. My telephoto lens reaches across the remaining six thousand feet to the summit like it’s just across the street.
In reprocessing this image I went in search of an appropriate black and white conversion. This might surprise you since it was only last week that I subtly decried the “Cult of Black and White”, but you can’t say I’m not flexible. This is one of those cases where I believe that a well-crafted black and white version is much more meaningful than the typical original color snapshot. It just takes a little work to engineer the transformation.
THE ORIGINAL COLOR SNAPSHOT
The original composition is just fine for my needs. As usual I am satisfied with just a fragment of the mountain. The telephoto allows me to get much “closer” than my feet can safely transport me, but I’ve left enough blue sky to place the mountain in it’s lofty context. There are no magical clouds about, but how often are you that close to the summit, unless you are a ski bum? You have got to work with what you get, even if you are only sixty miles away.
APPLYING THE PANORAMIC CROP FOCUSES ON THE SUMMIT
THE ORIGINAL BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION
The first thing you do is to convert to black and white in Lightroom, which allows you to convert the colors to various shades of gray. It is at this stage that you can see how the camera “sees” differently from your human brain. Typically you lose all of the color contrast along with the color. In converting to black and white, you are now left with contrast being based on the “luminance” values of the scene. Often you are shocked to realize that very different colors are very close in luminance, and the first conversion to black and white is a very bland gray mess.
LOWERING THE BLACK LEVELS RENDERS THE BLACK PORTIONS OF THE IMAGE AS DEEPER BLACKS.
In working with Lightroom, you must attempt to realistically bring back contrast levels without any colors. The first thing I usually try is to lower the black level by deepening the blacks without affecting any other gray tones. You can really bring the blacks lower because our eyes are used to seeing many true blacks in the world, and they can adjust to a good amount of tones in your image that are black ink without any detail whatsoever.
INCREASING THE WHITE LEVEL ALLOWS FOR A TRUE WHITE TONE IN THE SNOW.
You must be more careful in raising the whites, since our eyes do not react as well to pure whites that have lost all detail - in essence the shear white of the photo paper. So you go as close to that level as you can without “clipping the whites” and losing all detail. But especially with snow, it had better be white or it will look like New York after a week of no snow removal. In fact the only thing that had “better be white” more than snow is the bride’s wedding dress. Your camera’s eyes are easily fooled by snow since it wants all of the colors (and whites) to be as close to the 18% gray that makes up the world as it can. So you frequently have to overrule the camera by over exposing the snow by up to three stops of exposure to get the whites you really want. Lightroom will allow you to just raise the whites without raising the overall exposure and mucking up everything else.
I’ve used Lightroom’s Dehaze control to increase the contrast in the mountain itself, since most of it is several thousand feet from where I am standing. I also apply the usual sharpening and noise reduction adjustments. I brush in some adjustments to raise only the shadows in the darker areas of the slope and the peaks along the ridge next to the sky. These adjustments are important, but I will admit that at these magnifications you might not see, much less appreciate, how they strengthen the image.
THE FINAL BLACK AND WHITE VERSION. THE SKY IS NOW RENDERED AS BLACK, WHILE THE PEAKS ALONG THE RIDGE ARE LIGHTENED TO SEPARATE THEM FROM THE SKY.
But it ii now time to transform the image and totally change the mood. I determine that the sky is till much too light. There are as usual many ways to darken one part of an image, but in this case I will reach back to the color information still existing “under” the black and white. That incredible clear blue mountain sky is the only part to the image that is “blue” and use Lightroom’s ability to just adjust one color, even if it is now just a shade of gray. I lower the luminance of the underlying blue to near zero, and suddenly I have the black sky that I was after - achieving a graphic contrast with the snowy mountain summit. And notice how you can finally see the world's highest ski run inching up the mountain in the midst of the snowfield.
I love abstract imagery, and I delight in the fact that most viewer’s brains can totally accept a graphic landscape image that renders the sky as black, even though they have never seen a black sky before midnight. Black and white has allowed me to make this scene my own - and my black and white rendition will probably be significantly different from many other photographers who try the same strategy.
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SEPTEMBER 19, 2025
A NEW BLACK AND WHITE IN 2025
I’m still recovering from my recent hard drive disaster, but it has given me yet another excuse to go back into my archives and find some old images to play with. One of the most enjoyable games is to take an old chestnut, an image that worked (at least I thought it did) as a color photograph and see, just for laughs, how it would work as a black and white image.
This can be even more fun if you have lived with the color image for a very long time, and never even imagined it in monochrome. These images I will show you today date from 2009, which is somehow sixteen years ago. While I have converted most of them to black and white over the years, I never considered the cover photograph as a black and white, since the color version seemed to work and reminded me of the dismal night I captured the photo. One of the ways I know I am getting older (and wiser) is to look at an image like this and know that I am no longer that stupid as to stand on the Burnside Bridge in the middle of a thunderstorm, on a December night no less, to pursue my craft.
THE ORIGINAL COLOR VERSION, 2009
Recently it has occurred to me that another photographic cult has formed, that of Black and White as the “purest” form of photographic expression, even in the digital age. In a time when black and white film is only available from a refrigerator in the last photo store in town, at prices that rival eggs in New York City, it seems that black and white is entering another golden age.
THE INITIAL BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION, MUCH TOO LIGHT AND BLAND. YOU CAN'T LET THE COMPUTER DO ALL OF THE WORK.
I'VE TAKEN MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS BY USING THE "BLACKEST" PRESET, AND THEN FURTHER LOWERING THE BLACK POINT TO ACHIEVE HIGHER CONTRAST. NOW WE HAVE A GRAPHIC IMAGE THAT REFLECTS A HORRIBLE PORTLAND NIGHT.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love black and white imagery, and have always considered it as an important part of my skill set. It takes a lot of practice to master this particular skill of rendering our colorful world in only shades of gray. As a lover of abstract imagery, I have always found it very interesting that most viewers find it much easier to accept a landscape photographic with a black sky than an image of a portion of their world that they don’t instantly recognize.
HERE I MISS THE COLOR CONTRAST.
I STILL LIKE MY ORIGINAL WEIRD BLUE COLOR CONTRAST DERIVED FROM A SUBJECTIVE WHITE BALANCE OVER THE STRAIGHT BLACK AND WHITE.
I am old enough to remember the days of film, but I never had the opportunity to delve into the darkroom in any obsessed way, and accepted that photos came in color unless they were in an old Life magazine. When I did try black and white film, I used a “revolutionary” english film that allowed you to give it to the one-hour place just like color film. Of course you then had to spend months trying to track down a place that would deliver black and white rather than purple or brown black and white.
IN THIS PAIR I FEEL THE BLACK AND WHITE IMAGE IS MUCH STRONGER, WITH DEEPER SHADOWS AND MORE DETAIL.
When digital came along, and I finally joined the revolution, I was excited to try converting my digital file into black and white. I mastered that art right about the time that the younger old masters finally admitted that the best sensors and printers and inkjet papers could deliver a “proper” black and white image that deserved a gallery setting. Black and white imagery had followed the road from the only technology, to the hobbyist technology, to the fine art technology, to the dead technology, and now to the latest cult.
IN THIS CASE I HAVE STRONG FEELINGS IN FAVOR OF THE BLACK AND WHITE VERSION WHICH ELIMINATES THE BLUE CAST COMMON IN WATERFALL ENVIRONMENTS IN THE CASCADES, AND LEAVES THE SNAPSHOT BEHIND.
I say a cult in the sense that there are now very hip, and rich, people who will “only” shoot black and white and look down on color images as mere snapshots, or in today's context, something that should be seen only on an iPhone. Having finally embraced digital, they now spend very many thousands of dollars on advanced cameras that somehow will only shoot black and white images. It’s like buying a convertible car that doesn’t come with a top - that’s why the first convertibles were finally “convertible.” I know that my skills in the digital darkroom allow me to use the color information still present in my digital negative to achieve a much more interesting black and white that I could ever hope to achieve with old fashioned chemistry.
THIS ONE IS CLOSE. I LIKE THE BLACK AND WHITE'S GREATER CONTRAST AND DETAIL.
Some of these image pairs appeal to this viewer as just a matter of taste. I might like either version just because I am more used to it. Sometimes I have a clear preference. It might be as superficial as just not liking those colors, or finding the colors bland or unimportant. Most of my photography is about composition and contrast, and sometimes I find the contrast in monochromatic tones much more compelling than a pair of contrasting colors. As a person who strives for clear and concise imagery, sometimes the best way to “keep it simple” is to eliminate color from the equation.
THE FINAL BLACK AND WHITE VERSION AFTER SHARPENING AND OTHER TYPICAL POST PROCESSING MOVES THAT DELIVER THE STRONG CONTRAST THAT I PREFER. YOU MIGHT DISAGREE.
I embrace black and white imagery as long as you don’t tell me that I can’t have color too. I believe that there is a time and place for both genres, and that while there are images that seem to work better in either, most will work in both. In my experience, most great color photographs, even those that seem to be all about color, can work very well, if differently, as black and white imagery. But that doesn’t mean that you now throw out the color crayons - keep your options open.
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ANOTHER VIEW OF THE FAIRY GLEN
SEPTEMBER 14, 2025
The proverbial lone tree in the magical landscape of the Fairy Glen.
Another journey back into the archives this week, now that I have finally finished getting those archives back into some kind of shape after my most recent hard drive debacle. Everything finally seems OK, but my confidence level is far less than it used to be. But for now, I can look at my archives and find something worth working on instead of worrying that I won’t find anything at all.
This image is from the Isle of Skye from our visit in 2024. The Fairy Glen is a pretty magical place on the island, even if the purported magic is more a product of tourism hype than anything else. It is a small area with very accessible hiking trails that contains a lot of the same scenery that is found in the wilder parts of the Isle of Skye. This of course makes it a very popular spot, but if you plan your visit to avoid the crowds it can be a beautiful place to spend more than a few hours. While there are some spots that we couldn’t get to because of our age and our intelligence, there was more than enough to do and see that was within our capabilities.
The original snapshot, complete with a very boring sky and a horrid fence across the foreground.
This image is all about the picturesque lone trees that are a feature of this landscape. My object was to highlight this one particular tree as much as possible. I used just a few minutes of time and just a few of the tools available in Lightroom (or any other post-processing software) to bring out the subject of the photograph.
The first and most important tool was to crop the photograph to place more emphasis on my subject. A square crop was not required, but it’s one that I am very comfortable with. This crop accomplished two things. It eliminated the bright sky, which is the bane of most woodland images since your eyes are drawn there despite it not being the subject the photographer is interested in showing the viewer - especially a flat boring sky like this one. While I liked the leading line of the foreground stream, I didn’t particularly want to spend the time to eliminate the annoying fence lines cutting through the foreground. So out they went.
I feel the square crop gets to the point very quickly.
Raising the overall exposure allows for more detail in the landscape.
The second move was to increase the contrast by lowering the blacks and raising the whites. This is hard to show at this small magnifications, but I also raised the exposure which clearly had a major impact on the image.
Using some of Lightroom's tools like Dehaze and Texture brought out more detail in both the background and the foreground, while deepening the exposure again. One step forward, one step back.
The final image. I have used selection brushes on the tree to brighten it's exposure. The I flipped the selection to darken the surroundings. The result is a hopefully subtle emphasis on my tree without the viewer realizing what I have done. If you flip back to the original snapshot you can decide for yourself how I did - or even if the whole effort was worth a damn. I had fun in any case.
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THE TURBINE ROOM, REVISITED
AUGUST 15, 2025
The turbine room at the converted Tate Gallery in London, seventeen years ago.
This week I would like to return to an image I captured about seventeen years ago while traveling with Fran and Benjamin to London. We visited the new (at least for me) "Tate Modern" Gallery on the South Bank of the Thames. This was a much heralded “adaptive reuse” project, in that a surplus coal-fired power plant on the neglected bank of the Thames, but directly opposite St. James Cathedral, had been converted into a gigantic new art museum. I’m old enough now that the Tate has since acquired yet another addition nearby and the South Bank has now become one of the “hottest” neighborhoods in London.
Before you congratulate me on my comprehensive photo archive that allows such ancient explorations, I would state that it is a near miracle that I maintain any records at all. I haven’t written any blog posts in a month due to yet another crisis in the management of my archive. I have become somewhat more responsible in the last few years, and when my latest and greatest external hard drive showed some signs of acting up, I leapt into action. In the past like most men I would have ignored the signs of impending doom and been left in a crisis when my primary hard drive met it’s maker. While I do have a full back-up system, it is still dangerous to let things get that far. So I hit the internet, and within one day a new hard drive was on my porch, immediately christened La Cie 6, which joined the legacy hard drives La Cie Prime, La Cie 1.La Cie 2 and the faltering La Cie 5 in my stable. We don’t talk about La Cie 3 and La
Cie 4, which lie broken and forgotten in a drawer in my study. They have not been destroyed due to the simple fact that several times in the past a “lost” hard drive has suddenly come back to life for no reason. This leads to a sudden emergency push to grab the data before it again disappears. If you think I have too much faith in one hard drive company, you might be right, except for the fact that my experience with other manufacturers has been even worse.
The original snapshot. What a nice red scarf amid the murky brown walls.
My story is not unique. When you have accumulated thousands of images over the years the only way to even come close to preserving them is to acquire multiple hard drives and try to create a system that will duplicate your data so that when a hard drive fails, and it certainly will, you have a simple solution of just buying a new one to take it’s place. I’m not even considered the least paranoid. I have friends who have hard drives in safe deposit boxes, friend’s houses, and pay hundred’s of dollars every year for online solutions which are problematic at best. I even have a friend who buys a new set of hard drives every January 1st, whether he needs a new one or not. The only thing that makes it a little less painful is that digital storage is one of the few things that gets cheaper every time you go to the store. The new hard drive was just as ridiculously large as the suspect one that I worried about, and thirty dollars cheaper. La Cie 6 is in fact eight times as big as La Cie 1, and costs only about 2/3 as much in inflated 2025 dollars.
So I congratulated myself on my digital maturity and started to transfer data to the new hard drive. This is a boring but simple procedure of “dragging and dropping” files from the older hard drive to the new one, hopefully before the older one gives up the ghost. The shear amount of data means that it will take some time, but it can happen in the background, and even over night, so it’s not a trial, until it stops working for no apparent reason. I spent over two weeks alternately cursing Apple, Adobe, and La Cie depending on my mood and the apparent cause of the problems, which of course kept changing. Yes, I did “shut it down!”, the classic solution for all computer problems, but that didn’t seem to help. Since each time I shut the computer down it required about twenty minutes for the terrabytes of data to renew on the hard drives only added to my pain. And of course, trips to “Help” for both La Cie, Adobe, and Apple were completely useless. La Cie tells you how to install the drive, which a child could do without any instructions - but doesn’t tell you anything about why it doesn’t work, because that is simply "unprecedented." Adobe blamed Apple, but offered no help. Apple was better. They acknowledge the potential problems, but their multiple solutions include instructions to follow screen shots that had nothing to do with the ones on the Mac I was trying to fix.
The initial black and white conversion. The computer revealed all of the details of the space and the people that I didn't give two whits about.
I
n the end I persevered, mostly due to some intrepid detective work based on grim experience and dumb luck. Even “asking The Google” which is Fran’s answer after “shut it down!” was no help. It turned out that “drag and drop” had worked like a charm, but that the Mac’s nefarious systems had decided to “uncheck" external hard drives from the devices that were listed on the finder. It’s hard to work with a new hard drive if you can’t find it. The the new hard drive refused to list the contents of the duplicated Lightroom data base. While this is theoretically impossible, since it was all there on the hard drive, I had to spend a week importing 15 years of the Lightroom data base that by all accounts should have already been there.
I wish I could say that everything was hunky-dory, but it’s good enough for government work now, and in the process I managed to eliminate thousands of duplicate files that were gumming up the works. I also found this image from so long ago. The original color shot was useless unless you had a thing for red scarves. The colors of the room and the people themselves were of no use to me. The Turbine Room became famous as an art exhibitio0n space because it could handle almost anything a curator could throw at it. The enormous area of the room, which had contained massive turbines to generate electricity for a good part of London, was impressive all by itself. Several rows of windows and massive skylights didn’t seem to alleviate the overwhelming gloom, which could only be relieved by lighting the art like actors on a stage.
The mystery of the Turbine Room is finally revealed by eliminating most of the superfluous details of the space.
I immediately turned to black and white since the colors were murky at best. The initial black and white conversion which followed standard procedures was completely lifeless. I was not interested in the actual perimeter of the space, so lifting the shadows to reveal details in the walls, floors and ceiling was exactly the opposite of what I was aiming at. In the end the final version concentrated on the light from the windows on the end wall, the skylights up top, and the reflections off the endless concrete floor. None of the highlight detail was lost, while the dark, dark mood of the space was absolutely preserved, at least for me. As was this image from the past, which lives on at least until the next hard drive disaster.
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JULY 18, 2025
BAMBURGH BEACH - DECEMBER 21, 2008 / JULY 16, 2025
This week I will take another spin on my time machine, otherwise known as as my photo archive. Assuming that I have not lost yet another set of images to a hard drive disaster, my photo archive allows me to retrace my steps and revisit a photo session from the past. I can then take another look at a photo that I captured a long time ago, and see if I can make something new. This new interpretation can be based on my changing mood, a new set of post processing tools, or both. My new interpretation might not be an improvement, but at least it will be different - and might reveal a new way of seeing a scene that I might never actually experience again.
THE ORIGINAL WIDE ANGLE SNAPSHOT LOOKING ACROSS THE SEA TO THE SOUTH.
This walk on the beach took place on December 21, 2008 when Fran and Benjamin and I were all a lot younger. We spent three wonderful very short days in a place called Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast in Northernmost England. Bamburgh is a tiny coastal village that was cited as one of the best beaches in England in a guidebook that I had consulted in Powells. We arrived in late December in the midst of a worldwide economic collapse that coincided with our month-long holiday in England and Scotland. Bamburgh is an English version of Cannon Beach, with four hundred souls on another edge of the world. The North Sea is if anything even less hospitable than the Oregon Coast, especially in December. Instead of Haystack Rock holding court, we found one of the most complete castles in England in almost the same position on the beach. Bamburgh Castle is one of a string of castles on this coast (think sentinels like the Lord of the Rings) that guarded Northern England from the Scots or the Vikings depending on the century that you lived as a peasant, or perhaps the Duke, in this part of the kingdom.
CROP TO A SQUARE - THE CASTLE JUST GOT CLOSER.
We had a wonderful time in Bamburgh. We had the entire B&B to ourselves, and a choice of two pubs to visit within our walk to the beach. December in Northern England requires a certain amount of get-up-and-go even if there is not much to do, since sunset starts about 3:00 P.M.
It was cold on the beach that day, but at least the wind was calm and it was not raining. I now realize that this is one other most picturesque spots in England, since I inevitably find myself on this beach again in almost every photo book or You Tube video that comes across my feed. I know of at least half a dozen “famous” landscape photographers who live so close to this village that I could have met them in the pub. Of course their images are a little more picturesque than mine, since I spent a few days on the beach and they spend their lives nearby.
CUE BLACK AND WHITE.
This particular image looks down the coast at the next castle in the fortified ring, Dunstanburgh Castle which lies across the bay a few miles to the South. The original snapshot takes in most of the coastal expanse. My attention was attracted to the castle silhouette and the moody sea and sky.
I instantly decided to crop the image to emphasize the castle, which got larger in the smaller crop - although there is still plenty of negative space in this image. Although the image was already monochromatic, I decided that black and white would be moodier than the blue reality of the scene.
SUBTLY BRING UP THE EXPOSURE TO ALLOW FOR SEPARATE EXPOSURE MODIFICATIONS TO THE FOREGROUND AND THE SKY. BRING DOWN THE BLACKS TO PURIFY THE SILHOUETTE.
The rest of my work was devoted to highlight the contrast and textures inherent to a black and white conversion. I lowered the blacks to purify the castle silhouette while I subtly raised the overall exposure. This allowed me to work on smaller portions of the image. I used Lightroom’s new Texture tool to bring out the texture of the sea, while a judicious use of the new Dehaze slider increased the mood of just the sky. I finally used an adjustment of the highlights in the sky to bring out some more contrast in the “God Rays” that emerged from the dark clouds.
THE TEXTURE SLIDER BRINGS OUT THE CHOPPY SEAS WHILE THE DEHAZE FILTER FURTHER DARKENS THE SKY.
THE FINAL IMAGE ON THIS DAY.
So after an interval of almost twenty years I think I’ve achieved an image closer to how I felt that day on the beach. It hopefully conveys the mood of a coastline on the other side of the world. One of the wonders of this new age of photography is our ability to revisit images from long ago and far away. I encourage you to take the trip.
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JULY 11, 2025
FINAL PORTRAIT AFTER ONLY A FEW MOVES IN LIGHTROOM
Another quick one this week in my continuing campaign to convince you that post-processing is an exceedingly simple and quick procedure that should not be avoided, especially if it “takes too long.” This floral portrait was transformed in only a few steps, and I believe the final product comes much closer to my initial vision of the image.
I captured the snapshot nine years ago on a trip to Vancouver, B.C. to a beautiful garden known as the Bloedel Reserve. I heartily recommend that you stop by this garden if you are anywhere near the area - it is worth a full day, including a ferry ride. This image was taken along with several hundred others that day, and immediately forgotten. mostly because it was underexposed and didn’t reveal it’s worth upon my initial inspection. Today I went back to that day nine years ago and decided to see what I could make of the snapshot.
THE ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
I’ve grown tired of the single floral portrait, so I am more attracted to an image with multiple flowers. The first thing I did was to grab my trusty cropping tool to center my attention on just a portion of the image. The square crop reduced the field of flowers to just a few of the specimens that had caught my attention nine years ago. Google has just informed me that these are Big Blue Sea Hollies.
I BELIEVE THE SQUARE CROP FOCUSES YOUR ATTENTION ON ONLY A FEW BLOOMS
I then made a short series of “global” adjustments to the entire image. I adjusted the exposure, brightening the entire image a touch, and then followed with some sharpening which is pretty much standard procedure for almost every digital image. The main subjects, the interesting white blooms, were coming into their own. Now it was time to separate them further from the background of blue flowers which were competing for attention.
THE FIRST MOVES TO CONCENTRATE THE VIEWER'S ATTENTION ON THE WHITE BLOOMS
Once you begin to affect only parts of the image through selecting only specific areas, your images can begin to reflect your original intent. Each image reacts to different techniques, based on the image, your strategies, and your skill in using Lightroom’s selection tools. These tools seem to increase constantly, so it is up to the individual photographer to try to keep up to date, which includes rejecting any new tools that really don’t live up to their hype. Frequently told standards still work the best.
The trick is to study the image and see what might work best in this individual case to divide the image into areas that can be easily separated from the main body of the image. I worked with white and black points to add some sparkle to the white blooms. The color adjustment tools allowed me to darken and subtly desaturate the blues which only affected the background flowers.
Once you begin to affect only parts of the image through selecting only specific areas, your images can begin to reflect your original intent. Each image reacts to different techniques, based on the image, your strategies, and your skill in using Lightroom’s selection tools. These tools seem to increase constantly, so it is up to the individual photographer to try to keep up to date, which includes rejecting any new tools that really don’t live up to their hype. Frequently told standards still work the best.
The trick is to study the image and see what might work best in this individual case to divide the image into areas that can be easily separated from the main body of the image. I worked with white and black points to add some sparkle to the white blooms. The color adjustment tools allowed me to darken and subtly desaturate the blues which only affected the background flowers.
THE FINAL PRODUCT AFTER PAINTING IN THE BACKGROUND TO DESATURATE THE BLUE FLOWERS AND TO USE THE SHARPENING TOOLS TO REDUCE THE SHARPENING OF THE BACKGROUND.
The final result really allows the interesting blooms to pop out of the background, and my work is complete. I would assure you that even with all of that brushing, it has take me much more time to explain my process than it took to actually get to the final image. I would encourage you to try to play with the post-processing tools at you disposal to quickly transform you own images beyond what you thought was originally possible. Have fun!
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JULY 4, 2025
TODAY'S NEW "FINAL" BLACK AND WHITE IMAGE.
This week I would like to take another look at three of my older images. Every once in a while I explore my archives to see if I can reinterpret an image to find an alternative view to both the original snapshot and my older “final image” after I finished with Lightroom. I find that I can try a new route towards a new “final image” based on a new vision. This new vision is often supported by improvements in post processing software, both the software itself or my skills in using it.
THE ORIGINAL "FINAL" COLOR IMAGE.
I would emphasize that I was not disappointed with my original “final images”. The act of re-editing an image is an exploration, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a viewer like the original or really didn’t see what all the fuss was about. To each his own, but these are my images, and you should be able to stand up for you interpretation of your images despite what anyone else might think of your efforts.
ORIGINAL BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION
SUBDIVIDING THE IMAGE TO ISOLATE THE BRIDGE.
The first image is one of an amazing number of shots I have taken of the Hawthorne Bridge over my last thirty two years living in Portland. I was pleased that I had finally captured an absolutely symmetrical image, for all that was worth. I was little disappointed that the image seemed a little washed out despite my efforts to correct what I viewed as overexposure. I decided to try a black and white conversion so that I could manipulate the exposure beyond what would be acceptable in a color rendition. I darkened the sky much more - if you can accept a black and white sky, what’s the problem with a darker and moodier one? I then lightened the river in the foreground. These moves achieved a better separation of the bridge overall - which of course was the original subject.
ORIGINAL WOODLAND SNAPSHOT.
The second image is one of a series of woodland images from one of my walks in the woods from several years back. I had originally completely overlooked it as nothing special, but I decided to see if I could achieve a clear separation of the foreground trees from the surrounding woodland.
GLOBAL ADJUSTMENTS DIDN'T WORK TO SEPARATE THE TREES.
My usual corrective measures of “global” processing of the entire image actually made things a lot worse, since all of my efforts brought out the background that I was trying to ignore.
DARKEN AND SHARPEN THE TREE TRUNKS.
I realized that it was time to use some of Lightroom’s tools in what was for me an unconventional manner. I first concentrated on the tree trunks, selecting them alone and reducing their exposure and sharpening them to focus the viewer’s attention on my subject
NOW YOU CAN FINALLY SEE THE TREES FROM THE FOREST.
I Inverted this selection, and actually lightened the background exposure and moved Lightroom’s new “Dehaze” slider in a negative direction. I then reduced the sharpness in the background and my separation efforts were complete. While I am not pretending that there was some kind of sudden fog bank in the woods, The two foreground trunks certainly are now the subject of the image.
THE ORIGINAL COFFEE AND CROISSANT SNAPSHOT.
The last image was a snapshot I had take in the midst of a coffee and croissant a few years ago in one of my ultra-cool neighborhood’s French outposts. I was intrigued by the series of reflections in the coffee house storefront. Like the Impressionists, I understand the power of print in literally forcing the viewer to at least pay some attention to an image. It really doesn’t matter if the words are incomplete, backwards, or in a foreign language - the left side of our brains will try to make some sense out of the word fragments, and you are halfway there to drawing them into your image
CROP TO A SQUARE TO EMPHASIZE THE REFLECTED PRINT.
The original exposure was all wrong, and the image was far from straight. After I cropped and straightened the image to emphasize the printed matter, I converted to black and white. the colors were doing me no favors, and I thought that monochrome would further emphasize the print in the window.
ORIGINAL MONOCHROME WITH MULTIPLE FLAWS.
The only problem in an image that focuses on reflections is the reflections that you don’t want to include. I’m not pretending that this is an easy procedure, but Lightroom has improved and added several tools in the years since I captured this image, and I took full advantage of several that I had not really explored. Once you get started, it’s not really easy to stop, sort of like weeding in the garden. But you can divide the job into several segments to prevent post-processing madness, and lo and behold, you will eventually eliminate all of the reflections you do not want to see. Whether anyone else would have seen them in the first place is not that important.
ANOTHER FEW MINUTES TO GET RID OF THE REFLECTED REAL ESTATE SIGN AT LOWER RIGHT.
THE "FINAL" IMAGE, AS CLEAN AS I CAN MAKE IT RIGHT NOW.
I would encourage you to renew your acquaintance with some of your older images to see how your post-processing skills have changed and improved over the years. It’s fun to discover new gems in forgotten places.
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JUNE 20, 2025
MT. HOOD AND IT'S REFLECTION, MODIFIED TODAY THREE YEARS AFTER THE FACT.
Another quick one this week. Let’s look at just one image, taken three years ago on one of my very infrequent trips across the river to Vancouver, Washington. I have been here long enough that I have an ingrained prejudice against one of our largest suburban areas. Vancouver is another example, like Beaverton and Gresham, of tiny farm towns that have somehow grown into gigantic suburban conglomerations despite every effort of people like me to fight sprawl in our fair city. Vancouver achieves a special place in suburban hell in that it is not even in our state! In fact the entire reason for Vancouver’s existence is as an anti-urban doppelgänger just across the river, representing everything that Portland is not supposed to be. Our urban planning maps for the last thirty years have left the area north of the river as the “Great White North”, with absolutely no details, as if only monsters dwelt up there. That nickname also reminded people that even though Portland is consistently ranked as one of the “Whitest” cities in the nation, it was still not White enough for some of the people who chose to live across the river. Light Rail has never extended North of the river for the simple reason that people there have feared that Portland’s relatively minor amount of diversity would follow the rail lines and sully the suburban vibes in Washington. Anyone who tells you that this is not so is just plain lying, even though Vancouver is in reality way different than it used to be, since so many Portlanders have moved there. At least I hope that no matter how long I live into the Twenty-first Century, I will never have to hear about the "Twin Cities” along the Columbia.
MY ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT. PRETTY WASHED OUT, BUT AT LEAST THE HORIZON IS FAIRLY STRAIGHT. YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED HOW MUCH BETTER THIS VARIANT WITH THE MOUNTAIN SLIGHTLY LEFT OF CENTER IS TO IT'S SISTER WHERE THE MOUNTAIN IS SLIGHTLY RIGHT TO CENTER. YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE ME.
Well I’ll try to end that rant, but the reality is that even though I’m sure that the vast majority of the people of Vancouver are no doubt as nice as can be, they live in an environment totally foreign to my own. This is the land of strip shopping centers, endless developments, and a lot of the retail that has never bothered to put down roots in Portland. In fact, it is our small taste of the vast majority of the American landscape that is stridently “Not Portland.” I am also very prejudiced against any place that uses numbers for both directions of the street grid. I am completely discombobulated when I confront a completely forgettable intersection labeled 248th Street and 162nd Avenue. But it is still the Northwest, and the mountain still has a way of showing up in the most unexpected places to prove that despite everything, it is still America the Beautiful. This view of Mt. Hood and it’s reflection is captured on the shores of Vancouver Lake. Don’t tell anyone.
LOWER THE EXPOSURE IN BOTH THE SKY AND IT'S REFLECTION AND THINGS START TO POP. WHILE YOU ARE AT IT, INCREASE THE WHITES AND THE CONTRAST TO HIGHLIGHT THE MOUNTAIN ITSELF.
The original snapshot was obviously overexposed. The sky is washed out, but at least the horizon is not totally wonky. I did all the usual exposure modifications, but the color rendition is still a little wishy-washy, for lack of a better term. The answer, or at least my answer, is to each for the crop tool to eliminate some of the sky and the foreground. I am a big believer that if you are capturing a grand landscape like this one you might as well go much wider than normal. This crop, which make the frame two times as wide as it is tall, allows the mountain to assert itself in the midst of what is actually a pretty quiet landscape. The crop is much wider than anything that can be achieved with a normal wide angle lens, and the mountain remains larger in the frame.
THE BORING BLUE SKY ENCOURAGED ME TO CONVERT TO BLACK AND WHITE. NOW THE WHITE MOUNTAIN IS EVEN MORE THE CENTER OF INTEREST, AND MOST OT THE LITTLE SUBURBAN DETAILS ARE LOST TO THE BLACK FOREST ACROSS THE LAKE.
As usual in my pursuit of not making another snapshot, I then converted the file to Black and White. I feel that the contrast and detail achieved in monochrome more than makes up for the loss of color. Black and white also allows for deeper exposure modifications, so that I can get rid of any suburban angst across the lake in a deep watery black.
TODAY'S SQUARE CROP DROPS THE WIDE VIEW FOR A STRONG EMPHASIS ON OUR ICONIC MOUNTAIN. WHAT IS LOST IN BREADTH IS MADE UP WITH IMPACT. I HEAR A COASTER CALLING IN THE BREEZE!
The final variant that I created this morning flips the entire script. The square crop totally centers the mountain and it’s reflection in the frame, and fairly shouts “Mountain!” It’s up to you to decide which rendition you like best, as long as you admit that the “crop is the thing.” This comes in the week where one of my post processing programs has announced that it has a new AI Crop tool which will take care of selecting the proper crop for your image. Yet another nail in the coffin of photographic civilization. Why don’t we just let the camera do everything and abandon all our artistic efforts so that my image will be no better or worse or different than yours? Somehow I don’t think this is what we had in mind when we picked up our first camera.
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JUNE 7, 2025
A WHITE ROSE WITH YELLOW BUDS! A "CLUMP" OF FOUR ROSES AT PORTLAND'S ROSE GARDEN.
This week I would like to concentrate on just one image that will illustrate my strategies for creating images that reflect my vision rather than documenting the subject at hand. Friends had come to Portland for a couple of days, it was actually nice out, and a trip to the Portland Rose Garden was in order.
I’ve been to the garden millions of times, but this was the first time with my new/old Fuji, so I was eager to see how it would change my routine in creating what I call flower portraits. I have done so many of these that I am frankly bored with them - I have a system, and it works for me, and there’s not much to it. The challenge I set for myself these days is to shoot what I call “clumps” - more than one flower - to keep it interesting. This intermediate position is on the way towards garden photography, which I consider very challenging as opposed to concentrating on one flower.
MY ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT OF THIS "CLUMP" OF WHITE ROSES, ONE OF ABOUT FIFTY SHOTS I TOOK IN THE HOUR.
The Fuji was, as per usual, as frustrating as it was delightful to use. This camera has so many controls, dials, and buttons that I’m still more concerned on not hitting them by accident than I am taking advantage of their power to facilitate image making. There are usually multiple ways to accomplish the same thing, which frequently confuses the issue since something has changed without my knowing what I have done. On the other hand, the advances in technology have certainly changed my shooting style in the garden. I have begun to concede that on a pleasant day there is absolutely no need to drag along the tripod. The Fuji can produce clean files at 6400 ISO, a clear four stops greater than my old Canon. Combine that with a camera that is half the size and weight, with improved vibration control, and no mirror to shake, and you have the ability to capture images without worrying too much about not being able to hand-hold the camera. I have begun to realize that I can produce very sharp close-ups at speeds as slow as 1/4 of a second, which is truly unbelievable. This ability to broaden the exposure parameters to at least eight times the range of my old Canon allows me to concentrate even further on what I want to achieve, rather than how I’m going to manage to somehow deal with the current lighting conditions.
THE FIRST THING TO DO IS TO CROP.
In making a floral portrait, I use three main strategies. The first and most important is to reduce the context as much as possible through both cropping and exposure. The object is to concentrate almost solely on the flower head. If you can’t frame the image as tightly as you can in the field, then crop with abandon when you get home. In my way of looking at flowers, there is almost no limit to just “getting closer” as an overall compositional strategy. And there is no rule that says that you must show the entire bloom - just like in a human portrait, you can choose to leave out a little forehead.
EXPERIMENT WITH THE WHITE BALANCE - THIS IS ACTUAL DAYLIGHT WHITE BALANCE, AND IT IS CLEARLY AN EXPERIMENT IN TERROR. THE "REAL" WHITE BALANCE IS COOL TO THE POINT OF BEING BLUE.
I also treat the white balance with a grain of salt. Choose whatever looks good before you’ve introduced an obvious color cast. Frequently something warmer or cooler than the actual conditions will produce a much better portrait than slavishly worrying about the truth. After all, it’s just one flower head, and if you’ve gotten close enough, whose to say that the actual color of the flower was way different than your interpretation? White balance will frequently affect color much more realistically than actually changing hues of colors directly, which male pattern color blindness will lead to less than satisfying renditions.
THANK GOD, WE ARE BACK TO "AS SHOT." BUT THERE ARE STILL TWO MAJOR THINGS LEFT TO DO. WE MUST CRUSH THE SHADOWS TO ELIMINATE THOSE PESKY LEAVES IN THE BACKGROUND. AT LEAST I THINK SO.
Finally, the best way to “shine a light” on your flower is to crush the shadows surrounding the bloom. Avoid dealing with the overall exposure by just lowering the surrounding shadows to near black, losing as much of the details of leaves, dirt, and branches as you can. If you can’t lower the shadows enough directly, you can use other selective color controls to reduce the saturation of those green leaves, or just use a vignette to lower the exposure of whatever context your crop has still allowed to dilute you floral portrait.
NOW THAT'S BETTER. NO MORE ANNOYING CONTEXT.
NOW DON'T INCREASE THE OVERALL EXPOSURE, JUST BOOST THE WHITES TO MAKE THESE WHITE ROSES COME ALIVE.
SOME SUBTLE CHANGES - BOOSTING THE YELLOWS FOR THOSE BUDS AND STAMENS, APPLYING SOME "TEXTURE" AND SHARPENING, AND WE ARE DONE.
Once you have made these three major changes, any other post processing is really just gilding the lily, even if you are shooting a rose. A little sharpening, a tiny increase in the saturation of the main color of your flower or one of it’s details, and you are done. There are many controls you can use to achieve nearly the same results, but as long as the viewer doesn’t “see” them, you have achieved your floral portrait.
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MAY 23, 2025
RAW FILE TAKEN IN CAMERA, WITH "VELVIA" FILM SIMULATION APPLIED.
Yesterday I spent an hour walking through a small portion of Mt. Tabor Park in Portland. Mt. Tabor is a prototypical Portland Park, in that it is an oasis on the city’s East Side, in the midst of an eclectic mix of Portland neighborhoods that despite considerable gentrification, still exhibit an incredible mix of socioeconomic characteristics. It contains areas that contribute to the entire city, including playgrounds, three historic reservoirs, picnic areas, hours and hours of hiking trails, and view points that include the Downtown skyline to the West as well as Mt. Hood to the East. It is one of the centers of Portland Bike culture, with most of the roads closed to auto traffic at least one day a week. And in the "Keep Portland Weird" category, it is the venue for the annual full-scale adult soap box derby, which is as crazy as it sounds. Oh by the way, did I mention that Mt. Tabor is the only ancient volcano within the city limits of an American metropolis?
A CHANGE TO "PRO NEGATIVE" MOSTLY JUST REDUCES THE SATURATION AND CONTRAST, JUST LIKE CHANGING FROM VELVIA FILM.
It was a typical day in Portland, with sunshine and rain drops present in the same short hike. I shared the park with hikers, joggers, bicyclists, tourists, and some people who you wouldn’t want to spend an extended time with by yourself. The amount of dogs in the park showed how much the neighborhood maintains it’s ownership of the space - I was in a small minority of people who were not accompanied by at least one canine. The fact that it was just a typical Tuesday meant that there were not that many people present in the park. I saw only one other person with a camera the entire time I was there.
LIGHTROOM'S "ARTISTIC 5" LACKS POETRY BUT WARMS UP THE IMAGE A BIT.
The park contains an incredible number of trees, some of which if not in fact Old Growth might as well be. There are many areas in the park which are more forest than park, and often the only clue that you are in a park is the occasional park bench and the fences to prevent you from falling off the hill or down the stairs. I took a series of photos which tried to capture the woodland in early spring, with the overall sense of being encased in green.
"LIGHTROOM 2" SEEMINGLY JUST INCREASES THE EXPOSURE WHILE REDUCING THE GREENS AS A RESULT.
This is one of those photos, taken of a stand of trees right off the park road. I am indebted to Andy Gibbs, a photographer from Vancouver, Canada whose woodland images I admire. His work has given me the “permission” to try a horizontal framing of a subject that usually encourages a vertical orientation. I am trying to show the forest, not a portrait of a tree, so that the subject becomes the series of tree trunks that make up this portion of the forest. By ignoring the park road, I can get an approximation of the wilderness that makes up a large portion of the Northwest environment outside of Portland. The horizontal orientation also cuts off most of the sky, whose brightness compared to the overall scene is the bane of all woodland photography.
OK NOW WE ARE GETTING SOMEWHERE BY GOING TO "LIGHTROOM BLACK AND WHITE #3". BUT THE REDUCED OVERALL EXPOSURE IS SOMEHOW MAKING THE BRIGHT SKY EVEN MORE OF A PROBLEM.
Before you start to realize that these twelve versions of the same photo are in fact pretty subtle, I would both agree and caution you that their appearance on the web does not really compare to a larger reproduction in real life. That is why that the true measure of a photographic image is as a larger print you can at least hold in your hands. I hope that you enjoy these images in my blog, but they in no way compare to even an 8 x 10 print in the real world. Which is not say that some of the differences are in fact rather subtle. I have already commented in my appraisal of the “Cult of Fuji” that the Fujifilm film simulations, which now number in the hundreds, can defy characterization in the same way that my wine magazines can differ on the “undertones” of what might be a fantastic beverage but is in the end an alcoholic form of grape juice.
THE PROBLEM WITH ROMANTIC FILM SIMULATIONS IS WHEN THEY DON'T SEEM TO FOLLOW THE HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS. "BLACK AND WHITE RED FILTER" DOESN'T OFFER THE INCREASED CONTRAST I EXPECTED FROM A RED FILTER, SO IT'S A BIT DISAPPOINTING.
Thus the first six versions of this scene are un-retouched variations that just use Fujifilm and Lighroom film simulations without any further post processing. This, according to the "Cult of Fuji" is "straight-out-of-camera" as long as you ignore the fact that you have delegated your post processing to the camera's computer when you were snapping the photograph. If you think these are subtle, remember that there are dozens more available. Some are just horrible (at least for this image) while others defied my ability to define any real difference from the ones that I had already tried. The fact that Fujifilm labels their versions after old Fujifilm film stocks and Lightroom just unceremoniously numbers them is really the only difference in the range of possibilities.
FINALLY IT'S TIME TO DO SOME POST PROCESSING. I'VE LIFTED THE SHADOWS, ADDED SOME "TEXTURE", SUBTLY INCREASED THE SATURATION OF JUST THE GREENS, SHARPENED THE ENTIRE IMAGE AND ADDED A SUBTLE VIGNETTE - DARKENING THE EDGES OF THE FRAME TO DRAW YOUR EYES TO THE CENTER.
My arguments for the utility of post processing might also be hurt by these reproductions on the web, but I assure you that the next two versions which contain work on exposure, contrast, color, and sharpening improve the images greatly when viewed at larger scales. None of this work is out to fool you, but only to subtly heighten what drew me to the scene in the first place. With post processing, if you notice it, I have gone too far. On the other hand, if you leave it to the camera, you have left money on the table.
HERE I'VE REDUCED THE HIGHLIGHTS IN THE SKY ALONE, BUT IT'S SOMEHOW TAKEN A LOT OF LIFE OUT OF THE IMAGE.
NOW WE ARE FINALLY GETTING SOMEWHERE. DON'T REDUCE THE EXPOSURE IN THE SKY, JUST GET RID OF IT. YOU DON'T HAVE TO AGREE WITH THE RESULTS, AS LONG AS YOU ADMIT THAT THE CAMERA CANNOT DO THIS BY ITSELF.
It is when you have the guts to change your framing after the fact that you really take control of your images. By eliminating much more of the sky with a 1:2 crop, I have increased the focus on the trees and removed the need to further reduce the exposure of the sky. Sometimes you can mitigate problems with your image by just cropping out the offending areas instead of just modifying them. I leave it to you to decide if I have left out too much context, but I think the panoramic crop is closer to what I saw in my head, not in the viewfinder.
ADDING SOME SIDELIGHT TO BRING SOME MORE LIFE TO THE IMAGE. IT'S ALL RIGHT IF YOU MISS IT. TAKE A LOOK AT THE TREE IN THE CENTER.
The decision to go for black and white is also to taste. As usual, black and white allows for more exposure modifications and increases the focus on textures by eliminating color. The thing with woodland imagery is that it is really monochromatic as well, since overwhelmingly green images do not contain that much more “color” variations than black and white versions of the woodland.
NOTE THE INCREASED TEXTURAL EMPHASIS AND EXPOSURE VARIATIONS ALLOWABLE IN BLACK AND WHITE. THE LAST BRUSHING ON THE TREES SEEMS MORE APPARENT. IT'S OK IF YOU MISS THE GREEN - I DO TOO.
Finally, the last two versions of the image contain subtle brushwork on the tree trunks that mold them by introducing a side lighting that brings out their round dimensions. If I worked on these images for an hour, at least half the time was devoted to this effort. I’ve lightened the right sides of the tree trunks and darkened the left sides to add some life to the overall exposure. It’s alright if you miss it, but I assure you that it is there. It is so subtle that I don’t even see it while I am doing it, only at the end of the process when I go back to the previous version. Of course we are rapidly reaching the area of diminishing results, where Fran declares that I’m just crazy because she can’t see a difference at all; that’s when I call it a day, and finally declare the image as "finished."
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THE EASE OF POST PROCESSING
MAY 16, 2025
BIKES AND TATOOS ON DIVISION STREET
This week I’d like to approach the debate over post processing from a slightly different angle than last week’s diatribe against the current fascination with “straight-out-of-camera.” I do believe that post processing, in whatever program you like, to the extent that you wish to pursue it, is a very important part of the modern photographer’s toolkit. But if you don’t want anything to do with it, that’s OK too. I just think that you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And that is coming from a world-class curmudgeon. So I would like to show a few examples of how I processed several images, and emphasize the simplicity and speed the transformations involved. I do know my stuff, and I have been improving for over a decade, but I would never claim to be an expert. In fact, I am of the opinion that you can learn almost all you need to know in a very short time. Anyone who tells you that this is THE WAY to do things is ignoring all the other methods available to accomplish the same thing. My God, Lightroom is such an old program that it still has cascading menus, if that is your thing.
This first image is an experiment in street photography. I was amused that the security guard seemed to be providing store security while standing outside the store. The final image cropped away superfluous information, darkened the blacks, lightened the whites, and focused the viewer’s attention on the guard. This took about 30 seconds at most.
The next pair of images took even less time, since I just used a different Fujifilm film simulation to pop the colors a little. But then I used Lightroom to raise the shadows to bring out the stair details and then increased the contrast to then emphasize the shadowily in the image.
Another pair of images from Laurelhurst Park required even less work in Lightroom. I really only reduced the exposure a tad, which usually helps with increasing the saturation in woodland imagery.
The lakeside images received the same treatment. I increased the saturation of the greens, which were obviously the main subject. But far more attention was given to deepening the exposure of the pond, which really brought out the reflections. Selective sharpening in that area brought out the texture of the water. All of this work required less than one minute.
Obviously the daffodils had much more impact in color than in the original black and white. But far more important to me was the crop, which eliminated a lot of useless context.
The next pair of images dates from a trip to New York in 2012. I was enamored of the grid and the reflection on a tower in Lower Manhattan, and was very happy with the final image. The other day I came across the image and wondered how it would do in Black and White. As usual, it became more dramatic because black and white allows for more exposure manipulation without losing reality (as long as you accept that the world no longer is in color).
On the other hand I do miss the color contrast which was part of what drew me to the image in the first place. Even such a dramatic change required only a couple of minutes to accomplish - and there are probably at least a dozen other black and white variations available to experiment with.
Finally, let’s return to Division Street, where I noticed a display of definitely ordinary bicycles outside a tiny bike shop. And if you need another tattoo, you can go right next door. You don’t have to find this street scene as riveting as I did, but I think that the 30 seconds of work on the image really paid off. Yes I increased the contrast, which could have been accomplished by changing into another one of the dozens of black and white film simulations available with Fujifilm. But your camera doesn’t know how to crop to achieve the composition you actually wanted, and restricting yourself to the original quick snapshot framing “straight-out-of-camera” seems to really limit your creativity. Will anyone really miss the extraneous wires at the top of the original frame? Is my square crop that centers on the bicycles any less pure? Why would anyone resist the 30 seconds it took to modify this image?
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MAY 2, 2025
FINAL IMAGE OF A CONSERVATORY AT A GARDEN FRAN AND I VISITED LAST WEEK. THE LAST OF DOZENS OF SHOTS I TOOK THAT DAY. YES, IT IS KIND OF PERVERSE TO TAKE BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES OF SPRING FLOWERS, BUT WHAT CAN I SAY?
This week I would like to take a stand against the popular notion that there is something purer about just ignoring the power of post-processing and sticking to your results achieved at the moment you snapped the shutter on your camera. This “straight-out-of-camera” ethos has taken hold for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad, but I believe that it is based on several falsehoods and cedes back too much power to your camera. My title for this essay might be deliberately provocative, but let us take a look at one image that I think proves my point.
ONE OF MY TYPICAL "GRAB" SHOTS WHEN MY WIFE HAS SAID IT WAS TIME TO GO MINUTES BEFORE I TOOK THE SHOT.. I WAS INTRIGUED BY THE GLOW OF THE CONSERVATORY IN THE MIDST OF DARKER FOLIAGE, BUT OBVIOUSLY CARELESS ENOUGH TO NOT EVEN MAKE A COMPOSITION THAT WAS INTERESTING, MUCH LESS STRAIGHT.
I never sat in an office all day working with a computer. I can understand that those who were chained to a digital “helper” might not want to duplicate this relationship once they got home and tried to enjoy their photographic hobby. The operative word is “enjoy”, and I would never tell a hobbyist to sit down and suffer over an image. If you do not want to enhance your images with just a few mouse clicks, that’s alright with me. Just don’t adopt the attitude that your refusal to do so makes your imagery somehow “purer” than a carefully considered enhancement of your original snapshot.
This attitude ignores the history of photography, where almost all of the most admired images ever exhibited were the clear result of manipulations, large and small, done in the darkroom. The original confusion was the elevation of documentary photography, especially photo journalism, to the heights of the critical discussion of all photography. I believe that the search for the “truth” in an image both denigrated and ignored the real power of photojournalism. The fact is that the heroism involved in actually witnessing historical events with a camera so overpowered aesthetic considerations that it was easy to insist that no manipulation of an image was to be allowed. This ideology persists today, even when "deep fakes” call into question the entire meaning of truth in photo images.
I'VE CHANGED THE FLAVOR OF FUJI'S BLACK AND WHITE FILM SIMULATION. DON'T BEAT YOURSELF IF YOU CAN'T REALLY SEE MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE, BECAUSE IT IS VERY SUBTLE. THERE IS JUST A LITTLE MORE "GLOW" IN THE CONSERVATORY. IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, THE "CULT OF FUJI" HAS NOW PRODUCED HUNDREDS OF THESE FILM SIMULATIONS THAT ALLOW PHOTOGRAPHERS TO INSIST THAT THEY ARE NOT MANIPULATING THEIR IMAGES BECAUSE THEIR CAMERA IS DOING THE JOB.
Now it is one thing to shoot for the New York Times, but it is another when you are merely pursuing your art. Everyone has a certain “red line” that they will not cross in the digital darkroom. Some of the “straight-out-of-camera” ethos evolved from the obvious distortions of the first forays into post-processing - which are frequently duplicated every time a beginner tries their hand at moving those all-too-overwhelming sliders. It is incredibly easy to g o way overboard, and some very good advice has always been to return to an image the next day when it is very easy to see that you have gone too far. This natural tendency is only compounded by the never-ending search for “likes” on social media. In an age where any image on your phone must leap out from a million other images every day, it’s a miracle if your mother even notices your work. Thus the various efforts industry-wide to sanction oversaturated, overworked, and downright manipulations of the scenes in front of the camera in a vain effort to be noticed.
STRAIGHT-OUT-OF-LIGHTROOM HAS A LEAST FINALLY STRAIGHTENED OUT THE COMPOSITION. IS THERE SOMETHING "PURE" ABOUT A WONKY HORIZON LINE?
The real “truth” about post-processing is that the photographer has failed if the audience has realized that something is not up. The goal is not to fool anyone, but to deliver an image that is enhanced without losing any reasonable relationship with reality. There is a wavering line between photography and “photo imagery”, but like pornography, you know it when you see it. Are those colors outside of any known natural palette? Is that Moon so large that the Earth is about to be destroyed? Maybe removal of some trash in the foreground is OK, but what is that dinosaur doing over there?
NEVER, NEVER CROP YOUR PHOTOS. IF YOU MISSED IT IN CAMERA, JUST SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES. PLEASE JUST GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE.
The ultimate fallacy of the “straight-out-of-camera” ethos is that it ignores the manipulations that your own camera goes through in delivering that JPEG that you consider “purer” than your own post-processing. A RAW file is a pure digital negative, whose objective is to render every piece of digital information that your camera has captured. It is so objectively “flat” that camera makers quickly realized that consumers would be appalled if they thought that was all their camera could deliver. Thus even the image on the back of your camera that appears when you are shooting in RAW is actually a JPEG! You only see the actual RAW file when you open it up in Lightroom on your computer.
THE FINAL BLACK AND WHITE IMAGE. JUDICIOUS EXPOSURE ADJUSTMENTS BOTH WITHIN AND OUTSIDE OF THE CONSERVATORY HAVE FINALLY DELIVERED THE IMAGE I WAS AFTER - A GLOWING GARDEN STRUCTURE IN THE MIDST OF DARKER VEGETATION. I BELIEVE THE IMAGE IS STILL "REALISTIC." AND IF WE ARE GOING TO ARGUE AGAINST "ABSTRACTION" IN THE FACE OF "TRUTH" THEN WHY ARE WE ACCEPTING BLACK AND WHITE IN THE FIRST PLACE?
IF YOU WERE WONDERING WHAT THE "TRUTH" LOOKED LIKE, HERE IT IS. MOST OF THE SAME MANIPULATIONS WERE DONE TO THE COLOR VERSION, BUT IT IS NOT AS SATISFYING TO AT LEAST THIS VIEWER. I CAN'T GET RID OF THE GREEN COLOR CAST, WHICH IS VERY UNDERSTANDABLE IN SINCE THE OVERALL SCENE IS SO GREEN. THE COLOR CONTRAST IN THE COLOR VERSION SEEM TO FIGHT WITH THE CONTRASTS IN LIGHTING THAT I WAS MORE INTERESTED IN WHEN I VIEWED THE SCENE.
The idea that the camera’s JPEG is sufficient, or even better than what you can achieve yourself with a few keystrokes and a modicum of education and experience, is fundamentally absurd. Even my new-old Fuji, with the ability to “create” dozens of “film looks” in camera, does not have anywhere the computing power of my average Mac laptop. While my Fuji can allow me to see and shoot in half a dozen flavors of black and white “in camera”, I hope that you can see that just a few minutes and a few keystrokes deliver a far closer image to the one I had in mind out in the field. You don’t have to agree, you don’t have to even understand what I was after, to see that the final product was certainly different than what I saw when I pushed the shutter - and in my humble opinion, more than worth the trouble.
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THE ROOKIE STREET PHOTOGRAPHER
APRIL 25, 2025
OBLIVIOUS IN NEW YORK
On my last full day in New York, I left for the city early in order to explore one of my old haunts, Greenwich Village. I resolved to try my hand at something I almost never do, photographing people on the street. I am usually photographing subjects like architecture that are standing still, far away, and never talk back. The idea of actually photographing people on the street was very intimidating, but here I was in New York, the prime subject of street photographers for at least one hundred years. If I could spend an hour or so alone without a serious confrontation I would consider my experiment a success. As usual, very low expectations opened the possibility of actually coming away with a few images that were not total failures.
A BAKER FROM THE STREET, COMPLETE WITH REFLECTIONS.
My new Fuji camera was half the size and weight of my old camera. While certainly not stealth, it promised a more unobtrusive footprint on the street. It allows me to shoot in both Raw and JPEG, which enables me to “see” in black and white while holding the camera, knowing that I am also capturing all of the color information so that I can convert back to color later. So I ventured out on the street and into Washington Square Park to New York’s denizens in their native environment.
SHE DID CATCH ME BUT SHE DIDN'T SEEM TO MIND. OR MAYBE HER SCORN IS HIDDEN BY MY LOUSY FOCUS.
I learned a few things during my first hour as a street photographer. One was that I was not at all ready to actually photograph people if they were aware of my presence. I realized that while I was not interested in actually spying on people, it felt most comfortable to photograph a scene in totality before I shot one last image of a person alone. That way I became part of the environment and could be ignored by most of my subjects. Of course it helped if these subjects were in their own little world, unaware of what was going on around them, including me. Since this was New York, I was far from the only guy walking around with a real camera, so that also helped me fade into the environment.
HUMAN WITH PHONE. I HAVE ANOTHER DOZEN OF THESE.
I soon realized that a Tuesday afternoon did not provide enough activity to really take advantage of finding subjects in the park. I was not ready to take photos of the chess hustlers, especially since they had no takers - there was not much need to take images of hustlers waiting around with nothing to do. Ditto for the jazz musicians, who seemed to think that they deserved donations for photographs. Thus I just started walking around, seeing what I could make of a quiet day in the park.
HUMAN WITH BOOK. OLD SCHOOL!
The disconcerting thing that I discovered was that almost everyone was on their stupid phones. I could have taken dozens and dozens of people of all ages and races, all glued to their phones. It was refreshing to actually come upon the rare person that was actually reading a book - they instantly achieved status as a NYU student. Even someone just zoning out and starring off into space provided a little more interest.
HUMAN ZONING OUT.
After reviewing my results I found that I need to get a lot quicker in both my framing and my mastery of quickly focusing on the subject at hand. I was so off of the “decisive moment” that I could only hope for another moment while I fumbled my way to an image. Upon inspection, most of my images were not sharp enough to survive observation at full size. Thank God for the limitations of the web. While it was frustrating, I did have fun. I also realized that street photography is even more of a solitary pursuit than my usual walks around the city looking at the built environment. I don’t see how anyone could do this with someone else either whether they were also shooting or just tagging along.
SHADOW PLAY IN THE PARK
SHADOW PLAY A FEW STORIES UP
I also realized that I could also occasionally take some more standard “Rich” images even while I pursued my street goals. Just because I was out to shoot people didn’t mean I couldn’t notice my usual shadow play in the park or on the street. Having a mission doesn’t mean you have to avoid any distractions that might catch your attention.
PUTTING THE STREET INTO STREET PHOTOGRAPHY. THIS LITTLE SHORT STORY ACTUALLY REQUIRED A CINEMATOGRAPHER. THE TWO UNSEEN TRUCK DRIVERS IGNORED THE REALITY OF NEGOTIATING THIS TURN WITHOUT HITTING ONE OR BOTH OF THE PARKED CARS FOR A GOOD TEN MINUTES WHILE ALSO BLOCKING THE CROSS STREET. TRY TO IMAGINE THE CURSING AND HORN BLOWING. IF SCORSESE HAD BEEN AROUND, SOMEONE WOULD HAVE MET THEIR DEMISE.
OBLIVIOUS. A QUICK SHOT MADE POSSIBLE BY MY SUBJECT'S DETACHMENT FROM THE WORLD. POST-PROCESSING ALLOWED ME TO FURTHER ISOLATE HIM THROUGH CROPPING AND LIGHTENING THE SUBJECT AND DARKENING EVERYTHING ELSE. HE DOESN'T KNOW AND HOPEFULLY YOU DON'T EITHER. I'M JUST TRYING TO TELL A STORY HERE PEOPLE, NOT WORKING FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES.
So I am satisfied by my results even while I realize that this was even harder than I thought. I hope you like some of these images straight from New York. And rest assured that even though I hope that none of these images are over-processed, there is no way that those Fuji “straight-out-of-camera” JPEGS even come close. Extraneous limbs on the edges of your frame do not make for great photos. If you saw most of my spontaneous horizon lines you would think that I didn’t do half-bad while I was drunk. I still do not understand people who think that taking stock of your results on the computer is somehow cheating, or just takes too much time. I spent much more time on the street than at the computer for most of these images.
]]>APRIL 18, 2025
THE MUSEUM THAT ATE 53RD STREET - THE NEW ENTRY IS ALMOST HALD A BLOCK FROM THE ORIGINAL BUILDING IN THE DISTANCE.
I reserved one of our days in New York for a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, ostensibly to check out the new (for us) addition and remodeling to the museum. Fran’s not much of a museum gal, but she agreed to one museum visit for the week. One of the clues that you are of a certain age is when you realize that a building that was remodeled when you were an adult has now been remodeled AGAIN. We went to visit one of the greatest museums in the world to see how it had been transformed by its latest modernization.
I realized the second that I emerged from the subway that I was really engaged in a trip back to my youth. The “neighborhood” that I understood best in Manhattan had been the area that I had visited as a teenager when I journeyed to “the city” to have fun while I was supposedly engaged in serious research for schoolwork. I was really just asserting my independence that was otherwise confined to endless games of stickball, poker, and trips to the ballpark.
ONE OF THE "XYZ" BUILDINGS THAT OVERLOOKED OUR OFFICES ACROSS SIXTH AVENUE, SO CALLED BECAUSE THE THE THREE TOWERS WERE NEARLY IDENTICAL. THE INHUMANITY, THE INHUMANITY!
Later this became the scene of my only real stint as a New York office worker. I had spent a semester in London, and returned to Binghamton so disappointed in my return to reality that I moved heaven and earth to make sure that the fall semester would be my last upstate. My dissatisfaction with school was only heightened when I somehow was allowed to take a graduate seminar in History. I so loved being treated as a graduate student that I completely revised my dreams of what to do with myself after school. Of course I didn’t realize that this class had really been a lark for me and had no relationship with what graduate school would really be like. But that’s another story.
So I graduated without graduation and went back to my childhood bedroom while I applied to grad school. My father asked an old friend to pull some strings to get me a job in his office, and suddenly I was commuting to Midtown to become the worst secretary in all of New York. This job was as close as I ever got to “working a no-work job” like a young mafioso on a construction site. The real problem was not that I was totally unqualified, but that there was no real job - despite my total lack of proficiency at being a secretary, I still didn’t have enough work to ever really fill the day. But I was only let go when the boss cashed it in and sold the firm to an agency from London. There were now two problems. My accent obviously didn't fit with an English travel agency, even in New York. And when I visited our new prospective digs across the street for the first time, I realized my days were numbered. This was 1977, and every office in the building opened off the elevator in exactly the same way - glass doors fronting a glass desk with one receptionist holding forth. It really didn't matter if the receptionist was as unqualified as I was - my legs just didn't make the grade.
MY FAVORITE BUILDING NEARBY, ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS SO DIFFERENT. NICKNAMED "BLACK ROCK" FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, IT WAS THE HOME OF CBS AND A SYMBOL OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM. THE FACT THAT IT IS NOW OWNED BY CHARLES SCHWAB REALLY SAYS IT ALL ABOUT HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED.
This office was one of the last real travel agencies, as well as being a Broadway ticket agency. We are talking the dawn of time here people. I would answer the phones and type up the itineraries of people who were taking cruises around the world. I soon realized that I knew where most of the best-selling authors of the day were a lot of the time since I was typing up there book tours. The big boss was literally such a bastard that I also had to walk around the theater district to visit box offices to procure tickets since the boss had so rankled every theater in town that his ticket agency could only purchase tickets on the sly.
There were only three things that received the boredom of this non-job. Amazingly I enjoyed the commute on the subway, which allowed me both glorious views of the skyline and a slice of the world’s population that I had never experienced growing up in Bayside. The highlight of my day was lunch, which I couldn’t afford but allowed me almost an hour walk around Midtown after I ate my sandwich at my desk. Each Friday I allowed myself an actual lunch out, which allowed me to sample my first real gyros and sushi, among other things.
THE NEW WORLD. THIS IS THE NEW TOWER DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OLD TOWER. OH, BY THE WAY, A PERFECTLY FINE TEN-YEAR OLD SMALL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN CRAFT WAS TORN DOWN FOR THIS MoMA EXPANSION.
But the real highlight of my days became the excuses I found to just not go home right away after work. I realized that most of the museums in New York had one free night a week that would allow me to sample some real culture. My favorite became the Museum of Modern Art, just a short walk from work. Once a week I would literally close the place at 9:00 P.M., having spent a good three hours exploring the entire museum. At that point the Museum was small enough that one could really develop a relationship with the entire collection. And it was free! When I was fired from this non-job my father’s friend took me aside and handed me two vouchers for basically free round-trip tickets to London that Summer. I was so happy that I skipped through Midtown like a Broadway dancer on the way to the British Airways office.
A few years later I was now an architecture student visiting New York frequently enough to acquaint myself with the “new” MoMA, now grown twice the size after a skyscraper condo addition that paid for the expansion. Yes, it had some aspects of a retail mall, but it was a really fancy mall. The five stories of escalators were a bit excessive, but at least they overlooked the sculpture garden, still one of the best public spaces in any city on earth.
ONE OF MY OLD FRIENDS, A SIKORSKY HELICOPTER THAT COULD BE STRAIGHT OUT OF MASH, STILL FLIES ABOVE, BUT SEEMS TO HAVE LOST IT'S PRIDE OF PLACE IN THE DESIGN COLLECTION.
AT LEAST THE SCULPTURE GARDEN IS STILL INTACT. IT'S JUST HARD TO FIND IT, SINCE THE MUSEUM'S LAYOUT OBSCURES IT FROM THE GALLERIES. YOU CAN STILL SEE IT FROM THE VARIOUS EATERIES, MOST OF WHICH ARE NOT AVAILABLE TO THE HOI POLLOI LIKE YURS TRULY.
There aren’t too many images of the latest version of MoMA, since I found the new layout a real disappointment. Another condo tower addition to the West provided the money for much more exhibit space at it’s base - the Museum had basically swallowed almost the entire block of Midtown where it had started just before WWII. The only problem was that there now was a giant black block of no-entry space right in the middle of all of the floors of the museum. The bank of escalators was still there, but they overlooked nothing, blocked away from the sculpture garden and the city beyond. Most of the overlooks that allowed for some decompression when entering another part of the collection were now gone or very much compromised.
A PORTRAIT BY A CZECH ARTIST NEW TO ME, FRANZ KUPKA. I WONDER IF THE SUBJECT LIKED IT AS MUCH AS I DID.
And of course part of the problem was the intervening years of my acquaintance. Instead of having the Museum mostly to myself on a weekday evening, the crowds, even on a random afternoon, were totally overwhelming. The steps were seemingly never-ending, and those Breuer benches had gotten way too low after almost 48 years. The only thing that was refreshing was that the collection was displayed very differently than in the past, with the “greatest hits” interspersed with contemporary art of the time that was very new to me. This I enjoyed immensely.
THIS IMAGE SAYS IT ALL TO THIS CRITIC. AN IMPECCABLE WHITE CONCRETE COLUMN FRONTS PART OT THE MYSTERIOUS BLACK BOX THAT CUTS OFF THE MUSEUM FROM THE SCULPTURE GARDEN. NOT TO BE CONSPIRATORIAL, BUT PRAY TELL, WHAT IS HIDDEN IN THAT BLACK BOX?
So you can go home again. And MoMA will always be there, and it remains one of the greatest museums in the world. I only hope that they get it right the next time it eats up another part of 53rd Street.
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THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
APRIL 11, 2025
LOST IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE, OR AT THE DEEP END OF THE POOL, OR SUPPLY YOUR OWN ANALOGY.
This week I would like to take a short look at the new wing of the American Museum of Natural History, by the renowned architectural firm Studio Gang from Chicago.. This is the newest addition to the museum, which follows the well-worn model of an overwhelming grand hall surrounded by exhibits that was pioneered in Wright's Guggenheim more than 66 years ago. The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation is in fact a long name for an addition to a museum which already contains more than 2,500,000 square feet of space in 45 interconnected buildings.
I must say I was totally underwhelmed by the experience, even though Fran appreciated it much more than I did. I was left with the feeling that I couldn’t find any justification for the entire affair. The addition provided a new entry point for the museum, which was unnecessary for a museum which already had a surplus of entrances all around its astonishing exterior. I never could figure out what the addition’s program of exhibits was all about - it seemed to lack any theme that held it together. But most important for this observer was that I failed to understand what this sculpture was trying to say about the museum, its collection, or even its place in New York City.
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY THAT THE SPACE IS NOT PHOTOGENIC. I USED TO LOVE SWIMMING THE LENGTH OF THE POOL UNDERWATER, AND THE SKYLIGHTS REASSURED ME THAT I COULD ALWAYS BREAK THE SURFACE AND COME UP FOR AIR.
I’ll be pretty mean. If you ever wondered what it would be like to enter a moody, under lit, upside down swimming pool some four stories tall, now you can find out. The sculpture was built entirely like a swimming pool, with concrete plastering an arbitrary steel frame. There are no orthogonal lines allowed except for the floor plates required for people to circulate throughout the space. A series of skylights are scattered above which provide most of the lighting without indicating any rational order for the space. There are only a few windows looking back towards the city besides the main entry window and door where you can enter the space. The connection to the rest of the museum is tentative at best. While the "geologic landscape" provides an excuse for this sculpture's place in the museum, and its form, I didn't buy it in the least.
I have never been to the Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian, which opened a few years after we left Washington for Portland oh so many years ago. This wing resembles that museum’s exterior, whose sculptural layering was justified by its resemblance to the sandstone mesas of the American West. No such meaning is applicable here. Now if you judge the power of architecture mostly by its reality as a giant sculpture, I suppose that you could ignore most of its other reasons for being. But when you don’t even like the sculpture, it’s hard to justify almost anything else.
A PORTION OF THE EXTERIOR OF THE LAST ADDITI0N TO THE MUSEUM, THE ROSE CENTER, BUILT IN 2000, WHICH CONTAINED NEW EXHIBITS ON SPACE IN A TRANSPARENT CUBE FACING NEW YORK.
I STILL LOVED THE ARRAY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, TO SCALE, WHICH FILLED THE GREAT ROOM SURROUNDING THE SUN, WHICH CONVENIENTLY HOLDS THE NEW PLANATERIUM. THE TINY CORNER OF THE SUN SHOWS IT'S SIZE RELATIVE TO TO THE PLANETS.
THAT BIRD STILL HASN'T MOVED OFF THE SHOULDER OF THE BISON IN ONE OF THE DIORAMAS THAT IS OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD.
AND OF COURSE THE BLUE WHALE STILL COMMANDS ONE OF THE LARGEST ROOMS IN THE MUSEUM.
The museum of course is still one of the wonders of the world. We had a wonderful time just trying to explore a tiny part of the exhibits. As natural history museums go, it is only really challenged by museums in London and Washington. My sisters, nieces and brother-in-law barely got to do anything beyond making sure that we saw the “greatest hits” from our respective childhoods. I was flummoxed by the layout, which seemingly required you to get lost to find what you were looking for. And the “Disneyfication”of the museum, which required additional payment for some of the permanent exhibits, seemed to further remove the museum from any economic reality just outside it’s doors. I suppose that New Yorkers solve this by membership, but it left a bad taste in this tourists mouth when I realized that my $35.00 entry fee didn’t cut it if I wanted to enter some of the most popular parts of the museum. One of these exhibits was the Butterfly Vivarium in the new entry hall, which required a separate admission.
ENCOUNTER WITH ONE OF MY OLD FRIENDS. I MIGHT HAVE TAKEN PRETTY MUCH THIS SAME IMAGE IN PARTS OF FOUR DECADES.
In conclusion, of course you should devote a day to visiting this incredible museum. You can even get a stamped ticket that will allow you to decompress in Central Park or grab lunch on the Upper West Side before you take on a little part of the rest of the museum. Most of this small collection of images were grabbed when I stumbled upon some of my favorite exhibits while getting lost in the museum. I hope you can discover some favorites of your own someday.
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APRIL 4, 2025
A BIRD ALIGHTS AT GROUND ZERO
This week I would like to show a small set of images from my first trip to Ground Zero. I was determined to visit the museum and memorial, even though I knew it would bring up very unpleasant memories. Fran and I decided to devote most of a day there, and I am very glad that we could spend the time, and that we were lucky (smart?) enough to go on an ordinary day without the crowds of a Summer weekend. Here are my thoughts on the memorial and the museum, warts and all.
It still grates that the museum was not made part of the Smithsonian. Our decade in D.C. taught us that museums, especially those that memorialize a key point in our nation’s history, should be free to the public. I would recommend that you purchase a special pass that allows “free” admission to a few NYC sights, so that at least you won’t have to stand on line and fork over $30.00 or so to get in - you can pretend that your government can sustain the memorial and the museum without you having to chip in.
THE TOP FLOOR OF THE MUSEUM BUILDING WITH THE FREEDOM TOWER BEYOND.
We arrived a few minutes earlier than our appointed admission time, and I found the initial layout of the site very disorienting. We emerged from the subway at one of several stations that are fairly close to the site, and soon realized that we had entered a precinct that was part of the city, but separate at the same time. We crossed the first street, and found that it was mostly utilized by the police vehicles that were still ubiquitous at the site. Then we confronted the Oculus, Calatrava’s gigantic sculpture masquerading as a train station. It is breathtaking and at the same time looks like it was dropped down in Manhattan from outer space, with no real relationship with the present day memorial site or with my memories of the former site of the Twin Towers. Fran remarked that it looked like it might even crash into it’s closest neighboring tower.
Across another empty street and we arrived at the museum building, which was a fairly opaque two-story parallelogram with its own arbitrary placement on the site. At least the entry plaza, which had enough snaking lines to handle thousands, was actually empty, and we counted our blessings.
THE LAST STRUCTURAL PIER THAT LEFT "THE HOLE" WITH SIGNATURES OF THE VARIOUS WORKERS AT GRAND ZERO IS ONE OF THE FEATURED ARTIFACTS IN THE GRAND SPACE WAY UNDERGROUND.
This building was designed totally from the inside, and successfully allowed the crowds to be uplifted to the second floor with a sloped roof that directed views toward the site and the Freedom Tower across the ponds that marked the original towers. The building’s sequence almost disguised the fact that we were about to plunge a good three or four stories below grade to confront the original foundations of the towers destroyed on September 11th.
Anyone alive on that day has a special relationship with the events. Our experience was unlike that of those waking up on the East Coast. I liken the “tape delay” to watching the Super Bowl, when West Coast residents realize how our day differs so much from the vast majority of Americans who still cling to the Atlantic coast. As usual my son Benjamin woke up his dad to drive him to school, but this time with a confusing story about a plane having hit the World Trade Center. I tried to comfort him with my knowledge that a bomber had barely scratched the Empire State Building during World War II, but as we turned on the television I realized that something was very wrong. And then we watched with horror as the second plane turned and hit the other tower. For the next hour or so we watched New York and Washington under attack, all occurring live on TV before we went school
A DETAIL OF ONE OF THE REFLECTING POOLS IN THE MEMORIAL.
A few months before September I had stood in the plaza wondering if I should bother to take the elevator up to the top of the tower before deciding that I could always come back, and since it was a nice day, I might as well walk across the Brooklyn Bridge instead. A little more than a month after September 11th, Benjamin and I went on a preplanned surprise trip for my Mother’s birthday on an empty plane to an empty Kennedy Airport, while Ground Zero still smoldered.
The museum experience was just what you might expect. It didn’t take much twisting of the knife before I was nearly bawling. Each turn on the way down to the bottom provided another small reminder that would hit each person differently. And even though I knew that the journey of the second doomed plane was right around the corner, I could barely control myself when it eventually showed up. But I had two overwhelming emotions as we journeyed down to bedrock. One was that the museum was nearly empty, with no real attempt to tell a story besides “being there” and exhibiting a few giant artifacts from the site. The second was that Fran and I were not the oldest people there, but that most of the visitors were not reliving memories, but seeing this story from their history books
ONE MEMORIAL POOL AND A FLIGHTLESS BIRD BEYOND.
The museum in my opinion suffered from the same problem as most of the museums that came after the Guggenheim. It is arranged absolutely backwards. While the sequence downstairs is actually handled quite well, and the ending space under the original towers is large and impressive, this weird “entry lobby” is as empty as any main space that attempts to mimic the power of the Guggenheim's main space. The power of the Guggenheim is that the main space is an empty gesture, with no relation to the art on exhibit all around it. But the art is not hidden, since it is always in an uneasy relationship with that space. All of it’s successors try and fail to come up with as powerful a grand space, but then in various degrees divorce the art in ordinary rooms beyond and separated from the great space.
WHAT A SCULPTURE! TRY TO IMAGINE WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE FROM THAT CORNER OFFICE THIRTY FEET AWAY.
The separation here was almost total, compounded by a way-finding problem made almost impossible by a total lack of signage. As an architect, I relied on faith that there had to be exhibits somewhere, but only this instinct finally led me to the main exhibit hall underneath the second tower. It was only there that Fran and I found a museum so comprehensive that we barely got through it in more than the three hours we spent there holding back tears. I would submit that you wouldn’t have to be a total doofus to miss the entire thing - that’s how badly it was hidden.
EXTERIOR DETAILS CRY OUT FOR INVESTIGATION.
We emerged outside to the memorial, which I liked better than Fran, who thought that the water dropping into the pools was just way too loud. I thought that the design was quite successful in dealing with the fact that we were overlooking a giant graveyard. Just like at the Vietnam memorial, the names were overwhelming in both their variety and normalcy. The act of adding a carnation to the names denoting that today was their birthday was a reminder that everyone named had died on the same day at this place.
THE INTERIOR IS AS OVERWHELMING AS IT IS DIVORCED FROM FUNCTIONAL CONCERNS.
The biggest disappointment of the entire site was Calatrava’s Oculus building. It is an incredible sculpture by an architect/engineer whose work continues to amaze even when you know what is coming. The photographs that I managed to take in a few minutes only scratch the surface. It is one of those buildings that is so photogenic that a photographer struggles to say anything new even while he or she realizes that it will take many visits to even realize when you are getting a good shot rather than just another ordinary one. It’s just so beautiful while being completely arbitrary. It makes the Guggenheim look like it completely fits in to the Upper East Side - the concrete spaceship has been superseded by a white bird of prey in Lower Manhattan. The ribs invite detailed and abstract images that have as little relation to the actual building as the building has to the site itself.
LIGHT AND SHADOW PLAY AMONG THE RIBS.
The Oculus is supposedly a train station that serves the PATH trains to New Jersey and connects to myriad subway lines as well. We entered the building, were overwhelmed by the space, and realized that while 250,000 thousand people might actually travel though here every day, the train station was so hidden beyond what was really another mall that the entire building was called into question. In fact the Oculus’s only reason for being should have been as the main entry space to the museum. It should have been the Museum and Memorial in one, and then this incredible space would have had some justification. Maybe someday.
THERE IS ALMOST NO LIMIT ON THE ABSTRACT COMPOSITIONS THAT YOU CAN CREATE OUT OF THIS SCULPTURAL SPACE THAT DEFIES ANY RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS SITE OR ITS FUNCTION AS A TRAIN STATION, OR EVEN WORSE AS A MALL IN THE MIDST OF A MEMORIAL SITE.
MARCH 28, 2025
HUSTLE AND BUSTLE IN THE NEW TRAIN HALL
This week I would like to present a brief overview of our whirlwind week in New York City at the end of February. Fran and I had a marvelous time, courtesy of our friends Vinny and Steve, who let us stay in their historic and way-too-small apartment in Park Slope. Our trip would have been impossible without their graciousness. I would also comment that the crazy people who run America’s air travel system provided us with a fare to NYC cheaper than anything we could get for anyplace farther than Seattle. While it doesn’t make any sense, you do get surprises in the death throes of American capitalism. We also did get to have some quality time with my family. All in all, it was a marvelous week.
TRUSSES AND BALLOONING SKYLIGHTS
Which is not to say that it wasn’t hard work. I will always be a New Yorker, but it really hit me just how hard it was to deal with New York even while you are having a great time. Everything is just such a big deal, even when you are on vacation and not worrying about normal life. As a retired tourist, I still felt I hadn’t worked as hard in years. We severely restricted what we tried to do, and still felt that what we did really required twice the time as we had in one week. For each day in the city, it would have been delightful to spend another day in our neighborhood in Brooklyn to decompress.
A SKYLIGHT ROOF
I’m going to turn 69 years old next week, and don’t think it didn’t occur to me that it was just a little bit (or a lot) harder to get around the city. The first time a middle-aged women offered me her seat on the subway it struck me like a lightning bolt. I turned to Fran and declared that I was now officially and undeniably “OLD.” I only regained some of my mojo a few days later when I realized that people were asking me for directions as if I had any idea on where they should go. I might be old, but I still looked as if I belonged in the city.
TRAIN HALL DETAIL - SOMEHOW THIS CLOCK DOESN'T CUT IT. DARE I SAY IT SEEMS A BIT CHEAP?
We spent a large portion of five days in the city, going to different parts of Manhattan - Midtown, Downtown, the Upper West Side, the Village and SOHO. We went to three world-class museums, ate out three times, and saw one show on Broadway and one way off Broadway. It was a lot. Here are some initial impressions as a photographer, an architect, and a former New Yorker.
YOU CAN GET "ON" LINE
The first architectural monument that I decided I must try to see was the new (for me) addition to Pennsylvania Station. We accompanied Vinny and Steve there while they caught Amtrak for a weekend visit to Philadelphia. The Moynihan Train Hall turned out to be really fine attempt to mitigate the world’s worst architectural train wreck when the city allowed the demolition of Pennsylvania Station back when I was a little boy. This was only comparable to allowing the Dodgers to leave Brooklyn.
YOU CAN DO A SOPHISTICATED LEAN
The disaster that is Madison Square Garden, which was allowed to crush the station underground, ruined the entire train experience in the nation’s most important train station. Ever since then the Dolan family, which ruined both the Knicks and Rangers, has also ruled out any attempts to move the Garden even across the street in order to re-invent Penn Station. Even as I write this, there are several new plans for moving the Garden, which I can confidently say have very little chance of going anywhere. The Moynihan Train Hall tried to expand the station by taking over the next block to the West, which housed the main Post Office in an exceedingly grand building that totally dwarfed the needs of the Post Office, whose sorting and collection facilities had moved away. The skylit Train Hall replaces the exterior inner courtyard of the Post Office and provides a reasonable facsimile of the old station, as long as you had never been there.
OR YOU CAN GIVE IN AND HIT THE FLOOR. IF I DID THIS, I WOULD NEED HIS HELP GETTING UP.
I have only a few regrets about the project. The architects at SOM, led by David Chiles (who died recently) had too many masters, and they had to keep a remnant of the post office on the site. One of the grandest stair cases in New York, two stories high and an entire block wide, does not lead to the expanded train station but to the tiny post office which still gums up the works and denies the train hall a grand entrance to the street.
DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A PLACE TO GET AN EXPENSIVE BITE?
Another regret is that the most important clock in New York, which reigned in the middle of the old station, has been replaced by an under-detailed clock which doesn’t deserve to be in my photograph. More importantly, there is no place to sit in the station. The only real waiting area is beyond glass and only for ticketed passengers who don’t seem to understand that if they are not in the train hall itself that they will have little chance to grab a good seat on their train once their track is announced and all hell breaks loose. So in what looks like an attempt to make sure no homeless person has a place to sit, no one has a place to sit. It’s been a long time since I could recline on the floor of a train station with my backpack, but that is what I’m supposed to do.
THE GRAND STAIR TO NOWHERE
The Train Hall actually seemed to be an upscale food emporium, with more places to eat and snack than most cities in the United States. In fact the depressing Food Hall, which would not rate in most malls in the nation, seemed like an incredibly unnecessary afterthought once we attempted to find a restroom. Why do you need a Food Hall if the entire Station seems to be food hall?
JUST OUTSIDE THE STATION, GLIMPSES OF NEW YORK
ON THE STREET YOU CAN FINALLY SEE GOTHAM
Rant over. The Train Hall actually was a grand public space, with no real purpose except to simulate the old really grand space. I don’t even know if anyone actually arrives there, or if it is just for people leaving New York. And as a true New Yorker, any grand place that just leads to New Jersey is a real disappointment indeed. More next week.
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MARCH 14, 2025
JUST AT THE ENTRANCE OF BADWATER BASIN, THERE IS ONLY A VERY SMALL POND OF "BAD WATER" (MUCH TOO SALTY FOR HUMANS OR ANIMALS) BEFORE THE VAST MILES OF SALT THAT COVER THIS PORTION OF THE VALLEY UNTIL THE DISTANT MOUNTAINS. YOU MUST CROSS THOSE MOUNTAINS BEFORE YOU GET TO THE OTHER PART OF DEATH VALLEY THAT STRETCHES UNTIL THE EVEN TALLER SIERRA MADRE. THERE IS NO WATER FOR ALMOST 80 MILES.
This week I would like to show some images from my return to Death Valley late last year. It was a delightful trip, in that I got to show Fran this extraordinary place which she had never seen before. In her love of geology and desolation, she finally met the ultimate landscape that she can place before all others. Death Valley lives up to its name in that you can kiss almost all vegetation goodbye. This is desert, salt flats and mountains - and literally almost nothing else. Visitors hopscotch from viewpoint to viewpoint along a small number of roads in a vast landscape, well aware (or they should be) that you do not lightly go off the beaten path. There is always the chance that you will not make it back.
THE SAME VIEW IN BLACK AND WHITE, WHICH HIGHLIGHTS BOTH THE GRIM MOOD AND THE TEXTURES OF THE SALT.
I learned a few things on my return to Death Valley. I had visited the area on a road trip with Benjamin from Los Angeles back when he was in graduate school. I now realize how stupid I was to try to visit in the Summer. At the end of October Fran and I were certainly in the desert, but we were not in Hell on Earth. Benjamin and I endured temperatures that reached 121 degrees, and required a bottle of water for each us every time we left the car for what you might characterize as a little stroll. This time with Fran it barely exceeded 80 degrees and made life much more enjoyable if a little less memorable. Another realization was that a couple of days beyond a destination wedding was not nearly enough time to see most of the Valley. Benjamin and I had driven the nearly 100 miles across the park, traveling past vast fields of sand dunes and across a mountain range to see the Western side of the Valley. Fran and I barely got to spend time in only two areas of the park on its Eastern edge.
A TURN TO THE LEFT AND A PANORAMIC CROP SHOWS THE FULL EXTENT OF THE MOUNTAIN RANGE THAT DEFINES THIS PART OF THE VALLEY. THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF HUMANITY IS THE SMALL THIN LINE OF THE ONLY ROAD OVER THE MOUNTAINS, WHICH IS BARELY VISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE.
Yet these two areas were absolutely spectacular. Badwater Basin is one of the lowest points on Earth, more than 282 feet below sea level. In reality it was only a short drive from our motel, but the heat had prevented Benjamin and I from visiting the area. Just like in the mountains where you lose a degree climbing every 100 feet in elevation, in Death Valley you gain a degree every 100 feet you descend into the lower reaches of the desert. Benjamin and I turned around when we reached 121 degrees with 200 feet to go and wisely never got to Badwater Basin.
TURNING AROUND, YOU CAN SEE OTHER RIDGE THAT DEFINES THIS PART OF THE VALLEY. ABOUT THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY UP IS SEA LEVEL.
THERE ARE A PLENTY OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR PICKING OUT GEOLOGICAL DETAILS AND COLORS IN THESE RIDGES WHERE NO MAN HAS HOPEFULLY EVER GONE BEFORE.
This time Fran and I allowed ourselves to venture a good half of a mile into the salt flats beyond the information/warning signs in this vast a deadly landscape. We merely walked until the vast majority of the visitors had decided to turn around, and turned around ourselves. When sand turns to salt, you know that you have reached the ultimate in desolation. Only the distant mountain range, which is responsible for blocking any rain from getting anywhere near the valley, relieves the unrelenting landscape. You search in vain for for a rock, much less a tumbleweed.
ZABRISKIE POINT IS ON THE EASTERN EDGE OF DEATH VALLEY. A VAST AND FORBIDDING JUMBLE OF MULTI-COLORED ROCK FORMATIONS THAT YOU CAN EXPLORE ON SEVERAL PATHS. I FOUND IT MORE ENJOYABLE TO USE MY ZOOM LENS FROM THE SAFETY OF THE RIDGE. THOSE PEAKS ARE MILES FROM WHERE I AM STANDING. THIS IMAGE IS STITCHED FROM ABOUT SIX SHOTS TO TAKE IN THE VAST AREA.
The other area we explored was Zabriskie Point, named for an executive of the borax company that mined the area before the formation of the national park. This area is a mountainous jumble of multi-colored rock formations that provide a virtual rainbow of geology as far as the eye can see. While there are multiple opportunities to hike in the wilderness, the first ridge is accessible from a paved path that almost anyone can handle. What you miss from walking along the desert path s below is more than made up by the amazing views in every direction from the ridge.
A DETAIL OF ABOUT A THIRD OF THE VIEW THAT SHOWS JUST PART OF THE MULTI-COLORED RIDGE.
I FOUND THAT THE FOLDS AND THE COLORS OF THIS INCREDIBLE LANDSCAPE WERE ENHANCED WHEN I JUST IGNORED THE SKY AND JUST CONCENTRATED ON A TINY PORTION OF THE SURROUNDINGS. YOU CAN REALLY FEEL THE TEXTURES AND SEE THE COLORS IN THESE DETAILED VIEWS, WHICH STILL TAKE IN DOZENS OF MILES.
THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE IMAGES. THIS PORTION OF THE LANDSCAPE LACKED ANY REAL COLOR, SO I TURNED TO BLACK AND WHITE TO EMPHASIZE THE TEXTURES AND THE RANGE OF TONES AMONG THE FOLDS OF THESE HILLS. BLACK AND WHITE ALLOWS ME TO DODGE AND BURN THOSE FOLDS AND RETAIN A REALISM THAT WOULD NOT HOLD UP IN A COLOR RENDITION.THE LACK OF COLOR ALLOWS THE VIEWER TO0 SEE THE THIN PATHS IN THIS VAST WILDERNESS. I'M MORE THAN HAPPY TO USE MY CAMERA TO TAKE IN THE SCENE, THANK YOU.
I hope that these images give you a small taste of the wonders of Death Valley, and encourage you to take the opportunity to see it for yourselves. If possible, arrange flights that can arrive in Los Angeles and leave from Las Vegas so that you drive through the entire park. Death Valley is a long way from anywhere, so take your time visiting this remarkable place.
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FEBRUARY 21, 2025
DESERT VEGETATION AGAINST SANDSTONE
This last November Fran and I were invited to a destination wedding in Death Valley (!). We had a wonderful time, despite having to spend some time in Las Vegas, which I feel has to be one of the worst examples of the American Dream. The nicest part of Las Vegas is the opportunity to get out of that hell-hole and to visit some world-class scenic locations a short trip out of town. This week I would like to show you some images from our visit to Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park. This was my first opportunity to take my new camera “on the road” to see how far I had advanced on my learning curve with my new/old Fuji X-T3.
AZTEC SANDSTONE WITH CRACKS AND POTHOLES
A GUARDIAN AT THE SEVEN SISTERS
The Valley of Fire is about an hours drive East of Las Vegas. What the Maps app on the phone fails to mention is that you pass by some of the worst suburbs that Las Vegas has to offer, along with some more “exclusive” subdivisions whose locations on the side of the barren roads were even more depressing than their poorer neighbors. All in all not exactly a showcase for one rather extreme example of urban America. The other thing that Maps neglected to mention was that the “toll” we had to pay on our route was actually the admission fee for Lake Mead National Recreation Area. Our admission fee included admission to other National Parks for one month, so we didn’t have to pay to enter Death Valley a few days later. We drove through a long stretch of the Mohave Desert for a few minutes until we took the turn-off for the Valley of Fire instead of heading towards Lake Mead and Hoover Dam.
CONFRONTATION
BLUEY ROCK, OF COURSE. YOUI DON'T SEE IT?
The Valley of Fire is composed of about 40,000 acres of desert in the middle of absolute nowhere astride an early road towards Las Vegas. It contains several areas of raw natural beauty that early travelers noted as significant in the context of the unforgiving desert. It was set aside as Nevada’s first state park, but the Depression and the state’s apparent neglect almost led it to be reclaimed by the National Park Service. State pride, coupled with hatred of the Feds, finally led to the park we see today.
AT THE MOUTH OF THE RAINBOW VISTA TRAIL
ALONG THE TRAIL
There are two main roads through the park. Most of the maintained hiking trails branch off from these roads, as do several picnic/camping sites that are locate right off the road. Fran and I spent a lot of time at one of these, the Seven Sisters area, which we passed on the way to the Visitors Center on our way into the park. I resolved to double back to this very intriguing collection of massive Aztec Sandstone red-orange rocks arranged in a line off the side of the road. The minimal parking lot led to a small collection of covered picnic tables literally nestled between the several-story-high rocks. These rocks had been carved by thousands of years of wind into highly evocative shapes whose resemblance to some poetic vision was only limited by your imagination. We had a wonderful time wandering among the rocks without regretting that several decades of age and good sense would not lead us to actually climbing on to the rocks. We noticed that most of our fellow travelers had a much easier time climbing up than on the inevitable trip back down. A surreal time was had by all with the arrival of another destination wedding party, complete with catering and limousines, to the parking lot. A few dozen travelers watched as another few dozen Parisians attended a wedding up hill beyond the rocks. The idea that people from Paris, not exactly a slouch in the romance department, had decided to stage a wedding thousands of miles away, complete with an Elvis soundtrack, was simply beyond belief. To each his own, and they seemed to be having a wonderful time.
ROCKS ON THE TRAIL
NEAR AND FAR ON THE TRAIL
We then decided to take up one of the shortest hikes in the park, the Rainbow Vista Trail, which promised an easy trip up a short canyon. This canyon was truly spectacular, even though Fran and I never got near the trail’s triumphant endpoint. The trail seemed to be as ill-judged as anything on the Isle of Skye. We were prepared for the sun, but not the idea that most of the trail was composed of deep sand that would do Cannon Beach proud. By the time I got used to that heavy going, the trail then devolved into a giant collection of boulders that only promised sprained ankles in our near future. With no end in sight and the trail narrowing at every step, we found a rock bench in the shade and had a primitive picnic before heading back. Even the youngsters who gallivanted over the boulders without a care were disappointed by the trail’s conclusion beyond our sight. Several evidently thought that Rainbow Vista was the promise of an actual rainbow rather than just another multi-colored rock formation.
WHERE'S THE RAINBOW? TASTE THE RAINBOW!
THE MOUNTAINS BEYOND THE CANYON
In any case the canyon was spectacular. I found a lot of photographic opportunities surveying the cliffs that surrounded the trail. As usual I seemed to be drawn to the more intimate landscapes that concentrated on the brittle vegetation nestled against the red rocks. I think that my most successful images utilized the color contrast between the red rocks and the vegetation which sometimes verged on purple along with the parched desert greenery.
BACKLIT DESERT VEGETATION
PURPLE VINES AND RED ROCKS
GREENERY AMIDST WHAT APPEARS TO BE PETRIFIED WOOD ALONG THE CANYON WALLS
It was only a few days later that all memory of any sort of vegetation was gone when we arrived at Death Valley. I would recommend that anyone who ventures to Las Vegas try to visit the Valley of Fire. Fran and I only scratched the surface at all the park has to offer only an hour away from Sin City.
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FEBRUARY 14, 2025
The Cult of Fuji appears on Division Street
This week I would like to finish my discussion of my recent purchase of a new/old camera, the 2016 Fuji X-T3, and my realization that I had joined yet another commercial cult. I have always known that Apple was no doubt a cult, but I reasoned that at least the products actually worked, as opposed to the other computers I encountered when teaching post-processing classes. I joined the cult of Volvo when I bought an old Volvo station wagon as the best alternative for transporting all my stuff to Saturday Market. I only gradually realized that every Volvo owner in Portland had the absolutely “best” Volvo mechanic to fix their automotive obsession. My own “best” mechanic finally told me that while my 2001 model was certainly a fine vehicle, he would no longer fix it. I was not rich enough to continue investing money in the car. He said the next vehicle I should buy should be one where I didn’t know my mechanic’s name. I promptly bought another Volvo, but wouldn’t admit it to my mechanic for almost a year.
It's easy to achieve simple black and white conversions like this in camera - even subtle black and white variations including grain.
Fuji is another company that I now realize is really a cult. It makes really fine cameras, but that doesn’t seem to fit its customers absolute devotion to the brand. I knew I was buying a camera that fit my needs very well, and that I faced quite a learning curve in mastering technologies that represented a decade of advances beyond my old Canon, even though I was buying a used camera nearly a decade behind the times.
More drastic changes of a Fuji Raw File can easily be achieved in Lightroom.
The camera was almost built for me. It was designed in such a traditional manner, despite its new technologies, that it was in some ways even more “old school” than my old camera. It has more “analog” dials and buttons than my old Canon. Even though it is built like a tank, with substantial metal components along with the inevitable plastic, it is clearly half the size and weight of my old camera. I had to buy a small “extender” for the camera so that I could securely grip the body. Fuji actually makes a zoom lens that is almost exactly the same as my old Canon lens that fit my needs like a glove for almost twenty years. I have nothing but praise for its build quality. My overall feeling that these people certainly know what they are doing. It is a quality product.
Another simple scene on Division Street. While most of these changes could be achieved in camera, it's a lot easier in Lightroom. The trouble with most Fuji film simulation discussions on the Web is that a scene like this is considered a really fine image.
But I am an old goat. My old camera’s “menu” was so primitive and generally meaningless that I only really consulted it to reformat my memory card after a day of shooting. The Fuji’s menu is so long that I grow weary just looking at it, even though I skip entire sections devoted to flash photography. I don’t even know most of the terms contained in the multiple pages devoted to video controls. I discovered that there were at least three different ways to avoid using the menus, but I couldn’t master them as well. It was not much comfort when I learned that part of the Fuji mystique was its superior menu layout as compared to other modern cameras - I could only shudder at the thought.
As the "before" shot shows, it's pretty easy to mess up the white balance on a film simulation in camera. This black and white conversion is much easier in Lightroom than in camera, even though Fuji lets you shoot square images in camera - but that's not the same as straightened and cropped images.
I went on Amazon and bought a highly regarded guide to a ten-year old camera. I also downloaded the official owners manual, which only proved that Japanese to English translations had not really improved in the last twenty years. I followed the advice I give all my students, reading through these guides slowly with camera in hand so as to really understand the camera’s layout and controls. While I have built up some muscle memory, it has been a very slow process. A big part of the problem was the almost infinite way that you can set up the camera - almost a dozen dials and buttons can be configured in multitude ways that have nothing to do with the labels on the camera body. Just like in the grocery store, infinite choice led to paralysis. Frustration mounted when I would realize that my careful decisions had been changed by an inadvertent digit on one of the buttons.
The Fujifilm film simulations can be transformative, but certainly not on the fly. You need Lightroom for this kind of stuff, which allows this skategurl to emerge from the darkness.
This was my first clue that I had joined a cult. Once the algorithms realized that I had bought a Fuji, I was bombarded by nearly a dozen experts who all had ironclad systems for properly “setting up” the camera. The fact that they contradicted each other wasn’t the problem - it was that the camera was so complex that it lent itself to such discussions. The process of using a camera to actually take photographs had become so fetishized that it seemed more important than the images themselves. I’ve finally come to adopt a strategy that embraces an almost fully manual ethos that ignores almost all of the controls that promised to make my life easier. I add a new control only when I truly understand how it will help, and am no longer disappointed when I forget how to use it a few days later. I’ve also learned that most of the commentary on Fuji on the web even funnier than most web memes. People take this stuff very seriously indeed, and the comments sections frequently devolve even farther than those on news sites. One of the biggest Fuji sites is literally called “Fuji Rumors.” I’m trying not to make fun - respect must be shown to someone who has been posting almost continuously for seven years. I am writing a blog after all. Yet note that this website is not even mostly about current or past Fuji products, but is devoted to projections about future products! Rumors are of course forgotten as easily as politician’s promises once a new product is actually introduced.
The Fuji Film Simulation provided the initial super-contrasty black and white. I could then crop and darken the edges in Lightroom
The other facet of the Fuji cult that I had not anticipated is that a big part of the cult actually is based on the idea that these cameras are designed to eliminate post processing. Readers of this blog realize that I fully embrace the computer and do not think that an image is complete until you have put your stamp on it in Lightroom. While you can certainly shoot in Raw and import your Raw files into Lightroom, a big part of the Fuji ethos is to rely on Fuji “color science” to post-process your images into baked-in jpegs right in the camera.
Lightroom required to build upon the Fuji film recipe.
These jpegs are romantically called “film simulations” and are supposedly based on their chemically forbears found in Fujifilm film emulsions developed before most hipsters were born. The idea is that these “looks” will relieve any need to work on the computer since the camera’s computer has done all of the work already. The entire promise of digital photography was based on the idea that a little work after the fact could allow a photographer to have more control of the image than they had ever been able to achieve in the darkroom. The idea that “presets” could provide some guidance was not as an end product, but as a starting point. A jpeg “straight out of camera” is as big a dead end as film’s adherents mystical belief that chemical film profiles cannot be duplicated in a computer program.
This kind of black and white manipulation is way beyond the Fuji film simulation it started in "straight out of camera."
The cult deepens. Just like photographers like myself cajoled Adobe into advancing Lightroom way beyond their dreams, Fujifilm has opened a pandora’s box deep in those menus. They allowed photographers to modify their own Fuji simulations. The nearly two dozen “film simulations” available from Fuji were now just the tip of the iceberg. Enthusiasts have gone on to develop and promote these “recipes” for fun and profit. Another venerable website is Fuji-X Weekly, with another seven years of blogposts (wow!) that promote these recipes. There are now more than 250 of these “you’ve got to try recipes.” Obviously another example of the promise of simplicity transforming into another cult of infinite choice. Most of the time it seems even easier to just return to post-processing in Lightroom.
It can be scary indeed what a few minutes can achieve in Lightroom. There was not much promise in the original snapshot of a Halloween remnant in a Division Street apartment window four flights up.
The trouble is that these recipes require a return to the camera’s menus. Programming a recipe requires changing about a dozen parameters in the menu, naming a recipe and then saving it in the camera. The camera’s computer is so sophisticated that it controls the simulation. In order to view your efforts on a larger screen in Fuji’s computer program for your laptop, you literally have to run a cable from the camera to the computer. I kid you not.
Now this photographer, like most men, has to admit that I am colorblind to some degree. But with 250 recipes and counting, most of this “color science” is subtle indeed. Especially when the inspiration for most of them is to achieve a mystical “film look” from days gone by. The parameters for the Fuji recipe modifications abandon any numerical scales common in any other post-processing programs - sometimes even the positive and negative directions seem to be reversed. All in all the film simulations appear to be a “black box” that I haven’t come close to breaking. Most of the images shown in this essay could start as a film simulation. and It might even be fun to see them on the camera’s rear screen while shooting. Yet I think you will easily see that my final images cannot be achieved “straight out of camera.” You don’t have to like them - but don’t pretend that any camera can do it all, even if it has “Fujifilm”on the front.
I hope you can see that a quick snap on a street can become a much more graphic image after a little post processing. "Straight out of camera" might be required for a photo in the New York Times, but not in your portfolio.
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PART TWO
FEBRUARY 7, 2025
PORTLAND'S NEWEST TOWER - BLACK AND WHITE BY FUJI
This week I would like to describe how a simple decision to buy a new (old) camera has introduced me to another consumer cult. Last week I recounted the demise of my 17-year old Canon digital SLR, my first and only digital camera. After weighing my options, I decided to leap two technologies and ten years to buy into the Fujifilm camera system. My new 7-year old camera changed the computer/camera interface in two major ways. The digital breakthrough allowed photographers like me to utilize the computers in our homes to fundamentally change the way we manipulated our original camera captures into finished images. The darkroom was replaced by software programs that gradually improved and changed in ways that even the software engineers had not anticipated and even tried to resist. The other major change was the abandoning of the entire concept of using a set of mirrors to focus and monitor exposure through the actual lens of the camera. The same advances in electronics that replaced film with digital sensors now allowed camera designers to replace the optical viewfinders of the single lens reflex with what essentially a small TV screen either on the back of the camera or in a vestigial viewfinder that mimicked the old systems - or both!
BISTRO SEATING ON DIVISION, ENHANCED BY FUJI
These technological changes occurred as the good-old fashioned story of business innovation and more importantly plain incompetence played out across continents. The original patents for the digital camera were held by Kodak. Since Kodak was the largest film producer on the planet they made the incredibly poor decision to not endanger their cash cow, film sales and production. Meanwhile, their only real worldwide competitor, Fuji in Japan, took the opposite tack, which allowed them to keep selling film while embracing the new technologies that would seal film’s demise. Kodak had bet that film would reign supreme for twenty years or so while digital cameras caught up in actual image quality and far more important for the vast consumer market, went down in price enough to compete with the established film ecosystem. I finally gave up film in 2008 when even I saw the handwriting on the wall, Kodak’s bet was off by a good decade, and for all intents and purposes the company is no more. As a kind of middle-finger to it’s old competition, My new-old camera still proudly sports the Fujifilm label, as do all of their digital cameras. All of the images shown here are the result of my experiments trying to both overcome and ignore a rather daunting learning curve while I respond to my new camera.
LANTERNS AT A SUSHI PARLOR ON DIVISION - THE ONLY OTHER BRANCH IS IN TOKYO!
Fuji was never as big a camera company as its major Japanese competitors, Nikon and Canon. When the third major innovation came along with the worldwide smartphone revolution, Fuji was in some ways in a better position than its bigger rivals, in that it had far less to lose as point and shoot camera sales plummeted off everyone’s sales charts. So the smaller company made a conscious decision to become a luxury brand by making really good products that did not appeal to the vast majority of consumers because of design or price. It figured that it could stay in business as a Porsche rather than as a Ford. Or in terms of the hundred-year old camera business, could it position itself as the new Leica?
TREE TRUNK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Leica was the innovator that created the first “small” cameras that could compete in quality with the much larger film cameras of the early Twentieth Century. The sheet film that required loading and unloading in complete darkness was replaced by modified movie film that was so much smaller that it could be loaded into a hand-held camera that was as small as the simple Kodak box cameras that made up the small consumer market. The Leica cameras were state of the art, and almost handmade, both before the war, during the war, and somehow even after the Second World War as a surviving German company. While I saw a vintage “SS Edition” of a wartime Leica during my trip to Germany in 2006, the company had also ran a variation of “Schindler’s List” for its employees during the war.
ROAD CLOSED
Leica’s business model was so compelling in that the camera almost never really changed. My father bought a fairly complete Leica kit in 1953, albeit with less expensive lenses that were licensed by Leica and made in Canada. In percentage terms, it was probably the most expensive purchase my father ever made, even though it was essentially the same camera as the pre-war model. While Leica “screwed” my father by abandoning its original screw-mount lens design the year I was born in 1956, it really didn’t matter since my father was in no position to purchase any newer Leica gear. The camera changed even less throughout my father’s life, becoming even more of a luxury product. A 1956 lens could still be used on a “new” Leica forty years later.
DIVISION FACADE DETAIL
Fuji endeavored to produce a digital Leica despite Leica’s refusal to consider moving away from film or the older rangefinder focusing and exposure system that had been replaced in the Sixties by the modern SLR, never mind the newer DSLR. Fuji’s first iteration was such a throwback that it was a literal copy of my father’s camera with a digital back, and was almost as small as my father’s Leica. It became an instant hit among the camera enthusiast crowd - not only was it a Porsche, but like the never-changing Porsche 911, it was a new vintage Porsche!
VERY UNDERSTATED RESTAURANT SIGN IN FRONT OF A DIVISION PIZZA PARLOR
It took a few years for Fuji to expand its premium line to include a mirrorless camera that in some ways was even more of an illusion than its original rangefinder model. While those X-Pro models had included a dual optical/electronic rangefinder, the new X-T1 model mimicked the forty-year old SLR designs that most photographers who had never owned Leicas were more familiar with. In some ways it was ridiculous that the old centrally located mirror hump now contained a TV screen that didn’t need a hump, but there you had it. In almost every other way the camera was still a pseudo-Leica, with enough manual controls to satisfy any photographer who harkened back to any number of previous “golden ages” of camera design.
MULTNOMAH COUNTY PRARIE
This is where I came in, and I promise to actually reveal my realization of the cult status of my new-old camera next time. My X-T3 from 2016 will soon be even more vintage with this year’s rumored X-T6, but it will still be essentially the same camera as the original X-T1. Fuji has become so successful at copying Leica that it has in some ways become Leica. Resistance is futile.
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PART ONE
JANUARY 31, 2025
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF AN OLD LOCAL FAVORITE, THE ST. JOHNS BRIDGE
This week I would like to discuss the bane of most photographers, the desire for the latest and “greatest” camera equipment. We even have a name for it, Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS), which seemingly hits normally rational photographers at the point where they cannot figure out why their artistic efforts have hit a plateau. Rather than reading a book, taking a class, taking a trip to an exciting place, or just “practicing” more of their craft, they fall victim to the notion that all they need is a new camera or lens. I have successfully resisted this idea for over 16 years. I finally bought my first and only digital camera in 2008, when the experts at my local camera shop assured me that the nearly ten year old technology had finally advanced to the point that my usual neglect of my gear would not instantly break my new purchase. They still wouldn’t sell me the camera until I bought my first camera bag to take it home in.
PORTLAND'S NEWEST SKYSCRAPER, THE RITZ CARLTON
My Canon EOS 50 slowly became an extension of my brain and a constant companion, allowing me to more fully realize my artistic vision. I ignored newer models - Canon eventually got to the EOS 90 with a few random numbers thrown in to confuse customers. I ignored the full-frame revolution because my urban landscape photography actually suited my “inferior” camera. My usual subjects were far away, didn’t move, and didn’t talk back - the extra “reach” of the smaller sensor was an advantage for my imagery. I ignored Canon’s move to mirrorless, and the subsequent generations of the new cameras and lenses that rendered my camera a near antique. I only had to get my very robust camera fixed a few times in all of those years, and only lost a few lenses to my neglectful ways. I knew that the camera was somewhat out of date, but it suited me. I ignored the fact that it was certainly large and heavy compared to newer models, since once you start to bring a tripod along the size and weight of your camera is essentially meaningless. Since I am in the tiny minority of photographers who actually still dream of the cover photo rather than the two-page spread, I even bought a rather large extended grip that allowed me to take vertical shots without contorting my hands. Of course by the time I did this I the ”wrong way” was such a part of my muscle memory that I barely utilized this feature. I was so used to my “tank” of a camera that I almost didn’t understand the horror that bystanders frequently exclaimed when they saw what I was carrying around all day.
A WALK ON DIVISION - TWO BOLLARDS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
For the last three days of our stay in England my camera suddenly ceased to work. I could only use my phone, and I was actually surprised at the images it was capable of producing once I did some post-processing. Of course the amount of enlargement was severely limited, but for this blog I think most readers could not tell the difference between an iPhone image and a “real camera” image. After recovering from jet lag it was time to see if I could fix the old war horse. I took it to the two places in Portland that still did this kind of camera repair work. The first simply declared that they wouldn’t and couldn’t fix it - it was too old. I declared that I was too old, we all laughed, and that was that. I went to the second place, the nice technician declared that he could fix it for $269.00. When I inquired where he had instantly come up with such an exact price, he admitted that was the sum they used when they doubted that they could fix something but needed enough money to begin a fruitless investigation.
A LOCAL CLASSIC
So it was time to go about replacing my camera, and I began looking into the very interesting world of buying used camera gear. The used camera market has recently begun working like the used car market, fortunately without the sleazy sales people, as long as you stay off Ebay. There are a number of reputable sources of used gear, both online and at both of the camera repair shops I had already visited. Most professionals have long shopped that way, buying the last model of a camera once everyone with Gear Acquisition Syndrome had traded it in for the latest and greatest. The only trouble is that new cameras have become so unbelievably expensive that used cameras are no bargains either. In order to replace my old camera with the corresponding new Canon, certainly not “top of the line”, would run to almost $4000 dollars. This was a price that I would not pay - it was something beyond what I could even understand.
LINES AND SHADOWS ON DIVISION STREET
The technicians showed me several alternatives. My now very heavy paperweight of an EOS 50 could turn into a fully functioning EOS 70, 80 or 90 for around $600 - $800. I would be holding a more modern version, with somewhat improved specs - but the virtue was that there was almost no learning curve involved. It was the same camera, with all of the same controls. Even with a little more plastic involved, it was still a tank. My one lens could be fixed for $100, or I could buy one that seemed to be almost brand new, for what do you know, $100! The only trouble with this strategy was that the kind gentleman admitted that in only a couple of years the newer model Canon I was about to purchase would not be able to be repaired.
THE NEWEST APARTMENT HOUSE ON DIVISION. AFTER USING EVERY ENGLISH TWIT NAME IN THE BOOK, AND THEN JUST NAMING BUILDINGS AFTER MEANINGLESS ADDRESSES ON THE STREET, WE'VE NOW GONE ONTO ARTISTS. AT LEAST ROTHKO WAS ASSOCIATED WITH OUR FAIR CITY.
This is what led me to finally buy a “new camera”, a Fuji X-T3. The Fujifilm line of cameras are the only ones that I had ever hankered for when someone brought one into my booth at Saturday Market. When anyone ever let me take a look at their Fuji, I instantly realized that it was the modern version of the “poor man’s Leica”. These cameras were clearly very well made examples of the best Japan could produce, exuding quality in every button, switch, and dial. And there were so many of these controls. The cameras were “retro” not only in appearance, but in the fact that there were more tactile controls than any other modern camera. A state of the art mirrorless digital camera that seemed to provide all of the old-school controls that I was used too. Of course it was not a handmade Leica, but Fujifilm was still in a very good economic position. A new Fuji and lens cost less than one fifth of the corresponding Leica, while offering a very similar user experience.
DIVISION AT NIGHT
I was too cheap to buy a new model, the Fuji XT-5, which would still run almost $3000 with a new lens. I opted to buy a nearly new XT-3, saving more than $1000 and advancing all the way from 2008 to 2016. The learning curve for the rest of 2024 loomed very large indeed, as I had to adjust to an entirely new camera world, even if the camera was over eight years old. It has been a difficult but exciting journey.
THIS SHOP ON DIVISION DOESN'T SELL EITHER FLOWERS OR BICYCLES. I TRULY DO NOT UNDERSTAND SHOP DISPLAYS, BUT I DO GUESS IT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION. I STILL HAVE NOT VENTURED INSIDE.
I have gone on too long as usual, so my introduction to the cult of Fuji will have to wait until next time. All of the images shown here were captured with my new camera as I have walked around the city and my neighborhood. Next time I will show you some of the same photos after I have put my own spin on them with some post-processing - something I didn’t realize went against a large part of the Fuji ethos. It is a very fine piece of camera gear, but I didn’t realize that I had joined a cult similar to the cult of Apple or the cult of Volvo. More on that next time.
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JANUARY 17, 2025
I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year despite what portends to be a very troubling new chapter in our nation’s history. It’s very hard to uphold my own standards in either art or commerce when everyone else seems to have abandoned any sense of normalcy and expertise itself is ridiculed. But enough negativity.
THEY MAKE SOME NICE TREES IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
Yet in the belief that every once in a while it is useful to assess my own state of affairs, I would like to discuss what my artistic and commercial efforts amounted to in 2024. I find this annual exercise enlightening in what it reveals about both the artistic and commercial challenges ahead for 2025. While I am just as stubborn as the next guy, I can use this information as a reality check, both positive and negative.
TWO VIEWS OF THE SCOTTISH COAST
Artistically, 2024 was a very good year. After a couple of years of having nothing much to shoot because of the dismal state of Downtown Portland, which constitutes “my patch” as my English detectives would say, Fran and I went on several trips that allowed me incredible photo graphic opportunities. This was the first year in a long while that I spent more time making new images than working on old ones. Six weeks in England and Scotland have hopefully provided us with enough memories to encourage us to travel throughout our coming years as “pensioners.” Another week in Death Valley also allowed us to enjoy a very different environment. And while Portland only was “getting better”, a new camera and a very steep learning curve forced me to explore familiar areas of town with the excuse that I had to learn how to even begin to master the new technology in my hands.
I FINALLY GOT TO CAPTURE SOME BLUEBELLS!
A GRAVEYARD ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER
These two dozen images in this essay are among the best images I created all year, in my humble opinion. I present them with a minimum of commentary, since most of them have already appeared or will soon appear In my blog posts this year. Consider them as very rare “untitled” images. 24 is an arbitrary number, and I could have narrowed it even further, but since I started with 140 I was satisfied that I had been critical enough. I would encourage everyone to go through this exercise even though I am not a big believer in “greatest hits.” But it is useful to take a look at your own art and to try to depersonalize it to the greatest extent as possible.
TWO FIVE THOUSAND YEAR-OLD STONE CIRCLES, BUILT BY PEOPLE WHO PROBABLY NEVER SAW ANY OTHER STONE CIRCLE THAN THE ONE THEY HAD BUILT THEMSELVES.
Try to pretend that you are just looking at images that move you, while ignoring the fact that you made them. Try to completely divorce yourself from the act of creation - how you felt that day, how hard it was to create the image, or how lucky you felt that you got to see these places at all. This kind of appraisal will eliminate enough images that you can go from 140 to 24 without killing yourself. It will allow you to realize that, all in all, you aren’t half bad as an artist. More importantly, the act of whittling down your photos allows you to discover that these images are truly your own. They are your way of seeing the world even when you have never been there before and might unfortunately never get to visit those places again. It is uplifting to realize that no matter how many images you have seen of a place on Instagram, your efforts seem to be just a little bit different. It makes all of your artistic work seem worthwhile.
TWP EXAMPLES OF WHAT INSTAGRAM CALLS "CLOUD PORN"
As could have been expected, about two thirds of these images come from England and Scotland. About half of these 24 images are shown in Black and White, but not because the color versions weren't any good. I believe Black and White frequently just captures the mood much better than a color version, no matter how”pretty” it appears at first glance. As someone who tends to move toward abstraction rather than documentation, it has always intrigued me how much viewers of my work can accept manipulation and abstraction of the real world as long as color is removed from the equation. They seem to accept a much higher level of abstraction once they allow themselves to believe in a black sky, even though they know it is blue.
MOST OF SCOTLAND IS VERY EMPTY
As far as commerce goes, 2024 was a very mixed bag. I actually did just as well, if not better, each day at the Market than I did in 2023. I even seemed to do as well, if not better, than most of the other visual artists at the Market. The trouble was that everyone had a pretty dismal year, so that by the end of the year we all had to admit that things were so bad that we really had to abandon our efforts to continue selling on Sundays. I didn’t mind since I had long ago determined that Sundays didn’t make sense for me, as long as I could handle a very long day on Saturday. It was very difficult for me to complain, much as I wanted to, since I seemed to make just as much (or little) working one day a week instead of two. Sundays had long been the day for locals, and they have not been coming since the Pandemic.
THE POWER OF BLACK AND WHITE TO CONVEY MOOD. GLEN COE IS AS FOREBODING AS IT IS AWE INSPIRING.
The most interesting thing about selling fine art photographs that people almost universally admire is that there is even less chance that they will actually purchase them - unless they too have been to those far-flung places. The market for photographs in Portland, Oregon really doesn't center around views of England and Scotland, no matter how much I would hope that people would admire my art. Now if some Highlander would just walk in my booth, I might have a chance.
TWO VIEWS OF THE QUIRAING, LITERALLY TAKEN IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS.
I had resolved to try to be more of a fair-weather vendor, and by the end of the year I succeeded beyond my expectations. Between our trips, bad weather forecasts and actual bad weather, I went to the Market for only twenty days in 2024. So I did well when I went, but it was a very small sample size. I only had two extremely bad days, about 5 really good days, and the rest fair to middling. Reports from my fellow vendors suggested that I rarely missed much. As long as it is nice out and I can meet enough people that I can have a nice time, fair to middling is OK.
ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS STILL INSPIRE ME, BOTH AT HOME AND ABROAD.
Of course it is nicer to make more money, but it really is nice to get my art around the world. I only had about 120 customers all year, about 6 per day. But 11 people from all over the world took my art home. More than 80 people from all over the country also bought my art. What says it all is that only 27 people from Portland bought art compared to an average of some 400 locals who have bought my art each year since 2010. So even though I now have art in Anchorage, Alaska, Regina, Saskatchewan, Assam, India, Nelson, New Zealand and Iquique, Chile, it is certainly tough to be an artist. On many days it seemed to me that I was selling things that people just didn’t seem to want. But I was not alone - a popular refrain among vendors was still the question “are many of these people aware that these items are for sale?’
TWO INCREDIBLY LONELY PLACES. IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, MORE PEOPLE LIVE NEAR THE LUNAR LANDSCAPE THAN THE PLEASANT LOCH.
Among the things that do sell, my photo coasters were still my most profitable items. I made a profit of over $1600 dollars, even though coaster sales fell another third from 2023. My “miniatures”, small photos mounted on thicker wooden frames, also made money, earning more than $500 in real profits. My metal prints achieved oohs and ahs, sold fitfully , and still earned over $600 in profits.
A NEW CAMERA ENCOURAGED NEW ATTEMPTS AT FAMILIAR SUBJECTS.
I resolved to not bring any more new framed prints to the market, and lost more to breakage than I sold to customers. This really didn’t bother me that much since like most of the other artists I was pretty much giving the frames away anyway. It was much better going back to selling “prints in a bag” - I had over 40 new prints for sale, sold only 9, and still only lost $53.00 in the effort.
TWO "RICH PICTURES" OF VERY SMALL DETAILS IN MUCH LARGER ENVIRONMENTS, BOTH NATURAL AND URBAN
I hope you have enjoyed taking one last look at my self-selected Best of 2024. I also hope you have been encouraged to make your art, without any hope of actually selling any of it. Please pursue far more lucrative ways of making money, in the hope that you will share some of it with me this year at the Market. Hope to see you there.
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WHY BLACK AND WHITE?
JANUARY 3, 2025
Happy New Year! This week I would like to return to England and Scotland one last time in order to discuss the ways that black and white photography can invigorate your image creation and allow you to make your images feel more like your own. Of course your mileage might vary, and there is certainly nothing wrong if you like a particular color version better than its black and white counterpart.
Fran and I had a great six weeks in England and Scotland. I took many photographs, and then created a nice number of meaningful images. I’ve shown you guys many of these images over the past few months. I enjoy them as color images - it’s difficult to argue with the incredible blues and greens and browns of these landscapes. I’m proud to show them, and am somewhat surprised at how much more I feel that their black and white versions speak clearly of my intentions when I first saw these landscapes.
Black and white conveys mood better than color photography. Either view of this iconic mountain at the mouth of Glen Coe conveys grandeur, but I feel that the black and white version adds to the feeling of doom that pervades this landscape.
If any of these images are truly important, the fact is that any great black and white photograph is based on its origins as a great color photograph. This was true even in the age of film, since no photographer ever met any scene in the real world that was not in color. In our digital age current technology preserves this original color, but then allows us to use all of this information to create black and white images in ways that are easier and were sometimes impossible in the darkroom. I came into photography at the tail end of the film era, and never really had the opportunity to fall in love with the darkroom. I also resisted the emerging digital age (that’s just the way I am) but when the new technology advanced to the point where the cameras could withstand my vigorous usage without breaking instantly, I finally made the leap.
If its all about the light, go to black and white. This scene has mountains, clouds and the sea, but the "gesture" that caught my attention are the "God Rays" that lasted for only a few moments and made this view absolutely magical. Black and white allows for exposure manipulation that brings out the light that was there in the scene which would appear unrealistic in color.
The abstraction of black and white allows me to emphasize the range of tonality in the scene. Viewers will delight in this range of tones, even though they "know" that the sky is never really black.
Since then I have learned to improve my images in the digital realm a million miles farther than my amateur efforts in the darkroom. The left side of my brain is just as amazed at the magic of the prints emerging from my printer as I was at the miracle of a print suddenly appearing in a chemical bath. The right side of my brain knows that my post-processing zeroes and ones can do everything that chemicals could do in the darkroom. I leave it to those who can afford the best cameras from the film era, not to mention the film, to enjoy their efforts in a darkroom, as long as they don’t insist that there is some magic in a chemical film response that cannot be duplicated on the computer.
The colors in this view of an unworldly landscape are only a distraction. The removal of those colors conveys mood and heightens the textures of these hillocks while further separating them from the real hills beyond.
In this view of an even more alien landscape, the black and white version allows for heightened contrast that further defines the awesome grandeur of the scene. The color version seems to make it far more ordinary, even though a viewer knows that it is not.
One of my favorite photographers, Jay Maisel, wrote an entire book of his work based on the idea that a great photographic image relies on Light, Gesture, and Color. A black and white image is based on exactly the same criteria, even though there is no longer any color - but there still is. All of those shades of grey are based on the real colors that existed in the real world, and it is the job of the photographer to coax the life out of similar shades of grey that emerge when you simply desaturate an image. Change Color into Contrast, and that becomes the poetry of a black and white image. This is not surprising, since most powerful color images are based on color contrast. What we lose in color contrast, we gain in manipulating those 256 shades of grey to achieve contrasting tones that are based on the original colors in the real world.
Glen Coe is extraordinary in any light, but once again black and white emphasizes textures and tonal gradations much more that the color version. The skies and the lonely road emerge from the color version, and the overall mood is that we better get down that road, for it might not end well if we stay in this valley much longer.
The colors are charming in this magical landscape, but black and white really conveys the textures of the land, so that I think that the viewer really knows what it feels like to round that corner.
Vincent Versace, another great photographer, added one more criteria to Maisel’s list. Black and White photography exhibits a “Timelessness” that went beyond mere nostalgia to a continuum with the photography’s entire history. In many of my images of England and Scotland, there is absolutely no hint of the real age of the photographic image - it could have been captured yesterday, or one hundred years ago. That timelessness of black and white imagery lends itself to subjects that transcend human scales of time like these landscapes.
Yes, there is no argument with a mountain confronting a loch. Either version is breathtaking. But notice how the black and white version somehow just appears much more rugged, since it allows me to subtly heighten the contrast of the surfaces of the mountain cliffs. The black sea feels as real as its dark blue in the real world.
The majesty of Glen Coe is awfully hard to ignore or mess up as a photographer. While I miss the beautiful brown grasses in the foreground, the rest of the colors in the scene only seem to distract me. The increased textures and tonal gradations that I can emphasize tin the black and white version seem much more satisfying than the missing colors.
As black and white imagery eliminates color, it heightens our awareness of other important concerns that make up a fine photograph - chief among them lines, shapes, tonality, textures, and mood. “Gesture”, which might be defined as what made you press the shutter in the first place, is still just as important - but color is no longer a distraction. The fundamental abstraction of black and white is more readily acceptable to most viewers than almost any other abstract element in a photograph. That acceptance gives a photographer much more leeway in post-processing, allowing changes in an image that would be dismissed as “unrealistic” in color.
This scene really illustrates the importance of the mood that a photographer wants to convey in his interpretation of a landscape. the color version is just entirely too pleasant, a delightful loch-side scene, a postcard of Scotland. The black and white version reveals my truth - the end of the world feeling at the end of a lonely twelve miles of single-track road that threaded its way through those mountains just past the loch and the trees.
I hope you have seen in these examples that black and white’s freedom of expression can lead to a much more personal interpretation of incredible vistas that has long attracted photographers, and will continue to captivate them long after you are gone.
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DECEMBER 13, 2024
ONE VIEW FROM OUR COTTAGE
This week I would like to finally stop milking our trip of a lifetime that Fran and I took this past Spring to England and Scotland. After spending two weeks with friends on Skye and in Glasgow, we started our long drive back to London. We decided to return to rural isolation with three days in a village in England’s Peak District. By the way, all of the images here were taken on on my iPhone, since my 16-year-old first and only digital camera finally seemed to bite the dust in Scotland. I was appropriately distressed, but the phone rose to the occasion, which once again proves that it is not about the gear. While I doubt that these images could be enlarged much beyond 8 x 10 or so, they are certainly fine for the Web. I doubt that anyone could tell that they had been captured with a phone.
Edale is not so much a village as an overgrown hamlet, deep in a valley in the heart of the Peak District. Our trip was uneventful until we got absolutely lost in a place where getting lost seemed impossible. Our cottage was one of maybe at most two dozen in Edale, with seemingly absolutely detailed instructions on how to get to the front door. The only trouble was that the directions led to at least three spots that seemed to qualify as that front door, but with no clear idea whether we were actually in the right place. In some sense we were fortunate that no one in the village seemed to be home, so I was saved from at least a half a dozen embarrassing wrong front door encounters. We even had the help of several locals, all to no avail, and our hosts were away for the weekend. It finally turned out that the crucial turn, which we had passed multiple times, was completely left out of the instructions because VRBO has a rule against showing competing accommodations. The crucial “turn right” at the inn next door was thus verboten. You know what it is like being lost in a place with only two lanes and maybe twenty houses?
UP THE PATH TO OUR COTTAGE
Our next three days were wonderful. Edale was as quaint as one could imagine, even though it turned out to be one of the central points of the outdoor attractions for the entire area. The Peak District is one of those areas that prove that “there will always be an England.” It is an area of farmland, rural villages, and wilderness of some 500 square miles that was “created” as the nation’s first National Park - in 1951! The National Park Idea obviously came very late to the United Kingdom, where almost every square foot of land has been cultivated, occupied, and fought over for more than two thousand years. This first National Park was analogous to the National Health Service, in that it was another War aim of the Labour Party that was promised to the people if they could only defeat the Nazis. There had long been a tradition of public access too the countryside, but rich and mostly absentee landlords had begun to restrict such natural and ancient rights. Just a short distance from our cottage was the sight of the first “mass trespass” on open moorland that led to the formation of the Park.
THE FIRST PORTION OF THE PENNINE WAY - ONLY 267 MILES TO GO!
The other amazing thing about the area is that it lies adjacent and between two of the largest urban conglomerations in the English Midlands - Birmingham and Sheffield - which were two of the centers of England’s, and the world’s, Industrial Revolution. Just imagine if Yellowstone was a half hour train ride from Manhattan. Edale has a station on the original train line between the two cities, and it would be a commuter line if anyone actually lived in Edale. Most people come for the day to hill walk as if they were just going for a picnic in a city park. Fran and I encountered almost more people than we had seen in Glasgow because it turned out that our last day in Edale was a Bank Holiday Monday. Bank Holidays in England are long weekends created for holidays without actually commemorating or honoring anyone beyond declaring that the banks, and thus business, will be closed that day.
A "BY RIGHT" FOOTPATH ADJACENT TO A LONELY FARM.
THE PATH RAN PAST THIS ANCIENT DRY STONE WALL
A LARGER FARM WITH AN EVEN LARGER SKY BEYOND
These views highlight the incredible skies that qualified for what Instagram calls “cloud porn.”
A PANORAMIC VIEW OF ONE OF THE RIDGES THAT CUTS OFF THE PEAK DISTRICT FROM CIVILIZATION BEYOND
The Peak District is criss-crossed with so many trails, paths, and rights-of-ways that there is literally something for everyone. The Park information center included hiking guides way beyond the ordinary. I found a guide for walking trails that promised an ancient pub every few miles for libation, as well as “Miles without Stiles”, guides specifically for hiking with your dogs in the countryside so that your pups would not have to negotiate any ladders, gates or walls. Yet only a few steps from our cottage was the start of the Pennine Way, a long-distance path of 268 miles that involved real mountain climbing all the way back to the Scottish border. Fran and I walked the first mile along an ancient canal/stream before turning back at the first stile.
A LITTLE SPOT OF COLOR AMIDST ALL OF THE GREEN
Yet all in all the Peak District was positively tame in comparison with Scotland. We walked for miles on paved paths hundreds of years old that no Scot would have even qualified as a walk much less a hike. The beautiful valley was almost no match for the surrounding hills that cut off the district from Urban England.
A QUIET SPOT IN THE VILLAGE
We left the car in the village most of the time, but we took one wild drive a few miles away to Winnats Pass, where Fran once again navigated across 25% grades through a short section of wilderness. I find these places through “unorthodox” research, where I somehow come across collections of motorcycle guides to "wild rides" in the countryside, available to only those who bring their Ordinance Survey maps along for the journey.
OFF THE ROAD ON WINNATS PASS
This road eventually led to a beautiful village called Castleton. We stopped for an ice cream like everyone else and walked to our last church burial ground in England. The oldest gravestone that we found that we could still read was from 1367, 300 years after the Castle at the top off the hill was built that eventually gave the village its name. Peveril Castle was built by one of the barons who came across with William the Conqueror in 1066.
AN ANCIENT CHURCHYARD, WITH AN EVEN OLDER CASTLE ON THE TOP OF THE HILL
OUR LAST SET OF STANDING STONES IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE ON THE WAY OUT OF THE PEAK DISTRICT
WHAT HAS HE GOTTEN ME TO NOW?
We left the next day for London, with our final stop on the way out of the park on a foolish quest for our last stone circle of the trip. This was prompted by yet another bout of You Tube research. Fran was more than game, and we finally found the stones after traipsing across a farmer’s field in the pouring rain, with only a lone cow for company. I could have sworn he was laughing at us, if cows could laugh, and I would bet that he didn’t see another human that day. The stones were said to be five thousand years old. A few more hours on the Motorway we were in Heathrow, and the next day we were 6,000 miles back home in Portland.
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NOVEMBER 30, 2024
After our return to the reality of urban Scotland in Oban, it was time to take on the real thing with our last stop in Scotland, three nights in Glasgow. Four years ago when we first planned this trip, I had set aside almost a week in the city. But our traveling companions, Amy and Bill, seemed almost dead set against spending time there, so we compromised with a very short stay that really didn’t do the city justice. Let’s call it a taste of Glasgow, and we did eat and drink very well indeed.
THIS COULD BE NEAR REGENT'S PARK IN LONDON. BUT IN GLASGOW THESE WERE NO LONGER HOUSES, BUT EXCLUSIVE OFFICES THAT SERVED A CLIENTELE THAT WOULD NOT BE CAUGHT DEAD IN A REGULAR OFFICE BUILDING, LIKE PRIVATE DOCTORS OR PERSONAL BANKERS.
There are parts of Glasgow which are beautiful, but it is not very pretty. The climate is grim, and there is no rural ambience to hide the fact that it is very grey even when it is not raining. As Portlanders we were of course familiar with this ambience, but Glasgow rain was not Portland drizzle, and our maps hid the fact that the ten block walk we set out on was about equal to about thirty of our standard miniature Portland blocks. While Glasgow is not San Francisco, it was Seattle, and it soon became apparent that one had to plan for some real hills as we walked around the city. If we had been there a few more days we would have deciphered the transit system and avoided some far too long walks and frustrating drives around the city.
COMMERCIAL EMPIRES WERE RUN FROM OFFICES LIKE THESE IN DOWNTOWN GLASGOW.
Amy and Bill are hotel people, and we stayed in a classic large Bed and Breakfast in a beautiful neighborhood near the museums, parks and spaces bordering the University campus. For God’s sake, there were real grass tennis courts across the street. We reserved the latest spots that were available for breakfast, which was so epic that it took up two pages and allowed for a multitude of choices after the initial page of cereal and pastries. We usually finished around 11:00 AM, and it took all of our strength to not return to the room for a nap while Amy and Bill made their first foray to visit all of the fine museums that Fran was all too happy to avoid. We usually attempted to meet them in the afternoon at a pub, where I finally had a drinking partner in Bill to explore the world of Scottish beer and queerly flavored crisps.
ONE OF A NUMBER OF VICTORIAN TRAIN STATIONS IN CENTRAL GLASGOW
finally overcome De-industrialization was stopped in its tracks by recent history. There were entire districts of empty new office buildings and apartments that had never been occupied once they were built. Outside the center of the city, many places seemed to be in a state of suspense animation, waiting for the boom that had been on the cusp of transforming the city. On the other hand, some parts of the center of town contained brief interludes reminiscent of the energy and affluence of London. On one stretch of a few blocks I passed more than half a dozen shops that offered watches from every country on Earth that started at prices higher than we had spent for our entire six weeks in Great Britain.
JUST AROUND THE CORNER FROM OUR HOTEL A GRAND OLD SYNAGOGUE HAD BEEN CONVERTED TO0 OFFICES.
Fran and I spent a few nice days avoiding all of the art, science and history museums that we could. We had one nice afternoon exploring our neighborhood which was a quite lively university district once we had found the old shopping streets that seemingly offered cuisines from every corner of the globe. Fran finally had enough of Scottish cuisine and somehow found a Polish restaurant around the corner from our hotel that transported us back to the end of Cold War. It turned out to be part of the Polish Consulate and we had dumplings and wiener schnitzel and Polish beer.
THE BIGGEST GREENHOUSE IN THE BOTANICAL GARDENS, A CATHEDRAL OF STEEL AND GLASS
Another afternoon was devoted to the Botanical Garden which rivaled Kew Gardens in London for outrageous displays of vegetation from around the world, both in a beautiful park setting that seemed to be nanny central for the city, and in incredible greenhouses for anything that couldn’t grow in the Scottish climate. It culminated in a giant greenhouse that had been donated by some Scottish lord when he got tired of maintaining it on his own estate. This glass and steel cathedral of plants had been taken apart piece by piece and reassembled in Glasgow.
THE GREENHOUSE INTERIOR UNDER THE DOME
I found a museum that Fran would enjoy in an architectural triumph by Zara Hadid that was somewhat curiously called the Museum of Transport. It turned out to be a collection of objects that illustrated the trappings of the Glasgow throughout the Twentieth Century. Every device that ever carried human beings around the city, from early bicycles to entire trains, was displayed in an absolutely chaotic fashion that could appeal to grandchildren curious about a foreign world before the present day to their grandparents who had lived in that world many years before. While I realized much to my chagrin that the museum’s incredible roof was basically an arbitrary sculpture, it did allow for the Disneyland recreation of entire streets of Old Glasgow that could illustrate the city’s history.
A REAL CLIPPER SHIP MOORED OUTSIDE ON THE RIVER AND REFLECTED IN THE MUSEUM'S ENTRY FACADE
There the Model T wasn’t in a museum but parked on the cobblestone street outside of the drugstore interior that had been saved from a long-departed Glasgow neighborhood. It was incredible and a little bit eerie to walk into an ice cream shop that was just like the one where I had my first job as a soda jerk, or into an old pub where I could have known where to hook up the keg, or into an Undergound Station not that much different from my station in London from oh so many years ago. The museum was almost like a novel that told a universal story while paying particular attention to a very unique part of the world.
ON THE STREET OUTSIDE THE PAWN BROKER
To culminate our taste of Glasgow we had our first High Tea at the Willow Tea Rooms in the middle of Downtown. Imagine a living history museum which celebrated Glasgow’s architecture, combined with a trip to the Great British Bake Off. Around the turn of the Twentieth Century, Charles Mackintosh found his first great opportunity in designing Tea Rooms around the city where women could dine and gossip and no doubt create the Suffragette movement when no respectable woman could go to a pub.
THE PROPER FONT TO ANNOUNCE YOUR JOURNEY TO THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY WORLD OF PASTRY
Mackintosh created an entire environment, from the architecture to the furnishings to the silverware to the menu in these tea rooms. We had the opportunity to have High Tea about two and a half hours, sitting in a very accurate restoration of one of these places. I got to sit on one of Mackintosh’s “throne chairs” which cost more than my first car.
THE FURNISHING, DECORATION, AND STAINED GLASS ALL AUTHENTIC AND AVAILABLE TO OUR PARTY, AT LEAST FOR ONE AFTERNOON.
More importantly, the spread met the approval of my pastry chef wife, who’d declared the culminating cake as a “first class sponge” just like she was a judge in the tent. A great time was had by all, and we were so stuffed that we got Amy and Bill to eat our last dinner together at their “ungodly late hour” of 7:30!
THE PASTRY CASE WITH JUST SOME OF SELECTIONS AVAILABLE FOR "HIGH TEA"
The next day we had our final breakfast which was more than enough to fuel us all the way to our final three days in England's Peak District on the way back to London.
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A DAY IN OBAN
NOVEMBER 22, 2024
A short one this week. I’d like to discuss the serendipity of actually traveling to a place as opposed to just seeing it on Instagram, which is weird since that is what I’m offering you guys each week. The fact is that no photograph, even such excellent images that I endeavor to produce, can truly convey, for better or worse, what it’s like to visit a place in reality.
URBAN SCOTLAND, SLATE AND STONE
I had a much better time than I expected in our one day and night in Oban on the Western shore of Scotland south of the Isle of Skye. I had not even wanted to go there, agreeing only because there was a serious lack of places to stay anywhere near Glen Coe on our way to Glasgow. The city is known as another gateway to the Western Isles, with numerous ferry routes to all sorts of islands, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we were going there since we were not going to take the ferry anywhere.
OBAN IS MOSTLY ONE HIGH STREET ALONG THE HARBOR WITH A VERY STEEP HILLSIDE SURROUNDING IT THAT HIDES THE RESIDENTIAL AREAS.
In the end though Oban served as a very nice and mellow reintroduction to the urban world after more than a month in some of the most rural places I had ever been in my life. It turned out to be a way to be reaclimated to urban life before we got to the major city of Glasgow. Oban’s charms, such as they were, did not lend themselves to photography. The shock to my system at suddenly being confronted by traffic, buildings more than five stories tall, and all of the sights and sounds of a typical high street in urban Great Britain, tended to keep the camera in the bag. The fact that it was raining most of the time we were there didn’t help at all.
THERE ARE S0ME PICTURESQUE VICTORIAN BUILDINGS IN VARIOUS STATES OF DECAY.
Now don’t get me wrong. Oban was far from an urban hell-hole; in fact it’s layout as a major historical port, surrounded by tiers of hills that offered San Francisco-like walks, lent it modicum of THE picturesque. But it certainly was a tourist town, and it took a lot of very lucky touring to find some places that were for the locals. A big part of the problem was that we stayed only one night; Fran and I quickly resolved that we would endeavor to never do that again if we could help it.
IT WAS FUN TO SEE TOWERS OF CHIMNEYS THAT BROUGHT BZCK MEMORIES OF MY OLD LONDON NEIGHBORHOOD.
The only things that kept me going were the parts of a trip available only if you actually take the trip. We ate two meals in Oban, both of which were excellent and irretrievably local. I had the most authentic fish and chips I have had since I lived in London almost fifty years ago, in one of the three chipies renowned for being among the best in Scotland which were located overlooking the harbor. The next morning we had breakfast in a locally famous bakery cafe that Bill found on a walk. The food was so good and the cafe was so well run that Fran and I made the effort to stop the harried owner and compliment her as two elderly veterans of the “hospitality” industry.
THE REAL REASON FOR OBAN - THE VIEW BEYOND THE HARBOR
The last image from Oban might illustrate my point of the necessity of actually visiting a place. I do not expect you to be as fascinated as I was by the sidewalks of Oban. After all, I am a retired architect and unban designer. But this detail of the stone sidewalks of Oban was not in any way unusual. The entire city was mostly covered in stone like this, which to me signified a sense of civic pride far beyond the obvious ubiquity of stone in the local environment. This kind of attention to detail in what in fact was merely a sidewalk illustrates much more to me about Oban than anything else I could capture in my short time there.
CIVIC PRIDE EXTENDS TO THE SIDEWALK
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NOVEMBER 15, 2024
This week I would like to recount my partial success in avoiding Loch Ness. We left Inverness after a very nice three-day stay with our friends Amy and Bill. I had planned a drive all the way back to Glen Coe for them to see this incredible area while not allowing any dilly-dallying on the way to avoid having to participate in any absurd tourist activities surrounding Loch Ness. The long drive to Glen Coe and then beyond to Oban seemed to provide all of the insurance I needed to avoid spending time along Loch Ness. A planned return to Glen Coe also insured that we would get to see it even if our earlier visit one month before had ended in foggy and rainy disappointment. The weather Gods smiled upon us and we got to spend two visits to Glen Coe with very little rain.
THE BEAUTY OF LOCH NESS IS USUALLY REFLECTED IN THE WATER.
I have always resisted silly tourist activities; Fran still has not gotten to go to the Trees of Mystery or the Oregon Vortex back home. I wanted to avoid a boat ride on Loch Ness in pursuit of Nessie without having to act like an old fuddy-duddy, so I let our schedule dictate our time on the Loch. We embarked on our road trip and within a half an hour we lost our friends to an alternate route and didn’t see them for the rest of the day. Such are the hazards of suddenly traveling with another couple in two cars.
ALONG THE CALEDONIAN CANAL AT FORT AUGUSTUS
Loch Ness is actually very beautiful if you can avoid Nessie. It takes up most of Scotland’s Great Rift which divides the Lowlands from the really empty Highlands. You don’t have to be a geologist to look at the map and realize that the loch runs along a giant fault line that runs from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. Loch Ness is so long, wide and deep that it almost seems like a Scottish Great Lake, except for the fact that there are very few people living along the Loch beyond Inverness at it’s Eastern End. In fact the entire South Shore of the loch is so remote that it warrants only a single-track road. The North Shore is not exactly teeming either. There was only one real town along the way, Fort Augustus, where Nineteenth Century industrialists crafted the Caledonian Canal to allow shipping beyond Loch Ness to the Atlantic. The Canal survives mostly as a way for pleasure boats to cruise beyond the Loch. It was fascinating to watch as the boats negotiated past the locks and rose several stories to continue on their way. And it was genuinely Scottish in that the boat owners were the people who were dragging their boats from the sides of the canal under the watchful eyes of the government bureaucrats who ran the operation. The rest of the settlement was devoted to making tourist dollars off of the spectacle, but I didn’t mind since it was sunny, we had a nice Pub lunch along the canal, and I got a good price on a lambswool scarf - all without mention of Nessie.
TWO VIEWS AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE CANAL. ABOVE YOU FEEL THE POWER OF THE LOCH, BELOW YOU REALIZE ITS EXPANSE.
IT TAKES A NINE-STITCH PANORAMA TO ENCOMPASS THE VIEW UP LOCH NESS
The photographic possibilities along the Loch shore depend on whether you want to focus on details of the Highland scenery or on the big picture. My tendency is to go for the more detailed shots, but there is something to be said for the grand scenic in such an overwhelming environment. Here are examples of these two approaches, both taken at the park right at the entrance of the canal. The first shows the power of Loch Ness, which appears almost ocean-like with real waves at the entrance of the canal. The second image, taken from exactly the same spot, is a stitched panoramic composed of parts of nine different images that reveal the overwhelming expanse of Loch Ness. One could be forgiven if you mistook this for a standard view of the Columbia Gorge - the geology is pretty much the same.
SINCE THERE ARE NO SETTLEMENTS, SHIPS PROVIDE THE SCALE ALONG THE SHORELINE
The photographic possibilities along the Loch Ness shore depend on whether you want to focus on details of the Highland scenery or on the big picture. My tendency is to go for the more detailed shots, but there is something to be said for the grand scenic in such an overwhelming environment. Here are examples of these two approaches, both taken at the park right at the entrance of the canal. The first shows the power of Loch Ness, which appears almost ocean-like with real waves at the entrance of the canal. The second image, taken from exactly the same spot, is a stitched panoramic composed of parts of nine different images that reveal the overwhelming expanse of Loch Ness. One could be forgiven if you mistook this for a standard view of the Columbia Gorge - the geology is pretty much the same.
DETAIL OF A CLIFFSIDE
As we drove down the South Shore there were more opportunities to concentrate on epic hillsides that then became small parts of wider stitched panoramas. The cliffs and mountains that contained Loch Ness hinted at the immense depth of the water hiding the cliffs that continued below the waterline. The occasional boat no doubt spewing out Nessie tall-tales provided rare indications of scale since there were no hints of human settlement along the shore.
A MAJOR HILL ALONG THE SHORE
A PANORAMA REVEALS THAT THE HILL IS ONLY A MINOR PORTION OF THE MOUNTAIN RANGE SOUTH OF LOCH NESS (STAGE RIGHT)
ANOTHER STITCHED PANORAMA
Most of these images required two areas of post-processing. As per usual, you must reduce the exposure of the skies, which are too bright to allow for an even exposure with the hillsides. These days you can do this very easily on the computer without resorting to gradient filters in the field. In fact recent advances in software technology allow you to pick out the sky without your linear gradient filter running over the mountain slopes. You just have to be careful to make sure that you AI assistant doesn’t mess up overlapping mountains ranges or confuse clouds with mountains. But that is why we are paid the big bucks, or at least should be. The other gradient you need to apply is to lighten the Loch waters to actually reveal the various levels of reflections encountered along the shoreline. Most people strive for the mirror reflection, but I actually feel that a nice ripple can add a lot to an image - my favorite from this set of images is the last one, where the wake from an unseen boat beautifully distorts the reflections on Loch Ness.
WAVES DISTORT THE MIRROR. FAR LEFT OF THE PANORAMA ABOVE
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OCTOBER 25, 2024
OKAY, EVEN DOG TRAINING SEEMS A LITTLE MORE AUTHENTIC IN FRONT OF A REAL CASTLE.
This week I would like to recount our day at the Highland Games at Gordon Castle near Inverness. We had finally left Skye and driven East to Inverness to meet our friends Amy and Bill for a week in the Highlands. They are B&B people, so it was time to abandon Fran’s cooking and see how many Full Scottish Breakfasts we could handle before bursting at the seams. Fortunately, the places we stayed were very authentic and delivered a true B&B experience that I had not expected to find in this day and age.
ON THE WAY TO THE GAMES, YOU REALIZE WE WERE NOT IN GRESHAM ANYMORE.
The crew decided that we had to go to the beginning of the Highland Games that were held in various places throughout Scotland. I thought I had had my fill of Highland Games held near Portland every Summer, but it turned out that these Highland Games were a different breed than the ones I was familiar with in the Portland suburbs. The games, artisan booths, clan revivals, and the music were all the same - but there was something tangibly different about the setting that made the day unique. Gordon Castle was not Mt. Hood Community College, and the participants were not Scottish Americans play-acting for the day. Gordon Castle bills itself as a premier "sporting venue" for hire, with it's own salmon streams, hunting woodland, and enough room for a small wedding for 250 guests. Normally the Castle is not open to any tours or visitors. Guests are assured that the public will not only be kept away, but will not even know that anyone is staying at the Castle. The only day that commoners like ourselves are welcome is for the annual Highland Games.While the day was devoted to Scottish heritage, all of the participants were more locals than professional reenactors. The range of true sub-cultures available at the Games was truly extraordinary.
A WONDERFUL GORDON SETTER
This started, but certainly did not end, with the celebration of the local dog breed - literally the Gordon Setter, a pretty large and dark breed of current and formally hunting dogs that were local to the area. I have never been around more dogs that were so well trained that one barely heard a bark or saw any confrontation between hundreds of quite large dogs that could have beaten up any hound at Saturday Market. What was even more remarkable was that none of the owners thought that this behavior was at all remarkable.
A TYPICAL OWNER - I'M NOT KIDDING.
Many other subcultures were present as well. It was interesting to walk the vintage automobile show and to realize that I had no idea of the “marques” (brands) that were exhibited widely - this went far beyond the Jaguars, MG’s, or Bentleys that I could pretend I knew something about. I was in an undiscovered country, even before I arrived at the farm machinery exhibits.
I HAD NO IDEA ABOUT MOST OF THESE VEHICLES. I COULD PRETEND THIS HAD A V-8, BUT SOMEHOW I DOUBT IT.
I ADMIRED THE SHEET METAL WITHOUT IN ANY WAY KNOWING THE VINTAGE OR BACKGROUND OF THE OBSCURE (TO ME, ANYWAY) HISTORICAL CARS.
AN EXUBERANT FAIR BOOTH. I STUCK TO THE SCONES. THAT SKY WAS TYPICAL OF THE DAY, EVEN THOUGH IT RARELY RAINED.
The artists booths were more familiar, and I talked shop with a few photographers who seemed just as cynical as yours truly with dealing with a public that didn’t seem to understand that photographs existed beyond their iPhone screens. The fair food seemed to be just as dismal as back home, but we eventually found enough scones and such to satiate our hunger. What was interesting that the famed Scottish hospitality extended to the various Scotch establishments. I could have gotten stinking drunk on free samples of liquors that I would never have any chance of buying, even if I could afford them. Even Fran had a couple, as she pretended to have an opinion on “smoothness” and “smoke.”
NOT THEIR FIRST RODEO
And then the music started. There were enough Marching Bands to make one realize why the Pipes might have stirred fear in the hearts of any Englishman on any battlefield for hundreds of years. Yes, there were some women around, but for the most part these groups looked like they were not only local, but had been playing together ever since they had served in the Army together. I could almost imagine their former ranks, and decide who had been harboring a grudge against the Sergeant Major for over thirty years. All in all, the spectacle was overwhelming and I soon decided to concentrate on small details rather than attempt to make sense of the tides of musicians roaming around the place.
THE PIPES, THE PIPES!
BE-RIBBONED HEADS
QUITE AN OUTFIT
I had a great time despite myself, while of course Fran absorbed every bit of Highland culture that anyone could stand. In the end even I couldn’t resist the dance competitions, where women from seven to seventy flung themselves about doing the Highland Fling for fame and fortune. The judging seemed as serious as any Olympic Ice Skating event. And the little girls seemed radiant at their parents snapped the winners in front of a Rhododendron as big as our bungalow back in Portland.
WE HAVE A WINNER!
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OCTOBER 18, 2024
ONCE AGAIN HEADING DOWN OUR DRIVEWAY FOR THE FIFTEEN MINUTE DRIVE TO DUNVEGAN
This week I would like to take you on a short stroll Fran and I took in Dunvegan. The Two Churches Walk was a rarity on Skye as it lived up to its reputation as a pleasant stroll near town. While it was not as short as advertised, it was a pleasant surprise on an island that could charitably be described as not exactly “user friendly.” While we certainly needed our hiking poles, there were none of the unpleasant terrain difficulties we encountered on almost every other hike on Skye.
THE REMAINS OF ST. MARY'S CHURCH, RUINED AROUND 1730
The walk was advertised as taking about an hour, which as usual included no time at all for actually taking in the beautiful scenery available on the hike. It sometimes seemed to me that the trail times were set by walkers who were suffering through their exercise rather than enjoying their day. Since we actually wanted to have a good time, the walk took closer to couple of hours as we enjoyed the wild variances of environments that we encountered in less than two miles of exploring.
SOME GRAVES ARE MORE MONUMENTAL THAN OTHERS
The walk started at a lay-by very close to the town center, just opposite the Airb&b that Fran and I had anticipated spending a week in March of 2020. The property was still there but the business had not survived the pandemic. We set out on a path that took us up a hill to the ruins of St. Mary’s Church, which were composed of two gable ends and a graveyard and one old tree that looked like it too had been there for centuries. The church dates from before the Protestant Reformation. The graveyard contained many gravestones dating back to the 1730’s, including several chieftains of the Clan MacLeod which ruled from nearby Dunvegan Castle.
THE OPEN MOOR
We then started uphill and encountered the first really open moor we had seen in a while. This moorland was as close to wilderness as you can find in the United Kingdom, even though you are within sight of the local roads. The fact is that these moors are so inhospitable, even to sheep, that they remain pretty wild even though they are close at hand, and are the results of the ancient human desire to cut down any woodland that man encounters. This results in a "moor", which can be accurately described as a man-made wilderness, a medieval product of “paving paradise and putting up a parking lot” - in this case trading in a forest for scrubland that nobody seems to know what to do with, centuries later.
MORE BLUEBELLS, OH MY!
Just when I thought we were doomed to one environment, we went through another gate and started hiking through a reasonable facsimile of the ancient forest that preceded the moor. At first it seemed to be a typical Scottish woodland, complete with appropriately gnarly oaks and birches surrounded by bluebells. But after a few more twists and turns, and considerable loss of light, Fran and I found ourselves transported several thousand miles back to the Columbia Gorge.
IS THIS OREGON, OR SCOTLAND?
The woods were so much like Oregon that I could reasonably get away with labeling these images as originating just an hour from home rather than a continent away. It turned out that this section of forest was one of the best approximations of the original Scottish woodland that was lost many years ago, and is usually only found deep within a planted tree farm in the Highlands of Scotland.
A FAMILIAR ENVIRONMENT
GREEN AS BACK HOME, COMPLETE WITH NURSE TREES!
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
The environment was so complete - the ferns, the fir trees, the moss, and the ever-present moisture - that Fran and I felt very much at home. Yet only a few minutes later we were walking through the parking lot of the “new” Duirinish Church of Scotland, the second of the “two churches” and were back in Dunvegan, looking for scones.
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OCTOBER 11, 2024
THE ONLY CLUE THAT WE'RE NOT IN OREGON IS THE ANCIENT STONE WALL LEADING TO THE SEA STACK.
This week I would like to recount a day trip Fran and I took to Talisker Bay, a beautiful and fairly remote beach on the Western side of Skye. This is one of those places that is pretty out of the way and thus frequented more by the locals than even intrepid visitors. In fact at least one nice woman begged me not to tell anyone about the place, and she was only half-kidding. I think it’s safe since the lonely road from Dunvegan takes any least a half-hour before you get to the single-track sections. Since most tourists stay closer to Portree this trip really becomes a whole-day excursion.
WE WOKE UP TO THIS VIEW BEHIND OUR CABIN DUNVEGAN. THE SHEEP HAD NOT ARRIVED AS OF YET.
THE ROAD WEST
The road west from Dunvegan takes you through a series of hills, lochs and mountains on the way to the tiny village of Carbost, which is dominated by the Talisker Distillery. We stopped by to get our bearings and find the single-track road out of the village to the Bay.
THE VIEW ON THE WAY TO CARBOST
Before we left we stopped at the Oyster Shed, a renowned place to get fresh fish on Skye. An obscure single-track road wound uphill, with no real indication of where in the hell you were going or even if the store was up there at the end of the road. We finally came upon what had to be the worst car park on all of Skye. I still do not know how Fran safely parked the car. The restaurant was outstanding, as long as you realized that you would be eating outside with dozens of your closest friends at one picnic table with a view down to the sea. We both ate more than our fill, especially after I realized that a dozen fresh-shucked oysters cost the same as half a dozen!
A VIEW OF ONE OF THE FOLDS IN THE MOUNTAINS SOUTH OF THE PATH TO THE BEACH
The traffic dropped drastically on the four mile single-track road to the beach hike at Talisker Bay. The hike was very gentle for Skye, although I soon realized that the advertised one-mile long route did not include the one-mile walk from the car park to the start of the hike.
THE SOUTH END OF THE BAY PUNCTUATED BY A SEA STACK
The hike started in a thoroughly obscure manner among the outbuildings of Talisker House, the manor house of the neighborhood since the 1730’s. Boswell and Dr. Johnson stayed there for a few days on their Scottish journey in the 1790’s. After searching around the courtyard fully expecting to come upon a crime scene, we finally found the path to the beach. The path was straightforward and not beyond my abilities until we passed through the second gate and got to a long stone wall down to the sea. We had “arrived”. I found a perch near the stone wall and was delighted to sit there while Fran continued down to the water over the moor in pursuit of the full sheep experience.
THE NORTH SIDE OF THE BAY, ENCLOSED BY THREE MOUNTAINS.
I surveyed a vast panorama from my comfortable rock. On the far left on the South end of the beach at the end of the ancient stone wall was a sea stack plucked from the Oregon Coast, the tail end of the mountains we had just walked by to the beach. The Bay curved to the North, with endless views to North America somewhere 3,000 miles to the West. As I followed the sea to the North side of the Bay, I was no longer on the Oregon Coast. Three even higher mountains closed off the beach, complete with substantial waterfall that looks puny coming off one of the mountains to the plain.
FRAN ON HER WAY DOWN TO THE BEACH
Fran was now pretty close to the water, surrounded by sheep who were enjoying a day at the seaside. The sight of sheep cavorting near the waves was pretty funny, especially since there was no clear route as to how they got there or where they were spending the night. When Fran had had her fill of close encounters with the sheep, we left the stone wall and proceeded back down the path.
THE FULL PANORAMA OF JUST THE NORTH SIDE OF THE BAY. FRAN IS WEARING HER REGULATION NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC RED SHIRT - ALL THE WAY ON THE RIGHT, FOR SCALE.
THE VIEW BACK DOWN THE VALLEY. SCOTCH BROOM IS NOT AN INVASIVE WEED, SINCE THIS IS SCOTLAND!
One of the joys of hiking in Scotland is that the views are so incredible that you frequently find the walk back as exciting as the initial hike. Since the views down the path were so incredible, you really don’t look back at where you started. Our hike back afforded views of the incredible valley we had walked through, complete with even more mountains that ringed the valley and closed off the route back to Carbost.
AT THE END OF THE VALLEY STANDS THE VERY IMPOSING MOUNTAIN OF PRESHAL MOR.
ANOTHER VIEW OF A FOLD IN THE SOUTHERN HILLS
OUR FIRST "SHEEP DRIVE"
A highlight of our trip back to Dunvegan was our first encounter with a “sheep drive” that blocked the road for a spell. We couldn’t tell who was the most frustrated by the effort to get these sheep to cross the single-track road. The farmers were pretty disgusted by the inability of the lambs to follow their directions, the hired sheep dogs, or the simple example of their mothers who simply wanted to get back to eating on the other side of the road. After some time watching the dogs trying to corral the lambs, the farmers finally picked the lambs up and simply threw them across the road to their bemused mothers.
THE LONELY DRIVE BACK TO DUNVEGAN
We spent most of a wonderful day on our excursion to Talisker Bay. If anything the road back to Dunvegan was even lonelier in the late afternoon. Fran was as usual very intrepid, and I was grateful that at near 8:00 P.M., we still had a few hours of sunlight before dark.
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OCTOBER 4, 2024
BURIED AT THE END OF THE WORLD
One of the best parts of our stay on the Isle of Skye was that we were there for so long that we could wander around without worrying about missing the “most important” sites on the island. One day we sent Vinny and Steve off to Elgol to take the boat trip we had already taken. As an example of how “the madness” had begun, the same boat on which we had been the only passengers now contained Vinny and Steve and almost twenty other passengers. We set off to explore the rest of the Waternish Peninsula, North of Dunvegan Castle.
MULTIPLY THIS TOWNHOUSE BY ABOUT TWELVE AND YOU HAVE THE VILLAGE OF STEIN
Another wonderful aspect of Skye was that no matter how isolated a spot we visited, there was always another place that seemed even further removed from civilization. As we traveled North of Dunvegan on the usual single-track road, we encountered one of the weirdest “villages” I have ever seen, the hamlet of Stein.
STEIN IS NOW THREE BUILDINGS BECAUSE ONE OF THE TOWNHOUSES BURNED DOWN A LONG TIME AGO, LEAVING A GAP. THE STEIN INN HELPFULLY "SIGNS" ITS NAME ON THE NOW EXPOSED PARTY WALL AT THE GAP
Stein dates from 1790, when Thomas Telford, a noted British architect, was tasked with creating a new fishing village to encourage economic development in an isolated part of Skye North of Dunvegan Castle. The only trouble was that the croft farmers of the area had no desire to become fisherman in the dangerous waters surrounding Skye. Within a generation the corporation finally gave up its plans and the little village became a pretty weird hamlet of croft houses for the still struggling farmers.
WHAT MUST BE THE MOST ANTI-SOCIAL DWELLINGS IN THE WORLD - THE ONLY SINGLE DWELLING IN STEIN, A FEW HUNDRED FEET AWAY FROM THE ROW HOUSES.
Stein is composed of about a dozen houses, all contained in only three different buildings. It is as if a row of urban townhouses from Brooklyn had been transported thousands of miles intact to the wilds of Skye. The only reason that there are three buildings is that at some point one of the townhouses was destroyed in a fire, leaving a gap in the row. We drove up to a village that had one street and a white-washed set of row houses, pretty much identical two-story dwellings, white with black trim. They all shared the same view of Loch Bay across their individual gardens and one public lawn.
THE SHORE OF LOCH BAY
Most of the village now seemed to really be a set of holiday cottages. The Stein Inn occupied a few of the townhouses. It is reputed to be the oldest pub on Skye, dating from the original demise of the fishing village plans. It seemed to be a very attractive pub, but I waited third in line at the bar for more than fifteen minutes with no apparent staff when Fran sent me in for a drink. We later realized that the barmaid was the only woman we ever saw on Skye who was actually sunbathing in the park the whole time we were there. This speaks to the problem of finding employees that are not actually part of your family in a place like Skye. By the time we left the boss was literally begging her to go serve the punters in the Inn.
THE VIEW ACROSS LOCH BAY
The only other place to eat in town was the Loch Bay Restaurant, a Michelin-starred place where the prix fixed dinner ran to 175 pounds per person. Fran and I eventually settled on two cokes and a bag of crisps in the park. We found the apartment we almost picked to stay on Skye above a gallery in the line of townhouses, and realized that Stein was a nice place to visit, but probably a pretty weird place to actually live, even for a week.
THE VIEW AT THE END OF THE ROAD
The only comparable living situation I could compare Stein to were the ancient Hopi apartment blocks in the midst of the Navaho Reservation, where most of the entire Hopi nation live in three single blocks of attached dwellings in the middle of nowhere. We left Stein and drove further up the Waternish Peninsula for another few minutes to the literal end of the road.
A GREAT PLACE TO BE A SHEEP, BUT YOU BETTER LIKE YOUR FAMILY.
The views were absolutely beautiful in this incredibly lonely place. At first we looked across Loch Bay, which solved the Skye problem of whether to call a body of water a Loch or a Bay by just combining the two. Across the Loch sat another part of the Isle of Skye, whose various peninsulas form a sort of lobster when viewing the entire island on a map. As we turned the final corner of the road, we were now starring across “The Minch”, the body of water between Skye and the Outer Hebrides two to three hours away by ferry. After that it was clear sailing all the way to North America.
TWO VIEWS FROM THE LONELY GRAVEYARD AT THE END OF THE ROAD
We ended our trip at yet another very picturesque graveyard, whose denizens had stared out to sea for over two hundred years. Everyone obviously had strong ties to somewhere nearby, although there were many people who had lived in Glasgow, London and even further before coming back to be buried in this tiny portion of the end of the world.
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DUNVEGAN CASTLE AND GARDENS
SEPTEMBER 27, 2024
THE VIEW OF LOCH DUNVEGAN FROM THE BATTLEMENTS ON THE CASTLE ROOF
This week I would like to take you on a quick tour of Dunvegan’s pride and joy, the medieval castle and extensive gardens that are the biggest tourist draw in Western Skye. While I appreciated the opportunity to visit a castle that dated back eight hundred years and still functioned as part-time residence of the Laird of Clan MacLeod, I enjoyed the gardens even more. Call me an unreconciled small d democrat.
The castle is remarkably intact, even though most of it is composed of additions and remodels that are comparatively modern. That is the most interesting facet of the tour, in that once the tourists withdraw, the ancient family has the run of the place. Most of the castle feels more like an aristocratic palace than a medieval ruin - because it is. While we don’t get to see the present-day family home, most of the rooms feel like they could host a party later that week. Even though their is forbidding stair down to the dungeon, and there are cannon relics on the ramparts, the castle mostly feel more like Downton Abbey than Shakespeare.
THE VIEW OF THE SHORELINE OF LOCH DUNVEGAN FROM THE CASTLE
That stirred up latent democratic prejudices in my soul. I truly believe that Great Britain saved the world in the 1940’s, and for that we should be forever grateful. I cried once again listening to Churchill’s “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech just the other night. Yet the aristocratic triumphalism that places like Dunvegan Castle represents just gets my goat. The Monarchy is of course ridiculous, but that is not the real problem - it is next 400 or so families further down the pecking order that still distort the entire British nation.
THE MODERN ADDITIONS TO THE CASTLE THAT KEEP THE MYTHS ALIVE DATE FROM THE 1850'S
Modern Britain of course went through a social revolution that in some ways took down the landed aristocracy more than a few notches. That’s why the hoi polloi actually get to visit these castle because the inheritance tax made the old order unsustainable, and required new “alternative” sources of income like admission fees to keep up appearances. I’m not arguing that the castle should fall into ruins, but that the idea that one family still owns a place that is really part of a nation’s history strikes me as folly.
THE ROUTE TO THE HISTORICAL REAL FRONT DOOR OF THE CASTLE WHICH ENSURED RESUPPLY FROM LOCH DUNVEGAN
This is Scotland, so the mood is enlivened by the idea that this aristocratic line is somewhat revolutionary. There is hardly a Union Jack to be found anywhere on the grounds, and the usual Scottish myths are part of the tour. I find most of Medieval Scotland can be best understood as simply West Side Story, with interminable conflict between the Sharks and the Jets. The Clans seem to be no more honorable than Mafia Families. On Skye this conflict was between the MacDonald's of Armandale and the usually triumphant MacLeod Clan whose seat was at Dunvegan. In the end both families lost their power to modernity, and the Southern Scottish aristocracy who realized it made more sense to be part of the world’s greatest empire than to hold out at the end of the world in places like Skye.
THE TRADITIONAL BARONIAL WINDOW OVER THE CASTLE'S LANDWARD ENTRANCE.
A TABLEAU AT A LIBRARY WINDOW THAT SEEMS MORE 1930'S THAN 1430'S.
The Clan system at least allowed for the election of the Laird, even if they happened to be a woman - although I doubt democracy really held sway. Walking through Dunvegan Castle what really made an impression on me was that modern people lived there, and the library, dining rooms and the parlors all contained stuff that I might find in my house, if I was a tad richer. Only when I walked past the one representation of “Downstairs” did it really hit me that a servant lived their private life in one simple room, even if they got to hear Mr. Churchill on the wireless.
A SERVANT'S ROOM - DATING FROM THE 1940'S.
I enjoyed the rather beautiful gardens attached to the Castle a lot more than the Castle itself. The family obviously had caught the gardening bug a long time ago, and the gardens took full advantage of an incredible site along the Loch Dunvegan. The gardens were arranged along quite a hike uphill from the Castle, bordered by a series of streams with all sorts of bridges here and fro. The walk culminated in a series of beautiful waterfalls which provided the water for all those streams. Not your ordinary suburban garden.
STREAMS AND BRIDGES
ANCIENT TREES
FERNS APLENTY
THIS HOSTA COULD HAVE COME FROM FRAN'S GARDEN.
EVEN THROW IN A FEW RHODDIES
What made it more special for Fran and I was that the climate was essentially identical to Oregon. We had traveled thousands of miles to a Medieval castle whose garden could have been found in Portland - ferns, crazily shaped trees, rhoddies, and enough water to make us feel right at home. The fact that it was raining most of the time we were there only completed the illusion that Scotland was somehow just part of Laurelhurst Park, with a ton of history thrown into the mix.
I COULD EASILY LIE AND CLAIM THIS WATERFALL WAS SOMEWHERE IN THE COLUMBIA GORGE.
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SEPTEMBER 20, 2024
THE VIEW FROM THE COTTAGE FACING LOCH ERGHALLAN
This week I would like to discuss our transition to the other side of the Isle of Skye, to the village of Dunvegan. Dunvegan is probably the fourth biggest concentration of people on the whole Isle of Skye, but it closely resembles a very small hamlet on the Oregon Coast. As we traveled west from our home for almost three weeks North of Portree, we realized that we were moving even further away from most of civilization. We made the right turn off our usual route to Portree, and the route quickly devolved into a single-track road that became a half hour trip that only went twelve miles West. Dunvegan resembled most of the villages on the Isle of Skye, with a string of houses along a single road; Dunvegan at least boasted a small grocery store, some galleries, and a few pubs. Fran and I found the Airbnb that we had reserved before our trip had been cancelled in 2020. I realized how naive I had been in imagining Dunvegan as a village like the ones we were familiar with in England. There was no village green or square, no central Pub, and certainly no chance to meet the Vicar or the local Constable and solve the latest grisly murder in the area. This was not the BBC.
OUR MODERN COTTAGE. OUR BEDROOM WAS ON THE LEFT. VINNY AND STEVE HAD THE ENTIRE UPPER FLOOR. THE LIVING ROOM ON THE RIGHT OF THE FIRST FLOOR WAS TWO STORIES HIGH.
We traveled to Dunvegan to meet our friends Vinny and Steve, who we we were delighted to share another week on Skye in a cottage that they had picked out on the web that could accommodate two couples. Vinny is former innkeeper, and like most salesman who are very susceptible to the latest sales pitch, he cannot resist the high-end accommodation websites that make up a lot of the places to rent on Skye. Fran and I are frugal if not cheap, so we made our usual arrangements with Vinny that we would be open to what he desired as long as they made up the difference between a perfectly adequate house and the object of his desires. As it happened the house near Dunvegan was doable since we were splitting the price - even though one week cost a little more than what we had paid for two and a half weeks in a traditional cottage.
THE IMMEDIATE REAR OF THE COTTAGE, WHICH WAS FREQUENTLY OCCUPIED BY SHEEP.
The modern croft cottage was fairly typical of the new places that dotted the island that screamed that “architect was here.” The site was spectacular once we found the house, which shared a driveway with another modern cottage off the single-track road just out of “town” on the side of Loch Erghallan. It helped that my trusty Ordinance Survey map was so detailed that we found the house right on the map. The house was very well designed and built, and this retired architect certainly found a lot of things to like, especially since we quickly realized that we could avoid the stairs by letting Vinny and Steve have the deluxe bedroom upstairs.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COTTAGE, WITH ONE MODERN AND ONE TRADITIONAL NEIGHBOR TO THE SOUTH. THE MOUNTAIN KNOWN AS MACLOED'S TABLE FOR PRETTY OBVIOUS REASONS, IN IN THE NEAR DISTANCE. THERE IS NOT MUCH IN BETWEEN THESE HOUSES AND THE NEARBY WILDERNESS.
It took only a few minutes for us to really sour on the place even before Vinny and Steve arrived. None of our complaints were their fault, since there was no way that you could tell how absolutely crazy the place was from the website. Innkeepers on Skye seem to feel that visitors will be chilled to the bone, so the heat was full on, with no clear way to lower it except by opening all the windows and doors to get some air circulating. Skye’s name in Gaelic is not a comment on the overwhelming views, but relates to the constant wind. Within seconds the entire house shook with all of the doors slamming shut. There was not a doorstop to be found, and I soon had to forage around the house for quite large rocks to try to keep the doors open. Then I attempted to start a round of laundry and discovered that a cottage that rented for much more than one thousand pounds a week seemed to provide only two laundry pods. The instructions for the combined washer and dryer were indecipherable.
THE LIGHT KEPT CHANGING BUT THE VIEW REMAINED SPECTACULAR. THE ISLAND OF EILEAN MOR IS ACROSS THE LOCH.
As we settled in for the week we were constantly reminded that the owners’ taste in furniture was the only challenge to their lack of any real efforts to make our stay easier. The house seemed to be an absolute indictment of my former profession. The lighting scheme and the outlet placement seemed to defy any logic. It took four college graduates hours to begin to understand how to work any of the appliances, from the washing machine to the stove to the dual ovens to the dishwasher. We never really figured out how to make the fancy TV work, and just gave up on the microwave. This was despite copious pages of instructions provided by the owners, which only seemed to make things worse. Most of the admonitions of “what not to do under any circumstances” were hidden in the bottom drawer of a random cabinet. After two weeks of my hard-earned experience making tea in a traditional electric teakettle, the super-fancy modern rendition nearly exploded and flooded most of the kitchen counter. We eventually got used to the fact that our dining room chairs were all rocking chairs, which made dinner very interesting. Yet a lot of the rest of the furniture was reminiscent of the furniture In “Beetlejuice.”
ANOTHER MORNING, ANOTHER VERSION OF THE VIEW FROM THE COTTAGE. THERE WAS NO REAL PATH DOWN TO THE WATER.
Okay, I will quit my complaining. The site was certainly spectacular, and we got used to the 15-minute drive to downtown Dunvegan. In the next few weeks I will describe our visit to Dunvegan Castle and its wonderful gardens, and recount our adventures on several outstanding hikes in the area.
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SEPTEMBER 13, 2024
MY FIRST IMAGE FROM MY ROCK.
This week I would like to explore the photographic concept of “turning around.” This is the simple admonition that sometimes a rather wonderful photographic composition can be discovered by simply turning directly opposite of the obvious “heroic shot.” In this age of Instagram there are very few undiscovered vistas available to the traveling photographer. This is true even if you have the opportunity to travel more than 6,000 miles away from home to the Isle of Skye in the far Northwest of Scotland.
A PANORAMA STITCHED FROM SEVERAL IMAGES WIDENS THE VIEW.
One of the places that every photographer is supposed to capture on eye island is the lighthouse at Neist Point, the farthest West one can go on the Isle of Skye without a boat. It is located at the far end of the typical single-track road, which to some extent keeps at least some of the tourists away. But you will still have plenty of company, with one of the worst car parks on the island to share with your fellow travelers. As usual we snagged the last parking space available - it could have easily taken another hour to wait for someone to decide to leave the area and free up another space.
FURTHER CROPPING REVEALS THE OVERWHELMING EXTENT OF THE VIEWS OPPOSITE THE LIGHTHOUSE.
The attraction of the site is an epic view of the lighthouse about a two-mile walk from said car park. Now I like a good lighthouse as much as the next guy, but the prospect of taking “the shot” that everyone else in the world has already taken was not on my bucket list of -photographic experiences. You can go on Instagram right now and probably find thousands of almost exactly the same images taken from the trail. Landscape photographers actually get into internet altercations on the proper placement of the horizon in relation to the lighthouse. Now of course it is possible to take a bad photograph of the lighthouse - but the problem is that the “good” images are basically identical. If you are lucky enough to actually live on the Isle of Skye you might encounter a rare weather condition, but I doubt the sanity of anyone who would drive out there in really inclement conditions that landscape photographers live for. The road is bad and long enough that even a standard sunset image requires a drive back after dark that you really shouldn’t be taking. Not to mention that sunset in the Summer is about 11:00 at night.
FINALLY, CUE THE "GOD RAYS" AND THE REAL VIEW IS REVEALED, DIRECTLY OPPOSITE WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS LOOKING AT.
We started the hike to the lighthouse and it didn’t take very long for me to abandon the effort. I was newly mature concerning what I was capable of taking on in the hiking department. The “easy” hike that was literally laid out in front of us involved a mile-long descent along the usual irregular stone “staircase” followed by another mile of ascent to the lighthouse. I assured Fran and our friends Vinny and Steve who had joined us for a week that I was perfectly happy to find a rock to sit on and have fun taking images while they hiked to their heart’s content. Even though my rock was far to the left of the vantage point required for “the shot” I figured with a little work I could find the right spot.
ANOTHER VERTICAL PANORAMA SHOWS A DETAIL OF THE COASTLINE.
I soon realized that my perfectly ordinary rock afforded me incredible vistas as soon as I literally turned 180 degrees away from the lighthouse. These images are just some of my efforts captured while on the rock. Starting with just an overall view, I then moved on to the stitched panoramas that really began to capture the extent of the view. I was looking at three mountains, complete with a waterfall that fell into the sea, that I had no memory of ever seeing on Instagram. I couldn’t believe that no one else seemed very interested in even just looking at this view, drawn inevitably by the lighthouse across the way. When the “God Rays” showed up the scene was complete. After I took another round of panoramas in case I had blown something in my excitement, I moved on to several other details along the coastline.
ALONG THE WAY ON MY PATH TO THE SPOT FOR THE LIGHTHOUSE IMAGE.
When I finally started moving towards the spot where I thought would allow me to capture “the shot” I realized that the usual route required the cliff-side trails that I had sworn off. I started moving across the moorland, finding a path that allowed me to hop across small streams as long as I traveled at least three times as far as the coastal path required. When I arrived at the “spot” that revealed the usual shot of the lighthouse, my excitement was pretty short-lived. Vinny soon arrived from the hike, and he too got yet another version of “the shot.”
A VERTICAL RENDITION.
When I finally started moving towards the spot where I thought would allow me to capture “the shot” I realized that the usual route required the cliff-side trails that I had sworn off. I started moving across the moorland, finding a path that allowed me to hop across small streams as long as I traveled at least three times as far as the coastal path required. When I arrived at the “spot” that revealed the usual shot of the lighthouse, my excitement was pretty short-lived. Vinny soon arrived from the hike, and he too got yet another version of “the shot.”
THE HORIZONTAL RENDITION SHOWS THE PATH TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. THE SCALE IS REVEALED BY THE SILHOUETTE OF TWO HIKERS.
Now there is nothing wrong with traveling a long way in pursuit of a world-famous image, either on Skye, or in Paris, or even on the Oregon Coast. But I would suggest that there is a lot more satisfaction in finding an image that is a little more unique. Especially if all that seems to be required is to just turn around.
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SEPTEMBER 6, 2024
THE VIEW OUT OF OUR COTTAGE WINDOW, WHERE WE HUNKERED DOWN FOR TWO DAYS OF RAIN. THIS SUNSET SIGNALED THAT IT WAS TIME TO JOURNEY OUT INTO ANOTHER FAR REACH OF SKYE
This week I would like to show you several images from the far North of the Isle of Skye. I will concentrate on how you can endeavor to illustrate your feelings about a place by emphasizing just a few aspects of the surroundings. The idea is to de-emphasize documentation by focusing on images that are truly your own.
We journeyed North on the Trotternish Peninsula to delve further into wild Skye without necessarily hiking about. I was till feeling peckish after my bout of sickness, and we wanted to go far enough afield that a simple ride into the far country would suffice to satisfy our sense of adventure.
THE MAIN COTTAGE AT THE MUSEUM OF ISLAND LIFE IN THE FAR NORTH OF SKYE
Our official excuse was to visit Skye’s Museum of Island Life, located about 22 miles North of our cottage in the middle of nowhere. The trip took most of an hour, par for the course on Skye, with Fran once again showing off her skill in negotiating the single track roads which made up the majority of the route.
The museum was well worth the trip, a travel back in time to when the region and the whole island was simply another world compared to mainland Scotland much less Great Britain as a whole. The museum is a reproduction of a “typical” crofting settlement with several stone and thatched roof cottages, each exhibiting a different aspect of island life. Some of the cottages were actually the houses that were part of the original settlement. The main house constituted two rooms which housed a family of two parents and twelve children.
What was really incredible was that we were journeying to Pre-war Skye - but not before the Napoleonic Wars, but rather World War Two. The cottage contained a wireless radio, which meant that we were glimpsing island life from the early Twentieth Century.
THE SMALL SCATTERING OF CROFT FARMS AROUND THE MUSEUM
My feelings of isolation were profound, and that became the theme of these images. Of course the surrounding landscapes were beautiful and wild, but I was moved by an encounter with what seemed like the end of the world. In every direction surrounding the museum I was reminded that there really was nothing anywhere near here, and that human history had not made much of a dent in the area for a very long time.
IN ONE DIRECTION, FARMLAND AND THE SEA. IN THE DISTANT IS ANOTHER PART OF SKYE.
There was still just a scattering of croft farms in the area, and the cemetery nearby contained graves from several hundred years of the families that had lived their lives within shouting distance. Beyond the farms there was only a very isolated shoreline and cliffs which seemed to keep the rest of the world a distant memory.
THE SHORELINE - NO HOUSES, NO BOATS, AND CLIFFS TO EMPHASIZE THE POINT.
THESE CLIFFS ARE JUST A PRELUDE TO THE MAIN QUIRAING RIDGE BEYOND.
A VERY WIDE PANORAMA REVEALS ONLY ONE SMALL ROCK IN THE BAY
A BREAK IN THE CLOUDS PROVIDES A GLIMMER OF LIGHT ON THE SEA
But above all there was the overwhelming presence of the sea. Skye is quite a large island, but it is still an island, and there are very few parts of the island where the sea is not part of the environment. Here in the far North the sea both cut off the rest of the world and made the little piece of shoreline seem completely insignificant. The distant pieces of land that we could see across the water did not hide the fact that the entire Atlantic Ocean laid beyond those rocks.
OVERWHELMING BEAUTY : THE SEA, THE LIGHT AND THE SKY
I captured many images of the sea while we were there, but the ones I show here were my efforts to play up that sense of isolation. While I usually enjoy focusing on small snippets of the environment, this area led me to try to show the extent of the view.
AT THE LOSS OF SOME SKY, THE PANORAMA CROP EMPHASIZES THE BREADTH OF THE VIEW
The compositions are very minimal, with lots of what photographers call negative space - parts of the composition where there is not much to focus on. A small piece of distant land, a brief glimpse of sunlight, and a sky full of threatening clouds, is all I felt was necessary.
MONOCHROMATIC BLACK AND WHITE VERSION FURTHER HIGHLIGHTS THE TONAL RANGE OF THE IMAGE
I found that cropping to a panorama emphasized the wide extent of the view. Since the color images were in fact mostly a monochromatic blue, I then experimented with black and white, which allowed me to further up the contrast beyond what was acceptable in the color versions. I hope you feel my sense of isolation in these images of a beautiful but very lonely landscape.
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THE BLACK CULLIN RISING STRAIGHT UP FROM LOCH SCAVAIG
This week I would like to take you along on a fabulous day Fran and I spent in one of the Southernmost areas of the Isle of Skye. We traveled for about forty-five minutes across the island through the Cullin Mountain range, ending up on a single track road to the very remote village of Elgol on the shores of Loch Scavaig. We were far enough from our home base that we traveled far beyond the detailed Ordinance Survey maps that we relied upon for most of our travels on Skye. The only saving grace was that there was clearly only one road most of the way, with turn-offs so obscure that you were clearly lost if you followed them - which is not to say that your intrepid navigator did manage to get lost. Fortunately the road ended and we were forced to turn back to the point where I had made my mistake.
WE GOT UP EARLIER THAN USUAL FOR OUR JOURNEY ACROSS THE ISLE. BUT THE SHEEP WERE BACK!
This convoluted route to Elgol was one of the most daunting roads we traveled on the Isle of Skye and probably accounts for the reason that a lot of visitors never travel to Elgol. The route takes you past the Red Cullin mountain range, which we were already familiar with because there are only a few roads on the whole Isle of Skye. After passing through Broadford, one of the larger villages on the island, we took off on the 14-mile single-rack road to Elgol, which took most of another forty-five minutes. The descent to the coast at Elgol is hairy enough, but it doesn’t prepare you for the realization that the village is even more isolated than you thought. Elgol has about 150 souls, a town hall, a school, a few food trucks, and a pier with two friendly competitive boat trip companies. The couple of dozen houses are piled up on the hill you just drove down. That is it.
THE RED CULLIN RANGE ON THE WAY DOWN TO THE SOUTHERN TIP OF SKYE
The attraction of the village is the incredible views across the loch to the base of the other part of the Cullin mountain range, the forbidding Black Cullin. These mountains rise up straight from the loch, and while you could walk eight or so miles to get there, the far easier way is to take the boat ride across Loch Scavaig. A word here on the Scottish naming conventions for bodies of water. There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason on why some body of water is a loch, or a bay, or just not named at all, even though a Loch is supposedly an arm of the sea around the Isle of Skye. Loch Scavaig seemed like an arbitrary designation of the open sea around Elgol.
A PICTURESQUE ROCK CLIFF ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS
As we waited on the pier for our sailing, Fran rolled her eyes a little more violently than usual as I started laughing hysterically as I looked across the village. One of the reasons that I had wanted to come to Elgol in the first place was a You Tube video on the place by one of the photographers that I follow, Andy Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs is a fantastic photographer, but I suddenly realized that as a storyteller he was not above a little exaggeration. I spied across the way a very familiar picturesque two-story stone outcropping that was featured in his video. Now albeit he there on a much more stormy day then our few minutes in Elgol, but the video, like my first image of this isolated spot on the forbidding Scottish coast, failed to mention the cottage less than twenty feet to the right of the rock. I now realized that Mr. Gibbs could have stopped for a cuppa a minute after his journey to the wilderness.
WHO KNEW THERE WAS A CUP OF TEA WAITING JUST A SHORT WALK AWAY?
A WILDERNESS PANORAMA FROM THE BOAT
Which does not mitigate the fact that once we set off on our half-hour boat ride, we were actually going to the wilderness of the Black Cullin. We set off with the captain and only one other passenger, a young mountain climber that immediately brought out the grandfather in me. While we were off for a few hours and possibly a few mile walk before the boat returned, she was going to hike alone for a few days before taking the boat back. All I could think of saying to her was to ask that she took care on her adventure.
A CLOSER VIEW OF THE BLACK CULLIN
It only got worse when the captain ventured close to shore so that she could scope out her projected route up the mountain that rose straight out of the water. The “Impossible Step” involved a rock climb across a granite outcropping at the beginning of her projected route. The only saving grace was that if you fell off you would not get hurt because you would fall twenty feet into the water so you could try again. I felt very old.
THE CLOSER YOU GET, THE MORE FORBIDDING THE LANDSCAPE APPEARS
The boat docked at a pier that was very rudimentary at best. I would have not reached land without the help of the captain. Fran and I then set off for our projected short hike to the smaller fresh-water Loch Coruisk which was supposedly very close by and fed into the open water across a hop, skip and a jump of a stream up ahead. While Fran was game, it soon became very clear that I was not up for the short hike. The way ahead seemed another variation on the Scottish pile of rocks, and my poles helped but not enough. When we spied what we thought was the small stream that we would have to cross, I promptly found a convenient boulder to perch on and declared that these people were out of there minds. The stream only lacked jumping salmon and Grizzly bears to star in an Alaskan video. While I kind of new that there had to be a safer route just out of sight, I had had enough. We spent the next hour or so perched on the rock until we gingerly made our way back to the dock.
MY ROCKY PERCH A FEW MINUTES ASHORE
A CLOSER VIEW OF WHAT WE THOUGHT WAS THE SMALL STREAM WE THOUGHT WE HAD TO CROSS TO GET TO LOCH CORUISK. WE WERE WRONG, BUT HERE IS WHERE WE CALLED IT QUITS.
Which is not to say that the surroundings were not incredibly beautiful. We could look in almost any direction right smack into the middle of a range of mountains that rose straight out of the water. The only sign of mankind, much less civilization, was the dock and the small hut that mountain climbers could start their treks into the surrounding mountains. Most of these images from my boulder and from the boat across the loch required stitching multiple shots to begin to capture the breadth of the incredible views.
THE DOCK IS JUST OVER THAT SMALL HILL. THE MOUNTAINS EXTEND FOR MANY MILES INTO THE DISTANCE.
Our captain once again proved indispensable in getting me back on the boat. Fran and I were now the only passengers, and we had a delightful time as the captain played us tea and shortbread while made our way back to Elgol. The conversation soon turned to the political problems that our two communities, 6000 miles and worlds apart, seemed to share in common. Fran was besides herself to be hearing about the lack of affordable housing and gentrification of Elgol, and we seemed right back in Portland. Except for the return trip up the lonely roads back to our cottage on the other side of the Isle of Skye.
JUST A PORTION OF THE BLACK CULLIN - A STITCHED PANORAMA FROM MY BOULDER.
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AUGUST 23, 2024
ARMADALE CASTLE GARDENS, WITH THE RUINED CASTLE TO THE LEFT AND THE MOUNTAINS OF MAINLAND SCOTLAND BEYOND
This week I would like to show you some images taken from a trip Fran and I took to the Southern end of the Isle of Skye in early May. The gardens at Armadale Castle on the Sleat Peninsula offer an environment that differs in many ways from the rest of Skye. The forty acres of gardens stand in contrast with the wilder, almost wilderness nature of most of the island. Yet since this is Scotland, there is more to this garden than meets the eye.
MILES OF WALKING PATHS WIND THROUGH GARDEN RUINS AND SURROUNDING WOODLAND
The village of Armadale, at the Southern end of the isle, is about as far away from our cottage as you can get on the island. In fact the ferry from the mainland that preceded the only bridge to the island lands at Armadale. The trip was almost an hour through a lot of the most forbidding scenery on Skye. The route becomes very familiar since there are only half a dozen main roads across the island. You drive through the Cullins, a mountain range that constitutes a wilderness at the center of Skye, as well as miles of shoreline along major lochs and open ocean that surround Skye.
TERRACES PROVIDE REST AREAS WITHIN THE GARDEN
The gardens are pretty refined as compared to most of Skye. There are different areas and “garden rooms” that could be in many other public gardens around the world. It is only when you get to the center of the garden that you encounter the ruins of a real castle that remind you that you are in Scotland. Armadale Castle was the seat of Clan MacDonald, “The Lords of the Isles”, who fought over the Isle of Skye with Clan Macleod that was based on the Northern end of the Island for hundreds of years. The Clan Donald Lands Trust has maintained the garden, a museum, and 20,000 acres of the surrounding Highland Estate since it bought it from the last absentee Laird in 1955.
THERE ARE PLENTY OF SPECIMEN TREES OF VARIOUS AGES IN THE GARDEN
Once you see the Castle the story gets even weirder. One half of the castle are the ruins of a centuries-old castle that burned down in a massive fire in 1855. After faltering attempts at reconstruction, the family moved into an adjoining addition in 1925. The Castle then really fell into ruin, with Nature taking over most of the interior, sans roof and windows. A housekeeper ended up living alone in the smaller house for over twenty years while several generations of owners lived on other estates in Scotland.
THE FOREST WITHIN THE CASTLE RUINS
What remains are the stone ruins of a castle, along with the closed house. The castle ruins are inaccessible due to severe structural issues, but provide a very interesting contrast with the surrounding garden. The wildest areas of forest in the garden are in fact within the old castle ruins, which have been barely stabilized. Nearby areas of the garden are spotted with signs warning visitors to keep very clear of the ruins, whose missing windows reveal the forest growing inside.
A VIEW OF WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE MAIN HALL, NOW REVERTED TO NATURE.
THE UPPER FLOORS AND ROOF ARE ALSO HISTORY
SOME SEGMENTS OF THE ROOF SOMEHOW STILL STAND
AN ARTIFACT OF CLAN MACDONALD FROM THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
The garden also includes a beautiful “Museum of the Isles" whose exhibits tell the story of Skye, with an emphasis on the Clan Donald. A few weeks later we toured Dunvegan Castle in the North of the island, which tells the contrasting history of Clan MacLeod. It’s almost as if the fighting has only reached an intermission.
A PANORAMIC VIEW OF MAINLAND SCOTLAND ACROSS THE OCEAN FROM ARMADALE
The gardens are certainly worth the trip. Their surroundings include miles of shoreline, with views across the ocean to Mainland Scotland and even more mountains. I hope you have enjoyed these images of this corner of Skye.
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AUGUST 24, 2024
THE ROUTE UP TO CASTLE EWEN, THE HIGHEST POINT IN THE GLEN
This week I would like to take you on a short tour of a very special place on the Isle of Skye. I will try to resist calling it magical, since I believe that designation has led to both over-tourism of a pretty spectacular site while at the same time creating a “back story” that obscures its real value as a unique geographical feature on Skye. I believe that the Fairy Glen is much more than its mythological associations would imply. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but the less said about this particular piece of tourist hype the better.
A TYPICAL(!) PART OF THE LANDSCAPE IN THE GLEN - THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF WIND AND RAIN HAVE FORMED THESE HILLOCKS.
The Fairy Glen is simply an almost perfect miniature of the surrounding larger and forbidding landscape of the Quiraing landslip. Almost anyone can maneuver around the one-mile circuit that encompasses very weird hills, gnarled trees distorted by the ever-present winds, and a surplus of sheep that are peacefully grazing about without any thoughts of fairies in their midst. Even in my weakened condition following my bout of ill-health I could go anywhere on the site that a reasonable person might want to go without risking life and limb. My hiking poles ensured a very safe transit of the area, which is crisscrossed by a multitude of paths that for the most part avoid the Scottish tendency of seemingly making life as difficult as possible for the visitor.
GROVES OF ROWAN TREES PROVIDE SHADE FOR THE SHEEP
The Fairy Glen is the result of small post-glacier landslip that geologists place around 100,000 years ago. It is similar to the larger Quiraing ridge that forms a barrier across a large portion of the Isle of Skye. As opposed to the hikes around the Quiraing, which range from spirited hill walks to downright mountain climbing, you can walk the whole Fairy Glen in a one-mile circuit. As usual, while the tour guides suggest it might take you one hour, that time suggests that you do not make any stops. Why would anyone go to such a place to take a brisk walk without even looking around? Fran and I spent around 2 1/2 hours at the Fairy Glen, and with a picnic lunch could have easily stretched that to a nice four hours. Of course there are no port-a-potties, since this is Scotland.
A CLOSER VIEW REVEALS THE INCREDIBLE FOLDS IN THE LAND THAT DEFY EXPLANATION.
The car park is the most dangerous part of the site, since it is too small and soon leads to even more dangerous parking on the very tight roads surrounding the site. The best strategy for the parking situation is to deliberately go to the Fairy Glen when you think nobody else will ever be there because of the time or the weather. The route to the Fairy Glen is one of the small turn-offs after you negotiate the very difficult switch-back turn that is required for any trip North of the village of Uig. Of course there is no sign for one of the biggest tourist stops on the whole island. Once again, my trusty Ordinance Survey map provided the only clear explanation of the route. I wondered how anyone else managed to get there at all
ISOLATED ROWAN TREES CAN PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR MORE DETAILED PORTRAITS.
The Fairy Glen provides for a lot of photo opportunities. The undulating landscape promises another surprise around every corner. The gnarly Rowan trees are delightful either as individual specimens or as quite extensive groves in the landscape. The sheep just add to the fun.
SINCE IT'S SCOTLAND, YOU MIGHT AS WELL THROW IN A BOG OR TWO.
The highpoint of the glen is the very steep rock outcropping that has been labeled Castle Ewen. While the views from its small flat summit are probably wonderful, the path is very steep and even requires some scrambling near the top. The images of the rock require careful timing so that you can avoid any tourists hanging around the summit. Not that I’m against including figures for a “sense of scale”, but the inevitable Titanic “I’m the King of the World” stance is not only repetitive but pretty stupid considering the drop. No photo is worth dying over, and no photo is worth the possibility that you might catch an idiot’s last moments right in your frame.
EVEN MORE DETAIL AS A RESULT OF A FOUR-IMAGE VERTICAL STITCHED PANORAMA.
YOUR WORD OF THE DAY IS LOCHLAN, A SCOTTISH TERM FOR A SMALL POND. FRAN CAPTURED THIS REFLECTION WITH HER iPHONE. IT IS NOT ABOUT THE GEAR, BUT THE VISION OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER, WITH A MODICUM OF POST-PROCESSING.
I hope you have enjoyed these images from the Fairy Glen. Its magic is such that it transcends the tourist board’s over-enthusiastic myth-making. And once you leave to make your way home, you get to see other magical views en route. Skye is an island, after all.
A VIEW OF THE SEA ON OUR WAY HOME FROM THE FAIRY GLEN. IN THE DISTANCE IS ANOTHER PENINSULA ON THE ISLE OF SKYE.
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AUGUST 9, 2024
ANYONE FOR AN OFF-WORLD EXPERIENCE? THE FAINT LINE BELOW THE MAIN CLIFF FACE IS THE MAIN PATH PAST 'THE PRISON" THAT GUARDS THE COLLECTION OF EVEN WEIRDER ROCKS BEYOND. ON THE LOWER RIGT, FOR SCALE, NOTE THE TWO CARS ON THE ROAD BACK TO CIVILIZATION ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIDGE.
This week I will take you to the Quiraing, a land formation on the Isle of Skye that can only be described as somewhat unworldly. It is one of the highlights of Skye, and makes up for its difficulty with its relative accessibility - if you time things right and realize the limits of your hiking ability. It is important to head up there on a reasonably nice day, because weather conditions are very localized and you might be greeted with wind and rain that can be daunting if not downright dangerous. There is the possibility that fog might envelope the entire area, which will certainly call into question why you even bothered at all, since you will only see your shoes. The only trouble with picking a nice day is that everyone else on the Isle of Skye will want to join you at the Quiraing.
THE REST OF THE 180 DEGREE VIEW FROM THE RIDGE. NOT AS WEIRD, BUT MAYBE EVEN MORE FORBIDDING. THAT'S A PRETTY LARGE LOCH DOWN THE SLOPE, WITH THE SEA BEYOND.
One of the pleasures of staying so long on the island was that Fran and I could pick a good day knowing that we had plenty of opportunity to return if conditions were less than ideal. We also had had the opportunity to scope out the best route to the Quiraing from our cottage on Skye. While it was theoretically possible to ascend to the Trotternish Ridge right from the end of our single-track road, that would have involved the usual Scottish “walk” of a few miles up a 1000 feet without switchbacks, so we demurred.
A DETAIL OF THE MAIN SLIDE.
The Quiraing is at the northern end of the Trotternish Ridge, a miles-long ridge with multiple summits that divides the Trotternish Peninsula into two halves. If you have ever had the opportunity to visit Steen’s Mountain in the Eastern Oregon you will have some familiarity with this type of land formation. Less a mountain in the conventional sense, both of these places are the result of an enormous landslide that formed a ridge towering over the surrounding area, a giant wall of rock that snakes across the landscape.
A SLIGHTLY SMALLER PANORAMA OF SEVERAL MOUNTAINS TO THE RIGHT AS THE RIDGE WINDS ITS WAY SOUTH.
Geologists figure this landslide occurred 175 million years ago. Throw in the wind and rain and several Ice Ages, and the result is a very strange collection of features that will be beyond your ordinary imagination. While the Quiraing is several thousand feet lower and not as long as Steens Mountain, it makes up for that with its sheer other worldliness. This is Scotland, and there are almost no trees to soften the landscape. As is the Scottish way, there is also very little attempt to make the experience any easier for visitors. In fact, due to its popularity, the Quiraing actually does make a small attempt at keeping its visitors safe. Then those visitors seem to do everything they can to immediately run afoul of these safety measures.
A DETAIL OF "THE PRISON". NOTE THOSE TWO INTREPID HIKERS ON THE HORIZON, A GOOD HOUR IN. ONE GUIDEBOOK DECLARED THAT THE HIKE WOULD TAKE TWO HOURS TOTAL, WITH NO STOPS. JUST THINK ABOUT HOW STUPID A STATEMENT THAT REALLY IS.
After scoping out my Ordinance Survey map of the area, I realized that there was an actual road across the ridge at one point, complete with a carpark (!) that could plant you right on the ridge, and shorten the usual hike by a few miles at least. We had become familiar with the route after our forays north of the village of Uig, which required passing the intersection of this single-track road that led to the ridge. Much to my surprise, this road was much better than I had anticipated, no worse than the usual tiny roads we had gotten used to as we traveled around Skye. And then we got to the car park. This was the only car park in rural Skye where we ever encountered a parking fee, and a person who seemed to be patrolling to make sure the fee was paid. The only trouble was that the carpark was completely overwhelmed by visitors, and the resulting anarchy made the car park the most dangerous part of the Quiraing.
BEYOND THE PATH, A SHORT DROP TO THE SEA.
We somehow found a space, and proceeded on a very short walk to a small plateau that was set aside to accommodate handicapped visitors. It was rimmed by Skye’s first small fence, sort of like a barrier a foot off the ground like you might encounter in an art museum. Presumably visitors might take that as a clue that you could literally really hurt yourself one or two feet further on, but of course several photographers had already claimed tripod perches beyond the fence. Did I mention that this nice day included forty-mile an hour winds on the ridge? After another short walk we got to a larger bluff that overlooked the start of the main trail into the Quiraing. Most of the images shown here were taken from this plateau. Here the fence was replaced by a pile of logs around the perimeter, which seemed to have even less of an effect on the crowd. We saw multiple people buffeted by the wind, losing their balance right on the edge of a sizable cliff, only to immediately return to the edge.
A DETAIL CAN REVEAL THE TEXTURES OF THIS LANDSCAPE.
It was here that we lingered for a good long while, knowing that we would not be going on the main hike. I could clearly see that the view would not change for more than a mile down the very up and down path, so we would devote a couple of hours to see nothing beyond what we already could see from a higher viewpoint. The area beyond “The Prison”, the strange formation on the right of the main rock slide, with its collection of weird spires and shear drop-offs, would stay out of reach of these two pensioners. While it was disappointing, I realized that I was probably thirty years too late to risk life and limb for a photograph. That is what videos on You Tube are for.
PLEASE DON'T GO ANY NEARER TO THAT EDGE TO SEE THE SALMON FARMS IN THE DISTANCE.
I hope you enjoyed these images I captured from the relative safety just off the car park. They are at least a little different from most images you might see on You tube in that most are stitched together from multiple images in order to at least begin to show the extent of the views available at this site. Several of the other images are of various details, which sometimes can better explain experience of taking in small portions of the view.
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AUGUST 2, 2024
A VERY TAME AND BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WOODS
This week I would like to discuss how you can go with the flow when circumstances alter the expected path of your vacation. It is important to take the new opportunities presented by what at first might seem to be a crimp in your well-planned activities. I came down with some virus on Skye, and at first Fran almost contemplated somehow coming home to Portland. I nixed that , but I was pretty out of it for a few days, and the opportunity for medical attention on Skye was pretty nonexistent. There are only two hospitals on the island, and the only one that is open full-time was forty-five minutes away. There is no ambulance service. Our landlady Jeannie was nice enough to let us use her landline since cell phone service was not available at the cottage; she gave us her daughter’s number if we needed to negotiate with the National Health Service. You cannot be admitted to hospital without first seeing a doctor on Skye. In any case i eventually recovered, but Fran put me on a pretty severe diet of what we could do for the next few days. There was to be no more hiking without extensive vetting for any prospective walk once we realized that everyone else visiting Skye was either more than thirty years younger than we are, or a long-time mountain climber.
WE FOUND THIS HIKE ON THE EDGE OF UIG HARBOR. UIG (THAT'S IG) IS COMPOSED OF A FERRY TERMINAL, ABOUT TWO DOZEN HOUSES, A SMALL GROCERY STORE, AND A VERY BAD HAIRPIN TURN THAT WILL HIGHLIGHT ANY ROAD TRIP BEYOND THE TOWN
Fran found a website called “Skye for All” which promoted walks that could be taken by anyone, including disable people and even those in wheel chairs. Of course my ego was crushed, but that was the way it was going to be until I noticeably improved. Of course since this was Scotland, we soon realized that wheelchair access was clearly aspirational, but these walks in the woods were well within our capabilities. What was even more important was that these walks provided some wonderful photo opportunities in parts of Skye that would have never appeared on any tourist’s typical bucket list. Instead we were on walks that were mostly for the natives out for a constitutional before dinner.
AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODLAND WAS AN ARM OF THE SEA, WHICH PROVIDED ALL THE GRAND LANDSCAPE FOR THE HIKE. THIS PANORAMA WAS STITCHED FROM HALF A DOZEN SHOTS. ON INSTAGRAM, AN IMAGE LIKE THIS IS REFERRED TO AS "SKY PORN."
Thus we found ourselves on a walk in “the woodland”, which is how photographers describe a forest that only they would ever travel to because they can take photos in peace, away from an epic location. These places are few and far between, because after two thousand years of cultivation, there are very few forests left that are neither parks nor wilderness. In Southern England there is even a place called the “New Forest” which really confused me until I realized that it had literally been create because almost all of the old forests were gone a long, long time ago.
TEXTURES AND COLORS CAN BE THE SUBJECT
The woodland is thus a well defined photographic subject in the United Kingdom. It is not for the faint of heart, not because it is dangerous, but because it is just very hard to compose an image in a place that seems almost tailor-made for photographic frustration. Photography is not an additive art, but one that requires you to rigorously simplify and organize the natural environment in order to make any sense of it. There are very few places that are harder to simplify than the naturally organic and overwhelmingly complicated environment of a forest, or excuse me a woodland. It pays to try to restrict your frame to a well-defined tiny portion of the forest, any experienced photographers will spend a lot of time moving around so as to try to even eliminate any overlapping of adjacent tree branches so as to reduce the confusion.
THE BLUEBELLS ISOLATED FURTHER AGAINST THE OLD STONE WALL THAT HAS LOST ITS WHITEWASH
Even if you don’t get that anal, it’s really hard to simplify the woods. Photographers reveal in the presence of fog, since that really reduces the view of anything beyond your chosen subject. But of course a brief visit to the woodland will probably not present you with fog, despite its ubiquity on You Tube. Another strategy is to find a subject that can organize your image - a stream, a nurse log, or if you are in the United Kingdom - bluebells! Bluebells typically carpet the woodland in British photo magazines, and I despaired of actually ever seeing such scenes in real life. But there we were, and so were they! My mission became how to best isolate the small fields of flowers between the trees, and let them organize my images.
IF YOU CAN'T FIND SOME BLUEBELLS, YOU CAN ALWAYS USE A STREAM TO ORGANIZE YOUR IMAGE. AN INTIMATE LANDSCAPE LIKE THIS COULD EASILY PRETEND TO BE IN OREGON RATHER THAN ON SKYE.
OR JUST LET THE WOODLAND LIGHT BE THE SUBJECT OF YOUR IMAGE
This small selection of images shows how you can adjust your expectations when life intrudes on your vacation. Eventually we again graduated beyond wheelchair paths, but I never ventured beyond what I felt comfortable in doing; Skye is so beautiful that you rarely have to concentrate on “the shot” that is all over the web - frequently you will find almost as spectacular a view by just turning 180 degrees away from what everyone else is going after. The woodland will stretch your compositional muscles farther than any rendition of a world-famous viewpoint. This last image was composed by Fran on her iPhone, and only my ego would find any real differences between her version and mine. Once she got over the idea that post-processing was “cheating”, she realized that a little work beyond pushing the shutter really elevated her snapshot into something she really could be proud of - and look at those bluebells!
AFTER A CROP AND A LITTLE POST-PROCESSING, FRAN'S IPHONE IMAGE CAN STAND UP TO ONE FROM A PROFESSIONAL CAMERA. WHILE IT MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO BE ENLARGED FOR THE WALL, IT CERTAINLY WORKS FOR THE WEB. IT'S NOT ABOUT THE GEAR, BUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER - EVEN IF SHE PROFESSES TO NOT KNOW WHAT SHE IS DOING. SHE MOST OBVIOUSLY DOES.
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JULY 26, 2024
THE VIEW NORTH BEYOND THE COTTAGE FENCE. ALL OF THE LAMBS HAD SOMEHOW DISAPPEARED DURING MY BRIEF ILLNESS, SENT OFF TO ANOTHER PASTURE.
This week I will once again advocate a very relaxed form of travel that allows you to take it easy in the face of the vagaries of the weather and to listen to your body and just do nothing on that particular day. Since we were blessed with three and a half weeks on the Isle of Skye, we were allowed to take it easy. Even though we were blessed with unnaturally wonderful weather, when it finally did come down in buckets for two days we just had a nice time in the cottage. Our long stay allowed us to relax, since there was always another day tomorrow to run around the island.
SEVERAL OF THE CROFT COTTAGES THAT WERE ASSEMBLED FOR THE MUSEUM OF ISLAND LIFE. ONE OF THESE COTTAGES HAD ACTUALLY BEEN ON THIS PIECE OF LAND IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, ABOUT THE TIME OUR BUNGALOW WAS BUILT IN PORTLAND. A FAMILY WITH TWELVE CHILDREN LIVED IN TWO ROOMS.
The day after our disastrous Storrybreac Circuit hike I got very sick with some kind of virus, which probably played some part in our misadventures. There is only one full-time hospital on Skye, which was forty-five miles away from the cottage. Fran was very nervous about my fever and inability to get out of bed, but there was very little we could do. There is no ambulance service, and no cell phone service at the cottage. Our landlady was nice enough to lend us her landline and provided us with her daughter’s number in case we needed to consult a doctor. You see you can’t just go the hospital - you need to see a doctor before you can be admitted. In any case after a few days I was out of the woods, and could slowly get back up to leaving the cottage. Our long stay on the island allowed for a bout of sickness without ruining the trip.
Our first foray back on the roads led us to the northern end of the island. These images are from a wonderful day on the northern end of the Trotternish Peninsula, the part of Skye where the cottage was located. Our official reason for heading in that direction was to visit the Museum of Island Life, a collection of traditional houses that exhibited what life was like on Skye not so very long ago.
THE VIEW ACROSS THE SEA TO THE OUTER HEBRIDES
The museum was actually much more interesting than I had anticipated. It was kind of like Colonial Williamsburg without any docents. Some of the cottages had actually been part of the croft, or farm, that had been located on the site, while others had been moved there to form the museum. Each cottage was set up to represent a part of village life - the store, the blacksmith, etc. - which could illustrate what life used to be like on Skye. These cottages were one or two room “black houses” - so called since the thatched roof, stone and mud cottages were heated with one fire pit in the center with a hole in the roof. This life was lived at the turn of the century - the Twentieth century, not three hundred years ago. Skye was at the end of the world, and a youngster “came of age” when they were allowed to walk to Portree, about 15 miles away, and come back on the same day.
THE FARMS AND HOUSES IN THE IMMEDIATE AREA
The surroundings were incredible, and except for the modern single-track road, little changed into the Twentyfirst Century. The sea was ever-present, as were the animals that still chomped on the empty land on the edge of the island. The Outer Hebrides Islands of Harris and Lewis were the only land on the horizon, a multiple hour ferry ride away. Beyond them, 3000 miles away, was North America. It is a beautiful, and lonely prospect. There was a scattering of farms in the area, and the village cemetery, which contained multiple generations of the entire area’s residents stretching back several hundred years.
ONE EDGE OF THE CEMETARY
As usual on Skye, it was all about the incredible beauty of the empty land. My camera captured particular snippets of such beauty in every direction I turned, whether towards the sea or directly opposite to the cliffs just beyond the water’s edge.
ANOTHER PART OF SKYE ACROSS THE EMPTY SEA UNDER A SCOTTISH SKY
Fran and I have severe doubts about whether we could actually live on the edge of the known world, but it was incredible to get to visit. I hope you can arrange an extended visit to a place that you can pretend to live, instead of just pass through.
TURNING AROUND, A PANORAMA OF THE CLIFF JUST A SHORT DISTANCE FROM THE SHORE - ASSEMBLED FROM ALMOST A DOZEN SHOTS TO BEGIN TO TAKE IN THE VIEW. THE REAL CLIFFS THAT RUN FOR A DOZEN MILES BACK TO PORTREE ARE STILL HIDDEN BEYOND.
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JULY 24, 2024
THE VIEW FROM OUR BATHROOM, FOR GOD'S SAKE!
This week I would like to introduce you to the wonders of the Isle of Skye. Fran and I were privileged to spend more than three and a half weeks on Skye from late April to the middle of May. Most visitors are lucky if they get more than a few days on the island, and we reveled in adopting the slow pace of life on the island, which offers so much to see and do that we still didn’t get to go to all of the top spots. It was so wonderful to realize that we always could try again tomorrow, and that we would have a chance to actually return to a place that we found really attractive. While I don’t think I could actually live in such a rural place, it was delightful to be able to pretend that we were actually living there instead of just passing through. I know that in this day and age it is probably impossible to just stay in a place till you are bored and then move on, it sure was nice to lay back and enjoy rural life for even a short while.
A VIEW OF BEN NEVIS AND THE GREY CORRIES ON THE WAY TO SKYE
I do mean rural. Let me repeat, rural. We stayed in a place so small that I would be grossly exaggerating if I called it a village. It was stretching it to even call it a hamlet. Glenhinnisdal is a collection of of maybe two dozen farm houses along a dead-end single track road off one of the main roads on Skye. We were so lucky to share a house there with our landlord Jeannie, who allowed us to glimpse her world which was so different from Southeast Portland. We were introduced to life on Skye at "Half of Three", her cottage whose address followed the system on Skye where even “congested areas” just listed the houses in consecutive numbers, since there were rarely even multiple streets. Jeannie was a delight, helping us with everything we needed, especially when I got really sick a few days into our stay. She was also thrilled that we were staying so long, since the Summer “madness” would start upon our moving out. She was completely booked for short stays until September, so our long stay was kind of like a mini-vacation for her too.
HALF OF THREE AND IT'S ENVIRONS
Let me reemphasize rural. Fran met a few of the neighbors on her short walks down the road, but after a week we both knew everyone’s cars, the arrangement of the houses, and the location of most of the livestock in the area. We could comment on whether the neighborhood horses had gotten their blankets today, or wonder when the cows emerged from their barns at the beginning of May. Both of Jeannie’s neighbors owned sheep farms, and the cavorting of the lambs delighted us endlessly just past the fences on both sides. Then one morning every single sheep was gone, moved on to other pastures. For almost three weeks the only sounds we heard were sheep and birds. A few of the other houses were also inns, but there was not even a pub on our road. It turned out that it was really fortunate that we were only twenty minutes away from Portree, which is the only real town on Skye. Portree has a small street grid which we eventually mastered, a real supermarket, and a few shops and pubs. As we toured the island we eventually realized how well located our little rural hideaway really was, once we drove to places that were really out in the boondocks. Skye has a population of about ten thousand people, on quite a large island. There are about 100,000 sheep on Skye. Need I say more?
PORTREE HARBOR - MOST OF THE SMALL STREET GRID IS TO THE RIGHT, ON THE UPPER LEVEL. PORTREE IS PERHAPS AS BIG AS CANNON BEACH, AND NOT NEARLY AS URBAN. ONE QUARTER OF THE POPULATION OF SKYE LIVES HERE.
The reality of Skye is that it is just so beautiful that you really can’t go wrong - the next turn will reveal a beautiful vista often more spectacular than the one you just left behind. It is completely unnecessary to visit the top ten or even fifty spots, since you soon realize that a completely unheralded spot is worth an entire afternoon. I had thoughtfully equipped us with a few Ordinance Survey maps that covered most of the island, and these allowed us to go down roads and attempt to visit places that few besides the local cottage owners had bothered to drive past in months if not years. Fran was game, and even though some of these explorations were decidedly boondoggles, we did find some places that were seriously off the beaten track. You know you have left most of civilization when the local post box is the only landmark on the route.
SKYE IS SO CONVOLUTED IN SHAPE THAT YOU ARE USUALLY LOOKING AT OTHER PARTS OF SKYE ACROSS PART OF THE SEA. HERE ARE TWO VIEW AT THE START OF THE "SCORRYBREAK CIRCUIT."
That’s the other side of Skye. There is very few attempts to try to fit the reality of its rural nature to the needs of all of the tourists. It almost seems that in having enough gumption to actually get there, Skye expects you to get along with rural life and even wilderness and not the other way around. The roads are so small and winding that you soon realize that everything will take at least twice as long to get to, no matter what the map says. Most of the roads are single-track, which can lead to very awkward if not dangerous situations if you actually encounter “traffic.” Fundamentally, I soon decided that the only reason a curve in the road merited even a sign, much less a rudimentary guardrail, was that someone had actually died there - it was not any more dangerous than the previous half a dozen curves that had not merited any caution.
FRAN AT THE START OF THE HIKE BEFORE THINGS GOT HAIRY. THAT "WELL DEFINED PATH" TURNED INTO A REPEATING SERIES OF STONE "STEPS". IT WAS ONLY "WELL DEFINED" BECAUSE IF YOU VEERED OFF TO THE RIGHT YOU MIGHT ONLY BREAK YOUR LEG AND NOT DIE.
And then there were the hikes. Fran and I went on a forty-five minute “jaunt”, reputed to be one of the easiest hikes on Skye a few days into our stay. Granted that I probably already had come down with some virus that kept me in bed for a few days. That still doesn’t really explain why Fran and I were both proud and suitably chastened when it took us four hours to finish the “Scorybreak Circuit”. We were so confused that we thought that we had gone on the wrong hike. Yet the images I’ve shown you here matched up with at least four guidebooks we consulted and then threw back on the bookshelf, never to be trusted again. Skye caters to the young, and most people anywhere near our age turned out to be mountain climbers. We resolved to try to never again exceed our abilities, and mostly succeeded.
THE IDYLLIC SECTION MID-HIKE. IT SOON GOT WAY WORSE AGAIN.
In my next few essays I will show you more of this remarkable island, which has some of the most remarkable scenery on the planet. Hopefully I will inspire you to visit Skye so that you too can slow down and experience this magical place.
FORTUNATELY WE MADE IT BACK TO THIS -SHEEP, BIRDS, CLOUDS, AND DISTANT MOUNTAINS FOR ALMOST THREE WEEKS.
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JULY 12, 2024
THE END OF THE ROAD THROUGH GLEN ETIVE
This week I would like to encourage you to experiment by getting off-the-beaten path when you arrive at a major tourist destination. It is hard to concede that you are part of the problem of “over tourism” when you arrive at a crowded spot after months of planning and saving and realize that your desire to “get away” has led you to a place that seems to be the victim of its own success. I believe that we can go a long way towards solving this problem not by abandoning our plans but by just subtly modifying them. It is amazing how suddenly uncrowded a place can get by simply going one more step beyond where all those crowds are willing to go. Those steps usually do not require a major expedition - sometimes merely leaving the car park can do the trick.
Such was the case when Fran and I visited Glen Coe in Scotland. To put it mildly, Glen Coe is one of the most beautiful and accessible places you might ever get the chance to visit. You are minding your own business, driving down one of the few major roads North of Edinburgh and Glasgow, when suddenly that road winds a lonely path through a valley surrounded by almost a dozen major mountains in the space of a few miles. The road almost seems ludicrous until you realize that it was the King’s Road, built not for any logical reason of getting from here to there, but to subdue the rebellious Highlanders who lived at what was literally the end of the world. But that road allows you and every other person with a taste for overwhelming beauty to enter a wilderness that for all intents starts right off the road. No wonder it gets crowded.
A SNIPPET OF THE VIEW FROM THE BEACH AT LOCH ETIVE
The answer is to just choose a way to get away from the crowds. You can deliberately arrive at a time when most sane individuals are either sleeping or having dinner. You can go on a hike. The problem is that most of the walks are merely just down into the valley, where you will not see any different view than the one you are looking at for at least several miles in and then out, and you can see all of the people who have chosen that hike, and it too looks pretty crowded. Getting away from those hikers requires semi-mountain climbing, which most people are not ready for even if they think they are.
LOCH ETIVE RUNS FOR ANOTHER 12 MILES TO THE OCEAN PAST THOSE MOUNTAINS ON THE HORIZON
Our answer was to take what must be one of the best ”Sunday Drives” in the world. An obscure side road of the major A82 road leads off on a dead end drive through Glen Etive, one of the only side valleys off Glen Coe that actually has a trail, much less a road. Glen Etive is absolutely beautiful, winding for ten miles past a few more mountains until it peters out at Loch Etive, which is not wilderness but might as well be. The road achieved some fame since it supposedly led to James Bond’s childhood home as shown in “Skyfall.” Needless to say, this is all hokum, although you can follow directions on You Tube to get you to to the ”exact spot” where Bond and M had a major confab on the way to the final shootout climax in the movie.
ANOTHER VIEW FROM THE BEACH. WHILE WE WEREN'T ALONE, IT'S NOT EXACTLY CROWDED.
Fortunately Fran already had experience driving on such roads while we visited the Lake District on the way to Scotland. I will be the first to admit that it was a lot easier navigating on the road rather than actually driving, especially since “navigating” amounted to just reassuring her that we were actually getting closer to the end of the road. There were no turn-offs anyway, and I don’t recall any places where you could actually even legally stop to take a photograph. Fran was game, and did a remarkably good job after less than a week in the United Kingdom. Single-track roads work remarkably well as long as people realize that you are still driving on the left, even if there is only maybe a lane-and-a-half. You must look ahead, which works until you meet a blind curve or someone who does not know what they are doing. Etiquette mandates that the car closer to a passing place should stop and let one or two cars pass in the opposite direction. It works like clockwork until you encounter the inevitable asshole who is either driving more than twice as fast as he should be, or is so entitled that he doesn’t feel the rules apply to him, or both. Then a “Scottish standoff” would ensue, and my only advice to Fran was to not go off the road, even if the ditch looked relatively benign, and to just stop - if the other guy wanted to hit our car, then at least we were more in the right because we weren’t moving.
ONE OF THE MOUNTAINS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF LOCH ETIVE
The drive to the Loch took a good two hours to go ten miles. I do not even understand how the map apps can even begin to estimate times since they cannot know how many well-behaved drivers will be on the road. I guess that they just drive the road when it is literally empty, when they really shouldn’t anyway, and throw in a few minutes for fun. We arrived at the Loch, which was absolutely stunning. These images only begin to convey its beauty, and almost all of them are stitched panoramas of multiple shots to take in parts of the view. The Loch's widest expanse is nearly a mile, and you could kayak ten miles to the ocean if you so desired. There is rumored to be one or two villages somewhere in the woods, but there was no way to get there short of walking, so we took in the view and drank our water and had some chocolate bars. Among the small number of people that had made it all the way were some who were clearly in the know, because the picnics and tables and chairs in evidence were fit for Instagram.
BACK AT GLEN COE. THE ROAD THROUGH GLEN ETIVE LED PAST THESE TWO MOUNTAINS.
The drive back as usual seemed to take a half hour at most. We had successfully eluded most of the people we saw again as we drove back to our B&B at the other end of Glen Coe. I would really recommend that you come up with your own “Plan B” when you encounter too many other people who had the same plan as you did. I guarantee that you too will be glad you did.
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JUNE 24, 2024
THE THREE SISTERS VIEWPOINT AT THE CENTER OF GLENCOE : TWELVE IMAGES STITCHED TOGETHER BARELY GET THREE OF THE MOUNTAINS IN ONE PANORAMA, AND IT IS FOUR TIMES AS WIDE AS IT IS TALL.
This week I would like to take you on a virtual journey to one of the most incredible places in the Scottish Highlands, the valley of Glencoe. I can honestly say that this must be one of the most incredible landscapes on Earth, and in some sense one of the most accessible to ordinary human beings - at least those lucky enough to be able to make the journey. Glencoe serves as one of the few gateways to the Highlands, which constitute the majority of empty Scotland north of Edinburgh and Glasgow. While it is not impossible to avoid a passage through Glencoe on the way north, it is pretty hard - there are just not that many roads in the Highlands. Any detailed map of Scotland will reveal vast areas with no roads at all, and the fabled A82 through Glencoe is one of the few ways to travel north into Scotland's wilderness.
BUACHAILLE ETIVE MOR (ISN'T GAELIC JUST CHARMING) IS AN ALMOST STEREOTYPICAL MOUNTAIN THAT STANDS AT THE EAST END OF GLENCOE
A good American analogy to this route is the Transcontinental railroad. Just as this rail line sealed the fate of the American Indians, the road through Glencoe was built through one of Great Britain's major mountain ranges as a tool to subdue the Scottish Highlanders forever. As you travel this route today you are mostly impressed with the absolute desperation of the Crown willing to create a route of conquest that might as well have reached to the ends of the Earth. Compared to England's "green and pleasant land", Glencoe is absolutely frightening, even over the few pleasant days Fran and I were privileged to stay there on our way to the Isle of Skye. We deliberately planned to return one month after our initial visit because it doesn't take much You Tube research to realize that a visit to Glencoe might turn out to be one giant sodden mess. it's not rare that all of these scenes I will show you this week would be hidden in the clouds and the wind and the rain. The only thing comforting about a journey through Glencoe , even in the snow, is that the authorities must keep the road open, since there are no alternative routes.
LOOKING BACK EAST TO THE ENTRANCE OF GLENCOE
Glencoe is so spectacular that it is exceedingly hard to convey its power through photographs. While these mountains are not very tall - they are only one quarter as high as Mt. Hood - the concentration of ten major named mountains and numerous foothills along two sides of a two-lane road over just a few miles will take your breath away no matter how many times you drive through. Like the Grand Canyon or Crater Lake, this sudden appearance of a wilderness along a little road is almost beyond belief. It is just too big to take it all in, and a camera lens, no matter how wide, can not reveal the breadth of the view.
ANOTHER VIEW EAST THROUGH THE GLEN - THIS IS THE ONLY CONVENTIONAL IMAGE IN THIS ESSAY
TWO OF THE THREE SISTERS LORD IT OVER THE GLEN
Thus a photographer can only focus on portions of the landscape, large and small, and rely on their memories to convey the real extent of the valley. Only one of these images of Glencoe is in fact a single photograph. I have relied on the computer to stitch together multiple photographs, ranging from only a few to double-digit in number, to begin to convey how these scenes felt in person. These stitched panoramas go far beyond what is possible with any wide angle lens, and do not reduce the apparent size of the subjects at hand. The first stitched panorama is four times as wide as it is tall, and still only covers the central portion of the valley. There are two major mountains on either side of this scene, just beyond the frame, and three on the other side of the road. The road itself is so insubstantial that it doesn't appear to be much more than a path through the mountains. The hiking paths can only be discerned if there are people on the trails down in the valley. Most of these trails do not venture very far from the road, and are better for recreation than achieving viewpoints very different from those that can be seen right off the road. At best you might be able to place the tiny river Coe in the foreground. At worst you will be engaged in real mountain climbing in order to explore the areas further into the mountains beyond the road.
AONACH DUBH, THE LAST OF THE THREE SISTERS NEAR THE WESTERN END OF THE GLEN
A MONTH LATER, A SLIGHTLY HIGHER VIEWPOINT HIGHLIGHTS THE A82 IN THE FOREGROUND AND LOCH ACHTRIOCHTAN IN THE DISTANCE. CHANNELING YOUR YIDDISH PRONUNCIATION REALLY HELPS DEAL WITH GAELIC.
A DETAIL OF THE EAST EDGE OF BEINN FHADA WITH LARGER BUACHAILLE ETIVE BEAG IN THE DISTANCE
I hope that these images have conveyed even a little of the drama of Glencoe. I humbly suggest that you give stitching images as try, as it seems to be the only way you can begin to convey the majesty of places like Glencoe. It is not that hard to do at all, since the computer does most of the work - just get a cup of coffee while it "thinks" about what you are asking it to do. And the more modest your stitching is, the easier it will be to display the final product. There are very few places on Earth that can require a 4:1 frame, and Glencoe is one of them.
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JUNE 21, 2024
A TRANQUIL LAKE DISTRICT SCENE - BUT WE ARE HEADING UP TO THOSE HILLS IN THE DISTANCE.
A PANORAMA THAT TAKES IN JUST A FEW LAKE DISTRICT FARMS BELOW THE MOUNTAINS
This week I would like to show you some images from an adventure Fran and I went on during our second day in the Lake District in Northern England. The Lake District is absolutely beautiful and has something for everyone, from luxurious resorts to picturesque villages to some serious hill walks and drives. We stayed for two nights and I don't think you could see most of it without staying at least a week. Fortunately we stayed in one of the quieter parts of the park in the few days before "the madness" as our innkeeper host put it was due to start - the day we left they were totally booked for the next four months.
A SMALL PORTION OF THE HILLS SURROUNDING THE HONISTER PASS - THERE ARE HIKING PATHS ALL OVER THESE HILLS
Our adventure was based both on advanced research before the trip and our borrowed Ordinance Survey map that allowed us to actually find the route to the places that I had researched. This became our modus operandi for the rest of our stay in England and Scotland. My research before the trip was mostly concerned with finding places that were spectacular but off the beaten path - it is rumored that one quarter of the people in Great Britain visit the Lake District each year, so the obvious tourist attractions can be overwhelmed. What is actually wonderful about You Tube is that the same algorithm that can give you the creeps by responding to your every search can also lead you down rabbit holes to places and interests that you could never find on your own.
GATESGARTHDALE BECK IN THE MIDST OF THE HONISTER PASS
Our excursion was inspired, I kid you not, by an entire series of videos that chronicled the most picturesque and dangerous motorcycle rides in the Lake District. Armed with this somewhat obscure knowledge, and a willing driver in Fran who didn't seem to be phased by websites like "Dangerous
Roads" we set off to conquer a renowned route in our absolutely terrible rental car, a Peugeot that was so nervous that its warning beeps would go off if we so much as came within hailing distance of another car. Even though our goal was the Honister Pass, only about a half hour from our B&B, there was no way we could have come close without the Ordinance Survey map our innkeeper let us borrow that day.
ANOTHER VIEW OF GATESGARTHDALE BECK, JUST OFF THE ROAD
A BLACK AND WHITE VERSION - YOU LOSE THE COLOR CONTRAST, BUT IT ALLOWS FOR MORE DETAIL AND A DARKER MOOD
The Honister Pass is a small road that leads through a mountain pass. It has several stretches where the road's gradient exceeds 25 percent as it climbs to the summit at 1167 feet above sea level. Like a lot of places in England and Scotland, there is very little accommodation for safety - it is assumed that if you are game to be there, you are on your own. Most of the road is single track, with passing spaces that work very well if everyone knows the rules and there are no assholes about - good luck with that. We quickly got the feeling that when guardrails or even signs appeared at a curve, which seemed no worse than the one we had just confronted, it simply meant that someone had died on that curve, so they finally put up a sign. The road leads up to the last operating slate mine in England, which makes most of its money off the large car park that allows people to stop somewhere on the road. Here friendly hosts will sell you everything from slate coasters to house numbers to very beautiful tombstones if you so desire. After Fran and I were absolutely humbled by the "easiest hike" in the area -straight up a hill for 1200 feet with no switch backs - we went back to the car to complete our trip through the pass. The B5289 road parrallels a small river called the Gatesgarthdale Beck, which follows the Lake District naming rules by calling every geographic feature a name unknown anywhere else on Earth. Supposedly this is due to the long history and many successive conquests of the region - Romans, Picts, Vikings, among others - but I think it is mainly to just confuse the tourists. Thus a hill is a Fell, a valley is sometimes a Dale, a ridge is an Edge, a lake is a Water, and a waterfall can be a Force.
TWO VERSIONS OF A TYPICAL VIEW AT NEWLANDS PASS. THERE WAS SO LITTLE TRAFFIC THAT THERE WAS NO DANGER IN JUST STOPPING ON THE ROAD.
After successfully getting through Honister Pass, Fran was not in the mood to just double back along the same challenging route. This is where the OS Map came in handy, for I found another route home that promised less dangerous traffic than Honister Pass. Fran was suspicious but game, and we turned off the B5289 on to an "unclassified" road - oh boy - and followed that road up to Newlands Pass, at 1093 feet above sea level. Newlands Pass was even more spectacular than Honister, and almost no one was there, which made it much safer. These roads are so small that even though that even though we traveled for only 6.8 miles and stopped just once, it took most of the rest of the day to get back home.
THERE MIGHT BE ONLY HALF A DOZEN FARMS ALONG THE ENTIRE ROAD
Our one stop was at Moss Beck Force, a quadrupel waterfall that spiraled down one of the mountains that surrounded the road. There were people hiking there, but I was perfectly content to just attempt to capture an image of the waterfall. Like several of the images I have showed you today, this was impossible without stitching multiple photos together on the computer. This technique can be magical, but also very frustrating since in this digital age it is rare that you do not know if you are successful until you get back home. Sometimes you only discover strange artifacts at 1:1 scale that you can overlook at smaller enlargements - and realize that you cannot correct these in post-processing. A panorama might work for the web, but will fall apart if you blow it up to the size that the file might easily support. So I have learned to be very modest in creating these panoramas, combining only several images instead of a dozen, and then almost always cropping them to 2:1 instead of the unreal results, which can sometimes be more than 4 times as wide as they are high.
ONE OF THOSE FARMS - IT'S A LONG WAY TO TOWN
I hope that you have enjoyed these images, and encourage you to explore your intended travel goals both on the web and on a very detailed map. You might be very delighted and surprised at what these tools can allow you to discover on your journeys.
A STITCHED PANORAMA OF MOSS BECK FORCE , THE ONE REAL STOP ON THE ROAD
JUNE 14, 2024
CASTLERIGG STONE CIRCLE IN THE LAKE DISTRICT
This week I would like to share my thoughts on creating a small project while traveling. When we travel abroad, we frequently encounter the problem of sensory overload combined with the realistic belief that we might never return to the area. While we all want to encounter the must-have shots, I would suggest that one strategy to get personal shots out of your travels would be to create small projects while you are traveling.
THIS IS THE PLACE! NOT MUCH MODERNITY IN THIS VIEW.
These projects can be created through advanced planning or on the fly. The days of just winging it while traveling through Europe are long past over - this last trip to England and Scotland was planned and mostly paid for months before Fran and I boarded the plane. It was a very weird experience for me to be trying to reserve dinner reservations 7,000 miles away and four months ahead, and finding places already full. Spontaneity is vastly reduced, but that doesn't mean you can't plan ahead, especially if you decide to look for special places to explore. So certainly explore You Tube for all you're worth, but skip the obvious places after a cursory glance. The point of advanced research is to find somewhere that you wouldn't have dreamed of exploring, especially if you can be reasonably confident that most people would never have heard of it or wouldn't be interested if they had.
FOLLOWING THE STONES ON THE PLATEAU
The other way to find special places is to equip yourself with a series of great maps, and to not be afraid of using them. Your phone has certainly made it far easier to get someplace once you are aware of its existence, but it is pretty bad at planning travel off the screen. And coverage has an annoying habit of dropping once you really get out in the boondocks. In the United Kingdom you can purchase Ordinance Survey maps of a particular area you will be visiting. These maps are of such a scale and detail that you will certainly find the house you are staying at, as well as any other evidence of human habitation all over the area. You can certainly plan any hike you can dream of, and find most of them that you will never be able to complete. That is not what makes them most interesting - it is the discovery of places to visit that never made a guidebook or a video. While there is always the possibility of not actually being able to get there, you will find it very hard to actually get lost. On Skye Fran and I found places that were just breathtaking, and we might have been the only tourists who had ever stumbled on them, because Fran was game on following the map until we had reached the end of the road.
FRAN PROVIDES A SCALE REFERENCE AMIDST THE STONES
The small project I will illustrate today involved the pursuit of ancient stone circles that are spread throughout Great Britain. Once I realized that they were in some sense all over the place, it became a reasonable goal to visit some even though we weren't necessarily traveling to some "famous" ones. In the end we got to visit three stone circles, which I had discovered deep within You Tube on very local videos, the kind where you figure you could do a more professional job right now without ever producing a video. No matter, because you are in pursuit of very local knowledge. Now the maps come in , because there is literally no way the videos can ever get you anywhere near where you want to be. Research informs your interest; then other tools enable you to get there yourself, or determine that it might not be worth the bother.
STONES AMID THE FOREST AT CLAVA CAIRNS
The stone circle pursuit obviously began with "Outlander", although I informed Fran that she would be on her own if she disappeared into the past. Depending on the difficulty of actually getting to one of these circles, you might not find yourself alone in the pursuit. One of the skills required in landscape photography is sheer patience, while you not only wait for the light, but for the other tourists to tire of touching the stones. Another skill is framing. This not only means finding a quiet background to the ancient stone circle that doesn't include a road full of traffic. It also means moving around so that your subject, the stones, obscure the other visitors around you. It helps if the stones are bigger than most humans - just use them to hide the other people. I found that this wasn't too hard, as long as you were also willing to wait to get the shot you wanted.
PEERING INTO THE INTERIOR CHAMBER OF A CAIRN
The first stone circle we visited was in the Lake District of Northern England. While Castlerigg Stone Circle was off the beaten track for a lot of tourists, it was easily accessible, especially for locals for whom it served as a local dog park. It was so popular that the powers-that-be were constructing a third gate through the stone wall that surrounded the plateau on which the stone circle had reigned supreme for five thousand years. The only real evidence of modernity on the site was that stone wall, with only a few farms scattered in the near distance. The setting, surrounded by hills, provided all of the evidence you might need to realize why some ancient tribe had decided that "this is the place."
A STONE STANDS ALONE IN FRONT OF A CAIRN
We found our second stone circle near Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. We had continued our pursuit of Scottish history by visiting the battlefield of Culloden, where Highlander culture met its end in a blaze of glory. While I found the Museum to be very enlightening, the site itself is really just another plateau, with not much to offer. Culloden was less Gettysburg than Wounded Knee, since it less of a battle than a massacre - lasting far less time than a visit through the museum. But on the way back to Inverness we decided to take another route through would hopefully offer interest than the malls that surrounded Inverness. It was here that we stumbled on the Clava Cairns, an ancient site in the woods just off the smaller road. I had noted this site, but then it sat neglected in my travel notes, proving once again that research is fruitless if you don't actually look at it when you get there. This site featured a series of cairns among the larger stone circles. Cairns in this case were large circular mounds of stones with a small path into a central chamber that had been covered by a dome when they were constructed. Since these ancients were not Roman builders, who wouldn't come along for another two thousand years, the domes had long since disappeared. Archaeologists debate what the cairns were really for, much like they argue about the stone circles - but it's really humbling to consider that this site had existed for some four thousand years, while everything else that was there, including a very old forest, was probably at least the one hundredth "surrounding" that the site had seen since the stones had been erected.
THE NINE STONES CLOSE CIRCLE REVEALS ITSELF ACROSS THE FIELD WITH ITS FRIENDLY STONE WALL AND TREE
The final stone circle we visited was in a very obscure spot in the Peak District, located all by itself between Manchester and Sheffield in the Midlands of England. I had seen it on another You tube video, and determined that it was not far off the route out of the National Park on the way down to London. Fran was game, and was not deterred as the traffic and the road got lighter and smaller as we approached the site. By the time we "arrived" the road was not even single track, but more of a lane between stone walls, and the skies had opened up. We were alone. The cows in the adjoining field were bored by our presence, and Siri had been reduced to "prepare to park" which we recognized from experience as her way of saying "you are close, but why the hell are you here?" I saw another landmark that had been on the video nearby and reasoned that if we went on the public footpath that led to it we would find the path to the circle. The only trouble was that the space left between the two stones in the wall that constituted the "gate" would have challenged me fifty undernourished years ago. Fran could only laugh while I tried to get through, admonishing me that she would leave me there while she tried to get help. We were ten seconds away from calling it a day when I spied the tree from the video and realized that we were only one field away from the circle. There was no clear path, but we traipsed across the field, and found the circle right where it was supposed to be. Fran remarked that the stones were probably quite delighted to see more people had finally arrived since the guys who had shot the video. We stayed a little while in the pouring rain, and returned to the car, which had barely not blocked the lane. In any case, we saw only one car go by during our entire misadventure.
ALONE WITH OUR LAST STONE CIRCLE AT NINE STONES CLOSE
After a long day on the Motorway, we arrived hundreds of miles and forty centuries later at Heathrow Airport. While we got to stay more than forty days in England and Scotland, we found a lot of enjoyment in the few hours total that we spent pursuing the stone circles. I would seriously recommend that you search for a similar obscure project to enliven your travels between the obvious major monuments.
THE INTREPID EXPLORER
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JUNE 7, 2024
I KNOW IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE, BUT THIS IS A TYPICAL SCENE IN SCOTLAND; LOCH LEVEN
After nearly two months away from home, it's interesting to be back in my study, writing about my travels with my wife and my camera. We have just spent six weeks in England and Scotland, and I feel very privileged to have been able to make such a trip, and to do it in our way. In this day and age, I felt a little paranoid about admitting that our house was empty for such a long time, so I resisted posting about our trip while it was underway. It is also interesting that my readership actually increased while I was away, which either means that I have built up a certain amount of momentum, or that your hearts grow fonder if I just shut up for awhile. Fran and I had an incredible time slowly exploring some select parts of the United Kingdom, and today I would like to explore several things I learned, or re-learned, about a photographic adventure far away from home.
A MEMORIAL ON A CHURCH IN CIRENCESTER, A MARKET TOWN IN THE COTSWOLDS - 1914-1918 BELOW WASMORE THAN 4 PANELS. A WORKMAN WATCHING ME TAKE THIS IMAGE REMARKED THAT WORLD WAR TWO'S CASUALTY LIST WAS SMALLER BECAUSE THERE WAS NO ONE LEFT IN THE TOWN TWENTY YEARS LATER
A TYPICAL LANE IN THE LAKE DISTRICT
The first and most important thing is to always keep safety first. I am sixty-eight years old, and even though I "practiced" hiking with my poles in Laurelhurst Park for weeks before we left, I was not ready for hiking in the wild, especially in Scotland. Part of this was due to my age and physical condition, but a big part of it was due to the differences between American and Scottish theories about protecting people once they have left the urban environment. Fran did an admirable job at doing all of the driving, and I must say that after a month or so she was a far better driver than most people on the road. There were two recurring problems on the road. One was that unlike all of our English detective shows, the one-lane roads were never empty. Passing a car coming the other way can work like clockwork if everyone knows the rules and follows them. If anyone is murky on the proper procedures (it took awhile to realize that all of the Europeans were in the same backwards boat as we were) or are just plain assholes, native or not, then the whole thing just breaks down. I finally begged with Fran that if someone was just being ridiculous, to just stop dead and at least they would be hitting our stationary car. The scarier thing , single track road or not, was that it soon occurred to us that any safety measure found on the roads - signs, lighting, guardrails, etc. - were indications that someone had already died at that spot. We were on our own.
TWO IMAGES FROM GLEN COE, ONE OF THE MOST SPECTACULAR PLACES ON EARTH. ALL OF THESE SCENES ARE LITERALLY TAKEN RIGHT OFF THE ROAD. IT IS ONE OF THE MAIN ROADS IN SCOTLAND, BUILT BY THE KING TO PACIFY THE HIGHLANDS
This cavalier attitude extended to the hiking trails as well. While I would not characterize anywhere we went as "wilderness", Scotland is certainly wild in the sense that there is very little accommodation to your safety if you venture out on paths and trails that might be a thousand years old. You have got to know what you are getting into, and to take every guide you read with a big grain of salt. I will illustrate this with the first two occasions where we got in over our heads. The first time was in the Lake District in England. I conned Fran into driving down a famous road with 20+ grades, which she passed with flying colors. When we go to the big hiking spot, I first observed people going off on hikes that clearly were probably way beyond their skills and certainly beyond ours. At the information desk my alternate choice of hike was loudly applauded as the best and easiest hike in the area, and we set off. The English have a rather casual relationship with the metric system. Distances on the road are all in miles, and speed limits are all in miles per hour. While I could never understand their penchant for citing parking and tourist stops as 420 or such yards away, as if yards were at all relevant to driving instructions, at least it was the outmoded English dimensions we were used to. But then came time to talk about hills and mountains, and suddenly without warning everything was meters. The hike we were sent off on was only one mile in length, and I thought that the four hundred foot elevation gain was not going to be easy, but certainly was doable. One quarter of the way up I realized that it was really 1200 feet straight up. If you have ever climbed past the bridge all of the way to the top of Multnomah Falls, then you know that this is not for the faint of heart. I have done that hike, and realized how long a one mile hike can be if you include all of the switch backs. This hike in the Lake District had no switchbacks - it was simply straight up. I was smart enough to simply sit down and wait for Fran to realize that while she was certainly doing better than me, this was not to be. I was content to return down the hill on my ass since I found it impossible to stand up again until I had nearly reached the bottom of the hill.
THE MOST PLEASANT SPOT ON THE TRAIL. IT WOULD AGAIN SOON TURN VERY GRIM
Suitably chastised, or so I thought, a week later we set off on what several guidebooks cited as a very easy jaunt just outside of Portree, the biggest, and really only city, on the Isle of Skye. This walk was so underplayed that I foolishly left my poles in the car, since we were only going on an easy 45-minute walk in the woods. While it turned out that I certainly had caught a virus that laid me up for a couple of days after this hike, I would submit that it was not really our fault - them hike had no relation to the guidebooks assessment of difficulty. Have you ever started a hike that seemed more difficult than advertised, and reasoned that it must get easier soon? What a mistake. While the path was "clearly marked" it was only because there was a vertical drop on one side that meant at least you would break an ankle if not something far worse. Without poles I could not negotiate a path that was really a series of too-high "steps" next to a cliff. The views were spectacular, but not if you are on your skinned knees. It took quite a long time for me to get back up, and I didn't want to risk anyone else who offered to help me up since I feared we would both go down the hill. Finally I got up, Fran returned from further up the trail, and we set out again, figuring that it had to get better, as we resisted turning around. It did get better, then it got worse, and after a few more falls, and taking a lot of the eventual downhill portion on my ass, we finally finished the hike. An "easy" 45 minutes had turned into a very difficult four hours, and I was very lucky that I only had skinned knees and a very bruised ego. We never believed any guidebook again except for one very conservative photographic guide which declared that no one should ever hurt themselves in pursuit of a photograph - a position that I agree with 100%.
TWO IMAGES FROM TALISKER BAY FROM OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE BEACH. THIS PLACE DOES NOT RATE ON TOP SKYE SPOTS!
Fran found a site called "Skye for All" and we certainly could manage trails designed for wheelchairs. After a few weeks we graduated to harder "easy" trails, but never went anywhere without our poles, and promised each other that we could stop whenever we felt uncomfortable. I would stop whenever I had had my fill, and made some of my best photographs when I found a comfortable place to shoot while Fran went further down the trail.
FOUR SCENES FROM THE TROTTERNISH RIDGE ON SKYE, BEFORE IT REALLY GETS UNWORLDLY
As a result of my difficulties and the unrealistic trail expectations, even after almost a month on Skye I never got near to some of the "iconic" places that I came to shoot. While I might still be disappointed, I came to realize that I had to come to grips with my limitations, and find other things to photograph. Once again I realized that even when you go far away, it's probably best to shoot in the same way that you do at home. Your view of the world can probably work on Skye as well as it does in Portland. And your particular way of seeing will lead you to more unique photographs than even a well-done rendition of "the shot" that is all over You Tube. Unfortunately photography is in many ways a solitary pursuit, and even a muse like Fran can only take so much of the start and stop that is part of a walk in the woods or in the city with a camera. While I was making every attempt to be a "proper" landscape photographer, we never got up before dawn or made use of our head lanterns. I carried a tripod all over the United Kingdom and only used it once, and then because I was not willing to have never used it all. Most of the time the conditions didn't even require a tripod; while it certainly wouldn't have hurt, I was unwilling to be even slower on the trail than I already was.
WOODLAND TRAIL IMAGE BY FRAN, FROM A VERY FRIENDLY TRAIL. THIS SHOWS WHAT CROPPING AND POST PROCESSING CAN DO FOR AN IPHONE IMAGE.
ANOTHER IPHONE IMAGE BY FRAN FROM AN EASY TRAIL IN THE FAIRY GLEN. EASY UNTIL YOU'RE CRAZY ENOUGH TO CLIMB THAT TOWER AND PROCLAIM THAT YOU ARE THE KING OF THE WORLD! OH, TO BE YOUNG AND IDIOTIC!
I learned to ignore "the shot" even when I could take it. The chances of coming up with something new and interesting were pretty much nil. We were blessed with the weather, so we didn't face any difficult weather conditions that enable unique photographs. In six weeks in the United Kingdom, it really rained only three or four days. We should have put on our rain pants, which we never wore, only a couple of times. The best excuse for ignoring "the shot" beyond sheer stubbornness is that you are frequently far better off in just turning around 180 degrees and finding something almost equally spectacular that everyone else is ignoring. This doesn't make you a genius, just someone who is willing or forced to find something beyond the obvious. A telling example for me was our trip to Niest Point. Look it up on You Tube and you can decide where you stand on the endless debate (I kid you not) on whether to place the promontory above or below the horizon. Fran and Vinny and Steve went off to take good hour-or-so hike up and down hills that I clearly could not handle to walk to the lighthouse. I found a nice rock to sit on and spent most of the time looking at the literally spectacular mountains and seascapes that were directly opposite the lighthouse. Eventually I had my fill, got up off the rock and proceeded very slowly towards the area that I knew I had to reach to get "the shot." I couldn't take the path which was another collection of wet rocks, but I traipsed across the meadows, negotiated some small streams, and eventually found myself on the exact best spot to take " the shot." When Vinny finally caught up with me, I ceded my spot so he could take "the shot." If all this sounds very anticlimactic, well it certainly was. I have never seen any images like the ones I captured by literally turning around and ignoring the lighthouse. A lesson learned.
TWO STITCHED PANORAMAS OPPOSITE THE LIGHTHOUSE
"THE SHOT" OF THE LIGHTHOUSE
Another lesson I learned was to certainly do a little research, but to then stop. Even travelers like Fran and me who are determined "not to do too much" can fall into the trap of at least planning too much. We were on Skye for almost a month and certainly didn't get to see "everything." While the roads on Skye do not lend themselves to just stopping on the side of the road to capture a scene that you and maybe no one else finds intriguing - because there is no side of the road - you can still find your way to pretty obscure places if you have a good map. I do not mean on your phone, although they are remarkably accurate even in the middle of nowhere. In the United Kingdom the OS Survey maps are so detailed that you can even find the Air BnB you are staying at on the map, along with every road and house in that portion of Skye. This level of detail allows you to find your own way to places that are not world famous not because they are not spectacular but that they are very out of the way. My advice would be to do the level of research that will allow you to find several places you really want to see, famous or not, and then to leave everything else to serendipity.
OUR FIRST STONE CIRCLE, CASTLERIGG, IN THE LAKE DISTRICT
OUR SECOND STONE CIRCLE NEAR INVERNESS
OUR THIRD STONE CIRCLE IN THE PEAK DISTRICT, ALONE IN THE POURING RAIN. ALL OF THESE CIRCLES ARE ABOUT 4000 YEARS OLD, GIVE OR TAKE. WHATEVER INTERESTS YOU, YOU CAN FIND IT ON THE GOOGLE. IT MIGHT BE MORE DIFFICULT TO FIND IT IN REAL LIFE.
Finally, it really, really, really is not about the gear. After sixteen years my DSLR stopped working four days before the end of the trip. While my mode of shooting does not lend itself to the iPhone, I made do and think I have some very nice images from those final days of the trip. I went to my repair shop a few days ago and the nice young man declared my camera beyond hospice and clearly dead in the water. Not only wouldn't he fix it, but he couldn't fix it -there were no longer any parts around, even if I was crazy enough to spend two or three times what my camera is now worth to fix it. So while I will get a "new" camera, it probably will not be "new" since it would cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $3000 to duplicate my old camera with something on the same level in a 2024. So just like replacing my 2001 Volvo with a 2006 Volvo, I'm probably going to "make do" with a state of the art camera from 2016 to replace my state of the art camera from 2008. And I will be just fine.
SEASCAPE OFF THE NORTHERN END OF SKYE
I hope you have enjoyed these lessons and the accompanying images. There are many more tales and photographs to come from the United Kingdom as I absorb all of our memories from an incredible trip.
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APRIL 12, 2024
SPRINGTIME IN LAURELHURST PARK AT 1/60TH OF A SECOND
This week I returned to Laurelhurst Park for another round of experiments as I took out the tripod to increase my muscle memory so that i can increase my confidence in dealing with the recalcitrant "helper." It pays to do this once in awhile in order to check both your camera gear and your brain to see if anything has become rusty. Last week I was thwarted in taking any really long exposures since when I reached into my bag to take out my 10-stop filter I discovered that couldn't get the quite exquisite packaging open. Harumph!
I returned home and with the help of some pliers and elbow grease I released the filter from its case. So I returned today to try my hands at longer exposures. These three images will hopefully show you what you can achieve when you slow down your camera so much that a passerby might wonder what the hell you are doing. If you in fact slow it down enough then that person will not appear in the photo even if he walks right in front of your camera. These experiments can be fun but you must give up any hope of rushing anything.
Dealing with the tripod is absolutely necessary since we are taking exposures that last multiple seconds instead of fractions of a second that we are used to. No human being can hold a camera still even for "one Mississippi"; properly executed, with the right filters, a tripod can take a shot so long that you are tempted to bring a book along while you wait. A ten-stop filter blocks so much light from reaching your lens that you will only achieve a similar "correct" exposure if you increase your exposure times by ten stops or so. Each "stop" is letting in twice as much light, so you are compensating for the filter by increasing your exposure time by somewhere around 1000 times. The filter is so dark that once you put it on you can no longer see anything in your viewfinder - you must lock in your composition, determine a "correct" exposure, then put on the filter and blindly increase your exposure time the equivalent of 10 stops. Believe me, a ten second exposure seems just short of an eternity. Once the camera finally "clicks" you can then see what you have wrought, which does not look much like the reality around you. This is a real Goldilocks procedure, since you really do not know what you are going to get. It's just a matter of seeing what happened and speeding up or down a little and waiting another very long time again.
We are going to this trouble because we are trying to make images that reveal something beyond what is available to our own eyes at the scene. Just like a camera equipped with a strobe flash can "stop" a speeding bullet, with our tripod and filter we are slowing down time so that the scene appears differently than it does in real life. This in no way ensures a good image, but it can open our eyes to viewing a scene in a different way. This works exceeding well when we can combine stationary objects with parts of a scene that are moving in front of our camera. The moving objects are "smoothed out" because our exposures were long enough to miss the movement. This is the key to making waterfalls appear silky, or even removing ripples in a pond like the one at Laurelhurst.
AT TEN SECONDS, WE'VE ENTERED OUR OWN REALITY
I've tried to explain all of this, but it might easier to just show you what happens. The first image was of a tranquil scene at Laurelhurst Pond. After some post-processing, I achieved a pleasant image that is sharp and properly exposed. Notice the sharp leaves and the ripples in the pond that some might say "ruin" the mirror image of the trees in the water. I might not agree, and you don't have to either. The first image was captured in 1/60th of a second, which of course a human being cannot really understand since it is much faster than we can snap our fingers. Think of the difference between Gold and Silver at the Olympics. The second image was taken with a ten-second exposure. After some more post-processing, the exposure is roughly the same, but the image is completely different, and the mood has certainly shifted. We don't quite know what we are looking at even though the tripod has not moved from the spot in front of my body. The water is completely still - it could be a sheet of glass. But the wind - there was no wind - has reduced the sharpness of the trees enough so that we seem to be looking at a dream of Laurelhurst Park instead of the reality in front of the camera.
ANOTHER DREAM OF A FRIDAY IN THE PARK
Here is another example. This exposure lasted 15 seconds, but there was a little less of a breeze, so that the vegetation appears acceptably sharp. Yet the water and the mirror images are very different than what we expect to find when we look above the waterline. We seem to be painting a scene as opposed to capturing a snapshot. Once again we can see how far from reality the statement that "the camera doesn't lie" can be from the truth of the matter. Our images are our interpretation of the subject at hand, and some of the techniques we can use can remove our imagery from "reality" while revealing an inner truth that our mind saw even if our camera didn't. I encourage you to expand your horizons beyond what is plainly in front of your face.
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LAURELHURST THROUGH THE TREES
This week I returned to Laurelhurst Park in Southeast Portland to enjoy a few hours on a nice Spring day and to have fun experimenting with my camera. It's been a while since I went out deliberately to try techniques that went beyond simply trying to make the best images I could in a particular situation. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but trying out new techniques (at least new to me) can stretch your photographic muscles in new ways, even if you find that they really are not your cup of tea.
INITIAL SNAPSHOT
I also wanted to crack out my tripod, just to see if I or it had lost its way since I had not used it in months. A tripod is the bane of every photographer who has ever used one. It is also the one tool that I guarantee will improve your photography more than any other I can recommend. A tripod will allow you to properly expose a photograph under conditions that will not allow photography at all without it. All of the "rules" we learn about shooting in less than optimum conditions, ie. almost all of the time, are thrown out the window once your recalcitrant servant is holding your camera firmly in place. While there are certainly times where a tripod is not necessary, not allowed, or just a hindrance, I believe that in almost every circumstance your image would have benefited if you had just had the patience to bring that blasted tripod along. I know that my most arresting images, the ones where viewers feel that I must have had access to a camera that I have never used and never could afford, were simply taken on a tripod. It's that important. But you must take it out, and optimally you should do so more often than not, since muscle memory goes a long way in recalling ways of dealing with the blasted thing.
Now of course your tripod doesn't have anything to do with your compositional choices. That is why I recommend that you walk around a bit before you unpack it, so you can explore possibilities before it completely slows you down. This first image is an example of that, whatever you might think of it. I was intrigued by the branches over the water, and the contrast within the pond. It would have taken me ten minutes to unpack the tripod and set it up. This shot, taken at 1/90th of a second, was clearly within my ability to hand-hold the camera, and any exposure problems were inherent in the range of light within the image itself. I feel that the improvements in the processed image are clearly justified - white balance adjustments, lowering overall exposure to bring out the colors, the usual sharpening - and bring out what originally made me pick up the camera. I used a linear gradient to further reduce the brightness of the sky, a frequent problem in woodland scenes, even if you are shooting in the artificial woodland of a park. The result is a much richer scene, from the blacker branches to the vegetation. Notice the dogwood on the right, which you can now actually see. We'll be focusing more on that tree in a moment.
SLOWER THAN NORMAL
While observers might have wondered what the hell I was doing shooting overhanging tree branches, they certainly began to give up on my interest in the water itself. Of course they weren't focusing on the reflections in the water like I was, and didn't realize that I was perfectly willing to crop away most of the scene that I it looked like I was shooting. Now the tripod came to the fore. This image is a small portion of the shot, which was shot at f27 and 1/8th of a second, settings which I would normally avoid like the plague. I wanted to restrict the light coming into the camera so that I could reduce the ripples in the water, leaving me with a slow speed that I could never realistically hand hold. Experiments like this are exercises in improvisation, since you almost can never tell what you are actually getting on site. All you can be assured of is that the scene you are viewing is divorced in some way from what is appearing on your camera's screen, and that it's probably worth experimenting further.
REALLY SLOWING DOWN
So I slowed down the shutter speed even further, by putting on my polarizer filter that loses 2-3 stops no matter how much I actually "polarize" the scene. Think of it as sunglasses for your camera, and you can see that in addition to cutting down on the glare, it reduces light levels. Now you can see that if you really want to smooth the water, it really helps to shoot a 1 1/2 second exposure, which feels like eternity, and is only possible on a tripod. In order to reduce the possibility of camera shake of any kind, I set my camera for a 2 second delay before it took the shot. Eternity squared. I then took out my electronic shutter release, which I couldn't believe still worked, and took the exposure without touching the camera at all. You still don't have to like the results, but rest assured that without the tripod this image would not exist at all.
WHAT MY CAMERA SAW
Images do not have to look "weird" to benefit from the tripod. My eye was caught by the beautiful contrast of the dogwood and the background greenery across the pond. In order to keep this contrast, I had to shoot this at 1/20th of a second, way slower than n=my dumb camera wanted to, and a lot slower than I could comfortably hold myself. A "correct" exposure would raise the light levels enough to make you wonder why you took the shot in first place.
WHAT I SAW
A little post-processing helped of course. I lowered the black point to make the darker areas darker, and then raised the shadows to reveal some detail below the tree to give its base some context. I used a linear gradient to darken the sky a little further, and then put a "spotlight" on our tree by using a circular gradient to raise the exposure of the tree without affecting the rest of the image. I believe that my moves improved the image without moving it into "unrealistic" territory. Feel free to disagree.
TALK ABOUT BORING, NOT TO MENTION OUT OF FOCUS
Now we have moved left and recorded what can only be called a pretty boring image. It's not even in focus, since yours truly forgot to return to auto focus after I created a panorama that you'll see in a moment. It should be immediately deleted, but I took it as an opportunity to experiment. I tried ICM (intentional camera movement) to really put it out of focus. This is another experiment that tries to create an abstract image out of nothing by intentionally moving the camera during the exposure, usually along an axis suggested by the actual scene. It pays to lengthen the shutter speed beyond what you might used normally since you don't really care about sharpness anyway. Of course this is very experimental.
INTENTIONAL CAMERA MOVEMENT (ICM)
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but at least this isn't boring. Does its abstract quality reveal any deeper truth about a stand of Fir trees in Laurelhurst Park? Hell if I know, but you might like the image.
LAURELHURST PANORAMA
This is another image that didn't require the tripod, but did require a willingness to experiment while shooting without the instant gratification that usually can occur when we use our digital cameras. I am still looking across the pond, but I am shooting multiple shots that I will let the computer combine when I get back home. You must practice this technique in order to have any chance of success. You orient your camera in the opposite direction of the direction you are shooting, since the stitching software will reveal slight deviations from an exactly level movement across the scene, tripod or not. You must also decide on one focus point and then move to manual focus, so that the camera is not trying to refocus as you take multiple shots. Ditto with exposure - look around for the brightest part of the prospective scene, expose for that so you are not blowing out the highlights, and lock in the exposure to let everything else fall where it may. Once again, you must not let your stupid camera try to adjust the exposure as you move across a scene which has multiple different light levels. I have found that modest goal lead to better results. This image is a successful combination of seven different shots across the scene, overlapping by about 1/3 each time I moved the camera. While it is a "panorama" in the sense that it is much wider than what my camera lens is capable of taking, the resultant image is still in a standard 3:2 image ratio. A standard wide angle lens, after setting me back a couple of thousand dollars, would have included way too much sky and pond. I like the results I can achieve using this technique even though I know that I won't know what I have actually achieved until I have a cup of coffee while my computer thinks about what the hell I want it to do. Once again, you either like it or not, but I know that I have expanded what I can do with my camera whether you are aware of it or not. Another benefit is that the seven-shot combination contains so many pixels that more detail is present whether or not I enlarge it beyond what your walls or pocketbook can afford.
SPRING BRANCHES AND REFLECTIONS
In the end I tried one last reflection shot. The tripod allowed me to shoot at 1/10th of a second, to reduce but not eliminate the ripples in the water. This contrasted the shaky dark reflections of the leaves with the exacting detail of the branches above. I lowered the saturation of the blues of the lake while subtly increasing the greens to achieve the balance I liked without hopefully exceeding your capacity to believe in the image.
I hope you have enjoyed another foray into Laurelhurst Park. A good travel tripod will set you back 1-200 dollars. You don't want anything bigger in this day and age since you must be able to put it in your luggage in any case. And you can experiment with intentional camera movement or panoramas, even if you only use your iPhone. I wish you luck with any experiments that you might try, even though you might not really be aware of what you have done until you get back home. Just remember that you never knew your results back in the days of film, and adjust your expectations accordingly.
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MARCH 24, 2024
AN INTERPRETATION OF STEEL BRIDGE SPRING, 2010, IN 2024
This morning I looked back on three short walks I took in the Spring. As opposed to last week, when I cruised through Laurelhurst Park, I took these walks fourteen years ago, in the Spring of 2010. Through the two miracles that pixels never seem to die, and that I haven't managed to lose these files over the years, I was able to spend just a few minutes in order to show you how easy it is resurrect and improve your old photos.
STEEL BRIDGE SPRING, 2010
I snapped this view of the Japanese Memorial Garden and the Steel Bridge as our Cherry Trees blossomed out many Springs ago. Last week at the Market repeated this scene as thousands came to view the spectacle. Unfortunately the usual Spring rains will have probably stripped most of the blossoms by this weekend. This image was lost in the archives not through any faults of its own - it had just lost out to "better" images over the years. There is nothing really wrong with the image; it took just a few moves to improve it in my mind - some of which can be characterized as even more anal than usual. I used the crop tool to move the left edge in just enough to remove that thin sliver of rock that was bothering me. I then straightened out the image a whole .02 degrees, which is of course ridiculous. Exposure and saturation modifications darkened the overall exposure while highlighting the trees, which were the whole point. The bridge was brought back to its true "colors" by lowering the black point to achieve true Steel Bridge black. There was nothing to gain in the sky, since it was as uniformly gray as usual. But the overall impression of the "after" image seems to justify my stopping to capture it more than a decade ago.
HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD
Later that Spring I took a short walk in Portland's Hollywood District, which is delineated by the Hollywood Theater, a landmark movie palace whose architectural exuberance has few rivals in town. This image was again overshadowed by my efforts to include the iconic neon sign that's out of the picture, stage left. But I did respond to the overwhelming terra cotta carvings on this false facade above the marquee, which seem to extol an historic period that existed only in the architect's imagination. The overall effect can only be characterized as somewhat Oriental. The orange and green garlands of vegetation and the numerous decorated vase-like parapets are only rivaled by the row of nymphs who seem to have suddenly realized they had forgotten their blouses.
ARCHITECTS ON SOME KIND OF DRUG
There was not much left to do here beyond the usual and necessary sharpening required by all digital captures. I opened up the shadows just a bit to reveal just a little detail in the overhangs, and very subtly increased the saturation of the greens and oranges of the decorations. I deepened the blue of the sky to what most people who aren't Portlander's might reasonably expect on such a nice day. I tried to "expand the canvas" to the right so as to include that last bit of cornice which was lost those many years ago, but my current expertise in Photoshop was found wanting; such an improvement awaits further education. I tried converting to black and white, but the subtle polychromy of the subject just revealed a bland gray rendition without much more detail, so I left it alone.
A QUICK SNAP - YES, YOU HAVE GOT TO LIKE OLD CARS
I walked past this lovingly preserved old truck in the Spring of 2010. Hopefully it still exists in someone's garage. The following variants show what you can quickly achieve on the computer years after the fact - and they are just scratching the surface on the different takes you can make of an old subject.
CANDY APPLE RED
Without much ado I quickly focused on the subject at hand and immediately reached for my trusty 1:1 crop. Fortunately I just managed to get the important stuff, the vents and the "Custom" insignia, into the square crop. You might be forgiven for thinking that it's too crowded, but opening up the frame would again require that I expand the canvas and create some more pixels. Someday. More important was to lower the exposure enough to bring back the colors. In cases like this that will really enhance the color, since the actual colors are far too complex to saturate them individually. Lowering the black point also helped to delineate the joint in the body work at the hood. I will leave it to the next guy to go to the trouble of cloning out the pollen above the fender - let's get real!
BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
I couldn't resist trying a black and white conversion, even though the image seemed to be all about color. I was pleased that the image now seemed even richer since I could further lower the black point without making everything too saturated. Black and white even got rid of the pollen! And before you declare the black and white "unrealistic", how do you know that the truck wasn't painted a rich black in the first place?
It's great to take a walk in the Springtime, even if the current weather is not cooperating. I encourage you all to take these walks back into your archives to see what you can find there.
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MARCH 22, 2024
A WALK IN THE PARK, YESTERDAY OR ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
This week I would like to take you on a short tour of Laurelhurst Park in Southeast Portland. The park is an outstanding example of the City Beautiful Movement which was part of what American Historians call the Progressive Era at the turn of the Twentieth Century. While the Progressive Movement was very complex, and included distasteful aspects like racism and concerns about dreaded socialism, it's very hard to be against parks. These were designed to give the teeming cities places to breathe, and to allow most of society to get a taste of Nature as a way of humanizing the new urban America. Laurelhurst Park was designed as the centerpiece of a new neighborhood on Portland's Eastside; imagine today's developers devoting such an oasis as a neighborhood amenity. It is a link to the most famous parks of New York, Central Park and Prospect Park, since it was designed by the successive firm of the Olmstead Brothers. Portland Parks Superintendent Emanuel Tillman Misch enlarged a spring-fed pond into a three acre lake for ducks., and added over 250 trees to the 100 Conifers already on the site. After one hundred years the thirty acre parkis a tribute to the intelligence of city fathers who have preserved it even though they don't seem to have any chance of duplicating the energy and political will to follow thiws obvious model of urban renewal. The park is a short ten-minute drive from my house, and I take extra enjoyment on every visit since Jews were originally excluded from the neighborhood.
Now the beauty of the idea of an urban park is that while I will never be able to afford a house in Laurelhurst, I get to enjoy the park as often as I like. And since my taxes keep it in shape, I'd have to be out of mind to not take advantage of a world-class park. During the Pandemic, Laurelhurst Park was one of the few places beyond Fran's garden where we could venture out in the world. In this first week of Spring I tried to get some exercise there, while I also exercised my photographic muscles as well. These half-dozen images are about a third of my efforts yesterday. While none are award winners, and aren't even my best images of the park, they aren't half-bad, and will hopefully show you a little of the beauty of the park.
LAURELHURST IN BLACK AND WHITE
This first image is an example of the typical experience of walking through the park. It's possible to walk multiple miles through the park on concentric paths through the artificial woods past fields, a lake, sculptures, and a century of trees. The lamp posts that light these paths are original. The dappled light allows for a play of light and shadow that works as well in black and white as in color. I find that I often find the monochrome treatment superior in mood even when Spring's colors might have originally caused me to pick up my camera.
JUST ANOTHER BUNCH OF REALLY BIG TREES
This is another example of the kinds of huge trees that you can find in the park. The fact that Portlander's aren't even impressed by such giants is an indication how extraordinary an environment that the park simulates.
LIGHT AND SHADOW
Black and white emphasizes detail over color and allows me to manipulate contrast to bring out the shadows and textures far beyond what would appear realistic in color.
COLOR ACROSS THE PARK
But of course it is Spring, and sometimes that burst of color is what catches my eye across to the path beyond.
I'M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MR ZIEGFELD.
Then you come across what might be termed a specimen tree that demands attention on its own. This same tree might recede into the background within a few weeks, but right now it is the star of its neighborhood. It works just as well, if a bit differently, if we ignore the color that forced us to look.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF CONTRAST
As usual, the exposure manipulation allowed in black and white allows me to bring up both the whites and the shadows to achieve more detail. You can decide for yourself if the increased contrast makes up for the loss of the original color contrast.
BLOSSOMS AGAINST TREES
Here I tried to set off the new blossoms against the trees that surround them. You can often increase this contrast through different strategies to de-emphasize the background. Here I both de-saturated the blues of the sky and applied a pretty strong vignette that lowers the exposure of the borders of the image so that the central subject pops out even more. I'd like to think that the vertical crop relates to my love of Japanese screens that ignore most rules of Western perspective in favor of close-up details.
MAGNOLIA DETAIL
One of the stars of Early Spring is the Magnolia trees, and here is a detail of the blooms on one section of a tree. In massaging a snapshot like this, I first crop to my choice of subject, then increase the blacks to allow for more detail. Lowering the overall exposure while raising the white point really brings out the colors.
MAGNOLIAS BEFORE COLOR TV
Or you can again be yourself and just ignore the color all together. There are more shades of gray here than in the color version, and the background is now almost totally black. Of course most viewers will really miss the color.
I hope that you have enjoyed this brief walk through Laurelhurst Park. I think that it shows how much photographic fun is available at a simple walk in the park. I might just take another stroll there this afternoon.
]]>MARCH 15, 2024
THE OREGON COAST'S IDEA OF A SUNSET
This week I would like to discuss the idea of one path you might pursue in approaching an old photo that you discover in your archives. This is not the only path by any means, and I will once again caution you that anyone, including me, who suggests that there is "the way" to post-process your photos is either lying or just ignorant. I only suggest through three examples that this method frequently works for me, until it doesn't. The "Goldilocks" method of trying something you have not really explored, testing it, and then probably dialing it back a little, works for a lot of things in life beyond post-processing your photos.
I find that there are four stages to this process. The first, and probably most important one, is to look through your archives in search of an image that deserves a second chance. Forget about discovering something that will achieve fame and glory. After all, why would you miss such a golden nugget in the first place? Chances are that you did pick the "best" shots from that particular day years ago, but maybe, just maybe, you missed something that might be worthy of your attention. The most important part of that statement is the unspoken "today." You are looking at something years after the fact. Why wouldn't you see something that you didn't see years ago - haven't you changed since then?
So you don't look for gold, but you ignore most of the lead as well. Just admit it when you see something that might respond to your hard-earned post-processing skills. Have enough faith that if something caught your eye, it probably has a lot of room for improvement. Maybe ignoring the fact that it was you who made the original capture might help - you are just looking through a pile of "historic" photos of uncertain lineage, and there is one that caught your eye. All it takes is to acknowledge why your eye was caught, and to run with it.
SOMEHOW THIS SEEMS EVEN MORE UNREALISTIC
My first move is to usually consult the crop tool. Frequently I find that the thing that caught my eye is lost within a frame that is just too big. This seascape is distinguished by the glow of a sun on the water, even though we don't see the sun at all. A lot of the sky, and at the same time , a lot of the silhouetted beach grass, contributes nothing extra to the image. My thought is that while I like the dark sky, and the sea grass silhouette, the image might benefit from a wider perspective. I think that the 2:1 panoramic frame focuses the attention on the central glow while it simultaneously gives it room to breathe.
I run through my usual strategies of exposure modifications, which include adding contrast by lowering blacks and raising whites, before I actually modify the exposure as a whole. Lightroom allows many ways to subdivide the image, and in this case I raised the exposure in the sky while lowering it in the water, which is actually the opposite of what I might normally do - but this reveals a lot of detail in both areas. The beach grass silhouette is reinforced by increasing the black point in that area.
What is interesting is that these changes have actually brought much more color back into what was a pretty monochromatic image. I usually try to see if what originally caught my eye in an image might benefit from a black and white conversion. While I liked the additional details, and the panoramic crop, I wondered if the image might look better without the distractions of color.
DRAMA WITH DETAIL
This monochromatic version eliminates the color casts, adds even more detail in the sky, and brings the glow back to the sea while allowing for more detail in the surf - it is no longer blown out. I believe that these changes have lead to more realistic yet still mysterious image that warrants a closer look.
ON THE TOP OF MT. HOOD, OR AT LEAST 5000 FEET CLOSER THAN I HAVE EVER BEEN
While this is a wildly different subject, I pursued a similar editing strategy in looking at the very top of Mt. Hood. I was intrigued by the wisps of wind-driven snow and the contrast between the rock and the glaciers. While I do not think the modifications have been as dramatic as the seascape, I still think that they have led to a more dramatic image. Which is not to say that you have to agree, or that on another day I might actually like the original crop or the color version better. There is no one right answer.
MOUNTAIN TOP DREAMS
I think that the panorama focuses your attention on the mountaintop while still giving it room to breathe. More importantly, white balance changes and exposure modifications have brought out "truer" colors in both the snow and the rocks, while the sky is still an overwhelming blue. I think you can see why our intelligent but stupid cameras can be fooled by these alpine conditions. I lowered the blacks and raised the shadows on the rocks, which made them come alive.
IT'S GETTING PRETTY CHILLY UP HERE
This is why I love black and white. It reveals detail, while it ignores reality. There is even more detail in the rocks without worrying if they are the right shade of brown. We know the sky is not black, but the blue looked almost as unreal as the black. We can make even darker here - after all, we know the sky is not black, so why can't it be blacker? Most of all, how does the lack of color make you feel? I don't know about you, but his rendition lowers my temperature way below zero. It just looks way cooler and bleaker and I am much more comfortable in my study while I am looking at this version.
WHERE WAS I? WHAT WAS THIS? I HAVEN'T A CLUE
Finally we have here an image that is almost totally graphic and already separated from reality to a very large degree. At first I didn't know what the hell it was, and I took the photograph! Now I could have ignored it as I have done for the last dozen years, but I was intrigued, because I very rarely forget why, and even if, I took a photo. Photography is my moment of zen, so I was baffled by this image. I set to work on it as if it was an out-of-body experience - what was this totem trying to tell me?
POSITIVELY AGLOW
What ever it was, there was too much sky. So even though I knew that there was no future coaster here, I went for the 1:1 crop, straightened the image by looking at the flashing, which I had no idea was actually straight, and finally carefully and anally made sure that the lower flashing hit the corner of the frame just so. Even though I still had no idea of what I was looking at, Lightroom's new "Texture" tool really brought out the texture of what I concluded was stucco. I adjusted the exposure of the sky and that mysterious cap so that it could glow a little more at the top.
PORTLANDIA TOTEM, IN ENIGMATIC BLACK AND WHITE
I think you know what happened next. Often I investigate black and white because the real world has not supplied much color, or even more arbitrarily, I just don't like the colors in the image. Who says I can't change them or get rid of them as I see fit? The black and white version also allows for even more detail (grit) to be exposed, and for the relationship of colors to be changed now that they are just different tones of gray. My image, no matter what it was about, was certainly not a pretty pucky shade of tan and a line of green flashing. Black and white allows me to add some detail to cinder block wall in the foreground, and to lighten it up in relation to the formerly tan chimney to balance the parts of the image that really don't matter. And the top of the totem stands out even more from the darker sky. While you can certainly question my choice of subject here - is there a subject at all? - I find the result a very mysterious totem from some forgotten religion of "Darkest Portlandia." And I still don't know what this really is, and would be surprised if Lightroom's new AI selection tool could find the subject better than I can.
I hope you have found my quest for meaning in three old photos at least amusing if not enlightening. I encourage you to explore your own hidden mysteries that can be found lurking in you photo archives.
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ALONE ON THE OREGON COAST, PANORAMIC VERSION
This week I've got another few images to show you that I have saved from the obscure reaches of my archives. But my real subject is the lengths I go through each week to prepare my very temporary gallery at Saturday Market, where I attempt to actually sell the fruits of my photographic labor. The Market opened last week, and even though I was smart enough not to go sit there in the rain, I probably will succumb to the pull of the Market this week. The Market is fifty years old this year, and even though I am a "raw rookie" in my fifteenth year, I still participate in a craft market that is pretty much unique in this country. Its existence has basically allowed me to be an artist, something which I could only dream of more than a decade ago. I make more money selling my art than probably 90% of artists in the country, even though I have never come close to "making a living." Fran's understanding and support are the real reason any of this has been possible.
I HOPE MY WORK ON THE PANORAMIC VERSION MEETS WITH YOUR APPROVAL. IT IS PROBABLY THE ONLY IMAGE THAT MIGHT SELL IN MY BOOTH.
Saturday Market vendors are notorious for our never ending complaining. The Market is a lot like democracy - the worst form of government except for all of the others. Trying to sell art at the Market is also a never-ending struggle, except that it is clearly the best way to sell art that I have ever been able to come close to figuring out. While the web is continually about to "explode", the only people who make money are the very early adopters and the web itself. One photographer that I respect has a theory that the web itself is designed to reduce any art on any platform to a value of zero - it's just a function of time. Even though my website is now eminently "respectable", it is really only a place to prove that I have actually have produced some art - as a market, it has almost no value whatsoever. It's real "raison d'etre" is to provide a place to post these essays for the past three years. As for the gallery system, I finally realized long ago that even if I became a "real artist" with gallery shows, there was almost no chance to make real money in that environment either. Every time I have contemplated opening my own brick and mortar gallery, other gallery owners have reacted by admitting the reality that I would be much more "legitimate" but that I would make no more money than if I stayed at the Market.
WHAT IF THIS NONSENSE IS ALL THAT REMAINS WHEN WE'RE GONE?
So I have, and I have run a "successful" gallery at the market for almost fifteen years. The only trouble is that my gallery's success is due to taking advantage of the artist (me) whose art is on exhibit. As for the minimum wage worker (me) who sits there all day, well, if I made minimum wage the gallery would go out of business. An interesting economic dilemma.
So I thought I would briefly discuss what goes into creating my little gallery under the Burnside Bridge. A few years ago my wife walked by one of the junk shops in our neighborhood and remarked that she couldn't believe that they had to bring everything back into the store at the end of the day. I looked at her in horror while I wondered what she thought I did every week. It is a similar feeling that I get when yet another customer wonders in June if this was the first week the Market has been open, three months into the season. Or when other customers wonder out loud if the Market pays for and erects our booths each week. In my dreams.
SOMETIMES ARCHITECTURE HAS NO "STYLE" - JUST AN AMAZING AMOUNT OF CRAFT
Every Saturday at 6:45 in the morning I arrive at my bare 10 x 10 piece of concrete under the bridge. For the next three hours I will create something that actually looks like an art gallery - as long as you ignore the idea of real walls, floors, heat, or a front door to lock. Each vendor endeavors to create an environment that will encourage the public to enjoy our art and fork over some money to take it home. There are very different levels of elaboration, and we all "suggest" ways to enhance these little galleries. After resisting entreaties to spend even more time and money on my booth, I created the somewhat bitter acronym "IAFT" (It's a Fucking Tent!) to try to shut up my fellow vendors. In any case the average booth ends up costing several thousand dollars after you add up the tent, the walls, the tables, and all the other stuff that tries to hide the fact that it is just a tent under the bridge.
Of course you have to fill that tent with some art to sell. No matter how you figure it, that art usually represents another few thousand dollars investment, which doesn't include all of the art in your basement that you have given up trying to sell. I probably could fill another two booths with all of the art that I have created that has not found a home beyond my own. I have been struggling for over ten years with the mantra of "bring less, sell more" without much success, since the public want to see an art gallery with evidence that you are creative and successful before they will even consider buying something from you. People have so little faith in their own taste that they will not buy from a new vendor until they have seen them for a few years and figure that everyone else has bought enough to keep them in business. Most vendors, and especially photographers and potters, soon realize that their stuff has to be "perfect", it is very fragile, and that you can have a great day at the Market and bring back home almost all of the stuff that you came with. And god forbid that you leave something at home, because that's the first thing that a customer will request. At the end of the day, the only vendors who are the last to pack up are usually the potters and the photographers.
THE TANNER SPRINGS SCULPTURE ON THE STREET, THROWING SOME SHADE
It took working in a Hardware store for a few years for me to realize that all of the stuff we use to outfit our booths has a real purpose in the world besides allowing me to create an art gallery out of nothing each week. When I go to the Market for the first time this year I fully expect to stare at half of this stuff and wonder just what it is for. I am not alone in realizing that the distance from a genius to a doofus is very short indeed. The instant you congratulate yourself for coming up with a brilliant new way to make your life easier is only a few seconds before you wonder why in the hell it took years for you to finally wise up. Let's just say that some of the stuff we use to set up our booths is really used by carpenters, plumbers, electricians and kidnappers - and is not usually available in arts supply stores.
My theory of inflation is that we each have our own personal inflation index. I do not care if McDonald's raises their prices; you certainly shouldn't care if the small masonite panels that I use for my coasters have quadrupled in price over the last few years. As a photographer, what is actually wonderful is that the market for our stuff has gotten so narrow and expensive that the few manufacturers left almost know that the market will probably not bear that many more price increases before we all just hang it up. Of course that assumes that you have enough brains to realize that your sixteen-year-old camera is much more than adequate; the professional photographers leave the latest and greatest to the hobbyists once we realize that we are actually talented enough to stop worrying about the gear. We have enough to worry about , like the printer that I'm starring at that cost $1200 dollars, and who cares, since each color ink cartridge (there are twelve) costs sixty dollars apiece. In fact, since my ink cartridges are bigger than yours (!) the price I pay for ink has gone down to merely domestic champagne. As near as I can figure, and why should you care, it costs me .015 cents per square inch for the ink on a photo print. This is the razor blade pricing model par excellence, since I have spent multiple thousands of dollars on ink since I purchased my current printer years ago. I tried to explain to the Epson guy that he was forgoing something like $5000 dollars in ink over a few years when he refused to meet Canon's price for a replacement printer, but what do I know? These printers are near miracles until they decide to not work on a random Tuesday, and waste hundreds of dollars in ink before they end their job action.
SOMETIMES I AM JUST SO AMUSED THAT I REALLY DON'T CARE IF YOU OR I REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON - I JUST WANT YOU TO NOTICE THESE MAGICAL MOMENTS TOO
Most of the other supplies I buy suffers from fact that I know that almost all of my customers that are not photographers will never even begin to see the difference between mere expensive papers and ridiculously expensive papers, and my prices will never justify these costs. What's funny is that even Pre-Covid, the panoply of photo papers at the only real photography store left in Portland included only a few that my customers could appreciate and afford. I would stare at the packages and realize that the "small" price differential was really more than four times since the more expensive papers came in packages with half the sheets, and were printable on only one side. Thus my pile of sheets that are available for coasters once the damn printer messes up the print the first time would be only good for the trash bin. While I know that the more expensive papers will show more detail in my deepest blacks, I also know that you won't see it and certainly wouldn't accept the increased cost of my prints.
And don't get me started on frames. After many years I have almost abandoned the idea of selling a beautiful print in a beautiful frame. if you talk about a terrible economic position for an artist, then framing your work is the worst thing you can get into. Customers "know" that we are ripping them off, when in fact we are literally giving the frames away. it can drive you to utter frustration, and that's before the damn frame breaks before it even gets sold. The worst sound in the Market is the sound of breaking glass - we all look around in horror to make sure it's not one of our pieces, and then we feel thankful and guilty the rest of the day when thank God that it wasn't.
You know what's the difference between a Saturday Market vendor and a whining dog? The whining dog eventually stops. Enough for today. I hope you have enjoyed these images amid my gripes, and that maybe you can have gotten an inkling of how much we enjoy showing our work each weekend, despite the problems I've only begun to outline. And lo and behold, when I leave the empty concrete slab under the bridge, maybe another group of people have some of my art to exhibit in their homes, and that makes me feel very good, if not rich.
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MARCH 1, 2024
THE FLATIRON AS PART OF NEW YORK
This week I would like to return to the topic of what a photographer can do when they are confronted by a subject that has been seared into their brain long before they have ever encountered it in real life. In our visual age, we all have images in our brains that we have never actually seen. Most of these images are not historical, or scientific, but are simply famous places that we have never visited. The visual image is divorced from the experience in ways that our parents, much less our ancestors, could never have imagined. We now "know" what something looks like because these images are instantly available - and this ubiquitous nature of a particular image can sometimes make it very difficult for a photographer to find anything new to say when they actually see it for the first time.
One of these subjects is the Flatiron Building in New York City. You do not have to be an architect to be very familiar with this building. It has loomed far above the streets of its neighborhood in Manhattan for so long that the neighborhood has changed so much that one of the only things that is constant is the building itself. The real estate world finally noticed and now the neighborhood is known as the Flatiron District. The building is now 120 years old, and at twenty-two stories, was once one of the tallest buildings in the world. Even though it is now dwarfed by contemporary structures, it is the very embodiment of a "skyscraper", especially in the New York context. It was designed by Daniel Burnham, who was most famous for his urban designs in Chicago. Here in some ways he brought the prototypical Chicago skyscraper to the streets of New York, complete with a the tripartite base, shaft and top, and a variation of the usual paired large windows surrounded by muscular, but now decorative terra cotta "stone."
NOW WE'RE IN NEW YORK - BUT WHEN?
The building caught the public's attention because not only was it the largest building that most had ever seen, but that it was in itself really a piece of urban design. Located at one of the disruptive junctions that Broadway makes with the regular street grid of Manhattan, the shape of the building was so unusual that viewers likened it to the similar shape they knew from their daily chores - the triangular cast-iron flat iron that at least the women used to iron the household clothes.
Men being men, they were attracted to the building because it created its own micro climate. In an era where a glimpse of "stocking was somewhat shocking" men would linger at lunch hour to see if the wind currents coming down the 18-story facade would hit the ground and very subtly lift a women's skirt a few inches above the pavement. This extraordinary event led to an expression of general delight - "23 Skidoo!" - that became a common idiom. The Flatiron building is located at 23rd Street. Another interpretation would say the phrase was coined by the cops as a way of getting those same men to "move along."
The FlatIron building became such a famous subject for photographers because of its striking appearance, its historic significance as an early skyscraper, and the fact that its erection coincided with a vast expansion of the photographic medium itself. Literally every famous photographer who ever visited New York over the past hundred years has contributed to its legend as a subject. Not to mention the millions of unknown photographers like myself who has tried to contribute to the "canon." One of the best photography books that I have ever read is actually totally devoted to just this fascination with the building. The author, Peter Kreitler, realized that pictures of just this one building in New York could illustrate a good portion of the entire history of photography as an art. The constancy of the structure stands in absolute contrast with everything else - the fashions, the transportation devices, the storefronts - that the building becomes both historical and ahistorical. At least in the New York context, it has always been there. Recently the building and the neighborhood have seen hard times, but now it is in the process of being converted from offices to forty condos. When asked if he could sell these high-priced condos, the developer said that there were probably at least forty people who wanted to live in the Flatiron Building.
FLATIRON WITH LAMP POST
So what is the enterprising photographer to do? There are 3,987 photos of the Flatiron building available on the Shutterstock stock photo web site! I think there is the real measure of maturity in the knowledge that one should at least try, even though the chances of saying something new is next to zero. The fun is in the process, the willingness to stretch your own boundaries even if others have probably already gone way beyond your own. The more context you include the better chance that your image will be of a particular time and place - although only you might only remember that particular era of taxi. The chances of encountering a particular weather condition after a century is also exceedingly rare, and even your "FlatIron in a Blizzard" will probably not be enlivened by snorting horses in the cold. The more abstract an image you pursue might lead a viewer to wonder what he was looking at, but that historical "Flatiron Memory" will probably help you with most New Yorker's if not the the tourists.
A LAMP POST THAT MIGHT BE AS OLD AS THE BUILDING
These four images were among my photographic efforts on one St. Patrick's Day in 2011. They probably will not be included in any future photographic opus on the building, but after finding them in my archives today, and doing a little massaging in Lightroom, I can show them to others without questioning my artistic talents.
The first image shows the most context, but it would take a pretty anal historian to declare "obviously 2011!" What I like about the image is something I have recently observed about my profession - that the strongest buildings can quietly assert themselves as part of the context of the city itself. This image is of New York, with all of its charm energy, and chaos. Oh there's the Flatiron building, looking good at the end of the street, behaving rather well with all of its ordinary neighbors. In the context of both photographic and New York history, converting to black and white removes the image a little from its time. We are so used to seeing New York in "black and white" that it can sometimes seem more real that way than in living color.
The second image removes most of the context. The shape is the subject, and the city has been reduced to one historic lamp post that seemingly harkens back to Edison himself. I tried to emphasize the subjects height by cropping to a vertical panorama, leaving out as much sky as possible. As usual in black and white, I can increase the contrast and sharpen the image far beyond what a color rendition could handle.
LINING UP THE FLATIRON
Now I've gotten pretty abstract. Not only is the image all about the shape of the building against the sky, but I have allowed myself to ignore everything but graphics by aligning the cornice with an image frame that is totally the product of my imagination. I have chosen to frame this historic shape in this manner in order to strengthen the graphics of a building that needs very little help in this regard. While I am certainly not the first photographer who has tried this move, it certainly says "Rich"if you have encountered many of my photographs.
GRAPHIC FLATIRON, B&W
Black and white allows Rich to have seemingly created this image at any time in the last 120 years, if you ignore a few window air conditioners. Black and white graphics also relieves the viewer of wondering about the sunshine on what is probably a nice Spring day. The image is now almost all about that cornice racing around the block.
FLATIRON FACADE
Finally I have gotten so abstract that most people would be forgiven if they didn't know that this was the Flatiron building at all. It could be part of a New York quiz. What I love is the subtle play of the sunlight across the terra cotta masonry. Even more subtle are the oh-so-gentle bay windows which scream "Flatiron" only if you have spent as much time staring at this building as I have. Timeless, except again but for the air conditioning units, which at least give you a hint that it was taken some time while I was alive, but you already knew that. Maybe this is another answer for how to capture such a famous building -create an image which ignores the purported "subject" almost entirely.
Pretty perverse I know, but such extraordinary problems call for desperate measures. I would encourage you to also take matters into your own hands if you want to create your own images - your art is not what everyone, or even anyone else, sees -it is your little mark on the world we all share..
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FEBRUARY 24, 2024
GLASS TOWER ON THE HORIZON
Last weekend Fran and I spent a couple of days in Tacoma, Washington. We stayed in a nice neighborhood that resembled our own, if you added a part of the Puget Sound a few blocks away. We enjoyed two nice meals with some old friends. And we got to spend most of a day visiting Tacoma's Museum of Glass, which I would heartily recommend to anyone anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. It is one of the few contemporary buildings which makes me proud to have been an architect.
The Museum of Glass was built as part of an urban renewal project at the turn of the century. Tacoma, long in a blue collar shadow of Seattle, endeavored to cover up yet another ill-conceived and uncompleted highway by lining it with so many civic institutions and new hotels and apartment houses as to try to render it invisible. An entire new regional campus for the University of Washington joined about a half a dozen new museums whose collections ranged from State History to Vintage Automobiles to Art - clearly something for everyone in an effort to boost civic pride and the local economy. The Museum of Glass was the crown jewel of the entire assemblage, with its glass kiln tower an instant landmark. Arthur Erickson, the Canadian architect, was in charge, and provided the drama required for a new civic landmark in a very strange site. Erickson clearly wanted to create a very opaque sculptural plinth that would be its own world, one with incredible distant views of both the water and Mt. Rainier, while ignoring its immediate surroundings. The museum is surrounded in part by a host of new condos, despite, in Fran's words, "Who wouldn't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for an apartment not only next to a highway but also next to three mainline train tracks?" The series of roofs, stairs, and ramps that surround and surmount the museum resemble a similar arrangement at Seattle's new Sculpture Garden which also tries to literally ignore surrounding highways and railroad tracks by offering sculptures with views of the distant Olympic Mountains.
I visited the museum when it was almost brand new, surrounded by hundreds of architects and hosted by Erickson himself at an architectural conference many years ago, but I had always wanted to show it off to Fran. We finally went together after driving by Tacoma innumerable times while being stuck in traffic on the way to Seattle. It was another shock of "older age" to realize that it might have been almost twenty years since my first visit, but the building's design holds up. While the roofs were certainly livelier with hundreds of fellow visitors, and most of the art seemed to have moved inside, the pilgrimage around the tower still captured our attention despite being alone on a typically gloomy Northwest day.
The chimney Tower for the demonstration Glass Blowing arena is of course the highlight of both the exterior and the interior of the museum. It is composed of 2800 stainless steel panels on a computer-designed structural grid. It is absolutely compelling as a photographic subject, but it is hard to capture the entirety of the sculpture without including some of its dreary, even unsightly surroundings. While I am sure that native photographers have discovered some great viewpoints from some surrounding buildings, I adopted my usual strategy of trying to isolate the tower from its surroundings while allowing myself to not include the entire sculpture.
THE ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
A CONSIDERED IMAGE
This was one of my more successful snapshots. There is nice collection of angles, and a subtle glow on the aluminum panels. I left the composition alone, but used Lightroom's masking tools to individually adjust the three different ares of the image - the sky, the tower, and those foreground sheds - so that I could both raise the overall exposure while manipulating the different areas on their own. The sky was first darkened, then lightened, with out affecting the other parts. The Tower was lightened and then had its contrast ratcheted up to bring out the subtle shading of the different tiles. Each row of these diamond-shaped panels gets slightly smaller as it rises up the cone, which was designed to recall the beehive wood burners that formerly lined the waterfront. The lower sheds were also lightened, but only to reveal a little shadow detail without really drawing any attention from the tower. Lightroom's new AI selection tools were made for an image like this, for any algorithm worthy of its creation can certainly pick out the sky and the subject of a graphic image like this. For the foreground sheds, a new selection tool that allows for a selection based on a chosen luminosity range differentiated between the lighter tower and the darker sheds very well.
A ROOFTOP JUXTAPOSITION
As I walked around the roof, I tried to find new ways to capture the tower. It was interesting to me that as an architect I was fully capable of "suspending my disbelief" at so arbitrary an object as the tower but just couldn't accept a winged roof over the elevator to the roof. I decided to include it as a speeding bullet impaling the tower.
AN ARROW TO THE HEART
I left most of my visual pun alone, restricting my manipulations to subtly darkening the sky and lightening the tower. My major annoyance was the perfectly natural blue tinge on the tower, so I reduced it by lowering the tower's saturation almost to black and white.
WHAT AN IDIOTIC CAMERA
The museum's actual collections try to encompass the entire range of artwork that uses glass in an almost encyclopedic range of means and intents. These include items that are traditional "craft" pieces to conceptual art that happens to be made of glass, and everything in between. The problem a photographer faces is that the combination of natural and artificial light renders a snapshot that usually bears no relation to what ou human eyes saw and our brains adjusted for. Post processing is the only way to get back to anywhere close to what we saw when we snapped the shutter.
A BEAUTIFUL BLUE AND GREEN BOWL
Results like this are as shocking as they are typical. Once again the camera is either just plain stupid or merely too realistic in its depiction of color casts that our brain rejects on site. Most snapshots taken in conditions like this only reveal how complex the magic of our visual perception really is - how our brain interprets what our eyes see.
SNAPSHOTS IN MIXED LIGHTING CANNOT BE BELIEVED
Some of the exhibits use commissioned art pieces to illustrate the various unique properties of glass as a material. This series of colored rings showed how glass's transparency did not preclude it from creating a play of shadows as well.
LIGHT AND COLOR AND SHADOW
I cropped the image, and the sculpture, to eliminate the ordinary interior environment of the ceiling and corners so as to concentrate on my own collection of the rings. As usual cropping eliminates problems like light fall-off by just getting rid of the offending parts of the image. After once again correcting the horrendous white balance I concentrated my efforts on enhancing each of the colors by individually manipulating their luminosity and saturation. to achieve the results I was looking for. By increasing both the overall exposure and deepening the shadows I could highlight the shadows the artist was interested in.
A SCHOOL OF GLASS SALMON
Some of the art was merely breathtaking, and pretty hard to render in one photograph. This school of glass salmon numbered in the hundreds and filled up a gallery almost as big as my bungalow. The fish both reflected the room and allowed you to see through them and appreciate the entire school. Even the fishing lines that tied them to the ceiling became a work of art. My black and white rendition here avoids the color changes that occurred continuously because of reflections from a movie of a real salmon stream projected on an adjoining large wall on one side of the room. A color photograph rendered these multi-colored stripes as an additional layer of confusion that a viewer could never be expected to understand.
THE TOWER'S INTERIOR REVEALED
A lot of the museum's collection, and most of the items available for purchase in the museum shop, are actually created in the museum itself. The "Hot Shop" is the museum's center of creation, an amphitheater that is analogous to a giant outdoor exhibit at an aquarium. Here a team of glass blowers perform the artistic ballet required to create these glass sculptures, ranging from trinkets to sophisticated chandeliers. Narration of their efforts, accompanied by diagrams and explanations, illustrate the processes that lead to either artistic success or to a pile of shattered glass that needs to be swept away. The Tower is really an enormous chimney, 90' tall, needed to exhaust the gasses and heat from the enormous gates to Hell that heat the raw supplies of glass to 2400 degrees and allow the artisans to melt and manipulate the glass into the finished pieces. The chimney allows the heat in the amphitheater to hover at about 90 degrees. The engineering of the tower revealed here in its interior is almost as breathtaking as the sound of the fans and the heat rising to the skylights above. This near-black and white rendition was achieved by lowering the saturation of the blues, which glowed from the skylight and provided the only real color in the interior of the tower. Drastic exposure manipulation was required to balance the overall darkness with the burnt-out highlights in the skylights.
ONE LAST HORIZONTAL TAKE ON A VERY VERTICAL SUBJECT
We once again return to the roof for one final take on the Tower. As an architect I was often asked both in school and then later by clients "what the hell I was doing" which of course was a pretty existential question of what an architect was worth as a member, if not a leader, of a team of builders. I only had to hope that the results of my efforts would justify my vision of the project which I hoped exceeded my client's dreams without breaking their budget. I feel that it is a building like the Museum of Glass that answers the question without saying a word. The sense of wonder that accompanies a visit has absolutely nothing to do with program, or function, or cost - this is art, plain and simple. Even if my training allows me to have a fuller understanding of both the difficulties and the triumphs of such a work, you have got to be an absolute Philistine in every sense of the word not to be moved in some way by this piece of art designed to exhibit and shout the virtues of other pieces of art. Of course it is willfully arbitrary, and "unnecessary", and that is what makes it human.
I hope that these small two-dimensional images of mine, which fall far short of documenting the three-dimensional reality of a large building in Tacoma, might actually encourage you to visit and see for yourself. The Art of Photography is in revealing one's individual feelings on a subject as an artist, even if the subject is a work of art in itself.
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FEBRUARY 16, 2024
OREGON COAST PANORAMA
This week I would like to make one last (?) trip back to 2012 to look at three images that I've overlooked all these years. After a little massaging on the computer, I am pleased with the effort and wonder why it took me so long to find something worthwhile in my archives from ten years back.
This first image shows how bloody romantic and dramatic the Oregon Coast can be. The area attracts people from all over the world who really don't have any idea of what they are getting into. Fran calls this the "Winter Beach Experience", available for your enjoyment all year round. She loves it, although I don't think the Chamber of Commerce has this in mind for a new advertisement campaign. In fact the only real difference between Summer and Winter on the Oregon Coast is that in Winter the rain tends to be horizontal in nature. The scene above is from August, and what you are looking at is the dreaded and feared "Marine Layer." This occurs when the typical morning fog refuses to dissipate, and the expected high for the day plummets 20-30 degrees.
REMEMBER YOUR SWEATSHIRT, EVEN IF YOU SKIP THE UMBLELLA
This is my snapshot from the day, which clearly shows the disappointing weather, but does not really convey the mood. I first went for the crop tool, since the upper portion of the sky above the seagull (which I initially thought was a piece of sensor dust) didn't add anything to the photo. There was clearly enough gray sky without it. To my eye the 2:1 panoramic crop was better suited as usual to the beach and emphasized the energy (foolishness?) of the two hikers on the beach. Keep in mind that I was out there to witness their trek. The next move was to convert to black and white, since there wasn't a shred of real color around anyway. I cleaned up the beach a bit after I spared the seagull, and then tried to deal with any exposure and contrast changes that would enhance the mood of the image. I kept this a little simpler than usual, since it is pretty easy to use Lightroom tools to "correct" an image and render it completely differently than the mood you wanted to convey. If you pay attention to the histogram, and try to make it more balanced, you will ruin the high-key look that attracted you in the first place. More sophisticated algorithms like "Dehaze" obviously are not called for here. Even using "Dehaze" in a negative manner seems like gilding the lily. I even kept sharpening to a bare minimum.
ANOTHER WONDERFUL DAY ON THE COAST
The result might still contain too much definition, but I feel that it certainly conveys the kind of day that you might encounter on the Oregon Coast on any random day of the year. At least the dog, and certain random photographers, will still have a good time.
LEFT FIELD CORNER
These next two shots come from a delightful day in Seattle at a day game in July. The Mariners schedule a few day games each Summer to encourage an easy trip from Portland. If everything works out reasonably correctly you can leave Portland at a reasonable hour in the morning and get back before the witching hour without having to deal with any traffic on I-5. The train station is just a short walk from the ballpark, and you can have a fun day and feel so much more intelligent than most of the other thousands of fans at the game.
Safeco Field, or whatever the hell they call it these days, is a very nice rendition of the throwback ballpark style that started with Camden Yards in Baltimore. This despite the fact that it is not related to a Seattle reality or history at all. The King Dome was such a horrible place that almost anything would have been an improvement of course, but there is no denying that it can be a very nice place to spend the day. It has enough quirks and idiosyncrasies to prod your interest, and this architect can feel proud of a profession that can sometimes produce something so beyond what is simply required to make gobs of money. Of course gobs and gobs of money are being made, and I will skip my usual rant about how it is impossible to imagine how the young fan that I once was could experience all the good times I had at the ballpark when minimum wage could get you into the game. The nicest thing about this park is that the field is always accessible from the concourse, which also allows you to ramble completely around the place if the game turns less than riveting.
This detail of the corner of left field shows an architectural homage to several old ballparks like Fenway and others that keep a long fly ball in the field of play by erecting a wall for the ball and the poor outfielders to bounce off in pursuit of the highlight reel. The deliberate uncoupling of the foul line and the lower stands also allows for a crucial few feet for a ball to fall foul, or an area where a misplayed fly ball might bounce around and turn into a triple.
EVERYTHING AS IT SHOULD BE
It didn't take much to improve this snapshot unless you are an anal architect-turned-photographer, and the you do them because you care, even if very few other people notice. "Dehaze" and sharpening tighten everything up a notch while making most of the colors a little deeper without making the exposure too dark. You can clearly critique each fan's fashion sense a little better, while the foul line and the 331 mark will now let you put off another trip to the eye doctor. My judicious and "absolutely necessary" crop has eliminated the guillotined fan above the Yankees logo, while also brilliantly allowed both the foul line and the bleacher wall to hit the bottom corners like God intended.
ORIGINAL ROOF SNAPSHOT
The biggest architectural move at the ballpark is the incredible "non-dome", ie. the moveable roof that hovers over the stadium even if it is not closed. It is a wonder, even if it is kind of silly, and it moves! Slowly enough that it cannot respond quickly enough to a change in the weather, which makes "roof or no roof" more of a strategic decision than anything else. Be certain that sports radio will have many opinions on the day of the game, bolstered by analytics that will declare certain victory or defeat based on the location of the roof rather than the abilities of the team. Of course it is better to leave the roof off to the side of the stands so that you can watch baseball in the sun or at least under the stars as it was meant to be. But the nice thing about this roof is that even when it is "closed" it doesn't completely cover the stands, so that the some of the hoi polloi still get wet. In fact, if there's any kind of wind, the rain will blow in because the lid does not close over any exterior walls. Thus you still get to watch baseball outside, even if you are under a roof. And it moves!
THE ROOF IS A STAR AS A BLACK AND WHITE FLYING SAUCER. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!
My conversion to black and white really helps here, since that "blue" Seattle sky will only impress fans from Portland. Black and white, with some use of the "Dehaze" slider, crisps everything up to emphasize the structural bravado. Remember, the lid a good ten stories above my head. As usual deepening the blacks and raising the shadows reveals most of the details of the structure. A small crop of the mechanism at the top purifies the curve of the roof edge. The steel now almost glows beneath the clear white sky.
I hope you can see how easy it is to improve some of your old snapshots, even a decade after the fact. Of course your mileage, and your opinions can vary. But that is what makes the world go round.
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FEBRUARY 9, 2024
ACROSS THE GORGE
This week I would like to return to the Columbia River Gorge, the incredible natural area just an hour East of Portland. Fran and I spent a day there last week, which included a two-mile stroll along the waterfront, a few art galleries, some fine coffee, and a very nice dinner in an historic hotel. The fact that it was not a walk in the woods illustrates just how unique the Gorge is a part of America's public lands. The Gorge is a National Scenic Recreation Area, which includes everything from actual wilderness to small and growing cities along the same river gorge. We spent the day in Hood River, whose fame began when some athletes decided that it might be fun to surf with the aid of the wind, combining surfing with sailing. Hood River's location at the heart of the Gorge provided seemingly constant 20-30 mile-an-hour winds whipping past the small town. Formerly known for access to orchards and Mt. Hood, the small town now resembles nothing less than a simulation of Santa Fe brought to the Pacific Northwest. A short walk in downtown brings you past almost a dozen places to drink fine wine, artisan coffee, and more art galleries than the ones still open in Portland.
We spent most of our time in a new riverfront park down the hill from Downtown. The park does a very nice job in providing locals access to about a mile of waterfront with beaches and picnic areas existing somewhat unexpectedly next to a growing office/warehouse park. The new buildings in the complex include restaurants, coffee houses, and at least three new breweries. Somehow it all works, with more of an industrial than cute vibe, even though it is clearly brand new. And what other municipal park in the world enforces leash laws because "dogs and windsurfing gear don't mix."
The two images I'll show you this week were both taken right from the park path, which just goes to show you how spectacular the surrounding Gorge can be without climbing a single switchback. This first snapshot shows the view right across the river in Washington State.
INITIAL SNAPSHOT
I have already exerted my editorial control by excluding the opposite riverbank to avoid the freeway and the train tracks on the Washington side. These small hills at the edge of the Gorge piqued my interest, and I was far enough away to reasonably ignore any signs of man besides the snow covered farms and clear cuts across the way. The mission now was to cut through the haze and add enough contrast to bring back the scene available from the path. Even though I knew that the sky would provide some more detail once I had reduced it's exposure to match the hills, there was still way to much sky, so the crop tool was the first I grabbed. The white balance was also clearly off a little. "Auto" went too far, but "Cloudy" brought back enough browns to render the scene in a much more realistic manner. Reducing the exposure of the sky by one stop did reveal the detail I had hoped for. Lightroom's new AI Selection tool which can pretty accurately select the "sky" worked very well in this case, reducing the amount of work formerly required in brushing the areas on the edge of the hills. But cropping to a panoramic 2:1 ratio seemed to be the move that the scene required.
A MORE REALISTIC RENDITION
I'm pleased with this result, which adds some pop without passing through to postcard vibrancy. The sky is clearly more dramatic and represents the reality of the day's light much better. But I was still a little troubled by the colors, so it was time to go for black and white.
A DRAMATIC BLACK AND WHITE
While this is not for everyone, it is much more attuned to my sensibilities. Black and white allows me to add drama and detail by pushing exposure boundaries without worrying about "ruining " the colors. The result is a lot closer to what I saw and felt that day, even though the real world is in color.
The other image I found that day on the waterfront involved a lot more work. You can be the judge of how much it was worth it in the real world. The first snapshot is what I saw looking East down the river looking through the Gorge. It captures the expanse of the Gorge, even though my lens cant go wider than about 45 degrees.
EAST UP THE GORGE
This conveys the majesty of the Gorge, but it is clearly too dark on the river and too light in the sky. The light is too blue, which is no surprise considering the blue sky, blue river, and green-blue hills. My anal brain also insisted that the river was tilted down to the left. After investigation, it was only two degrees off straight, but correcting that small tilt at least please yours truly.
A MUCH MORE DRAMATIC RENDERING OF WHAT I ACTUALLY SAW
As usual, correcting the white balance and lightening the foreground and darkening the sky have gone a very long way to rendering the scene in a much more realistic manner. The sky is much more detailed without edging into moody. The river and the hills all show far more levels of detail now that the blacks have been strengthened while the shadows have been lifted. And notice how trees on the right have now turned from blue to their natural brown. What still gnawed at me was the idea that there was too much sky, especially since the upper portion clearly lacked the drama of the lower clouds.
CROPPED 2:1 PANORAMA
The 2:1 panoramic crop certainly seems to be more in the spirit of this image. Our eyes are telling us that this view is "wider" even though our brain should be insisting that I have just cropped the top third of exactly the same image. Know you know why movies are shot in a 16:9 ratio that is "cinematic"; this is just a hair under the 2:1 ratio shown here. I cannot get any wider without eliminating most of the sky, and losing even more pixels. I could print the original shot at about 8 x 12 without any computer hocus pocus. This panorama could be easily printed at 8 x 16 because that blue sky we eliminated contained few of those pixels - but how could we get a bigger print?
STITCHING RESULTS IN A VERY WIDE 3:1 PANORAMA CREATED FROM SEVEN SHOTS
The answer is stitching, which uses the computer to combine multiple overlapping photos of a scene to create a wider image. In this case I took eight vertical shots across the Gorge, which combined to form this 3:1 ratio panorama. The image now contains more than 3 three times the pixels as the 2:1 crop, and I could easily print it 12" x 36" wide - and the expanse of the Gorge that is shown here almost justifies this crop. But I have found that realism in both cost and wall space argues in favor of the 2:1 crop. So what will cropping this stitch down to 2:1 get us for our trouble?
A 2:1 CROP OF OUR 3:1 PANORAMA
There is much more detail here, even though it might not be apparent on the web. The image could now be printed at 11" x 22" because it contains almost tice as many pixels as the cropped 2:1 panorama. The trouble is that the scene has shifted to the right, and our "V" is not as prominent.
THE GORGE RE-CENTERED AT 2:1
But this is a crop of the 3:1 panorama, so we can just take a different portion of the 3:1 to get a different 2:1 with the "V" back closer to the center. Notice that this 2:1 is actually a "wider" view than the cropped 2:1 we achieved without stitching, which allows for more trees and hill on the left side. Since the image is "wider", the central elements in the image have gotten a little smaller - but they are much larger than they would be with a conventional wide angle lens. Since the computer is doing most of the work, it certainly seems easier than shelling out $1500.00 dollars for the wide angle lens. Not to mention that if you so desire, the 169 megapixels in this file would allow you to easily create an 24" x 48" print, if you could afford the printing costs and the wall space.
BLACK AND WHITE 2:1 PANORAMA
And for the inner Ansel Adams in all of us, just convert to black and white and step back to view a print like this, which will allow even more exposure manipulation. While I might never be able to print like Ansel, this file contains enough information that the detail can easily challenge the results that Adams could achieve with a large format negative.
I hope you have enjoyed another foray into the Gorge. I think you can see how easy it is to elevate a simple snapshot into something far more worthy of your attention.
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FEBRUARY 2, 2024
AN INTIMATE GORGE LANDSCAPE
Twelve years ago Fran and I took a walk in the Columbia Gorge. If I was a more organized individual, I could actually tell you exactly where it was, but at least through the power of my photo archive I went back there this morning to rescue a few more images. I'd like to show you several of these images to show how a small amount of time spent post-processing can improve an image enough that I am not embarrassed to show them to you. In this way a twelve-year-old snapshot can become a new image worthy of closer inspection.
People travel from all over the world to visit the Columbia River Gorge, an incredible collection of waterfalls, cliffs, vistas, and woodland. But since it is a slow hour drive from Portland, we tend to take it for granted - until we take time to try another hike. Then we realize how lucky we are to live so close to this treasure. On this day in July a dozen years ago the hike took us past a roaring stream with a lonely tree on a stubborn rock.
THE LONELY TREE, 2012
The original snapshot is not bad. It captures the isolated tree on a rock that somehow usually withstands the stream flow. I didn't see the value in any cropping, but the image can be improved by adjusting the white balance and increasing the contrast. As usual in the Gorge, the overwhelming greenery tends to manufacture an overall green color shift. The thing to do is warm up the image, which reveals the browns amid the greens, and in this case brings the dark stream and it's white rapids a little bit back to a neutral color tone. By raising the white point and lowering the black point, the overall contrast of the image is increased and the image begins to pop.
A MORE DRAMATIC ISLAND IN THE STREAM, 2024
I then used more selective changes to refine the image. I first increased the sharpness and saturation of the tree so that it would stand out against the background of the stream. Then I backed off on the whites at the central rapids to reveal a little more detail in the water. Finally I subtly dodged and burned the dark and bright areas in the stream to further increase the contrast. The brushes used are at such a low intensity, around only 10%, that you don't even see the changes while you are brushing, Yet a "before" and "after" will reveal a truly dramatic transformation.
VIEW FROM THE TRAIL, 2012
The Gorge is not just a feast of intimate landscapes. On most hikes the woodland will eventually open up to reveal incredible vistas with hundreds if not thousands of feet of elevation gain to admire. The trick is to figure out hikes that reveal these awesome vertical overlooks without making you climb them, unless that floats your boat. This hike overlooked a mountain across the way on the Washington side. I'm sure it has a name, but like most of the prominent points in the Gorge it is just treated as another segment of the fiord's rim. In this snapshot I tried to set up a classic landscape strategy of bringing some depth to a two dimensional image by including a foreground along with a distant subject. As usual, I was not very successful. There is not enough Rhoddie in the foreground, and the middle-ground is missing probably another thousand feet down to the river before you encounter the cliff face on the other side. The result is either a mediocre perspective, or as I prefer to see it, another example of my tendency to create my own Asian screens. This other great tradition of the landscape arranges flat planes of subject matter with no attempt to create a three-dimensional illusion. Like in this image, the viewer sees a compressed series of planes, as if one were scanning segments of the entire scene independently of each other. My love of the telephoto lens, which increases this distance compression, also tends to move me in this direction.
ACROSS THE COLUMBIA, 2024
No matter how you feel about my composition, there are certain things that can be improved. I warmed up the white balance and lowered the blacks and lightened the shadows to increase the detail and contrast in the mass of the green hillside. I felt there was a little too much gray sky, so I cropped some away. I then lowered the exposure of just the sky by one stop to reveal a small amount of variation in the overall gray. I used Lighroom's new "Dehaze" tool to great effect to bring up the overall contrast - the tool was obviously made for situations like this, since the mountain is probably miles away from where I am standing on the trail. Finally I tried another new tool from Lightroom , the "Texture" slider, after brushing a selection confining its effects to the shear rock cliff face on the right side of the mountain. I think that these changes vastly improve the image - it might still not be an award-winner, but it's not half-bad by any measure.
A GORGE WITHIN THE GORGE, 2012
This final image of the day showed me that I could handle a vertical gain far larger than I thought, at least twelve years ago. That's Fran down there on the bridge, multiple switchback below my current position on the trail. Since I don't shoot for National Geographic I neglected to outfit her with a red shirt, but she still shows the scale of this gorge within the Gorge. While it took an entire Federal program to build that bridge, one can see that the Civilian Conservation Corps only barely touched the entirety of the Gorge. But that slim sliver of trail and bridge allows ordinary people to enjoy this incredible environment without bushwhacking like the original hikers had to do for the first few thousands of years that men and women walked near this spot.
I adopted similar strategies in dealing with this snapshot as I did with the others. The change in white balance removed the green color cast and revealed the brown and grays of the river. As I tried out "Dehazing" and "Texture", I realized that good old "Clarity" and sharpening helped most on this image to bring out the mid-tone contrast. Each image responds differently to different algorithms, and the skill that you gain is knowing what works best in which situation. But the humble truth is that there is a lot of trial and error involved in post processing, along with an adherence to the Goldilocks principal of moderation in all things. Finally I used my judicial powers to remove that annoying highlight just above Fran by cloning in an adjacent part of the forest. All of the images on this day benefited from our typical Oregon weather - the last thing you want during a walk in the woods is bright sunlight which will bring on chaotic light shafts and shadows that will lead to visual anarchy. There is already enough visual chaos in a typical woodland scene, and the prime directive for the photographer is to try to bring some order to the very complicated environment.
WAY DOWN THERE, 2024
I hope you have enjoyed this brief walk in the woods, and I encourage you to get out there, even if your neck of the woods is not as spectacular as ours. While Fran and I are twelve years older, these images show that the Gorge is eternal.
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JANUARY 26, 2024
EMPIRE STATE AGLOW
This week I would like to make another foray into my disorganized archives in search of images that I can resurrect through the power of more recent photo processing tools and my improvements in my own technique. I have found that it is well worth the effort to see if I can make something out of an image I have previously ignored or forgotten.
These three images date from 2012, a mere twelve years ago - but which increasingly seems a long, long, time ago. I was an established artist but also unemployed, with all the angst that that implies. Today I am still an established an unknown artist, but I am retired, and in some ways in a lot better economic shape. Amazingly, I am also a grandpa. It is the wider world of course that has seen much more troubling changes, including a worldwide pandemic. Twelve years ago only New Yorker's and reality television fans were aware of an absolute asshole named Donald Trump. In some ways the world seemed a lot simpler in retrospect, and certainly less depressing.
EMPIRE STATE, 2012
This first image is a take on the Empire State Building, certainly an iconic image of New York. I have tried to place it in context, looming above the typical landscape of Manhattan. This shows how the skyscraper can suddenly appear on an ordinary street, similar to the way that Mt. Hood can appear in a quiet Portland moment and cause us all to gasp in wonderment. My snapshot is well composed, in my opinion, but suffers from a way too wide exposure range and an exceedingly boring sky. Even if the Empire State Building is actually kind of brown, we certainly don't think of it that way. Something must be done.
EMPIRE STATE, 2024
We are not in Kansas anymore, but this image somehow seems much more realistic even though we know that no matter how dirty New York air can be, the sky is certainly not black during the day. Converting to black and white allows for exposure variants that a color photograph would not support. New advances in Lightroom masking algorithms allow for much easier selections of portions of an image. Thus the program can now easily select the sky, allowing me to underexpose it two stops. Better noise control also enables such a drastic move. The program also recognizes that a certain skyscraper is obviously the "subject" and it's clean selection than allows me to raise it's exposure one stop - now that the building is three stops brighter than the sky, and wonderfully silver instead of brown, it positively glows above the city. Using the good old-fashioned brush tool I raised the shadows in the buildings in the foreground, revealing a little more detail. But that selection also allowed me to cut back on the highlights in that area so that the reflections of the sky in the lower windows would not distract from the skyscraper above. All in all, I am very pleased with the result.
DIRECTOR PARK, 2012
This next image also shows the power of exposure in interpreting an image. Twelve years ago I looked down upon a new square in Downtown Portland. Director Park saved us from yet another parking structure, and sported both a fountain to illegally splash in and and a glass pergola to protect us from the rain above. I took this snapshot from the exterior stair of a neighboring parking garage, taking advantage of a few stories of height to gain a different perspective. But the image was very sloppily composed, dull, and probably seriously underexposed as well. Upon looking through the archives, the only thing that intrigued me was that patio table seemingly caught in a spotlight. Could I make something out of that?
I leapt to a few of my usual strategies. Since I was really only interested in the central table, everything else was easily jettisoned, especially the other two tables that could compete for attention. The upper third of the photograph didn't seem to be making much of a contribution, so it was easy to crop to a square starting from the bottom. Since the color in this color photograph was nearly non-existent, it was also an easy decision to convert to black and white. Black and white allowed for a wider exposure range which enabled me to lower the blacks even further while raising the whites to highlight the table. I felt like my son the scenic designer, manipulating the spotlight to really make sure sure that the audience knew where to look, and the park was now clearly a stage set, with a lone mysterious actor shuffling in from stage left.
ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, 2024
We leave the city for this last image. In 2012 Fran an I took a hike in the Columbia Gorge to Wachella Falls. This became one of our favorite hikes, and not only because it was beautiful. It is one of the few hikes in the Gorge with very little elevation gain, so you can saunter through the woods without having to climb a mountain disguised with switchbacks. Never take anything for granted, since this trail was one of several sections of the Gorge that was wiped out by a forest fire several years later. It is only a few years now that you can walk this way again.
WACHELLA FALLS, 2012
I liked my composition, which highlighted one of the rather large rocks that fell over the decades from the sides of the gorge that the stream created after it plunged down the double waterfall. I felt the image only needed a few tweaks to really make it better. My first move was to subtly crop the image to remove the small portion of sky at the top edge. Woodland scenes, even those with a waterfall, work better if you eliminate or at least curb the sky, which is always much brighter than the woods and only distracts from the subject at hand. While I had been successful in not blowing out the waterfall, I then lowered it's exposure further to reveal more detail in the water.
SUBTLE CHANGES CAN ADD UP IN 2024
I also subtly changed the white balance to warm up the scene. It's very easy in an environment like the Gorge to end up with a greenish tint to everything, so a little shift to a warmer white balance can bring out the earth tones beneath the overall green environment.
BLACK AND WHITE CAN REVEAL DETAIL
Of course if you really want to get away from those overwhelming greens you can convert to black and white. The Gorge is part of geologic time, but this image now brings us back to the first photographs of the Gorge in the Nineteenth Century. Of course those first photographers probably couldn't get to this spot since their wasn't a recreational trail here. Native American trails were used mainly for trade or hunting, not gaze at falling water. More than nostalgia, black and white conversion as usual allows for further strengthening of exposure variations without rendering the scene in unrealistic colors. I could darken the waterfall even further without muddying the scene. And I could dodge and burn like back in the darkroom, very subtly darkening the dark areas and lightening the bright ones. This involves brushing in masks at such a low strength, around 10%, that you can't even see any changes while you are brushing them in. It is only when you look at the overall before and after that you can see what a real positive change that you have made in the image. It is almost like the image has finally popped.
I hope this might inspire you to see what you can make out of your own forgotten images. Sometimes a return to the recent past can lower the present's high blood pressure.
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TAKING ANOTHER SHOT
JANUARY 19, 2024
GRAPHIC ARCHITECTURAL EXERCISE
Today as I write this essay I'm getting a little stir crazy after day six of another Winter Storm Event. At least the local news has resisted naming these infrequent storms; the UK recently gave in to this nonsense, naming storms like hurricanes to add more to the crisis atmosphere. Portland seems content to just close down, which is OK by me since I am now a "pensioner" with no real need to go out and about when I should stay at home. Our power went out for only a few hours, so I have no real reason to complain. And I did get to the grocery store for one quick trip a few days ago, so we are all set. This stay-at-home event has given me another excuse to go back into the archives, this time to see what my new software skills can do for some old friends as well as shots that have always seemed to defy my efforts at improvement. These five images are the result of those efforts which I conducted yesterday.
A short rant before we start. In my younger days I certainly did some things that I can only characterize as pretty stupid, so I am willing to be a little understanding of people who should know better. Yesterday on Instagram I saw yet another series of photos of frozen Columbia Gorge waterfalls labeled "I went there so you don't have to." I hope that was in the spirit of idiot prevention, but I'm afraid it wasn't. If you want to be a combat photographer, go for it. But if you are a landscape photographer, I'm sorry but there is no excuse for putting your live in jeopardy to get yet another image of a place under conditions that label you an idiot for having gone out there. It's one thing to walk through Manhattan in the snow, as long as you are dressed for it - it is another to brave deadly road conditions on a closed Interstate 84 driving past jackknifed big rigs to get a shot we all can find on Google. Please grow up. Rant over.
THE WAY THE CAMERA CAPTURED IT
I took this photo about a decade ago of a new tower in the Pearl District whose shape and reflections intrigued me while I walking around the neighborhood. Yesterday I used some new software techniques to get the shot I really wanted. I know you don't really believe that this was a color photograph, but remember that this is Portland, so that the thin sliver of sky in the upper left corner, as well as all of the sky reflected in the glass facade is at best an anemic gray. The tan concrete panels are best left out of our discussion despite having gotten past someone in the architecture office. After a decade of fiddling with color controls, I finally just converted to black and white. After a minor crop and some straightening to satisfy my OCD, I took advantage of the lack of color to create a lighter, high-image that showed off the new white reflections in the facade. Lightroom's new "Dehaze" filter, which adds contrast and detail in the background better than clarity or sharpening, really brought out the detail in the facade, especially after I had raised the exposure by half a stop. These kind of manipulations would be pretty unsightly in the color version, but work well in black and white. I believe that the result is a lot closer to what I saw ten years ago than what my camera caught that day - a very graphic assemblage of lines and reflections that pleases me much more.
THE WAY I SAW IT
MASONRY CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE
Another collection of lines in the environment. This circle is an alcove in Portland's Pioneer courthouse Square, and it took such a dreary day to find it unoccupied. If you stand on the dot and whisper the brick amphitheater will broadcast your voice very clearly everyone dozens of feet away. My snapshot is clearly under-exposed, and the brickwork is pretty untidy.
SHEDDING SOME LIGHT ON A CLEANED-UP SUBJECT
Now that is more like it. I maintain my artistic credibility by keeping the circle off-center in my new square coaster crop. My raising the exposure has rejeuvenated the square and the clone tool has eliminated most of the discoloration and random litter on the site. I was not trying to take a photo of maintenance problems at the Square after all, but just an appreciation of the brickwork. I'm still a little troubled by my attempt ot eliminate the shadowy words on the dot through selective muddying and reverse "Dehazing", but improvements will probably have to wait for another round of software advances, or at least better technique from yours truly.
GLASS BLOCK WALL
This one has also defied my efforts for a decade. What I felt would surely be a wonderful rendition of a back-lit glass brick wall has always been a dull shot without meaning. Since the "color" was clearly not working, I converted to black and white, hoping that i could blacken the grout lines and also raise the exposure to lighten the block.
TOO CLOSE
To a large degree that move was successful, but even I would have to admit that this won't make a good coaster. I'm just too close, and those bubbles in the glass block look more like graffiti. Time to pull back.
BACK TO THE WALL
The original composition, with some very judicious straightening, was clearly more successful. I still don't know to do with image beyond selling it to Pittsburgh Glass Block, but I never said I was a stellar businessman.
THIS IMAGE NEEDS HELP
This image is a lot more important to me. I've been here long enough that the Central Branch of the Library has now been closed for renovations for the second time in thirty years. It is one of my favorite places in Downtown, and I'm not alone. The crowds going through the front doors on any normal day were bested in Downtown only by Nordstrom's, and that's pretty good for a cultural institution. This is the corner of one of the skylights in the top public floor, and I always thought that it could be a great coaster - but I never could get the crop and the exposure I wanted.
A LIBRARY SKYLIGHT
Once again, I think what I feel is a success was achieved by a few subtle moves. As usual, the move to real black and white from just low saturation color was crucial. This allowed me to actually darken the mullions, while a "Turning on the Sun" by drastically raising the exposure to achieve white instead of gray in the sky. After years of struggle I finally realized that it was only necessary, even better, to only straighten one of the axis of mullions. This allows a stable, but dynamic composition of lines to surround the book cartoon that provides the whimsy.
DRINKING COFFEE IN THE SQUARE
Finally I return to an old friend, one of the few examples of "street photography" in my portfolio. I have never been comfortable approaching strangers on the street in order to include them in my cityscapes. I think the hardest five words in any language are "May I take your photograph?" So this example of what some call "Street for Introverts" is a testament to looking around Pioneer Courthouse Square, and in my wife's words, finding about every cliche in just one non-portrait. A pretty girl in casual clothes sitting idly in the Square enjoying her coffee. I didn't have the guts to say hello, so there you go.
DOCUMENTARY, OR JUST ANOTHER INTERPRETATION?
If I'm going to be a real street photographer, I'd better go black and white. While at least I didn't try a preset that would shoot this in Tri-X film, I do admit that it feels a little bit more authentic. The black and white version allows me to reduce the Starbucks logo, ignore the blue pants and take down the henna (although I am a sucker for henna). More importantly, black and white allows me to emphasize that incredibly nubby sweater with new "texture" filter, and to increase the sharpness of the background bricks with the "Dehaze" filter. Black and white allows for a subtle vignette that would also not work in the color version. I probably still like the color version better, but only because that the henna hair works with the red brick of the Square.
I hope my experiments might encourage you to try something new with old images, whether they are old friends or old headaches. You might be surprised.
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THE RIM OF DEATH VALLEY
This week I found out that in November Fran and I are invited to a destination wedding in I kid you not, Death Valley. Evidently this is a thing. I am skeptical, but supposedly there are some nice resorts in parts of the park that I didn't travel to with Benjamin in 2015. So we will celebrate my niece's nuptials and use it as an excuse for a road trip. Fran has never been, so it will be an opportunity for me to show her one of the wildest places in the country. And since Benjamin and I visited in August, November will be child's play. It climbed to 120 degrees when we were there, and I abandoned the trip down to Badwater Basin way before we hit the bottom of the valley.
I took this invitation as a "sign" that it was time to revisit the archives and see what my recent software acquisitions, and my journey down the learning curve in their use, could do for some neglected images from that fist trip. I was pleasantly surprised at my success with these images, so let's take a look.
A HEAT LADEN SNAPSHOT
Death Valley is more than sand dunes and colorful geology like Zabriskie Point. One of the big realizations of my first trip was that a lot of the impact of the place is that it is an incredible valley, surrounded by mountain ranges form the periphery of the park. The isolation one feels is not only due to the heat, but also because it is not exactly clear most of the time of the proper route to escape its clutches. In general, one always feels that you are only heading down , or at best keeping level, way below the surrounding moonscape. So please forgive the snapshot above, since I was probably only half-way through my dozen bottles of water that day. The dust and haze is only matched by the heat, and it's very easy to overexpose your shots all day, especially when you almost cease to care. There is no shade at all.
THE REAL SCENE IS NOW REVEALED!
It is under conditions like these that Lightroom's new "Dehaze" filter really comes into its own. These mountains are not really that far away, in the great scheme of things. But the dust and heat in the air seem to disappear after utilizing this filter, which lowers exposure and increases contrast in its own unique way. As usual, the important thing is to use it very judiciously in order to avoid artifacts and other unrealistic results. What you see here is only 20% strength which certainly yields very dramatic results. I lowered the brightness of the dessert blue sky and cut the saturation of the yellow valley floor; the result is as beautiful and foreboding as I remember our journey that day.
RED ROCKS INTHE LANDSCAPE
These other three images show what you can achieve through the art of "stitching" together multiple images to form a panorama that is unavailable in the field, no matter how wide angle a lens you bring along. These views are actually closer to what you see when you move your eyes to "take in the view" than a standard wide angle perspective. Only experience can lead to the confidence that your efforts will work out when you get back home at the computer. I have learned that modest expectations can lead to the best results, since most scenes cannot hold enough interest as the panorama gets wider and wider. These two first images are actually panoramas, but I have restricted the "wide angle" aspect ratio to just 2:1. I have found that this ratio leads to the best results on all but the kind of vistas that you might find at a place like Death Valley. Their is a "generous" feel of breadth without feeling that you have to scan the image itself because it's too wide. When you go view the very wide open shots of a Western at the movies, you are usually looking at a the "Cinematic" ratio of 16:9, which is a little shy of 2:1.
THE SHARP EDGES OF BLACK AND WHITE
The original snapshot of the colorful scene above suffered from the same difficulties as the first image. I used On One's software's "Dynamic Contrast" filter to really enhance and sharpen the mid-tone contrast. The algorithm just makes things "pop" in subtly different ways than you can get with other software tools. As usual, only experience will guide you in extreme moderation. You first lower the strength of the filter to a reasonable level; then you use advanced masking tools to restrict its effects to only the parts of the image that need them at all. In the black and white version I have lost all of the color contrast but have gained even more "crunch" in the textures. You decide what appeals to you more.
GEOLOGY, NEAR AND FAR
Okay, in these last two images I have violated my usual rules and allowed myself a 3:1 ratio to take in the expanses available in Death Valley. In both cases I actually captured what would be a 5:1 ratio panorama. It is incredibly easy to go overboard out in the field when faced with such wide vistas. These 3:1 "crops" are plenty wide enough, and are already too wide for a realistic print on my or your wall. At only 16" tall, this image is already four feet wide and much more expensive than you or I can afford, even if we found a place to hang it.
ANOTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD, AT A WIDER PART OF THE VALLEY
What is interesting is that even though it is "all dessert", Death Valley can provide so many different views even when you are driving along incredibly lonely roads on the way to the famous vistas on the postcards. I hope you have seen that the Park is an absolute delight, and that just stopping at a different side of the road can allow you to make the park your own. I am really looking forward to exploring it with Fran, at a balmy 90 degrees, thank you.
JANUARY 5, 2024
HAWTHORNE BLUE HOUR - IN BLACK AND WHITE!
This week I would like to wish you all a happy new year, and to continue my survey of what I consider my best images of this past year. Last week I concentrated on images that I captured last year; this week I will explore the images that I "recaptured" through various post processing strategies. I feel that these transformations resulted in images closer to my intentions for both the individual images and my overall values as an artist. I will also through in some final thoughts on my commercial struggles and strategies for the future.
The season at Saturday Market was pretty dismal, and it took a lot of discipline to not feel that it was all my fault as I sat there trying to stay awake. Most of it was clearly not my fault, and my fellow vendors and the half-dozen fellow photographers still at the market did not appear to be doing appreciably better than I was. But I do have to admit that my desire to exhibit new work, and work unrelated to Portland, was wildly unsuccessful. What is interesting is that for the first time I generally controlled myself in introducing two new formats, so that all in all I haven't invested too much money in a losing cause. Most of the negative effects of these efforts must be characterized as "opportunity" costs, since the display of these items took up space in the booth that could have been used to show other things that might have sold better. In my quest to show other images, I neglected to realize that my customers were just not interested in buying these photographs, no matter how much they seemed to admire them.
DARTMOOR ABBEY
I came up with a new format that could allow for a lower price point than my metal prints. I adapted my lamination process I use for my coasters to a larger image size, mounted on masonite panels with surplus wood panels (they hadn't sold either) to lift them off the wall. These 9" x !2" prints looked great, and the customers said so, but I spent the year looking at them and did not sell any at all. In the end, even I had to admit defeat, and I will drastically reduce how many I show in the booth. I will convert any I do actually sell into another format. While that format, a larger 11" x 17" poster , also did not show much success, it is a lot easier to produce and offers a higher profit at a lower price. We'll see.
Artistically, a lot of these "best" images were the ones that did not sell at all, so my opinion as a critic was not matched by my dismal record as a businessman. What it tells me, which is not what I want to hear, is that an image which might work very well in a blog post, or on social media, will not translate into sales in my gallery. I must once again recognize that what I might see as an advance in my art will not be reflected in my sales as an artist.
ROSS ISLAND BRIDGE PANORAMA, WITH A TIMELY SAILBOAT
BRITISH MUSEUM CHARM
These first four images are examples of my continued exploration of black and white conversion techniques that, at least to my eye, result in images closer to my reality than the color snapshots that they started as years before. The amount of detail and the exposure manipulations possible in black and white allow me to interpret these scenes in different ways than their originals. I have found that even a very fine color image, like the Hawthorne Bridge's beautiful colorful city lights and reflections, can work well as a black and white image with a completely different mood.
"THE TREE" PANORAMA IN BLACK AND WHITE
Another technique that can transform an older image is a new distinctive crop. Since a big part of photo composition is framing, adjusting the framing can result in a new way of looking at an image, even for the photographer. I first converted this image of "The Tree", the famous maple in the Japanese Garden, into black and white because I had captured it at least a week after peak color, so that it was clearly inferior to the other million photographs of the same subject exhibited around the world. But it really sang, (at least to me) when I radically cropped it into a panorama that left out almost the entire context and converted the tree into a kind of black snake crawling across the image.
CROWN POINT PANORAMA
This image has always been a popular one. It's mine because this retired architect is really most concerned with the only man-made part of the scene. Vista House is a very glorified bathroom with one of the greatest sites of any piece of architecture in the entire world. What I enjoy is that just like the Golden Gate, the scene now seems absolutely incomplete without man's intervention - this would be "just" another beautiful bend in the Columbia without it. I think my original square crop has now gotten even stronger as a panorama. Vista House clearly is balanced by Beacon rock across the way, the course of the river is heightened, and I finally solved the terrible forest fire cloud ridden sky by just getting rid of it entirely.
SPACE NEEDLE DETAIL
I cropped this already tight shot of the underside of the Space Needle, removing any context in the original and furthering my intent through exposure manipulation and black and white conversion to transform a throwaway snapshot into a graphic exploration. You could forgive anyone but a Northwest resident for not knowing what the hell they were looking at.
GRAPHIC RED UMBRELLA
Which brings to mind two other images which allowed me to "trust the graphics" to hold the image together without a compelling subject. Of course everyone loves a bright saturated red, but it is the umbrella's structure which makes this image.
NORTH CAROLINA BEACH ABSTRACT
And while I like yellow more than most, this example of intentional camera movement converts this ordinary beach panorama into an intriguing image. There is just enough sharpness to ensure that the viewer is looking at the beach, even though it is unclear why the waves seem to be moving horizontally instead of towards the shore. Why everything is yellow instead of blue only adds to the mystery.
WHITE HOUSE RUINS, CANYON DE CHELLY
In some cases new software advances allowed me to revisit older images and make an impact. This image of the White House ruins in Canyon de Chelly was transformed through judicious use of Lightroom's new "Dehaze" tool, which finally sharpened the details decades after I took the shot. "Dehaze" was not designed at all for an image like this, but it finally did the trick after other basic sharpening techniques had failed on this image. What's funny is that another new tool, "Textures", didn't work as well at all.
NO TURNS
Black and white conversion relieved this image of most of the anarchy of the color version, but some improved masking in Lightroom allowed me to really emphasize the anarchy that I was actually interested in. Drastic exposure changes, as well as reducing the sharpness of the background, made it possible to heighten the drama of the confusing and contradictory street signs at this one New York intersection.
TWIN TREES
Improved Lightroom controls, or maybe just my improved technique, allowed me to achieve an interesting high key black and white image out of an ordinary confused woodland scene. The two foreground trees and their spindly branches emerge from a too-colorful snapshot. It is often intriguing to me how a black and white conversion can appear more realistic than the original color version.
MOONLIT SAN JUANS
I've worked on this image for years, and I have never convinced myself that the colors were right even though my computer assured me they were. Part of the problem was that this long exposure was taken long after the sun had gone down, so that moonlight was the light and color source. Only the camera could truly reveal all of the shades of blue, even though my eyes at the time knew that the dark scene was truly blue. Better selection tools allowed me to eliminate the blue color cast on the weathered gray canning facility while leaving the blue and purple bay and sky alone. I think I'm finally almost getting there.
THE BLUE BRIDGE
And part of the problem is adjusting memory to reality. this image was truly a find, since I had ignored it for more than fifteen years. It was only when I realized that this was the famous "Blue Bridge" in Regent's Park in London that the image came into its own. I selectively added saturation to the arched blue bridge beam that had appeared so dull on an unusually dull day, so that I, the viewer, and the duck could finally notice how special the bridge actually was, and still is.
TWO BROTHERS ONE DAY AT THE BIG SHEA MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS AGO
The last image of the year is one of my oldest images, at least that I can find in my haphazard archives. I have had an enjoyable time this past year experimenting with scanning some of my old color slides. This image is over fifty years old. The camera that took it is a non-functional paperweight in my basement. I don't even know where I could purchase a slide projector. Shea Stadium, the pit that Met fans called home, is long gone. This "new" digital version allowed me to both darken the stadium background and lighten the human foreground, rendering details in both areas that a viewer could never see in the slide. One can only hope that these two brothers are now also grandfathers like me.
I hope you've enjoyed this tour the past two weeks through my personal best of this past year. Over the past three years my website's analytics insist that over time an average of more than 300 people eventually read these essays, which is amazing and gratifying and mysterious, since I actually know very few of my readers. As a way of saying thanks for your readership, I am offering my readers 20% off my standard prices for prints of any of these "Best of 2023" images during January and February of 2024. Since I know that you are reading this on my website, please take a look at the formats available. Please just contact me and we will work out the details. Happy new year, and thanks again for your interest.
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DECEMBER 29, 2023
ABSTRACT ARCHITECTURE
The image above is emblematic of my year in 2023 - in my opinion, a year of artistic experimentation and business frustration. In this 2023 survey I will try to communicate both the "best and worst of times" by summarizing my business struggles and looking back at what I thought were my most interesting images of the year. The images, 24 in number, are a difficult selection of about 75 in the original batch. There are 8 new images, created on short walks and three longer and delightful trips during the year. The larger number of images arose from trips into my archives that featured in many of my blog posts this year. I perceive these as images from 2023 because most of the time they were not just discoveries, but to some degree completely transformed from the original captures ranging in time from 2022 to almost fifty years ago. I have so much fun discovering that I wasn't that bad in the past. This revelation, combined with the continued depressive state of our urban environment that constitutes most of my photographic world, led me to find most of jollies in the past.
This image was created on one of my short walks downtown in 2023. Although it appears to be a figment of my artistic imagination, it is a straight photographic of a very distorted and enigmatic architectural fragment. The subject is a facade of a parking garage that is doing its best to not appear as a parking garage, maybe because it hides four floors of parking at the convergence of three types of mass transit that should render its existence unnecessary. It is a rather clever assemblage of square folded metal plates that hide the fact that there is no glass between you and the cars inside. Sometimes the plates are not folded to present a more opaque appearance, injecting more than a hint of randomness. I love reflections, and this is a straight view of a segment of the facade that is reflected in a blue glass curtain wall across the street. I have carefully straightened the grid of this building and removed any context so that this scene appears much stranger than it really is, and is now all mine - which might explain why it has not "jumped" off the walls of my booth.
TILIKUM CROSSING AS AN EGYPTIAN ARTIFACT
Not that anything else provoked many sales this year. Everyone at the market, including me, suffered this year from declining sales brought on by the decline in the ambience of Downtown Portland. The tourists, bless their hearts, both from abroad and around the rest of the country, seemed to have resumed normal life and enjoyed their trips to the Market - which is after all the second biggest tourist attraction in the state. But Portland residents still seem to be stuck in a doom loop that both recognizes and exaggerates all that is wrong with Downtown, and just don't seem to want to come anywhere near it. It doesn't help that our civic leadership wants to do almost anything else except lead, so that nothing seems to get better. We were left with a Market where visitors seemed to be having a great time, while everyone else was staying away. My sales to locals were down almost 90% this year, while tourist sales held steady. That kind of statistic is something that even I can't ignore, and was the basis for my coming back home on Saturday night with $100 dollars less on the average than I did last year last year.
The image above was created on a walk across the Tilikum Crossing. I've taken so many images of this bridge since it opened that I now search for almost anything new. This rendition focused on the symmetry of one of the four towers, and all of my post processing served to heighten the affect. Careful cropping and the panoramic vertical aspect ratio left no doubt, at least to me, of what I was after. The black and white conversion increased the abstract nature of the composition and allowed for increasing the contrast and textures beyond what a color rendition would allow before it was no longer realistic.
SUN AND SHADE AND "MUD" IN ALBUQUERQUE
In looking at my sales this year, while profits held steady or improved, there just weren't enough sales. Even though for the first time my coasters were actually cheaper than my competitors, coaster sales were only 25% of the levels before the Pandemic. I think this really reflected the economic stresses felt around the world. It was almost painful to watch tourists, who used to debate whether to buy one or two sets of coasters, pick up one coaster, set it down, pick it up again, and then just leave. I almost felt worse for them than I did for myself, although I felt pretty bad when I returned to reading my book.
The image above came from our impromptu trip to New Mexico in February. Fran and I both loved the landscapes and the architecture once we gpot used to the fact that they were almost as alien to Portland and Oregon as almost anywhere in the world, much less a short flight away. Gray and rain and green were replaced by sun and blue and grit, and it took most of the week to get used to it. The image above intrigued me with both its curves of "mud" and strong, even harsh light that seemed to produce shadows in multiple directions at once.
RARE WATER IN NEW MEXICO
A few years ago at the Market I came up with a line of what I called "Miniatures", 4x4 images on thicker wood blocks that "belonged on the wall" since most of my customers refused to believe that their coasters could easily go on their walls no matter what I did to show them that they easily could. Not that I'm complaining, since I make a bigger profit with the miniatures. I've also discovered that different images do better in that format, or at that price point, than they do as coasters. In any case sales were fine but incredibly frustrating since while they averaged one or two a week, I really would sell half a dozen or more one week , and then not sell one for a month. In my continual unsuccessful attempt to "bring less, sell more" I think you can see why this drove me to distraction.
The image above is a tranquil landscape outside of Albuquerque. What I love about has almost nothing to do with the image itself. You are looking at "Wilderness" since no people are ever allowed into this wildlife sanctuary we viewed from a Visitor Center. The mountains beyond are about ten miles away, and the biggest city in New Mexico is sitting unseen in between. The ordinary Douglas Firs in my neighbor's yard that could crush my house can only grow on the tops of those mountains, ten thousand feet up, which shows how different the climate is in New Mexico.
ROCKS AND CLOUDS OUTSIDE OF TOWN
Most of my booth is filled with metal prints, and I believe that they are an incredible way to show off my images. I was the first photographer at the Market to try to sell them; everyone else has joined me to one extent or another. The only trouble is that they are a premium product and are perceived that way, even though they are actually much more reasonable priced than a conventionally matted and framed print of the same size. Thus I can not sell the larger metal prints that fill my booth, even though I can justify their existence as "billboards" that can drive traffic to the booth and sell smaller stuff. Thus my 8x8 metal prints consistently sell, netting a reasonable profit, while I bring fewer and fewer larger prints to the market. Changing the prices to equal or even beat my colleagues at the Market seem to have no affect at all, and they don't seem to sell any either. It's my fault that I have another whole booth of these prints in my basement; it's not my fault that my bungalow's wall space is already full and can't take another image above ground.
The image above was taken from a trail through Petroglyth National Monument outside of Albuquerque. I wouldn't go for the petroglyphs, although you will eventually learn to scope them out. This is another example of what is essentially wilderness, since there is only one trail, and you are not allowed off of it since you fellow human beings would of course destroy the very things they came to see. Thus you are left with this incredible hillside, the clouds, the heat, and Albuquerque looking incredibly tiny and insignificant in the near distance down in the valley.
ELEVATED SUNSET
One bright spot at the Market was the resurgence of sales of my posters, which had bottomed out so badly ago that I stopped exhibiting them, relegating them to packing material to protect the metal prints. This year I sold 40 of them, which is quite amazing since I still use them at the end of the day when I pack away the small metal prints. I hate to admit it, but this weird turn of events supports Fran's retail theory of "what do you have to lose?" It also calls into question any conventional theory of pricing, since the "costs" are long forgotten. For some of the items in my booth the only real costs left are the aches in my back or the inability to display something else.
The image above, taken on the trip back from Albuquerque, delights me beyond its aesthetics because I am amazed that this view is available to human beings today for the price of a cheap air ticket. For the entirety of human history before only last century this image was beyond the imagination, much less the reality, of anyone on Earth.
A JOURNEY BACK IN TIME
PAINTED HILLS PANORAMA
I'll leave off any more Market complaints until next week. These last two images both come from the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which we visited with our old friends Vinny and Steve during the Summer. These geological wonders are in the middle of nowhere in Central Oregon, and their isolation is only matched by the wonder you feel at viewing over forty million years of geology in one fell swoop. This trip's revelation was that the more neglected areas in the park had wonderful hikes and views to offer, even though the Painted Hills are always the highlight. This ridge is so amazing that no matter how many return trips you take, you still are speechless when you make the last turn and see this in front of you.
Both of these images rely on the technique of stitching together multiple images on the computer to achieve a viewing angle beyond any wide angle lens, one that comes closer to being on the site, where of course you are moving your eyes and head to "take in" the view. Experience has shown me that less is more - that the best results come from combining only three to four images. In fact the first image is only a bit wider than a conventional image, but includes just enough to show the entire central portion of the ridge. These images end up containing so many megapixels that you could make a billboard-size print - and that require a coffee break to let your computer create the stitched image.
These images are some of my best of the year, in the humble opinion of the artist who created them. You can certainly disagree. Next week we'll take a look at the older images which I transformed in 2023, making them "new" again. I hope you will enjoy them as well.
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DECEMBER 23, 2023
MY TAKE ON AN OLD SIGN
Sometimes you are just walking around, minding your own business, when something catches the corner of your eye. Since you are a photographer, you always have your camera with you, even if it is just your phone. These moments of serendipity can be quickly forgotten, especially if like me, you frequently shoot from the hip. While the compositional possibilities might have provoked your interest, that doesn't mean that you came anywhere near nailing the exposure, or even getting anywhere near it. Since I wasn't even sure there was a real subject, I certainly don't "work it" that day. The initial unloved snapshot is relegated to my archives. If it survives at all is just a matter of chance in the maelstrom of my "organization."
But walking around is not limited to the day of shooting. Once again I am suggesting that if it is just a horrible day out, and you are not on vacation, then perhaps it is time to take another walkabout in your archives to see what can catch your eye. Here are another three examples of what I found today after returning to walks I took around town six or seven(!) years ago. I have no idea if these scenes still exist, but that doesn't matter, since there they are on my hard drive, ready for resurrection.
THE OLD SIGN
I was walking in the Pearl District back in 2017 when I passed this historical remnant on the side of a new condo. Redevelopment sometimes yields these historical artifacts as blank walls are either uncovered or saved to give new construction some historical patina. This happens frequently in the Pearl District since building sites, both new ones and historical, did not take up the whole of the block. A lot of the existing structures were very traditional masonry warehouses that were so stoutly constructed that it is easier to incorporate them into the new project than to tear them down. When you are confronted with an existing building whose wood structural posts are as thick as trees, and provide a fire rating equal to whatever steel structure you would have to replace them with, "adaptive reuse" rears its complicated head. This old dairy sign is certainly older than I am, and I'm no "spring chicken."
REJUVENATED OLD SIGN
A few minutes of effort on the computer brightened up my subject and my day. Very judicious cropping tightened things up at the edges, removing some distractions that might have only been distracting to me. I increased the contrast in my usual manner, achieving some true blacks and more importantly bringing up the highlights to achieve a sunnier old party wall. These moves lightened the exposure without lightening the overall exposure, and the onluy saturation I changed was a little oomph to the reds which I couldn't resist. I then tried to clean things up a bit, which was pretty funny when you consider that I was making an image of a weather beaten old sign. The magical erasure brush was employed to eliminate the "crap" - telephone lines, offending tree branches and even ancient graffiti, so that the old sign could shine anew.
AN INNOCENT FORAY INTO "STREET PHOTOGRAPHY"
It's not really hard to "Keep Portland Weird" when it seems to do just fine all by itself. This sidewalk scene appeared on a bench in the Sellwood neighborhood back in October 2017. I laughed, quickly moved on, and forgot all about it since the exposure seemed all wrong and the context was too distracting. I took another walk in my archives today and managed to correct most of the flaws of the original image. I cropped the top of the image to eliminate the black triangle. I then took advantage of Lightroom's new Artificial Intelligence Masking tool, which picked out the "subject" - our malnourished fellow - so well that it was then no trouble to "invert" the mask to selectively lower the exposure of the background. I then raised the whites of the skeleton to further increase the contrast in the scene.
A STANDOUT KIND OF GUY
Our friend is just as dead but certainly seems a lot livelier. The image is certainly silly, or as Fran would say "whimsical." Since I live in Portland, Oregon, the image almost counts as "documentary" - it doesn't really surprise me at all.
BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE
The last image for today comes from a walk in the neighborhood in 2018. This bark caught my eye just like it does almost every time I walk by the tree, and I took yet another inconsequential and pretty incompetent snapshot. Today I resolved to see what I could make of it.
GRAPHIC BARK
You certainly do not have to fall down to your knees over the improvements, but this image is a lot closer to what I feel about the tree. The square crop eliminates most of the compositional errors of the original. It is now completely clear that the subject is the extraordinary result of the shedding of the bark to allow for a new spurt of growth for the tree, which reveals the vibrant color beneath the surface. I am no longer documenting the tree, but I think that I am asking you to consider the graphical power of this natural event. I subtly increased the saturation of the reds, reduced the yellows, and darkened the remaining bark on the left and right to reduce distractions from my subject.
As the weather turns nastier and nastier, I encourage to take some walks in your archives and find some moments from nicer days in the past that you can interpret as your individual reactions to your environment. This is the real way to make your photography really your own.
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DECEMBER 15, 2023
MEDIOCRITY IN ACTION AT THE JAPANESE GARDEN
This week I would like to explore the conumdrum we all face as photographers when we are face to face with a subject that has been shot to death. There are different versions of this dilemma. You might have been there too many times - maybe it's just time to move on. It is one thing to be working on a project, which can be among the highest callings of a photographer, but if you are just taking the same image again and again, that is not a project. Of course it is one thing if the subject is right out your back door, but even if it means just taking a bus, it doesn't seem to be the best use of your time. As a professional, I am always willing to concede that I might someday encounter a unique lighting situation, or somehow realize that I've been doing it all wrong, but once I have "my shot", even if it is not the world's best shot, my motivation goes way down in my pursuit of that subject.
The most common problem is not overshooting on your own part. I always say that you should "work the subject" and who am I t tell you when it is time to stop? The trouble becomes much more philosophical when we show up at a world famous photo location, take a hard look around, and realize that there is probably not much more to say about the subject than the admittedly beautiful images that were a large part of the reason we went there in the first place. Sometimes the "money shot" does really say it all, or at least as much as anyone who doesn't live nearby will ever get for their efforts.
Our strange new world of cheap air travel, Iphones, and Instagram has only made this worse. In the heydey of photojournalism, most people, even the smaller subset who appreciated photography as an art, had no real chance of duplicating or even seeing an image from the other side of the world. They had never been to Paris, didn't own a camera that could easily produce a sharp image, and probably had only viewed less than a dozen images of the Eiffel Tower. Everything was so gosh darn new, and the fact of the image's existence far overshadowed its artistic aspirations.
There are now more photographs of the Eiffel Tower than you could ever view on Instagram even if you devoted your life to the pursuit. The chances you (or any one) could ever say something "new" are darn near close to zero. When artistic depression hits, it hardly seems worth the effort at all. But as Fran always tells me, you are not going to Paris to take photographs, even if someone is paying you to take photographs - that's there problem. You are there for the food, the sights, the history, the experience - your art is just something to pursue in a new highly stimulating environment. The images are for you, as part of a process that you enjoy, with no real expectation that anyone else might find them new, much less unique.
So of course you should take the "money shot", but don't make it an obsession and certainly don't stop there if you want to try to say something "new", even if you don't really have much chance of success. This first image above is a Portland "money shot", so famous after an appearance in National Geographic that it is known around the world by photographers as "The Tree." This particular example, taken by me in an offhand manner this past year, is really not very good. As usual I was a few weeks past prime foliage exuberance, so there was no real chance to compete with better-timed shots. The path next to the tree at the Japanese Garden is divided by a rope line so that the usual line of photographers and their tripods will not interfere with civilians. Even though I was "late" there was still quite a line. At this point in my life I am just not willing to lie on the cold concrete to capture the same image as everyone else on line.
Now don't get me wrong. If you travel across the country to visit Portland, God bless you. Please go visit the Garden, and take a look at the tree. Then come to Saturday Market and buy a photograph of the tree from one of colleagues, whose efforts no doubt are at least marginally better than anything you could achieve in one visit. And when you come to my booth, please purchase an image of "My Tree", another Japanese Maple that I love at our Chinese Garden a few blocks from the Market.
So what is a photographer to do? My short answer is to try anything, even things that almost certainly make no sense, in the effort to make a ubiquitious subject your own. Here are some explorations of my admittedly "meh" shot that I pursued yesterday through the magic of post-processing. I had fun, produced something new even if was just "putting lipstick on a pig." There are worse ways to spend an hour or so.
Since the tree was weeks past its prime, all I could do with the color version was to increase the saturation of the little remaining color with the individual orange and red color sliders. My composition was below par since I didn't lie on the floor, but I still got a feel for the romantically convoluted branches of the Maple. The "better" composition that included some space to the left of the tree is lost somewhere in Lightroom, which says more about my organizational "abilities" than it does about my artistry.
THE ABSTRACTION OF BLACK AND WHITE
The first thing to try is to convert to black and white. This is almost as perverse as a black and white sunset, but I'm past prime color, so what can I do? Unless you just love monochromatic green, then I have lost nothing except a touch of uninspiring orange in making this move. I now can work on improving the composition after the fact, and exploring manipulating the exposure. Maybe there is enough here to make an interesting image.
DOES THIS PANORAMA MAKE ME LOOK THIN?
Cropping is always your friend. I converted to a 2:1 panorama to see if the tension and concentration I could achieve could make up for the context that I left out. I happen to like this version better, but you could certainly disagree. The right-hand "snake" limb is emphasized by the crop whose horizontal shape seems to mirror its movement through the frame. I've lost some curves on the left, but I don't think those are as important. What is funny is that the image has gotten a little darker, not through a change in exposure, but just because I've excluded some of the lighter portions of the sky that were cropped out at the top. If I pursued this further, I could explore increasing the exposure to lighten things back up.
IS A SQUARE MORE INTENSE OR JUST BORING?
Here I went in the opposite direction, cropping to a square and seeing if the right-hand limb could carry the entire image. I do like the single dark line travelling across the frame, but I am not sure that it is enough. I really darkened the blacks and the shadows to get the graphic qualities I often find interesting, and it would be interesting to see how that worked with the other crops. It also might be fun to see if I could so manipulate the exposure to try to remove the leaves, since I think this could resemble and aerial image of a dark river valley. But I don't think it is as nice a tree as the panoramic version.
HIGH KEY
Finally I returned to the original crop to see what exposure manipulation could do for the image. This is about as "high key" as I think the image can take before it became a dull bland mess of a black and white. This forest, which is of course only single tree, is certainly much brighter, and you can finally appreciate some of details in the trunk. The decline in contrast is so great that in fact the lighter portions of the background now appear darker since there is very little difference in t0ne with the light trunk. Another point of interest is that this look was not achieved by raising the exposure at all. I used a "preset" that supposedly simulated what the image would have looked like if it had been taken with infrared film. As a simulation, it is a total failure, but the preset "raised the exposure" by brightening the yellows, greens, and oranges to 100%, so there you go. I put back some detail, since infrared usually reduces the sharpness of an image, and the result is this "high key" scene. Which only goes to show that there is no one way to get similar results with widely different software manipulations.
In the end I like the panoramic version the best, but that is just my opinion. Despite the perversity of a black and white conversion of such a colorful subject, I feel that I did achieve something at least a little bit different. I'm perverse enough myself that I think that only another photographer might know that this was in fact yet another rendition of "The Tree".
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SAN JUANS NOCTURNAL SCENE
This week I would like to discuss just three images that I discovered on yet another recent trip through my archives. These forays are usually an uncertain effort to save more images that I lose in rationalizing the organization of thousands of images from the past forty years. As they say in the Naked City, these are just a few of their stories.
The first image is a moody landscape across the cove taken from the extravagant porch of a vacation rental a few miles from Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. We stayed there for ten days, and I captured many versions of this scene. I had just purchased a new tripod, and spent many early evenings experimenting with capturing photographs that were essentially taken in the dark. The exposures allowed by the tripod allowed the camera lens to gather in so much light that the darkness of twilight could reveal shapes and colors hidden to the naked eye. In some ways these are mystery images since the photographer often does not even truly see what is in the frame, just a memory of what was there a half hour before. The tripod allows exposures of several seconds to several minutes, all of which would be impossible to hand-hold.
What is interesting is that because I didn't really see what I was "seeing", it allows for an even broader interpretation of the scene once the camera reveals what was "there." It's so hard to say what you really saw that it is hard to discount a subsequent interpretation as "unrealistic." The moon was certainly out, the sea was very calm, and the derelict fishing plant and pier were certainly reflected in the water. But while the overall blue tint of twilight was apparent to my naked eye, the richness of the blues and the gradations of purples were only caught by the camera.
ORIGINAL EFFORT
This is the original scene caught by the sensor. The camera has already rendered the scene lighter than reality, as shown by the brightness of the moon, complete with its reflection, which was not perceived anywhere near as bright from off the balcony. There are no lights on in the building - the lights in the windows are caused by the same setting sun that is lighting the moon above.
The first thing to do is to crop the scene to a square to get rid of the boring sky above the moon. Fortunately the square crop still allows for both the moon and its reflection to stay in the frame. In order to maintain any degree of integrity as a landscape photographer, i then straightened the horizon by following the water line at the island opposite my location.
Any post-processing beyond these initial moves are a subjective matter of interpretation. One could certainly hold the opinion that I have overemphasized the blue and purple tones, except for the fact that they were all there in the original. Their power was revealed not by the saturation slider, but by merely raising the shadows to reveal more details in the ruins. I think I successfully resisted raising the exposure too much, a natural tendency which spoils the reality of how dark the scene really was - you don't want to replace night with day. In looking at the history of my post-processing, I actually subtly lowered the overall exposure, raised the shadows and the white point, and drastically lowered the highlights to keep the moon in check. Most of the blue shift was the result of correcting the overall white balance, which operator error had allowed to be "daylight" which it obviously wasn't at the time. I then raised the brightness values of the "blues" in the scene, which of course raised the exposure since the only color thaty wasn't mostly blue was black. Lightroom's new Dehaze filter increased detail by cutting through the haze which in this scene was mostly just darkness.
UPON FURTHER REFLECTION
I frequently tell my students to let things lie overnight so that you can look at your image with refreshed eyes and see where you might have gone too far. While writing this essay I decided to revisit the "after" image and to lessen the "realistic" blue tint in the one place that it bothered me - the fish house ruin. Using the masking tool, I adjusted the white balance, the exposure, and the saturation of just the warehouse to render it far closer to gray. It is still a cool gray to be sure, but it is not blue, and now looks more realistic to me, despite what the computer might think. I also added a little sharpness to the warehouse wall, which might not show up at this enlargement size. These are the only changes between the first image and the third. You can certainly disagree with my interpretation, but just remember that this image was captured essentially in the dark.
SPACE NEEDLE DETAIL
This next photo was much more straightforward. It is another example of my tendency to capture snippets of things rather than the whole. This certainly allows me to concentrate on the details that are important to me at the risk of losing so much context that a typical viewer might not know what they are looking at. Unless you are a resident of the Pacific Northwest, you would be forgiven if you didn't immediately realize that this was a portion of the Space Needle in Seattle.
ANAL SPACE NEEDLE DETAIL
You also might be forgiven if you are not bowled over by efforts to "improve" this image in post-processing, but remember that I am an anal retired architect, and that it is my image and not yours. It was important to me, and maybe to no one else to do a few subtle things to the image. I couldn't crop to a square as is my usual wo0nt, but I could crop to eliminate those pesky violations of my inner circle at the outer borders on the upper edge. I also straightened the verticals at the center of the tower and placed them in the exact center of the image. Big deal. More to the point, I raised the whites, lowered the blacks to make the initial grays black, and then darkened the remaining shadows to make the image more graphic than realistic. I resisted the urge to convert to black and white out of maybe an undo fascination with the orange lights in the center of the tower.
BLACK AND WHITE SPACE NEEDLE DETAIL
I know that I really do like orange, but I converted to black and white anyway. Black and white allowed me to further deepen the real blacks and to further darken the shadows to up the graphic nature of the image. I utilized Lightroom's new "Texture" tool to bring out the joints, dirt, and discolorations in the lighter portion of the tower to return a note of realism to the image.
AUTO EXHIBIT
A few years ago I attended an art exhibit at the Portland Art Museum that explored the art of classic auto design. While the vintage cars were certainly beautiful, the exhibit was really an excuse for auto enthusiasts and photographers to salivate over the possibility of capturing images of this incredibly sexy sheet metal. In addition to the usual classic car suspects, and the always embarrassing "forgotten years" of Mercedes models, there were cars exhibited that i had never even heard of, much less seen in the flesh.
Taking images of automobiles, classic or not is very hard. It is one of the subjects that separates artists like me from photographers who actually know what they are doing. Automobiles are such a specialty that certain photographers make an entire career of the subject, whether for advertisers or classic car owners who will pay really good money for a portrait of their automotive children. To say that a packed museum exhibition was not a good venue would be an understatement. The white balance of the museum lighting was so wrong that even a person who didn't even understand that light has "color" would realize that something was terribly wrong. It was very hard to take a photograph that didn't include other museum goers. The cars were so polished that it was even hard not to include your own reflections in the image. Overall views of any car were impossible unless you were in the market to show an image of the exhibit itself for the museum brochure. It is easy to see why there are special studios and lighting for automotive imaging, as well as trips to national parks and deserted roads for suitable backgrounds.
I tried to make the best of the situation, and this image was characteristic of what I achieved in the museum. I needed to straighten the image, crop it further to eliminate messy details at the edges of the frame, and to make some sense of the color balance - I swore the car was silver rather than the gold the camera rendered.
STRAIGHTEN UP AND FLY RIGHT
The "real" Graham is now revealed. I have never heard of Graham either. Yet you've got to love all of those vertical and horizontal vents on one small portion of a vintage nose, and while you might not agree, it certainly seems time to grab the old fedora and go for a drive with your gal. Cue up the score from Guys and Dolls!
I hope that you have enjoyed another short journey into the archives, and I encourage you to see if you can discover any forgotten gems in your own photo folder. You might be surprised at what you have overlooked and the images that can be coaxed out with your post-processing skills.
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DECEMBER 1, 2023
RED UMBRELLA
This week I would like to discuss how to use color as a graphic element. My readers know that I am a big fan of black and white photography, which can usually bring out textures, tonal variations and other aspects of composition which can benefit from the absence of color. But what happens if color is the entire point of the image? I'm not talking about a beautiful landscape image where the photographer stereotypically placed his wife, clad with a National Geographic regulation red jacket into the scene at an intersection provided by the "rule of thirds." I love graphic images, and color is one way to certainly bring out the nature of an image without necessarily caring about the "subject." Even though photography is a realistic medium, I think you can emphasize the power of color so that the color becomes the real subject of the photograph - even if the viewer is not aware of what you are up to.
It helps considerably if you can include other graphic elements - lines, shapes, repetitive elements - that can play off the color that you have chosen to feature in your image. Silhouettes can be very powerful in this regard, since their near black rendering can provide a visual element that will subdivide the areas of color and provide an element of realism without really competing with the color you are trying to celebrate. An example is this first image, which comments on the structure of an absolutely wonderful contraption whose beauty is frequently overlooked by its emergency function to keep the rain or the sun off our heads. The graphic nature of the image is preserved because the entire field of view is the RED umbrella, with no sky or humans involved. Even though the subject is red, whose power caused me to pay attention, the image could work with a yellow, or a blue umbrella as well, without getting involved with a discussion of color emotions as such - as long as the color was light enough to set off the black ribs. This red umbrella, back lit by the sun, didn't need any help with the saturation slider, but of course anything goes since we aren't trying to sell red umbrellas.
BEN'S WINDOW
This image was all about the color in an elaborate fan light above an entry door at Benjamin Franklin High School in Portland. Centered and cropped to a square per coaster requirements, it is converted to another semi-abstract image by a total disregard for context. In this case the pretty gray Portland sky didn't do much for me, so I upped the saturation considerably without changing the hue. The following two examples show that Lightroom can completely change the hue, or color, as long as you generally keep to the blue side of the color wheel. If you need to change it to orange or such, you've got to go to Photoshop. When you change the color, you can also affect the saturation and the brightness.
A MUCH LIGHTER BLUE - DON'T ASK ME WHERE THE BROWN CAME FROM
A ROYAL PURPLE
A LONG VIEW OF A BROKEN PIER
We are heading toward realism here, but not really, since this wreck of a pier is pretty obscure even with a reflection in the waves. The blue is heightened by my not correcting the overwhelming blue color cast present in the camera's reality - our eyes and brains bring this much closer to gray, but who says I have to?
GOLDEN EIGHT
Here i noticed another hint of realism surrounded by a color field of water. The Willamette was of course gray, not blue, but when I changed the white balance to "cloudy", this beautiful light gold tone appeared out of nowhere. The "real" image started out almost black and white. Such is the power of the monochrome image that this gold water is perfectly acceptable as reality even though we know it can't be true in the Portland we know and love.
REALLY GOLDEN EIGHT
Oh, if that gold is not floating your boat, so to speak, then you can certainly change "cloudy" to "shade" which will achieve the sunset glow of your dreams. The silhouette of the racing skiff gives the viewer something to focus on, but the subject is really the color.
SAN JUAN SUNSET
Here is another silhouette, but just barely. As in astrophotography, a small sliver of the earth provides the "grounding" required for this sky study which can certainly be entered as "skyporn" on Instagram. It doesn't matter to anyone else but me and my memories that this took place in the San Juan Islands, but I can honestly say that the atmosphere provided the colors without any help from Lightroom.
SERRA RUST
These colors are almost all my invention. I focused on only a small section of a Richard Serra Corten Steel curving wall sculpture. Corten steel naturally rusts to shades of red and orange that actually serve to protect the steel below from really rusting. I brought out the variations in color which were certainly "there" but nowhere near the levels of contrast and saturation that I gave the pretty muted sculpture. Thus working with color allowed me to comment on another artist's artwork, achieving a level of abstraction that allows me to "paint" my own abstract, without a lot in common with the reality of a ten-foot tall curving steel wall.
BANANA RAYS
Even nature images can be converted into color abstracts if you allow that to be your intent. This section of a banana leaf is ripped from its context in a greenhouse to become a study in pattern and shades of green. All I had to do line up the lines, restrict the field of view, and heighten the contrast to bring out the varieties of green.
OTHER WORLDLY BEACH
This panorama is almost totally abstract, since it is an example of both long exposure and intentional camera movement on my part at the end of a week starring out at a featureless North Carolina beach - no sea stacks here! While the viewer might recognize this as a series of waves, it is not apparent that this body of water is on our planet, not with those colors. But if you like yellow, how can you complain?
THE REAL WORLD, BUT IT IS KAUAI
Finally we come to another seascape which I swear is the spitting image of reality. Of course it helps that these stripes of paradise are on a beach in Kauai. All I did was make sure the horizon was straight, even though that brought out fact that the beachfront was in fact a little hilly. I might have darkened the sky a little to bring out the clouds, but that was it. The image is all about color, even if the four or five shades of the sea can seem unreal.
KAUAI IN BLACK AND WHITE, ONLY BECAUSE I CAN
I had to work much, much harder to make this black and white version come close to working at rendering this scene. I am actually pleased with the result, although it still seems to be the answer to a challenge that nobody else would take on. Although it might work as part of a black and white portfolio, most would wonder what the hell was the point. If the color moves you to say wow, then do not be afraid to communicate that with your audience. Someth=imes color is the whole point of an image.
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NOVEMBER 17, 2023
ORIGINAL FISH POND LANDSCAPE
This week I'd like to continue the discussion of adjusting to new software in post-processing our images. This is a two-edged sword, balancing the frustrations of having to abandon or modify habitual and comfortable ways of working with the opportunity to try and learn something new. In the real world there are no magic bullets and the results attained with new software are usually very similar to your accustomed results. But there can be some advancement, especially if you keep your expectations low. This can ease the pain of learning the quirks of new software, especially if the endless cycle of new hardware and software has forced you into new versions you didn't even ask for.
ORIGINAL CLIFF PANORAMA
This is my recent struggle with adjusting to a new version of Lightroom that was forced on me by my new laptop which couldn't bear to deal with my perfectly adequate 15-year old Lightroom version. These two images will hopefully illustrate both the problems and opportunities of learning to do familiar things in new ways. The caveat is that of course there are many ways to achieve the same results, and that the "old" ways are usually hidden within new software. I find it somewhat amusing that the newest software still includes the cascading menus that were state of the art 25 years ago, even though young computer gurus would never even dream of using them. It is also comforting/frustrating that programs like Lightroom will even let you modify the new program to behave like the old one, if you are willing to go to the trouble of modifying the software in ways that will require consultation with a teenager.
These two images were captured in Hawaii four years ago in what seems like the "before" times. I took two walks on successive days on the Big Island, and a journey into my archives yielded these two images which I had previously ignored. the first image is of a Hawaiian's king fish pond, which were cleverly built along the coast to capture and support local fish for harvest right next to their former ocean homes. The second image illustrates how much the coast can vary on one island - these cliffs defy anyone to get close to the ocean unless you are willing to climb down what looks to be a ten-story ladder to get to the surf.
NEW LIGHTROOM VERSION
I modified the original to achieve this preferred version using my new version of Lightroom. I cropped the original to reduce amount of foreground and sky. In doing so both the left and right borders also moved in, placing the two outer trees much closer to the edge of the frame and thus placing more attention on the central palm. This is especially true on the right side, where the crop eliminates the black palm's crossing beyond the striped palm. I'm not sure that this is a plus, but I had to accept it to make the other changes. In the midst of four cockeyed palm trees I found the one horizon in the distance - the path on the other side of the pond - and straightened things out. Boosting the saturation in both the greens and the blues brought life to the pond and the central palm. Sharpening improved the entire image, but special exposure and texture changes on the right pond brought out its "tiger" stripes. Darkening the left palm, especially its left edge, reduced its impact on the entire image and allowed it to just serve as an edge on the left side.
"ON ONE'S" TAKE ON THE SAME IMAGE
I then brought the image into my tried and true "plug-in" for Lightroom from a Portland software company called "On One". This software can enhance an image in very specialized ways relating to adding contrast and sharpening to specific areas of the image in ways that are not impossible, but just more difficult, than in Lightroom. Fortunately this plug-in still works with the new Lightroom version, since I am also four years behind in On One as well. The results here are pretty subtle at this level of enlargement, but I think you can see even more emphasis on the right palm's markings and a subtle increase in the detail in the both the pond and the central palm's foliage. This kind of enhancement can be very tricky, since at low magnification it can be near impossible to see while a large enlargement can reveal ugly artifacts that don't seem to exist in smaller versions.
A NEW CROP
The small portion of sky remaining still bothered me. I tried to brush out the saturation that resulted when I saturated the pond, but I was still not convinced, and the answer became to change the aspect ratio to 4:5 from the standard 4:6. This brought even more attention to the central palm as the subject, since th was no more jungle, much less sky, at the top. The wider image also seemed to strengthen the two border trees.
"ON ONE" BLACK AND WHITE
It was time to try black and white to see if heightened contrast and detail could make up for the lack of color contrast. While I usually appreciate this bargain, in this case there were a few things I missed in the monochrome version. The extra detail in the pond made it seem much too crunchy. The right palm was certainly contrasty enough, but for once I missed the beige which seemed much lighter than the white in the black and white version. Finally the variations in the central palm foliage seemed just "dirty" in black and white.
NEW LIGHTROOM VERSION
Then I tried a black and white conversion in the new Lightroom software, and for some reason I was more taken with this version. The decline in contrast and sharpening in this version seemed to just lighten the whole image. It just goes to show you that just like "on any given Sunday" in football, a certain workflow will suddenly enhance a particular image, even though it might not be the way you usually proceed for most images.
NEW LIGHTROOM VERSION, STAGE ONE
The cliff image presented some different problems and shows how different paths might achieve similar end products, especially when compared to the original. What should be a grand vertical panorama seems just a little too dark, way too dull, not nearly sharp enough, and even a bit crooked. I used the small bit of horizon in the distance to straighten out a very crooked cliff. I removed quite a bit of blue color cast which came off of the ocean. By cranking up the contrast by boosting both the black and white points, I revealed a lot of detail in the cliff face. Lightening the shadows also helped a lot, especially in the distant cliff faces. But the overall exposure now seemed a bit too dark.
ON ONE GIVES IT A TRY
On One's version tied to achieve contrast and sharpening in some very different ways. It left the white and black points alone, and used a revised white balance that was much warmer to separate the rocks and the sand at the top of the cliff. Notice that the fog in the sky seems a lot more gray rather than purple. But On One's Dynamic contrast, a mid-range contrast control, still seems to have made both the sea and the sand just a little bit too crunchy for my taste.
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF "DEHAZE"
The new Lightroom software tries to achieve similar levels of mid-tone contrast enhancement in a different way than Dynamic Contrast. I think it works better on this image. Dynamic Contrast can affect the exposure and white balance in ways that are not immediately noticeable when you are positively stimulated by the increase in perceived sharpness, but they are there. The sky has become purpler again, and the sea is maybe a little bit too saturated and crunchy. Lightroom's new (at least to me) Dehaze control tries to increase contrast in a way that can mimic and alleviate the typical loss of detail in a long distance view. It was seemingly made for a landscape image like this one. For the first time, those windmills on the horizon are coming into view, without making the foreground sand on the cliff too gritty. Real separation on the central part of the cliff is achieved without affecting the overall exposure of the image.
ON ONE BLACK AND WHITE
In moving to black and white, my usual strategies of further increasing contrast and sharpening have also seemed to yield a dark and brooding image that is maybe more suited to Scotland than to Hawaii.
NEW LIGHTROOM BLACK AND WHITE
Dehaze and raising the shadows have yielded a lot of detail in the cliff face without too much contrast or the storm in the sea in the first version. I seem to like this version better, although I could easily change my mind tomorrow. That is the nature of our visual perception, which can be as fickle as either computer hardware or software. It is frequently very useful to revisit an editing session to see if you've gone too far. Even Goldilocks could be mistaken on the first go-around.
NOVEMBER 10, 2023
DIRECTOR PARK PERGOLA, FINAL COLOR VERSION
This week, begging your indulgence, I'd like to present one old image that I rescued from the archives, accompanied by an extended rant about having to adapt to yet another new technological wonder I didn't really want. This photo was taken 13 years ago, when I went to take a look at a new park in Downtown Portland. Director Park is a beautiful example of many things, including design, philanthropy, one family's strong bonds, and a rare public triumph over corporate greed that used to characterize the small world of Portland's urban experiment.
This image is my first attempt to struggle with my new version of "Lightroom" that I finally purchased, much to my dismay, last week. I have been doing just fine with Lightroom 5, which is not even the newest version, Lightroom 6, that Adobe made before they decided to not sell it to anyone anymore. Like some other software companies, Adobe hit upon the idea that they wouldn't sell anything, only "rent" it. Old codgers like me naturally resisted the idea that I would now be forced to rent a new version of software when the older version still met all my needs. I succeeded in avoiding this new "tax" until I had to purchase a new laptop this year. Of course the new Apple miracle would not support the relic Lightroom software, except it did. Until it started to psychiz-out a few weeks ago, and even I had to admit that maybe this "professional" had better not wait until the whole thing came crashing down. The learning curve that I had avoided for nearly 15 years reared its ugly head, and now had to actually pay attention to all of those remarkable "improvements" that I had not seen any need for heretofore.
Of course I will get used to it, but let's just say that is hasn't been a picnic. As Fran always says, it's only "intuitive" to the idiot that designed it. Tools that I have used for a decade are now hidden four layers down, and I must say that this old dog is pretty frustrated. Not to mention that this "book learner" is now faced with the fact that books on software have gone the way of the dinosaur. God willing, if I live another ten years I will have to pay Adobe more than $1200.00 to not own their product, assuming that the price doesn't go up, which of course it will. I have had to violate the only correct economic advice I have ever taught Benjamin - to resist subscriptions or any other recurring payments at all costs! Of course the $10.00 a month will not break me, and since it is a business expense, all of you are pitching in 3 bucks or so, but it's the principle of the thing! Why? Why? Why?
Director Park is yet another example of how well the urban design of Portland as a "miniature city", composed of a grid of very small 200' square blocks, can be adapted to create pocket parks that enliven the cityscape. Since our blocks are so small compared to most American grids, it is easier to 'leave one out" without destroying more economic growth than Portland can afford to lose. There are numerous examples of this strategy around Downtown, since it has been employed almost since the grid was first laid over a virgin Old Growth forest by the city's founders in 1850. This idea started with the original Park Blocks, was employed to set aside parks, one for men and one for women, at the center of municipal government, and then became the genesis of Portland's "Living Room," Pioneer Courthouse Square in the center of Downtown. It can even be a windfall for developers who are smart enough to listen to urban designers.The Pearl District's series of one block parks that skip along through the new district allowed eight blocks to drastically increase in value because they all now were adjacent to a new public park. Thus two dozen blocks of condo towers were now elevated in value by giving up three blocks to the neighborhood, and to the rest of the city.
Director Park exists in it's present form because of corporate greed, and the overwhelming desire to provide parking in the heart of Downtown despite Portland's efforts to sustain and expand mass transit. The "powers that be" decided that the best use of one block surface parking in the midst of some of the most valuable real estate in Portland was to erect an exceedingly ugly 10-story parking garage. No matter how the architects tried to dress up this pig, the problem of course was the appalling idea of a new parking garage in the first place. This block was adjacent to not one, but two existing 4-story underground parking structures underneath two of Portland's newest towers!
Thus began an almost typical Portland battle royale. I was one of almost 300 citizens who showed up for a public meeting with their pitchforks and testimony. I was one of the usual suspects, and one of the few architects who could engage in such a fight without threatening potential Downtown clients, since of course my outrage was only matched by my lack of business acumen. The only real contribution I made to the debate, based on my overwhelming architectural experience, was when I "innocently" pointed out that the slide of the beautiful professional rendering of the proposed building had somehow left out the title of the drawing - "Nordstrom's Parking Tower" - which let the cat out of the bag. We were giving up a block of Downtown to park cars for a department store whose front door already let in more people every day than anywhere else in town except perhaps the Central branch of the Library. The ultimate irony was that Nordstrom's downtown store, the most successful new free-standing department store in the nation, had been built adjacent to Pioneer Courthouse Square, which had replaced an ugly two-story parking garage in the center of Downtown!
Philanthropy then entered the fray when one of Portland's richest families, the Schnitzer's, engineered a deal to buy the block and donate it to the city for another one-block park, which coincidentally would stand on top of four stories of underground parking that would connect with the existing lots on the adjacent blocks. The park would be named for the other branch of the family, the Director's, complete with a fountain that honored schoolteachers like Mom.
This image and it's variants show the other main feature of the park, a four-story glass pergola that takes up half the block and supposedly answers the question of an identity for an urban hardscape of brick and stone and water, while providing some protection for visitors on most of those days when Portland "sunshine" - in other words, rain, is making an appearance. The pergola is certainly a grand architectural statement, a very well-detailed mass of overlapping glass shingles that covers nearly a half-acre without blocking the occasional sun. I don't really know how well it does block the rain, since it is four stories above the street and our rain is often accompanied by wind, but there you go. Parks throughout history have frequently contained "follies" and is this is ours, so be it. The park has always been well maintained, and "programmed" to make up for the fact that Americans have little piazza experience. It is even one of the few places in Portland where mere citizens can move the chairs around!
The photographic problems with pergola, at least for this photographer, relate to its size, its "hollowness", and its surroundings. The structure's size makes it hard to take in the whole thing without diminishing its actual stature - the usual "wide angle" problem. It is also very hard to photograph a "space" whose boundaries are so porous - open sides, and a glass roof, don't provide much spatial definition. Two dimensional images have a hard time defining three dimensional space. Photographers like myself often avoid this problem by concentrating on the details, since we know that you can only really experience the space by actually being there. But the pergola really suffers by the fact that Paris is not across the street, just some admittedly banal Portland towers and older storefronts. The surroundings of this urban space are just not that inspiring, so its openness seems to work against it, at least in photographs.
CLOSE TO THE ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
I tried to deal with this "problem" by concentrating on the glass roof itself. I took this image while walking down the stairs at the adjacent four-story above-ground parking garage(!) which provided this elevated view. I have already cropped out most of the edges of the pavement, but the surroundings are still too apparent for my taste. My solution was to mask out the surroundings and drastically reduce the exposure with brushes and gradient masks; increasing contrast and brightening up the pergola roof itself further highlighted the structure, my real subject. I also straightened the columns since I am an anal retired architect, but you will notice them too in the finished variant.
STAND UP STRAIGHT! DIM THE LIGHTS IN THE BACK!
Much better, at least for me, but then my prejudice against "sickly" green struck again, so I reached for the magic of black and white. As it is, the image only contains one real color besides that green, the light wood Glulam beams, and I don't think I'll miss them too much either.
GET RID OF THAT ANNOYING COLOR!
Now we have a picture! The lack of color highlights the details and the shadows on the beams. In my opinion, the dark black surroundings actually look more "realistic" in black and white than in color, since they are just another aspect of the abstraction inherent in a black and white image. Since I have removed so much of the context already, it was time to crop some more and get an even closer look at the roof.
WILL GETTING EVEN CLOSER IMPROVE THE VIEW?
The square crop now makes this image all about the glass roof, with just a little touch of black space thrown in at the top for contrast and to ensure the viewer that this roof doesn't extend to infinity and beyond. What is funny is that the green tint doesn't bother me as much now that I'm closer, and the overlap of the shingles has become even more intriguing even though I still don't see they keep the water out.
BLACK AND WHITE IS JUST FINE, THANK YOU.
But I still like the black and white version a little better, but maybe that's just me. It is my image, after all. Of course I now have to learn a number of "marvelous" new ways to convert my images to black and white. It is really weird to have to learn yet another version of 21st Century software in order to explore black and white imagery that dates to the 19th Century. Have a good week.
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NOVEMBER 3, 2023
ONE OF MY MOST ABSTRACT IMAGES OF A REAL LIFE SUBJECT. IT INVARIABLY MADDENS VIEWERS WHEN I AM FORCED TO REVEAL WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS.
Discussing your art with others can be very interesting, especially if you hope that they might actually bring an example of your work home. I find that even people who profess admiration of my "eye" sometimes seem lost over my artistic intentions. Which is certainly not to say that this disconnect is their fault - it's just that either I have failed to communicate my intent, or that my way of viewing the world is even more foreign than what my viewers thought. As a retired architect, I am naturally drawn towards architecture and the city as a subject, and my training has certainly allowed me to put myself in the designer's shoes. I approach a work of architecture by trying to understand what the architect was trying to accomplish, even though centuries might have past, and that designer certainly wouldn't understand my world. I also must acknowledge that most of the time I am faced with work that is certainly beyond my capability as an architect - I'm just trying to understand it so that I can better appreciate something that I probably couldn't have accomplished myself.
ONE OF THE CORNERS OF THE BUILDING. THAT IS A LOT OF GLASS WITHOUT ANY FUNCTION WHATSOEVER.
Two things get in the way of my communication with my viewers. One is that I am very rarely interested in documentation as a my primary goal in creating an image. I understand that I have been priviledged in being able to travel to see buildings and cities in places far beyond what my viewers have seen - but the architecture that I might be focusing on might not be something that they have ever "heard of" or even would notice in the same way if they had had the opportunity to travel to that city. Since I am not really interested in documenting a building, my images tend to ignore the entire building and concentrate on parts of the work or even details that might only interest me. To me images of an entire building are either boring and bland or are just to much trouble to obtain - no one is paying me to provide an overall shot to explain a building in an architectural magazine. Frankly, I have neither the photographic lenses, the training, or the budget of both time and money to procure such imagery, so I happily leave it to others. Since I don't want to document a building, I can take it on my own terms, which allows me to use another architect's art to create my own. I hope to create an impression of a whole building as a sum of the parts that have moved my eye. Of course this collage approach only works if my choices make sense to my viewers, but that is my problem, not theirs. If the viewer has not had the opportunity to actually view the building it might be even harder to communicate my take on the subject.
AT LEASTFOUR DIFFERENT MATERIALS IN AN ARBITRARY "DIVISION" OF ONE FACADE
Even though I sometimes refer to my approach as a series of "architectural portraits", I have to admit that these portraits are frequently harder for viewers to understand than portraits of humans. No matter how foreign or ancient or weirdly dressed, we can almost always understand that we are viewing a portrait of a human being. This is true even if we are looking at a science fiction "humanoid" whose strange features can't hide the fact that they are members of the actor's union. My architectural portraits can become so abstract that my viewers no longer know what they are looking at. But most of my images do tend to show enough of the whole building that with just a little imagination the viewer can appreciate the subject as a part of the whole.
THIS IS ALMOST UNDER CONTROL, BUT ALL THAT RIGGING SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM A TALL SHIP IN SAN FRANCISCO BAY
These images are all from an hour's walk around a fairly new building that I went to see in San Francisco on a weekday afternoon in 2009. What is interesting is that this structure, no longer "new" and separated from the present day by the Great Recession, a Worldwide Pandemic, and an urban "doom loop", is still so foreign to most viewers that they can't even decide what to think of it. That this edifice is a Federal Office building is beyond most viewer's understanding. I imagine that even most people who have lived in San Francisco ever since it was built still don't know what to make of it. All I can say is that it was designed by a firm called Morphosis, which should give you a hint that we aren't in Kansas anymore. Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi started the firm in 1972 and have been defying architectural conventions ever since. Since this building doesn't even have large elements that actually move while you are standing there dumbfounded, it isn't even part of the more "radical" part of the Morphosis architectural portfolio. This is the kind of building that even architects "confront" rather than just visit, and these images illustrate my personal confrontation fifteen years ago.
BRUTE STRUCTURAL GYMNASTICS THAT NO DOUBT CONFUSED THE STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS
Yes your tax dollars paid for this, so you have more rights to an opinion on the result. More than thirty years ago, observers as varied as architects, bureaucrats, and even Senators began to wonder why Federal architecture seemed so unimaginative and conventional that even those who didn't mind "Classical" design in our Nation's Capitol didn't see why it should be duplicated around the country by mediocre architectural firms that very few people had ever heard of, much less saw in the architectural press. There began a concerted effort to expand the range of firms who could be hired to design government buildings beyond those who had learned to how to fill out the opaque calls for references that seemed to include every criteria except for design excellence. So all bets were off, and staid federal office buildings, court houses, and even "infrastructure" were suddenly open to art beyond the usual "5% for art" that had formerly gotten people's hackles up around the country. The entire building was now a piece of art, and the public was now exposed to much more unusual architectural forms than the Classical Columns they were used to.
ZIGS AND ZAGS AND A YELLOW TRANSPARENT BEAM THAT IS HOLDING UP AIR
If you think that this went too far, you wouldn't be alone. All I can say is that it is certainly interesting, well built, heroically detailed, maybe to a fault, and can grab your attention as you skirt the tents on Market Street. Is it overwrought? Yes. Are there parts that are more attractive than others? Yes. Does it make any sense at all? Who knows? All I know is that if you don't like one facade, just turn the corner and you'll find a completely different facade that you might find more attractive or even less understandable. In an age when most architects were at least paying lip service to designing with a recognition of the urban context of their building, Morphosis didn't even acknowledge the context of their own building. To say that it doesn't make sense is certainly a critic's right, but that doesn't even seem to be the point.
EVEN THE LANDSCAPING IN THE COURTYARD IS A SOURCE OF CONFUSION. AND WHERE DOES THAT REFLECTION COME FROM?
So this architectural photographer, who tries to treat a building as a collage of images, was confronted by a building that was a collage in itself. Even almost twenty years later, while I don't think that it is an example of the Emperor's new clothes, it is certainly open to question. The talent exhibited in parts of the collage seem completely disconnected from the object as a civic structure. Most of the architectural moves, while certainly picturesque, seem, to have little to do with the actual function of giving office workers a place to be bureaucrats.
A GREEN FACADE TOPPED BY A GLASS CORNICE
And like an auto accident, it's pretty hard to turn away. Even architectural critics, who are paid to try to explain this stuff, could only come up with "Deconstructionism" to describe buildings that not only broke the rules, but seemed to have no rules at all. This collage approach, while certainly dynamic, and even more divorced from history than any radical piece of "Modern Architecture" that now populated the history books, proved as short-lived as the "Post Modern" phase that proceeded it. When you are so determined to absolve yourself of any rules beyond the fact that the building should not fall down, it becomes very hard to determine why any decision might be more correct than any other. Architecture that becomes totally arbitrary, with no relationship with function at all, becomes just as straight-jacketed in its own way as any mute rectilinear black and white glass and steel box where "form follows function." The "style" proved very hard to expand beyond the larger commissions that Morphosis continues to get to this day. These sculptural collages make Frank Gehry's sculptural buildings seem positively "conservative" in comparison.
OH THESE GREEN GLASS FINS ARE ACTUALLY VERTICAL SHADING DEVICES! GO KNOW!
I hope this collection of images provides some understanding of this urban event. I don't know if you will find the architecture compelling or even understandable. But as usual I tried to express my "wow" and hope to communicate it to you, even though I don't know if my "wow" is just a very complicated reaction to such a confrontational piece of art.
I HAD FUN WITH THE SQUARE CROP THAT FURTHER OBSCURED THE REALIZATION THAT THIS WAS A COLLECTION OF ONE-STORY HIGH EXTERNAL SHADES ON AN OFFICE BUILDING. THIS IS ACTUALLY THE CALMEST FACADE OF THE BUILDING, AND THE ONLY ONE THAT "MAKES SENSE." MOST OF MY VIEWERS LOVE THE COLOR, BUT THE MOST COMMON GUESS IS AN ASSEMBLAGE OF RAZOR BLADES.
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OCTOBER 27, 2023
HAWTHORNE BLUE HOUR - ALL ABOUT COLOR
OR IS IT? HAWTHORNE BLUE HOUR B&W
It's no secret that I am really a fan of black and white photography. I am not a religious fanatic about it though - I just think it can be a very useful tool in your photographic arsenal, providing a really attractive alternative interpretation for some images. While I did a small share of work in the darkroom just before the advent of digital photography, I was happy to leave the world of chemicals behind for post-processing on the computer. Part of this was due to the fact that my darkroom skills were not very good, and that I was more interested at the time in working in color, which had never really been an option before the computer age. I can remember evenings spent at U-Develop, a remarkable Portland photographic institution at the time, which had color darkroom facilities of a sort. The trouble was that no one really knew what they were doing, except for the sages behind the counter, who would cryptically suggest you "add a little magenta" after you had waited in line after yet another unsuccessful print. This was a very expensive hobby, especially when I realized that everyone else seemed to be a professional that was not worried about costs since their bosses or clients were paying for all this anyway.
OLD GROWTH, NEW GROWTH IN NATURAL MONOCHROMATIC GREEN
OLD GROWTH, NEW GROWTH IN ABSTRACT BLACK AND WHITE
Thus black and white was not really romantic, nostalgic, or cost effective in my environment of trying to achieve a perfect, or even just mediocre color exposure. I never really paid much attention to black and white except for some experiments with Ilford XP2, the first black and whiter film which could be developed by the minimum wage worker in the one hour kiosk. Yes, it was black and white, especially when the machine was properly calibrated, and it had zero grain, which was also revolutionary. But the one-hour guy still didn't have any capacity to really make a quality print, and since it was really "color" film, I still had to head back to the line at U-Develop.
I DO MISS THE LONE RED STICK, BUT I LOVE THE BLACK WATER
Just about the time that traditionalists were declaring that "film is not dead", I discovered that even though my new digital "negatives" were in color, I could use the computer to render them in black and white. It took a number of years for the software industry, and even more time for the revolutionary home photo printers to be able to create black and white prints that were any better than embarrassing, but they eventually did. While there is another segment of true believers that still use film while no doubt listening to their long-playing records in the darkroom, most people have moved on. My prints that come out of my home printer are so much better than anything I could ever achieve in the darkroom, and to tell you the truth it is just as magical when they emerge from that printer in my well-lit study as it ever was in the tray of chemicals in the dark.
IT'S REALLY ABOUT THE PORTLANDIA SIGN, AND I COULD UP THE CONTRAST
But for the most part I was still a color photographer, since I was mostly observing the real world of color and there was still quite a learning curve involved in converting a digital color photograph into black and white. There was one real reason that I started trying at all - it was that sometimes I just didn't like the colors in the real world! I am one of the few Portlanders who actually doesn't love the green of the St. Johns Bridge, so it was only naturally perverse that when I finally got around to exhibiting my image of that ubiquitous Portland symbol, I insisted on black and white. It was also fortuitous that the green, now silver bridge actually stood out against the green, now black woods in Forest Park.
INTO THE WOODS IN BLACK AND WHITE
So now I created black and whites when I didn't like the real colors, or when I realized that the colors were so unimportant that it didn't really matter if they were gone. But now that I had enough black and white images customers started to ask "whether I had that one in black and white as well" so they could assemble a black and white portfolio. I started to develop my style in black and white imagery, and to see what it could do for my photography.
GOTHAM CITY SHOULD BE IN BLACK AND WHITE, DON'T YOU THINK?
Over time I learned a few things about photography in general and my imagery in particular. I had always been more interested in interpretation than in documentation, and as I developed my skills in post-processing black and whites I realized the truth that the old masters had known. Black and white allowed for much more latitude for interpretation than color ever did. Colors could be wrong, or even weird, but the abstraction of no color seemed to allow you to get away with things like black skies or contrast that would be completely "unrealistic" in color. In the further reaches of interpretation bordering on abstraction, the absence of color seemed to be the one abstraction that most of the public seemed to really accept without question. I also learned that even though the world does exist "in color", a lot of it is really pretty monochromatic. The key is to see "in monochrome" rather than in "black and white." If my trips to the forest are really into a world of many shades of green, does it matter if they become shades of gray? Those coast scenes of blue skies and blue water might just as well be monochrome gray as monochrome blue. As an urban landscape photographer, a lot of my world was already in shades of gray, even in the natural world.
THIS PORTLAND CITYSCAPE IS REALLY ABOUT THE FREMONT BRIDGE, AND BLACK AND WHITE ALLOWS ME BOTH TO EMPHASIZE THE BRIDGE IN TWO DIFFERENT WAYS BY MANIPULATING THE TONES AND THE MOOD
It was about this time that I created a secret identity for myself. I decided to start showing my work on the website 500 Pixels, which is really a very high falutin Instagram - think much better photographers and mercifully no videos. Even the very few cat photos are really good cat photos. I tell people all the time that if you want to see what a very good photo of "x" might be, search for it in 500 pix and you will quickly find an example of what you should aim for, no matter the subject. But when I decided to join, I also decided that I would only show my black and white images. I wanted to see if I could attract some attention from those who only thought in black and white. Suddenly, and very nicely, I was attracting likes from all over Central and Eastern Europe from guys who had probably never taken a color photo - they accepted me as another old codger. It took a while, but I was running out of black and whites, and my new secret identity was in danger of exposure. I began to search my archives for more images to convert to black and white to keep up the charade. It was now that I really learned something, when I began to convert images to black and white that I had thought "were all about the color." What was shocking was that there were very few great color images that could not be great black and white images. Certainly different, but not without value. It was almost always not "about the color", it was really "about the contrast." Color photos are in fact really about color contrast, and if you can preserve that contrast in the black and white interpretation, in the absence of the color wheel, then you will preserve the power of that contrast. The trick is to manipulate the different shades of gray to create contrast between colors that shout "contrast" in color but are really about the same brightness as shades of gray. The photographer must decide that the yellow must be brighter, or the blue sky should become darker, to get back the contrast.
EVEN SUCH A SIMPLE GRAPHIC IMAGE IS ALL ABOUT THE COLOR, UNTIL IT ISN'T
BLACK AND WHITE CONTRAST CAN SUBSTITUTE FOR COLOR CONTRAST WITHOUT BEING SO LITERAL
It took about a year before I ran out of black and white photographs, and I slowly started to introduce some color imagery without provoking an international incident in Eastern Europe. But the important thing I learned for myself is that for the most part a good color image has every right to be a good monochrome image. So give it a try - there is no right answer, but you might be amazed how different, and wonderful that an image can look without color. and it's no problem if you like the color rendition better in any case.
THE ABSENCE OF COLOR CAN COMPLETELY CHANGE THE MOOD. "STUMPTOWN EVENINGS", AN EXCITING VIEW OF GLAMOROUS PORTLAND AT THE ADVENT OF A NIGHT OUT, BECOMES "STUMPTOWN NAKED CITY" EVOKING A DANGEROUS URBAN MYSTERY
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MY INITIAL INTERPRETATION - MAYBE A BIT MOODY? OR JUST DARK?
This week I would like to take you through a short round of post-processing of one individual image. This exercise might let you explore the method to my madness, and see how you too can explore alternatives of your own images. There is nothing extraordinary involved, no secret tips or diabolical methods - just a standard set of responses to one landscape image. There is no guarantee that you will agree with my "workflow", the unromantic name photographers apply to their usual method of working with images. I prefer a more exploratory "a little of this, a little of that" which seems to better capture the spirit of fun that should accompany an artistic pursuit. When combined with the "Goldilocks Theory" that one seeks a happy medium after exploring the extremes, these post-processing journeys can yield some fascinating results. Yet there is no guarantee that you, or even I, will see an unalterable progression to the "best" rendition of an image. Art is a very subjective matter, and we can have different opinions, and even change our minds from day to day. I often follow the advice that you should sleep on the "final" image because the next day will find you realizing that you went too far. On the other hand, when I show Fran the last two versions of my latest photographic search for truth, and she declares confidently that there is no discernible difference between the two versions, maybe it is time to call it a day. Even though I know that the last one is the best, I have reached a point of diminishing returns. Until tomorrow.
THAT CERTAINLY BRIGHTENED THINGS UP - BUT WHAT THAT THING ABOVE THE WATERFALL?
It is interesting to me that this is one of the few photographs in my archives that i have so misplaced that I have no idea where and when it was first captured. It is a waterfall, it is most likely in the Pacific Northwest, but the rest of the story is a mystery. In some ways this makes this "alternative exercise" easier, since it's hard to have an emotional prejudice about the direction an image should go if you have no memory of it beyond that you must have taken it because it is in your disorganized archive. Thus the emotional desire to "get it right" is naturally very low, and I can be more open to experimentation since the stakes are not very high.
THE DARK FOREST
The first image is my initial take on the capture. I of course have lost the original file, so you'll have to take my word for it that I haven't eliminated any mass murders or surface parking lots just to the left of the image. I cropped just to eliminate some white to the right due to imprecise scanning of the original, but the basic 2/3 ratio0 has been kept. I warmed up the white balance a bit to adjust to the overwhelmingly green Northwest forest. As usual I deepened the blacks, and opened up the whites to achieve some more contrast. In order to control the bright waterfall I lowered the overall exposure. After the usual sharpening, I made a few more subtle moves to get to a pretty dark woodland interpretation that would emphasize the waterfall, the obvious subject.
NOT NEARLY AS SCARY , BUT THEN YOU SEE THAT THING ABOVE THE WATERFALL
So far so good, but upon further reflection I immediately started to lighten things up. I went for a more neutral stance that would seek to grab much more detail at maybe the expense of mood. I needed to protect those highlights in the water, but I found that I could open up the shadows considerably without either ruining the waterfall or lightening up the scene so much that I would just get to "blah." There was a lot of detail hidden in those woods, which was great, but opening up the exposure also revealed some problems that had been nicely hidden in the murk, as well as some opportunities. The two skinny birches on the left now called for some extra attention since I could finally see that they had something to offer. But the large area of leaves on the right was now bright enough that you could see they were not really in focus, and needed much more sharpening. Worst was a large artifact resembling a huge fish that seemed to hover over the waterfall now that that area was not just black. Once you make some initial moves you frequently have to deal with unexpected results that are now revealed, and usually require a little more finicky post-processing.
THANK GOD HE'S GONE, AND THE BIRCHES AND THE LEAVES ARE SHARPER
This was pretty successful, but I then decided that maybe that entire mass of green on the right was best corrected by just cropping it out. Sometimes the best solution is to just to get rid of the problem, since one of the most powerful superpowers photographer possess is that we get to frame reality. The waterfall is now larger, but maybe it is too close to the center. I now experimented with a square crop, which my "coaster overlord" always at least suggests, but I found that I liked the longer run of the river allowed by the vertical orientation. I also liked the view up the gorge, which showed a touch of sky without competing with the waterfall. So I stayed away from the square.
BUT MAYBE THE SOLUTION ON THE RIGHT IS TO JUST ELIMINATE THE RIGHT!
It was now time to try black and white. Woodland images are largely monochromatic anyway, with green substituting for gray, so it is a natural progression for photographers to see what black and white will reveal. This is usually a hell of a lot of detail and texture and subtlety of tones once color is stripped away. Since this scene does have a lot of detail, it responded very well to a black and white rendition. I think that my initial take most closely resembles a pen and ink drawing, since the lines are much more present than the tonal areas.
BLACK AND WHITE REVEALS DETAIL AS IT ELIMINATES COLOR
The move to black and white also allowed me to ignore the upper gorge since its warm color was gone, and brought more unwanted attention to the unsharp leaves in the foreground. The square crop thus reasserted itself, and the two birches on the left became even more important to me.
THE COASTER REVEALS ITSELF IN BLACK AND WHITE
Finally, and I say that loosely, the ability of black and white to render more extreme highs and lows in exposure while appearing more realistic than color images moved me back towards a darker interpretation. Since I could allow the waterfall, the birches, and especially the river to get brighter without losing all of the details, I could conversely allow the woods to darken up again. The image is now really about the bright stream in the dark woods.
BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH A MOODIER BLACK AND WHITE
You could say that maybe this journey has been a circular one back to square one, but I for one have gained a lot of insight into the scene and feel that my later interpretations reveal more about my feelings about this woodland, stream and waterfall than my initial stabs at the subject. I hope that I have shown you that landscape photography is much more about interpretation than documentation. I happened upon a scene, went "wow!" , and it is now my job and hope that I can somehow communicate that "wow" and maybe make you feel it too.
MY FAVORITE, BUT YOUR MILEAGE MIGHT VARY, AND THAT'S A GOOD THING
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OCTOBER 13,2023
HAWTHORNE BRIDGE - ONE YEAR YOUNGER THAN MY BUNGALOW
This week I took another stab at just going out for a walk and taking some pictures. I've avoided this lately because it's been much too hot, but football weather is finally here, and my weather app promised a nice late afternoon. The real reason I have avoided photo walks is that my chief bailiwick has always been the urban landscape, and let's face it, Portland has not been looking its best lately. While it is not the urban Hellscape featured on Fox News, even I have trouble making graffiti-covered plywood look good in an urban landscape. Thus I have been exploring my archives for images instead of venturing out to try to find some new urban images. Since it is October, and sunny days will soon be just a distant memory, I decided to walk across the Hawthorne Bridge to get some exercise and maybe some images.
THREE BRIDGES
It has been a weird summer in Portland. The tourists are back, which is surprising to everyone here since our reputation has suffered so much in the press. In the past two weeks I sold art to people going back to Dubai and Reykavik, which expanded the countries that now contain my art to 62 around the world, which is very gratifying and just amazing, considering that my sales record on the web is worse than dismal. All of these sales occur in my little booth under the Burnside Bridge. What has been very disappointing is that the locals refuse to come Downtown, and sales at the Market have been down across the board. My incomplete records suggest that in twelve years my art has gotten into around 4000 homes in Portland; this year my sales to locals amount to a grand total of 33 people. Clearly the local news has driven people into their homes. And while this New York boy has maybe naively felt that it was not my fate to be mugged in Portland, Oregon, even I have to admit that there are some blocks downtown that I would rather not visit even before dark. This statement is so new and depressing that I have only recently admitted that while Downtown is certainly not scary, it is certainly unpleasant. I has taken our civic leadership, such as it is, over three years to acknowledge that something is wrong; now we await a pathetic Portland Process to figure out what to about it.
PEOPLE PAY GOOD MONEY TO WATCH THE FED EX TRUCKS GO BY
My solution to this urban depression is to concentrate my walks on the multitude of bridges that cross the Willamette. I can get in a good 2-3 mile walk and just touch down in Downtown before turning around. These seven images were all captured on this walk, and with a little post-processing can illustrate one late afternoon in Portland. While there are probably no award winners here, it does illustrate what is available on a random walk in the city.
BIG PINK HOT SPOT
This image is an example of an urban micro-climate, in which a large building like Big Pink can actually change the lighting by reflecting the sun into the city. This kind of serendipity can enliven an ordinary walk; it is then my job to protect the exposure of various parts of the image to both emphasize these conditions and not to allow them to overwhelm the limits of the overall image.
DOUBLE VISION
Sometimes I notice things and then wonder what it all means. This natural double exposure reflects the strong sun falling on a raised nameplate that almost no one ever sees unless they are walking across the bridge under the right conditions. While it intrigues me, I wonder whether it might interest anyone else.
THE BLANKNESS OF URBAN LIFE
Here I am engaged in actually trying to create as mute an image as I can possibly capture on the Hawthorne Bridge. Sun and shadow, gray planes, a few sticks and some wires. Not one sign of human habitation. I'm only as cynical as I can manage knowing that there is a market for this kind of image, especially if it is taken with film. Not for me, but someone might like this exercise in urban ennui.
MY COLLECTION OF PYLONS IS DIFFERENT THAN YOURS
Then again, I always say that you are halfway there if you can keep it simple. This is just part of the floating dock at the East end of the Hawthorne. There are probably another dozen or so pylons, and a boat shed. I tried to isolate one line of pylons against the river while leaving out the shed, the bridges, and the river bank. While this kind of simplicity appeals to me, your mileage might vary. I often believe that isolating specific elements will concentrate the viewer's attention at the cost of a certain amount of context. In this case you either appreciate my collection of visual elements or wonder why I cared at all. Unless you frequent the Hawthorne Bridge, you would be hard-pressed to locate this image in Portland at all.
Go take a walk. You might be intrigued at what you will find. It doesn't really matter whether anyone else "gets It".
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OCTOBER 6, 2023
A HIDDEN OASIS BELOW THE CANYON RIM
This week I would like to take you to the Canyon de Chelly, which my family visited during our road trip around the Four Corners area in 2002. In many ways , this was the highlight of our trip, which is saying a lot when you also get to go to Bryce and the Grand Canyon, among other parks. The reason I enjoyed the canyon so much was that it was off the beaten track, unknown to me before our visit, and allowed a brief glimpse into a Native and very foreign culture.
TYPICAL HIGH DESERT ENVIRONMENT BEYOND THE CANYON
SOME OF THE BEST FARMLAND IN ARIZONA BELOW THE RIM
The Canyon de Chelly is deep in the heart of the Navajo Nation and one of the places on the reservation that feels very far away from the modern American landscape. In typical Anglo-Saxon fashion, it's name is pronounced "de shay" which is a bowdlerization of the original Navajo through Spanish with French spelling just to confuse anyone encountering the place for the first time. This crack in the high desert, whose canyon walls protect a micro-climate about 1000 feet and a world away below the flat desert above, has been inhabited by humans for more than 4000 years. The Navajo lived here hundreds of years after the Anasazi people first came here and occupied cliff dwellings in the canyon walls. These "Old Peoples" and then the Hopi lived in the Canyon before the Navajo used the Canyon as a hiding place and refuge from the US Cavalry until they were removed to other parts of the reservation in the 1860's. In many ways one of the spiritual centers of Navajo civilization, the canyon is now a National Monument, jointly administered as a National and Navajo Nation Park. It became a National Monument in 1931, and is run as a park by the Navajo Nation.
CONTRASTING ENVIRONMENTS
THE CANYON FROM ABOVE THE RIM
Today about forty extended Navajo families still live in the Canyon. The climate at the bottom of the canyon is like an oasis in the desert, with some of the best farmland in Arizona. The only way to tour the canyon is to take a Jeep tour with a Navajo guide. I rode shotgun in front and the meeting of cultures between Navajo and New York Jew was both strange and delightful. To call it an urban/rural split is to discount two entirely different world views. We revere our history in our built environment, even if its history might be just a second compared to a tenure like the Navajo's in the Southwest. But the Navajo do not preserve any of their built environment - their houses are not inherited, but burnt to the ground when someone dies. Their entire history is preserved as oral tradition, and this New Yorker could not fathom an area where two hundred thousand people lived with no real hint that anyone you did not literally meet that day actually lived in the place. Jewish mothers are legendary, but they do not run a matriarchal society where all property and wealth runs through the mother's line. When a man marries, he joins his wife's extended family, and it is considered a little radical if your mother-in-law will even speak directly to you. My guide could only lead the jeep tours because he had had married into his wife's extended family who farmed in the canyon. When we reached the canyon rim at the end of the tour he nicely pointed out his home in the far distance; I just as nicely pretended that I could see it in the midst of nothingness. He then declared that he was in the process of moving because "it was getting too crowded" near where he lived.
THE WHITE HOUSE RUINS DWARFED BY THE CANYON
THE WHITE HOUSE IS LITERALLY PART OF THE CANYON, ABANDONED FOR 700 YEARS
The White House ruins were built and abandoned by the Anasazi people around the year 1300. Only a White cultural historian could begin to explain why we call this cliff dwelling ruin the "White House" - our Navajo guide left us to our own devices since like most of his people he will not go anywhere near a remnant of the Old People.
SPIDER ROCK CATCHING SOME RAYS
Another highlight of the Park is the 700 foot tall Spider Rock, which is estimated to be 230 million years old. Named after Spider Woman, who taught the Navajo how to knit their exquisite blankets, it suddenly rises up at one bend of the canyon. Canyon de Chelly is such a hidden gem that you can't even see this rock beyond the canyon rim since its top is still 300 feet below the surrounding high desert.
TWO VIEWS OF TREES PROVIDE SHADE IN THE CANYON
I hope you have enjoyed these images of the Canyon, and I hope that you someday can find your way there yourselves.. My very limited understanding of the cultures of the Southwest has been heightened by the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman and now his daughter Anne Hillerman, who weave an incredible amount of Indian history and culture through their stories. Tony Hillerman was honored by the Navajo for his deep understanding and portrayal of their way of life. The only way to read these novels is alongside the historic and contemporary AAA map of "Indian Country" which can guide you through this landscape where GPS etc is still hit and miss at best.
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SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
BRYCE CANYON MONEY SHOT - BUT THERE IS A LOT MORE TO EXPLORE
A little over twenty years ago my family took an extended road trip in the Four Corners Area of the Southwest. We hopscotched around the incredible collection of National Parks, visiting a park, skipping one or two, and then visiting another. Unfortunately we have never had the chance to make a return visit to see the parks that we skipped. I would encourage you all to make the circuit, and not to skip Bryce Canyon under any circumstances.
THERE IS PLENTY OF FOREST BOTH WITHIN AND BEYOND THE RIM
THE CANYON SUDDENLY APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE IN A MORE MONOCHROMATIC LANDSCAPE
Bryce Canyon suddenly appears around a bend in the road as a vision from another planet, an amphitheater of mostly orange spires in the midst of the high dessert of pine forests and blue skies. These spires, known as hoodoos, come in an infinite variety of shapes usually only seen in Dr. Suess books, not in the real world. Then you come to Bryce, and are overwhelmed.
ROCKS TO MAKE YOU DOUBT YOUR EYES
YOU NEED TO TAME THE CONTRAST BOTH WINTHIN AND BEYOND THE CANYON
It is tempting to consider Bryce another one-hit wonder like the Grand Canyon or Crater Lake, but the remarkable thing about Bryce is that most visitors can easily explore the Canyon beyond the usual series of overlooks. You don't have to take your life in your hands on steep trails down into a river canyon like the Grand Canyon, or wait all Summer for the park's roads to open like a trip to Crater Lake. A series of short hikes can take you down into the hoodoos for a more personal experience than the beautiful, but distant one available on the rim.
A TOUCH OF CONTRASTING GREEN CAN REALLY HELP BALANCE THE ORANGE
BEYOND THE RIM
It is awfully hard to take a bad photo at Bryce, but you have got to stretch your visual muscles to find a series of images that will be of "your Bryce" as apposed to everyone else's. These images are a sample of what I saw on our one and only trip. The first image is the "money shot" of the amphitheater, featuring the hoodoo known as Thor's Hammer. This view is about as wide as my camera could go in the days before stitched digital images. My scanner allowed me to rescue these photos from my disorganized archives, and after a few minutes of post-processing they have emerged as remarkably better images than the 4 x 6 prints that came from the one-hour place.
THERE ARE OUTCROPPINGS BEYOND THE MAIN RIDGE
PATH BETWEEN THE HOODOOS
HOODOO DETAIL
Along with usual sharpening and some cropping, Bryce images benefit greatly from several Lightroom techniques. Your film's color balance was probably thrown off by all that orange, so it really helps to adjust the color balance of your newly scanned digital negatives. The light at mid-day when you are probably around the canyon is pretty harsh, so you must balance the light and shadows within the canyon as well as darkening any sky beyond the canyon rim. Sometimes the shadows within the canyon can only be balanced with brushwork since simpler graduated filters never met a hoodoo they could deal with. The Bryce Orange that is so memorable that you can get it from Benjamin Moore as a very bright paint color is so saturated in real life that it sometimes benefits from de-saturation to render it more "realistic" in a photograph.
TOWERS IN THE SKY
LARGE TREES CAN SEEM VERY SMALL IN THIS ENVIRONMENT
One thing that I have learnt in looking at images of Bryce, my own and much better ones by others, is that all that orange really sings only when you get some of the green trees in your images. This natural contrast on the color wheel seems to benefit almost any Bryce image in my humble opinion - and you can't do that twenty years later in post-processing. I have also found that attention to individual hoodoos can bring out their character beyond the overwhelming first impression that this landscape is just too weird to make any sense of - it is still just a rock after all, even if it is unlike any rock you might have ever seen. The great thing about Bryce is that a good dose of de-saturation can allow more attention to texture and detail way before you get to black and white, which can seem both ideological and absurd in such an overwhelmingly colorful environment.
THERE IS NO DENYING THAT SOMETIMES IT IS JUST WEIRD CITY
VERY HARD MUD
IT CAN STILL BE JUST AS WEIRD IN BLACK AND WHITE
I hope that you have enjoyed these images, and that you can get to Bryce Canyon someday. I sure hope to return in the future.
]]>SEPTEMBER 22, 2023
DUPONT CIRCLE CIRCA 1983
I'm not the most organized person, so when I went on another trip into my archives, and found some slide pages that were actually "catalogued", I was absolutely shocked. This week I will explore a number of images that date back over forty years and were all listed under "details." I think that they have less value as historic artifacts than as links to a young man who was about to become an architect, after another seven years of education and apprenticeship. these details show that my camera was already pointed at architectural details before I ever stayed up all night in architecture school. I would bet that after forty years these small vignettes have not changed one bit, which shows in some way how the built environment can persevere if we don't go out of our way to obliterate it. To my mind they also show how delightful a walk in the city can be if you slow down and enjoy the details around you.
This first image is nothing special to most of you, but it is a view of most of my afternoons in the early 1980's. I was a waiter in a wine bar in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. for seven years, and walked through this delightful piece of urban design most days before work. I worked here before, during , and after architecture school, somehow avoiding a pretty justified firing as a New York waiter in Washington, D.C. I survived only because I was "employee number three" after the two owners and fit in among a collection of "waitrons" that included writers, actors, opera singers, and other ne'er-do-wells. An architect was only another part of very eclectic mix, and I could write the list of desserts on the blackboard like nobody's business. Fran occasionally filled in as a bus girl, as long as she could was allowed to be "Inga" whose only English was"more bread?"
A WROUGHT IRON KIT OF PARTS AT AN ENTRY
I carried my first real camera, and then my first real SLR, on my walks around some of the older neighborhoods in D.C. like Dupont Circle and Georgetown, where Fran worked as a pastry chef in a fancy catering company. There were plenty of wonderful details to notice, most which seemed far too "highfalutin" for the architecture they were attached to. They alluded to the pride of early developers, as well as the fact that both architects and craftsman had come really cheap back in the day. This ornate little entrance stair on a row house is an example of a common tactic to make yet another row house kind of special. What intrigues me is that these seven steps are exactly the same walk up as the stairs as my 1911 bungalow 3000 miles away - the dimensions and material are completely different, but I get a basement and these people probably lived above a lower-level apartment.
BEAUTIFUL DETAILS THAT DEFY LOGIC BUT MAKE EVERY DAY BEAUTIFUL
What caught my eye, and still makes me smile forty years later, is that this more expansive entry stair in Georgetown shows such attention to detail in its design while not caring a whit that beautiful brick steps will probably have to be rebuilt every decade. I'm sure they are still there, although the fancy car parked next to them on the front terrace/parking space has no doubt been replaced a dozen times. Hopefully someone fixed that errant fence picket!
UNION STATION WINDOW WALL
I seemed to be drawn to the details even when I was touring a piece of architecture with a capital "A". Here is a detail of one of the incredible arched windows at the newly restored Union Station. I was fascinated by the grid of windows that allowed for and enlivened this early window wall. They are almost an exact match for similar monumental windows at the main building at Ellis Island in New York. I'm old enough that this building is again being restored.
PUBLIC ART THAT MIGHT NOT PASS MUSTER TODAY
This incredible sculpture is just one of the art pieces that embellished the Depression Era government office buildings known as the "Federal Triangle" off Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. I don't know about you, but somebody wasn't paying attention when this nearly homoerotic horse and wrangler greeted government workers every day.
PLAYING WITH SCALE ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
Sometimes Robert Venturi and his firm could be too clever by half, but this plaza along Pennsylvania Avenue, which shows the plans of the Capitol and the White House in sight of the buildings themselves is probably the best way anyone ever actually explained and illustrated L'Enfant's plan of the new Capital city. Amidst all of the monuments of Washington it is probably still my favorite.
DETAILS FOR THE PEOPLE!
This downspout was a few feet from the garden apartment row house where Fran and I, and then Benjamin, lived in Arlington outside of D.C. This downspout shows the attention to detail that such a modest apartment complex could contain if people cared about such things as apartments for workers. This development was built to accommodate some of the first workers at the new Pentagon, a few miles away by dirt(!) road. When Fran and I and others were insulted by the "inside price" that a developer offered us to buy our new condo, we successfully created the first affordable housing project in Northern Virginia. Much to the horror of our middle class neighborhood, Fran and I, a waiter/architecture student and a pastry chef, were the richest tenants among 140 units, which still included a dozen people who had moved in forty years earlier. In doing my research, I found the original plans and realized that our courtyards, which resembled college quads, were supposed to be parking lots that the original developer had "forgotten" to build. Our new affordable rent rose from $200 to $800 a month, but we kept our apartment.
DETAILS BY A MASTER
On to some famous architecture that I visited in those years when I was broadening my "architecture vocabulary". These two images are from two houses by Frank Lloyd Wright. One was a "modest" home built near D.C. contemporary with our apartment complex. This was an example of a "Usonian" house which Wright promised would cost only $5000 to build. Yes, it like most of its cousins ended up more likely in the low teens, but you did get to live in small house by Frank Lloyd Wright. I would spend next thirty-five years trying to convince my clients that they deserved such attention to detail, and never got a chance to build a "window wall" of french doors like the one shown here.
SOMETIMES A WINDOW IS NOT JUST A WINDOW
This image is a detail of one of the most famous houses in the world, Falling Water. I infamously once drove a tourist board employee to near tears when I insisted that she must be mistaken when I insisted that Falling Water was just outside of Scranton when it is really located near Pittsburgh. Yes, it is built over a waterfall, but what impressed me most was this window wall, built of a multitude of small industrial casement windows. Not only were they built into the adjacent stone wall without any frames, but he had the guts to paint them a wild red-orange! Forty years after our visit we painted our bungalow a similar shade.
I hope you have enjoyed this walk down memory lane. Remember that not only is "God in the details", but some of our the best recollections of our past can be found there.
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SEPTEMBER 15, 2023
HARD NOT TO BE IMPRESSED FOR THE FIRST TIME, AND FOREVER, BY A CITY SET IN SUCH A PLACE
Thirty-nine years ago, in 1984, Fran and I visited San Francisco for the very first time as newlyweds. This morning I explored, revisited, and attempted to improve some of the images I captured on that trip. There is an old photographic adage that every photograph over fifty years old is inherently interesting. I'm getting old, and let me tell you that these images from nearly four decades ago are pretty close to making that mark. They reveal both the timeless and the historic nature of one trip to the "city on the bay." They are not award-winners, but they are not half-bad either, and were improved immeasurably by a few minutes of post-processing forty years after the fact.
HUSTLE AND BUSTLE AND STRANGE STREET NAMES
Like most New Yorker's I immediately fell in love with the place after I got over the fact that it was clearly insane to have overlaid the street grid I was used to over a multitude of gigantic hills. The city was so clearly spectacular, seemingly familiar in it's density, but with enough quirks that even a newcomer could appreciate its charm. We stayed in an old-fashioned hotel with an elevator so small that we each had to go up separately with our bags. Then we were puzzled by the double-hung windows that seemed upside down - until we realized that since there were no bugs, hence no screens, that you could not be allowed to open the bottom sash a dozen flights up.
CLASSICAL FOLLIES
AND UNIQUE NEI9GHBORHOODS
We had a wonderful time, and looking back on it I remember how just plain lucky we were even though we had planned and planned the trip out, including trips North to the Wine Country. I had been a waiter in a wine bar for longer than I had been in architecture school, so I of course had to find some obscure wineries to tour. So after too much driving we ended up in a restaurant in the country, allowed to have lunch even though the crew was already having their staff meal at the next table. Without really knowing what we were doing, we had lunch at The French Laundry, soon to be one of the most famous restaurants in America. We had already somehow managed to eat at Chez Panisse, where no matter how much I was impressed by the food i was just amazed at the open kitchen twenty feet from our table, with no drama or cursing in evidence.
THE BEACH AT THE END OF THE WORLD, OR AT LEAST AT THE END OF THE "N JUDAH" TRANSIT LINE.
Fran had to deal with some architectural pilgrimages as well, which she was rather game for - after all she had married an architect, even though she had "known" what she was getting into, according to my best professor at school. So we climbed the step streets up the hills surrounding the Coit Tower, made famous by Armistead Maupin. We drove out to the Sea Ranch to view a resort that was just short of a cult retreat. I didn't have the guts to knock on the door and meet Charles Moore but it was still worth it. I did get to drive him back and forth to the airport a few years later, and the only famous architect that ever met turned out to be a very nice man.
THE MAIN CONDO BUILDING AT SEA RANCH
A WINERY VISIT - I THINK IT WAS "CLOS DE BOIS"
AN ORDINARY STREET IN THE SUNSET - BUT LOOK AT THOSE CARS! DAD, WHAT IS A MOVIE RENTAL?
All these years later a lot of water has run under the bridge in San Francisco, which is reputed to be in a "death spiral" even worse than Portland's. But i still wouldn't bet against it, since it has survived an earthquake, a dot.com boom and bust, a Great Recession, and a Pandemic since our first visit. Some of these images show how spectacular it was and still is, while others feel like historical artifacts. The street scenes are familiar, but look at those cars! The only one that I recognize as something that exists today is the old Volvo like the one that is parked around the corner from my bungalow.
I THOUGHT YOUR PEOPLE DIDN'T TRAVEL MUCH.
THE SAME GOOFY SMILE, BUT LOOK AT THOSE GLASSES!
The two young people pictured pretty much look the same - at least Fran does. My facial hair styling did not survive this trip, after one coffee cart barista declared that he hadn't thought that "my people" traveled that much. My Amish period was over. Fran looks the same, at least to me, but her hair is even longer. And look at those glasses - my hippy chick is still going strong!
]]>SEPTEMBER 8,2023
THE CHARM OF ROME IS THAT EACH BIG STREET LEADS TO A SMALLER STREET WHERE YOU MUST ABANDON THE CAR AND PROCEED ON FOOT BEFORE YOU GET TO YET ANOTHER CHURCH TWO BLOCKS AWAY.
This week I would like to continue discussing how you can make your travel images a little more personal. We all have faced the "problem" of our travel photos looking like more of the same photos we have already seen multiple times on Instagram. We are in new and strange places, bombarded with visual excitement, and unsure of how to react and create imagery that will reflect our own view of the world. Last week I suggested focusing on details; this week I will try to extoll the possibilities of concentrating on the ordinary, quiet, and typical streets of the new cities that you are meeting for the first time.
SIENNA, ITALY'S LARGEST "HILL TOWN", DOESN'T EVEN PRETEND TO HAVE REAL STREETS FOR CARS.
In my world this is not "street" photography, in that I remain much too intimidated to actually make images of strangers. Let's call these "streetscapes" or "urban landscapes", where my landscape photography meets my preferred urban environment. Of course there is considerable overlap with architectural photography and my interest in details, but here I try to illustrate the form of the street. What is it like to walk down these streets, and how is it different from walking in Portland? Can my imagery bring the viewer in contact with an urban environment that they might have never experienced? Or remind them of what they loved and experienced themselves in Italy?
TABACCHI
The Italian streetscape, even in Rome, contains hints that this is not our version of city life. This ubiquitous sign confused me, even though I knew that Italians still smoked way too much. Then my friend who lived in Rome took me on the ordinary route to the tram. First we had to stop for an espresso in a narrow storefront with no seats made totally out of chrome. Then it was time to go the tobacconist, which really existed to sell tram tickets as well as cigarettes. Only then would you make your way to the tram stop. There was no rush to catch your tram because you could see both the one you had just missed and the one that you could catch next - they literally came every two minutes.
THESE STREETS THEN DEVOLVE INTO ALLEYS THAT YOU SHARE WITH NEIGHBORS.
In concentrating on the streetscape, I try to avoid the usual monumental architecture we all came to see and photograph. Of course I give those subjects a try, but I realize that it is very difficult to have a "new" take on the Vatican, for instance, especially if you are seeing it for the first time. That kind of visual exploration is probably best left to photographers who have lived in these places for a very long time. So in these images I try to stay away from the famous buildings, and even the famous parks or squares, but to try to illustrate the city with an image of an ordinary street. I hope to illustrate Italy, but not the Italy that everyone else has seen over and over. I was here, and I noticed something, and I hope to show it to you, and elicit a response. I try to do that all of the time, but in my travel images I place renewed emphasis on avoiding the obvious.
THE MOST IMPORTANT FACADE OF A BUILDING MIGHT NOT EVEN BE ON THE STREET, BUT HIDDEN IN A COURTYARD.
The Italian street is so different from America in that it predates the automobile by multiple centuries, and usually makes almost no attempt to accommodate the automobile in any way that might be characterized as rational. Even when it tries to include cars it runs into the anarchist strain in Italian life. The Italian way of coping with traffic that includes streetcars, taxies, Vespas, bicycles, and pedestrians that run the gamut from models to nuns is probably more closely related to the streets of the early Twentieth Century Lower East Side of New York than any street we are familiar with today. What I try to show in my studies of the smaller and quieter side of the Italian city is the way the absence of the grid teases and delights the walker, only slowly revealing what is around the bend - even if it is a major monument of global architectural history. The organic nature of these streets is further compounded by their overwhelming verticality. I grew up with the "canyons" of New York, but they are nothing like centuries-old five-story piles of stucco and stone that line "streets" that are maybe a dozen feet wide. At least you are probably not going to be pelted with the contents of a bed pan anymore, but this is not the American street of sidewalks and traffic controls. Even when you walk alone, you know that the street is for pedestrians like you since anything else will cause untold problems and might even be dangerous.
ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY, RIGHT ON THE STREET
This little covered arcade in Florence just happens to be one of the first and most important architectural artifacts of the Renaissance. It was the revolutionary front facade of the first hospital in the city state. I recognized it from my architectural history books, but I am an architect. More importantly for most pedestrians, after more than five hundred years, it still kept the rain off their heads as they walked through the neighborhood.
And then you get to Venice. Once you get over the fact that the streets are really waterways, you then discover that you will be walking on the sides of those canals on streets that lead to thousands of little bridges and then to dead ends that are someone's front door. You will get lost even if you know exactly where you are going. For me the charm is not the Grand Canal, but the little side canals and the walks that lead to the inevitable doubling back. Walking around this Venice is the only way to escape the Disneyland of the main streets and piazzas. The charm is that once you get lost you will be alone, and might experience the "real" Venice you are dreaming of, even though you might be only one hundred feet away from thousands of fellow travelers.
BACK STREET, CANAL, AND BRIDGE IN VENICE, WITH HUMBLE ROWBOATS AND TOURIST GONDOLAS]
VIEW OF A SMALL CANAL FROM A BRIDGE - WHAT'S AROUND THE BEND?
ANOTHER BRIDGE AND MORE APARTMENTS, BUT YOU CAN'T GET THERE UNLESS YOU HAVE A BOAT, OR YOU DOUBLE BACK.
A TYPICAL VENETIAN DEAD END WHERE YOU EITHER KNOW SOMEONE WHO LIVES THERE, OR SHEEPISHLY TURN AROUND AND RETRACE YOUR STEPS.
One of the most wonderful aspects of walking in such historic environments is that sometimes you don't even know what is about to happen unless you are staring at your map instead of watching your step.
WHEN'S THE LAST TIME YOU TRIED TO PARK NEXT PIECE OF WORLD HISTORY?
This is a small street about a block away from the piazza in front of one of the most important buildings in the architecture of Western civilization, The Pantheon from Ancient Rome. This Temple of All of the Gods is more than two thousand years old, and the piazza must slope down almost a story because the front door is still at the level of the street before those two thousand years of dust and Romans filled in the surrounding city. But from a block away it is just part of the present-day city.
AND THEN JUST LIKE THAT, YOU ARE IN ANCIENT ROME.
I hope you have enjoyed walking down some streets in Italy. These scenes are more than twenty years old, but I am confident that they have not really changed at all. The images have all benefited from post processing since the differences in light levels along these narrow streets are similar to those found in a forest. I routinely had to really raise the shadows, while still keeping some level of "murkiness" to maintain the reality of the street. Often I found that a black and white conversion led to a more realistic image despite the lack of color. I encourage you to try your hand at imagery of the ordinary streets even when you travel to a very new urban environment.
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SEPTEMBER1,2023
ROMAN LIGHT ENLIVENS ITALIAN FLOWERS, SHUTTERS AND STUCCO
This week i would like to illustrate how you can create a unique portfolio from your travel snapshots, even two decades after the fact. While it certainly helps if you actually shoot to a theme, this is beyond the attention span of most photographers. This is especially true when we travel to far-flung places for the first and unfortunately , maybe the last time. We are so overwhelmed by sensory overload and the unfamiliarity of our surroundings that it is sometimes pretty remarkable that we can even take different, much less unique images than all of the tourists that have proceeded us. Yet in some ways Instagram has in fact made this a little easier, in that we have mostly seen all these places already, and there is less need to take shots that are overly familiar, even if you yourself have never taken them. We have now come full circle from the days when every shot seemed to be a verification that you had actually been there - now your presence might be the only thing that distinguishes your image.
A PERFECTLY ORDINARY PALAZZO JUST LIKE THE ONE ACROSS THE STREET.
But we must not give in to just pursuing the "money shot" that everyone else has already taken. If you have enough faith in your "eye", the way you usually make sense of the world, then you can just go with the flow and try to take "your shots" no matter where you are. Chances are that you will return with images that are more representative of your take on a very wonderful but unfamiliar environment. Through the wonders of post-processing, you can even discover a theme many years after you originally captured a set of images.
AN ORDINARY HOUSE IN VENICE WITH AN EXTRAORDINARY BALCONY AND SHUTTERS TO DIE FOR.
THIS BALCONY ENNOBLES ANY HUMAN BEING LUCKY ENOUGH TO WALK THROUGH THE DOOR.
Before the turn of the Century (how's that for feeling old?) Fran and I had the privilege to spend three weeks in Italy on the pilgrimage through mostly Rome, Florence, and Venice. Yesterday I spent an hour looking through my images of that trip for the first time in several years; I then selected few dozen prints to scan so that I could see what I could make of them after so long a time. What I discovered was that the images that had an impact, even though I had never before felt that they were "special", were those that concentrated on ordinary sights in these very special cities. While there are images from some "landmarks" I would be hard-pressed to recall the exact sites beyond the placement in each city. This week I would like to show images that focus on what struck me as the "details" of Italian life beyond the great monuments and art that we had come to see.
EXTERIOR STAIR CENTURIES OLD AT A PAPAL PALACE.
WHILE YOU WALK UP THE STAIRS YOU CAN LEARN THE TIME, WAY BEFORE ANYONE WORE A WATCH.
These details show how impressed I was with the craftsmanship that seemed to be an inherent part of Italian life - the feeling that if it was worth doing at all, it was worth doing well. This applied to laying brick as much as creating art, which only seemed to prove that laying brick could be an art. Everyone seemed to be in an unspoken pursuit to "show off" how well they could do something, daring you to try to ignore how much they cared.
AN ORDINARY STRUCTURE WITH AN INCREDIBLE ROOF - WHO SAID ALL OF YOUR ROOF TILES HAD TO BE THE SAME?
Beyond the exhibited craftsmanship was the attention to detail. There didn't seem to be anything unworthy of attempting to be "special", which struck this American weary of catalogs and standard details as absolutely wonderful. This concentration, sometimes bordering on O.C.D, made the anarchic qualities of Italy even more charming if undecipherable.
OKAY, YOU CREATE ONE OF THE MOST INCREDIBLE PIAZZAS IN ITALY. IT COVERS ACRES, SLOPES A FULL STORY FROM ONE END TO ANOTHER, AND CAN HOST A HORSE RACE A FEW TIMES A YEAR. SO WHY WOULDN'T YOU CHOOSE AN ELABORATE BRICK PATTERN WHILE YOU'RE AT IT?
It only helped that most of these details I was seeing for the first time had existed for many hundreds of years. The textures and age of these artifacts were all the more unbelievable in that they were not in some museum but were just part of ordinary life. Even if they had once been an exhibit of wealth and power, after dozens of lifetimes they were just part of the city's daily life, available to anyone with the time to take a look.
THIS STRUCTURE IS SO NOBLE THAT ITS BRICK WILL SUFFICE, NAKED OF THE MARBLE AND STONEWORK THAT WAS PROBABLY ONCE THERE.
In the end this is what struck me as the most important part of what I was seeing. The fact is that most of these details have been around so long that they have been saved and restored and preserved multiple times. They are part of Italy's cultural heritage. Subsequent generations have shown as much pride in these details as the original craftsman did in creating them many hundreds of years ago.
LOOK AT THAT GARDEN RAILING! NOT TO MENTION THE WISTERIA.
I would encourage you to take your own look back through your archives. My theme might be architectural details; yours might be food, landscapes, or faces. All that matters is that I believe you will find that these images are far more meaningful than yet another landmark, even if it takes you years to rediscover them.
CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT SOMEONE ONCE THOUGHT THAT THEIR BALCONY RAILING OBVIOUSLY SHOULD BE HELD UP BY A TORTOISE BASE?
AUGUST 23,2023
ELUSIVE SUN BREAK ON THE SOUTHERN OREGON COAST
This week I would like to explore some images from a trip I took with my family up and down the Oregon Coast during Spring Break in 1997. We had been in Oregon for almost five years, but this trip proved how we were still rookies when it came to traveling around the state. I had rigorously planned our trip, complete with reservations at campgrounds all along the coast, but we had a great time despite all of my planning, which was almost completely unnecessary or even ludicrous. The notion that we would be camping on the Coast in early Spring was clearly a crazy idea that was reinforced most every night throughout the week. We were mostly alone, sharing the campgrounds with a few sane people in RVs. Since it got dark right around 5:00 we mostly ate in the dark, especially since we could barely get a fire started even if it wasn't raining. I can't really remember ever feeling so constantly wet, and ended up staying at some cheap motels along the way to preserve our sanity.
HEADLAND OVERLOOK
SOLITARY SEA STACK ON THE BEACH
Yet we still had a great time, since we were all in this together, and the Coast is just so beautiful, even in the rain. Although come to think of it this trip inaugurated our subsequent Spring Break tradition of epic driving vacations with just Dad and Benjamin, with Fran enjoying a break at home. I also remember that this trip was the start of Benjamin's exploration of sarcasm. We drove into yet another empty campground in the rain searching for our reserved site, Benjamin came back to the car after a reconnaissance confidently declaring that it really didn't matter since our chosen site was completely under water.
ROCKS ON THE COAST AND BEYOND
THE EVER-PRESENT MARINE LAYER JUST OFF THE COAST
The Oregon Coast gets more and more spectacular the further South you travel even though the Northern Coast is renowned world-wide. Some of this is just because of familiarity, since the Southern Coast is really quite a trip from Portland, especially if you drive along 101 on the Coast. While this route is certainly beautiful, and promises a new beach every few miles, you just have to get used to the idea that you'll be going 30 mph as much time as you get up to 60 mph. Distances seem to infinitely expand. The payoff is that the further South you go the emptier the beaches get, and more importantly they seem to get even more picturesque the closer you get to California.
OUR SUNSETS ARE JUST DIFFERENT, AND IN SOME WAYS MORE DRAMATIC
These images were all forgotten in my archives for more than 25 years. They all were vastly improved after just a few minutes of post-processing which rescued them from the mediocrity of the one-hour photo print. It is amazing what a revised white balance, some true blacks, a little mid-tone contrast and cursory sharpening can do for an image. I also cropped with abandon, either creating panoramas out of ordinary seascapes with too much sky, or focusing on the details in too-wide landscapes. The weather also encouraged a monochrome conversion in some cases, although the changes in white balance and exposure usually reveled that the Coast, even in the rain, was a lot more colorful than the original snapshot would lead you to believe.
SHARK'S TOOTH SEA STACK AT HIGH TIDE
WHEN DOES A SEA STACK BECOME AN ISLAND?
After 25 years I really have no real idea of the exact location of most of these images. I will say that I have always recommend that everyone try to stop for awhile at Bandon, Shore Acres, and Samuel Boardman State Park, among others. These images, and the Coast, seem timeless. After rescuing these images from my archives it occurs to me that a return trip down the Coast would be a great idea. Maybe just not at Easter.
REQUISITE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC RED PONCHOS HIGHLIGHT THAT IT'S JUST NOT A WALK ON THE BEACH
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AUGUST 18,2023
DANGEROUS BEAUTY
This week I'd like to go back nearly thirty years ago to my second and last trip to Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone is truly like no place else on Earth, and is so weird and beautiful that it is very hard to capture in photographs. As usual in my forays in my archives I have concluded that while I'm in no danger of appearing in National Geographic, I was a lot better than I thought I was way back then. A little post-processing goes a long way.
POOLS, GEYSERS, AND FUMES, OH MY!
IT'S NOT REALLY CLEAR WHY THE POOL IS OVER THERE INSTEAD OF RIGHT UNDER YOUR FEET
These images concentrate on the unique thermal pools in the park that are as compelling as they are dangerous. Crystal clear and wildly colored, they tempt closer inspection than is really safe. The real dangerous clues are the steam coming out of them, which does appear in images that cannot convey the awful smell that is present in this environment. It's like the commercial for the gas company that warns of the smell of rotten eggs, but one hundred times worse.
A POOL IN THE FOREST ENVIRONMENT
These pools highlight my images since I felt that no matter how the park was clearly beautiful, they were the clue that something terribly wrong was going on just below the surface. They seemed to intrude on most areas of the park, even right next to Yellowstone Lake, and dominated other areas which were clearly not meant for extended hikes. I myself found the pools much more compelling than the geysers, which just seemed like intermittent fountains in comparison. To each his own.
A SMALL POOL RIGHT NEXT TO A LARGE LAKE OF MANY COLORS, 7300 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL
The most important feature of Yellowstone in my opinion is its immense size and wildly varied environments. As opposed to many natural wonders that contain one or even several "money" shots, Yellowstone rewards continuous investigation. Forest fires larger than several States seemed to not really mar the park when we visited, and I'm sure that their effects are now just distant memories.
LAVA POOLS BORDERING YELLOWSTONE LAKE
I would of course encourage you to visit or revisit Yellowstone, but more importantly I once again encourage you to visit your photo archives in order to discover how your long-ago efforts actually captured your experience. Post-processing cannot rescue "bad" photos, but in my experience it can clearly reveal the gems that were obscured by the indifferent industrial photo processing of the past. Your images deserve better, and short of returning to wonderful places like Yellowstone, it's the best way to recapture the wonder of traveling.
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AUGUST 11,2023
SOMEWHERE INCREDIBLE IN IDAHO
This week's excursion into my photo archives revealed two unexpected revelations about my photography. One was that I was perfectly capable of capturing standard horizontally-oriented landscape images, even though that is not my usual modus operandi. The other was that fine landscape images can be captured literally from the side of the road. I have utmost respect for my usual crew on You Tube who are "proper" landscape photographers, journeying to far-flung locations before dawn. These images all entailed a hike of less than a stroll from my car as I drove towards Wyoming more than 25 years ago. They prove, at least to yours truly, that sometimes just driving through epic landscapes is more than enough effort required to find a chance to create a fine landscape image. In fact the only thing you have to do is have enough energy to stop the car and stretch your legs.
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK, PERHAPS IN EASTERN OREGON
All of these images were stuck in my archives for all of this time, the victims of desultory one-hour photo processing. I had never considered them worthy of a second glance, and their continued existence as 4x6 prints is due more to my lack of organizational energy than archival rectitude. Less than an hour of scanning and post-processing rescued them from their obscurity. While there might not be any award winners here, they are not half-bad and certainly show off parts of the West that can lift your spirits right by the side of the road, even if you can't believe anyone ever built a road so far from civilization. What is interesting is that frequently the only sign of man is actually the road you are driving on; it is not dangerous to just stop, since you haven't seen another car for the last hour.
AGRICULTURAL LAND NEAR THE IDAHO WILDERNESS
The first few images show the road less traveled through Eastern Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming on the way to the Grand Tetons. It was the first trip into the Outback since our original journey down our Oregon Trail to Portland a few years before. We looked forward to staying at a ski condominium this time instead of our little battered tent, but many days on the road were still required to get there. I think it is amazing that these views were just off the side of those roads.
SOMEONE OWNS THESE COWS, BUT THE RANCH MIGHT BE BIGGER THAN SOME STATES IN NEW ENGLAND
SOMEONE HAS A BEEF WITH TRUCKS, HILLS, OR JUST TRAFFIC SIGNS IN GENERAL?
Most of my post-processing was my standard workflow of increasing the contrast, sharpening the image, and checking the white balance. Frequently a judicious crop to emphasize the horizontal nature of "the road" improved the image way beyond its original form. Several of the images worked better in black and white.
GRAND TETONS PANORAMA; THAT RED BARN IS SLIGHTLY TO THE LEFT
THE MAJESTY OF THE MOUNTAINS IS MATCHED BY THE SKIES
When we arrived at Grand Tetons National Park my forays only slightly off the road continued to achieve pretty epic views that challenged those scenes only available after hours of hiking. Sometimes the mere act of cropping away the road I was standing near was enough to elevate the image. Even the Jenny Lake reflection image was shot right off the parking lot.
JENNY LAKE RIGHT OFF THE ROAD
My message is that the pursuit of the landscape does not require superhuman effort. If you want to take wonderful images right off the side of the road, then the first thing to do is to try to find more interesting roads.
THIS STORM DID NOT LOOK AT ALL REALISTIC IN COLOR, BUT YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT'S ON THE WAY.
AUGUST 4, 2023
BADLANDS VISTA
Thirty-one years ago my young family, soon to be characterized by our first friends in Portland as "the bold and the stupid", traveled our version of the Oregon Trail from Washington, D.C. to Portland. These images are my first impressions of our first encounter with the "real West", the Badlands of South Dakota. We had been on the road for a week or so, but Iowa and Nebraska, while certainly different, in no way prepared us for the beauty, the alien landscapes, and the shear emptiness of what was to come.
YOU HAVE GOT TO HAND IT THIS TREE - YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT IN THIS PLACE!
YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE
WANDERING AROUND THE BADLANDS
We had a very limited understanding of the meaning of "The Badlands", since rural America already had impressed us as extremely different from our East Coast environments. Then we met the first place that even Native Americans and then settlers realized was not really fit for human habitation. It was a shock to our systems. We were used to small mountains and forests that lacked people mostly because they were far away, but these lunar landscapes mocked any people that might even cross them, much less civilize them. The settlers that had tried clearly lacked any sense way beyond refusing advice from the natives who had long ago decided that the Badlands were not worth the effort.
TRAILS IN THE BADLANDS ARE SOMETIMES ASPIRATIONAL
Fran immediately realized that she should have been a geologist rather than an English major. She absolutely loved what most would characterize as shear desolation. We set up our campsite, and a few days of exploration and wonder began. It took awhile to realize that our campground was the largest collection of people in the entire area. It felt less like a park than the end of the world. The first time we parked and four-year old Benjamin scampered to an overlook probably hundreds of feet high, with no pretense of a guardrail, was our first clue that we certainly "were not in Kansas anymore."
ANOTHER TURN IN THE TRAIL TOWARDS YET ANOTHER GULLY
FRAN AND BENJAMIN EXPLORE THE PRAIRIE SURROUNDING THE BADLANDS
A few days in we experienced our first "cold front." As I was pumping gas I realized that the temperature had seemed to drop nearly ten degrees in the time it took me to fill the tank. When we got to our campground, it was mostly gone. Dozens of tents and camping equipment were scattered over a quarter a mile in all directions. Somehow our "home" held on by one tent stake, and we packed up and skedaddled to a hotel that was rumored to exist about thirty miles away. The surreal night concluded with a wonderful dinner of Indian Flatbread under a raving review on the wall of the restaurant from the New York Times.
BADLANDS PANORAMA
We would continue on for another thousand miles, enjoying the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier before we arrived in Portland thirty-one years ago on October 1, 1992. Fran agreed that we could rent an apartment on the campus of Portland State with the proviso that she would kill me if it wasn't safe. For the next six months we introduced ourselves to Portland. Fran negotiated Psycho Safeway and our tiny kitchen, with a view of Mt. Hood! Benjamin half-way believed that the South Park Blocks were his backyard. I reveled in the views from the terraces of the apartments on the floor above ours that never rented and were my personal retreat via a fire escape at the end of our hall. Fortunately my wife somehow convinced the bank that we could actually buy a house and our Downtown idyll ended after we moved to our 1911 Bungalow where I am writing this essay.
A VIEW TO THE EAST FROM OUR APARTMENT'S "BORROWED " TERRACE
If you ever get a chance to visit the Badlands I heartily recommend you do so. In fact any road trip across this incredible country is not to be missed.
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JULY 28, 2023
A VIEW OF ONE PORTION OF "THE PALISADES" LITERALLY FROM THE PARKING AREA.
This week I would like to finish up my survey of our recent trip to the John Day National Monument in Central Oregon. We'll concentrate on the least visited part of the park, the "Clarno Unit", which even the park guide characterizes as in "the middle of nowhere." It is easy to see why this area is frequently overlooked, since it is close to two hours away from the Painted Hills. Despite its obscurity, we found a trip to the site rewarding, as long as you carefully plan your visit.
THESE ROCKS FELL SOMETIME IN THE LAST FEW MILLION YEARS
I recommend a visit on the way to the rest of the park from Portland. It will not seem so far out of the way as a stop on the way to the main portions of the park, and can be a very nice stop on a day's drive from Portland, about four hours from the city. After an hour or two exploring, another two hours will get you to Mitchell's collection of places to stay near the Painted Hills. We stopped here on the way back home, which set up a very long drive with almost no reasonable stops all the way back to Portland. If you choose to stay in Fossil instead of Mitchell you could make this a day trip, since it's only 18 miles to Fossil.
DETAIL OF ROCKS ON THE RIGHT PORTION OF PANORAMA BELOW.
The highlight of this area is the mile-long outcropping along a cliff edge known as "The Palisades", which could be the remains of a credible castle if that castle was a mud flow 30-40 million years old. The only way to really appreciate the extent of the ridge is from an aerial image, since the outcropping is curved and extends pretty far from the parking area/picnic shelter that is the only real evidence of the park's existence, beyond some signs and three short trails. These trails lead up to the cliff face where you can get a closer view of the cliffs and appreciate their size in a different way than the overall panoramic view from the start of the trail. The choice is similar to the view from court side or the cheap seats in the Rose Garden. There is absolutely no shade, with only a few trees near the cliff as a testament to nature's refusal to admit that the high Desert can sustain anything but sagebrush.
2:1 PANORAMA OF JUST ONE PORTION OF THE PALISADES
The Palisades need to be loved for their towers, since they lack the colors of the Painted Hills further down the road. My solution was to concentrate on several sections of the ridge, striving for larger details, before I accepted the challenge of stitching together panoramic views. Upon seeing aerial views after the fact, I now realize that the curve of the cliff introduces distortion that precludes a panoramic view of the entire Palisades. Stitching will simulate a wider view of the cliff, but since you can't see the whole thing even when you are there, it's pretty hard for your camera to capture it all.
MONOCHROME RENDITIONS EMPHASIZE DETAIL AND TEXTURES. WE INSTANTLY ACCEPT THESE VERY ABSTRACT IMAGES AS REALISTIC.
The lack of color allows for exploration in black and white, which can seem close to perverse at the Painted Hills. As usual black and white can allow for more contrast, sharpening, and vignetting that would seem unrealistic in a color image. The white skies are very evocative of early Western imagery when film was not responsive to blue skies. Since the desert rocks are much darker than the skies, it is pretty hard to darken the skies without completely reversing the expected dark/light relationships of the natural world. These geologic vistas are other worldly as it is.
ANOTHER PORTION OF THE PAISADES
In my visit to this area it was very hard to deal with geological time as opposed to the human concept of time. You are looking at millions of years of mud flows that occurred amid vastly different climates in the same place. Then consider that millions of years of erosion by wind and very occasional rain sculpted these mud flows into what humans could ponder for just 10,000 years or so. One of the few signs on the portion of the trail that we traversed put it succinctly - "every few feet you walk toward the Palisades constitutes the passage of a million years." The photographs you can take at these sites, depending on how you process them, could have been captured at any time during the history of the photographic medium. It's not very hard to capture an image that would be very similar to the first wet glass plate taken during the first photographic survey of these "Wonders of the West" in the late Nineteenth Century.
NINETEENTH CENTURY VIEW, AVAILABLE TODAY!
We really enjoyed the entire John Day National Monument experience. Upon further research, I realized that the up close and personal views I had remembered at the Painted Hills were from the Painted Cove Trail a few miles beyond the "OH MY GOD" viewpoints we concentrated on this trip. I really recommend visiting this trail. The other must is a visit to Dayville, a hamlet east of Mitchell that makes Mitchell look like Paris. But a visit is required to the lone cafe, which serves a credible lunch which is concluded with a world-class collection of pies that will prompt a return trip. Do not miss this dessert in the High Desert.
YOU CAN'T HEAR THE WARNING ON THE TRAIL, BUT I CERTAINLY DID. RIGHT OF WAY GOES TO RATTLESNAKES.
A few last words on photographing this area. When you are so off the grid it is tempting to just try to get the "money shot" that you've already seen on Instagram. The only trouble is that you have already seen it. Enjoy your visit, certainly take it, but really try to find your take on the experience, which would ensure a memory unavailable on Instagram.
MERE PERVERSITY, OR MY IDIOSYNCRATIC INTERPRETATION? THE PAINTED HILLS IN GLORIOUS BLACK AND WHITE.
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JULY 21, 2023
PAINTED HILLS PANORAMA #1 , 5 SHOTS, STANDARD 2:3 CROP BUT SIGNIFICANTLY WIDER THAN STANDARD IMAGE, YET WITH MORE BACKGROUND AND ESPECIALLY MORE FOREGROUND
I took off last week to be with my son's family as they visited Fran and I in Portland. The other reason was that this week's blog post took an inordinate time to put together, as it depended on my stitching together panoramas from our visit to the Painted Hills at the end of May. Stitching together panoramas has opened an entirely new facet of my landscape photography, but there is no doubt that there is a learning curve, and that the process will tax even the most powerful computers out there. It will even increase your coffee consumption as you wait out your computer's efforts to put together such large files, which can sometimes exceed 1 Megabyte for a single image.
THE STANDARD "MONEY SHOT", ONE 3:2 STANDARD IMAGE
We will look at several examples of panoramas from this trip, discuss their creation, and seek to come to some consensus on their value versus a standard one shot image. The first thing to say is that the process is not that hard, since the computer is doing most of the work. In the field the photographer is following some simple rules. As you pick a viewpoint, take a series of images revolving around that fixed position, overlapping about a third as you pivot your camera across the desired field of view. You do not need a tripod, although it couldn't hurt, and you will have less of the natural overall angle that even a conscientious natural pivot will create. But hand held is more than OK, as you will probably be creating a wider panorama than you will actually want to view or print. I've come to believe that somewhere between 4 and 7 images are more than enough. Two important points require you to turn off your automatic functions. First determine your desired focus point, which will probably be near infinity anyway. You do not want your camera changing your focus point as you pivot around the view. The same goes for auto exposure. As you scan the anticipated field of view, pick an exposure that will not blow out the highlights on the brightest part of the panorama and then turn off auto exposure so that your dumb camera doesn't try to change the exposure across the scene. Remove your polarizing filter, since your pivot might be wide enough that your filter will disconcertingly change the sky's appearance as you change your relationship with the sun.
PAINTED HILLS PANORAMA #2 - 2:1 PANORAMA GETS WIDER, LOSES BACKGROUND, KEEPS FOREGROUND
This is not as hard as I make it sound even when I am telling you it is easy. Which doesn't mean it is foolproof, and I would encourage two things. Always take what you would consider your best single shot of the subject in case nothing works at all. And do not hesitate to try several attempts to guard against a simple mistake. In this digital age it is somewhat disconcerting and delightful that you do not know if you have succeeded until you get home and play with the computer.
STANDARD 3:2 CROP ONE SHOT VERTICAL IMAGE CONCENTRATES ON THE FOREGROUND INTEREST
PANO # 3 - 2 SHOT HORIZONTAL PANORAMA IS STILL ONLY STANDARD 3:2 RATIO, BUT SEEMS TO HAVE COMPLETELY SHIFTED AROUND FOREGROUND ROCK
This technique will allow a wider view than almost any wide angle lens will achieve, and probably keep your subject larger in the frame, since you are actually building up standard or even telephoto views into the panorama. You can also build up very large levels of detail since your new built-up image will contain many more pixels than one shot. As I have done more of these panoramas I have come to believe that less is more. Few subjects require such a wide view as the Painted Hills, and the wider you get the more distortion you must begin to deal with, including the realization that your horizon, which "should " be straight, is now so wide that you are beginning to see the curvature of the earth in one photograph. A subject like the spectacular cliff side of the Painted Hills is easier to deal with than a city skyline or even a woodland scene whose perimeter trees are exhibiting a noticeable "lean."
PAINTED HILLS PANO # 4 - 3:1 PANORAMA SHIFTS TO RIGHT AND CAPTURES END OF THE CLIFF
Once your computer has presented you with the stitch, it is now time to decide how much you want to use. I have found that 3:1 is about as wide as almost any scene will justify. Most compositions do not have enough interest across such a wide frame to warrant such a wide view. I find that 2:1 is usually even better, since it certainly is "wide" without being weird. It is just wide enough to get a few more crucial elements in the frame than a standard 1 1/2 : 1 view. Sometimes a stitch can even be presented as a standard crop - the viewer will just assume you had a wider lens in your bag than you own. You will then do your own standard post-processing workflow on the created panorama, treating it as a whole.
PAINTED HILLS PANO #5 : RETURNING AT SUNSET FOR 3:1 PANORAMA OF LEFT SIDE OF CLIFF FACE. SHADOWS OPENED UP IN FOREGROUND.
I feel that the biggest problem with these panorama creations is how to exhibit them. That is why I feel 2:1 is the best ratio to shoot for. Any wider than that will require a very large image that is actually large in only one direction. A 24" x 36" print is a quite impressive way to fill a wall, but a 12" x 36" panorama seems smaller. A 24" tall 3:1 panorama will be 6 feet wide, and face the same exhibition problems as a too large television in most domestic spaces. Not to mention that you probably will quake at the cost to print and frame such a monster.
PAINTED HILLS PANO #6 : ANOTHER OUTCROPPING "SHORTENED" TO A 4:1 CROP ALMOST GETS THE ENTIRE EXTENT OF THE HILL
As you have look at some of the panoramas that I created at this very panoramic subject, your are entitled to your opinion on what this technique actually achieves over a well-composed standard view. I myself like Panoramas #1 and #3 the best, which seem to capture the spirit of the place in a different way than their single image cousins.Sometimes the panorama change is dramatic, sometimes it's just a little different, and sometimes it seems more trouble than it is worth. But at least it seems worth a try, since most software now includes the capacity to create these compilations. The Painted Hills, like Crater Lake, the Grand Canyon, a mountain range, or a whole city skyline, would seem to be the ultimate test of this software. I encourage you to give it a try.
PANO #7 : 2 1/2 : 1 CROP SHOWS A DETAIL OF ANOTHER OUTCROPPING WITH VEGETATION IN FOREGROUND; 2 SHOTS AND A LOT OF CROPPING
JULY 7, 2023
PAINTED HILLS : THE MONEY SHOT
This week I would like to take a look at the highlight of our trip to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Central Oregon. I would say that I would argue that the Painted Hills are the highlight of anyone's trip to John Day. While the other parts of the park are certainly worth a visit, it is the Painted Hills, one of the "Seven Wonders of Oregon", that makes a four-hour journey to the middle of nowhere a must for any traveler to the state. It is one of those places, like the Grand Canyon or Crater Lake, that you just don't believe you are seeing when you catch your first glimpse. And while there might be a tendency to treat this incredible geological formation as a one-trick pony, changing lighting conditions, points of view, and seasonal variations reward repeat visits. Not to mention that upon a repeat visit, even on the next day, most will still gasp in wonder.
A DIFFERENT ANGLE, LATER IN THE DAY
This first image is pretty much that standard "Oh My God, what am I looking at?" introduction to the Painted Hills, which suddenly appear without warning after yet another twist in the lonely road from Mitchell, Oregon, where we stayed for three days last month. Mitchell is home to about 150 souls, and the nearest real (small) city, Prineville, is about an hour away. This overview of the hills takes in only about a third of the formation, which is why it is very useful to take along a wide-angle lens. Photographers like myself who don't like and/or own such a lens can now use software to "stitch" together several shots to achieve a wider than wide-angle perspective on such a site. Once you get used to the technique it is not that hard, but it does hearken back to the"old days" in the sense that you don't really know what you've gotten in the field. I have not had a chance to put together some of these panoramic images that I took at the Painted Hills, so they will have to wait until next week. These images are all examples of what I could achieve in a few hours with my standard to telephoto zoom lens. It is pretty hard to get closer to the hills because they are very fragile and would quickly disappear if people were allowed to get close enough to touch what they shouldn't touch. On this trip I didn't find any of the trails that I have taken through the hills along boardwalks through the dunes, and I do not know whether I just didn't go the right way or that the park has closed them since I last visited with Benjamin many years ago. When you realize that you are looking at millions of years of sedimentary deposits that one idiot could ruin in minutes, it is easy to accept that it's OK that you are required to keep your distance.
VERTICAL WITH FOREGROUND INTEREST
The different colors come from the different chemicals present in the different rocks that were deposited at the bottom of Oregon's inland sea over the course of millions of years, and then were exposed for our viewing pleasure by volcanic shifts in the land coupled with more millions of years of erosion by the wind. If you dug down below the sagebrush for many miles around you would probably encounter similar layers of sediment - and there are several smaller hills and gullies around this famous ridge that suddenly pop up and show off their geologic colors as well.
TWO DIFFERENT OUTCROPPINGS
A photographer has to hope for some luck on a trip like this beyond the privilege of getting to visit at all. Cloudy skies that interrupt the interminable desert blue will improve any image of the hills, but you can adjust by including less sky or even no sky at all. If you can arrange for one or several thunderstorms then the baked colors will really come into their own. The rare rainy Spring will sometimes yield strings of desert flowers in many of the gullies on the cliff face. I brought out the polarizer filter, which is sort of like sunglasses for your camera, to try to bring out the colors, but found that arriving at sunset was a much more fruitful strategy. The trouble with a polarizer is that it really only works when you are near 90 degrees to the sun, and you might get blotchy skies when trying to get wide angle shots that are wide enough to encompass the Hills. Skilled astro photographers can probably achieve beautiful composite images of late day on the Hills combined with amazing star scapes at night in what must be one of the darkest landscapes around. While we saw a moon rise while we there, we didn't stay around to see if the moon could like up the hills. It is very dark out there, and that ten-minute drive back to Mitchell would probably stretch to a half hour.
SUBTLER COLORS ARE ALSO PRESENT
There are other photographic opportunities around if you stop staring at the main cliff face, although that can be hard. There are smaller outcroppings with different colors, and even the "grayer" colors can exhibit a lot of interesting patterns of gullies formed by the rare presence of water.
FLOWERS AND ROCKS OF THE HIGH DESERT
As the sun goes down you can turn your attention to the High Desert surroundings and concentrate on vegetation, flowers, and the details of boulders in the environment. If you show up near sunset you will get deeper colors on the cliff face but you will have to use graduated filters on the foreground which is going near black as the sun sets behind you. You might even get your own shadow intruding on the scene the closer you get to Sunset. At least you don't have to worry about missing the show by sleeping-in in the morning, since the cliff faces West and thus is in shadow until mid-day.
SAGEBRUSH AGLOW AT SUNSET
The intrepid landscape photographer can thus finally avoid waking up too early. Enjoy your breakfast!
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BLUE BASIN STITCHED PANORAMA
A FEW TREES,SOME GRASS, AND THE MOON IN THE SKY ARE THE ONLY CLUES THAT YOU ARE NOT ON MARS
This week I would like to concentrate on the Blue Basin, a geologic formation North of Sheep Rock in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. We took our longest hike in the Monument on the Island in Time Trail, about three miles in and out into the center of the basin. While it is overshadowed by the nearby Painted Hills (next week, I promise!), the Blue Basin is another area of John Day that is not to be missed.
THE EROSIVE POWER OF WATER, DESPITE ITS APPARENT ABSENCE.
HINTS OF A BASIN
First, a mea culpa. I violated at least several of the rules for hiking in the High Desert, so that my enjoyment of the hike was cut short. My first mistake was to properly navigate the shorts/jeans debate - I chose wrong with long pants, violating the rule that if it might be hot, always choose to risk being cold. I didn't bring a hat, and there was absolutely no shade on the trail unless you were willing to sit down next to a big rock, which I eventually did. I forgot my water bottle, a cardinal sin. Thus large portions of this hike became an unpleasant slog. I started to even get mad at the signs, which promised 19 bridges on the trail - I stopped counting at 22, but my number was suspect. So the best part of the hike for me was the downhill portion at the end, when we emerged from the basin. A big part of being a landscape photographer is knowing what you are getting into, and I blew it.
TWO DETAILS OF VOLCANIC ERRATICS AMID THE DRY STREAM BED
Despite my problems, the outing was certainly worth it. The trail runs along and across a dry stream bed which shows evidence of water, but the kind of evidence that astronauts might someday find on Mars. When you visit a place like John Day, you know that the conditions are probably not going to be ideal. The perfect day would be cloudy and cool, just after a recent thunderstorm that would fill the creek with blue-green water coming off the cliffs of the basin. The recent rain would also bring out the colors of the red volcanic boulders that litter the stream bed. But at least there were no flash floods to worry about.
AT THE END OF THE TRAIL
MOUNTAINS SURROUNDING THE BLUE BASIN
Two things first. The Blue Basin is not really blue, but a shade of blue/green/gray layers that really only appear blue in contrast to the surrounding brown landscape. The only place that you will actually appreciate the "basin" is if you hike the longer and higher loop trail, where you can actually see the geological bathtub below the surrounding mountains. Since you are walking through ravine into the heart of the basin, it is kind of hard to see that you are in a depression.
ACROSS THE JOHN DAY RIVER
MY ATTEMPT TO CAPTURE A WELCOMING STIFF BREEZE IN A STILL IMAGE
AFTER SAND AND ROCKS, SAGEBRUSH NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD
With these caveats, and the oppressive heat, the Island in Time Trail has a lot to offer. Whatever the actual color of the sedimentary layers, this is an unworldly landscape, where geology really comes alive. The time scale of erosion is so far beyond the realm of man's imagination that it is difficult to understand how many millions of years these cliffs represent. On the other hand, you are awfully glad you weren't around on the days that the little stream moved around the volcanic red boulders in the ravine. At the end of the hike I really appreciated the wind in the sudden reappearance of High Desert grass, the occasional tree, and the slightly more fertile surrounding hills. I didn't even mind an encounter with a baby rattlesnake, who was kind enough to m ake his presence known. There is nothing like that sound to get your attention at the end of a long hike.
JOHN DAY SHADOWS AT THE END OF THE DAY AT THE END OF THE HIKE
JUNE 23, 2023
MT. HOOD FROM THE EAST, ON THE DRY SIDE
In the next few weeks I will explore the photographic cornucopia of one portion of Central Oregon, centered around the John Day Fossil Bed National Monument. We had the opportunity to tour the area again with friends from Brooklyn, and believe me, it was fun to watch their alternate states of wonder and culture shock in their encounter with dry-side Oregon. We were not in hipster Portland - in fact, when you visit this area of the State, it's hard to believe that you are anywhere near anyone or anywhere. We drove through half a dozen counties which had less people than a mediocre crowd at Saturday Market. What the area lacks in population it more than makes up with spectacular scenery.
APPROACHING MITCHELL, OREGON - PRETTY CLOSE TO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
THE JOHN DAY OVERLOOK IN MITCHELL
This first image shows Mt. Hood from an unusual vantage point. It is taken along the side of the road near the beginning of the "Journey Through Time Scenic Byway", which we mostly followed for about half of its 286-mile lonely route from Central to Eastern Oregon. This is the Mt. Hood the pioneers saw as they assessed how they were going to get past the last big obstacle on their trip toward the promised land of the Willamette Valley. As we drove South from the Gorge we could see Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, and the Three Sisters from this road, all looming over grasslands with not much evidence of humanity except for the road we were driving on towards Mitchell, Oregon.
SHEEP ROCK, TYPICAL VERTICAL VIEW
Mitchell is not much of a place, with about 125 residents. It is the biggest settlement for about fifty miles on Route 26. This area is really made for camping or van life. The "Gateway to the Painted Hills" has a gas station, two hotels, one brew pub and one conglomeration of five Air BnB's on one street run by the same family. It's the kind of place where the fact that your lodging exists at all takes precedence over its quality or its price. Mitchell is so small that in a very imaginative move to keep its school alive the village developed a boarding school model for its school that takes in kids from around the world. Talk about culture shock!
STITCHING MORE OF THE SCENE INTO A 2:1 PANORAMA
This week I will concentrate on our first day, where we took in one of the three parts of the National Monument, which sprawls across an area so large that it can take over an hour to drive between the three "units" of the park which stretch along the John Day River.The Sheep Rock Unit contains the Thomas Condon Visitors Center, which contains a Paleontology Museum which easily is worth a few hours itself. There you can get an overview of forty million years of fossil deposits that constitute the whole of geology after the dinosaurs met their fate at the hands of a pesky "meteor extinction event." The monument contains fossils spanning the entire Age of Mammals. In fact it contains more of these fossils than anywhere else on Earth.
ANOTHER 2:1 DETAIL OF THE LEFT PORTION OF THE SCENE
Many of these images center on Sheep Rock, which looms over the visitors center. This view point is literally from the edge of the parking lot, and the big photographic problem is what you should include in the vast vista. The entire monument lends itself to the digital technique of "stitching" multiple shots into one larger panoramic image. In this way you can take in much more area than any wide angle lens you might own. If you are successful you can begin to reproduce the real-life views you remember because you are in fact scanning the entire scene by moving your eyes or even your head while you take it all in. Most post-processing programs these days can accomplish this stitching, as long as you follow several rules. The first is to set your focus, which will probably be near infinity anyway, and then change to manual focus. You don't want the camera shifting focus across your multiple images. The same goes for exposure - scan through your anticipated panorama, and pick an exposure that will accommodate the shifting light levels without ruining one part of the expansive scene. The only other thing to remember is to turn your camera opposite to the direction of your panorama, so if you are taking a typical landscape panorama you will be taking a series of vertical images. Since your panorama will be at least twice to three times as wide as it is vertical, this ensures that you will include enough "height" in your overtly horizontal view. All you have to do is to overlap your images by about 1/3rd, so you can give the computer enough information to stitch them together. All of this does not necessarily require a tripod as long as you are not over-caffeinated or near heat stroke.
A 3:1 PANORAMA THAT CONCENTRATES ON THE SEDIMENTARY LAYERS
The real value of the stitching technique, in my opinion, is not to produce an incredibly wide panorama. While places like John Day can sometimes support such a wide view, I believe that using the technique on a more modest scale like 2:1 or even to just produce a "wider" standard view is where this technique can really shine. Not only is software relieving you of spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on a wide angle lens, but stitching together multiple near-telephoto shots ensures that your subject will not disappear into the wide angle view. You can achieve amazing levels of detail with all of the pixels your are including, and you can always get another cup of coffee while the computer does all of its magic.
IF YOU GO WIDER THAN 3:1 YOU CAN BEGIN TO TAKE IT ALL IN
If you are willing to be modest, you can achieve imagery that you cannot produce in the field - but that is absolutely "truthful" to the scene as you experienced it at the time. My camera can capture 18 megapixels but stitching can produce images with almost 1 Gigabyte of information. My lens widest field of view is equivalent to a slightly shorter than normal 42 mm, but the stitched images can stretch to the view of a 16mm wide angle lens. The modest solution is to use the technique to go just a little wider, but to achieve enormous detail that might not even register until you print a larger enlargement.
I MYSELF LIKE KEEPING IT TO 2:1 FOR THE GOLDILOCKS FEEL OF WIDE, WITH DETAIL
So you can use this technique even when you are capturing details, since you can include that "just a little bit more" than your telephoto can muster.
IT'S PROBABLY JUST WOOD, NOT PETRAFIED WOOD, BUT IT WAS CERTAINLY OLD AND DRIED
Next week we'll take in a hike in another part of the Sheep Rock Unit, into the Blue Basin. Come along and avoid the heat, the lack of shade, and the rattlesnake. Isn't a photo essay a relaxing way to partake in a forbidding but beautiful environment?
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JUNE 16, 2023
EXPOSURE MANIPULATION TO HIGHLIGHT THE WONDERFUL EXUBERANCE OF ONE PLANT IN THE WOODS
We spent a few days in Seattle with old college friends, and all I got was a few walks in the woods, which was a wonderful way to spend our time. The fact that these woods were not out in the boonies somewhere, but were in fact almost entirely created by landscape architects, gardeners, and volunteers made them even more special in some ways. In a world where mankind seems to just muck things up, it's nice to find places where we cultivate and celebrate nature instead of paving it over.
CONTRAST IN LIGHT LEVELS BRINGS OUT THE FOREST'S CHARACTER
SOMEHOW I DON'T THINK THE STANDARD PLANTING DISTANCES APPLIED HERE
I've consulted the dictionary to try to find the difference between a garden, versus a botanical garden, versus an arboretum. The overall category of garden is defined as a planned space set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants. Its singular identifier is control by design, no matter how "natural" it is made to appear. The secondary identifier is the need for enclosure, in a space set aside for unnatural nature. A botanical garden is a type of garden which is a documented collection of plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, and display. An arboretum is defined as a more specialized botanical collection composed almost exclusively of trees of a variety of species. In the real world of course, these categories of "gardens" are not as rigid, and can vary considerably even in the same category.
INSIDE A WEEPING WILLOW
ANOTHER TAKE GIVING IN TO THE UNIQUE CHAOS OF BEING INSIDE SUCH A LARGE "WEEPING" TREE
We toured two arboretums in the past two days. One was unknown, the pride of a small Seattle exurb called Maple Valley at the edge of the Seattle metro area. It was beautiful, unexpected, and the result of fifty years of volunteer efforts by this small community. The other was the world famous University of Washington Arboretum, almost one hundred years old and so large that a four-hour visit only scratched the surface. While both of these collections did not feature planted beds of flowers, they contained enough flowering trees to satisfy most blossom fans. The major difference was that the larger garden was twice as old, so the trees were larger, and instead of having one or two examples of a species Washington Park Arboretum would have half a dozen. But what was interesting to me was that both Seattle examples seemed to me much more "designed" than Portland's Arboretum, which is much more natural even though it is clearly a collection too. In Portland I have the feeling of walking through a woodland very similar to Forest Park except that there are obviously examples of non-native species.
CAPTURING COLOR IN A WOODLAND CONTEXT
In any case these "gardens", while certainly resembling natural woodlands, are as designed as Central Park, formerly a barren wasteland north of old New York. In fact, Central Park, Seattle's Washington Arboretum, and Portland's Laurelhurst Park were all designed by several generations of the Olmstead family of landscape architects, something that is readily apparent to anyone lucky enough like me to have now spent time in each one. About the only thing you can count on as "natural" is the general lay of the land, except that even that is not true - even the lakes, streams, and hills were not necessarily found there by the designers.
TRANQUILITY ON A MAN-MADE LAKE WITH NATURAL REFLECTIONS
This small collection of images show the range of views possible in a few hours. They constitute less than 10% of what I captured on those days, and as usual all have been vastly improved with small doses of post-processing. I have attempted to study the light present in these woods, looking for the contrast that will bring some order out of the "natural" chaos of even a man-made woodland. While I tried my usual strategies of concentrating on the details, I also experimented with several more abstract takes on Paradise. I even used the sharpening and clarity tools in reverse to achieve some "painterly" images, at least for me.
USING REFLECTIONS TO REFLECT UPON THE BEAUTY OF THE ABSTRACT
To this uneducated observer the major difference between these various manifestations of paradise is that the arboretum requires a more extended time frame - your are planting trees for God's sake, and your visions might not be realized for long after you came up with the original or modified plan. In that way they resemble cathedrals which were generational undertakings whose construction lasted long after the original king's reign. In our age of short attention spans and inability plan for an all-too-apparent future, places like these arboretums both make me wonder whether we could accomplish these ambitious plans today, but also give me hope that all is not lost. These people were just as flawed and petty as we are, yet they did at least start great things. We must not give up our long-range dreams to the current crisis of the day. Your photographs can honor their efforts with your unique vision.
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A VARIATION ON "THE SHOT" FROM THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE SALMON RIVER
This week I would like to return to the topic of photographic explorations of familiar stomping grounds. I believe the best way to overcome the problem of "finding something to shoot" in a place that you have explored many times is to simultaneously lower expectations, be willing to wildly experiment, and concentrate on details in the environment that you might have previously overlooked. When you have already gotten the shots that are "standard", it is time to expand your photographic possibilities. And to hone your post-processing skills. Even the "money shot" that I and several other thousand people have taken over the years relies almost as much on Lightroom as it did on my choices when I held the camera. The scene's severe exposure variations required multiple graduated filters to both bring down the brightness of the river while lightening up the forest. Then you have brush in smaller exposure variations within these areas to really make them come alive. Thus you can transform an almost unusable snapshot (no fault of your camera) to a compelling image.
IT'S SO GREEN!
We took our visiting East Coast friends for a quick day trip into the forest about forty miles East of Portland. Here they could get a short taste of Wet Oregon before we headed to the Dry Outback of Central Oregon later in the week. The Wildwood Recreation Site is 550 acres of protected land along the Salmon River in the midst of the Mt. Hood National Forest. it is adjacent to Highway 26 on the way to Mt. Hood, just past the last real town on the route, Sandy, Oregon. While the hierarchy of National Park, National Monument, National Forests, Wilderness Areas, and such can be very confusing for new visitors, it is safe to say that at the bottom lies Wildlife Preservation Reserves and Bureau of Land Management land. Only Westerners frequently encounter the Bureau of Land Management, which seems to somehow be in charge of most Federal land that has not been designated as something else. BLM land is sometimes very beautiful, but is frequently remote. So it is somewhat surprising to encounter BLM land so close to Portland. Once you have visited Wildwood a few times, it might finally occur to you that it in fact functions as a City Park for Sandy, albeit at the edge of the woods. It is exceedingly easy to pass up and pass by on the way to the mountain.
LIGHT IN THE FOREST
BLACK AND WHITE FOR EMPHASIS
Once you have happened upon it, it will easily warrant return visits. The park is mostly a "day use" area, with no individual campsites. Their are some group campsites, but they are located pretty far from the day use areas and probably mostly serve people from Sandy that are in the know. There are two main hiking trails, although these "hikes" are really only walks in the woods. One is in fact an exceedingly tame boardwalk that winds it's way through wetlands, providing about the closest view of a swamp that you can get without getting your shoes wet. The other trail that I will concentrate on today is a route that runs along the bank of the Salmon River and allows views of the river and the forest while probably amounting to less than a mile walk no matter how much you wander around. There are dozens of turn-offs with picnic tables for a protected lunch or snack off the trail. Most even come with grills, although this level of preparation is far beyond my organizational skills.
THJE RIVER THROUGH THE TREES
SILHOUETTE
The Salmon River is designated as a "Wild and Scenic River" which ensures that it will always seem pretty untouched by man, despite a few bridges across it and even a delightful aquarium-like viewing area that allows you to see under the water at one point on the trail. The trail allows for views both above the river and right alongside it, providing many places for my favored "intimate" landscapes. At least on a random Friday, there was really no danger of a random series of strangers intruding on your shots.
WE'RE JUST FRIENDS
The series of images that I have highlighted today are my attempts to capture the spirit of the Oregon Forest without documenting this particular walk in the woods. I have tried to concentrate on specific encounters along the trail that illustrate the quality of light in the woods. One hint is to avoid including the sky at almost all cost, since it's distracting brightness will only lead your viewers outside of the frame. Do not be afraid of only including parts of trees or scenes just like I advise about buildings in the urban environment. This is your view of the forest, not an entry in a documentary of Wildwood. Several examples show how black and white imagery can provide intriguing variations, since you are usually only exchanging monochromatic grays for the monochromatic greens of the natural environment. Black and white can be especially effective in back-lit scenes where it allows for more dramatic silhouettes that can be achieved realistically in a color rendition. Since you are already going "abstract" by removing color, viewers seem to allow for more lightening and darkening of parts of scenes than they might find "unrealistic" in a color image. Instead of just raising or lowering the overall exposure, subtle brushing along light and dark areas can really bring out shape and form. If you can keep these brush strokes at about 10% power, you will be amazed at the dramatic improvements in the image even when you really didn't see what you were doing while you were brushing. It is only when you do a "before and after" that you can see the power of this subtlety.
OREGON FERN BAR, WITHOUT THE BEER
When all else fails, go for the details. We can find beauty in particular close-ups of an Oregon forest way before we have to go all the way to Macro photography. In fact, your iPhone is actually more useful for this type of image than your "real camera", unless you have brought along the tripod and invested several thousand more dollars than even Apple has extracted from your wallet.
A VINE MAPLE AT THE EDGE OF THE RIVER
ANOTHER SEARCH FOR THAT FOUR-LEAF CLOVER
I hope that this little portfolio encourages you to get out of the house, even if you are going to a place that you know as well as your own backyard. There is always something new to find if you allow yourself to look.
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MAY 26, 2023
FLORAL PORTRAIT IN RED : RAINDROPS CAN BE AS COMPELLING AS LETTERS IN URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY - TRY TO RESIST BRINGING ALONG A SPRAY BOTTLE UNLESS YOUR WEIRDO QUOTIENT ALLOWS IT
This week I'd like to take you on a quick tour of Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden, one of Portland's crown jewels but a little off the usual tourist routes. Old friends are visiting this week, and the rhodies are near their peak, so off we went to walk through paradise. Even if you are not a rhodie groupie, Crystal Springs is a world apart. I am personally not a big fan of rhododendron bushes,but you have to understand that these specimens are so old and large that they are not bushes but trees, unlike the rhododendrons in your typical residential garden.
FLORAL PORTRAIT IN WHITE AND PURPLE
On the photographic front, I'd like to discuss the "problem" of making new images in a place that you are very familiar with and have photographed over and over again. Of course you can take advantage of new weather conditions, but let's face it, you are probably going to visit on a nice sunny day in the Spring just like the times you have visited the garden before. Unless you're business or passion is floral portraits, at a certain point you will be hard-pressed to find something new to capture.
FLORAL PORTRAIT IN PURPLE AND YELLOW
There are really only three answers to this problem. One is to deliberately experiment by not taking anything anywhere near the type of image you, or anyone else for that matter, would ordinarily capture in the garden. This might be interesting, but chances are that no one has tried this because it just doesn't work. The second choice is to admit that you are probably going to duplicate previous efforts, but to hope that something new might emerge. I recommend the third path which is to bring along the camera, but to seriously lighten up - in other words, use the camera as the excuse to have a wonderful walk with friends in a beautiful place, with no expectations at all of coming back with an image that will change even your world. These images I will show today are in that third category. As usual a little bout of post-processing goes a long way towards illustrating a nice day without threatening to make a new entry in photographic history.
BUDS AND PETALS
In a place like Crystal Springs I've found that my best efforts are versions of floral portraits. I make no effort to show much context, because the blossoms are the draw. I am not a good enough garden photographer to get a useful image out of a whole plant, but I think it is fairly easy to produce a compelling image of one blossom. The key is to get closer, and then get closer still. The best lighting is in the shade; sometimes backlighting, carefully controlled, can also produce a dramatic image. The object is to ensure a great degree of separation between the blossom and the background in any way you can - through exposure, saturation or a subtle vignette. once you do that, everything else falls into place.
VEGETATIVE LINES AND PATTERNS
After you tire of taking floral portraits, you can move on to other aspects of the garden. Concentrating on vegetation, either leaves or trees, can sometimes yield interesting results, especially if you treat the garden as a landscape and try to forget that humans carefully produced the scenery. Water goes a long way to supplying another subject beyond flower studies.
AT THE EDGE OF THE LAKE
YIN AND YANG
Black and white can be refreshing in garden imagery even if most viewers might find it perverse to leave out the color in some of the most colorful subjects we can come across. But if you include enough contrast, a garden silhouette can be a very nice change of pace in a series of color portraits.
FIR SILHOUETTES
I hope you have enjoyed this small collection of images I captured in the garden. I would encourage you to use photography as an excuse to get out of the house, even if you have very low expectations of the art you will create that day. Sometimes memories are more than enough.
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MAY 19, 2023
JENNY LAKE REFLECTION
I took another trip through my archives this week, and will humbly submit an additional two reasons why you should also consider such a journey through your photographic past. The first reason is to encourage you to make an attempt to improve images that you might have created more than two decades ago, because you would be amazed at how you good you actually were back then, now that you are liberated from the one-hour photo booth. The second more embarrassing reason is that you might have completely forgotten a few days from your past. Upon looking at the image above, I found it hard to believe that I had no real memory of such a place. I had to do a Google search for Jenny Lake to realize that it was located in Grand Teton National Park, and that I had spent time there during a trip to the Tetons in 1997.
HEROIC BLACK AND WHITE
Jenny Lake is one of the highlights of the park, but my memories mostly centered on some hikes we took closer to the center of the Park just North of Jackson Hole where we stayed during the trip. It's funny how our photographic memories become enmeshed in the general photo imagery that surrounds an incredible site like a national park. Recently I visited an art show in Seattle where one of my friends was exhibiting her images, and walked through about half a dozen booths of other landscape photographers in the show. These were all fine photographers, but they were showing mostly "greatest hits" imagery that I had seen ad nauseam on Instagram and even in several other booths in the show! When you say "Tetons" to a photographer two things immediately come to mind - a certain S curve of the Snake River, and the most photographed barn in the United States of America. I in fact complimented one woman who had managed to take a fine image of the mountain range without the barn, whereupon she sheepishly pointed out her standard shot with the barn, which of course sells much better.
The answer, at least to me, is to take the "hero image" because after all you are there, and probably won't be back - but try to capture your own imagery even if you are in an unfamiliar, and overwhelmingly beautiful place. Twenty-five years later you might surprise yourself. These first two images of Jenny Lake totally surprised me, and I was very pleased with the image once I massaged it in Lightroom. Like most photographs taken in the mountains, the first thing is to try to balance the exposure, bringing down the sky while brightening the foreground. Of course a reflection complicates matters, since the reflection has to "reflect" the exposure of the background. I cleaned up the lake, removing some random flotsom that had nothing to do with the image. While I do like the color version, somehow the black and white feels more heroic to me - but you hold to your own opinion.
JENNY LAKE VISTA
This second image feels more like my usual fare, where you can insert the title of the major magazine in the clouds without ruining the composition. Since I am playing with a silhouette, the black and white seems more pure to me. I could also darken the mountain a little more than I could in the color version without losing credibility. The waves in the lake are also much more interesting to me in the black and white.
MOUNTAIN CLOSE-UP
Get closer, I always say - although I have no memory of how I got closer, but maybe it was on the boat trip we probably took on the lake. In any case I actually like the color version better on this image, but not because I love the greens and the blue sky. What is interesting to me is not only increased contrast that color brings, but that the mountain's gray tones allow me to play the same dodging and burning games in what is essentially a black and white subject in a color photograph!
JENNY LAKE SHORE
This image also seems to match my usual "intimate landscape" sensibility, focusing on a tiny portion of a huge lake. I probably like the color version better, since it is hard to argue with that blue lake. The only problem is that it is much "bluer" than the sky, even though my post-processing actually "corrected" most of that difference. I do like the rocks better in the black and white, but it is a little too dull for me.
HIDDEN FALLS
After some research on Google, I realized that this is probably my attempt to capture the beauty of "Hidden Falls", which can't be too hidden since your non-intrepid explorer found it somewhere around Jenny Lake. I somehow did not blow out the waterfall, but as a result the rest of the photo appeared to have been taken in the evening. Raising the shadows to "infinity and beyond" allowed the forest to reappear. I lowered the waterfall exposure a bit to achieve more detail there as well. My attempts at black and white just muddied the waters.
IF YOU WANT TO CAPTURE MOUNTAINS, IT PAYS TO GO VERTICAL
Another heroic vertical to capture the magnificence of the mountains. I like both, but if you are going to play with silhouettes, perhaps black and white is the way to go. Black and white also allows me to darken the mountain edge against the clouds a lot more than the color version would support without appearing unrealistic. What is funny that I probably still had not broken my wide angle lens, which allowed me to take such wide shots that I can't capture now without stitching together multiple photographs.
SOMEWHERE NEAR JENNY LAKE, ON THE ROCKS
This final pair is probably the most "Rich" image that I discovered this week. This intimate landscape is all about the rocks, with no context at all. The black and white somehow seems richer. I love it, even though I have no memory of taking it, which is very rare for me. It could be any beautiful place in the world, but it just happens to be somewhere near Jenny Lake. I'm glad I rediscovered it, and hope you've enjoyed coming along on the journey.
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MAY 12, 2023
A RAINBOW AT THE END OF THE DAY
This week I would like to illustrate a long-held belief of mine that I gleaned long ago from a forgotten famous photographer. The short answer to photographic excellence, or at least the opportunity to achieve an excellent image, was simply "f/8 and be there." In other words, don't obsess over photographic technique, just choose compromise settings to get a reasonable exposure - but most important, journey through your life with a camera and the desire to create images. "Being There" can be the most important setting on your camera and in your mind, whether you encounter a moment of true serendipity or just notice something new on a walk through the city. These images all illustrate that just "noodling" with your camera, even if it is just your phone, can allow you to create something out of almost nothing - especially if you are willing to spend some time later improving your snapshot in Lightroom.
The first image came after a pretty bad day at the Market. When the proverbial rainbow appeared to lighten my mood, I quickly took out my phone to try to achieve "something" out of my lousy day. The most important thing about this image is that the capture of this serendipity actually did make me feel better. While it might not be an award-winning image, it reminds me to always be ready for the unexpected, even in a parking garage. A little cropping and sharpening was all that was necessary -after all it is a rainbow at the end of a long day.
A STUDY IN CURVY CARPENTRY
Sometimes it is just a matter of learning to look without caring what the subject is, or even conveying it to your viewers. This is the potential power of abstraction with a camera, which can prove very difficult since photography usually is pretty concrete. My usual solution is to just go with it, which results in images that interest me even though most people might just react with a "huh." This is a detail of a handrail on a bungalow in Northwest Portland, and is about the only thing of value that I achieved on a long walk in the neighborhood besides some exercise and a nice lunch. I did have my "real camera" with me, so I could crop with abandon - I can honestly say that the original snapshot was not about the handrail. Often the value of "looking at photographs" involves studying your own images to see what is really there. I converted to black and white to increase the contrast and to eliminate the ugly beige color of reality.
PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC
A walk through The Pearl found me once again starring at an old Packard advertisement painted on a brick wall. These days it is almost as amazing that the wall is still there as it is that the advertisement for a long forgotten product is still around. Which doesn't mean that you have to save all of the words. You might call this the swan song of the Protestant work ethic on the party wall of yet another condo.
YES
I love finding obscure signage around town. I have long recognized the power of words, or even just random letters in an image, since they can trigger my viewers' brains into "trying to figure it out" without the anger that can result when those curving lines turn out to be just a handrail. This affirmation out of the blue is just a small portion of the rear facade of Music Millennium near Laurelhurst Park. I don't know what it is trying to sell me, but you take your good moods where you can find them.
WATER CHANNEL REFLECTIONS
The next three images came from a walk in Tanner Springs Park in the Pearl and show the value of really trying to find something new in an area that most Portland photographers, including myself, have shot the hell out of. It is awfully hard to discover something new, even for just yourself, but the attempt can enliven a visit to an old photographic subject. And at least you are not going through the motions on yet another engagement or senior photo shoot. This first image is of the water channel that runs down to the pond at the lower end of the park. I had never seen the water so "high" so it caught my attention, and the morning light allowed for the reflections that can fascinate me even when there is nothing else "there." Your mileage might vary.
ANOTHER ANGLE ON TANNER SPRINGS
The railroad rail sculpture (say that three times fast) on the East side of the park has been a frequent subject of mine. A particular constraint I place on myself is that I do not allow myself to show either the surrounding condo buildings, or the boardwalk that I am standing on, when I take these images. I feel they both distract from the power of the sculpture; the boardwalk is the only part of the park that I would instantly demolish if given the chance. So I am delighted with yet another angle that meets my requirements.
A SCULPTURAL DISCOVERY
I was even more delighted when I finally focused on the blue glass that sometimes lies between the rails and discovered that they contained plant specimens between the sheets of glass. This is something that I had never seen before, so in this detail I left out all of the context. I guess you have to be there, but I find it interesting.
A MEANDERING RIVER IN AMERICA'S OUTBACK
Always have your camera with you, even if it is only your phone. These last two images were taken on a flight to Albuquerque a few months back. Taken with my iPhone, they required a lot of massaging in Lightroom, but I think they show some of my sense of wonder at the beauty of landscapes that I feel thaty sometimes have never really been seen by humans at ground level. Of course I have to crop out the edges of the window, and I don't like any intruding portions of the wing. I rely on the miracle of "resizing" software to enlarge the resulting very small files to at least snapshot territory. While I will never be able to enlarge these much more than this, I can still communicate my wonder on the web or in a book. This meandering river was in the middle of the middle of nowhere.
ALMOST SUNSET ALOFT
This final image, probably only a third of the "negative" (that pesky wing again) is a study of a sunset that only modern humans are privileged to witness. I encourage you all to try for images even when you think that there is no way you can achieve positive results. You might surprise yourself, and you are no longer wasting any film. Good hunting.
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CRATER LAKE REDISCOVERY 1 : FINAL IMAGE
This week I would like to illustrate the power of post-processing by journeying back twenty-five years(!) to my last visit to Crater Lake. I can't believe it has been that long, and I have never felt that the photos I took there were any good at all. It's one of the few subjects that even I concede probably requires a wide-angle lens, which I didn't own then and don't own now - it just doesn't match the way I view the world. But another recent dip into my archives found that while I certainly didn't take any world-shattering images, there were a few that weren't half-bad, especially after I used some of my hard-earned Lightroom skills to bring out there hidden potential.
Fran and I have been watching a lot of basketball lately during the Playoffs, and by my estimation the most demoralizing play during a game has to be yet another offensive rebound. The soul-crushing "second-chance shot" seems to be worth much more than another two points, since by all that is good and holy it shouldn't have occurred in the first place! But my second-chance photographic shots, like the several that I will show here, occupy a much more optimistic realm. The power of digital photography allows a photographer like me, and you, the chance to improve on an effort, even twenty years after the fact. Advancements in technology, and more important, our skills in using it, allow us to get closer to our original artistic visions that fell victim to the one-hour photo booth of yesteryear. In this essay I will show you my original shots, something I rarely do out of shear embarrassment. I do that here to illustrate the difference between a snapshot and an image. Try not to be depressed by your initial effort. While making every effort to improve your output in camera, it is important to realize that most images only emerge after some work after-the-fact in the computer, or in the old days, in the darkroom. Anyone who says different is probably lying, works for the New York Times where such efforts are verbotten, or is just too ignorant to realize how they might improve their images in post-production.
ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
The original snapshot is not horrible, but it certainly is very flat. I was actually shocked that I had achieved my minimum standard for what I consider in a Crater Lake shot, having literally seen thousands of them over the years. I hadn't remembered that I had climbed high enough on the rim to achieve the critical separation between Wizard Island and the rim of the crater beyond. Congratulating myself on my composition, I then began to deal with exposure throughout and within the image. I lowered the exposure both in the background and in the foreground rim of the trail, which had been much too bright in the original. A viewer's eyes go directly to the lightest part of an image, and clearly that masonry isn't the most important part of this scene. While I might regret that I didn't include a little more sky, I knew that I had to darken the rear to stop your eyes from escaping from the image beyond the lake. While some might conclude that I over-saturated the final image, anyone who has actually been to Crater Lake knows that I am still way within the realistic blue hue of this natural wonder.
BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
If you don't believe me, you might appreciate the black and white version, which achieves verisimilitude by avoiding color entirely. While working on this image I realized that the actual overwhelming blue of the lake sets up a weird blue color cast on everything else. Lightroom tells me that the green trees on Wizard Island are in fact blue-green at best, which makes it hard to achieve a separate tone from the water. Black and white avoids this dilemma.
ORIGINAL UNDEREXPOSED SNAPSHOT
This alternate image errs to much on sky side of the equation. While I could "invent" more foreground water in Photoshop, that goes beyond my personal limits, as does bringing in a more "interesting" sky. To each his own. But I have no qualms about cropping to a wider panoramic aspect ratio to eliminate most of the boring sky. I struggled straightening the image, since even a portion of the lake is so wide that the curvature of the lens and the actual earth starts to distort a level line from one end of the shoreline to another - you know in your heart that the water is "level", but my corrections made it worse. I finally settled on the compromise of just leveling the water "horizon" around Wizard Island - and then realized that the right end of the island was further away than the left end, so that it would appear higher in any event.
LIGHTEN THOSE SHADOWS!
Raising the shadows significantly brought out most of the detail on the island, while raising the overall exposure revealed the glare of the giant mirror that is Crater Lake under a cloudy sky. The blue is apparent here only in the shadows.
BLACK AND WHITE
The black and white version is still a little flat for me in this case. I nicely toned down the sky to give some definition to the upper edge. A subtle vignette also helped in black and white while standing out too much in color. But the contrast required everywhere else obscured all of the detail on the island. I remain flummoxed.
CRATER LAKE, AT THE EDGE OF THE CALDERA : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
As I looked through my images I realized that even at Crater Lake my particular way of seeing the world encouraged an "intimate landscape", even in such an epic environment. Suddenly it didn't seem as important to show the whole lake, especially since any Oregonian probably knows what they are looking at with just a hint of blue. I loved this shot, and just tried to make it better, to bring out wonderful cliff face of the caldera.
DODGE AND BURN AND SHARPEN
Sharpening the digital file helped a lot. I lowered the exposure in both the background and foreground to focus attention on the cliff. Then the crags were intensified by judicious dodging and burning, where I painted in about 10% lightening on the bright parts and a corresponding darkening of the dark areas. This is so subtle that you don't really see what you are doing while you are doing it, requiring a little faith during the process. It is only after you view the "before and after" that you realize how much co9ntrast and"pop" you've added to the image.
GET ANSEL ON THE PHONE!
Well if it's texture you want you can always go to black and white. You can add even more texture and exposure gradients that would not look realistic in color once you allow yourself the abstraction of seeing the world in shades of gray.
MINIMAL CRATER LAKE : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
At the risk of starring into the abyss of "minimalism", this image was clearly about as "Rich" I could get more than twenty five years ago. It attempts to say "Crater Lake" with as little context as possible, and in some other parts of the world this could be a cliff over the sea. This image didn't need much help at all, only discovery. I cropped it only a tiny bit to get rid of some indeterminate weird stuff at the top edge, and lowered the exposure again in a gradient from the far expanse of the lake and from the overly bright earth in the foreground.
MINIMAL IMPROVEMENTS
These minor changes did it for me. While I like the image I use for a coaster a little better, which shows more of the curve of the shore, this is not bad aa all. When I tried black and white I missed that blue too much so I created another coaster by eliminating most of the duller gray lake in the background.
BLACK AND WHITE RENDITION
This would do just fine in a portfolio of black and white images, even though I personally like that glorious blue. It's been fun showing you how you can convert snapshots into photographs with just a minimum of artistic intent - take a look at some of your old snapshots and see what you can find hidden there in plain sight.
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APRIL 28, 2023
A LANDMARK, AT LEAST FOR ME
An often cited truism concerning photographic images is that any photo more than fifty years old is inherently interesting due to its link to the past as "another country. While these images that I've saved from my archives are not quite fifty, it has been quite arresting for yours truly that they are over forty years old. Once again my scanner has brought some of my past back to life, and my skills at post-processing has created images that are leagues better than the original slides that have survived my pathetic attempts at "organization."
These images are all from the very late 1970's and the early 1980's, when I was "living in sin" with Fran, and working as a waiter before, during, and after my education as an architect. They illustrate the visual appetites of a young photographer who shared some of the same ways of viewing the world as I do today. This first image is only important if you love neon, or if you walked past this sign for seven years before yet another shift in the wine bar in Dupont Circle. It wouldn't surprise me either way if the drug store was still there; I do know that the real estate industry has expanded the limits of Dupont
Circle way past what I knew in the 1980's. The power of photography, at least for me, is that I can still feel like I'm walking on that street about to go to work, just like certain songs that were part of the soundtrack of the restaurant can bring me back there way beyond their musical merit.
A PORCH TO SPEND THE DAY LOOKING AT THE CORNER
I guess I began to realize that I was interested in becoming an architect for two reasons. One was that I was drawn to the slick professional architecture magazines in every library that I entered. Another was that I strolled through Washington taking pictures of buildings the way that others captured flowers or people. These two images show my love of porches, readily available in Washington in most older neighborhoods. As a Southern city, Washington embraced ever more gracious porches in the age before air conditioning. This particular circular corner example shows how porches could become so large that they could be divided into several areas for outdoor living. Among my first few projects as an architect were three elaborate screen porch additions. The last porch I designed was basically a studio apartment with areas for living, resting, and a full kitchen. The porch sported 24 skylights!
QUITE A BAY WINDOW
While I still designed porches once we moved to Portland, I had to give up my love for the masonry detailing that surrounded me in Washington. This particular exuberant example a bay window is probably from the Dupont Circle neighborhood. Talk about "eyes on the street!" When I worked a split shift at the restaurant I could walk a few blocks to the Phillips Collection, ensconced in Mr. Phillips old mansion, and take in his magnificent personal art collection and also take advantage of the nicest bathroom I had ever seen.
YOU STILL HAVE TO PARK IT SOMEWHERE
One of the delights of walking around neighborhoods like Georgetown in Northwest D.C., was to show how people had to "cope" with urban density. This urban townhouse hopefully had a rear garden, since the front of the house had to be devoted to rare off-street parking. Of course it you must park the car out front, it's nice to have a beautiful brick patio to drive on past the wrought iron fence, and to park your Rolls Royce to impress the hoi-polloi like me passing by your house.
A HEROIC FRIEZE
VAST INTERIOR
I didn't only focus on "anonymous" architecture in Washington, since there were always monuments around that captured my attention. These two images are of the Old Pension Building, created to house the veteran's system after the Civil War. It had just been saved once again for the new National Building Museum. I think you can see from the interior view why the building need to be preserved, and why it was so hard to figure out what to do with it one hundred years after it was constructed. It was literally too big and too beautiful to demolish. The great hall is subdivided by three-story columns and is big enough to host an inaugural ball, if you should ever be so lucky. The elaborate staircases that rise up the interior contain three inch risers so as to allow veterans to climb up the stairs with crutches. The exterior view shows a tiny part of the incredible sculptural frieze that runs around the entire building that takes up an entire block of Washington. It is modeled after the Parthenon, and attempt to illustrate the entire conflict that the Union veterans had just engaged in.
AIM HIGH
Washington is a city of monuments of course, and this was my interpretation of the then new Air Force Memorial that had recently joined the monuments to the Army, the Navy, and the Marines in Washington.The gleaming stainless steel abstract "flight" is so reflective that it picks up rays of the sun, the surrounding landscape, and even itself, as you can notice as it's spiral both goes behind its supporting obelisk and is reflected on its polished surface!
BENJAMIN AND THE CAPITOL
Some monuments are both enduring and changing at the same time. This shot of the Capitol is completely unassuming unless you know "The Big Guy", my son Benjamin, striding towards the seat of government. I'm not completely irresponsible, since the road was already closed to cars. Benjamin and I usually had the run of the government buildings, and I would take him to congressional committee meetings just as readily as the Smithsonian. In this instance we are headed for Statuary Hall, the old senate Chamber, where his father would have unobtrusively maneuver an entire bag of spilled Cheerios behind a statue of the former Queen of Hawaii, one of the two statues from the fiftieth state.
REFLECTIVE STREAM
Washington, D.C. has some very beautiful natural areas both in the city and surrounding it in Maryland and Virginia. This tranquil stream could be Rock Creek Park, but I wouldn't swear to it.
GREAT FALLS, A LITTLE HIGH
I do know that this image is from Great Falls, to the Northwest of D.C., which can range from a trickle to a raging flood depending on the water level. Those rocky cliffs on the shore are sometimes completely underwater, which can lead visitors to be terribly disappointed that they are just looking at a river instead of a waterfall. This giant series of rapids that marks the transformation of the Potomac from a river in the mountains to a tidal estuary caused the early USA to build the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to bypass this obstacle and provide a trade route to the interior.
SHENANDOAH'S IN BLACK AND WHITE
Speaking of mountains, this view of the Shenandoah Mountains from Skyline Drive shows another destination that Washingtonians take to escape the infernal heat and humidity. No volcanoes, but you can clearly see why the original thirteen colonies were restricted to the Eastern Seaboard. We forget that it would take almost two hundred years before those colonies, now states in a new country, would expand beyond these mountains. In fact Lewis and Clark had already walked to Oregon and back before there was any significant settlement to the West of this photograph.
I hope you have enjoyed this brief excursion to my era in Washington, D.C. It's hard to believe that these images were taken so long ago, by me, and that I can show them to you. I encourage you to also revisit your photographic past.
]]>APRIL 21, 2023
GOD RAYS IN MAINE, 1988
I return to my archives this week to discuss several images I captured as slides way back in 1988 on a trip to Maine, centered mostly on Acadia National Park. Once again I was shocked in two ways when viewing these slides by window light for probably the first time in this century. One is how hard it was to shoot Kodachrome, notorious for its beautiful color rendition, harsh contrast, and very dark shadows. I clearly was not very skilled at such an exacting media. The other conclusion I keep arriving at is that while my photography has certainly improved over the past few decades (!), these old images contain the germs of a "Rich" photograph. It just takes a little or a lot of coaxing in Lightroom to reveal the quality hidden in the slides. Believe me. it would only be boring for you and embarrassing for me to show you the original slides. Often a little cropping and horizon straightening would suffice, but my problems with exposure required a lot of massaging just to render something that you could even look at before you could make a judgement on the composition of an image. While I hope that I have not lost that Kodachrome vibrancy, I can say that I wasn't half bad back then, now that you and I can actually see what I was after.
In this first shot I was attracted to the color and what photographers call the "God rays" in the sky, caused by the intervening clouds. This rendition is pretty true to the original slide. I lightened the water and the coastline only a bit, since I wanted to preserve the blues and really didn't care about any of the "human" details along the coast. The sky is almost exactly the original, since no matter how subtle I was in my efforts to dodge and burn, the rays enhancements were instantly apparent. I used 21st century noise suppression to lower the noise quite a bit, and liberally removed dust spots and such from my scan.
ROCKS IN THE WATER
These next few images are closer to my usual attention to more intimate landscapes, where I tried to focus on smaller areas of the volcanic coastline, even more rocky than Oregon's. In general, the task was to reduce the contrast of the original slide. The waves had appeared to be blown out in the slide, but now show much more detail while retaining their dynamic movement. The clouds in the sky are back, and there is at least some detail in the dark coastline. If I was to make this larger I would work some more at actually darkening the coast to draw your eye away from the two houses; a larger rendition would also reveal more of the detail in the foreground, which actually appears pretty sharp.
ROCKS IN THE WATER, BLACK AND WHITE
The black and white version accomplishes some of this, but I actually prefer the color. It appears to have too much contrast and a little dull at the same time, which doesn't quite make sense. I think cropping down even further to just the middle ground or foreground might help.
CROP ONE : GET RID OF THE BACKGROUND
CROP TWO : GET RID OF THE FOREGROUND
CROP THREE : JUST THE FOREGROUND
It is pretty amazing how different framing can change an image. It just goes to show that one of the most important things a photographer can do is to decide what to include in the frame, even decades later. You can decide, and certainly debate, a=on which framing works for you.
ROCKS ABOVE THE WATER
Here I think that I have achieved some intimacy with the rocks by cropping with abandon to eliminate most of the original boredom to the left of the cliff face and dealing with the wonky horizon line by just getting rid of it. In this image some judicious dodging and burning on the cliff face revealed a lot of detail without distorting the dramatic dark granite.
GRANITE
More rocky excellence above the coast. It is amazing to me how cracked a rock can get without collapsing completely, but that is the difference between human time and geologic time. I'm not sure which version I prefer, not so much because of the blue sea but that I like all the shades of brown over the shades of gray. There is subtly more detail in the black and white, especially in the foreground.
GRANITE IN BLACK AND WHITE
I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND SWIMMING IN THE FOG
This image, like it or not, shows the power of digitalizing slides. The original slide is almost a monochromatic red, the result of experimenting with a red filter on slide film. Don't try this at home. The minimalism can now come through in black and white. I straightened the image by assuming that the deck was level, since the horizon line doesn't really survive my exposure or the fog. This is only the left side of the original slide, since crop after crop couldn't preserve much more negative space without eliminating too much deck or shoreline. So I just converted to a square.
WHAT HORIZON LINE?
The final three images show the power of viewing the same scene over a few days. It is Maine, so I was never so nuts as to actually swim out to the floating dock. You can certainly decide which view of the lake you enjoy most, but at least you can see how the weather and the time of day can dramatically change the appearance of even such a minimal landscape.
CLOUDS ROLLING IN
Except for straightening the horizon and reducing the noise in all three images, these are pretty accurate renditions of the conditions on a quiet lake in Maine over thirty years ago. I imagine, and hope, that it looks pretty much the same today.
END OF THE DAY
It was a lot of fun to show you some of Acadia, rescued from my old slides. I encourage you to travel to Maine if you ever get a chance. Have a lobster roll for me.
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APRIL 14, 2023
This week I would like to journey back to my second visit to Chicago, when I took teenage Benjamin along to the AIA Convention so that he could gain some more independence and I would have someone to join me for dinner. The only rule he had to follow was that he absolutely, positively had top be back in the hotel room at 5:00 P.M. or I would kill him. Each day I would hand him a twenty and he had the run of Chicago. We had a wonderful time.
These images follow a theme that I was concerned with at the time, which basically asked the question of how a building should meet the sky. While I never worked on skyscrapers as an architect, I felt this concern was relevant in that I was very interested in how to "include" the interaction with the sky in my residential projects. As an architect in Portland, I was never going to build a flat roof if I could help it, and our grey skies seemed to allow for as many skylights as I could get past my clients' fears and their budgets. So meeting the sky with bold gestures, and inviting it into the interior spaces I was designing for my clients were very important to me. Chicago turned out to offer very valuable architectural lessons.
This first "pinnacle" is one of the most famous in the history of the skyscraper as a building type. The Chicago Tribune Building was the result of what might be the most famous architectural competition ever held in America, and the winner enraged most of the early modernist architects that had made Chicago's skyline famous since the Fire. The idea that a skyscraper would be topped by an obvious Gothic crown was blasphemy. Yet this confection so many years later seems to enliven the skyline no matter how ridiculous it seemed at the time. Part of its charm is that it is so real - the stonework and arches and details could have been done by medieval stonemasons. The building actually used tiny parts of famous buildings as decorative plaques at ground level, ranging from the Parthenon to Cologne Cathedral to a broken piece of the World Trade Center.
These next few images show how the skyline became crowded with many different historical motifs way before Mies Van de Rohe would decree that all towers would just be sliced off with a razor at the sky. And I must say that once you've seen one flat roof you have seen them all, so that I am a big believer in "romantic tops", especially those that are well proportioned and well-built.
A CLOCK TOWER BECAME A NECESSITY FOR URBAN LIFE
WHO CAN ARGUE WITH POLY CHROME MASONRY AND A DOME?
INNOVATIVE DESIGNERS COULD INVENT THEIR OWN ORNAMENT AND THROW IN SOME ART DECO PANACHE
I think this is the top of the Auditorium Building by Louis Sullivan; Frank Lloyd Wright was his main assistant until he was fired for having too many side jobs. Here it is apparent that even a flat roof can sing with enough detail and a change of windows that could come straight from an Italian Palazzo. The ornamental details appear vaguely classical but are in fact the creations of Sullivan's incredibly fantastic imagination. I feel that this kind of ornament was in fact the road not taken, lost to either no ornament at all or slavish copies of historical motifs without the craftsmanship that rendered them beautiful. Just imagine those attic offices behind those round windows.
Chicago architects of every generation seemed to delight in bringing the gray skies right inside their buildings. Not content with inventing "The Chicago Window" that lit up these early office interiors enabled by the steel structural frames, they found many excuses for featuring skylights and entire glass roofs that brought the sky right into their interiors.These are some examples that fascinated me.
O' HARE AIRPORT CONCOURSE - CUE "AMERICAN IN PARIS"
One of the earliest examples of a modern airport terminal as one big skylight, with the architecture a celebration of how the whole thing stood up. Architects were now following the lead of the early Twentieth Century engineers who had built the great station sheds that were the real main event behind the serious architectural lobbies on the streets of major cities around the world. This terminal also shows off then innovative sun-shading devices built right into the glass itself. Don't ask me what the dinosaur is doing there, except maybe as a comment on the structural skeleton of the terminal itself.
BUILDING AS SKYLIGHT
This is a detail of Helmut Jahn's Illinois Government Center which was pretty new, and pretty controversial when I visited. Round, structural to a fault, with so much glass that glare wasn't a problem so much as a feature, it never really worked as a building but it certainly caught your attention. Mies was rolling over in his grave. This black and white rendition ignores the colors, which are way too many, in favor of the exuberant structure and reflections. I'm so old that Google is now renovating this building for new offices for people who don't want to come to the office anyway.
This final pair of images come from another newer building at the time I visited. The Harold Washington Main Library was built to be as traditional as it could be, a giant masonry Library that is so solid and just plain large that it makes Portland's brick pile seem absolutely feminine and delectable in comparison. But this is Chicago, and this the Loop, and now the masonry skyscrapers, once revolutionary, are the new tradition. Richardson couldn't have made a tougher pile of bricks and stone. Even the Ornamental Metal details seem positively Medieval, and one looks over one's shoulder wary of gargoyles.
SULLIVAN WOULD SHOUT FROM THE ROOFTOPS
Yet when you get to the top floor, the entire roof is revealed as a skylight invisible from the street. The only probem is that this was a "party" space instead of the reading room it deserved to be. Who knows, wiser heads might have rectified that by now.
THIS IS CHICAGO, AND WE DON'T DO "DAINTY"
I hope you have enjoyed this very narrow architectural foray through Chicago, circa 2004, and I hope that we all can visit there soon. Benjamin is now thirty-five, and comes and goes wherever and whenever he wants, most likely chasing my grandson Isaac.
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APRIL 7, 2023
DRY STONE WALLS ENCIRCLE THE SITE OF THE PUEBLO
This week I would like to finish my survey of images I captured during my recent trip to New Mexico. We had planned to visit several National Monuments on the way back to Albuquerque and our trip home. Two of our choices were still closed due to the remnants of Covid, still a big concern for the Native American population. After a quick survey of the map, we discovered another site, Pecos National Park, a short drive to the East out of Santa Fe.
A WIDER VIEW IN B&W - THE CHURCH RUINS ARE BACKGROUND LEFT
The Park is a large slice of history that even includes one of the Western battlefield sites of the Civil War, where Union Volunteers defeated an equally small contingent of rebels with dreams of Confederate territories to the West of Texas. Who knew? But the most important aspect of the Monument is the archaeological remains of one of the largest pueblos in New Mexico. This pueblo was "discovered" by the Spanish Conquistadors in their trek of conquest through New Mexico in 1600. Seemingly located in the proverbial "Middle of Nowhere", the pueblo actually was tied to trade routes that extended all the way to both the Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains and beyond to the East. The pueblo was home to almost two thousand inhabitants who all lived in one five- story adobe "apartment building" surrounded by defensive walls located above the Pecos River in the valley below. The pueblo had been thriving for 150 years before the Spanish arrived.
THE VAST SURROUNDINGS; THE PECOS RIVER IS HIDDEN BELOW, BETWEEN THE PUEBLO AND THE GIORIETA MESA
In typical colonial fashion, the Spaniards ignored hundreds of years of a successful settlement as they endeavored to control and "civilize" the Pueblo. Once it became clear that there was no gold in the area, (that search would be pursued all the way to present-day Kansas), the Spanish turned to religion as the main reason to assert their control. They built a church next to the Pueblo that was significantly larger than the adobe communal dwelling itself.
DRAMATIC SKIES IN B&W OVER THE SANGRE DE CHRISTO MOUNTAINS TO THE EAST
The various Pueblos banded together in a secret revolt in 1680 that successfully threw the Spaniards out of New Mexico. The Native Americans, in a tell-tale assertion of their revolution, built a Kiva right smack-dab in the middle of the remains of the church. But of course it took only a dozen or so years for the Spanish to return to retake their colony. Seemingly humbled, the new church they built was much smaller, dwarfed buy the foundations of the old cathedral around it. It now also lies in ruins.
THE PATH AROUND THE SITE
The pueblo lasted through the Mexican Revolution. The Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to Santa Fe ran right past the pueblo. But by the time the Americans arrived disease, depopulation and Comanche raids had forced the last few inhabitants to move West to join other Jemez pueblo. Native Americans who can trace their family history back to the Pecos come once a year to celebrate their old settlement.
NOT YET SPRING
CACTUS COLOR
Fran and I had a great time walking the path around the pueblo ruins in a stiff wind that only increased the atmosphere of the historic settlement. Archaeologists have unearthed most of their finds from the land fills that surrounded the pueblo. The only real remnants of the Native settlement are the defensive ring walls of stone that surrounded and demarcated the pueblo. They reminded me of Hadrian's Wall at the Scottish border of the Roman Empire, built one thousand years before. It took a lot of imagination to conjure up the settlement itself, except for the fact that the 19 existing Pueblos in New Mexico are still there and resemble in many ways this lost city. In the visitor's center we were confused by videos of "Mrs. Miniver" on sale, until we discovered that the English actress Greer Garson had married a Texas oil baron, moved west to New Mexico, and was instrumental in the development, expansion, and preservation of the park. For all its faults, is this a great country, or what?
A LESSON IN ADOBE
The land dwarfs the human history contained within the walls. It was so vast and empty that I had a hard time figuring out how travelers - Natives, Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans - ever actually found the settlement itself. But we were very glad we did.
THE SMALLER ADOBE CHURCH, NOW ALSO IN RUINS
PETROGLYPH NATIONAL MONUMENT
MARCH 31, 2023
CLOUD AND ROCKS
This week I would like to return to the landscapes of New Mexico, so alien to our environment in Portland. They are even drier and higher than the High Desert of Eastern Oregon, and in some sense even more uniform. But there are a few spectacular exceptions to the overall expanse of sagebrush. One of these is a series of bluffs to the west of Albuquerque that comprise Petroglyph National Monument. Driving very slowly, you are only twenty minutes from Downtown, yet a world away. The seventeen-mile long mesa has only a few trails that cross the expanse of the park. Looking at the map, there is not much else until you get to Phoenix, four hundred miles and a good six hours to the West.
ROCKS AND SAGEBRUSH : FINAL VERSION
Petroglyph National Monument is a very interesting Park, with four trails through a rocky landscape that will get you reasonably close to hundreds of Petroglyphs made by Native Americans, Spanish settlers, and Americans after the Mexican War. While at first I feared that we would actually have to hike up the bluff, the sandy trails just go in a few miles into near wilderness at the base of the bluffs. It soon became apparent that access was prohibited beyond the trail not to "protect the environment" but to protect the existing petroglyphs and to ensure they would not be surrounded by modern graffiti. The desert environment consisted of blue sky, clouds, a hint of the city in the distance, and a large expanse of boulders on the Northern hillsides.
A SANDY DEPRESSION SOUTH OF THE TRAIL : FINAL VERSION
The rocks on the surface seemed to be just the uppermost layer of an entire hillside of boulders. The Southern edge of the Monument was another series of bluffs with a sandy depression just beyond the trail. While you only lost the sounds of the interstate after walking in about a mile, Albuquerque was always still apparent to the East. What was shocking to me was how light the city seemed to rest in the dessert environment. The entire city was really just a smudge between these Western bluffs and Sandia Peak just to the East of town. Portland seen from Mt. Tabor seemed like Chicago in comparison.
ALBUQUERQUE'S LACK OF IMPACT ON ITS ENVIRONMENT : FINAL VERSION
SANDIA PEAK ON THE EASTERN EDGE OF THE CITY, A HALF HOUR OR SO FROM THE WEST SIDE : FINAL COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
As we walked the trail it soon became obvious that we better enjoy the landscape, since the petroglyphs were few and far between. At first we didn't see any at all, and Fran began to pine for some gauche arrows on the hillside. We couldn't even find them even when the trail side markers insisted that they were staring us in the face. We felt pretty lame until we came upon others on the trail who were finding even less "success" than we were. This wasn't as easy as the park rangers had advertised back at the Visitors Center. I started to just pay attention to "interesting " boulders, almost abandoning any effort to find any ancient graffiti.
AN "INTERESTING ROCK" : FINAL VERSION
A NICE CRACK, BUT NO PETROGLYPHS : FINAL VERSION
But as we walked on, we began to realize that we had to "be one with the ancient artists." We had passed the first test in looking for interesting rocks, since the artists wanted to find a canvas that would stand out on a hillside of boulders. The second test became the quest for the shady side of the boulders, since the carved signs were lighter than the rocks and stood out in the shade. Finally I decided to focus on rocks that afforded both easy access and comfortable places to draw, since these were obviously not quick sketches. Once we began to think like someone who would actually make a sign on a hillside of boulders we began to actually see some, and delightfully point them out to fellow tourists.
FINALLY SOME ART! : FINAL VERSION
A canvas in the shade. I could almost imagine carving while sitting on the ground next to the rock.
MYSTERIOUS GRAPHICS : FINAL VERSION
Graphics that appealed to me without having any idea of what they might actually represent.
B&W VERSION ADDS SOME TEXTURE, LOSES SOME CONTRAST
THE CONQUISTADORS HAVE ARRIVED!
Spanish settlers contributed some Christian imagery.
SNAKE ON A ROCK : FINAL VERSION
My personal favorite, a graphic snake and a cartoon-like deer sharing a rock face.
A HORIZON OF BOULDERS : FINAL VERSION
We ended up having a nice hike once we lowered our expectations, kind of like enjoying a round of golf despite your appalling score. I would recommend going in the late afternoon to get most of the canvases we found in the shade. And for heaven's sake don't try this hike on a hot Summer day. This is a very unforgiving environment indeed. We hiked only a couple of miles or so, but were so tired we immediately adjourned for an "early-bird special" dinner.
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MARCH 24, 2023
"TYPICAL" NEW MEXICO, BROWN WITH A SPRINKLING OF GREEN
This week I'd like to show you some of the landscape images I captured in New Mexico, and the difficulties photographers can have in adapting to a completely alien environment. We all get used to our own turf, and while it is exciting to encounter a new environment, it can also be disorienting. The trick is to try to react quickly, since most vacations are over far too soon. While I am familiar with the High Desert of Eastern Oregon, I was thrown by the even higher elevations of New Mexico, and the very different contrast of large population centers with deserts right on the edge of town. This first image shows a typical landscape mere miles from Albuquerque, New Mexico's largest city, with a population of almost half of the entire state. While Albuquerque is not really a large city, and it did sprawl like most Western cities, it was still surprising to find almost no human presence so quickly out of town. Since it rains only two months out of the year, vegetation, especially like Oregonians are used to, is not a real feature of the landscape until you climb high into the mountains.
COTTONWOODS JUST STARTING TO STIR
Another feature of the climate that through me was the strange nature of Winter. There was none of the nastiness of Oregon's wet environment, but there wasn't any snow either. The landscape just seemed to be in a state of hibernation, waiting for Spring with no clear rush to get to it. I slowly realized that the prevalent trees at 5,000 or so feet were Cottonwoods, which were just beginning to hint that they were still alive. They were the basic street trees in the city, and also constituted most of the vegetation in their natural environment in the Bosques at the river's edge. While the postcards assured us that these forests were actually going to get green and full, the woodland in March was pretty thin.
MT.SANSIA, LITERALLY ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY
Another feature of the urban environment was the very small impact it had on the overall natural environment. While my telephoto lens can make Mt. Hood seem right next to Portland, it is really sixty miles away. Sandia Peak, shown here, is a block fault similar to Steens Mountain, but it 's so close to Albuquerque that in the Portland context it's closer than Gresham. It took us only about 45 minutes or so, up a switchback mountain road, to get to the totally snowed-in summit from Downtown. It was only above 10,000 feet that we saw Douglas Firs, a tree that grows naturally in every Portland park worthy of a visit.
RIO GRANDE NATURE PRESERVE
But the real key to the desert environment was the presence of water in any form possible. Most of the entire population of New Mexico, from the ancient Pueblos to the modern cities, relies on the rare appearance of a body of water. The pond shown above was part of a small nature preserve near the Rio Grande on the East side of Albuquerque. The viewing deck at the modern nature center is the only access allowed. To the West of the preserve are an independent collection of parks that extend to the Rio Grande.
TURTLE TRAFFIC JAM
This collection of turtles occupied a snag of logs about thirty feet from the viewing deck. The pond and the nearby river make up one of the only flyways for birds as they migrate through New Mexico.
WATER IS LIFE : FINAL VERSION
WATER IS LIFE : FINAL B&W VERSION
A closer view of the Pond. Try to understand that almost all of Albuquerque is between this pond and Sandia Peak to the East. While the are some rich neighborhoods to the West of the Rio Grande, it thins out fairly quickly. As usual, the black and white version allows for much more contrast while keeping to a general feeling of reality.
THE RIO GRANDE
The Rio Grande is a very long, and very slow river. It starts in Colorado, and flows through the center of New Mexico before constituting hundreds of miles of border between Texas and Mexico. It's the only reason, along with the railroad and later Route 66, that Albuquerque exists at all. In many ways the difference between New Mexico and Arizona, with over three times the population, is due to the fact that the Colorado River has ten times the water as the Rio Grande. It is a pretty natural environment as it flows past Albuquerque, as shown in the image above. The park we walked through was refreshingly undeveloped, with no indication that there would be much traffic on the river as the weather improved. I believe there is only three bridges across the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, one carrying the main highway West to Arizona.
A VERY QUIET RIVER
.This is a view of the West bank of the river. While I did crop out the row of mansions on the bluff above, it was interesting to see that they had no real access down the cliff to the river, and there didn't seem to be any trails on the other side. In general, Albuquerque seems to have a very small impact on its natural environs despite its sprawl. At about one third the size of Portland, it somehow coexists with the desert. In the next few weeks we'll visit some parks further away from any semblance of urbanity.
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MARCH 17, 2023
SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY SHADOWS COMPLEMENT THE MUD AND BLUE SKY
Hi everyone. I missed last week because Fran and I took a week to visit New Mexico for the first time. We had a wonderful time, and experienced a healthy degree of climate, culture, dining, and architectural shock. These are the kind of contrasts that can excite the senses due to the alien nature of the new environment. At the same time we were reminded of the unique nature of our environs in Portland.
IRON BALCONY AT HISTORIC ADOBE CATHEDRAL
TWO ADOBE DETAILS AT MODERN HOTEL
New Mexico was a shock to the system. It was obviously Winter, but not the Winter we are used to - a High Desert climate, but much drier than even Eastern Oregon. The only street trees that seemed to thrive were Cottonwoods, and they were just barely beginning to bud. We kept seeing photos of green trees and people and realized that we truly had come to visit in the very slow season, and that there was zero chance of rain. I truly realized the difference when a natural science exhibit casually mentioned that the Douglas Firs we see in our neighbor's yards in Portland only appear in New Mexico on mountaintops above 10,000 feet. The weather was very pleasant, with highs about 25 degrees higher than what we had left, and there were very few people, much less tourists about. We began to actually fear ever coming here in the Summer once we realized how easy we had it.
THESE "FAKE" STRUCTURAL SUPPORTS PROVIDE GREAT SHADOW DETAILS
The combination of Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures was certainly different from Portland. The contrast between the living and very old cultures of the pueblos and the oldest cities in the United States with the idea that our bungalow in Portland was built a year before New Mexico statehood in 1912 was head-spinning. As a native New Yorker it has taken me thirty years to get used to the comparative emptiness of Oregon. It took us most of the week to realize that Albuquerque and Santa Fe combined were less than half as big as the Portland Metro area, and that those two cities made up almost half of the population of the whole state!
AS SIMPLE A WOOD DECORATIVE DETAIL AS THEY COME AT ONE COMMERCIAL CORNER
The dining was even better than advertised. We missed meals only because we were so stuffed from the ones we had loved much earlier in the day. Even though I thought I wouldn't miss yet another choice between red or green chile for a very long time, we had some wonderful meals.
NOW THAT'S REAL ADOBE AT PECOS PUEBLO CHURCH RUINS
Yet the biggest shock of all for us was the mysterious horrors of the automotive city. Both Albuquerque and Santa Fe, in their own ways, were total creations of automotive urban design even when they actively fought against it , which was very rare. The contrast with Portland.or at least the Portland Fran and I are used to, was instantly palpable. It took us four days to realize that all of Albuquerque wasn't as ugly as we first thought, mostly because the city was so weirdly laid out, with streets and parking lots at least twice as big as they needed to be. It took me three days to realize that if I just avoided the parking lots and walked down one street and one alley that the main square of Old Town was only three blocks from our rental instead of nine. Fran and I finally found something we could call a neighborhood that resembled Portland when we deliberately ventured away from the streets we were supposed to walk on. While Santa Fe was much more walk-able, it was still not very nice at all five minutes from the Central Square. In fact even a fifteen minute walk was too much, since we were walking on the equivalent of Powell Blvd. Let's just say that they're not handing out "96 walking scores" anywhere in urban New Mexico.
ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM MODERN SIMPLE ADOBE DETAIL REVEALS HEIGHT OF CORNICE AT FLAT ROOF
As usual my reaction to an alien environment led me to concentrate on the details that could delight me while avoiding the overall ambience that sometimes repelled me. The New Mexican architectural environment seemed to be composed of four elements -mud, wood, decorative details, and a very limited color range. This limited color range even extended to interiors, with color dependent on materials for the most part.
RARE PAINTED DECORATION AT VERY DEEP WINDOW SURROUNDS, HISTORIC CATHEDRAL
THIS INCREDIBLE STONE WALL PROVIDES THE ONLY REAL COLOR AT ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM
HERE THE ONLY COLOR IS THE HIDDEN LIGHTING ON BOOK-MATCHED WOOD PANELING
These first few images concentrate on mud. While some of this is authentic adobe, I soon ceased to care how "real" it was, since real adobe construction is restricted to historic structures, the very rich, or the very poor. It intrigued me how much the soft mud architecture was adaptable by skilled contemporary architects to new construction, even though I knew that there was probably wood frames or steel underneath. Even Santa Fe seemed more governed by a height limit (which I don't even know exists) than by the mud esthetic. The best contemporary architecture, exemplified by a couple of museums we visited, adapts adobe to their own ends as details without directly copying or pretending to be something they are not. Since it rains only two months a year, outdoor courtyards and flat roofs with elaborate cornices mean that this Portlander could go a week without actually "seeing" a roof. Buildings just ended, only topped by blue sky.
ANOTHER ADOBE CUTAWAY, AT THE ENTRANCE TO PUEBLO CULTURAL CENTER
There was very little wood, which was shocking coming from the land of wood. Wood appeared as structural elements, real or not, or even more characteristically as decoration amid the mud. Carved wood details and elaborate trellises to combat the sun replaced any thought of wood siding, which probably cracks way before it ever rots.
EXPOSED VIGAS AT PUEBLO MUSEUM COURTYARD
RUSTIC WOOD TRELLIS AT PUEBLO COURTYARD
ELABORATE WOOD CARVING AT PECOS NATIONAL MONUMENT VISITOR CENTER, ONCE HOME OF ENGLISH ACTRESS GREER GARSON!
The decorative impulse is based on elaborate details related to actual use, like openings, floors, and supports, amid all of the mud. I've included several that caught my eye.
THIS GATE BOLT IS TYPICAL OF EVEN "MODERN" HARDWARE
WOOD PATIO DOOR
SANTA FE "SECURITY DOOR"
THIS VINTAGE CARVED DOOR AWAITS YOUR NEW HOME AT A GALLERY
What was interesting once I realized what was going on was the very restricted color palette. As opposed to what I have seen highlighted in books on similar desert environments like North Africa or Mexico, New Mexico seems to be almost totally composed of shades of brown. Trim can only be white (my religious color choice) or more likely blue to match the sky. Rarely orange appears to brighten the scene, and lets be honest, that just really a very lively brown. The only real color that intrudes seems to be the decorative tiles that appear as wall decoration more than on floors.
ORANGE PAINTED WOOD AT FRONT PORCH OF CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
"TYPICAL" TILE WAINSCOTTING ON A VINTAGE COMMERCIAL BUILDING
I hope you have enjoyed this brief survey of New Mexico details. Next week we will take a look at the natural environment, just as alien from Oregon as the architecture.
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MARCH 3, 2023
NEWLY BUILT LLOYD'S OF LONDON - WHEN WE WERE BOTH YOUNG, 1990
This week I'd like to continue to explore my archives as a way of encouraging you to do the same. There are some marvelous things you can find ther, especially if you are as disorganized as yours truly. This poupourie has no real theme except that they caught my eye when I struggled through several dozen pages of old slides. When I say they caught my eye I really mean that I saw some element of hope, since my early struggles with my camera were exceeded only by my enthusiasm. Exposure and White Balance were often wildly off the mark. I would show you some of the original slides but for my embarrassment, even considering that slide film is a very unforgiving medium. Suffice it to say that most of these images have actually come to life only after my working on them in their newly digital form.
This first image can serve as a good example. Like all of these other images, it is more than thirty years old. No one outside of Little Rock had ever heard of Bill Clinton. This detail is of the exterior emergency stair of a ground-breaking modern tower by Richard Rogers for Lloyd's of London, taken when it was almost brand new. This was way before it was joined by a whole host of newer and larger towers in The City, the financial center of London. For all I know it has probably now undergone a renovation, and Rogers eventually became Lord Rogers. For once my exposure wasn't that off, but my camera had been so mistaken that the original slide rendered the aluminum stair tower almost as blue as the sky.
SIR JOHN SOANE'S MUSEUM - LONDON, 1990 : FINAL VERSION
This next image is a detail from one room of Sir John Soane's house in London. The next time you fear that your hoarder tendencies might have gotten the better of you, head to London to see this place. Sir John's collection overgrew his townhouse so he bought two more adjoining houses, and even then the resulting architectural hodgepodge has to be seen to be believed. The man was a genius and crazy at the same time, and his various spatial strategies have inspired generations of architects ever since his death, when his home became a museum.
A FORMAL ADMONITION - LONDON, 1990 : FINAL VERSION
Any trip to the Mother Country always has to include a few "There will always be an England Moment", like this understated sign in Spitalfields Market in the East End, several hundred years older than Saturday Market in Portland. Sometimes stuff like this in one of our British mysteries on the telly will cause Fran to scream out "But how do they reproduce?" There is often no real answer.
IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT - CAMBRIDGE, 1990 : FINAL VERSION
In a similar vein is this detail from one of the college courtyards in Cambridge. My total lack of understanding at how one can easily make this knot is only exceeded by the idea that this is still the way that the groundskeepers will keep me off the lawn, hundreds of years after the grass was first laid in the college quad.
SOMEWHERE IN EAST ANGLIA, 1990 FINAL VERSION
A typical East Anglian landscape, somewhere outside Cambridge. Yes, the image is still a bit noisy, but just pretend it was taken on some ridiculously fast color film instead of completely underexposed Kodachrome. I'm sure this place still looks exactly the same, many generations of ducks later.
BEFORE THE STORM, ORFORD, 1990
But sometimes England is not "a green and pleasant land." This is the sky that greeted us in Orford, a town on the coast of the North Sea, just before a near hurricane hit - red sky take warning indeed. The original slide is nothing short of an exposure disaster.
DUMBARTON OAKS, WASHINGTON, 1989 : FINAL VERSION
We move back one or two years to our former home in Washington, D.C. This is a small portion of one of my personal "most beautiful places on Earth, man-made edition" - Dumbarton Oaks Garden north of Georgetown. Their is truly nothing like Springtime in Washington, especially since it might just be "The Last Nice Day" before the heat and humidity arrive.
DUMBARTON OAKS TRELLIS, 1989 : FINAL VERSION
Part of the charm of this place for a retired architect of my persuasion is that the wealth of the family, and the army of gardeners that keep the place ship-shape, allowed the original landscape architects to virtually ignore any semblance of "common sense" in many details around the garden. Notice the total lack of concern for protecting the wood of this wonderful trellis in one "room" of the garden - if needs be we will just rebuild the thing, and no one will be the wiser. The detail that I love most in the garden are the incredibly comfortable curving brick benches that violate every rule possible in brick construction - horizontal brick that will collect water and inevitably lead to it's own destruction. But until we have to rebuild them a generation from now, they are the most comfortable brick surface you have ever had the pleasure to sit on, so stop worrying about maintenance will you!
YET ANOTHER DEMO, WASHINGTON, 1989 : FINAL VERSION
Let's end this essay with an unfortunately timeless image. It's somewhere in our Nation's Capital, and we are at yet another demo. We are blissfully unaware that almost thirty-five years later we not only will still be fighting the same fight, but that we will be in the process of losing it. Some things unfortunately never change.
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FEBRUARY 24, 2023
IT'S JUST LIKE YOUR COLLEGE, ONLY HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLDER : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to take you all on a trip to Cambridge and East Anglia in England. This journey is courtesy of my scanner, which has again allowed me to explore my disorganized archives and rescue some images from oblivion. These images were taken on a trip in 1990, when a "young professional" couple was foolish enough to take their 2 1/2-year old overseas. The photographer is now a pensioner, and the toddler is now a college professor, but it feels like yesterday. The scanner allows me to take slides which I can now only view by putting them up to a light bulb, and return them to the present day. The most important part of this process is that these new digital images can now be improved and transformed far beyond their artifact origins, as if they were captured yesterday instead of 33 years ago.
CAMBRIDGE SKYLINE : FINAL VERSION
A word to the wise when dealing with people like Fran and me - never invite us on a ridiculous overseas adventure. Our friends Doug and Joanne were going off to Cambridge on a six-month sabbatical and casually mentioned that we could visit them, probably never actually believing that we would follow through. A few months later we landed in Cambridge, and crammed into their apartment, which they had rented from Stephen Hawking. Cambridge is that kind of place. We had the experience of actually living in Cambridge for a brief time, which feels very different from just visiting. We decamped for ten days in the middle of our three-week stay to tool around East Anglia, the quiet and mostly rural part of England that contains Cambridge.
MEDIEVAL STONEWORK : FINAL VERSION
Many of you might be familiar with Oxford, England's other incredible university town where Inspector Lewis solved multiple murders for decades. Oxford is absolutely wonderful, but is instantly put to shame when you arrive in Cambridge. The difference is that Oxford is a real small city, while Cambridge is a village masquerading as a small town. The University is composed of a multitude of "colleges" that date back many hundreds of years. These images show some of the characteristic "porter's gates" that divide town from gown. Most of the collegescomprise small districts of their own, and customarily back onto the River Cam. "The Backs" is where students actually do cavort on small boats in the midst of academic paradise. Minus the problem of us actually going to college, you can see why the atmosphere was idyllic.
POLYCHROMATIC MASONRY, OLD SCHOOL : FINAL VERSION
Stone detailing embellishes a brick facade, including actual stripes. And how about that weather vane!
LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY MASONRY HOMAGE : FINAL VERSION
The second image above is a small addition to one of the colleges designed by one of my architectural heroes of the time, James Stirling. Sometimes derided as a dreaded and feared "Post Modernist", I felt that Stirling's best work actually was just trying to loosen up things by making an attempt to fit in, especially needed in such a historic environment as Cambridge. I think you can see the masonry traditions that tried to make this small building part of a larger architectural tradition..
The surrounding area of East Anglia is beyond the attentions of most visitors to England. It is mostly rural, very agricultural, and contains no spectacular national parks. It's kind of like England's Kansas. The topography is so flat that the sky holds most of the landscape's charm. And most of the shoreline is on the North Sea, not very conducive to a seaside holiday in early Spring. We had a wonderful time, being young and stupid, dragging a kid around with no idea where we would spend the night, much less reservations. We even weathered a minor hurricane when we actually got to the coast, facing the only winds I have ever had to make an effort to stay upright. On the beach, the sight of a surf that really couldn't make it to shore, and the gulls which could only fly backwards, only confirmed our foolishness through our amazed laughter.
NOT YOUR TRADITIONAL PARISH CHURCH : FINAL VERSION
Every parish church, no matter how grand, deserves a graveyard, which build up its own grandeur over time.
CHURCHYARD : FINAL VERSION
Benjamin of course doesn't remember a thing, but he also had a great time. He melted the heart of everyone he met, and "would the young man like some more chips?" ensured that none of us would ever go hungry in every pub we stopped at. East Anglia was once one of the richest parts of England due to the wool trade, and now trifling market towns are centered around churches that are really miniature cathedrals.
PARKING YOUR CAR NEAR A TYPICAL CORNER IN A MARKET TOWN IN EAST ANGLIA : FINAL VERSION
A lot of the housing stock is hundreds of years old, and no longer is based on the right angle. The particular characteristic half-timber construction of of large timbers supplemented by infill of stone or stucco lends itself to "settling" into a very casual relationship with gravity. We got used to the idea that we couldn't expect floors, walls, or ceilings (sometimes all three) to be "straight" - it was like being drunk without having had a drink.
IT'S OLD AND YELLOW AND A LITTLE OUT OF KILTER : FINAL VERSION
I hope you've enjoyed these images. I assure you that they have just a passing resemblance to the original slides, which suffered from the usual amateur's limited understanding of how to "nail" an exposure. Their new digital existence allows this old goat to correct the composition and exposure errors of his youth and finally revealing what caught my eye so long ago.
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FEBRUARY 17, 2023
WHAT THE HECK IS THAT? : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss the value of taking a deep dive into a subject, especially one that presents itself as a complete surprise. It's a lot of fun to come upon a photographic opportunity without warning, and I encourage you to explore the possibilities, at least until your companion shows signs of complete boredom. As I always tell my students, when the person standing next to you starts to wonder what the hell you are showing interest in, you have achieved a certain amount of personal vision - something other artists can take a lifetime to achieve. The artistic problem you then face is how to communicate your enthusiasm to others, but at least you have something unique to say.
I didn't realize that my most recent blog post was my 100th essay, and it is with a lot of gratitude that your collective interest has encouraged me to continue to share these photographic musings each week. I look forward to more essays, and hope to introduce a way to allow you to purchase the images in each post at a discount on my revised website. I hope you will explore it, and would love it you contacted me with your thoughts on how I'm doing.
A MINIMALIST PRELUDE : FINAL VERSION
I just thought I would throw this one in, mostly because I'm constantly confused and bemused by all of the minimalist images of architecture that somehow include light posts. This is taken outside of the Portland Opera offices at the East end of Tilikum Crossing. While I applaud the brickwork stripes and the carefully detailed awnings, I wished that they had somehow ensured that the requisite light pole could actually be straight!
Last week I showed some images taken on a stroll across the Tilikum Crossing, the newest bridge in Portland. This week I will show some details I discovered in the new neighborhood that has emerged across the river on the west side of the bridge. This collection of towers by the river still goes by the rather uninspiring name of "South Waterfront", and arose as a way to expand the city's main hospital complex. Note to urban planners - avoid putting a hospital complex on the top of a mountain. As the hospital expanded over the last century, its future as a growing concern was threatened by the fact that no matter how ingeniously architects piled new buildings next to, around, and on top of each other, there was just no more room on Pill Hill. When the hospital started to make some some self-serving noises about moving to the suburbs, something needed to be done. The abandoned industrial waterfront below the hill, across an actual neighborhood and at least two major streets and a highway, was deemed the site for future expansion. With much fanfare and major political controversy, a 57-million dollar "aerial tram" replaced a fleet of 37 buses that had continuously ran up the hill. This rather remarkable urban ski lift now connected Pill Hill to the neighborhood to be down by the riverfront.
EMERGENCY STAIR : FINAL VERSION
To my eye the first few hospital buildings are really pretty boring. While this emergency stair is certainly well detailed, it is the only architectural element that enlivens the entire facade
South Waterfront has now come along very nicely, with an entire host of both high-priced condo towers, and subsidized affordable housing at their feet that adjoins a number of hospital buildings that have joined the originals at the foot of the tram. There is no denying the waterfront views available to the condo residents, and over the years the incipient neighborhood has been further tied into the city. Yet it still exists in a state of unreality, with a real lack of neighborhood services that belie it's socioeconomic status. Covid certainly hasn't helped community development, since we still can't fill abandoned commercial spaces in our most established neighborhoods, much less new ones. The neighborhood finally has a better auto connection from the north, stops on the trolley line, and a pedestrian bridge over the highway underneath the tram - yet it still feels suburban at best, disconnected from the city that it adjoins. The old joke among urban planners was that the city had built two new neighborhoods for empty nesters downsizing from their suburban McMansions. Our fake SOHO north of Downtown, the Pearl District, would have enough pseudo urban energy to appeal to Democrats. The Republicans would find the suburban energy of South Waterfront more to their liking. While I don't know if this political division has really come to pass, and the price of admission to both neighborhoods is sky-high, South Waterfront is still undeveloped compared to the Pearl. While people like me realize that the Pearl will never be a real Portland neighborhood without it's own elementary school, South Waterfront still doesn't even have a real grocery store!
SUNSHADE DEVICES TRY TO ENSURE SOLAR CONTROL EVEN IF YOU DON'T SIMPLY PULL DOWN THE BLINDS : FINAL VERSION
But it is near the west end of the Tilikum Crossing, only few blocks from the north end of South Waterfront. Once three or four other towers are built on the industrial wasteland south of the bridgehead, this connection will be complete. So my friend Al and I walked south of the bridge to see how the neighborhood was doing. It is still very much a work in progress, with contradictions galore. The waterside path is still very underdone, even though the waterfront site is one of the main points of the entire neighborhood. And the actual streets of the neighborhood seem more than a little illusionary, since even the mass transit connections are still mostly oriented to the hospital buildings. Yet there is a certain amount of energy at the tram station, which even has what might be the most developed bicycle parking lot in the country. We talked with a bicycle commuter, a woman of a certain age, who told us that the hospital workers are paid a buck or so each day that they ride their bikes to work, and get to park them in a monitored lot so secure that they can even keep their full bags on their bikes all day!
MYSTERIOUS FOLDED PANELS : FINAL VERSION
The thing about South Waterfront is that while I can keep abreast of the neighborhood while driving across the Ross Island Bridge, keeping track of this or that new tower, I have no idea of what is happening on the ground, four or five stories below the level of the bridge. So I discovered the subject of most of the images in this essay only on the street. The facade that is explored here is the first few stories of what is probably an office building that I know as the "Yellow Building" since the window surrounds on the upper stories are a very bright yellow.
REFLECTIONS ON MYSTERIOUS FOLDED PANELS ON THE BUILDING NEXT DOOR : FINAL VERSION
It is only on the street that I found this interesting sculptural facade that covered the lower stories. It turned out that these folded metal panels were in fact dressing up the parking garage at the base of this building. Leave aside the larger question of why you need a four-story parking garage next to a mass transit hub in a neighborhood which itself is built on a series of underground garages - at least the architects made the effort to decorate this particular box for cars.
A SIMPLE FOLDED SQUARE : FINAL VERSION
I hope that this series can show how a brief exploration can yield a number of images that reveal different facets of one particular architectural detail. As I approached the facade from different angles, I began to see its simple logic - to provide light into the garage while obscuring its contents. In fact, even a retired architect could only realize that these weren't even windows until a certain angle was inspected. It was similar to the need for five different camera angles for the referees to determine pass interference.
WELL WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT! - ALL IS REVEALED? : FINAL VERSION
Now you might wonder why all this attention to a parking garage facade, and that is your right. But I would encourage you to explore these images as an exercise in graphic design, divorced from their apparent subject. I try to ignore the "subject" through tight square crops, and heightened contrast that hopefully focuses on the issues that I care about. I hope that you have enjoyed this series of images enough that you also don't care anymore about their pedestrian origins. Architectural details shouldn't only be for architects - have fun looking around.
AS GRAPHIC AS THEY COME : FINAL VERSION
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A STROLL ACROSS TILIKUM CROSSING
FEBRUARY 10, 2023
TILIKUM CROSSING PYLON : FINAL VERSION
This week the weather finally became somewhat conducive to actually venturing outside and pursuing my photography. I ventured across the newest bridge in "Bridgetown", the footbridge/bicycle/bus/trolley/Max bridge named Tilikum Crossing to honor the Chinook tribes native to our region. The "Bridge of the People" is a spectacular cable-stayed bridge, the latest and greatest type of suspension bridge very suitable for relatively short spans like the one required by the Willamette. This bridge is really the Division Street bridge that Division Street never received mainly because there was never enough city on the West Side in Downtown to deserve a bridge. With the creation of the South Waterfront neighborhood, the Portland Aerial Tram going up to Pill Hill, and the general redevelopment of the river edge south of Downtown, there became a justification for a river crossing near Division Street. In a more mature society than ours of course there would have been at least a token allowance for automobiles, which share lanes in most parts of the city with Mass transit, but there is no doubt that the pedestrian experience is paramount on this bridge.
TILIKUM CROSSING PYLON : FINAL B&W VERSION
I am a particular type of photographer, one who finds motivation problematic once I have captured an image of a particular subject that has more than satisfied me. There is no doubt that my chosen subject matter, the city and its architecture, can be greatly affected by the weather and the light, so that continued investigation might be warranted. But what do you do when you have already created an image where you know that that subject will "never look better" than the image that you have already created. Some people like musicians will and must practice for a lifetime, but my personality would chafe under that regimen. I took Kung Fu classes for nearly twenty years, and actually became pretty good at it, especially considering my age and lack of natural athletic ability. I excelled at the spontaneity of sparring, but positively rebelled at the daily practice of forms, which seemed to me to only exist so that your teacher could always find fault even after you earned a black belt. Thus I have to usually gird myself for yet another try at a subject that is very familiar to me, unlike other photographers who seemingly could photograph the Golden Gate every day of their lives and never tire of it.
TILIKUM CROSSING # 4 : FINAL VERSION
As I often say, attitudes like mine require a delight in the process of taking photographs, rather than the results of those efforts. The expected success rate, despite low expectations borne from years of experience, is only confounded by the fact that you have already been successful, thank you very much. And while I understand that I might have not captured a particular "money shot" of a subject that I know that exists, the fact that I have seen it again and again in other people's work lessens the need to have one of my own.
Now all this goes against my other belief that you do your best work as a local, so much so that a traveling photographer has almost no chance, no matter their skill, of capturing an image that might have taken a local years to take. You might get one chance to walk across the bridge, and I could probably walk across it most days for the rest of my life. As I have matured I have begun to realize, after careful prodding by Fran, that one doesn't go to Paris to make photographs, but you have fun taking photographs while you are experiencing Paris. Or at least until someone actually pays you to go to Paris to take photographs.
TILIKUM CROSSING : A SUBTLE SILHOUETTE
So I took yet another walk across the bridge yesterday to get some exercise and see my friend Al - these images were just a happy result. One of the reasons that I write these essays is to give me an excuse to exhibit additional takes on a subject that I know have almost no chance of making it into my gallery under the Burnside Bridge, because I've already got a great image of the Tilikum Crossing there, that either sells or doesn't sell to the public.
A BRIGHTER VERSION REVEALS MORE CONCRETE VARIATION
With all of these caveats, I had a great time, and came away with several nice images. The first image actually was a departure for me, since I have never concentrated on just one of the four pillars that support the bridge. It is now a sculpture devoid of context, whose almost anal symmetry doesn't mitigate its exploration of light and shadow. I'm not sure on the color versus the black and white version
The second image is far more conventional, but I think is fairly successful as a straight image of the pair of pylons at one end of the bridge, against a pretty nice partly cloudy Portland sky.
HIGH-KEY BLACK AND WHITE
The third and fourth images are much more dramatic interpretations of the pair of pylons, in tight close-ups that try but fail to straighten the pylons up, despite the efforts of my software. When you are this close it is much harder to do this with software, which is why there is till a place for shifting lenses which I cannot really afford to even rent. On the other hand, they are much better than the originals, with at least one of the pair seemingly not falling down. What I find fascinating is how the pretty subtle differences in exposure completely transform what is pretty much the same viewpoint. I think your affinity for silhouettes will determine which is more to your taste. I'm not sure, but I do like the more uniform pylons in the darker version. The high-key black and white version shows how powerful the rare blue sky in Portland can actually introduce the idea of "color contrast" - I don' think the black and white cuts it in this particular case.
BRIDGE SHADOW : KIND OF BLUE
BRIDGE SHADOW : BLACK & WHITE, STILL NOT ENOUGH CONTRAST
This last pair of images are both a work in progress, which might argue for another walk across the bridge. I was intrigued by the shadow of the bridge as a way of exploring its beauty. While this was a case of being there at "the right time", it will undoubtedly happen again. I am not satisfied by the contrast I achieved, even in the black and white version, and know I could probably improve on this idea someday. Of course you might not agree in the idea at all - right now I actually like the color version better, which is rare for me.
So there you have it. Take a walk with a friend, especially one who might be taking photographs too. You might actually create something new, and if it provides an excuse for getting out and about then it is worth it no matter what images you might come away with.
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SPRINGTIME, SOMEWHERE IN SPACE AND TIME : FINAL VERSION
This week I’d like to discuss another four secret documents that I recently found in my basement. I assure you that none were top were TOP SECRET, and I am releasing them to the public with no intervention from the Justice Department - in fact the National Archives doesn’t seem the least interested in my photo archives.
These four images were lost to the ages because they were saved as color slides, a format whose display is now just a memory. My scanner has allowed me to turn them into proper digital images. I can now process them any way I want, mostly to improve the original files as images by correcting the young photographer’s mistakes in exposure and composition.
Slide film was a very intriguing medium. It provided Twentieth Century photographers with the sharpest images possible with the best color rendition in the world. Unfortunately it also was pretty unforgivable in terms of exposure, which had to be “right on” to the point where even the best photographers in the world had to “bracket”, to take a number of different exposures of the same scene in order to find one that came close to optimum. Needless to say, ordinary people with a camera were more often than not reduced to tears when their slides came back from Kodak or wherever, usually gloriously over or under exposed.If you didn't shoot for Life or National Geographic there was little chance to see your images in print or on the wall. All you had was a tiny artifact that could be projected to a very large size in a darkened room. These viewing conditions, accompanied by your stimulating color commentary, usually led to groans no matter how good the actual images were. The actual printing of slide images was very expensive, to the point that it was not really available for most photographers. And of course it was pretty impossible to change anything after the fact.
AS AMERICAN AS A PICKET FENCE : FINAL VERSION
These four images that are included in this essay are so much better than the original slides that it is not really worth comparing them. It is often an act of faith in actually scanning your slides to see if there is something there. So there existence as forgotten images is not just because disorganized people like myself can't find them - but because when you actually find them, you don't really know what you have. In contrast to color prints in a shoe box, you usually have only your younger self to blame, not the incompetent minimum wage worker in the one-hour kiosk.
These images can now be viewed in their best form - at least as well as my current post-processing skills can manage. Of course I cannot go back to move a little to the left or right, and can only crop the original frame rather than expand it. And to tell you the truth I can only discuss them as "images", since even I do not remember their exact place in the space/time continuum.
So the first image is an idealized tree, since only Google can actually identify it. It is Springtime, and it is purple, and that is about it. I couldn't tell you the actual time or place. But there is a certain charm in the lightness of the foliage in contrast to the ancient solidity of the tree's structure, which cannot be duplicated in an engineer's office.
I believe the second image is from Colonial Williamsburg, but I couldn't swear to it. I love the receding fence line, and the play between shade and shadow on the fence itself. Since I balanced the color based on the highlight portions of the fence, the obvious blue tint of the shadows is true - shadows will be blue, especially on a white fence. Think of shadows on snow, for example. The color rendition hides the noise in the sadows much better than the black and white conversion. I also love the idea of such craftsmanship on a simple picket fence bordering a dirt road, which says something about public and private expenditures. The probable fact that the builder of this fence was also the owner's property is also something to contemplate.
A WATERFALL WITHOUT A NAME IS STILL A WATERFALL : FINAL VERSION
This scene also exists out of place and time, so it's value is simply as another example of my tendency towards intimate landscape images. I cropped the left edge to get rid of a thinner and lighter portion of the forest that competed for attention with my waterfall. I was amazed that this was a rare case that my exposure was so correct that I had not actually blown out the highlights in the water. I lightened the shadows to reveal a little detail in the forest while bringing down the real blacks to deepen the colors without actually saturating them. I was also pleased with my shutter speed, which achieved both detail and milkiness in the same waterfall. This image really works better in color than black and white, since the extra detail in the black and white version does not compensate for the contrasting color of the leaves, whose light tone was not really that much different than the water. The tree complements the water rather than competing for attention.
TWO DIFFERENT RENDITIONS OF A FAN VAULT "SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND", CIRCA 1990
Finally, we are "Somewhere in England", as the espionage film would say. These two views of a small but spectacular church interior show the limits of my wide angle lens. What's funny is that this is so much wider than my usual view point - but a 28mm lens, broken long ago, was not really wide enough for interior work. And yet it is already distorted, which show the limitations of such lenses. These days I could stitch a half-dozen shots together to maybe achieve a complete and vertical view of the church, but his is what I have. At least the present-day photographer knows enough to understand what "young professional" saw in this monument - those incredible fan vaults that formed the ceiling. This is almost certainly an example of an East Anglian parish church, which approached a cathedral in sumptuous if not in size. This area in England was so rich in Medieval times that these churches dwarf the rest of what are now small rural market towns. The two versions both have their charms. The color version shows off the color of the stone and especially those mysterious red dots that appear randomly in the stonework - the church seems to be getting over a case of Chicken Pox. The Black and White rendition ups the detail and contrast to really show off the ribs of the vaults. To each his own.
I will let you go now without inflicting you with a slideshow, which is now just another way of viewing your photos on Lightroom, unless you show it to a crowd on Power Point. We now have slideshows with out actual slides. My father's student gig as an aide in the Art History class, working the slide projector is as foreign to our reality as his playing both ways on both the Offensive and Defensive lines on the Dartmouth football team. I hope you have enjoyed this trip back to the past thru these four images.
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JANUARY 27, 2023
THE BRIDGE, 2010 : FINAL TIMELESS SEPIA VERSI0N, ANYTIME SINCE 1883
This week I'd like to ruminate a little on the value of history and the small ways that photographic exploration can allow a photographer like myself to both appreciate and comment on the past. The value of human experience allows us to see for ourselves and to both appreciate our own small part in the present while standing in awe of a historical monument that was built long before we saw it and will probably last long after we are gone, if not forever. It's one thing to contemplate Nature, knowing that it exists without, and even despite our presence on this world. It's another when we are confronted by a work of mankind, built by people very much like ourselves, but so stupendous that we seriously question whether our own age is up to these standards. As an artist, the need to observe and record our experience of such a monument to Man's achievement is balanced by the fear that we will not have anything new, much less important, to say.
THE BRIDGE, 2010 : NOT AS TIMELESS , BUT IT STILL COULD BE FROM ANY YEAR SINCE I WAS BORN
I have just finished "The Great Bridge" an outstanding historical work by David McCullough on the incredible story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge from 1869 -1883. I would recommend his poetic work of history to everyone, even if you don't think you could possibly understand the structural engineering involved. In that way it's a lot like "Moby Dick", which might spend a little more time on whaling than a modern reader needs to know. "The Great Bridge" is a very human story of a father and his son who achieve immortality despite death and crippling sickness. Alongside is the daughter-in-law. a woman who rose so far above her station that even the society of 1883 had to acknowledge her greatness even while they tried to ignore her example. McCullough concludes his volume by remarking that despite all of the struggles and scandals of Twain's "Gilded Age", that "in the end the bridge was beautiful."
I was born in Brooklyn in 1956, left New York for college in 1973, and did not walk across the bridge until the late summer of 2001. As a native New Yorker, forgive me for referring to the Brooklyn Bridge as just "the bridge", since in this case typical New York parochialism can be historically and artistically justified. I trained as an American historian, only to give in to logic until I pursued an even more quixotic economic journey into Architecture. So this book was right up my alley, but it stood on my bookshelf for decades. I finally picked it up a couple of months ago, searching for something that could possibly be a little more uplifting than another tome on the War (kids, that's WWII). Part of the shock of reaching a certain age is realizing that the humble artifact you are holding is itself a piece of history, since this book was written over fifty years ago, long before David McCullough achieved fame as a "talking head" on television.. The paperback was no doubt picked up in a used bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana over forty years ago, and survived the great trek to Powell's in 1992, when I sold the twenty-seven boxes of books that couldn't possibly fit into our new apartment on the Park Blocks.
THE BRIDGE, 2010 - IF I GO BACK, I WOULD STITCH SOME MORE IMAGES TO GET DOWN TO THE ROADWAY
These are a few examples of the images that I made on and off the bridge during my two walks across the bridge alone in 2001, and with Fran and Benjamin and Margaret in 2010. I somehow hope that you might feel that they look like Rich pictures, even though there have been whole volumes written solely on the art and photography of the bridge during its now 150 years on this earth. Far better artists than myself have tried to come up with their own interpretation of a monument whose iconic status resists a new image, even while it demands that you try.
The first image is a pretty standard symmetrical study which I daresay mirrors some more famous attempts that have wormed their way into my subconscious long before I strode across the bridge. It is amazing how much the light and even the position of the flag can affect the image, and this square crop for a coaster suffers from a lack of headroom. The original image was something like the vertical crop, also taken that day, although you can see that the flag is in a different position. The original is lost to history, another casualty of my lack of organization. I hope you agree that my use of sepia black and white tone is far better at conveying the historical nature of the structure than the straight color rendition. You would have to pay far more attention to detail than yours truly to be able to date this image with any accuracy at all. This is helped by the absence of the ground plane of the bridge, any background, and any other pedestrians or conveyances that might give a hint of the image's age. It is truly amazing that untold millions of people have viewed the bridge from exactly this spot, with only the flag's position (and the number of stars) dating the photograph. I do think the image does suffer from the lack of a ground plane, since the extra room in the vertical is still mostly sky.
THE BRIDGE, 2001 : A BLACK AND WHITE STUDY IN SILHOUETTE
This is far more like it, although I would be truly fooling myself if I thought it was anywhere in the neighborhood of unique. I went for an assymetrical silhouette, which is based on my lack of a wide angle lens and my usual hasty exposure. But we make images long after we take them, and I deliberately restricted the view to only one part of one side of one bridge pier while lowering the shadows to obscure any detail on the pier itself. The color original is in no way of any use at all. While my first black and white conversion held more detail in the sky, I lost most of that in pursuit of a brighter, and even more graphic image. Those in the know will realize that this is a certain bridge because of the diagonal bracing tying the vertical supports together under one of the main cables. The image tries to convey the delicacy of this spider web contrasting with the solidity of the great black masonry pier.
FRAN AND RICH, 2010
BENJAMIN AND MARGARET, 2010
Of course the bridge is bout people too. Here are four people - two middle-aged ex-New Yorkers, and two new young people in the city, in 2010. Benjamin looks like he could easily pass for one of the workers who built the bridge.
NO DAREDEVILS ALLOWED, 2010 : FINAL VERSION
Here are two details from the bridge.The first seems almost quaint, a sculptural celebration of the idea that maybe pedestrians should stick to the promenade provided for them since the bridge was built. The barrier probably works, although it looks like anyone crazy enough to walk on the cable across the bridge could manage to climb around this whimsical doorway in the air. The first man to supposedly jump off the bridge and live went on to star in a Broadway musical that celebrated his feat. The main cable pictured above, one of four, is more than 18 inches in diameter and is a wrapped combination of 15 cable clusters composed of thousands of steel wires. My father would occasionally take me to one of the factories where he worked as a Plant engineer which made similar cables. These machines he was tasked with keeping running, no matter what, spun cables more than two blocks long and could take off a man's arm is he wasn't careful. The working conditions were absolutely Dickensian. Today you can buy a multi-million dollar condo in similar buildings fronting the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund hazardous waste site.
WALK THIS WAY, 2010 : FINAL VERSION
The promenade is still there to allow pedestrians to cross the bridge, even though the horse-drawn caraiges and the cable-car railway is long gone. The original one-cent toll has also been forgotten. This recent super graphic serves to tell people where they should walk, something their great grandfathers would probably have deemed unnecessary if not condescending.
THE TWIN TOWERS FROM THE BRIDGE, 2001 : COLOR AND BLACK & WHITE
This last image, both in color (!) and black and white, illustrates how the bridge endures. I took this on my first journey across the bridge in the late Summer of 2001, on a visit to New York. I literally stood in the plaza at the World Trade Center while I decided whether to pay to go up; I had never had the opportunity. I decided that the sky was too gray to afford a good view, that I couldn't afford the admission fee, and that I could always go up the next time I was in town. So I had an incredible time walking across the bridge, for free, for the very first time. The next month the Twin Towers were gone, and this has became a somber historical image.
But the bridge endures, and it is beautiful.
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JANUARY 20, 2023
ALMOST CERTAINLY LAFAYETTE SQUARE, 1980'S : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to extol the virtues of the scanner. This machine allows the photographer to delve deeper into his or her archives. This assumes that they have enough years under their belt to have photo albums of old prints, or even old slides which they can no longer view because the projector is in a landfill somewhere. The scanner is actually a type of time machine, since it converts these artifacts into digital files that can be processed in Lightroom and be resurrected as digital images that can be improved far beyond their analog origins. These images are examples of my work, long unseen, which I can now exhibit. And prove, at least to myself, that I wasn't half-bad as a photographer decades before I considered the idea that I was an artist. Even though I can remember taking all of these photos, I really cannot claim to know their exact locations, subjects, or dates of origin. I know they are mine, but beyond that there is some element of mystery. This allows me to appreciate them as compositions even more, somewhat divorced from the reality of space and time.
BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
I SUSPECT THIS IS THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, BUT I COULD BE WRONG : FINAL VERSION
These first two images are both from my time in Washington, D.C. during the Reagan and Bush the Elder administrations. I lived in Arlington, Virginia, so at least I could vote, even if I rarely voted for a winner. Fran and I are old enough that when she really wants to get my goat she can accuse me of being a Reaganite, which in today's context can seem almost quaint. The first image I can almost swear is from Lafayette Square across the street from the White House. The real hint that it is Washington and not London is the brick instead of cobblestone. I don't really have a preference between the graphic qualities of the color or the black and white version. The color image shows off the red brick, while the black and white version emphasizes the curve and shadow of the railings. The second image could be the Library of Congress, but it really appeals to me as an example of the power of the dome as an element of architecture. I also enjoy that the awe I felt can be conveyed without showing the entire dome - your brain completes the circle without the fish eye lens I have never owned. And if this isn't the Library of Congress, does it really matter?
TWO VIEWS OF LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY LONDON : FINAL VERSIONS
These next two images are from London, but I do not know when they date from beyond the fact that they are pre-digital, which places them somewhere in the late Twentieth Century. I lived in London in 1976, and visited with Fran in 1977 and 1990. The first image is from some Wren Parish Church which again shows the power of a much smaller dome. This dome in fact hearkens back all the way to the Pantheon, although this oculus is a skylight which at least blocks the rain. The second shot looks like an image from a detective show with the subtitle of "Somewhere in London." My post-processing now reveals the street which was completely lost in shadow in the original slide. I converted the image to black and white to mask the overwhelming noise in the color shadows. This allows the viewer to focus on the row of chimneys which originally attracted me to the scene. It's almost as if the Victorian architect cared much more about the sculptural qualities of these chimneys than the actual row of dwellings themselves. At least the masons got to show off.
TRINITY CHURCH GRAVEYARD : FINAL VERSION
ONE DAY AT THE BALLPARK, EARLY 1970'S : FINAL VERSION
These next two images are from Old New York, and are more than 40 years old. I believe the first is a detail from the graveyard of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. Trinity's spire was the tallest building in New York before the first skyscrapers were built, and was carefully framed from a certain angle by the space between the Twin Towers. I carefully cropped and darkened the background to remove any hint of the late twentieth Century. The second image is a rare "street shot" taken at a day game in the early 1970's. The two brothers seemed to rooting for different teams, or at least had two different favorite colors. Presumably they are now in their late fifties, and hopefully have as fond memories of Shea Stadium as I do. My post processing allowed me to balance the exposure between the cheap seats I was accustomed to and the sunlit expanse beyond. Shea is no more, but at least I can still hate the Yankees.
SWAMP PATH : FINAL VERSION
These last two images come from somewhere and some time lost in obscurity, but I have always felt the compositions held some interest. My post-processing of the scanned images elevated them far above their one-hour origins. I love the boardwalk, whose design reveals the arbitrary whims of it's designer as it weaves it's way across the water. The image's age is highlighted by the absence of any politically correct safety railings. Presumably there were no gators in the shallow water. By the way, we were probably walking through what we innocently called "swamp", way before the reign of the "wetland."
RED CLAY : FINAL VERSION
This image is my homage to a photograph on a famous Jazz album I owned as a re-issue (!) in the early 1980's. Back when there actual album covers, an image a lot like this one graced my copy of Freddie Hubbard's "Red Clay." And while I certainly wasn't in Georgia, this sodden dirt road caught my eye because I was familiar with the other image. I cropped it to highlight the most interesting part of the photo, making it into a square because, like coasters, record covers were square.
I hope you have enjoyed this trip down Memory Lane, even if my memories are somewhat hazy. I encourage you to revisit your own pre-digital archives with the goal of utilizing the scanner time machine to allow you to improve and use your images from yesteryear.
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JANUARY 13, 2023
WHEN CURVES COLLIDE : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss the value of focusing in on the details. While this applies to most photographic subjects, it really comes into its own in architectural photography, especially in the type of image-making that I am particularly interested. I started out in my photographic journey on the mission to document my own projects as an architect, since I couldn't come close to being able to afford professional architectural photographers. My particular circumstances forced me to pay attention to small parts of the project - I didn't own the wild angle lenses required for most interior photography, and I didn't have the support staff required to "stage" a house for the typical magazine shoot. Since most of my projects were variations on small scale residential additions, I didn't want to focus on the whole house anyway, even if most of my designs were pretty sympathetic to the existing house designs.
WINDOWS MEET SCULPTURE : FINAL VERSION
I gradually realized that my developing photographic style, such as it was, had pretty much nothing to do with the professionals I couldn't afford - while I couldn't even approach their technical skills or equipment, as a practicing architect I knew where to find the "money shot" that could explain the value of the design. Of course it didn't hurt that I was the designer, and to give myself a little credit, I wasn't trying to photograph a horrible or at best mediocre design, which is the lot in life of most professionals. It was only when I went on a shoot with a professional architectural photographer and saw the shot list provided by the architect, that I realized the pretty unique position I was in. Most architects had no idea how to photograph their own designs, and most photographers couldn't think like an architect. Even when confronted by a high-quality piece of design, they couldn't find the "money shot" which would celebrate the skill of the architect.
A SCULPTURE GARDEN THAT SURROUNDS A SCULPTURE : FINAL VERSION
These circumstances led me to focus on the details of architecture, to document the small wonders in a work that I could celebrate instead of just documenting the entire building. I now realize that this approach guides my art whether I walk through my neighborhood noticing small details on ordinary buildings or visit a famous structure half-way around the world. And I know that this leads to a more individual set of images that I can call my own.
These first three images come from the work of Frank Gehry, one of the most famous architects of our times. They show the problems and opportunities that can arise when exuberant sculptures collide with our more pedestrian orthogonal world. You still have to keep the water out, or at least try. Think of the poor guys and gals who have to figure out how to place ordinary windows in the boss's sculpture, or to even sheath compound curves with metal panels. But the true genius of detailing comes when it serve a higher purpose. The third image of Gehry's Symphony Hall in Los Angeles shows the incredible garden that sits amidst the sculpture. While the building is so delightful that it qualifies as architectural porn, I for one insist that it looks just as silly on the street as Wright's Guggenheim - the best you can say is that it "enlivens" the streetscape" after it has fallen there from Outer Space. Yet it is only when you get to visit, and walk up an ordinary stair from said street, that you get to spend as long as you like in a block-long roof garden on the roof, available for free with out even entering the building!
1882 : FINAL VERSION
Architectural detailing started with a need to cover your ass, to figure out how to try to prevent water from getting into your structure. It was further refined to hide pretty much any joint - between wall and ceiling, wall and floor, any corner - that needed to screen the fact that materials and carpenters were not perfect. Since architecture is an art as well as a science, soon designers started using detail to celebrate their own ingenuity as well as to allow their craftsmen to show off theirs. That is why a beautiful detail can grace any structure, since you have got to build the wall anyway - why not allow the carpenter to show off a little? And that is also why old buildings have value, since both the architects and the carpenters came cheap, and the builders could afford to let them amuse themselves to a certain degree.
Masonry seems to have been delivered by the Almighty so that both the designer and the bricklayer could celebrate their existence. I think the first image shows a detail from a Massachusetts warehouse, which celebrates the structural piers and arches, and shows how the world's most ordinary "building block" can be manipulated to decorate without decoration. Throw in the pride of the mysterious "H" and the year of it's creation, and you have a beautiful warehouse.
IF YOUR SCHOOL IS NAMED GROUT, IT MIGHT BE A GOOD IDEA TO LET THE MASONS GO WILD : FINAL VERSION
Or think about the pride inherent in this brick detail above a side door of an ordinary Elementary school in Southeast Portland. The side door!
IT'S BEAUTIFUL, AND THE CLIENT WAS A LEFTY : FINAL VERSION
This is the front door of a bungalow in Southeast Portland. Just imagine the pride of the designer and the carpenter who created this entrance. The street number above is an example of a Depression Era Portland "make work" project when the city fathers encouraged the idea that houses should proudly show their addresses with ceramic tiles that would employ both craftsmen and carpenters.
AND YOU CAN RAKE LEAVES WITH IT! : FINAL VERSION
Or think about this exuberant porch detail on this small Victorian porch that ensures that this house is at least special if not unique.
CAN ARCHITECTURE BE SENSUOUS? : FINAL VERSION
When you get to an institutional client where price is no object, then budgets cease to matter. This is a detail of Louis Kahn's library at a small and over-privileged boarding school in New England. Forget the fact that you are looking at one of the corners of a four-story atrium at the center of the library, and that these concrete circles reveal the stacks and study carrels beyond. Think about the idea that this is some of the most sensuous concrete ever created, and that most every surface that is not concrete is incredibly detailed oak paneling that is worthy of fine furniture.
OKAY, ENOUGH ALREADY : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes detailing, like everything else, just goes too far. A recent development in architectural design is a celebration of detail that can become almost a substitute for the attention that must be paid to most other facets of design, in my humble opinion. It is no wonder that institutional projects can now cost $1500 per square foot. This is the emergency stair on a government office building in California, which if you look closely still requires a handrail behind its glass facade.
REFLECTION OF WHAT? : FINAL VERSION
I don't even remember where this facade was located. It amazes me that with all the attention to the incredible detailing of this curtain wall, that the architects did not realize that they were building an architectural Rorschach Test that would obscure their own efforts. It was up to me to notice this profound accident of intention meeting reality.
These images from my archives and from strolls last year show the range of delight that can be found when people - clients, architects, craftsmen, even societies - have a modicum of pride in their work. While the downside is that this can be a rarity, at least when I find it I like to pay attention.
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NATURAL INK BLOT PRINT : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to wish you all a happy new year and discuss the pleasures I get from observing trees. I'd say there are a number of reasons that I like to observe trees which relate to their beauty, their structure, and their refusal to either move or acknowledge mankind's presence at all.
Trees have always struck me as beautiful. I always resisted removing trees from a site when planning an architectural project. I frequently told my clients that "only God can make a tree" which is pretty definitive coming from an atheist. One of the reasons I find trees beautiful is their structure, which can be mimicked by structural engineers but nevertheless seems to have little to do with our orthogonal strategy of dealing with gravity. As a photographer who tends to love subjects that are larger than me, don't move, and don't talk back, trees fall into my wheelhouse.
I've been looking through my archives for photos of my son at the same ages as my grandson for a photo book I've been working on. More on that in a future essay. While on that search I came upon some images of trees that caught my interest and prompted some efforts in Lightroom to make them a little "more interesting" so as to catch your attention as well. A few came from files lost in the last decade, while the remainder were captured last year.
TREE ALONG 37TH AVENUE : FINAL VERSION
These first two images capture the beauty of two trees through the employment of silhouettes, which emphasize the intricate structure of two very different specimens against the sky. The silhouette uses an overwhelming amount of contrast to reduce the photograph to almost a line drawing or an ink block print. I reduce any detail in the tree itself that might have survived the natural back-lit conditions by lowering the black point to render the shadows as pure a black as I like. Since our eyes and brains encounter such conditions in the natural world, we can lower the blacks to near zero without causing viewers to declare the result as "unnatural." The same latitude does not apply to the lightest portions of a scene, for our brains want some level of detail to remain in an image besides the natural white of the paper where no ink at all has been applied.
The first image comes very close to a pure silhouette, with a series of trees standing tall against a featureless sky. It even appears to be a purely black and white photo until you notice that the gray sky that day was closer to very light tan. Of course this kind of image gives you an excuse to walk in the woods during the Winter, when there are no pesky leaves obscure the sculptural structure.
The second image was taken on the street in Southeast Portland a few days ago. There is no statute saying that you can't raise your camera to the sky and ignore your surroundings to focus on the real beauty close at hand. This silhouette also proves that a little color will not ruin the effect, as long as you resist the desire to lighten up the tree itself.
LONE TREE ON THE SAVANNAH : FINAL VERSION
Here I encountered another lone tree with an interesting shape, but the overall conditions led to a more natural approach. The silhouette revealed an appearance more furry than leafy. As usual, I had no idea what kind of tree I was looking at - and as usual I masked my botanical ignorance with a delight in "mystery." In any case, I tried without much success to coax some detail out of the gray sky - but I did lighten the foreground enough to reveal a lot of detail and color in the prairie that surrounded our star. Photographers employ gradient filters to balance the exposure in different parts of scene. Our eyes and brains can adjust to wide differences in light levels much better than our stupid cameras. In most landscapes it becomes part of the drill to reduce light levels in the sky, and increase them in the foreground - but only to the point that our brain does not rebel at the lack of any true blacks or shadows.
THE CLUMP OF TREES : FINAL VERSION
But there is more to trees than just their shapes. This clump of trees near the end of summer was just beginning to assert itself against the surrounding woodland. Not too showy, but they got my attention. As usual I tried to crop to reduce the gray Oregon sky to a bare minimum to allow the subtle colors to come through. Even Oregon skies are too bright in a woodland shot, and since our eyes are always attracted to the lightest part of a scene, it's best to eliminate as much of it as possible to concentrate on your real subject.
DOGWOOD DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
Of course in Spring and Fall our eyes are delighted by the color of the flowers of rebirth, and in a slightly morbid fashion in the flame-out of vegetation that signals imminent nakedness and death. This first image glorifies this Dogwood's plumage to the extent that I don't care about the out-of-square siding in the background and just appreciate that my neighbor painted his house a Portland Gray. I am always delighted when a scene does not need any additional saturation, thank you very much.
YOU SHOULD OF SEEN ME LAST WEEK! : FINAL VERSION
Then we get to Autumn, when certain trees just want to go out in a blaze of glory. Portland is not really known for it's fall foliage, since we are solidly in the land of perpetually green forests - and that once our few deciduous species finally turn on the color, the autumn wind and rain firmly shuts it off in a few days if not hours. This year we had one of our latest Falls ever, and when I caught this Maple in full glory in the Japanese Garden the maples at my house hadn't even thought of turning. Another example of the power of the micro climate, since the garden is located more than several hundred feet higher than my bungalow. Like any good National Geographic photographer who has never appeared in the actual magazine, I lowered the exposure a tiny little bit to saturate the color without using the Saturation slider.
I hope you have enjoyed this brief look at trees, and encourage you to pay more attention to their mute beauty.
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DECEMBER 16, 2022
LOVE THE BANANA CURLS! : NEW ENLARGEMENT THIS YEAR OF 2012 PHOTO
This week I would like to deliver my annual report for my art business, which continues to astound me in the incredible way it really doesn't make any sense. The more I try to be a better businessman, I seem to only succeed in being a better artist - the bottom line doesn't really change much at all. But I thought that some of you might be amused at my efforts, so I will share some of this year's round-number preliminary statistics. Since the State of Oregon finally delivered my tax refund this week, a mere eight months after I filed it in April, I don't think that anyone should mind if I make a first stab at assessing my year. The images in this annual report are my first attempt to determine my best images of the year. These 25 images survived an initial selection of about sixty out of 1300 photos I took or worked on this year. About half are "new" images that have little to do with the initial snapshots I might have taken a decade ago. This selection is pretty personal and few have had any impact on my sales - but they are this year's answer to "which one's do you like best?" Your mileage may differ.
THE NORTH CAROLINA COAST WAS PRETTY BORING COMPARED TO OREGON, BUT THE ALPENGLOW WAS NOT, AND I TOOK VARIATIONS OF THIS PHOTO EVERY DAY. 2022
AT LEAST I'M NOT A CHANDELIER SALESMAN! 2022
Before we get started with the grim statistics, let me first say that I am incredibly grateful that people respond to my images, sometimes even buy them, and that Saturday Market exists as a venue and that Fran still encourages me after all these years in every way possible. Her biggest achievement this year might be that after more than a dozen years I'm finally beginning to agree with her that none of this makes any sense, and that it really doesn't lend itself to MBA type analysis. The bottom line is that I do make money, incredibly rare for an artist, but that I don't come anywhere near to "making a living."
BAGDAD NOIR #4 2022
CASCADE LAKE : B&W CONVERSION OF 1996 PHOTO
I get most of my jollies from spreading my art around the globe not through the internet, where I have been a near total failure, but through my little booth at the market. This year I made around 350 sales, which averages nearly ten a day, which actually surprises me, but there you have it. It's the variability that can drive everyone nuts, which has led Fran to abandon any predictions of my mood when I come home exhausted at the end of the day. This year I put art in around 100 more houses in Portland, adding to my total after a dozen years of approximately 3500 homes and apartments where I might encounter my art. I sold art to about 240 more places in the rest of the United States, where I have sold art to people from every state in the Union. I have art in eight Canadian provinces - this year I "made" Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. My art now graces homes in 25 more places in sixty countries throughout the rest of the world; this year I sold art to people from Bosnia and the Czech republic for the first time. I frankly find this absolutely incredible.
BUG'S EYE VIEW : 2022 MACRO ENLARGEMENT
OREGON COAST SHIPWRECK : MY B&W SILHOUETTE CONVERSION OF 2016 IMAGE
The real story this year is that although I'm certainly not back to my sales totals before the Pandemic, I'm doing it in half the time. Saturday Market is now really Saturday Market, with no Sundays for the foreseeable future. So although I'm paying the same rent I used to pay for two days on the weekend, I am making just a little less in one day than I used to make in two. The slightly longer endurance required in more than 12 hours outside under the bridge is more than made up by Sunday at home. I have no complaints with earning about the same money in only about 60% of the time at the market.
MORRISON BRIDGE : 2022 B&W CONVERSION
A REDISCOVERED, AND RECROPPED B&W CONVERSION OF 2012 PHOTO
Now let's take a deeper dive in how I actually make money. Since I compiled some of these statistics in the process of writing this essay, consider that I am actually kind of thinking aloud - and that your conclusions about how I should respond to this stuff bears little resemblance to the reality of the art world, especially under the Burnside Bridge.
OREGON COAST DUNE GRASS : REDISCOVERED 2016 IMAGE
TILIKUM CROSSING : SEVERE B&W CONVERSION OF 2019 PHOTO
I am a coaster monger. Sales of coasters probably represent about a third of my total sales, and most of my profits if I really drilled down. I sold 527 coasters this year, about 150 less than in 2019. On any given Saturday probably 250 of my images are available as coasters, which is clearly nuts except that I've long held the belief that the one image that a person responds to is the key to a sale, despite the fact that nobody else except me ever gives a damn. So while the top ten coasters, including two ties, account for 43% of coaster sales, they might not be the reason a customer went for the set of four, but only the result of really liking another obscure image. 17% of my images sold just one time, which seems to reinforce that theory. On the other hand, 54% of my coaster images never found a buyer at all this year - they are clearly not pulling their weight, and even I have begun to cannibalize them for the creation of coasters that will actually sell.
AN ENCOUNTER IN LADD'S ADDITION : 2022
PLOVER PANORAMA, NORTH CAROLINA : 2022
I have not bought a new coaster blank for months, which is great since they have gone up by almost 50% - talk about inflation! I actually recommended to the proprietor of one of my art supply stores that they install some defibrillators after I noticed that the felt sheets I used to buy have gone up in price from $.33/sheet to $1.49/sheet! It's a good thing that for some unknown reason I saved bags and bags of the felt trimmings over the years, so that I have not bought a felt sheet in years, and hopefully will not have to for several years to come.
WILMINGTON COUP MEMORIAL : 2022
BERLIN'S MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE : B&W CONVERSION OF 2006 PHOTO
Magnets are a subset of coaster sales. For years magnets drove me nuts, since I couldn't rationally decide what should be a coaster and what should be a magnet. Inevitably I chose wrong, leading to customer disappointment. It was only when I became disenchanted and eliminated magnets entirely, (which of course led to unprecedented demand for magnets), that I hit upon the solution. I now convert coasters into magnets while you wait, which lets me charge the highest price in the market for a magnet, while the customers cannot believe I do not charge a premium for the surgery. Even though I only sold 63 magnets this year,more than I thought, that's about a $500.00 in profit since I spent only $10.00 or so on the magnet sheets.
SCARY GERMAN GARGOYLE : B&W CONVERSION OF 2006 PHOTO
Another product I sell is also a direct response to my coasters. My "Miniatures" are the same size as coasters, but placed on a thicker wood frame which allows them to stand by themselves in a bookcase or on a table or hang on the wall. Of course the coasters can hang on a wall with a couple of pieces of velcro, but try to monetize that! Believe me, it doesn't work since my customers declare "but they're coasters!" and then graciously email their installations a few months later - on the wall. The mini's started out like gangbusters, but know I only sell about one a week. At least I finally showed some restraint by declaring there would only be one copy per image - but this was countered by my attempt to sell images that were not squares. After all, they were not coasters; but try explaining to me why a 4x4 is cute, but a 4x6 is too small? At least the dozens of disdained 4x6's can now be used as the hidden frames behind my metal prints.
THE RED CHAIRS : WILMINGTON, 2022
MT. HOOD OVER VANCOUVER LAKE : 2022 B&W CONVERSION
Another victory this year was bringing back my small posters. They too were very popular until the 2018 Recession (oh you missed that one? it was true at the market) drove down market prices to the point where my posters, with my name on them, were selling for more than my competitor's matted prints. The posters survived in their bags as packing material for the small metal prints (they still are) until I decided to put them in a box on a table and see if anyone responded. I only sold 17 this year, but that's 17 more than I sold since 2018, and it's all profit. I probably have several years until I actually have to print another one.
BAMBURGH BEACH : B&W CONVERSION OF 2008 PHOTO
CRATER LAKE #1 : REDISCOVERED AND CROPPED 1994 PHOTO
My books are a total labor of love. I wrote four of them during the Pandemic, and thereupon learned that the only worse economic position than an artist was an author. If I could get these books into Powell's I would lose $1.00 with every sale, and even I realize that you can't make that up in volume. But I do sell about one a month, earning far more for each book, at a fair price, than most authors ever dream of. I'm very proud of them, and I dare say that you won't find another photo book with what Fran calls such "spirited" commentary.
SHADE HOUSE #1 : 2022
EASTERN OREGON MONOLITH : REDISCOVERED 1999 PHOTO
Which leaves my metal prints, the biggest source of sales, but also the biggest source of marketing frustration in my booth. These are my big ticket items, which grab the viewer's attention and show off my work better than any other medium that exists in the photographic market today. These prints are exquisite, but they are also very expensive, and inflation isn't helping at all. Thus they are pretty much billboards at this point, drawing customers into the booth but rarely leaving. My dream marketing plan would have me sell one or two each Saturday, but that rarely happens. I only sold 29 metal prints this year, and sold exactly zero of those larger than my smallest 8x8 size. I feel my prices are very fair, if not on the too fair side. And my colleagues, who have all converted to metal after I led the way, sell the larger sizes for some 100's of dollars less that I do. But I watch, and they DON'T sell them either, so lower prices doesn't seem to really matter. I'm at a loss, and I think I must stop bringing my larger metals if only to reduce the enormous time it takes to set up and tear down my gallery. Since they really are beautiful, it's pretty disappointing.
VINTAGE CANNON BEACH : A 2016 PHOTO, PROCESSED IN 2022, COULD BE 1942
So there you have my 2022 State of the Market. I remain optimistic but puzzled. One of the things that has kept me enthused this year is this blog. I realize that in some sense I have bitten off more than I can chew, that a blog a week might be too much, but I am still enjoying myself. When other artists say they have a blog, and I discover that they have written a dozen blog posts over four years, I can only shake my head. So I thank everyone for your attention, and hope you are enjoying these musings on my photographic journey. I once again invite you to tell me you are out there. My statistics tell me that on the average more than 200 of you are reading each week, but I have no idea who the vast majority of you are besides my wife, who provides her own "spirited" commentary each week. Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year.
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BIG PINK FRAMED BY BROADWAY : FINAL VERSION
I'm often asked what kind of photography is my main focus, and over the years I have struggled with this question. The problem is complex; I would like my images to speak for themselves, despite my zeal about writing about my process in creating them. Attempts at characterization run the risk of artistic pretension combined with the feeling that my specialty is unusual enough to just lead to confusion - and that my real specialty is a niche in that already narrow focus. So I will give it another try. I am an urban photographer, in that most of my images are set in urban spaces. I am an urban landscape photographer, since my imagery is certainly in the landscape tradition, minus the beauty of the natural landscape. Since most of my imagery is not in the grand landscape mode, I would then characterize it as intimate urban landscapes and start on the road to descriptive confusion. My photos are certainly not in the "street" tradition, in that the scenes usually do not contain urban inhabitants - but I am beginning to be annoyed at the "no people" designation in one of the photo-sharing websites I contribute to, since I suspect that they think I do not have any friends. And while my photos contain buildings, I wouldn't really describe myself as an architectural photographer since I'm not usually trying to present a "hero shot" of a piece of architecture. The buildings are important in their role in the drama of the city as a whole.
Now that I've confused the issue, I would like to show a half-dozen examples to attempt to clarify my pursuit. They come from Portland, London, and New York, but they really are about the urban condition as a whole. They were taken during the last fifteen years, and there are no people in them (!).
ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
This first snapshot was taken on a walk across the Broadway Bridge in Portland. I was interested in the juxtaposition of turn of the century pragmatic engineering with a heroic glass monolith that the bridge's designers couldn't fathom or even anticipate when they built the bridge. "Big Pink" is an icon in Portland, since it is one of our few real towers, standing apart in the skyline, and for God's sake it is pink. I could probably call this "Big Pink #10" and not be far off the mark. So if I am going to take yet another portrait of Big Pink I try to make it a little unusual.
While I said that the bridge structure was pragmatic, it's celebration of the art of the truss verges on the romantic. The joints, like this asymmetrical one involving five girders and wonderful collection of rivets, are almost poetic. When later City Fathers decided to paint the bridge red it only increased the drama.
The final image tries to do a few things. I've lightened the exposure to show off the bridge. I subtly cropped the composition to get rid of the annoying portion of the Koin Tower at the right edge, and to reduce the visual clutter of all those rails on the bridge. Lightroom allowed me to increase the saturation of the blue portions of the sky that were not even there in the original snapshot. Finally, I played with perspective correction tools to try to straighten both Big Pink and the vertical parts of the bridge truss, all to mostly no avail. The camera reveals that the bridge is not really square with the ground, so that this anal architect can have a straight Big Pink, or a straight bridge, but not both.
LONDON AT DUSK : FINAL VERSION
On to London. I think this scene is on a side street somewhere in the West End, but that is not really important. You would have to be a London Cabbie to convince me that you were certain of the exact location, but it contains enough details -the partial street sign, the stone and brick palate, and the typical church tower in the distance - to say "London." My frame of reference is those two yellow lines near the curb, which denotes the bike lane where I was allowed to ride on the street in 1976. This is Xmas 2008, and despite the lights, the mood was pretty grim.
ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Not as grim as the original exposure, which was probably more realistic considering it's a little past four in December. But I tried to lighten the dark shadows in the street to reveal details and in fact also reveal a little bit of the street lighting and the facades of the buildings forming this lane. Once again I tried to straighten up those buildings and the church tower, which necessitated some more cropping of the foreground.
LONDON AT DUSK : FINAL B&W VERSION
Somehow this black and white version seems to capture the mood better, even though it reduces the festivities. To each his own.
ORIGINAL SALMON SPRINGS SNAPSHOT
This snapshot of the Salmon Springs Fountain proves two things - I can take a photo through the windshield while waiting for the light (it's Portland so probably no one blew their horn when I failed to anticipate the green light) and that I can take a photo with a person in it, even if she is obscured by the fountain. Obviously this impromtu shot needs a lot of work, unless you're partial to street signs.
PANORAMIC CROP
The panoramic crop focuses our attention on the fountain and emphasizes its width. I can live with the red chair, but those posts have just got to go.
SALMON SPRINGS PANORAMA : FINAL B&W VERSION
While we're at it, let's get rid of the red chair too. Converting to black and white eliminates the red chair, while the "perfect eraser" removes those posts without any fuss. And its not like their was a whole lot of color in the shot in the first place.
PARK TABLE AND CHAIRS : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
A study in light, shadows, and pattern in an urban park. I can't go back and give the chairs more room, but I can "clean up the area" in such a minimalist composition. And straighten that leaning table post!
CROPPED AND STRAIGHTENED TABLE AND CHAIRS
I straightened the table and cropped out the mess at the top edge of the photo. When I converted to black and white instead of tan and white, I also got rid of as much litter and gunk as I could - you've got to tidy up!
TIDIED UP BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
REFLECTIONS ON PORTLAND : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Another Portland Icon, the Portland sign at the Performing Arts Center. I was intrigued by this natural double exposure which combines a mirror image reflection in the staircase glass of the street scene beyond with a reflection of the staircase itself. Or something like that. Once again, this intriguing image needed just a little less wonk.
REFLECTIONS ON PORTLAND : FINAL VERSION
Okay, now we are under control, even if we still don't know what is actually going on. A little selective saturation of the aqua sign and the red railings helps things along. Even if I specialize in the "intimate urban landscape", it doesn't mean that I can't approach the surreal.
WATER STREET : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Sometimes you are just walking along, minding your own business, and the absurdity of urban life smacks you in the face. Which way is one way? Even though Water Street and Dock Street might be perpendicular, how can Dock Street run past Water Street? It is now up to me to not only make you laugh, but to make sure that nothing distracts from the joke.
WATER STREET : FINAL VERSION
Time for a coaster. Heighten the contrast on the sign, eliminate most of the lower portion of the image, and most importantly strongly reduce the saturation of the distracting red sign. Even though the wall wasn't red, it also was rendered down to almost nothing when we blunted the sign. Now there is nothing left to look at except the rather confusing directional aids at the intersection.
I hope you have enjoyed these urban explorations. Get out and take a walk, and bring your camera.
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DECEMBER 22, 2022
EVEN A CONCRETE WALL CAN ATTRACT YOUR EYE : FINAL VERSION
While I was on yet another rescue mission in my archives I noticed that a number of the formerly neglected images that I had saved from the trash heap had one common theme. This theme of repetition was apparent despite the widely divergent "subjects" of the photographs. I feel that this compositional device can both draw viewers into the image and serve as an organizing principle that can ground the viewers in your way of seeing. I think of it as a more subtle expression of "leading lines", with volumes or objects or areas of an image repeating across an image and subtly holding it together. Let's look at six images for clues on how you can use this idea in your compositions, both when you are viewing the world and maybe years later when you are wondering what in the heck drew you to taking that photograph in the first place. Post processing allows you to both improve the image in all the usual ways - sharpening, cropping, etc. - and then enhance the image by emphasizing the repetition that you hope the viewer will wrap their brains around.
CONCRETE WALL : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
This first image has all the attractions of a dull concrete wall, the kind of scene that architects like me decried and tried to ban from the urban fabric of Downtown Portland. This doesn't make for a lively cityscape. Even in our miniature city, with it's tiny 200-foot long blocks that promise quick relief no matter how bad the building that is ruining your walk, it is hard to love such a forbidding wall. But the photographer can come to the rescue by seeing the hidden beauty of this landscape! The first thing I did was to adjust the color balance to more accurately reflect the lighting conditions on that day a decade ago. Who am I kidding - I don't remember what that day was like, and I am glad that a detective is not interrogating me about it. But the shadows on the wall hinted that it was a little sunny out, and these shadows "allowed" me to pretend that that the photograph was taken in the shade. This warmed up the scene considerably, and if the concrete is not exactly "golden", it is certainly more attractive. But the real reason I was suddenly intrigued by the photograph was the repetitive vertical lines of the concrete panels that drew my eye down the street. Since the image was now all bout those lines, this anal photographer had to correct the verticals by straightening the center vertical panel line. This is easier than actually warping the perspective, but in this case it worked like a charm, and even the line next to the right edge of the frame is no longer wonky. All that was left to do was to lighten the exposure a little, but increase the contrast so that the lines would rule the composition by becoming true black. A very nice side benefit was that this also brought out the slanting light and shadow of the sunlight against the concrete as another repetitive element in the image.
THE QUEEN'S STEPS : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
If my art can enliven a dull wall, what about a series of stone steps? I was drawn to these scalloped terraces near Buckingham Palace in just the way that the designer had hoped. It was now up to me to heighten that sense of repetition that I felt. The square crop was one way to eliminate the pesky human legs in the upper right corner, and I moved it around the original shot to find the right combination of repetitive scallops that would please my eye. Of course there are dozens more, and maybe a horizontal crop would even be better, but a man's got to sell coasters doesn't he?
THE KING'S STEPS, 15 YEARS LATER : FINAL VERSION
The levels are now foreshortened, the blue cast has been eliminated, and sharpening has brought out the textures and solidity of the steps. They are beautiful, but you certainly wouldn't want to take a tumble if you don't watch your step, so to speak.
PEARL TOWER : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
On to facade graphics. I was intrigued by the overwhelming repetitive nature of these balconies climbing up the exterior of a Pearl District condo tower, complete with a perfect reflection in the mirror glass that only added to the graphic nature of the image. Upon investigation, the overall blue tint was actually not really out of line with the actual light of that afternoon. Mirror glass will reflect a rare blue sky, after all. As a retired architect, I don't usually enjoy tilted buildings, but in this case I thought it useful to emphasize the height of the tower by getting the most I could get with my standard lens. Portland towers suffer from our urban design codes in that they most often resemble the base of the skyscrapers we are used to in other larger cities - they just aren't tall enough, especially for a New Yorker.
PEARL TOWER : FINAL VERTICAL PANORAMA
Your framing can certainly emphasize the image's proportions, so I converted the conventional vertical frame into a 2:1 vertical panorama to further heighten the visual experience. Sharpening and increasing the contrast brought out the divisions in the glass curtain wall and darkened these lines to continue the repetitive dance across the entire facade beyond the balconies. I finally slightly lightened the overall exposure and lowered the exposure of the triangular piece of blue sky to further define the building's lines.
PEARL TOWER VERTICAL PANORAMA : FINAL B&W VERSION
You want graphics, I'll give you graphics! By eliminating the blue, the black and white version further emphasizes the lines and sun/shadow interface that is now the entire image. I don't know which version is my favorite, but it is interesting that the black and white version finally allows the viewer to really see that balconies don't bite into the building - the "column" holding them up is actually another mullion in the curtain wall.
GERDING THEATER LOBBY INSTALLATION : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
GERDING THEATER 4 X 4 : FINAL VERSION
These next two images show that you as the artist get to control the repetition even when another artist has set it up for you. This first photo is of an art installation in the lobby of Portland's Gerding Theater. The red glass squares set into the stone wall, with their lamps mimicking candles, are certainly striking and repetitive. But I get to show the extent of the pattern that I like, so the reality of 63 or so squares is first reduced to six and finally to four, because four squares fit the square coaster. You decide if I've gone too far.
ELLIS ISLAND WINDOWS : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
ELLIS ISLAND WINDOWS : FINAL VERSION
These are two versions of the same image. The original snapshot of the windows at the Grand Hall at Ellis Island attracted me because I love patterns and the silhouettes I can make through exposure modifications to emphasize those patterns. The final result increased the contrast to emphasize the repetitive frames of the beautiful windows. The square crop also eliminated the reality of the badly proportioned square fragments at the edge, along with the vintage radiator in front of the windows. I subtly did some work on the exterior view to heighten the fall foliage, downplay the yellow railing, and allow the viewer to be more aware of the Empire State Building beyond.
TANNER SPRINGS #2 : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
We will end this essay on repetition by showing another segment of an artistic repetition that I can make my own. Just because another artist has provided me with a work of art doesn't mean that I can't interpret it in my art. This railroad rail sculpture in Portland's Pearl District snakes along the edge of an entire city block, and is meant to hearken back to the neighborhood's former existence as a giant rail yard. This snapshot shows just a tiny portion of the sculpture in the afternoon sun. I carefully framed the scene to use the trees as a background to screen the buildings beyond the park. But when I viewed the photograph last week, five years after capture, I was dissatisfied with the deep shadows obscuring the bottom of the frame. I will now show two ways to eliminate those shadows, and you can decide which one is more successful - based on the idea of emphasizing the repetitive quality of the sculpture that originally caused me to press the shutter button.
EXPOSURE FIX ELIMINATES DISTRACTING SHADOW
I raised the shadows in a realistic fashion in the bottom third of the frame to eliminate the shadow's distraction from the subject at hand, the repetitive railroad rails, and it certainly helps.
CROPPING ELIMINATES DISTRACTING SHADOW : FINAL VERSION?
But what if I eliminate the shadow by just cropping it out? I am not sure which way is the answer. While the rails' height and proportions are certainly diminished by the square crop, in a funny way their repetitive nature is emphasized by what is now a more horizontal sequence across the square frame. I'm still debating this, and you can certainly disagree with me without being wrong.
Without repeating myself, I hope that you have enjoyed this discussion of repetition in photographic composition and try to integrate it into your own photographic journey. Repeat after Me!
]]>NOVEMBER 25, 2022
LAN-SU MAPLE : FINAL VERSION
This week I thought that I would celebrate Thanksgiving by taking a look at some photos that I had created in the last 15 years at around this time of year, the tail end of November. In looking through the archives, I had the usual problems of misplaced images, but I did manage to find about ten images that fit this Thanksgiving criteria. And as usual I also discovered one image that deserved to be rescued from the murky depths of the archives - now I just have make sure that it doesn't disappear again now that it has been anointed as a "keeper."
LAN-SU POND : FINAL VERSION
I've agreed in the past that Ansel Adams was correct when he cited a ratio of 1 keeper out of 100 photos taken as a realistic goal to shoot for when heading out for a photo excursion. While this might seem depressing, it does free up some room for experimentation, and reinforces the belief that we are in this for the experience, the process of taking and creating images, rather than for the rare result of a winner. Getting outside, and learning our art, really provides most of the excuse we need to try once again in the face of the fact that most of our results will not measure up to our own standards. In regards to the 1/100 ratio we've discussed, it is interesting that the oft-cited rule that a real education requires 10,000 hours, or in this case 10,000 photos, that the results of such an effort would yield a nice portfolio of 100 images - which would be more than enough to justify the pursuit.
LAN-SU WEEPING WILLOW : FINAL VERSION
So imagine my shock when in investigating my Thanksgiving work over the years I uncovered two very interesting statistics. The first did not surprise me in the least - the paucity of images from late November. Portland, Oregon is not known for its great weather in late Fall, and I'm not alone in feeling that there is nothing as nasty as rain and 42 degrees, even though it's not a blizzard. It's not invigorating "football weather" either, so it did not surprise me when there were not that many images in the archives from late November. On the other hand, in the space of ten days at the end of November in 2009, I captured six images that rank among the best I have ever created - a run of imagery that resembles an undefeated college football team vying for the playoffs. Four of these images were taken on the same day, which I now realize was probably my best day ever as an artist.
LAN-SU GARDEN WALK : FINAL VERSION
These first four images were taken on one trip to the Lan-Su Chinese Garden on November 21, 2009. I obviously was having a very good day artistically, and after ten years of further visits to to the Garden I probably have not created much better imagery than on that day. The garden's beauty obviously didn't hurt, but I can honestly say that after taking and seeing hundreds of fine photographs of the Garden, these are pretty damn good. More importantly, they exhibit the qualities that run through my work - they are obviously my take on the Garden, and fit in with my best work, whatever the subject. When viewed in my tent in the Market, they are exemplary examples of my "photographic voice".
The first image is just such a "Rich"photo. It is a beautiful Japanese Maple, on the best day of its life. It takes up so much of the frame that it doesn't matter that I did not include the whole tree. Further inspection of the image might reveal its surroundings, including the pond just behind it, but the tree is almost the idea of a tree, or at least a Japanese Maple. It only adds to my pride in the fact that "My Tree" is not "The Tree" which is such a popular photographic subject that people must wait on line in order to capture the same image that they have seen thousands of times before.
The second image is of one of the iconic buildings in the Garden. I am very proud of what I didn't include in my tight framing - the only really bad detail in the Garden - the ugly concrete bridges that lead to this island, as well as the exceedingly blase office building rising above the pavilion. This building which i managed to ignore is in fact one of the few hints in the Garden that you are actually in Portland and not in China.
The third image is even more "quiet", but I did grab another great reflection while appreciating the skill the Garden's designers in placing four different foliage types and some crazy rocks in such a small space. I'm a sucker for weeping willows, and yellow is one of my favorite colors.
The fourth image is one of my favorites, since it combines my love of craftsmanship with a bent toward the abstract. Viewers are frequently very confused by what they are admiring, which some imagine as an aerial shot of some ancient city. Almost all of the Garden's pathways are paved in rocks imported from China, placed by artisans in a concrete base between slate borders. Each garden room has its own design.This is a detail of the "Garden of Cracked Ice". I thought that I could increase the abstraction by not including any hints of what surrounds this beautiful floor. Another level of abstraction is achieved in that while this is a color photo - note those radioactive leaves - I have increased the contrast to such a high level that the brown stone floor is now rendered in near black to almost white.
FALLEN GINGKO LEAVES : FINAL VERSION
The Garden is so beautiful that even it's debris is worthy of photographic attention. These fallen Gingko leaves, somewhere between orange and yellow, covered the planting strip outside the Garden's perimeter wall. The viewer has no idea whether this pattern extends for another few feet or only another few inches. The reality of the situation was that any less of an intensive view would have revealed that this was just a pile of leaves on the street and that I was sitting on a fire hydrant. Art is not reality.
REFLECTIONS ON NATURE : FINAL VERSION
As it happens, within a few days I captured another two of my most admired images. This first is of a reflection of a tree in the glass facade of the Mercy Corps headquarters building across from Saturday Market. It is a straight shot - all I did was crop to eliminate any building edges and turn the green shade of glass, which I hate, to a more pleasing gray by rendering the image in black and white. It says something about our photographic moment in that most viewers think that this is a triumph of my post-processing technique; they think that this is a composite, which each portion of the tree placed skillfully by yours truly in the spaces of the grid. My artistic skill of actual observation and composition is only revealed when I draw their attention to the tree and the building across the street.
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF LANTERNS : FINAL VERSION
I then went to a Chinese art exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. The exhibit was okay, but the Chinese lanterns placed over the sculpture court were absolutely beautiful and pretty surreal in contrast with the stolid brick of the museum beyond. My tight crop which neglected any of the sculptures and the edge of the museum beyond further contributes to the weird atmosphere of the image. By the way, those two slits in the obscured-glass wall that separates the interior sculpture court from the public pedestrian walkway beyond are my only contribution to the architecture of Downtown Portland. I insisted that the public deserved some glimpses of the sculpture through the block-long wall, and in a rare show of good sense the powers-that-be actually agreed with me.
SATURDAY MARKET : FOR GOD'S SAKE, TAKE THE PICTURE!
SATURDAY MARKET : COASTER
That same week at the Market it finally occurred to me (duh!) that it might be a good idea to include a Saturday Market image as a coaster to sell to visitors at the Market! I patiently waited to cross the street and took this wobbly snapshot that eventually became the image below. Sometimes a smaller portion of a photograph clearly says more than the actual scene you captured in the moment.
LONE TREE : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
A few days later Fran dragged me out for one of her forays into obscure natural areas surrounding Portland that she finds on the Web. She finds Nature Preserves without wildlife and her specialty, wetlands without water. We always have a good time despite the false advertising. This noble tree stood alone, with not a bird in sight. In my search for Thanksgiving imagery, I couldn't believe that I had neglected this tree.
LONE TREE : FINAL PANORAMA VERSION
I adjusted the tonal values of the sky and the foreground grasses, opening up the shadows but still leaving the silhouette of the tree intact. I tried for my usual 2:1 wide crop to emphasize the extent of the tree and to reduce the foreground, but it was too tight. For this shot the slightly more open 16:9 crop gave me the surroundings I needed. I usually avoid the 16:9 ratio which I feel is totally arbitrary since it is based on the proportions of your wide screen television. I don't see what that has to do with photography, so I usually just go with 18:9, but there you go.
LONE TREE : FINAL B&W VERSION
Faced with muted colors, I invariably reach for a black and white conversion. I like the mood of this version a little better, and it allows me to add a little more sharpening for more detail and darken the tree for a more graphic rendition.
THE MUSE, ON THE TRAIL : FINAL VERSION
So sometimes it does seem that a particular time and place can lead to an artistic winning streak. While I am always grateful for our life in such a beautiful environment, and for Saturday Market which has allowed me a unique venue to exhibit and sell my art, it goes without saying that Fran, my biggest supporter, in every sense of the term, has allowed me the space to pursue my artistic journey. On this Thanksgiving I once again reserve most of my thanks to her.
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NOVEMBER 18, 2022
JAPANESE GARDEN ENTRANCE FOUNTAIN : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to take you on a short walk through Portland's Japanese Garden. We finally had "football weather" yesterday, clear, sunny, and cold so I finally got out on a photo excursion with my friend Al. The Garden was absolutely spectacular, probably only a week past peak fall foliage, and the tourists were out in droves. This was my first visit to the Garden since Covid, so I really enjoyed the walk despite the cold. What's funny about Portland micro climates is that Fall is so late this year that the trees on my block or at the Saturday Market site at Waterfront Park have not even begun to turn color at all, while the higher elevation of the Garden finally let me see some Fall colors. I renewed my membership at the Garden after I realized that like a lot of other activities, I had not been there in three years.
Portland's Japanese Garden is nearly 60 years old and is thought to be the most authentic Japanese garden outside of Japan itself. The plantings, design, and details at the garden are so wonderful that a visit can elevate your opinion of the human race as a whole, which goes a long way in these trying times. I'm going to highlight six photos from this latest visit, to illustrate how relatively easy it is to come away from such a visit with memorable images - even if they are not on the greatest hits list at the postcard stand at the gift shop. This is my visit, or your visit after all, and your photos should reflect what actually moved you at the garden. After many years, not only have I have versions of these usual suspects, but I have multiple versions, so my interests have to focus on different takes on the garden. These six images were selected from about sixty photos that I captured yesterday, and each was enhanced by only a few minutes of post processing.
ENTRANCE FOUNTAIN : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
This first image was literally taken while standing on line at the entrance to the Garden. The most recent renovations and additions to the Garden completely reshaped and enhanced the entry sequence up the hill to the new cultural exhibits, gift shop, cafe and courtyard which gives the garden the entry it always deserved. The design and detailing of this new "Cultural Crossing" by renowned architect Kengo Kuma is enough to take your breath away and wonder about what can be accomplished by an architect when price is no object. My editing brought more attention to the leaves caught in the fountain, and enhanced the colors through both saturation controls and bring down the exposure, which has enhanced saturation since slide film days.
COLOR THROUGH THE TREES : FINAL VERSION
This image didn't need much help beyond the usual sharpening and raising the shadows in the foreground. My framing of this view on the entrance path up the hill had already solved most of the problems with woodland (or garden) photos, by restricting the sky to a very small part of the image. Now your attention is focused on the color beyond the trees instead of the bright sky which always compete with what you are actually trying to show the viewer.
ROCK IN POOL : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
This is an example of a "quiet image" whose discovery can thrill me after I have walked by the greatest hits, or the dozens of photographers who are taking photos of said greatest hit. "The Tree", made famous in the National Geographic, is just around the corner overlooking this same pond. The path up there is divided so that visitors can get around the line of photographers and their tripods who are allocated ten minutes each to get the shot. Since it was a week after peak, and not soon after sunrise, there was no point in taking another shot. But this rock caugt muy attention for the first time, mostly because of the leaves collecting in the water around it.
ROCK IN POOL : FINAL VERSION
I hope you agree that I have improved the image without going so far that it now lacks credibility. The slight crop naturally enlarges the rock by eliminating some boredom to the left and top of the original. More important is the adjusted color balance which eliminates a frightful blue shift apparent once you have adjusted it - sometimes our brains, which adjust colors on their own, can ignore an obvious color shift that our stupid cameras cannot ignore. Some subtle saturation to only the relevant colors bring out the orange leaves around the rock. But I am most proud of all of the subtle brushing that lightened the star rock while darkening the rocks behind it. This dodging and burning, just like in the darkroom, is so subtle that you almost can't see it while you are manipulating the controls. It's only after you compare before and after that you can see the dramatic, but hopefully "invisible" results of all your work.
WINDING STAIR : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Don't throw anything away. Just because you grossly underexposed a shot in camera, rendering what might be a nice composition into a muddy mess, doesn't mean you cannot redeem yourself later. I probably committed such an error only because I was contemplating how far I now had to climb back up the hill.
WINDING STAIR : FINAL VERSION
Now you can see what caused me to take the shot in the first place. I raised the exposure a full stop overall, and then went to work on the shadows of the stonework on the left. I then painted back the exposure of those two sunny steps at the bottom which had gotten too bright and drew you attention away from the lovely curve of the stair. Its this kind of attention to detail that can make your heart sing on a walk through the Garden.
WOW : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Okay, the Garden is at the top of a hill in Washington Park, and of course you deserve a view from the Garden. In Portland, a view means the Mountain, which might not appear when you most want to see it. This snapshot needs some work to make it deserve its subject.
WOW : FINAL VERSION
You can argue with the square crop, but I've got to sell coasters. I would have needed to erase the overhanging tree in any case. I shifted the color balance a little from the original blue, and lowered the exposure of the sky to balance it with the foreground. I then painted it back to brighten the mountain, which is nicely covered with snow after a very dry Summer. You might not care, but as a retired architect I had to straighten the towers so they would not fall down. I finally lightened the shadows in the foreground to bring out the tree and prove it was Autumn.
PORTLAND PARADISE : FINAL VERSION
We are our own toughest critics. I've obviously been here before, and have sold many coasters of this image. Which one is better? Does it even matter? They are not different enough that they can both "survive", but we must compare and contrast. The Autumn tree is an obvious improvement, I guess, but I somehow like the bluer sky even if it is less realistic. A subtle shift in perspective - probably only ten feet to the right - has now revealed some irrelevant buildings to the left, but has eliminated the disorderly base of the taller tower. Does the improvement in the tree make up for the intriguing colors in the windows of the tower? I probably will take another stab at the new image and bring back some of the blue in the sky. Frequently I only can really stop working on an image when I show Fran the final two versions. When she questions my sanity while declaring that they really are the same - then I know that I've probably reached an end point, at least for today.
THE VIEW OFF THE PORCH : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
I have taken this image many times. It is almost impossible not to respond to this artful arrangement of dozens of beautiful trees of all shapes, colors, and sizes across the pond of white sand. The Fall colors only add to the scene. What was interesting was that for the first time since I have been going to the Garden in the last thirty years, the traditional garden pavilion was actually open when I stood on this porch.
THE VIEW OFF THE PORCH : FINAL VERSION
Now we have a picture! Some very judicious cropping has tightened up the composition, but the composition has come alive by allowing the colors to shine, by virtually, but realistically, screaming Autumn! What is interesting is that this again is mostly accomplished by removing that pesky blue tint, most apparent in the now white sand. And when you have such a perfect scene as this one, you must spend a little time cleaning up the sand by eliminating any debris that has encroached on the sand since the staff cleaned it this morning.
I hope you have enjoyed this short virtual visit to the Garden. The most important reason we should attempt to create images of wonders like this garden is that it provides yet another excuse for going there for the first time, or the fiftieth time. The search for a new take on what is for me a very familiar but wonderful subject provided me an excuse for an engaging day with a friend, far more important than any image I might capture at the same time.
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NOVEMBER 11, 2022
ON THE EDGE OF THE MOOR : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to make a return trip to Dartmoor, at least through the magic of Lightroom. I've been fortunate to have visited this extraordinary National Park in Southwest England twice, alone in 1976 and with Fran in 2009. For this city boy it is one of the most wonderful landscapes I have ever encountered, wild but not wilderness. This 30-mile square patch of moorland has successfully resisted human occupation and improvement for over 2000 years, even though it is the midst of England's "green and pleasant land." There are only two roads that cross the moor, meeting at the United Kingdom's highest security prison, which is not that fortified at all. Unless you have a getaway car or helicopter waiting outside the prison walls, you will almost certainly die trying to cross the moorland at night. It's that forbidding. The only thing that seems to have changed in the years since my last visit is that you can now watch videos of hikers who walk across the moor in one day, since it is only 30 miles across, but I certainly don't think it's for the faint of heart. For the usual visitor, an excursion around the moor, skirting its edges, is more than enough to get the flavor without the risk. While there are some picturesque villages on the edge of the moor, there is nothing between them, and you might never see another car as you wander about.
While I frequently misplace images in my archives, I very rarely delete them. For one thing the neighboring images provide clues as I search for the mislaid files; but they also provide the opportunity to revisit the day I captured the original images more than a decade ago. I am frequently taken aback at the quality of the images that I have ignored all this time. We are so determined to find the "best" image of the day that we overlook other shots that deserve another look. The opportunity of hindsight, fond memories, and the advent of new software technologies allows you to realize that your new skills can transform the original snapshots you ignored into images that you can be proud of. While they might not be the original "keepers", how else can I walk around Dartmoor again without traveling 6000 miles to get there?
ON THE EDGE OF THE MOOR : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
This first shot is a lot better than most that will follow. It's certainly a little dull, but nothing to be ashamed of, taken from the side of the road. It gives a hint of the emptiness beyond the road - but the final image shows the benefits of a panoramic crop that eliminates most of the dull sky and foreground that adds nothing to the scene. The usual sharpening required of digital images reveals the texture of the moor that dissuades casual exploration even before the ground gives way to the wilderness beyond. Judicious dodging and burning of the rolling landscape beyond brings out the details and reveals the variations in that landscape that encouraged me to stop in the first place. As usual the idea is to create some "pop" without losing the feeling of the original reality that the viewer can believe in. You are the ultimate judge.
DARTMOOR TOR : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
One of the features of the landscape of the moor are the occasional rocky outcroppings that can provide the only guide posts as you attempt to cross the forbidding landscape. This is a rare example right off the road. While there are cairns that are landmarks left by hikers who died way before you were born, it is obvious that no humans moved these rocks. They are the rocks underlying the entire area which have appeared above the surface, and grow more prominent as the surrounding soils are laid down and eroded. This being England, of course the 360 known Tors in Dartmoor have been mapped and named, for posterity.
GET CLOSER! DARTMOOR TOR : FINAL VERSION
Lightroom allows me to get closer to the real subject, without losing all of the sky, through a crop that highlights the subject without losing all of the context. But the real heavy lifting on this image was to lift the shadows below the rocks and to sharpen the image to reveal the texture and details in the boulders themselves.
MOOR CHURCH : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
One of the villages at the edge of the moor had a splendid church, mysteriously grand for the village while fitting in with the grand landscape beyond. My original snapshot concentrated on the tower but still included too much of the surroundings I was trying to ignore.
MOOR CHURCH : FINAL IMAGE
This vertical crop left out the confusing roof tops on the right of the original image. In addition sharpening brought out the details of the church tower, and a "Sunshine " filter reinforced the sunlight on the tower without blowing out the sky. Noise reduction software reduced the digital noise present in the sky.
MOOR CHURCH : FINAL B&W VERSION
This image gained a lot of "mood" in this black and white variation. While I miss the warm masonry, the sky is very much more interesting than the color version. The contrast in this sky would not be realistic in color.
WILD HORSES ON THE MOOR : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Dartmoor's lack of human habitation has allowed a distinctive form of wild horses to thrive on the moor for thousands of years. My original snapshot from the road captures the environment but neglects the real subject. The sky is completely blown out. The photo also illustrates the problem of "two" of anything, since the two horses compete for your attention - odd numbers are almost always better, for some reason that brain research has still not answered.
WILD HORSE ON THE MOOR : FINAL VERSION
I'm still too far away, but at least there is only one horse, and you can begin to appreciate the heather as much as the horse does. The contrast in the scene has drastically improved, and the feeling of desolation has not been lessened by the absence of a featureless sky.
BACK-LIT WILD HORSE : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
This original snapshot illustrates the truism that it is perfectly possible to belittle your photographic efforts because after all, you are not a nature photographer. Well, I'm not, but this isn't half bad, and it does have some nice back lighting. It just need a little help.
BACK-LIT WILD HORSE : FINAL VERSION
The image has now gotten the attention it deserves. Stretching the white and black points has enriched the image without raising the exposure - the scene is brighter, and the increased contrast has really brought out the tree, as has the sharpening overall. The back lighting is still there, but the horse is now black and white rather than gray and white. Dodging and burning, which involves darkening the darker areas on the hill while lightening the lighter areas, has enlivened the background. This tactic is so subtle that I can't even appreciate it all while I am doing it - the brush, set at 10%, doesn't seem to be having an effect. It's only when you toggle before and after that you see how much it really changes the image.
MOOR OVERVIEW : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Finally we have the most dramatic transformation. Don't throw anything away! This snapshot was so underexposed that it is a wonder that I just didn't hit delete. It had nothing to do with the scene in front of me, but the raw file's hidden information allows you to overcome your initial miscalculation.
CORRECT THE EXPOSURE
Now you can see why I stopped to take the photograph. The sunlit hill is glorious, and there is now both a foreground and a background where there was just murk.
MOOR OVERVIEW : FINAL VERSION
Now that we have an actual photograph we can work on the image. The panoramic crop loses some sky and a lot of foreground along with the inconsequential horses. And even though the moorland is not flat, "correcting" the horizon just feels better even if it is not strictly correct. Lightening the shadow areas and adding some "sun" to the sunlit areas adds to the richness of the scene. Sharpening helps both the textures on the hill and defines the fields beyond it.
These six images are prime examples of the value in not throwing anything away. Storage is getting cheaper all of the time, and nobody else will ever delve into your archives, so at least take a look every once in a while to see if there is anything there that can whet your interest. You will most certainly not regret it.
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NOVEMBER 4, 2022
ART DECO STORM : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to continue my discussion of finding images within images by exploring the idea of creating new images of such small pieces of existing images that they could be considered macro photos, after the fact. These drastic crops allow you to explore imagery that relates to your original image but that is such a different scale that it could possibly constitute an entirely new photograph. These new images allow you to explore different aspects of the scene that were just not available at the time you captured the image - and might be considered a different composition based on a lens that was not on your camera at the time. Software innovations allow us to seemingly acquire new photographic hardware, years after the fact, without reaching for our charge cards at the camera store.
I have recently acquired two new software plug-ins from a Portland company called On One that make these radical crops possible. They both use Artificial Intelligence to improve on existing programs, and are probably the best of their kind, at least until another company inevitably improves on them. These programs try to deal with two problems that come up when you try to enlarge photos without reducing them to a pixilated mess. Enlarging is essentially what you are doing when you radically crop a photo - you are taking what was a small part of your original image and throwing away a good portion of the pixels in the original image.
Any digital noise in the image, which is the digital equivalent of film grain (but not as aesthetically pleasing to us old film guys, even though we didn't really like grain either), will only be heightened in the the smaller "negative." On One "AI Noise" is essentially a miracle - it can almost completely clean up the noisiest digital image, without the usual problems of just rendering it a fuzzy, jelly remnant of its formally sharp self. It works so well that sometimes it cleans up images that you didn't realize were noisy in the first place, so running every digital image through this program as a first move before doing anything else is not a bad idea at all - especially when you will be doing some heavy cropping.
On One AI Resize is a new generation of enlarging programs which allow you to enlarge an image way beyond the size possible using the native resolution of your camera. Any digital photo (or film photo for that matter) has a native enlargement ratio based on the laws of physics and math. In the days of film, the size of the negative basically determined how large an enlargement, with good detail, that you could achieve, assuming you could find photo paper that large anyway. An 8x10 camera produced an 8x10 negative, which did not require any enlargement to create an 8x10 print. A 35 mm negative required an 8x enlargement for the same 8x10, so it couldn't possibly hold as much detail in the resultant print. The same physical constraints exist in digital printing, which is why digital camera sensors have increased in resolution from 3 megapixels to sometimes 100 megapixels in the last twenty years. Camera companies of course engaged in an arms race, based on the promise of prints of ginormous sizes that no one could afford and place in their homes. My fourteen-year old camera's 18 megapixel sensor is considered antiquated, but thatbsensor is powerful enough to produce prints so large that you couldn't afford them even if I did not make any money when I sold them to you.
But that is not really the point of the megapixel race, if you desire to heavily crop your images - remember that you are throwing away those very pixels you just paid good money for. So it pays to have 40 megapixels if you are just going to use 1/4 of the "negative" - you will still have 10 megapixels of information, while my camera is reduced to about 4 megapixels. While I still could produce a coaster, anything larger would be problematic. Resize software attempts to solve this problem by literally creating new pixels to give you more to work with - algorithms determine that within reason, that next created pixel would probably be pretty close to the existing one. Of course this is an educated computer guess, and the claims that you can now enlarge your file to 10x the size are overblown - but 4 or 5 times is well within reach. In theory this allows you to take 1/4 of your photo, and now enlarge it to the size that the larger photo could achieve, without any noticeable loss of detail. Now for the big reveal.
ART DECO ORNAMENT : FINAL VERSION
The original image of one of Portland's finest Art Deco department stores is already a small detail of the overall facade, a storm design in a rare black Terra Cotta facade. Terra Cotta was a very popular early Twentieth Century material, a ceramic substitute for stone that severely reduced construction time and costs without restricting creativity. If you look at the bottom left corner of the original sculptural panel, you will find this flower - and now you can explore it in intimate detail. I'm not saying this is "better" than the original image, but it certainly offers something very new from the original photo. You can almost feel the clay in the hands of the craftsman.
SPACE NEEDLE #2 : FINAL VERSION
My take on an overall view of the Seattle landmark is already somewhat of a miracle, mostly due that great Seattle sky and the detail my telephoto lens could hold even from the deck of a moving ferry. But what if you wanted to just concentrate on the top of the Needle?
SPACE NEEDLE SUMMIT : FINAL VERSION
Yes, there is still a little noise in the sky, but you can count the number of people on the platform, which is kind of incredible. Only a telescope could get any closer.
HEUCHAERA LEAF : FINAL VERSION
This is a more conventional macro shot, of a beautifully variegated leaf. While it is not "macro" in the traditional sense of achieving a 1:1 ratio between the subject and the size of the image, this shot is pretty damn close and contains lots of detail. Now software can let me "buy" that macro lens I cannot afford.
HEUCHERA LEAF DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
If you have ever felt a Heuchera leaf at your local garden store, you now that's not digital noise, but "fuzz" - look at the edges of the leaf. There is no noise in the black background, and noise is always more apparent in the the darker tones of an image.
BIG ISLAND TREE : FINAL VERSION
This Hawaiian landscape is one small section of one of the Big Island's beautiful beaches on the dry side of the island. I focused on the lone tree on this thin outcropping which served to separate this beach from the resort beyond. This image was already a crop of the larger horizontal original, but I wanted to see what a closer crop would look like.
LONE TREE, BIG ISLAND : FINAL VERSION
Get closer! This closer crop is all about the tree. The sea loses it's "distracting" waves, and the closer crop even required erasing a lone figure that I hadn't even seen before lurking behind the tree.
LADY LIBERTY : FINAL VERSION
This has been my take on the Statue of Liberty ever since I went on the ferry ten years ago. It's already cropped, but would it gain some power by cropping even closer?
DETAILS ONLY BIRDS GET TO SEE : FINAL VERSION
This proves you can create a macro shot of the largest copper-hammered statue in the world. I would suggest that the last humans to see this level of detail were the sculptor and the workmen who erected this marvel. Any plane flying this close would risk a look-see from the Air Force.
FILMER'S COUNTER : ORIGINAL CROP
FULMER'S COUNTER : CLOSER CROP
Finally, we can see how these software tools have allowed me to improve this image, in my humble opinion. I noticed the reflections on the counter through a storefront window at a venerable downtown diner. It was pretty dark, and the resultant photograph certainly contained a lot of noise. I also managed to focus on the second set of shakers rather than the first, which was now out of focus. My new software has eliminated almost all of the noise, and enlarging the photo to crop even closer has eliminated that first place setting. The entire image now appears sharper even though it really isn't, and the image is now more about the reflections rather than the line of empty place settings.
These close crops are not for everyone, but I hope you can see how they can open up whole new worlds within your existing images. Once again, we can see that the click of the shutter is not the last time you get to create an image - it is just the first.
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OCTOBER 28, 2022
HADRIAN 'S WALL : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to show how you can usually find a few more good images within an exemplary image. This process of cropping to discover several new versions of the original photo is based on two basic theories of photographic composition. The first is that the framing of an image - what you include and what you leave out of the frame - is critical to your interpretation of the scene in front of you. This continues after you make an initial crop, because that frame is not the last word either. The use of different aspect ratios - the ratio between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of an image - can also completely change the way a viewer can interpret a scene. The second theory of composition that is one of my particular touchstones is to "get closer." My way of seeing is based on the idea that an image's impact will increase the closer you are to the real subject of the image. The admonition to "get closer" rules your cropping strategy until you have obviously gotten too close and lost all context for your subject. These two different cropping strategies will reappear in the variants I will show you of half a dozen or so images, most over a decade old. The fact that I am "used to" one way of cropping an image doesn't mean that another way will always be inferior. These different interpretations have intrinsic value in that they can break you out of the box, if you forgive the pun. The alternatives do not have to blow your mind either - your original decisions might still be the best.
The confession I have to make before we proceed is that in looking over my archives I have rediscovered two truths about my imagery. While I always say that a good landscape contains two or three other good images, I have realized that my particular way of seeing - a tight frame around a graphic image - actually makes that truism not as true for yours truly. The other aspect of my imagery that makes it tougher to find additional images is that contrary to most photographers, I usually frame my images vertically; this makes it harder to find interior images because the images do not contain as much breathing space as the more typical horizontal landscape. Yet I did still discover images within my images. Let's explore.
HADRIAN'S WALL : ORIGINAL
This first image was captured on a very cold day on the border between England and Scotland. Hadrian's wall stretched across the north of Roman Britain, from the Irish Sea to the North Sea to preserve civilization from the depredations of the primitive Scots to the North, who had never been conquered by the Romans. The analogies to the Game of Thrones are more than obvious. The wall still stands today, complete with fortifications every few miles or so; it used to be a lot taller only because the dust of two thousand years has raised the ground level around it. My original square crop of the original image obviously helped for several reasons, as did exposure tweaks. The square crop eliminates the unkempt snow on my side of the wall as a good portion of unexciting overcast sky.
HADRIAN'S WALL, SNAKING THROUGH THE LANDSCAPE TO THE HILLS BEYOND
HADRIAN'S WALL PANORAMA
HADRIAN'S WALL, UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
Here are three new interpretations. The first ignores the nearest portion of the wall in favor of the snaking portions in the distance. The second leaves out the mountains and that boring sky completely. Both use a panoramic 1:2 aspect ratio to emphasize the wide extent of the wall. The third square crop concentrates on the texture of the wall itself and the incredible skill of its builders on the edge of known civilization. Again, different doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, just different. In case you aren't feeling cold enough, see what the black and white version does to your bloodstream.
A BITTERLY COLD DAY AT HADRIAN'S WALL
We now move South to London, to Horse Guards Parade, which might be familiar from the Queens funeral. This parade ground is literally where the Horse Guards strut their stuff behind Whitehall in the center of the capital.
HORSE GUARDS PARADE : ORIGINAL
HORSE GUARDS PARADE : FINAL VERSION
HORSE GUARDS PARADE : BLACK AND WHITE
The square crop of the original snapshot is a vast improvement in my humble opinion, as the extra room on the right doesn't add anything to the composition; leaving it out also puts more emphasis on the surreal appearance of the London Eye in the distance. I can't decide whether I like the color or the black and white version better.
HORSE GUARDS PARADE : THE PEDESTRIAN EXPERIENCE
LONDON JUXTAPOSITION
These two new crops concentrate on parts of the scene to emphasize either the more traditional scene or the Ferris Wheel in the distance. Again, the overall crop might still be the best.
BATH : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
We now move onto Bath, home of some of the first multifamily housing in Great Britain. This is a sliver of the Royal Circus, a complete circle around a park, covered in the "Bath Stone" typical of the city.
BATH : FINAL VERSION
The square crop brings you closer to the scene by eliminating the top floor and a little of the sidewalk. But what if we get even closer?
ONE BICYCLE IN BATH
We can now give our attention to that modern invention, the bicycle, which lagged a clear half-century after these houses were built in 1824. The Royal Circus has been subtly humanized.
SOUTH BANK 4 X 6
The promenade on the South Bank of the Thames is a continuous walkway, complete with Victorian sculpted lamp posts every twenty feet or so. This was the venue for the recent "Que" to pay respects to the Queen, a line which extended ten miles over three days and nights. These tow additional crops show how subtle differences in aspect ratios can affect an image. While these are subtle, it is interesting how different people can really respond to a change in aspect ratio. The original is a standard 3:2 vertical; the narrower image is a vertical 2:1 panorama, while the last image is a very traditional 5:4 vertical to fit your 8 x 10 frame from the drugstore.
SOUTH BANK - VERTICAL 2:1 PANORAMA
SOUTH BANK - 8 X 10
DARTMOOR 1:3 PANORAMA
This is a ridiculously wide crop, a 1:3 horizontal, of a wild scene on the edge of Dartmoor in Southwest England. Beyond that hill is thirty miles of wilderness, so barren that when I walked on the edge I later realized that I had walked through an RAF bombing range. These two crops were easy, since there are obviously multiple images within this one.
DARTMOOR 1:2 PANORAMA
DARTMOOR : STANDARD 4 X 6 CROP
The first image is an under control 2:1 panorama, with the hill nicely balancing out the tree. And if you think the tree deserves its own image, the the standard 3:2 crop now looks like an absolute close-up. I lightened the overall exposure one stop and then darkened everything around the tree to let the tree stand out a little more than the original exposure, which I kept dark to hide the multiple artifacts from this panoramic stitching experiment, which used 5 different images!
CROWN POINT : SQUARE CROP FINAL VERSION
And finally we get closer to home, with this view of what I call "God's Restroom", Vista House at Crown Point in the Columbia Gorge. As a retired architect, I naturally emphasized the man-made intervention in this incredible scene. What a site! If you don't think civilization can improve on Nature, cover up the building with your finger and then form an opinion. Since I made this image, I have always been upset by the grim sky above, the result of raging forest fires deeper within the Gorge. If any image cried out for sky replacement, it is this one, but my ethics and lack of post-processing skill have always prevented me from further investigation of this image - until now! Could a different crop make a difference?
GET CLOSER! : SQUARE CROP WITH GUSTO
Get closer, while keeping to the square. The sky is diminished, and the building is even more important in the slightly less grand landscape.
CROWN POINT : HORIZONTAL
Does a horizontal aspect ratio help widen the scene while ignoring the sky?
CROWN POINT : PANORAMA
Get closer! This time by going even wider, since the 1:2 panorama cuts out the sky completely by leaving out the tops of the Gorge cliffs beyond.
CROWN POINT : VERTICAL PANORAMA
And finally, maybe perversely, will a vertical aspect ratio heighten the drama by drawing Beacon Rock visually closer to the Crown Point? If you've hiked in the Gorge, you know that the real killer is vertical gain, so why not narrow the scene to emphasize that grandeur? That brown sky is again reduced to just a sliver at the top of a vertical panorama.
I hope you have enjoyed this exploration of the art of the crop. It proves once again that there is more than one way to skin a cat, even if you have been looking at an image one way for more than a decade.
]]>OCTOBER 21, 2022
URBAN EXCITEMENT : FINAL VERSION
I've been thinking about New York even more than usual this week, mostly because my beloved team, the New York Metropolitans, have somehow succeeded in disappointing me once again. I had successfully resisted their charms all season until the final two weekend series against the Braves and the Padres reduced the season to ashes. The Yankees still remain, but of course they are not only the ancient enemy but also seem to to be the worst 99-win team in recent memory. Optimism does not reign.
I've lived in Portland now for thirty years, but I will always be a New Yorker. Fran is frequently confused by my latest rant until she realizes that the mayor that I'm complaining about lives three thousand miles away. As an urban landscape photographer I do envy the photographic opportunities available in "The City that Never Sleeps" as opposed to our own "City that Works." Along with London and Paris, New York serves as the scene of most of the world's history of photography in an urban setting. I do try my best with Portland, but it remains obvious to me that their is more potential for imagery on one block of New York than in the entire Rose City.
This week, in another attempt to find some of "The Missing", those important images that I have somehow lost once again, I happened upon a half a dozen images from New York that I had neglected over the years. I enjoyed processing them, and it proved to me that I can capture some of the beauty and absurdity of the place that I was born 66 years ago, but visit very infrequently. These images are from the last ten years, but somehow seem to be timeless glimpses of the New York of my imagination.
The first image above is a view looking down on Midtown. My telephoto lens provides some compression, so that four blocks can seem even busier than they are. Normally I would convert to black and white for what I consider a more realistic "naked city" monochromatic vision, but of course I would then lose those yellow cabs which provide some sense of visual order in the jumble of New York traffic.
MY FLATIRON : FINAL VERSION
Here is another classic view of New York. The Flatiron building has been one of the world's most famous photographic subjects since the beginning of the 20th Century. I've read one photo book which pretty successfully recounted the entire history of photography through images of just this one skyscraper. I'm not really adding much new here, but in restricting my view to just a portion of the facade I think that I have stressed the building's ability to be part of the fabric of the city even though it's height and shape and location was astounding to pedestrians when it was first built. By leaving out the famous curved end of the building, as well as both the sky and the ground, I can concentrate on what must be the most subtle bay windows ever drawn by an architect. I had never even noticed that the stone on these bays was a little darker than the flat portions of the facade. This facade serves as the proof, in my opinion, of the notion that older masonry skyscrapers achieve more "readability" than newer glass facades, in that we can readily imagine ourselves looking out from those clearly human-sized openings. In leaving out the base of the building, the image is rendered more timeless, since the Flatiron is always the same, but the pedestrians, the storefronts, and the "transportation conveyances" change over the decades. The only clue that this is a modern photo are those window air conditioners that look like they could be in my childhood bedroom. I converted the image to black and white, but I find this color image, so tan as to be monochromatic, to be more convincing.
EMPIRE STATE IN THE CITY : TWO VERSIONS
Which is not to say that I can be convinced in the other direction. Of these two versions of the Empire State Building, I find the black and white version so much more "New York" than the color version that I think the debate in this case is over. In fact, even though I know that the colors in the first image are "true", to my eyes they appear completely fake. Both images do illustrate what I like best about this tower, that it appears to fit the fabric of the city despite its overwhelming size. From a few blocks away it complements the older buildings that surround it; a lot of it's charm on the street is that even when you walk right by it, you cannot tell that something is going on until you look straight up.
A BLOSSOM IN NEW YORK (BLACK GARLIC AKA NEW YORK IRONWEED) : FINAL VERSION
Nature sometimes asserts itself. This image is from the High Line, the genius of an urban park created out of a ruined elevated freight line on the West Side. Here I've been charmed by the appearance of not one, but two butterflies, on a flower blossom two stories above the street. Drastic underexposure of the background has made the chain-link fence a distant memory.
BOOKS #2 : FINAL VERSION
BOOKS #2 : BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
Sometimes the choice of color or monochrome is just a matter of taste. This interior view of a small portion of the Chelsea Market works in both, but I really love yellow and orange, so that's where I fall on this argument. I love the way that the various light sources - the incandesent paper lanterns, the neon store sign, and the natural light streaming in from stage right - combine to create a harmonious atmosphere. As usual, the black and white reveals more detail, while those yellow and orange lanterns brings the image to life. What is interesting to me is that to my eyes the Books sign shows even more contrast in the black and white version, set against gray, than it does in color set against what should be a more contrasting tan. In both versions I feel that the image is very balanced, with the visual weight of the lanterns on the left holding serve with the power of the bright letters on the right.
BOOKS : FINAL VERSION
Another reason that I was charmed by this rediscovered image is that it provided a complete contrast with one of my most venerable images. I have sold hundreds of copies of this shot, taken ten feet away, and ten seconds after this forgotten image. "Books" has always provided me with all the proof I needed of the value of print in the photographic image. I never could decide the value of a neon sign on a clear background that could be seen from both the front and the back, but there was no denying the power of letters to engage viewers, even if they were backwards. It was nice to rediscover the cousin of "Books", now known as "Books #2."
14TH STREET : FINAL VERSION
This final image only works in monochrome, as we have entered the belly of the beast. I am forever grateful that I had the chance to grow up in New York, but I often find it impossible to understand how anyone who did not grow up there can overcome the urban angst that becomes second nature to a native. I know I am really back in the city when I descend below to take in the awesome reality of the subway, where every day more people than live in the entire State of Oregon somehow get to work, to the ballgame, or just back home, without questioning their very existence. As in a lot of the magic of the city, it is truly a miracle that it works at all.
If you question your sanity in relation to the average New Yorker, I leave you with this final thought, gleaned yesterday from the "Newspaper of Record." In an effort to do something about the filth of the city's streets, the powers to be have decided that they will not allow garbage to be placed on the street until 8:00 P.M., thus shortening the city's rat buffet by four hours. This proposed "solution", was taken by the only major city in the United States which in fact allows garbage to be placed on the street without that modern invention, the garbage can. This is yet another example of what constitutes the truly "Unique New York" quality of life in the city of my birth.
]]>OCTOBER 14, 2022
XMAS ABSTRACT : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to show off another half a dozen images that I rediscovered in my archives while searching for another round of "The Missing", the important photos that I have somehow misplaced once again. The current "Missing" files number ten, indicating that no matter how I try to improve, I cannot overcome my natural tendencies toward disorder if not outright anarchy. In any case, about the only benefit of these frequently hopeless searches are the rediscoveries of other images. Upon rediscovery, it is usually only a small bout of post-processing to render these new images into something wonderful that I can be upset if I then lose them at a later date. This circular destiny is both funny and frightening.
This first image didn't require much work at all beyond just finding it again. It dates back about ten years,taken during an especially dismal evening when I tried to sell my work at an offshoot of the Market at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Downtown. As usual, a retail opportunity that should have worked - selling art at Christmas in the heart of Downtown - didn't work at all. The image is a very abstract view of the Xmas lights on the annual tree in the middle of the Square which towered over my booth. I was so cold that I couldn't possibly hold my iPhone reasonably still, and the result is this hyphenated and caffeinated view of Christmas. All I did was to darken the black of the tree; the lights needed no saturation.
YARN BOMBING : ORIGINAL
This snap, and it really doesn't even deserve that characterization, was taken during another Christmas in the Square a few years later. In my usual resistance to all things entrepreneurial, I had somehow neglected to try my hand at one of the most popular tourist shots in Portland. This is the "Allow Me" statue in the Square is by J. Seward Johnson, Jr., who duplicated it in various poses around the country. It pictures a typical downtown businessman about to aid some hapless tourist. Unfortunately, while the typical Portlander can be helpful, he holds only disdain for the "Suits", and certainly does not carry an umbrella. The whole thing is rendered somewhat inauthentic. But at Christmas the statue is redeemed by a truly characteristic act of "yarn bombing" which subjects a lot of our public art to knitted additions in the dead of night.
YARN BOMBING : FINAL VERSION
Let me help you with some work in Lightroom. First the square crop, since this has some potential as a coaster, and the crop will eliminate some of the completely washed out sky that was the result of my overexposure. Then I used the angle tool to straighten the photo, on the theory that the lamp post in the rear was probably not falling over. To isolate the subject as if he was a supermodel, I simulated a two thousand dollar portrait lens by not only darkening the background, but also reducing it's sharpness and clarity, so that attention will be paid to our businessman. The final touch was to darken the umbrella and subtly lighten his bronze face to overcome the original backlighting.
PORTLAND JUXTAPOSITION #4 : ORIGINAL
I rediscovered another of my "Portland Juxtapositions", this one that pits City Hall, a 1895 confectionery inspired by the 1888 design of the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House in Washington, D.C. That building is famous for governmental skullduggery, as well as being so over the top that it somehow survived numerous attempts at demolition by later generations overcome by its sheer wedding cake audaciousness. Our City Hall is fairly modest in comparison, and stands as another example of a building which survives mostly because we kind of know that we would only replace it with something worse. To the rear is one of our modern skyscrapers, the Pac West Center, built one hundred and six years later in1984. The building looks like it was zeroxed from the 1977 City Corp Building in New York. Its architect, Hugh Stubbins, probably said "why the hell not, no one will notice, it's three thousand miles away!" Portland has several examples of such architectural duplication. One of our bank buildings downtown has exactly the same window grills as the Lincoln Memorial, done by the same architect, which would only be recognized by another architect doing too much poking around Downtown. Thus it is somewhat ironic that this Portland Juxtaposition involves two buildings whose designs are moved from two cities on the East Coast to stand next to each other on the West Coast.
PORTLAND JUXTAPOSITION #4 : FINAL VERSION
All I did to improve this image was to lower the highlights and raise the shadows, which is not my usual strategy which involves adding, not subtracting contrast. But in this case it revealed detail and color in both the sunlit facade and the elaborate cornice details, formerly hidden in shadows. The rest involved subtle cropping and straightening that probably only a photographer/architect truly cares about. If you notice, those pesky branches in the bottom left corner have disappeared, as have both the upper and lower window stripe fragments on our Citycorp copy in the rear.
REFLECTIONS ON NEW YORK : ORIGINAL
We now move to New York for a couple of images that I took while we were attending Benjamin and Margaret's wedding twelve years ago. This image is an example of my fascination with both minimalist glass facades and the reflections that are endemic in such buildings. Here you see what can happen if the architect is so bold as to throw in a corner - thus creating a dual reflection on the angled facade.
REFLECTIONS ON NEW YORK : FINAL VERSION
I tried here heighten this effect by both increasing the overall exposure of the photo while lowering the luminosity of just the tan solid portions of the facade. This both brightens the overall scene while increasing contrast without really darkening anything. The only added contrast is in the curving lines of the right portion of the facade. And while I appreciate the height of a New York tower compared to Stumptown's examples, I had to eliminate the sky at the upper left corner to heighten the graphic effect.
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND : ORIGINAL
If you thought the Father of the Groom was nervous before his son's wedding, imagine how these unfortunate souls felt a dozen stories down on the street. Here we have what might be characterized as a typical example what can only be described as traffic malfeasance. And you wonder why it's not a good idea to allow more handguns on the streets of New York?
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND : FINAL VERSION
It took far less time for me to improve this image than it took to unravel this little vehicular nightmare. A little cropping to reduce a little of the chaos at the edges, like the upper torso of the jaywalker and the unnecessary extra cab on the bottom edge, focused our attentions on the mess at the heart of the image. I reduced the glare on the right side of the street not bey reducing the exposure, which made it too dull and dark, but by selectively reducing the luminosity of the yellows which allowed for more detail on the sidewalk and the awning. Lightroom's Hue/Saturation/Luminosity controls can reveal the underlying colors of your image better, or at least different, than what your own eyes and brain tell you. Notice that reducing the sidewalk and the awning luminosity, which Lightroom told me was "yellow", actually revealed the yellow curb. When I tried to recover some punch in the yellow cab, it helped that Lightroom thought that the iconic New York yellow cab was really a little more orange than yellow.
MYSTERY IN THE DESERT : ORIGINAL
Finally we have this surrealistic scene on the highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. I am not making this up, and it was not Area 51. With remnants of LA smog over the mountains beyond, we are looking at fields of solar collectors which are also functioning as mirrors to concentrate light, in reverse light house fashion, on those mysterious towers. Or at least that's what I think I saw.
MYSTERY IN THE DESERT : FINAL VERSION
It's not often that I use a 3:1 crop, because it's really very wide, but this scene seemed to justify such a frame. The drama and mystery was concentrated in a narrow wide band, and very little smoggy sky was needed above the mountain range. And if you think this was a weird spot, well you are a few minutes from Las Vegas, so it will get you in the mood.
I hope you have enjoyed another rescue mission, and encourage your own forays into your own photo archives - and hope you are more succesful than yours truly in keeping track of your images.
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OCTOBER 7, 2022
LOVE IN THE MIST - THE ONLY VOLUNTEER : FINAL VERSION
I have another confession to make this week. Last Saturday was our Oregon Day, thirty years to the day when our family arrived in Portland after our trip on our Oregon Trail from Washington, D.C. This week we will celebrate Fran's birthday, when she is once again one year older than me so that I canclaim my status as her "boy toy." In the midst of these events, I want to acknowledge that my wife, in addition to all of her other stellar qualities, has created an incredibly beautiful garden around our bungalow. This is all her doing, with little or no effort on my part, so much so that I readily acknowledge that it is her garden, created around my indifference, ignorance, and generally bad attitude towards working in the dirt.
TIPTOE THROUGH THE TULIPS : FINAL VERSION
The only contribution I ever made to the garden was my brief devotion to planting tulips, when I realized that all I had to do was dig a hole, and that they seemed to come back every year. the only problem was that they would emerge in a blaze of glory, and then just be a mess which Fran had to take care of - she was not amused.
CANNA LILY : FINAL VERSION
ZEBRA (PORCUPINE)-GRASS : FINAL VERSION
My tulip phase was followed by a Hosta phase, wherein I would buy any plant I saw, as long as it was a Hosta which could grow in the perpetual shade of our street, where giant Maples, now banned by the city, spread completely across 37th Avenue. When we turned the corner the temperature would drop at least 5 degrees. Since our address didn't read Laurelhurst or Ladd's Addition we did not get any leaf pickup. I stopped all efforts when I reached twenty bags one year, which we had to pay a surplus $5.00 a bag to get hauled away. After careful observation I observed that our tree was the last on the street to lose it's leaves, and that the wind currents seemed to bring everyone else's leaves right to our doorstep. My gardening efforts came to a halt both in front and behind our house.
A CORNER OF THE GARDEN : FINAL VERSION
In my defense, which I sustain only to withstand the shame of my non-participation, Fran's garden started with more than two strikes against it. We have a very small lot, with very little privacy from our neighbors, and without knowing it we had bought on the "stupid" side of the street. In Portland, as opposed to back East, the hottest part of the day is the end of a Summer day when the sun has been beating down on our west facing garden for nearly eight hours. I could call myself a designer, even though I had never actually planted anything in my life, and considered any plant a gift from a God I constantly argued with but didn't quite believe in. Fran was certainly inexperienced as well, but responded to my lack of energy and unwillingness to engage in "stoop labor" with a drive to create a garden out of nothing.
THE WORLD'S SMALLEST FIELD OF BLACK-EYED SUSAN'S : FINAL VERSION
PENSTEMON OSPREY FLOWER : FINAL VERSION
My inability to contemplate doing anything with our garden had in fact created a pretty good approximation of a prairie, dominated with, I kid you not, thistles so thick, and taller than Fran, that you couldn't even see our back fence, much less walk to it. Three events led to Fran's garden. The first was when our neighbor's fence actually collapsed, held up only by my thistles. I agreed to design a new fence and pay for the materials if my handy neighbor would build it. I finally had some privacy and something behind my house that I could believe in. Fran then paid to have the entire yard cleared of my prairie. Finally our friends agreed to plant an entire preliminary garden of flowers for their wedding. Fran was on her way.
WHITE ON WHITE, OAKLEAF HYDRANGEA : FINAL VERSION
LADY FOXGLOVE DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
I designed the broad outlines of the garden, with a gravel path dividing the area into several sections. Fran had the rosemary bush removed, which had taken over anything the thistles hadn't controlled. I was told to get my rosemary elsewhere, which in my neighborhood was every other house within walking distance. Once Fran realized that I had very little interest in actually doing any work in the garden, any thoughts I occasionally offered were treated with the derision they deserved. As Fran's gardening experience and knowledge increased, my opinions became even less welcome. The garden was hers.
CAPE FUCHSIA : FINAL VERSION
There were two more garden conflicts between us. It soon became obvious that we had differing opinions on "volunteers", those plants which somehow arrived in the garden. These delighted me for some reason, maybe because I didn't have to do any work to enjoy them; Fran considered them a nuisance if not an outright affront. This was her garden, and neither me nor God had any say in the matter. The first image at the start of this essay is the last volunteer that was ever allowed even a brief stay in the garden. Our other conflict was over my misunderstanding of the "process", which demanded the purchase of such small plant speceimens at the garden store that I couldn't even appreciate them most of the time. This was then compounded by Fran's discovery of the discount section, which I derided as where they put "social worker" plants, which of course only endeared them to my social worker wife. I sometimes concluded that Fran's latest purchase was right out of the Monty Python skit - this plant you just bought is dead!
BUTTON HOLED, CALENDULA MARIGOLD : FINAL VERSION
BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
Needless to say, I was completely wrong about almost everything in the garden and after ten years or so I get to enjoy pretty much a small paradise behind our house. I still only move the occasional bag of compost, and actually enjoy the garden more than I think Fran does, since like most "makers" she usually sees only what still needs to be done. But I have tried to get her to actually appreciate what she has create all by herself, starting from less than zero. The thing is that she so enjoys her puttering that sometime the only thing I can do is to try to get her to stop working on the garden. I know if we put in a lighting system she would work way into the night. When she retires I think that she should volunteer to weed in the Japanese Garden or the Chinese Garden in Portland to find another venue for her weeding energy.
BUTTERFLY BUSH, WHITE GAURA : FINAL VERSION
FRENCH HYDRANGEA : FINAL VERSION
Almost all of these photos were taken on my iPhone, another argument for it absolute suitability for this type of photography. It is actually a fine macro camera, especially if you take the time to import the images into Lightroom and improve them there. I am sure that if you actually became proficient with some of the more advanced apps for the phone in the app store you could accomplish similar results there as well. As usual the key is cropping, simplifying, and exposure manipulation to highlight the subject instead of the chaotic surroundings. Sharpening is required as well, since every digital image, whether taken on a phone or a $10,000 camera requires some sharpening to counter the digital process itself.
LOOK AT ME! (LIVING LIBATIONS ROCK ROSE) : FINAL VERSION
I am by no means an outstanding garden photographer; I can only do my best in creating what I call "floral portraits" which concentrate on a single flower. I leave the overall garden images which can make sense of an entire garden scene to the professionals. I only hope that these modest efforts do some justice to the small paradise which Fran has created and she still lets me enjoy.
GOD IS IN THE DETAILS (JAPANESE THIMBLEWEED) : FINAL VERSION
]]>SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
LIBERTY : FINAL VERSION
I'd like to make a couple of confessions this week. I've been writing these essays for almost two years, and I have become a little cocky about my ability to write what I call a weekly column, as long as I have no editor, no word limit, high or low, or even a topic I have to cover. So cocky that I have even begun to not even know what I'm going to be writing about before I sit down to write my blog post. This week I even had the nerve to start a blog post about images I hadn't even created yet! The other confession I have to admit is that while I can mansplain with the best of them, I usually am a little uncomfortable with entering a project without the slightest idea of how I'm actually going to accomplish my goals. I tend to overthink things rather than just winging it.
LIBERTY : FINAL B&W VERSION
So today I want to address the value of trying something new, especially when you don't know what the hell you are doing. While frustration can ensue, the shear terror and understanding that your inexperience will not just betray you but completely undermine your efforts can lead to the excitement and liberation of very low expectations.
ONE DOLLAR : FINAL VERSION
People often ask me about my photographic training and skill set, and my usual answer is that I am an artist who happens to use a camera, but that I have large gaps in my photographic knowledge. I know how to make the images that I make, and do a damn good job of it, but if you ask me to shoot sports, or wildlife, or portraits for that matter, I am working on instinct. It's not that I might know more than you, but I certainly know less than a photographer who shoots those type of images, sometimes a lot less. My self-labeling myself as an artist relieves me of the expectations others might have that I can pick up a camera and of course shoot a ballgame or a wedding or even their dog.
ALL IN : FINAL VERSION
My training as an architect gave me a skill set as an artist when it quickly occurred to me that since I was an absolutely terrible businessman, my future in architecture relied on my skills as an artist that happened to be an architect. So it was a natural progression when I needed to take photographs of my architectural projects and couldn't or wouldn't afford to hire a "real" architectural photographer. It took me years to realize that even though I might never have their technical skills and wizadry, most architectural photographers didn't have a real clue about what the architects had been thinking when they designed the project - and I did. My architectural images thus combined the skill sets I had honed as an architect with the self-taught experience I gained as an artist whose subjects were usually far away, did not move, and certainly did not talk back.
ALL IN, IN BLACK AND WHITE
These images I am showing today are the result of a deliberate effort to try something completely new - not for the universe, but at least for me. I had little expectation that I would exhibit incredible skill as a still life macro photographer. A big part of the fun was the idea that I could accomplish anything at all, since I really didn't know what I was doing beyond holding the camera reasonably still. I even flubbed the things I did have experience with, like realizing that my tripod was still so full of North Carolina beach sand that it was really unusable. I set out to shoot some macro still lifes without a backdrop, or a real macro lens, or any flash equipment beyond my on-camera flash, which I had used about a dozen times in as many years - what could go wrong?
BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME? : FINAL B&W VERSION
Amid a lot of frustration I did have a lot of fun in the ensuing hour or so of shooting three subjects that were all available in my studio, hiding in plain site. These included a pile of coins which I haven't even had the energy to take to the bank, a collection of paperclips that fell on the floor as I reached for the coins, and a few cherry tomatoes that I snacked on just slowly enough to allow me to use some of them in several images. Out of about one hundred images, here are a dozen or so that are not completely embarrassing.
DEPTH OF FIELD SO NARROW IT CLEARLY CAN'T HANDLE MORE THAN LIBERTY : FINAL VERSION
I started with the coins since I had a few bad puns to at least work with, even though I knew that I wasn't going to make a profound statement about inflation or inequality with a pile of coins on a white background. Window light and one architectural lamp provided some good light before I dared to turn on the flash. Even though I did find the button to turn on the flash, something that has eluded me in the past, it was quite humbling to realize that my characteristic vertical grip on my camera was actually placing my hand in front of the flash. Talk about a newbie! I tried to use my reversing ring to achieve true macro enlargements that allow for 1:1 ratios between subject size and image size, without much success. The reversing ring is a simple metal ring that allows you to reverse your lens and attach it to your camera backwards - making it into a very low powered microscope. The only trouble is that all electronic connections between the camera and the lens are lost, which makes for a trial and error shooting style that can only be mastered with about several years more experience that I possess. I could never overcome the incredibly narrow depth of field that results from such close-focusing. That is why one part of something even as small as a penny can be tack sharp,while the other edge is very soft. I soon abandoned the reversing ring for just using my zoom lens which can achieve somewhat close to macro magnifications - but only after almost mangling it when I didn't realize that removing the reversing ring required me to push the usual lens removal button on my camera body. It's a good thing that this photo session was not taped for posterity.
MY TWO CENTS : FINAL VERSION
After several bad photo puns, and the realization from Fran's casual chuckles and comments revealed that she had far better ideas for possible shots using coins, I moved on to paperclips. At least I learned that a casual pile of paper clips wasn't as exciting as a pile of coins, so that I had to do at least a little compositional thinking. But not much.
CLIP ART : FINAL VERSION
IN ANOTHER FEW YEARS I MIGHT ACTUALLY COME UP WITH A STILL LIFE : FINAL VERSION
I finally moved on to cherry tomatoes. What was interesting was that I actually had to remove a lot of the light to control the hot spots on the tomatoes, so off went the flash. In the end, a collection of tomatoes wasn't much more than a few tomatoes, but at least they are colorful. The coins and the paperclips both seemed to gain interest when rendered in black and white. The extra detail and contrast seemed to more than make up for the lack of color.
GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT : FINAL VERSION
I hope that my experiments might encourage you to allow yourselves to engage in something way out of your comfort zone, whether in photography or some other endeavor. Don't start with skydiving.
CHERRY TOMATO BABY! : FINAL VERSION
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SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
ELLIS ISLAND PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to throw caution to the wind and insist that the real reason that you should try to learn post-processing software is not to improve your images and to communicate your artistic intent to viewers, but to have fun. I simply get a kick out of trying new things, not out of an effort to be weird, but to use these computer manipulations to get out of my comfort zone. The goal is to get a "better" image, but the fun is in the process, and the liberation that can come out of experiments beyond my normal "work flow." All of these images were rediscovered on a fruitful search in the archives after I had once again lost one of my most popular images, which I fortunately rescued from the "missing" file.
JOSHUA TREE, DEATH VALLEY : FINAL VERSION
JOSHUA TREE, DEATH VALLEY : ORIGINAL IMAGE
Sometimes the result is just a far better rendition of an image - not saving a photo per se, but attempting to find the potential I saw when I pressed the shutter and somehow missed when I viewed the result. Often this is simply the result of the perfectly ordinary fact that photographs do not directly relate to reality, which is one of the reasons we take them in the first place. The camera sees things differently from you and me, and while that often leads to wonder, it sometimes can disappoint. There is nothing wrong with continuing your artistic pursuits beyond your efforts "in camera."
DEATH VALLEY ROCK FORMATION : ORIGINAL IMAGE
DEATH VALLEY ROCK FORMATION : FINAL IMAGE
These first two images were created on my only visit to Death Valley, which I recommend to everyone - just don't go in the Summer, and please skip Las Vegas, which exemplifies everything wrong with our country if not the entire world. My post processing efforts are not dramatic, but I think they clearly improve these two images which were initially lost in the shuffle. Judicious cropping, increased saturation and contrast,sharpening and you've gone a long way to a better rendition.
STERN WHEEL : ORIGINAL IMAGE
STERN WHEEL : FINAL IMAGE
STERN WHEEL : BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
The next two images show how these efforts can improve the graphical bent that is one of my chief ways of seeing the world in the first place. Even these simple compositions can benefit from efforts that make them even more simpler. The switch to black and white can also be a major move towards abstraction, further removing the images from the morass of documentation. I didn't care "what" I was taking, and these post-processing moves can further highlight my intent. Structural ingenuity, separated by one hundred years, can also be treated as beautiful sculptures devoid of a purpose far beyond their maker's intent. Not that I don't think for a minute that those makers didn't delight in the beauty of what they had made - they just didn't revel in it for fear of it being removed by "value engineering."
SAFECO TRUSS : ORIGINAL
SAFECO TRUSS : THE COLOR IS BETTER, AND DON'T YOU SEE IT'S STRAIGHT? COME ON, MAN!
I HATE THAT SICK GREEN ANYWAY, SO LET'S GO BLACK AND WHITE
Sometimes my efforts can be totally arbitrary, often in my pursuit of a photo coaster which requires a square crop. While certain images can only be compromised, if not ruined, by such treatment, others are strengthened by this stringent simplification.
ART INSTALLATION AT GERDING THEATER : ORIGINAL
CLEARLY, FOUR IS BETTER THAN SIX!
TOOLS FOR TOOLS : ORIGINAL
CLOSER, BUT NOT CLOSE ENOUGH
THAT'S GETTING THERE, AND TEXTURE AND DETAIL REPLACES COLOR
If you have been wondering where all these wild moves I initially talked about went, I would remind you that I am inherently a pretty conservative photographer. My liberation might be your straight jacket. But in discussing this final image, I hope I can show how I can loosen up a little.
ELLIS ISLAND SNAP : ORIGINAL
This image was taken several years ago on a trip to the Statue of Liberty. As we sailed past I tried to capture an overall view of Ellis Island, the beginning of many of our families' American journeys. It's not a bad snap, but the first things I did were to straighten my wonky horizon and crop out some meaningless sky and water to achieve the real wider angle the building deserved. The usual sharpening, a little saturation -especially of the overall brick and the remaining fall foliage - and we have arrived at what would ordinarily be my "final version."
ELLIS ISLAND PANORAMA : "FINAL VERSION"
ELLIS ISLAND POSTCARD
Then I just decided to have some fun, and use some filters that I had previously avoided. The color image was first subjected to what the software world calls a LUT - a "Look Up Table", which are color filters that come out of Hollywood, used by cinematographers to achieve their overall "look" for a film. This look can become their career signature or at least the color cast for that movie. Think of "Chinatown", or "The French Connection", or even "The Lord of The Rings" - there was something going on in the rendition of color that gave them a certain feel, even if you couldn't put your finger on it. This LUT was labeled "Branaugh" by my software, which was good enough for me. It clearly muted the colors in such a way that I could temporarily forgive him for leaving Emma Thompson. I finally added a "texture" layer in the background, that added enough crunch and wrinkles that the image now can begin to resemble a postcard from the last century. Maybe yes, maybe no, but I certainly haven't "ruined" anything.
ELLIS ISLAND PANORAMA : BLACK AND WHITE
ELLIS ISLAND PANORAMA : SEPIA IN THE SUN
I then switched to black and white. The first effort is the result of my normal procedure in monochrome, and as usual the result focuses on sharper details and allows for more contrast overall and especially in the sky that can be achieved in color. I believe my efforts achieve a stronger image, especially if you don't miss the color. This final attempt lightened up everything, using a "sunshine" filter to brighten up the image a little more subtly than by increasing the exposure - as if the Sun just came out for a minute when I snapped the shot. Add some "glow" and the Sun can begin to really beat down on the lighter tones. Of course use restraint unless you are going for a radioactive representation. Finally a very subtle sepia tone was added to achieve an element of nostalgia, which is really just apparent if you view this rendition side by side with my standard black and white.
A great tip for working with images is not only to learn when to stop, but to go back the next day or a week later. It will instantly become apparent where your have gone too far, and then you can dial back your "radical" moves. Goldilocks learned an important lesson which can become your motto when working with images.
Non of this stuff is earth shattering, but I did have fun, and I encourage you to also move past your comfort zone, maybe even beyond my conservative parameters. When people ask me if I have had fun taking any photographs lately, I often tell them how much fun I have discovering the hidden value in images that I captured many years ago.
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SEPTEMBER 16, 2022
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to show you the images I captured on two hikes in the Columbia Gorge ten years ago. The commentary will be short and sweet, since my organizational talents have left me completely bereft of any real idea of where exactly these two walks took place. I know I should be upset, but what is the point? These images function as reminders of how blessed we are to live in such a beautiful place; they can stand in for generic Oregon Beauty Shots without too many more specifics. The real point I am trying to make is that this first image is the only one I have ever actually printed from those walks ten years ago. The value of Lightroom and my archives, disorganized as they are, is that I can take another look at images that would be lost otherwise, and find some that clearly deserve the light of day. It is that ability to go back in time, and post-process images from ten years ago with better software, and more importantly, better skill at using the software, that makes these forays so delightful. Yes, I'd "rather be out shooting", but what is wrong with going on a hike that you barely remember going on?
If I racked my brain I probably could remember exactly where these images were taken, but I think the images can stand by themselves without GPS coordinates. So let's take a look at some as photographs without worrying about their exact subjects.
OREGON TRAIL : FINAL VERSION
Fran and I are not world-class hikers, and my photographic efforts, and my incredibly slow pace, serve to slow down and shorten our trips into the woods. This image above illustrates the beauty and civilized nature of our typical hike - a nice, safe trail, so that the hike is about the surroundings, not the effort and danger involved in the trip.
TWO "SMALL" MOUNTAINS, TWO DIFFERENT DAYS : FINAL VERSION
Which is not to say that the surroundings can tend to be spectacular. Some readers might even recognize these two mountains, which are no big deal in the context of volcanoes like Mt. Hood, but which served as the focus of the two hikes. Getting anywhere near the top is not on my list of things to do, but I can still admire their stature, even without remembering their names. I can take comfort in the knowledge that whatever the settlers called them, their native names were probably more evocative and had a several thousand year head start.
INTIMATE NORTHWEST LANDSCAPE : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes a very quiet spot on the trail can mean more than the hike's apparent goal. This intimate landscape reveals the wide variety of tones present in what can seem an overwhelmingly green environment. I also frequently delight in the fact that I can walk in such settings without worrying about the violent nature of how they were probably formed hundreds if not thousands of years ago.
ONE BRIDGE, TWO WAYS : FINAL IMAGES
Often as a retired architect I can really appreciate the efforts that went into the creation of these trails that allow for my casual walks in the woods. Most of these trails were probably the result of "make work" projects by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) during the Depression, and you don't have to be a socialist to wish for such energy today. These two views of this bridge, miles from civilization, show how their efforts both enhance and make it possible for ordinary people to appreciate this beautiful environment.
FRAMING THE WATERFALL : FINAL VERSION
HORSETAIL FERN : FINAL VERSION
Of course it can help if you really slow down to enjoy the small wonders which can often be overlooked on the way to the overview. These two images highlight such moments.
TWO WATERFALLS : FINAL VERSIONS
Then there are the waterfalls which are the usual "goals" of these trails. You can't beat a waterfall, although I sometimes wonder why mankind is so mesmerized by these water features as a proof of gravity. The Native Americans and hunters that forged these trails out of animal byways surely weren't in for the views, were they, so why do waterfalls provide our excuse for these walks in the woods? But you cannot deny their power, especially when you consider that the water formed the immediate environment. Aren't you glad you were not around the day those rocks arrived at this beauty spot?
WEEPING WALL, TWO VERSIONS
The gorge environment is generally so wet that you don't even have to name the waterfall. These two images show what happens when the very walls of the canyon seem to be weeping. The black and white version allows for more subtle manipulation of tones to bring out the wispy water down the cliff, but both versions are enhanced by very subtle "dodging and burning" of light and dark areas to bring out the contrast an make the image really pop. Sometimes these efforts can seem so subtle as to be a waste of time, until you throw the "switch" and see how much of a difference your work can make in bringing out what you saw in the first place.
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT : ORIGINAL
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT : FINAL VERSION
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT : FINAL B&W VERSION
Finally, let's get back to the one image I thought I had gotten out of these two hikes ten years ago. On the way to the waterfall it is easy to overlook the stream that will make it all possible. On this day those trail builders had fashioned a bridge right over the river, allowing me to focus on the beautiful leading line that it provided in the forest. The square coaster crop eliminated some of the foreground, bringing you closer to the action. This final image also shows how sharpening, enhancing contrast to bring out the rapids, and some subtle saturation of those gorgeous greens can make an image pop. It's a matter of taste, but the details and range of tones in the the black and white version show that you don't really have to rely on the green at all.
Obviously, you have to appreciate the process in photography, since you can hope for only one "keeper" out of one hundred shots you might take on a hike, or in a month. While this is generally true, and nothing to be ashamed of, I hope you can see that you can find more than one image from a trip that is worthy of your efforts. You just have to be willing to take the walk again.
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SEPTEMBER 9, 2022
ONE CLOUD OVER BAMBURGH BEACH : FINAL VERSION
I would like to take the opportunity this week to take you on a photographic journey through a small portion of Northumberland, an English county on the edge of Scotland. This area serves as the model for "The North" in the "Game of Thrones", which Benjamin introduced to me as "The War of the Roses, with dragons." Benjamin, Fran, and I had the incredibly good fortune to visit there in the winter of 2008, which I cannot believe is now almost 14 years ago. We were traveling to Scotland on the wrong side of the road, and needed a base of operations on the way for a few days. I chose the coastal village of Bamburgh when I discovered it in Powell's while looking at a book on great English seaside villages. I hope these following images will reveal why I suddenly knew we had to stop at this small place on the map.
ONE PERSON ON BAMBURGH BEACH : FINAL B&W VERSION
Bamburgh entered my thoughts this week for a number of reasons. One was all the renewed talk of dragons and such with the advent of the new series. Another was the completely depressing news from the UK, which seemed to mirror the mood of England and the world during our visit in the Winter of 2008-2009. In case you think that we are the only english speaking country that can so mess up it's own politics, I would recommend that you pay some attention to London. We were on holiday that winter in the midst of the economic crash, and most Brits we met seemed to think that we might be the last Yanks they would see for some time. The drumbeat of bad news got so bad that the mayor of London, Boris Johnson (!) went on the "tele" and said that while things were bad, Britain had obviously gotten through more trying times in the past, and everything would be alright. The next day the Archbishop of Canterbury responded by calling him a "cockeyed optimist." The third item that jolted my memories was an article in the New York Times that highlighted the Holy Island of Lindisfarne that is a short drive from Bamburgh and that we also got to visit on this trip.
BAMBURGH DUNES : FINAL VERSION
Bamburgh is a small prosperous village of 400 or so souls on the Northeast coast of England, one of several in this area north of Newcastle. It really doesn't feel like a tourist mecca, especially in December. It resembles an exclusive town on the Oregon Coast like Gearhart, which only caters to people who can afford a beach house. But of course it is 1500 years old, and those uncouth tourists included real Vikings from time to time. December travel in England is certainly unusual unless you are visiting Grandma, so we had the Bed and Breakfast to ourselves, and got to sample the three pubs which were within walking distance for our entertainment and dinner after sunset at about 3:00 P.M. each night.
BAMBURGH SEASCAPE : FINAL B&W VERSION
These first few images are seascapes which could be really anywhere with an ocean view, though the beach was certainly very nice and fit into Fran's love of the "Winter Beach Experience" very well. I've done my usual bought of post-processing to make them my own, converted some to black and white, and I think they can stand in for a nice coastal image of a non-tropical beach. But then you turn your back to the North Sea, and realize why you came here, and that this is certainly not the Oregon Coast.
BAMBURGH CASTLE PANORAMA : FINAL B&W VERSION
Bamburgh Castle is right on the beach above the dunes. Built in stages and occupied at least since 500 A.D. it was saved and refurbished by a wealthy Victorian aristocrat into a private home (!) in the early 20th Century. The castle served as the seat of the Kings of Northumbria, a northern kingdom that controlled the area way before the English did. Henry VIII seized the castle and the monastery when he "dissolved" the monateries in 1500. It is one of a series of castles on this coast that protected the North from the current marauders, who changed over the years from the Vikings to the Scots. They were placed so that fires could signal of trouble for the next castle down the coast - think of the pyres of Middle Earth.
DUNSTANBURGH, THE NEXT CASTLE TO THE SOUTH : FINAL VERSION
My castle shot isn't bad, but of course it pales compared to those of photographers who live nearby and can come before dawn. What is funny and only occurred to me later is that these include most of the best photographer authors of "how to" books on my bookshelf. I swear it must be the water, but they all could gather in the local pub, and I am no longer surprised to turn the page of yet another book and once again find another spectacular shot of Bamburgh Castle.
BAMBURGH CASTLE FROM "DOWNTOWN" : FINAL VERSION
A "FRIENDLY" AT A UNIQUE PITCH : FINAL VERSION
LOCAL PHONE BOX - IS IT STILL THERE? : FINAL VERSION
The castle dominates the beach as well as the central part of "downtown" Bamburgh, serving as an understated backdrop that only an Englishman could learn to just get used to. The local football pitch literally fronts the castle, so this might be the only place where you can score a goal in such an environment. Our B&B and those pubs and this phone box were a few blocks away.
TWO LOCAL HOUSES - NO NEED FOR NUMBERS : FINAL VERSION
Part of the charm, and tribulations, of touring through such a small place in pre-Google days was that map reading was required, and English addresses were sometimes "quaint." These two examples were actually pretty user-friendly, since most addresses and street names were set into unlit stonework so that our usual post sunset arrivals were always an adventure.
HOLY ISLAND, LOW TIDE : FINAL VERSION
Five miles up the road from Bamburgh is another incredible spot, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, Northumberland's answer to France's Mont Saint-Michel. This monastery/castle stands on a very small island off the coast which is reachable by foot only at low tide. Several hundred people and a lot of sheep live on the island, and day-trippers have a penchant for, shall we say, pushing their luck. My photo of the warning signs still don't seem to work, and I wonder what you tell the agency when they find dead fish in your rental. Last week's Times article showed a recent innovation - seemingly random-spaced emergency stairs to decks above the twice daily waterline so that you don't have to wait on the roof of your car to get rescued.
DARWIN'S WORD TO THE WISE : FINAL VERSION
When you successfully arrive on the island you can view the low-lying landscape that will soon be underwater, and the local architecture that even include storage sheds that might be overturned fishing boats. Just be sure to check the tide tables - when we were there there were no overnight accommodations.
HOLY ISLAND CANALS : FINAL VERSION
STORAGE SHEDS AS OVERTURNED BOATS, WITH MY SHADOWY COMPANIONS
PARTNERS IN CRIME : FINAL VERSION
I hope you have enjoyed this short trip to the Northeast Coast of England. And I hope that it might inspire you to include an "obscure" spot on your next road trip, for not every great spot can command the world's attention.
]]>SEPTEMBER 2, 2022
OREGON : FINAL VERSION
My troubles with my photographic archives have not caught the attentions of the FBI, but that doesn't relieve the headaches that can ensue during a simple search for an image that I have somehow lost. The fear is that the image is gone, but it's usually just hiding on my computer somewhere, out of sight of Lightroom. The analogy that software engineers use when discussing programs like Lightroom or iTunes, for that matter, are that these database compilations are like the library catalogs where you search for a book that is somewhere on the shelves. Bear with me if you have never seen a library catalog, or searched among the shelves. Let's just say that my photos are not in Lightroom, but hopefully in one photo file on my computer, or more accurately, on one of three auxiliary hard drives that are plugged into the computer. One of Fran's favorite curse words is "dongle", the annoying series of wires that connect these drives to my computer. The trouble is that Lightroom sometimes doesn't remember where the file is, since yours truly has messed up something once again. The converse is that the original file, if you find it, is not enough, since you are really interested in the post-processing you did in Lightroom, which is contained in my Lightroom catalog. Continuing with the library analogy, my organizational skills often lead to a situation where the librarian has lost both the dog-eared card in the library catalog, or has not put the book back on the right shelf, or maybe both.
LOST, AND NOW REDISCOVERED MT. BACHELOR : FINAL B&W VERSION
The result is that I literally have a continually updated list titled "The Missing", which lists the images that I currently have misplaced. The "Missing" are not some random forgettable images, but are often photos that have actually proven themselves in the marketplace. Frustration abounds. Recently I have tried to respond to the current economic conditions by re-emphasizing the position of coasters as central to my marketing efforts, such as they are. Customers are back, but they seem worried. I have returned to the idea that each coaster can trigger a sale, especially as a solo item, so that variety is again more important than concentrating on my best sellers. That single coaster, with an image that appeals to a tiny minority, can turn a complement into an actual transaction. Of course this only works if you can find the bloody image in the first place.
REDISCOVERED TEACHERS FOUNTAIN : FINAL VERSION
My recent forays into the archives have been actually more successful than usual. This past week I did find these two out of seven on my current list. What I would like to tell you about this week are about the half a dozen images that I discovered hiding in-not-so-plain sight during my search. These kinds of discoveries can find some hidden "gems" which I have never even realized that were there.
Sometimes my initial exposure decisions were so out of whack that I passed over an image that had some potential. This Oregon stream, don't ask me where it is, was lost in the forest murk until I raised the exposure a full stop in Lightroom. This is the kind of corrections that are possible if you shoot in RAW, which doesn't touch your original file, but allows you to retroactively rescue an image from yourself.
OREGON STREAM, BEFORE AND AFTER
This next image shows the value of emphasizing the image's original strengths while eliminating superfluous issues. Here the crop tool works to play to the wide angle view I like at the coast, and subtle exposure fiddling emphasizes the incredible light conditions that prompted my interest in the first place.
COAST SUNSET : ORIGINAL
COAST SUNSET, REFINED : FINAL VERSION
Occasionally I discover an image that I wonder why I ignored in the first place. In our search for "the winner" we sometimes overlook an image that deserves some attention. This reflection in a neighboring building is the kind of thing that caused me to put aside my polarizing filter, a landscape photographer's constant companion, once I started to concentrate on architecture and cityscapes. Reflections are just too much fun to try to eliminate - they are often what creates a unique view in the city. I just tweaked the image a little to brighten it up; the black and white version further emphasized the distorted details in the reflection.
REFLECTIONS ON ARCHITECTURE : ORIGINAL, REFINED, AND BLACK AND WHITE
This image of a water tower in Portland required a lot more processing to show it's potential. The vast differences in exposure required multiple graduated filters to both balance the exposure and then tweak it further to bring out the contrast. As usual, black and white allowed for more aggressive manipulation, especially in the sky. The sky had been so boring initially that I had felt that I only could improve the photo by croopin it out.
THREE WATER TOWERS : POLISHING A GEM?
The wreck of the Peter Iredale on the Northern Oregon Coast is a on every landscape photographer's bucket list. As is often the case, the image becomes so ubiquitous as to render your version somewhat superfluous. Here I set out to convert one of my efforts into a striking coaster, cropping to a square, and manipulating the exposure to render the wreck as a silhouette. Finally the black and white conversion makes the image even more graphic, and my Peter Iredale is certainly different, if not better than yours.
MY PETER IREDALE : WORTHY OF YOUR ATTENTION?
And finally we come to an overlooked image that might serve as a postage stamp or in a dictionary to illustrate the term "Oregon." I cropped to my usual square and used multiple graduated filters and some subtle dodging and burning to bring out all the variations of tone on one Oregon hillside.
AN OREGON HILLSIDE : ORIGINAL
OREGON : FINAL VERSION
I hope you've enjoyed this trip through the archives, and I encourage you to try a journey through your own so that you might also find some fine image amongst the murk. Otherwise that gem might be hidden in the warehouse next to the "Ark of the Covenant" at the end of Indiana Jones.
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AUGUST 26, 2022
KIND OF BLUE : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to discuss a topic that is a big part of my work, which is abstraction in photography. To some observers, this topic is pretty senseless, since photography is in many ways the most concrete of the arts. Photographers don't start out with a blank page, but with the real world, which they then endeavor to organize, frame, and simplify in order to present their view to the rest of the world. So we seem to some extent to be stuck with the real world, although Photoshop has changed that to a certain degree.
ORIGAMI : FINAL VERSION
But of course a photograph is a two-dimensional abstraction of the real three-dimensional world in front of the camera. Photographers inately understand this, even if the viewing public often searches for the "truth" which is not really there. Some photographers compose their images to try to use every strategy they can to make their images more three-dimensional, through contrast, layering, or emphasis on foreground, middle ground and background in a single epic view. Others embrace the differences between a photograph and real life; Gary Winogrand famously declared that he took photographs to see what he pointed his camera at would look like in a photograph. And the extra level of abstraction that is a large part of the charm of black and white photography is often lost on the public, even those who admire that abstract art.
TURQUOISE : FINAL VERSION
So there is no doubt in my mind that while photographs are abstract art, there are various levels of abstraction, ranging from the seemingly documentary image to the images that are so divorced from a subject that they are mostly about themselves. I find playing with these levels of abstraction a lot of fun, even though I know that the more abstract an image, the less chance I have of actually making a sale. People generally do not like to be challenged or confused by an image, and their desire to find out "what is that" directly undercuts the artist's belief that it really shouldn't matter. Most of the time viewers who have been drawn to an abstract image are very disappointed when they find out what it really "is" - almost as if the magician has been conning them rather than delighting them. So it is okay if many of these images leave you a little cold - I will understand, even if I never stop trying to provoke a positive reaction.
I think that there are probably about five "levels of abstraction" available to the photographer; some overlap, and you could argue that I am often confusing the issue. I present these three views of one subject to try to illustrate these levels before I explore my five levels one by one.
GREEN SCREEN : FINAL VERSION
LAYERS : FINAL VERSION
THE GATES OF MORDOR : FINAL VERSION
These three images are all renditions of an heroic sun screen on the western facade of a federal government office building in downtown Portland. Like a lot of my images, they don't really appeal to tourists, but are more oriented to Portlanders who will recognize the subject even if they would never look at it that way. The first image is actually the most realistic in terms of color, even though it is inherently abstract since this is only a small portion of a 15-story facade. While the second image appears to reveal more of the structure, I still don't know where those green and blue background colors came from, since I do not think they really "are there." The third image is so abstract that it appears to be a black and white rendition until you notice the dark blue in the windows. I've exposed so much for the bright aluminum fins that everything else has faded to black, and I think my title conveys mysterious power that the image conveys, at least to its creator. I hope you can see the different levels of abstraction, even if all of the images are certainly abstract.
The first level of abstraction might not be abstraction at all, but I think it is the introduction of the subject at hand. "Minimalism" is a type of photographic image that deliberately simplifies to the point of abstraction. There is a lot of "negative space", which is a fancy way of saying emptiness, and while the viewer might know what they are looking at, they often might not know why in the hell they should care. There is a lot of overlap between minimal and downright boredom, often hidden behind the emperor's new clothes. Here are a few examples of minimalism you might either hate or love; try to remember that there are entire photography magazines devoted to this genre. Most minimalists might argue that these images are far too complicated!
DAMN NEAR CLOSE TO PERFECT : FINAL VERSION
BAMBURGH BEACH : FINAL VERSION
BIKE RACK : FINAL VERSION
BRITISH MUSEUM : FINAL VERSION
LIGHT, SHADOW, AND STUCCO : FINAL VERSION
THREE LINES AND A CROW : FINAL VERSION
If you can control your laughter, realize that the "single cloud" image is sometimes a photographer's best seller, even though mine leaves me cold. Some portfolios are stuffed with obscure scenes that are mostly collections of lines, shadows, or colors without a clear subject to even caption. And of course the last shot is my response to Portlandia's "put a bird on it."
An interesting inversion of minimalism are images devoted to deliberate obfuscation, either through photographic technique or just a weird subject. This is difficult to pull off, since we are supposed to be engaging in visual communication.
SURREAL STAIR : FINAL VERSION
REFLECTIONS ON WILMINGTON : FINAL B&W VERSION
ARCH ABSTRACT : FINAL VERSION
The first image is actually a pretty "straight" rendition of a facade on the Portland State campus. The only weirdness that I added was my white balance shift which rendered everything blue. The strangely drunk architecture is due to placing two glass facades opposite each other, and then allowing the glass windows to be just a hair too large. The strange reflections are available to anyone who walks by. The second image is a trip to a perfectly ordinary coffee shop in St. Louis, where I happened to be beguiled by multiple reflections of reflections that transformed the scene into a multiple exposure without making a multiple exposure. The last image is of a reflection that I spied at the Gateway Arch, and I can honestly say that I have no memory of actually capturing it, or how I managed to create it in camera, or what it is in the hard reality of the architectural context.
A wild sub-category of the abstract pursuit is what happen when you take photographs of abstract art itself. The art is already abstract, but now the photographer is tasked with making their own interpretation, which will inevitably lead to another additional level of abstraction.
VETERANS' MEMORIAL : FINAL VERSION
WILMINGTON COUP MEMORIAL : FINAL B&W VERSION
TANNERS CREEK #2 : FINAL VERSION
REFLECTIONS ON THE PICKET FENCE IN AMERICA : FINAL VERSION
GATEWAY ARCH : FINAL VERSION
I feel that my abstract images of abstract art contribute an additional level of abstraction, my own, to what is already an artistic intent to render an idea in an abstract manner. The first image is of a sculpture of hundreds of dog tags that memorialize service and sacrifice at a memorial to North Carolina's veterans. The second image is of an abstract sculpture that serves as a memorial to the only documented coup d'etat that ever occurred in the United States, when the white citizens of Wilmington, N.C. overthrew the legally elected mixed race municipal government. Next comes a portion of an abstract sculpture of railroad rails that reminds visitors that Portland's Pearl District was a giant rail yard before it became a sexy place to live and eat and shop. The picket fence is an abstract sculptural comment on the American ideal of the picket fence. My choice of exposure makes the mirrored sculpture even more abstract by removing the context beyond the fence to black - now the only reality is the field in front of the fence. And finally I have attempted to make an abstract image of the Gateway Arch, an abstract symbol of Western expansion that is a very real sixty-stories tall.
Photographers can also render very real subjects into abstracts by emphasizing patterns that "could" go on forever, even though we know they do not.
THE RED CHAIRS : FINAL VERSION
COILS OF STEEL FINAL VERSION
GERONIMO! : FINAL VERSION
FRACTAL POND : FINAL VERSION
Images like these are almost an attempt to create an abstract image out of the real world without distorting reality but by framing it in an abstract manner. They are all about patterns, rather than the actual subjects, without obscuring their ordinary subjects. These four abstract images started out as a portion of a beach condo facade, a stack of rattan cafe chairs, the underside of a parachute display at an Airborne Museum, and an ordinary collection of leaves in a pond. If you don't recognize the patterns, you might wonder why I created the images at all.
Now we can explore subjects that are more or less divorced from their contexts, so that while the viewer knows what they are looking at, it is an unusually detailed portion of the subject at hand. We are on they way to the point where the subject of the photograph is the photograph.
GARDEN POND : FINAL VERSION
This color study is all about the ripples and the mysterious colors, which are actually reflections of the fall foliage overlooking the pond.
NEW MUSEUM : FINAL VERSION
A detail of the facade at the New Museum in NYC that is such a close-up view that only adds mystery to an already opaque facade.
GLASS CEILING : FINAL VERSION
Incredible detailing of the glass roof of the shelter at Director Park in Downtown Portland, taken from above instead of below. My exposure also eliminated the busy context of the mediocre architectural surroundings of the park.
AFTER THE RAIN : FINAL VERSION
One of my most popular images; people love the rain drops, love the tree shadows, but are usually somehow disappointed when they find out that I found this image on a TriMet bus shelter.
M.C. ESCHER MEETS THE KOIN TOWER
A SLIVER OF THE SPACE NEEDLE, WHICH SOWS CONFUSION IN MOST PEOPLE
DRAGONFLY TENT : IT'S JUST MY IMAGINATION
DROVE MY CHEVY TO THE LEVEE... : FINAL VERSION
And finally we arrive at images that are so abstract as to leave the actual subjects way behind. These are the ones that can provoke reactions way out of what this photographer might expect in my booth. I usually just ask why my customers like the image, having learned through experience that they don't really want to know what it is, even though they demand that I reveal the subject. I will follow my usual practice and will not reveal what the hell it is. I hope you have enjoyed this trip down the rabbit hole.
DOODLE #1 : FINAL VERSION
KIND OF BLUE : FINAL VERSION
ORIGAMI : FINAL VERSION
TURQUOISE : FINAL VERSION
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AUGUST 19, 2022
NATURE'S CONTRASTING COLORS - ORANGE LILIES: FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to exhibit and discuss the strategies behind another batch of images that I have rescued from my archives. They all show the beauty available in the gardens of Southeast Portland. These range from neighborhood front yards to the incredible Portland Rhododendron Garden near Reed College. One of the delights I have in doing this blog is that it gives me the opportunity to tell a story with images that really have no chance of ever making an impact on my sales at the Market. While all of my work is "personal", there are some images that do not have any commercial potential at all, despite their artistic value - either because I have a "better" shot, or that the apparent subject does not scream at the viewer. Of course this is all in my humble opinion, and should be taken with a grain of Kosher salt.
JUST ABOUT TO POP (MONOCOTS, POSSIBLY HOSTA) : FINAL VERSION
I will repeat my main rules for garden imagery:
1. Get closer - think like an insect, not like a human casually viewing a plant from six feet away. Do not be afraid of not including the entire plant, or even the entire blossom. With my zoom lens I have discovered that I can fool the "minimum distance" limitations of the lens by first focusing on the wide end, then zooming in to take the image I really wanted; sometimes it helps to turn off auto focus after the initial long-range focus so the lens will not try to refocus and tell you that you are too close. My lens actually allows you to tweak auto focus manually, which makes this far easier.
PURPLE DELICACY (PACIFIC RHODODENDRON) : FINAL VERSION
2. Search for calm backgrounds. Flowers are like supermodels - you do not want the background to compete with the subject. While you should be using a wide aperture on your lens to soften the background, it pays even more to adjust your framing if at all possible to achieve as "clean" a background as possible.
SHOW OFF (LILY OF THE INCAS) : FINAL VERSION
3. You are not making a documentary photo - they have all been taken. Use exposure controls to place as much emphasis on your subject as possible. Subtly lighten and saturate the subject, while de-saturating and darkening the background. Think of it as giving nature a helping hand, since flowers are almost always lighter and more colorful than their surroundings, so that the pollinators can easily find them.
BLUE AND WHITE (BELLFLOWERS): FINAL VERSION
STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL (SENSITIVE PLANT - I'M NOT KIDDING): FINAL VERSION
4. Try for the shade. While it might be fun to be out and about on a sunny day, your camera cannot handle drastic differences in light and shadow as well as your eyes, especially on a blossom. It just gets confusing, and like most portraits of people, flowers look better in a quiet light. You can literally achieve this often by just shielding the flower with your own body. Overcast skies work better than direct sunlight for garden imagery, which gives Portland photographers a built-in advantage. The exception to this rule (there's always an exception) is if you can use back lighting, with the Sun hidden behind the foliage and shining through to highlight the colors and structure.
WHITE WITH A TOUCH OF YELLOW (KAREN TRIPLETT RHODODENDRON) : FINAL VERSION
VIOLATING MY OWN RULES : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes I violate my own rules. This image lacks a clear focus and is on the edge of shear confusion. Yet I delight in the complexity of a real bush, and I like the banded water background even more. This type of garden imagery is very difficult to pull off, and maybe it doesn't really work, but I like it anyway.
If you think of your garden photos as color studies, you are more than halfway there. You are reacting to the beauty of the subject, not the subject itself. While it might be an exaggeration to say that the subject doesn't matter at all, think in graphic terms - it just happens to be a flower. My photos try to be about color, or texture, or shape. Even when I'm just overwhelmed by the structure of a blossom, I hope that the photo is about natural structure rather than about that flower. When you convert to black and white, you are further emphasizing the power of contrast and detail - and again separating the subject from its environment. While it might seem perverse to render a flower in black and white when the subject is "all about" color, I am frequently surprised at how effective a black and white version can render the beauty of a garden scene.
COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS OF A TREE USE COLOR AND CONTRAST TO EMERGE IN THE WOODLAND
It is not about the gear. Your iPhone can beat an advanced "real camera" at this type of imagery hands down, at least until you spend $2000 on a camera and another $1000 or so on a macro lens. Just try to make sure that the phone is focusing on the flower, and that it is exposing for the flower. Once you post-process the image any viewer would be lying if they thought they could pick out the iPhone photo, at least until you tried to blow it up to fill a wall.
RHODODENDRON GARDEN DETAILS : FINAL VERSIONS
I find that concentration on small parts of a grand garden can inspire the idea that you could try for a similar vignette in your own garden, although that might be just wishful thinking.
ENTRY BRIDGE AT RHODODENDRON GARDEN ; FINAL VERSION
Then again, somethings just can't be duplicated at home - that's one of the reasons these places can be world famous, beyond the plantings.
GARDEN UMBRELLA COLOR STUDY : IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT THE FLOWERS
I hope these images can inspire you to try your hand at some personal floral imagery. Remember that you are not the gardener - you do not have to know what type of flower you are admiring in order to express your admiration in an image. Google is more than happy to tell you what you just shot, and supply the documentary image you are trying to surmount. And weeding is not required for garden appreciation.
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AUGUST 12, 2022
AALTO MAGIC : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss the problems and opportunities that face a photographer confronted by a place, either natural or man-made, that is both beautiful and somewhat resistant to communicate its charms. While I always encourage photographers to "work the subject", what about the idea that there is one obvious "money shot" - and that any other images cannot compete, are just variations on that shot, or way too narrow in scope. I believe that the answer to these concerns is for us to return to the idea of the photo essay, wherein we try to tell the whole story, or at least a large part of it, by including images that can support one another. Obviously it helps if you have an outlet for these stories, since the "money shot" will be the only one to sell, maybe, in a gallery. Since LIFE magazine seems to have lost my contact information, this blog will have to do.
AALTO MAGIC : FINAL B&W VERSION
The subject of this week's essay is Alvar Aalto's library at the Mount Angel Abbey in the Willamette Valley, about two hours south of Portland on mostly rural roads. The monastery is essentially a small college campus on a bluff overlooking the valley, complete with a beautiful quadrangle comprising all of the requirements of a Benedictine religious community with spiritual links to Medieval Europe - a very nice church, dorms for the monks, a dining hall, an office space for the community, and paths to walk and think in the surrounding woods. The monastery was started in the rural Oregon by Swiss monks in 1882. The seminary continues religious instruction, and laymen can come to participate in religious retreats with the monks. The Benedictines even carry on Medieval traditions by running one of the few monastery breweries in the nation in nearby St. Paul. While no t-shirts are for sale at the gift shop, I did once have to "shush" my young son Benjamin when he asked who this Jesus character was who seemed be prevalent among the items for sale.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE : FINAL VERSION
The real reason for visiting this complex, for those in the know, is to see a building whose beauty is as totally unexpected as it is quietly unassuming. Every campus needs a library, and the monks get to use one of the most beautiful libraries in America. While the library does take advantage of a beautiful site, its quality has nothing to do with its size, the art it contains, or its collection of books. Unlike the great central libraries of large cities or well-endowed universities, this library's size and external appearance most closely resembles a quiet neighborhood branch library. The major difference is that one of the greatest architects of the Twentieth Century designed it.
From the exterior the library is so low-key that you could be excused if you just passed it by on your walk around the quad. It is a mute one-story structure whose quality construction and materials do not overcome an architectural reserve that fairly shouts "background" building - "nothing going on here, just move along." An image of the exterior facade would only prompt a response of "huh?"
ENTRY TRELLIS : FINAL VERSION
This is actually pretty characteristic of all of Aalto's work. His buildings might be handsome, but they are not pretty, and his concerns do not center on making a splash on the exterior, but getting to the fun stuff inside. It might even be said that his work is almost unphotogenic. It is certainly clear upon investigation that exterior elevations are nearly unnecessary - that all of the drama is in the floor plan, the cutaway sections, which form the interior spaces. The incredible detailing is more sensuous than obsessive, although its intensity will only make most architects wonder how charismatic he must have been to command such loyalty from his clients and their budgets. Aalto was one of the giants of architecture who seemed to be "modern" but stylistically apart from the holy trinity of Wright, Mies, and Le Corbusier. He most closely resembles Louis Kahn, another "architect's architect", whose work only revealed its power upon close inspection rather than through photography. As a photographer it can be somewhat hard to admit when you come to realize that a photograph cannot do a particular subject justice.
LOW KEY LOBBY : FINAL VERSION
The monks actually wrote a letter to Finland in the early 1960's to inquire if Aalto might be interested in their library project. Almost all of his work was in Scandinavia, and he had only completed one project in the United States, a student dormitory at MIT in Boston. Since Aalto had designed several libraries and community centers in Finland, maybe the monks figured that he had another one in his back pocket. I Imagine it was analogous to when some advertising agency calls a classic rock band seeking permission to use what was once a counter-cultural anthem to sell insurance. "Well, hell yes, where do we sign?"
PULL UP A STOOL : FINAL VERSION
Aalto sent over a variation of his "typical" radial fan-shaped library design. At Mount Angel, his characteristic plan expanded in three dimensions. The one-story building is revealed after entry as one cascading three-story space, flowing down the hill that surrounds the quad. The space is organized as a series of terraces, reading desk overlooks, and bands of skylights that configure the space without dividing it. The rows of book stacks radiate out and down three levels, and almost everything is theoretically in view from the circulation desk, without CCTV cameras.
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC : FINAL VERSION
Once you get over the initial shock and awe, you begin to inspect the structure in detail, and discover to your delight that you are inside a "gesatkunstwerk", German for a project that has been completely handed over to the design team, down to almost every detail. For most architects this chance to influence nearly every aspect of a project is an impossible egotistical dream that would be such a shock as to almost certainly quickly lead to design paralysis.
SKYLIGHT AND WOOD CEILING OVER CIRCULATION DESK : FINAL VERSION
The library was dedicated in 1970 with a performance by jazz great Duke Ellington. Aalto, or at least his firm, designed almost everything at Mount Angel, from soup to nuts. The attention to detail, and the idiosyncratic details themselves, reveal a Scandinavian sensibility brought virtually intact to Oregon. It goes way beyond the famous furniture designs that you can still buy for your home today, like the three Aalto stools we own, just as beautiful and utilitarian as they were when Fran and I received them as wedding presents 38 years ago. But rest assured that the library contains the most extensive collection of Aalto furniture in the United States.
Every detail is thought out and customized, such as the unique light fixtures on the continuous desks at the perimeter of each floor level. Utilitarian metal bookshelves have beautiful wood slat end caps that mirror the custom wooden ceilings over the circulation desk. Windows overlooking the valley are used to ennoble individual study spaces, while the overall windows on each floor are bands of transom windows that resemble the skylights at each break in the ceiling above. A private perimeter office is surrounded by such a beautiful obscure glass partition that you almost can't resist breaking in to see inside. You can almost forgive the madness of seven different types of skylights in the initial foyer alone.
BOOKSHELF END CAPS : FINAL VERSION
QUIETLY ENJOY THE VIEW : FINAL VERSION
PRIVATE PERIMETER OFFICE : FINAL VERSION
My favorite professor in architecture school once punctured my attempt to analyze an Aalto building by humorously pointing out the inherent difficulty of such an exercise. He revealed the secret of Aalto's "design method" by drawing a cartoon of a lightening bolt. Mere mortals could only appreciate his work, without truly understanding how it was done. Please take a trip to Mount Angel and be thrilled by the show; the monks in their robes only add to the magic of the architecture.
THE DRAMA EXTENDS TO THE "BASEMENT" LEVEL : FINAL VERSION
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AUGUST 5, 2022
FLORAL PORTRAIT OF PERUVIAN LILYARTIC WITH PORTLAND'S LIQUID SUNSHINE : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to try to try and convince you that all you need to do to find something interesting to photograph is to go take a walk in the neighborhood. It's about that easy - all you need to do is open your eyes. Even Manhattan or Yosemite can become old hat if you are not willing to pay attention to your surroundings, but taking the time to look can deliver interesting images on a simple walk to the store.
ARTICHOKE THISTLES GRABBING THE SUN : FINAL VERSION
Most of my customers think that the nicest compliment they can make to me is to extol my "eye". I am not discounting my skills at composition, which led me to be an architect, nor all of the design training that can translate from the drawing board to the camera. But the biggest skill I possess as an artist is the ability to slow down enough to actually notice the world around me. I see things most people miss merely because I stop to smell the visual roses. After that my "eye" comes into play because I am willing to see things without caring to merely documenting my subject, but by expressing my wonder by interpreting it in my own way.
BEEBLOSSOM FLORAL DELICACY : FINAL VERSION
BEEBLOSSOMCANAN FLORAL DELICACY : B&W ALLOWS FOR EVEN MORE CONTRAST
These images were found and created on about three walks this past month as I "hiked" to the grocery store on Hawthorne Blvd. Thirty years ago our real estate agent apologized that our prospective house was eight blocks from Hawthorne - I replied that if I couldn't manage eight blocks that I would just stay in bed. All of these images were found on those eight blocks. I frequently get quizzical looks from passing pedestrians wondering what the hell I am possibly finding to photograph. And sometimes even I wonder what there is still to discover on that short walk, but inevitably I come across some little pocket of beauty I hadn't noticed before.
BUNGALOW CANADA LILY : FINAL VERSION
None of these images are earth shattering, but maybe that is the point. One of the reasons that I enjoy writing these essays is that it gives me the opportunity to create images that are totally divorced from any effort to sell them. The images that I exhibit at the market are all my "personal work", in the sense that I was creating them for my own amusement long before I imagined selling them. But I am not so divorced from reality as to understand what might appeal a little more to potential customers - my lack of skill as a businessman serves as a curb to any aspiration to "sell out." These images from my walks only need to appeal to me, and to possibly provide proof of my theories of what you can find out there on your own walks.
SEED PODS, COLOR AND B&W : FRUIT - IT'S NOT ONLY ABOUT THE FLOWERS
In a funny way my floral portraits are not commercial in that they are just too damn easy. A well exposed photo of a beautiful flower starts to lose its meaning after the first few hundred images. I could sell an unlimited amount of these images, but what is the point? Take photos of what you love, a wise man once said, and I love a pretty flower as much as the next guy, but not enough to actually care that much to make these images a large part of my work. I am not willing to obsess about flower imagery, which requires extensive lighting, carting along portable backgrounds, and heaven forbid, actually buying some flowers at a florist. So I take my casual "floral portraits", as I call these images, to emphasize the idea that it is my feelings about these blossoms that count, because it is hard to "document" something that you don't have a clue about. The only reason I can pretend to know the names of any of these flowers is because I recently discovered that Google images could reasonably tell me what the heck that particular flower actually was, way after the fact. I hope you can see that my portraits have very little to do with the documentary images that appear on Google.
FLORAL PANORAMA (BROOMRAPE) : FINAL VERSION
All of these images could have been taken on my iPhone. In fact, the only way you can make flower images much better than the output of your phone is by spending another thousand dollars for a macro lens for your "real camera" - the iPhone is that good at capturing nearby small objects in good light, which is kind of the definition of garden photography. My only advice is to get close, try to take photos in the shade, and expose for the flower, with the idea that the background can go dark. Just like a supermodel, you are trying your utmost to achieve separation of your subject from the background.
SUMMER LILAC (BUTTERFLY BUSH) : FINAL VERSION
All of this can be emphasized with your post-processing skills. Judicious saturation and brightening of just the flower, coupled with the opposite for the background, can give you the figurative spotlight that the star demands. Any way that you can heighten the contrast between your subject and its surroundings can help, but try to keep it subtle enough that your viewers won't notice your manipulation. Introducing vignetting, a subtle darkening of the exposure around the edges of the frame, can also contribute to separation. This is pretty funny since some portion of that thousand dollars you paid for your fancy lens was to correct for that same naturally occurring darkening of the edges of an image that plague cheaper optics. And you can always try for a black and white conversion, which can show your skill in pulling off an engaging image of something that seemingly was all about color.
A POX UPON YOUR PHLOX : FINAL VERSION
BANANA LEAF, ON THE PATH TO ABSTRACTION : FINAL VERSION
Since I am an architect, I also tend to notice the details that I find on the older houses in my neighborhood. Architectural details are always there for those that look, and can give you a measure of faith in human ingenuity despite the constant cheapening of our environment. These small bits of craftsmanship show the value of "vintage" construction, when people actually seemed to care about what they were doing while they made a living.
METAL SMITH TRYING TO COMPLEMENT, AND OUT DUE MASON : FINAL VERSION
SPOTLIGHT ON SHADOW ON STUCCO : FINAL VERSION
RECENT STREET MURAL : WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM!
I hope my short walk might inspire one of your own. Bring a camera, and remember my admonition that when someone comments "why the hell are your taking that photograph?" it means that you are more than halfway to achieving a personal "eye" of your own.
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JULY 29, 2022
JUST ANOTHER DAY ON THE BIG ISLAND : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to return to the Big Island of Hawaii, which Fran and I last visited in February 2019, so we could spend time with our good friends Vinny and Steve. We enjoyed the hospitality of our friend Miriam who had left for Hawaii to live with her partner Greg, where they lives in a jungle subdivision near Hilo. Sitting in my study today, with the temperature hitting 100 degrees, it is a relief to visit pre-Covid paradise through the magic of post-processing some of the images from that trip.
SURF AND LAVA : FINAL VERSION
These images were culled from hundreds I took in these two weeks on the Big Island. We first stayed in Miriam's condo on the dry side in Kona, which she rents out and uses as an escape from the rain in Hilo. To say that this place is luxurious is to belabor the obvious, but in fact it is not considered ne plus ultra. This despite the fact that groundskeepers literally spruce up the grounds outside your bedroom before breakfast every day, carefully removing any vegetation that has ceased to behave. Just beyond the grounds are lava-filled deserts featuring unruly palms and distant views of the volcanoes in the center of the island. The place is so isolated from reality that I found only one mailbox in the entire complex when I had the wild idea of mailing a postcard.
CONDO VIEW, BEYOND THE GROUNDS : FINAL VERSION
They are not kidding about the dry side. Kona's landscape is basically composed of the ocean and lava. We soon realized that the civilization that existed had also been been built on lava flows. This results in beaches that we were not used to, with very little sand, and lots of lava right behind you and sprinkling the water a few yards from the beach. The redeeming qualities were the pristine waters which are required for snorkeling, and the fact that the beach is usually a good ten degrees cooler than the grounds of the condo ten minutes away. The best beaches literally feature a palm tree for each blanket group, as long as you get to the beach before noon.
LAVA-CALMED LAGOON : FINAL VERSION
These beaches are also interesting since most are not just straight lines, but are little bays, so that there is something on the other side of the water, headlands which separate the "wonderful" beach which you have chosen from the one from the hoi-polloi next door, or even better, from the exclusive private beach one the adjacent resort grounds that won't let in the likes of you. Sometimes the lava flows are so extensive just off the beach that they protect a lagoon that has pretty much no relationship to the pounding ocean just beyond the rocks.
ANCIENT FISH PONDS : FINAL VERSION
There are also some environments that you only discover on a trip to the islands, such as the ancient royal fish ponds adjacent to the ocean. These are placid centuries-old lagoons that cleverly allow ocean fish to enter, but not escape, to live out their lives before they provide dinner. Now they are parkland, with mile-long trails and islands on the grounds, shaded by palms. There are also some places that reveal a small glimpse of pre-resort desert, as long as you know where to look.
JUST OFF THE RESORT PATH : FINAL VERSION
And there is always another beach. I would search for slightly different viewpoints, since I knew that only residents could probably achieve the perfect combination of clouds, surf and palms that my two weeks would probably not conjure up.
GAIN SOME ALTITUDE : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes all you need is a different perspective. we are eating lunch at a cafe on a ridge hundreds of feet above the beach. Those "weeds" below are fully-grown palm trees.
LAVA JUST OFF THE BEACH : FINAL VERSION
LAVA BEACH : FINAL VERSION
LOOK BUT DON'T GET TOO CLOSE : FINAL VERSION
The trick with Hawaiian photography for visitors is to adjust to the environment rather quickly. It was hard for me to realize that my usual vertical framing would just not work on the beach - that in fact even horizontal views usually benefited greatly from wide angle cropping. As an urban photographer usually interested in reflections, I'm not experienced with my polarizing filter, which is about as necessary on the islands as the analogous sunglasses you probably should be wearing to cut down on the glare.
As usual I compensated by concentrating on the details, ranging from my "intimate landscapes" to near abstractions. These allowed me to focus on the beauty available in this alien environment.
TROPICAL COLORS : FINAL VERSION
PALM LEAF DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
JUST OUTSIDE THE BEDROOM : FINAL VERSION
I hope you have enjoyed this return trip to the Big Island. I will leave you with a final image, one that I think that proves that a subject can transcend its documentary restraints. A palm leaf is not always just a palm leaf - it can stand in for a mathematical formula.
PALM LEAF CRESCENT : FINAL VERSION
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JULY 22, 2022
STUB STEWART STATE PARK : OVERALL PANORAMIC VIEW
We went for another walk in the woods last week. I'd like to show you about half a dozen images from that trip, with the emphasis again on concentrating on the details that can make an environment sing. Woodland photography has two main "rules." You must use your compositional skills to find some order in one of the most complicated environments that exist - to make sense and find landing points amid the visual chaos. Your other mission is to resist including any sky in your images, since the sky's brightness will distract the viewer from the forest environment that you are endeavoring to portray. If you can find a subject to focus on, and eliminate distractions in both your frame and exposure, you are well on your way to developing some expressive woodland imagery. It's also great if you can find some fog, which can reduce the visual overload, but I have never been as successful at that as the landscape photographers that I follow on the web. Oregon's environment does usually provide overcast skies, which ensure that the woods do not become a confused tapestry of contrast - sunlight can ruin your photography in an otherwise dark environment.
THE VARIED SHADES OF GREEN UNDER OVERCAST SKIES : FINAL VERSION
These first two overall images of the park, visible from the visitor's center, show the miracle of L.L. Stub Stewart State Park. The park was created through a series of land swaps with surrounding private and public timberland. The 1800 acres of the park stand in the midst of ordinary Oregon timberland off Highway 26 to the Oregon Coast. If you look beyond the park boundaries you will find the outlines of the generational cutting of Oregon forests, which denude hillsides for at least 20-25 years before they are presentable, even at long range. This state park was opened fifteen years ago and was the first state park to be created in Oregon since 1972. It is 34 miles from Portland, and is large enough to accommodate widely different user groups - hikers, horseback riders, off-road bikers, disc golf enthusiasts, campers - who can enjoy themselves without ruining anyone else's fun. After our first tip to the park, I feel a lot better about my state income taxes than I have in years.
ON THE EDGE OF THE FOREST : FINAL VERSION
The hiking trails we tried out went through very varied environments in addition to typical Oregon woodland. This first image shows the edge of the forest, daisies right outside seemingly impenetrable darkness.
DAISY MEADOW : FINAL VERSION
DAISY MEADOW : FINAL B&W VERSION
These "daisy prairies" exhibit character both in color and black and white. They seem to rise up immediately anytime the tree cover opens up, either through man-made interventions like picnic areas or in natural areas near recently fallen large trees. The color rendition highlights the subtle color variations in the underlying grasses, while the black and white plays of the contrast between the flowers and the grasses.
DAISIES READY FOR THEIR CLOSE-UP : NATURE DOCUMENTARY AND HOLLYWOOD NOIR VERSIONS
These daisy close-ups show the interpretative power of black and white - this exposure would not work at all in color, but allows an isolation of the flowers from their background while losing the yellow flower centers.
AMIDST THE FERNS : FINAL VERSION
As you move into the forest, Oregon ferns begin to take over. These yellow leaves were the only distraction in an ordinary field of ferns that could supply multiple garden centers.
BIRCHES IN THE FOREST : COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
The woodland we walked through on some of the trails was unusual for Oregon in that Birch trees seemed to rule the roost instead of the usual Douglas Firs. While they might not be the stark white of a stereotypical Birch, they did provide a lot of contrast with the green of the surrounding forest. This contrast works in both the color and black and white renditions, providing the focus for the image that will show the viewer where to look. It helps that the Birch trees are the lightest parts of the image.
BACKLIT THICKET : FINAL VERSION
These are probably Willows, but the Birches also exhibited multiple trunks as their usual configuration. This image shows how the thicket can both highlight and screen the lighter background.
BIRCHES AND BRANCHES : FINAL VERSION
BIRCHES AND BRANCHES : HIGH KEY B&W VERSION
This final image proves again how a black and white conversion can allow for widely different interpretations of a scene. I was struck at how the two birch trunks stood out from the surrounding greenery. In the color version I discretely darkened the forest, especially the small areas of sky peaking through the foliage. You would be surprised at how these very small areas could still distract the eyes, and how a subtle darkening will not alter the overall scene. In contrast, forgive the pun, the black and white version allows me to lighten the forest for an ethereal feel. I could both lighten the green information that is still contained in the black and white file, and then use graduated filters to further lighten the forest behind the trees. These strategies would be clearly garish in a color rendition.
I hope you have enjoyed another short walk in the woods. And I hope that you see that you can create woodland imagery without having to travel hundreds of miles to a National Park, not that there is anything wrong with that. Good hunting.
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A couple of weeks ago I resumed my exercise regimin, such as it is, by walking across another of Portland's bridges over the Willamette. The Broadway Bridge was built in 1913 during Portland's bridge boom, when the city fathers were consolidating the takeover of East Portland by replacing the ferries with bridges and more importantly, carrying the streetcar lines across the river which would allow for real development of the Eastside of the larger city. Portland had grown in 1898 in exactly the same way as New York City, by annexing the city across the river. The ramifications were certainly not as great, since Brooklyn had been the fourth largest city in the nation when it became part of Gotham.
The Broadway Bridge was named for the street it carried over the river, which had been named after New York's Broadway in the 1850's when East Portland was first platted out on farmland east of the river. What is interesting is that 7th Avenue in Downtown Portland on the West side was renamed Broadway because it connected to the new bridge, and subsequently became a smaller copy of New York's Broadway with theaters, nightlife, and a lighting scheme that can charitably be described as gaudy. This renaming was only as confusing as the 90 degree shift of the street from East-West to North-South when it crossed the Willamette.
Walking across the bridge is a pleasant excursion, marred only by the relatively bare moonscape of the road just east of the river, caused by the lack of street life near the Rose Garden parking lots. Yes, the Rose Garden now has a different corporate name, but we must fight the power. The only bright spot on this portion of the street is this sculptural, if somewhat non-functional transit shelter at the Streetcar stop near the East end of the bridge. The 1% for Art shelter was designed by Jorge Pardo and built in 2013.
NOT JUST ANOTHER TRANSIT SHELTER : FINAL AND B&W VERSION
The bridge, now 119 years old, is an historic structure known as a Rall-type Bascule bridge, whose lift span of 278 feet is the longest of its type in the world. For the non-engineers out there, it basically means that the counterweights pivot and slide rather than go up and down, so the Broadway Bridge doesn't have towers like the Hawthorne and the Steel Bridge, and the lift span doesn't stand out from the other four portions of the bridge, which extend 1742 feet across the river. The lift span confounds commuters about once a day. Parts for the bridge have to be custom-made, since the mechanism is so unique.
The bridge was painted black, just like the Steel Bridge, until 1961, when the powers that be decided that each of Portland's bridges should be painted a different color. "Golden Gate Red", also known as "International Orange", was chosen for the Broadway, and it is similar if not identical to its more famous cousin in San Francisco. We recently painted our house a similar red/orange, which is one of the hardest in the family to find in the paint swatch book. In fact, most oranges are not recommended for exterior paint due to excessive fading, but the "City that Works" knows best. The bridge has certainly faded a little since it was last repainted a dozen years ago, but everyone loves the color even if they can't quite define it.
These truss bridges were certainly Benjamin's favorites when he was a youngster, because of their complicated and seemingly inexplicable steel geometries, with girders and connections galore. He christined them "Dinosaur Bridges" after his childhood obsession, maybe because they were as ungainly as they were obviously antiquated.
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JULY 8, 2022
MT. TALBERT NATURE PARK : FINAL VERSION
The other day Fran and I and our friend Kathryn took a walk in the woods. I hesitate to call it a hike, since it was only three miles long, and my pace these days, especially with my camera, constitutes a stroll at best. On the other hand, though it was rated as "easy", it was clearly "moderate", though any route that is labeled the "Summit Trail" should have foreshadowed something a little harder than "easy." Fortunately the hardest part of the trail was right at the start, so at least it did get easier as we stretched our legs. And the summit was only 600 feet higher than the the parking lot.
MT. TALBERT NATURE PARK : B&W VERSION
The nicest thing about this walk, besides the company, was the implausibility of the setting. Mount Talbert Nature Park is almost a prototypical Oregon woodland, but it's survival in suburban Clackamas County outside of Portland, just off one of our horrible highways, I-205, was very surprising, at least to yours truly. I instantly decided that this natural area, set aside by our Metro taxes, was probably about the only thing that anyone should care about in this particular suburban setting. Happy Valley is a neighborhood that offers nothing to the greater Portland Metropolitan area - a creation of the home builders' industrial complex that builds horribly designed McMansions over anything they can get their hands on. It is one of those areas where they can plant subdivisions without any further thoughts about their connection to the region, much less the city. Happy Valley, in my humble opinion, is one of those places whose very existence is problematic at best. While of course I'm sure there are very nice people in Happy Valley, they choose to live there mostly because they believe Southeast Portland is an urban hell-hole. You might understand our mutual disdain as I write this essay in my 110-year-old bungalow, secure in the knowledge that the urban/suburban split might even be more important than Oregon's incredible urban/rural conflicts. What is even more ironic is that the preserves that our Metro taxes create are mostly supported by the more urban areas, where parks are harder to come by. So this section of woods was an unexpected delight. While you this hill seems pretty remote, it is the largest undeveloped butte in the area, an ancient subsidiary volcano of Mt. Hood. It is only what we call a very young Old Growth Forest. These woods were clear-cut about 100 years ago, and they would be cut again if they weren't preserved. Too many of the rolling hills of Happy Valley's subdivisions resembled this area long after my family showed up in Oregon in 1992.
FERN FOREST : PRIMEVAL OREGON, COLOR AND B&W
I think that these images, culled from about two dozen photos that I took over a couple of hours, can illustrate the value of taking your camera along on a walk. I had very low expectations when we set out, but found that this woodland offered some very nice prototypical "Oregon" images that closely resembled those found much deeper in the woods, hundreds of miles away from my house. These first two images show key components of our woods - evergreen trees ranging in size from large to gigantic, above groves of ferns that were around in the age of the dinosaurs. Once you realize that the color photos are largely monochromatic shades of green, you can try black and white versions that tend to show more details. The important tip that I might suggest is to avoid any significant areas of sky in your image, since the brightness of the sky will distract your viewers away from your subject, the forest. Remember that a desire to show the entire scene can detract from the important parts of the scene that led you to push the shutter button.
THE FOREST FLOOR : COLOR AND B&W
Here I've gotten even closer to those ferns, with only a hint of the big trees. Natural groves of ferns like this can be truly overwhelming, far surpassing any display at the garden center, and all without any intervention by mankind, thank you very much. The choice of color or black and white is very much one of personal taste, though close inspection will see that the black and white versions can allow for more manipulation of the scene than we can accept in color.
WOODLAND FLOWER, "RED CLOVER" ACCORDING TO GOOGLE : FINAL VERSION
Occasionally only color will do, because the primary reason for the image itself is color. This blossom deep in the woods shows off its colors to attract pollinators, not photographers, it attracts us just the same. If I had gone even further in for a macro shot, then there would be enough floral structure to justify a black and white version, but at this size the color really helps. This already is only a very small part of the actual original shot, so you can see what even a fifteen-old camera can accomplish. Of course the Iphone in my pocket would have done even a better job on a flower, while it can't hold a candle to a larger scene. Post processing increased the seperation between the flower and the background by selectively sharpening the flower, and blurring and de-saturating the background.
LACY BUSH - ALYSSUM, ACCORDING TO GOOGLE : FINAL VERSION
We came along this showy shrub which we had not encountered before, with very white and lacy flower fronds that stood out in the woods without any need for color. This really benefits from the black and white conversion, which allows for a very dramatic rendition that would not pass the smell test in a color photograph.
THE BURNING BUSH : FINAL B&W VERSION
The bush is now clearly ready for its close-up, and the forest can be reduced to a very dark bit player. The structure of the lacy fronds is more clearly delineated even while they positively glow under my artificial, but realistic spotlight. The black and white version more clearly shows what I felt about the bush in its environment - I can leave the documentation to Dr. Google.
I hope you've enjoyed this short walk in the woods. Nature can enrich our lives even if it is not as dramatic as a National Park - especially if we encounter beauty in such an unexpected place.
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OPEN TO INTERPRETATION
JULY 1, 2022
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : COLOR
This week I would like to discuss the power a photographer possesses when it comes to using modern post-processing in adjusting images. I believe it can in fact be much more important (and fun) than the initial capture of the image. This after-the-fact manipulation is based on the photographer's compositional skills, but it allows for a more personal interpretation of what might be a standard shot. It is certainly not "cheating", although everyone has certain limits concerning what they are willing to do to an image. My art is open to your interpretation - but it is my art, and the viewer should avoid declaring that my rendition of a scene is not the "truth". These nine different interpretations of this scene on the Willamette differ, and one might appeal to you more than the others, but none of them, in my humble opinion, is "wrong." Their is no real difference in interpreting an image in the traditional darkroom or in Lightroom, the clever name for the computer software that I use. Photographers have always used various techniques to interpret an image to their current satisfaction, which might change upon further viewing. Sometimes we will get even bolder, but often we dial it back a little after taking another look. I have already "dialed back" two of these images while I was preparing this essay this morning.
The "original" image above not straight out of camera - it has already undergone some basic corrections. It has been cropped to emphasize the subject, which has been adjusted to fit the square format required for its future as a photo coaster. The river bank has been straightened out for a level horizon, but i was far enough away so that Big Pink is not leaning enough to need to be corrected. The image has been sharpened to my standard levels, which will not make up for any camera shake, but is required by a digital photograph's initial softness. Subtle adjustments to contrast and saturation has also been made, because the "digital negative" of the RAW settings that I use allows for more manipulation later by delivering a very flat, uninterpreted file. Another falsehood that many photographer's continue to believe is that their JPEG files "straight out of the camera" are a straight interpretation of reality, while they are in fact the camera's computer rendering of a smaller file. The JPEG is already an interpretation, just one that is done frankly by a simpler computer than your laptop, over which you have no control, and will be degraded every time you subsequently adjust it. Programs like lightroom never touch the original file - your editing is non-destructive, and what you see on your screen is just a compilation of the "instructions" that lightroom will do if you export the image to the web or print it so that will re-enter the analogue world.
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : HIGH KEY COLOR
Now the fun begins. These three other color versions are I believe, realistic interpretations that I could make of the scene. The first is what photographers call "high key." It is not over-exposed, but the exposure is twice as bright as the original. it's just adjusted so that the brightest tones are in fact brought down, while the darkest tones are "crushed" to eliminate almost all of the true blacks in the image. The contrast is also lowered to reduce the difference between the lightest and darkest tones in the image. Unlike an HDR image, which tries to make everything visible, the high-key image will not eliminate all of the shadows, and might still contain some very small areas of dark tones that will ensure a degree of realism. So the result is a "brighter" version of Portland, which might be aspirational while still close to reality. Big Pink has in fact been darkened to ensure it doesn't fade into the brighter sky.
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : LOW KEY #1 (TOO MUCH) AND #2 (JUST RIGHT)
Now we turn to what is termed a "low-key" interpretation. The first version is darker, and upon instant reflection I dialed it back. The second low-key version is more subtle. The real difference from the original image is now the tones in the river, which are a little darker and richer.
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : THE SUN WILL COME OUT TOMORROW
There are other ways to affect a color image. One can manipulate the white balance to a degree without outraging the viewer. Most people seem to like warmer tones, and photographers have been baking this into their images for a long time. Subtle under-exposure when using film by rating it at a lower ISO then on the box was common; now a lot of people just tell their camera that it's shady when it's just a bright Summer day to accomplish the same thing in camera. Shooting in Raw allows you to subtly do the same thing in the computer with more control by just tweaking the white balance a little towards the warmer part of the spectrum, avoiding the color casts that can occur when "colorblind" males like myself directly adjust color hues directly. The result is just a sunnier, warmer day than most Portlanders expect, but not unbelievable.
It is hard to achieve bolder color interpretations without straining viewer credibility; I never subscribed to the HDR craze which resulted in what can only be described as surreal color imagery. While our eyes can see much more of the dynamic range of the world than our cameras can, it just seems weird to open up the shadows so much in a photograph. Our brains can see more detail in the highlights and the shadows because we are not really looking at them at the same time. But when our brains allow for abstraction by removing colors in a monochromatic image, we all seem to widen what is an acceptable interpretation.
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : STANDARD BLACK AND WHITE
This is the standard black and white interpretation Lightroom will make when it converts my original color interpretation into black and white. It is not just a de-saturated color photograph, but is in itself an algorithmic interpretation by assigning subtle values tones to different colors found in the original color version. De-saturation alone will yield a dull, lifeless image because the different colors we see might be rendered as very similar tones in grayscale. In other words, the original color information is not discarded, and we can easily overrule even this computer version by adjusting the grayscale tones of different colors. Special software tools even "know" the original colors so you can adjust tones in your black and white without looking back or remembering the original color photograph. This computer interpretation is a pretty good black and white interpretation, but there are an almost infinite range of other renditions which can transform the image into something very different.
You can access these varied interpretations in many different ways. The easiest, and again by no means "cheating", is by using presets which are supplied by the software. In this way one click will lead to a different interpretation which the human in control will have to decide is appropriate for the image under consideration. You don't like, go on to the next one, until one strikes your fancy. But the best part about presets, once you get over their amusing names which rival the names of paint colors, is that the same sliders that you move in the software move when the preset is clicked - and then you can still move any of them make the preset just the start, not the end of your black and white journey. Another way is to make the "standard" black and white interpretation, but use the different color interpretations you have already made as the different starting points. I, true to curmudgeonly form, just started out with the standard black and white and made my different versions by manipulating the first black and white interpretation.
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : HIGH KEY BLACK AND WHITE
Here is the "high-key" black and white. While if you look at the mid-tones you can see that the overall exposure hasn't changed much, The shadows have been opened up considerably, and there is very little pure black anymore. It's a sunny day in Portland!
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : DRAMA
Or we can go for more low-key without muddying the waters, forgive the pun, by avoiding lowering the overall exposure but just manipulating certain colors. Viewers accepted early black and white photos even though there was almost no detail in the sky since early films were not very sensitive to blue - our brains accepted white skies in the black and white world until advancements in film technology allowed us to see the clouds up there. Since photographers could now manipulate the sky, we soon learned that in our quest for contrast - the "color" in black and white - allowed us to render the sky in very dark tones. We know that the sky isn't really black, but isn't this arresting? Lowering the exposure of just the original blue tones in the sky and its reflection in the river makes for a much more dramatic mood.
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : KIND OF BLUE
Monochromatic images don't have to just black and white. Sometimes it can be delightful to inject a little monochromatic color to subtly affect the tones of the photo for a slightly different mood. I resisted the sepia tones most familiar to viewers from early black and white photos because it didn't seem to fit this view of modern Portland. But this blue tone seemed just right for our overcast city. A Selenium tone is another historic way that photographers used additional chemicals to prolong the shelf life of their prints. The software adds a blue tone, mostly to the highlights, while the darker tones remain mostly black. Even though no chemicals have been used here, I could add their blue tone, and then dial back the saturation to achieve even more subtlety than the computer's version.
BIG PINK AND THE WILLAMETTE : SPLIT TONE
Soon photographers started asking themselves that if they could add a color cast to their black and whites, why just one? Contrast could be subtly heightened by adding contrasting color tones to the highlights and shadows. Instantly dubbed "split tones", these black and whites achieved more than straight luminosity contrast by injecting subtle color tones in their shades of gray. This was not colorizing - these colors were still abstract tones - but photographers were soon tanning up the highlights while blueing up the shadows. As usual in post-processing, subtlety is the key, with success achieved through intriguing the edge of view consciousness without hitting them over the head. Somehow the black and white is richer; and if our brains allow for a white, or a black sky, why not a tan one?
I hope you've enjoyed these different interpretations of a February day on the Willamette. None of them strike me as too weird, but I'd love to hear which ones struck your fancy. Don't feel bad if any were just not your cup of tea. And I would really love it if this essay allowed you to think "out of the box" when it comes to reinterpreting your images. Your creativity can extend way past hitting the shutter button.
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JUNE 24, 2022
MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE : EXTERIOR DETAIL
I would like to continue my discussion of the power of travel photography to provoke memories, especially if you allow yourself to personalize your vision by looking at and responding to the things that provoke you. So many of the places we visit have been so documented by both good and bad photography that it's sometimes hard to see how your image will be any different than anyone else's take on the subject. But I believe that this challenge can lead to some important and personal images. And even if they are not that "loaded" to anyone else, you will remember how you felt at that place.
I approached our trip to Germany in 2006 with some trepidation, but we had promised Benjamin a European trip before he went off to college, so our German language student mapped out our route through Germany. We ended up having a great time, and the beauty of the country, my love of it's wine, and my ability to map out a weekly rotation of the narrow confines of German cuisine overcame my anticipated depression in confronting the overwhelming layers of German history. It turned out that we visited at just about the best time, since the Germans were in an unusually good mood during the World Cup, and the country was finally beginning to see the fruits of reunification. I might have been a little naive, but people seemed generally friendly, and I concluded that most felt like the United States was still the big brother who had delivered them from the evil of their own creation, not once but twice.
MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE - INTERIOR VIEW
It was fun watching Benjamin leading the way with his language skill, although his incredibly good accent would quickly lead to village idiot status when the natives would instantly conclude that he wasn't an American, but just an ignorant German with a small vocabulary. While Fran was certain that I was an idiot when I decided that I could communicate in English as long as I affected a German accent, the truth was that many Germans seemed fully fluent in English, with a German accent. We also soon realized that unlike in the rest of Europe, and even in England, we could pass as Germans, since we looked like them, especially when we held hands, which is our habit and seems to be theirs, while walking through the city.
Which is not to say that I overcame all of my personal triggers. Sometimes the small towns and villages were just a little too neat. Street names and map reading was okay, but I still seemed to quake when confronted by a full newspaper in German. I still couldn't abide with German Shepherds, no matter how handsome they were. The fact that it was 2006, and Germany seemed to be a very young country, helped me get comfortable with most people under 75 years of age. But now we were heading to Berlin, which in my nightmares is always pronounced in a very forbidding accent.
THE REICHSTAG : FINAL VERSION
Berlin turned out to be just fine, a city still finding itself 60 years after the War, and less than 20 years after the Wall was torn down. We stayed in the former East, in a neighborhood named Prenzlauer Berg, which seemed to be incredibly authentic since it hadn't been destroyed by Allied bombers and had been mostly abandoned by the East Germans since it was too close to the Wall. While we were at first a little disturbed by the graffiti, whose presence was over the top even for New Yorkers, we soon realized that gentrification and change were happening so fast that it would probably be gone in another six months. It was very interesting to be in a city of two million people with only a few skyscrapers in the new developments at Potsdamer Platz. How did so many people live in a city of only ten story buildings? It was only when we realized how big the blocks were, with most apartment houses containing a large park as a courtyard, that it all started to add up.
These images are mostly my reactions to the overwhelming layers of history in the city, and the German relationship with their own history, which seemed more introspective and nuanced than most Americans. Sometimes these were outright memorials, but often we would just stumble on something that would stop us in our tracks. A little park where we had some ice cream turned out to be the place where most of Jewish Berlin was assembled to depart to the East. I visited an exclusive camera store, and found one of the few swastikas in Germany on a vintage Leica similar to the one my father owned - it was the SS edition. What was interesting was that the Germans were ensuring that they would not forget their terrible history by keeping it around in prominent locations, no matter how disturbing the juxtapositions.
The first two images are of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe right in the center of Berlin, near Parliament, the Brandenburg Gate, and across the street from one of the most exclusive hotels in the city. These are color images, but you can see how these granite blocks seem to suck all of the color and sound and views of the Capitol city. The field of obvious granite caskets from the outside swallows up visitors who venture inside, since the ground falls away, and you are soon alone with your own thoughts, only conscious of the terrible grid and searching for the city you were just a part of.
REMNANT OF THE WALL : FINAL VERSION
The Wall is mostly gone, but it always reappears when you least expect it , even as just a line in the pavement. The idea of a city as a prison can seem almost beyond politics, but it's hard not to be proud of the Allies at Checkpoint Charlie, preserved as a museum of the Cold War division of the city.
ALLIED FLAGS, MINUS THE SOVIETS, AT CHECKPOINT CHARLIE : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes it wasn't so grim. One of the most jarring things to this New Yorker was a subway without turnstiles - this is an above ground station. The idea that people could just buy passes and be free to come and go as they pleased (and pay a hefty fine if they were caught with out a pass) was as foreign to me as the language.
"WHERE ARE THE TURNSTILES?" : FINAL B&W VERSION
WINDOWS AS GASHES AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM : FINAL VERSION
BACK GATE, JEWISH MUSEUM : FINAL VERSION
The Jewish Museum was one of the most interesting, and troubling, and frustrating buildings this architect had ever visited. It is an addition to an old Palace, which is now the entrance. The building seems to have been dropped from Outer Space, and it hits the ground with such force that even a simple back gate seems weird as Hell. This sculpture of a building doesn't even have a front door - you enter underground from the old Palace and then head down a one-way stair another five stories to an atrium that you can't see from anywhere else. This route is as disorienting as it sounds.
MAIN STAIR, JEWISH MUSEUM : FINAL VERSION
The only thing that relieves the pain is that the Museum succeeds in showing the entire history of Jewish Germany, not just the Holocaust. The building of course drops hints at the dislocation everywhere, from the windows on the skin which obviously don't seem to function as ordinary window openings, but appear as gashes in a metal skin. Once you are inside you realize that they have absolutely nothing to do with the rooms they appear in, so they don't seem to relieve the architectural tension.
RAILROAD COUPLER SCREAM, JEWISH MUSEUM : FINAL VERSION
When you finally get to the inevitable end, you are confronted with that hidden atrium, only lit from skylights at the top of the cube. The floor is lined with German train couplers, whose resemblance to faces is much more than off-putting. The climax comes when you are allowed (?!) to walk across the atrium, where the metallic sound of death echoing off the concrete will never leave you. Architecture, even that of a concert hall, has never left me with such an overwhelming sonic memory.
As if Berlin wasn't enough, the final image comes from Nuremberg. This city as well preserves it's history, seemingly by design, and almost in spite of itself and of the future. The Holocaust Museum known as the Documentation Center is just for Germans - their are no translations in the entire museum, although it is clear what is being discussed. The museum is also a "local" museum, since it concentrates on the Nazi nightmare in only one place - the spiritual center of the Party, Nuremberg. The museum is only part of Albert Speer's enormous arena - think of Madison Square Garden as a brick ruin - which seems almost too big to tear down. The most chilling part of the exhibit to me was my realization that the plaza where we had just eaten lunch, the exact table, appeared in a photo from 1938 under a large Nazi flag.
NUREMBERG REVIEWING STAND : FINAL VERSION
We took a tram to the reviewing stand, that reviewing stand where Hitler screamed his evil intent to thunderous applause. While the American Army blew up the swastika that crowned the stands, it made it clear to the Germans that this place would not be allowed to disappear, and it hasn't. In fact the brand-spanking new municipal soccer stadium is literally in view across the parade ground. In many ways it's like being in your own private newsreel, and I hope these images have conveyed some of my feelings of historical dislocation that will always be present in Berlin and Germany.
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JUNE 17, 2022
A BRICK CATHEDRAL DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to explore one way you can try to make your travel images much more personal. The natural tendency of most photographers is to concentrate on the top ten "money shots" of a particular location. While in my opinion that is a considerable advance on the selphie in front of a famous view, it is not a very satisfying way to document a trip. So grab the obvious shot, but concentrate on your particular way of seeing the world, which doesn't really change with a new venue. This can also help in overcoming the sensory overload that can accompany a new fantastic location. Restriction is frequently the mother of invention. After all, this is your trip - the standard images are all available on Instagram anyway, and it's really hard to believe that you can challenge a native photographer, who has the advantage of unlimited opportunities to take advantage of the season, the weather, and the light that will most certainly not occur on your once in a lifetime visit. So I would encourage you to make images that are as idiosyncratic as you are.
A VIEW FROM THE WINE VILLAGE : FINAL VERSION
These six images are all of very particular architectural details that caught my eye during a family trip across Germany in 2006. We had promised Benjamin a European journey before college, and like most good Jewish boys (!) he wanted to try out his German which he had taken for three years in high school. My love of German wine also didn't hurt. So we set out for Germany, where Benjamin learnt that most cafe conversations he could overhear and understand were not about philosophy. Fran and I were comfortable once we realized that most Germans seemed to be born after the war, and that the prevalent feeling we could discern was that most Germans attributed their comfortable present to our victory in 1945. America in 2006 still seemed to be the protective democratic big brother that had delivered freedom to the German people through defeat.
So in the spirit of recent books that promise historical insights by exploring a few artworks, or culinary dishes, or particular alcoholic drinks, an architect might try to explore a place through attention to architectural details. We started our trip in the wine country, staying in a room at a winery which had formerly only been a name on one of my favorite bottles of Riesling. Only a visit to a wine-growing area can provide the memories that will seal the deal. This initial image is really just a "typical" view of the village of Bernkastle-Wehlen in the Mosel wine region. The textures of the pavements and the stone houses set you up for strolls through the vineyards, where you can literally kick the slate on the ground that you taste in the bottle. The walk through the vineyard is usually only next to the vineyard, since that steep hill just beyond the town filled with vines is also typical.
J.J'S GATE : FINAL VERSION
J.J'S GATE : FINAL B&W VERSION
We stayed on the estate of S.A. Prum, "Eric the Red" for his thick red hair. He is a cousin of the most famous vintner in the Mosel, J.J. Prum. This detail is from the gate of his mansion in the village. J.J. obviously knows where his fortune comes from, and celebrates it on the imagery of his front gate. The best thing about Riesling is that until fairly recently I could afford most every bottle in the wine store, even J.J.'s, because my tastes were out of the ordinary. Visiting the vineyards reinforced the truth that most of the wine labels probably represented only a very small portion of the hills out of town. As usual, the black and white version heightens the gate details at the loss of the "green" grapes and some separation from the windows beyond.
POLYCHROMY MASONRY : FINAL VERSION
POLYCHROMY MASONRY, HOLD THE COLOR
The Germans had an unusual love of color for a Northern European country. While this Medieval window was certainly not typical, it was far from unique. Frequently the prevalent ornament seemed to be a variety of colors of the materials used for the stone or brick walls, or the roof tiles, rather than sculptural ornament. It occurred to me that Germans held to a belief that you had to build a building anyway, so why not achieve some distinction by just using more crayons in the box. Since these color combinations are sometimes not very subtle, even the black and white version highlights the contrast in the masonry, although those incredible interior colors are lost behind the windows.
LUBECK CATHEDRAL DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes only a color version will do, like on this detail of the cathedral in Lubeck, on the Baltic coast. As part of the Medieval Hanseatic League, a Baltic confederation that predates modern Germany by centuries, Lubeck built most of the city, including its cathedral, not with stone but with very elaborate brickwork. The bricks just go on and on, realizing all of the details, and some new ones, that we are used to seeing realized in stone. Throw in some painted symbols, and you get a very unusual cathedral.
SHIVERS UP YOUR SPINE : FINAL VERSION
The detailing can sometimes even scare you. Just because you don't have sculptured stone gargoyles doesn't mean you can't achieve horror in metal flying off a building. When you don't introduce color in Northern Europe, you can achieve a color photo that might as well be in black and white. In any case, the mood is just as grim.
DOOR HANDLE DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
The German attention to detail can extend into art for art's sake, such as this door handle. When you merely open a door you can explore the history of a rain-drenched town. Hundreds of years of door-opening have burnished those bronze umbrellas to a sheen which shows you where to touch the handle.
ANNO 1622 : FINAL VERSION
This last image illustrates the historical layers present in this country, far older than the modern German nation. Many structures, ranging from houses to cathedrals, will cite the date of construction right on the edifice, celebrating their erection hundreds of years after their birth. It seems to be a natural belief that this structure will never disappear. Notice that this castle was renovated in 1936, before most of the older buildings in German cities, whose urban renewal was due to Bomber Command by night and the Eighth Army Air Force by day.
I hope you have enjoyed this brief journey through German history through six details, and encourage you to pursue your own individual photographic journeys the next time you visit somewhere new.
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JUNE 10, 2022
PORCH SHADOW : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss an attitude that frequently comes up in my booth at Saturday Market. I can summarize the conversation as " you don't use Photoshop on these photographs, so you?" As if post processing is somehow fraudulent, or at least morally suspect. Now I don't advocate replacing skies, or liquifying waists, or taking away twenty years of aging instead of just using old portraits. Every photographer has lines they will not cross, some set up by the New York Times (I wish I had such problems!) but mostly by their own ideas of what they are trying to do with their art. My basic stance is that I am trying to communicate my view of the world, my take on subjects great and small, and that this communication should at least be based on what I saw, or what I feel now. The idea that photography conveys "truth" is just as silly as the one that History is the repository of the "truth" of the past. I went to graduate school in History too many years ago, and the first thing graduate students learn is that History is written by human beings, who have their own points of view, both weaknesses and insights. The study of History is called Historiography, and students learn that more than one viewpoint is necessary to take in the entire breadth of the historical story. This is a good thing, since if History was perfectly "true", there would be no need for future interpretations by those same students. Economic prospects for historians are bad enough as it is.
PORCH SHADOW : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Photographers channel their viewpoints in the same ways as historians. The primary way is their choice of subjects, which like any artist is usually completely up to them, in the sense that they are artists, not employees. Shoot what you love, and if it's flowers you probably aren't also shooting airplanes, although there's nothing wrong with that. Then you have to decide what to include in the frame. Even historians who write histories of the world cannot include everything - they must make choices on what to leave out. Now you have to choose your point of view, stated or otherwise, which hopefully will not distort the facts so much that readers will not accept most of what you say. That is why open-minded historians can respect Marxist historians even though they might think the underlying ideology is bogus. And of course we haven't even gotten to the point of deciding how much the particular historian will care to, or can even achieve, a truly wonderful way of telling a story, which in History is as fundamental as play writing.
PORCH SHADOW : FINAL B&W VERSION
The idea that traditional analog photographers did not affect their original captures in the darkroom is of course sheer ignorance. Even photo journalists or their editors decided which images were fit to print, and would of course choose a striking, well composed image if it was available over the other twenty shots that were rejected. Other photographers were restricted by the difficulties of dealing with technology. Color slide photographers would have to bracket, take multiple exposures of the same subject, because it was almost impossible to affect the slide image after the fact. Kodak was in charge of processing for everyone from my father to the world's most famous photographer when it came to slide film. Before that of course, you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black and white. Monochrome was the rule, not an "interpretation."
PORCH SHADOW : COLORIZED BLACK AND WHITE
But of course the whole point of photographers working their magic in the darkroom was not to save money at the source for most prints, which changed over the years from the mail to the one-hour kiosk at the mall. Photographers would spend countless hours in darkness, become amateur chemists, and devise innumerable ways to affect their images after the original negatives emerged from the film canister. If you have ever seen a master printer's record of what they have decided to do to a negative, which might include dozens of different development times for different parts of the image, then you might forgive me for moving some sliders in Lightroom. The final print is an interpretation of the original negative, which was even more true in the darkroom, where the "technology" consisted of holes cut in paper and wands of paper shapes to mask parts of the negative for longer or shorter exposures of light from the enlarger. Under these circumstances, it was hard enough to duplicate a print that photographers just admitted that this particular print was just their latest interpretation. The conductor interprets the composer's score, and it was only with recording technology that listeners could actually hear those interpretations side by side instead of in their memories of a particular live performance decades ago.
This first image is an example of what I would call a "grab" shot, taken yesterday with my Iphone as I walked out on my front porch. I was enamored with the shadow of one of our Japanese Maples on our newly painted porch columns. The original photo has many problems - it includes too much, is not straight, and it is not symetrical either. A simple shot like this usually is required to become more simpler in post production. The square crop focused on the shadow, straightened the post, and placed it in the center of the square frame. The black and white version allows me to realistically darken the shadow and brighten the column. The "colorized" black and white allows the viewer to see the yellow trim while eliminating the colors in the background. You are entitled to your own favorite, but it's not a stretch to say that it is probably not the original snapshot.
FERRY SKIES : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
FERRY SKIES : FINAL VERSION
FERRY SKIES : FINAL B&W VERSION
The next photo was taken during a windswept ferry ride back from Vancouver Island. The horizon is not straight, a cardinal sin in landscape photography, and is obviously underexposed. But it had potential. The final color version fixes those flaws, and the panoramic crop lets the horizontal orientation breathe by eliminating unnecessary sky and water from the composition. The black and white version increases the drama, and now the sky is back to being the original subject. There are probably dozens of fine black and white interpretations - this is just my final one for today.
This last image is yet another image of Tilikum Crossing, Portland's latest bridge over the Willamette River. Since it's now one of the signature walks in Portland, I take a ramble across from time to time. I am a photographer, and it is almost impossible to not try for yet another view, even if it might only be marginally different from previous attempts. Since I am one of the few photographers in Portland who doesn't have an image of the colored light night-time view of the bridge (my rare attempts at actually timing a photo shoot were on nights in which unaccountably the lights did not go on) hope at least springs eternal.
TILIKUM CROSSING #WHO KNOWS? : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
The original dusk snapshot is crooked, and includes much too much of the light post on the left as well as all the, let's face it, "crap" on the waterline. But the big problem is my white balance, which is too far off for even my liberal tastes to allow - the blue is overwhelming, and while skies are blue, and the river is rumored to be blue, concrete is certainly not, even in blue hour.
TILIKUM CROSSING #WHO KNOWS? : FINAL VERSION
Cropping up and to the right eliminates most the crap. The "real" white balance eliminates the blue but actually hints at a sickly green concrete bridge against a Portland gray sky. When colors are under inspiring I naturally try black and white, which will eliminate any obvious color casts and take care of meaningless and distracting lights on the river. Most important, black and white allows me to realistically darken the sky to get back to the original dusky mood.
TILIKUM CROSSING #WHO KNOWS " FINAL B&W VERSION
The absolute "truth", at least in my humble opinion, is that post processing is more than half the fun, and that both my and your images will only be their best after a little work on the computer. No you can't save a bad photo, but that is not the point. You can improve your photography by taking the time to improve on the original capture. Not doing so is akin to being an athlete who refuses to train for competition. The photographs I am showing you today all improved with a modicum of work, so much so that I think they bear very little resemblance to their original form. Whether or not you like my interpretations, I believe that you have got to at least admit the distance traveled, if not the value of the final destination.
The real magic in post processing is not in misleading the viewer like an illusionist, but in enhancing the viewer's experience through the magic of reinterpretation. And by the way, I do not use Photoshop, only Lightroom and On One software, which I swear you can easily use, if not master. Why don't you try it with some of your best images?
]]>JUNE 3, 2022
BAGDAD #4 : FINAL B&W VERSION
This week I'd like to make another trip into my archives in an effort to encourage you to revisit old photo shoots to see if you missed any gems in your first, or second, or even third go-around through your images. The last time I wrote of this effort, I entitled it "Revisiting Your Archives." But let's get real - this is really a rescue mission. It's not like I'm the only one who fails to see the brilliance of his efforts at first glance - although I would have to admit that my skills, along with my lack of organization both contribute to a supply of images worthy of later attention. After all, we are talking about a man who has a file called "The Missing", which notes images that I can no longer locate. In my efforts to highlight my images on social media, I need a steady supply of new photos which I cannot fulfill with just new photo shoots. Thus my efforts to slowly go through my archives, as disorganized as they might be, to find images I might have missed previously. I'd like to emphasize that these are not "rejects" - in fact some of these images are so good, in my humble opinion, that I now question my editing even more than I used to.
BAGDAD #4 : FINAL VERSION
This first pair is probably at least "Bagdad #4", since the theater is such a compelling subject and is only a fifteen minute stroll from my house. This latest effort was a grab shot with my Iphone while waiting for the traffic light to change. I was struck by the clouds and the sunset behind them. My usual tight crop reduced the image to just sky and sign. I do like the pink in the clouds in the color version, but as usual I like the black and white mood better. because it further reduces the information about the small section of the building in favor of the clouds and sign. The only hints that this is not the original West Side Story are that we know the Bagdad was a porno theater back in 1961, and that there was no such thing as dot com 60 years ago. I also like the window reflection of the marquee in the window, which is more apparent in the color version.
EASTER OREGON MONOLITH : FINAL VERSION
EASTERN OREGON MONOLITH : FINAL B&W VERSION
I somehow missed this image of a random monolith in Eastern Oregon when I put together my latest photo book, "Exploring Oregon" and can't for the life of me wonder why. Of course the black and white version is rich in detail, but I like the subtle colors of the color version better anyway.
CAPE FEAR RIVER : OVERHANGING BRANCHES, COLOR AND B&W
These two studies of overhanging branches on the Cape Fear River come from our recent trip to visit the kids in North Carolina. I don't know why I overlooked it before. While the black and white version as usual contains more detail, I feel the blue of the river achieves more separation and punch in the color version. The panoramic crop helps orient and concentrate the viewer's attention on what I consider important.
SOOKE POTHOLES : COLOR AND B&W
These two versions of a portion of the Sooke Potholes Park on Vancouver Island eluded me on the first edit of these vacation photos. I blame that on the success of a crop of the original image, and mostly on the many different images I took on this hike. Sometimes a lot of images can cause a photographer to fail to see the positive aspects of an individual photo. I think the color version's subtle colors show off the layers of the landscape better than the black and white. Of course if you want to pretend that the lichen on the hillside is snow, the black and white version is the way to go.
ROSS ISLAND BRIDGE PANORAMA WITH SAILBOAT : COLOR AND B&W
This image is from my foray across the Hawthorne Bridge last month. The Ross Island Bridge to the south caught my attention when I realized I could frame its central arch. The sailboat clinched the deal and I waited a minute or so until it found its rightful place in the composition. The green island trees provided a nice color contrast, but the black and white version really shows off the geometric lines of the bridge structure. In the black and white I can darken the sky and lighten the clouds and sails much more than I can get away with in color. I also think the thin shadow of the bridge is better portrayed in black and white. The panoramic crop emphasized the arch and eliminated a lot of superfluous river and sky. For the life of me I cannot understand how this image, one of the few I have ever taken of this bridge, eluded me when I went through this photo walk.
INTENTIONAL CAMERA MOVEMENT #1 : CAROLINA BEACH SUNSET PANORAMA
Finally I will show you one of my first experiments in Intentional Camera Movement, where the photographer deliberately moves the camera during exposure. Not one to think out of the box even when I'm thinking out of the box, it took a lot for me to go against my training and allow myself to move the camera. But I had spent the week looking at the same beautiful stretch of North Carolina beach, and was frankly looking for anything to see something different from the condo balcony. I overlooked this image as a failed experiment until I gave it the panoramic crop that it deserved, and actually decreased the saturation of the sunset reflections, especially that yellow sky. I'm now fairly well pleased with this image, although the algorithm's intent to throw every ICM image across my Instagram feed since I posted this image is not appreciated and a little disconcerting. But I am glad I saved all of these images from the obscurity of my neglected archives.
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MAY 27, 2022
HOOP HOUSE #1 : FINAL VERSION, FOR NOW
This week I would like to describe the process by which I "work a subject" by concentrating on seven different versions of one subject. Working a subject is even more exciting when that subject is completely unexpected, a surprise on a photographic jaunt that delivers something beyond the ordinary. Such an experience was part of an exploration of a garden center that I described in last week's blog. I anticipated a flower portrait session, and suddenly encountered an architectural abstract that falls into my wheelhouse. I was pleasantly surprised, and the following variations show how I tried to respond. By the way, if you do not share my enthusiasm for this image I fully understand. What piques my interest does not necessarily float your boat. It is my job to convert my initial "wow" into your "wow", and failure on my part might reflect on my photographic skills without in any way dismissing my initial interest. In any case, these images might inspire you to try different things when you encounter a subject that grabs you.
HOOP HOUSE #1 : FIRST TRY, PROCESSED
I walked through a door into a tent structure that was designated as "Hoop House #1", and while it's not the Pantheon, this arched shed for shade plants lifted my spirits. I guess the architect in me was excited by how such a utilitarian structure had achieved some poetry. The lightness of the structure, the way the fabric controlled glare without cutting off most of the light, and the unexpected size of the interior told me that I had found something special, at least for me. I might be wrong, but I think the tent is about 50' wide by 150' long. Did I mention that am a sucker for Japanese lanterns? Needless to say, I didn't spend much time looking at flowers for the next few minutes.
These photos were all post-processed and cropped, and "corrected", but I think they reflect the strategies around each initial attempt to respond to the subject. The first one above shows my fascination with the lone yellow lantern in the midst of the other lanterns marching down the tent. I cropped the image, but was uncomfortable with how close the last lantern was to the bottom edge.
HOOP HOUSE #1 : HORIZONTAL
I tried a horizontal orientation, somewhat unusual for me, to place the yellow lantern at the head of the line. I will say that I was concentrating on the ceiling because I do not have a wide angle lens, and more importantly, I didn't want to include any messiness, commercial signs, or even the plants that would clutter my vision. You might have reacted differently.
HOOP HOUSE #1 : SECOND HORIZONTAL
What if I left out the yellow lantern? Was it a distraction in the line of lanterns, or a highlight? This next shot tried to answer that question, and I found five lanterns, all lit, to run through the frame. I will tell you that a problem with all my shots was trying to determine the "proper" angle to achieve the illusion of a straight horizon with so many horizontal supports running through the frame - it usually involved a compromise that involved either leaving out or highlighting the level of the frame member closest to the edge of the frame.
SECOND HORIZONTAL, BLACK AND WHITE
Once I left out the yellow lantern I naturally tried a black and white conversion. This seems more "pure" to me than the color version, and as usual brings out the details in parts of the image like the lanterns and the tent that might be overlooked in the color version. By the way, I never got the yellow lantern to look any good in black and white - it only looked discolored and dirty.
RIGHT SIDE VERTICAL, HOLD THE YELLOW
It was now time to return to my normal vertical orientation, which would emphasize the view down the tent. I liked this angle better, but was troubled by two things, which of course border on the anal, but it's my image, right? The lead lantern doesn't seem to be lit, and by including the vertical back wall I have had to include an intruding fan. I will admit that with a modicum of work I could "light" the lantern and erase the fan, but you purists in the audience don't want to hear about that, do you?
VERTICAL PANORAMA
My solution as usual was to crop even tighter and go to an even more vertical 1:2 aspect ratio, reminiscent of Japanese screens. I no longer find the inclusion of the gable a problem - only architects would probably notice.
VERTICAL PANORAMA, BLACK AND WHITE
I immediately went to black and white. The image is even more clearly about the lines and lanterns, and somehow the lead lantern seems a little brighter. What is funny is that I don't really appreciate extra detail in the tent surfaces, which seems too busy, and the gables vertical lines are more intrusive too. And what's that ridiculous cable coming off the third lantern? It's there in the color version, but here it really is a distraction, so it will be gone when I open up this version again.
HOOP HOUSE #1 : SQUARE ORIENTATION
I returned to my original spot in the tent. When in doubt, I always try the square orientation. 16,000 coasters can't be that wrong. I let the yellow lantern lead the way, and trusted the receding horizontal supports would lead the viewers' eyes even though I only included three lanterns. I am under no illusions that this would make a popular coaster - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
HOOP HOUSE #1 : FINAL VERSION
Although I liked the square, I went back to the vertical to get more depth in the image. I adjusted the photo in post processing to get the most clearance I could for the last lantern, mostly by letting the horizontals go wonky by emphasizing the first level horizontal support.
This is my favorite, but that's just me. I would love your opinions. What is the best part about this unexpected photographic find is that it is about fifteen minutes from my house, so there is always the opportunity for more experimentation.
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MAY 20, 2022
BACK-LIT MAPLE : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to expand on my recent essays concerning the opportunity for taking photographs on "walkabouts", and also the power of using photography as an excuse to get out of the house. Photographic pursuits can both enliven activities and through the pursuit of art make these trips a "both/and" proposition. This is especially important when you are not walking by yourself but spending time with someone else. While Fran has never been coerced into carrying my tripod, she has acceded to my camera as a third wheel as long as I don't make a walk around the block, or on the beach, into a National Geographic assignment. These impromptu photo walks work even better if I'm tagging along on an activity that she knows will require some intense attention on her part. Instead of the stereotypical couch for husbands at the boutique, why not search for images when your significant other is otherwise engaged?
APPEARING AT THEATERS NEAR YOU VERY SOON! : FINAL VERSION
These images were created during a visit to a local garden center this last week. Fran loves when I accompany her on these outings, even though I am restricted in my commentary on her choices since my lack of stoop labor has given me no say whatsoever on any aspect of what has become her beautiful garden. My two cents are worth less than two lira when it comes to her garden. Sometimes she will allow me to pick out one specimen if it also passes muster with her personal vision, but I still find that I spend much time falling in love with some plant that needs an environment far different than our 40' x 100' plot can muster. And long ago I resisted going along with Fran on her walks "way to the back" of the nursery to search for "social worker" plants that only prompt the question "are these plants dead?"
MONOCHROME GREEN CAN BE BETTER AS SHADES OF GRAY : FINAL VERSION
So I take my camera along to while away some of the time. This allows me to pursue what I call "plant portraits" without walking in the garden, or through the neighborhood. Since this is very different from my usual photographic pursuits, it allows me to stretch my aesthetic legs while really lessening the pressure for a great shot. After all, I'm just walking in the nursery - how do I ever expect to grab a real image?
AFTER THE RAIN : FINAL VERSION
In fact the problems in taking a natural image in the midst of an artificial environment only encourage my natural tendency to concentrate on details or snippets of a subject. While this is somewhat similar to taking photographs at the zoo, instead of cages the photographer tries to restrict the presence of price tags and labels. So I try to zero in on the details of the plants rather than the commercial backgrounds. I used to even try this at the supermarket until multiple managers accused me of working for their competitors, obviously trying to steal their display ideas for green peppers. So far nobody has objected to my taking photographs of their beautiful plants on offer.
BIG LEAF STRUCTURE : FINAL VERSION
In addition to the isolation problem, I also have learned to deal with two other constraints on photography in this environment. The first is depth of field, which is a very different cup of tea than what I usually face as an urban landscape photographer. Instead of trying to get a majority of the image in focus, I am actively trying to reduce the surrounding environment to an out of focus haze to eliminate the commercial distractions. This then leads to the problem that plants, trees,or even flowers are three dimensional objects, and this reduced depth of field can lead to a very distracting view of a flower that is only partially in focus, even though front to back is measured in inches. "Focus stacking" an advanced concept requiring even more software than I own, and a tripod that would be way too much in a commercial environment, is unavailable on a simple trip to the nursery. Framing your image to restrict commercial artifacts becomes more important than wide-open apertures that might lead to out-of-focus segments of the subject at hand.
BUG'S EYE VIEW : FINAL VERSION
The other problem is focusing distance, which is probably too far away from that flower unless you own a specialized macro lens. Your floral subject will either be too small in the image, or your camera will not focus on the smaller part of the flower that you really were interested in at all. Auto-focus can be really frustrating as the camera either chooses to focus on the wrong part of the image, or just doesn't work at all. My lens will not focus at a distance of less than about two feet, but I have discovered a work-around that seems to work, at least for my lens which allows me to "tweak" the focus manually without going into manual focus mode. You might try this. Move back to a distance that your lens will focus at, then either "tweak" if your lens allows, or turn off auto-focus. Now move in to where you wanted to be in the first place, and try to manual focus on the flower. It is my experience that somehow this allows me to achieve focus at these much closer distances than my lens can supposedly allow. Your mileage might vary.
BUG EYE'S VIEW : FINAL B&W VERSION
What the real strategy that works for the garden center, or floral imagery in general, is to eschew your fancy real camera for the one in your pocket. The Iphone is actually the best camera that most people will ever have for taking flower images. It excels at such imagery because of its wide depth of field, its light weight, and its short focusing distance. It even has a built-in flash, which works very well if you can turn down its power. I would speculate that the only way to beat an Iphone in the garden is to buy a $2000 dollar camera with a $1000 dollar macro lens, not that there's anything wrong with that. If you are disappointed with most images from your Iphone, I think you would be delighted with the garden images you can achieve with your that "fake" camera in your pocket. Especially if you post-process them, print it, and put it on your wall.
A WALK IN THE FOREST GARDEN CENTER : FINAL VERSION
So I hope this encourages you to find some photography available in unusual places. Remember that a latte and a pastry at the end of the trip will go a long way to reduce the tension of bringing along the camera. It goes without saying that you should resist taking any pastry pictures. Enough is enough.
MAPLE LEAVES AGAINST THE SKY : FINAL VERSION
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MAY 13, 2022
I'd like to continue last week's discussion of finding excuses for getting out there and taking photographs. In addition to promoting some exercise, a proper photographic walkabout lets you stretch your aesthetic legs, especially in the pursuit of what I might call "the picture not taken." It's one thing to take a hike in Yosemite, or even a local park, and another to try to find photographs on the short walk to the anticipated photo destination.
By stretching your imagination of what could make an interesting image, you accomplish three things. You begin to appreciate the beauty that exists in the world beyond the obvious. You reduce the pressure to create an epic image, because after all, you are just noticing a little thing that maybe didn't even make you go "wow", but at least made you go "huh." And finally, by focusing on something that others might not even consider a "subject", you reduce the ordinary pressure to make your image about documenting the real world.
In this essay I will concentrate on just four images, all taken on a jaunt to and across the Morrison Bridge to Downtown Portland. It is very rare that one walkabout can deliver four "keepers", and I don't really feel that any of these photos are in any way "epic." Remember, I did get in a nice walk on a beautiful day, and sometimes the exercise of getting something out of basically nothing is worth the experimental time. I hope you can get something out of the process of making these images, even if you are not overwhelmed by the results I achieved.
The first image is of a somewhat famous neon sign of a bowling alley on my route to the bridge. Portland has a heritage of unique signage that recalls a time when sign makers came as cheap as carpenters, and a good sign was a point of retail pride, no matter how humble the establishment. I took something close to this same image a few years ago, and it had a future as a pretty steady selling coaster - most of my customers respond to a local landmark, especially if it is obscure enough to highlight their local expertise. Of course I mislaid this original file, and the image became one of "the missing", cited on my list of hopefully temporarily lost images that actually will sell. So on this walk I took a moment to try to recreate the image.
I took about half a dozen attempts, trying to isolate the sign, make sure it was somewhat straight, and give it enough room so that I could later crop to a square coaster. This is not as easy as it sounds, since I'm trying to fit a vertical sign into a square frame. I also had to deal with the support structure and the awnings that were underneath the sign. I finally determined which side of the sign looked better, based on the background, and went on my way.
The result was pretty underwhelming, but I began to see what I could make of it. The square crop was accomplished without losing any of the sign, and I straightened and centered it in the frame. Images this simple must be straight, and if you are going for symmetry, you better adjust that sign to be right in the middle or your "mistake" will jar and annoy your viewers. After all the usual moves in Lightroom, it was time to proceed to On One for some magic. At the risk of the balance of the image, I had to get rid of the remnant of the vintage lamp post on the left - my crop had left this distraction, and it was time for the magic eraser to get rid of something that was clearly not adding to whatever the image was trying to say.
Magic act over, it was time to get rid of the blue sky, which always seems inauthentic in a Portland photograph. By converting to black and white I would place more attention on the sign, which dealt with the black and white world of black bowling balls and white pins. But I was losing too much by losing the red neon, so I used some manipulation by de-saturating everything but the saturated colors, which left me with a black and white and red image. This was the extent of my knowledge of On One, which I am still mastering. After returning the file to Lightroom, I then knew how to de-saturate the only other color that remained, the remnants of blue in the sky. Don't be afraid of using parts of multiple post-processing programs to make life easier. I hope that the final image concentrates the viewers attentions on what attracted me to the sign in the first place.
The second image highlights another "site" adjacent to the Morrison Bridge. It also is another example of my folly of trying to create an attractive photograph of an art piece that I find problematic at best. This building is a speculative office building that is actually between two segments of the bridge, and is an example of "creative space" office space which is so weird that developers know it will only attract artists, architects, and other creative types - law firms need not apply. Most of Portland's bridges actually rise up over solid ground for a few blocks on the east side of the river, to reduce the grade and get over railroad tracks. Thus the first section of the Eastside has always been kind of a hidden area for trolls, darkened by the multiple bridge spans and becoming even more obscure than those streets under the "El" in New York. I think the only people who know what this building actually looks like at grade are the tenants and the architects.
It obviously has pursued a "look at me" strategy that easily provokes comment, and maybe interest, as you cross the bridge. I remain unconvinced, although I do acknowledge that the building actually improves a very problematic site. The paint job is wild enough, but when the potted plants appeared it clearly went over the top as well as over the roadway. Fran considers this kind of stuff "whimsy", while I wonder if it degrades my entire former profession.
I corrected the white balance, since the wild blue facade had made everything, including those pots, blue as well.
In any case, I try my usual strategy in isolating one part of the building in order to highlight the absurdity - their is no need to show the entire five-story box, and the idea that the viewer could imagine that this nonsense goes on even further might heighten their fears. The color of the facade was so wild that even my black and white version just de-saturates everything but the blues, and those potted plants now look closer to their eventual grey demise from all of the surrounding auto fumes.
When I finally arrived Downtown, I was struck by the contrast I noticed at one corner of one of our vintage office buildings. I don't know its name, and I don't care. This image is all about the sun, the light and shadow, and the repetitive nature of office windows of a certain age. It was necessary to straighten and relocate my corner as close as I could get to a central vertical. While I've got nothing against light brown brick, that blue sky was again annoying me, so I went to black and white. Monochrome allowed me to both add more contrast and to highlight the sun's focus on one side of the facade, and its absence on the other.
My last image on this day could symbolize one of city's nicknames as "Bridgetown." While it is frequently easiest to focus on the bridges when we are actually crossing them, I was struck by the layering of, count them, four different bridges to the south of the Morrison. The Hawthorne, Marquam, Tilikum, and Ross Island bridges all combine to form a wave of lines and shapes and four different engineering eras in one shot. My main attempt was to try differentiate the different spans so the viewer wasn't overwhelmed by the mess. I cropped to a panorama to focus the attention on the lines, eliminating distracting amounts of sky and river. I increased the contrast to show off the Tilikum's white cables and the Ross Islands"s black steel, and hoped the Hawthorne's towers and the Marquam's hulk would allow them some power in the image. I tried to place the Ross Island's arch as close to the center as possible. The color version tries to use the green of Ross Island to prove a contrasting background to all of these lines. The black and white version increases the contrast and allows more bridge detail to draw the viewer's attention. I'm not sure which works better.
I hope you've enjoyed another jaunt, and encourage you to take along your camera provide another excuse to get out of the house. Every one of your images doesn't have to be "important" if it provides the opportunity to practice your craft.
MAY 6, 2022
TILIKUM CROSSING ALPENGLOW : FINAL VERSION
TILIKUM CROSSING : FINAL DAYLIGHT VERSION
This week I would like to discuss the origins of a long-term photo project, which can provide the excuse you need to get out and shoot. These excuses do not even need to be aesthetic, because the joy we get out of capturing images can be combined with other desires that can be good for our bodies and souls. Most landscape photographers date the beginning of their image making to an overwhelming love of the outdoors, with the camera being mostly a means of documentation. It was only later that the chronicling of their hikes became an artistic pursuit to communicate their feelings about the landscape to others.
TILIKUM DETAIL : COLOR & B&W VERSION - I prefer the black and white
I have never been a long distance hiker, and my camping exploits ended when I rejected the idea of going places where I was not the apex predator. As an urban landscape photographer, my hikes are not as adventurous as hikes in the wilderness, but my love of the city and architecture has always propelled me to be a "walker in the city". Recently I began to try to combine this excuse for going for a walk with the actual aerobic benefits of said walks. The trouble with a "photo walk" as exercise is that this photographer needs very little excuse to stop and take multiple photographs that turn an already slow stroll into the aerobic equivalent of a chess game.
ROSS ISLAND BRIDGE : FINAL VERSION
So I began a game with myself that I might recommend to other photographers. I left my house and walked at a steady pace in one direction for a half hour, no stops allowed, with the promise that on the walk back I could take out the camera and shoot to my heart's content. Thus i am getting some benefit from the walk, which usually only takes 1 1/2 hours or so, and I can see that I have been walking farther than at the beginning of the game. The trouble remained that even though I was walking down some streets in my neighborhood that I had never seen in the thirty years I have lived here, it was still the old neighborhood, which left a certain photographic motivation tepid at best. Southeast Portland can be beautiful, but it isn't the Gorge.
These two images highlight the Morrison Bridge opening up, and the place where pedestrians must stop when the span opens - you don't want to be on the wrong side of that gate!
But as my walks became longer, and society gradually opened up from our pandemic slumber, I realized recently that I could drive towards the city, park, and start my walks from wherever I felt like, knowing that there would be something new to look at in my half hour. I know that this new regime is not earth shattering, but I have begun to broaden out from my own neighborhood. I used to do most of my walking Downtown, but while Portland is not the Fox-addled nightmare of urban decay, it can be somewhat depressing. Empty storefronts and encampments don't make for delightful urban landscapes.
EASTSIDE ESPLANADE BOARDWALK BRIDGE FROM THE BURNSIDE : FINAL B&W VERSION
In the past few weeks I hit upon the idea of walking to Downtown instead, and began my jaunts about 15 blocks from the river, with the promise of getting to walk across one of our bridges as the goal/highlight of the trip. Thus I have combined aerobic exercise (at least for me) with an opportunity to take a slow look at some of Portland's icons - one of our city's nicknames has long been Bridgetown. Portland's river, the Willamette, shares the centrality and dimensions of the Seine in Paris and the Thames in London - bridging the river allowed for the city's growth while not requiring the earth shattering engineering of the Brooklyn Bridge. Portland's bridges are numerous, and for more than a century their varied and picturesque designs have enlivened our landscapes. The fact that we rarely throw anything out means that some of our bridges are now living museum pieces, which can only be repaired if we reinvent their components. Throw in the fact that about half are drawbridges, with a potentially fatal effect on traffic, and you can see why Portlanders have a pretty intimate relationship with these spans.
BURNSIDE BRIDGE CONTROL TOWER : I don't know which version I prefer.
These photographs come from the walks I've take in the past few weeks, along with some of my most popular images of our bridges over the years. As usual, most of my imagery is pretty specific, and a lot of people only know some of the images because they have taken the same walks as I have. I have resisted the heroic shots that my colleagues take as required, usually suffering as a businessman. Portlanders have a relationship with the St. Johns Bridge that can only be characterized as an addiction - when I finally allowed myself to take a shot of the bridge, I sold over 30 coasters in the first three weeks. These were not to tourists, since almost no tourist even knows this most outermost of our bridges even exists.
INTO THE WOODS, ST. JOHNS BRIDGE : FINAL B&W VERSION
I'm one of the few people who actually don't like the green of the St. Johns, so black and white it was. I avoided symmetry out of habit and a fear of the semi trucks from both directions if you stand on the center line.
LATE AGAIN : FINAL VERSION
Three views of the Hawthorne Bridge, one of intimate disappointment as a commuter, the other a classic blue hour shot with the city lights just coming on. Much to my surprise, I think the black and white version works as well.
ON BROADWAY : FINAL VERSION
A really intimate view of the Broadway Bridge, which I have sold to several city engineers involved in it's restoration. While the color is similar to the Golden Gate, it's not an exact match.
I hope you enjoy this short trip across the river, and find your own excuse to get out and walk the city. It doesn't have to be for miles if it takes you to places you really didn't know because you've never taken the time to be a pedestrian there.
]]>APRIL 29, 2022
CAROLINA MOON RISE : FINAL VERSION
Last week I discussed how it could be very useful for photographers to actively experiment with new techniques or approaches when they go out into the field. I would like to expand this idea by encouraging you to experiment after capture by taking new paths in your post-processing as well. It is very easy to fall into patterns when using software to enhance our images, and a conscious decision to try something new, or even crazy, when we process an image can lead to unexpected and liberating results.
CAROLINA MOON RISE : ORIGINAL B&W VERSION
I have a lot of problems with the idea that photographers must develop what we call a "workflow" when we process our images. My first objection is primarily psychological, in that I resist the idea that this is "work", since I have a belief that art should be fun, even if you are crazy enough to try to earn some money from your efforts. I have never spent my work life in front of a computer screen, so I can understand why others might resist transferring their hobby time to more screen staring. But in reality this is not digging ditches, and while it can be repetitive, one might realistically ask why you are pursuing something if it has ceased to be fun. Part of the solution might be to deliberately switch things up, and I'd like to show you some examples of divergent paths I have taken in post-processing several images. I believe that this has led to some exciting new ways to interpret an image.
CAROLINA MOON RISE : FINAL B&W VERSION
Frequently the first move I try is to see how the original color image would change if it was converted into black and white. This is not usually done in search of nostalgia, or in an effort to just include an image into a portfolio of monochrome images. I have found that a black and white conversion can totally change an image, especially if the conversion is accompanied by additional moves that modify the image beyond removing color. In other words, we are not just searching for grey-scale, but seeing what we can also do to change the image's interpretation. Using the abstraction of black and white allows us to modify an image far beyond what most viewers would accept in a color photo.
The first example is the three different versions of this seascape off the North Carolina coast. The first image is a classic color image of the pink skies that can accompany the beauty of sunset if you are looking in the "wrong" direction, i.e. the sun is setting behind you. It's even more fun if the moon is rising. I cropped the image to emphasize the pink band, but increasing the saturation was not necessary - this event, which seemed to occur at 7:15 pm on the dot for over a week, was just that beautiful all by itself. The question then becomes what you would do and why you would convert a photo which seems to be all about color into a black and white photo? The first example shows what usually happens - a somewhat boring grey scale interpretation which does not replace the intensity of the color with anything very useful. We'll see later that you can attain a new level of detail by leaving out color, but this image is very simple, so that doesn't seem to work. But what about if you advance the clock a few hours? The final moody night-time shot, done by simultaneously drastically lowering the exposure and heightening the glow of the moon, changes the mood completely and doesn't strike the viewer as fake at all - impossible in a color shot.
FLORA #2 : FINAL COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
Here is another classic example of what is seemingly a fool's errand in black and white conversion. Why would you remove the color from a flower portrait, a stereotypical example of the power of color imagery? In this example I do it to emphasize the structure of the flower, and as a way of surreptitiously isolating it further from the background by converting said background into a velvet curtain. Viewers would not begin to accept this much contrast in a color image, at best figuring it was a studio shot as opposed to a real flower in a garden.
ANTEBELLUM SEATING : FINAL COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
Here I've used the black and white conversion to make the image more about the light on the chair than anything else. We lose the beauty of the various wood shades in favor of the various tones on the chair. The Bible is subdued, the chair's surroundings fade to black, and the pattern on the curtain is made more important in the monochrome version.
ST. JOHNS NOIR : FINAL B&W VERSION
These days a popular political cliche is not to waste the importance of a political crisis to not take advantage and accomplish other changes while you deal with it. I would carry that over to black and white conversion. A well-composed (if I say so myself) view of the St. Johns Bridge is converted into film noir interpretation suitable for Gotham City by exposure manipulation that converts it into a total silhouette, with almost no detail inside the black bridge. While I am almost always in awe of others who can coax hundreds of shades of grey out of a black and white, I am neither as skilled or oriented in that direction, so why bother?
CHELSEA CATHEDRAL : FINAL VERSION AND FINAL B&W VERSION
Sometimes it's just a matter of going with your gut, with the proviso that both interpretations might be equally as worthy. The color shot is a love letter to the beautiful sandstone Chelsea Cathedral in London, resplendent in the setting sun, with an interesting complementary blue glow in the stained glass. The black and white is all about the shapes of the arched window, the light and shadow of the flying buttresses, and somehow the texture of the stone is even more important without the golden color.
NAKED CITY CHRYSLER BUILDING : FINAL B&W VERSION
I love the Chrysler Building more than any other skyscraper in New York. It seems the most romantic building in the city, with its spire and frankly ridiculous Art Deco ornament, where hood ornaments become gargoyles, that it always makes me smile. The black and white conversion of this focus on the top converts what is really a post card into something very different. The spire and ornamentation, in fact the whole tower, positively glows because I have adopted a black interpretation of the boring blue sky that even Ansel Adams would be proud of. This has no relation to actual reality, but no one is offended by my departure, for we have an almost infinite acceptance of such manipulation in black and white.
OMSI : FINAL VERSION
Finally, we have an image which seems to be all about the color of the beautiful OMSI entrance sign that proudly stands in the building's lobby atrium. The image is another example of my love of outrageous color, and the power of letters to capture our attention as graphic devices way beyond their communicative utility. The OMSI red, contrasted with the mechanical/architectural gray and a typical Portland sky with powerful clouds, screams color photograph. Thus I was a surprised as anyone when I worked on this black and white interpretation.
OMSI : FINAL B&W VERSION
A black and white interpretation that cranks the contrast up to 11, throws in a lot of "glow" as well as an equal amount of sharpening, has resulted in a black and white image where, at least for me, the neon letters are even more vibrant than the color version. Once again, experimentation has yielded unexpectedly delightful results.
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APRIL 22, 2022
NORTH CAROLINA GROIN : FINAL B&W VERSION
I'd like to discuss the idea of experimentation in your photography this week. Another way that you can "discover" things to photograph while you are on vacation, or just around the corner, is to consciously set out to experiment when you head out with your camera. Trying something new can open up loads of possibilities, especially when the "subject" of your image is overly familiar. Experimentation can allow for a new way of seeing, either at the point of capture or later in post processing.
The image above is of a groin on a North Carolina Beach near Wilmington, North Carolina. I don't know why a man-made intrusion that disappears into the sea is also the place that a man definitely does not want to be hit, but that's for another day (in England, they differentiate by calling the seaside feature a groyne). This groin carried a pipe that probably discharged something nasty into the ocean, but on this rainy day I found it interesting enough to see how I could manufacture an image out of concrete blocks and an iron pipe.
My solution was to search for elements of abstraction in the image. I will show you the original color image in a second, but I turned to black and white almost immediately for several reasons. Since it was such a nasty day, the sea was grey anyway; the hint of green on the moss covered concrete didn't add much either, and the pipe and the stanchions in the water were already black.
NORTH CAROLINA GROIN : FINAL COLOR VERSION
But my search for abstraction centered on my experiment with a long exposure. While it was a grey day, it was still day, and the sea was actually pretty rough without being very exciting - think breaking swells that threatened my tripod without throwing up any picturesque splashes. My objective became how to lengthen the exposure enough to reduce the sea to a flat, abstract surface leading past the groin and the stations out to the horizon.
Photographers do this with a few pieces of equipment that allow us extend our exposures enough so as to perceive a kind of zen-like gaze at the environment that is the exact opposite of an artificially lit flash shot. While strobe flashes stop action because they show us exact, almost infinitesimal moments in time, long exposures show us things that our naked eyes cannot see by stretching out the duration of our view. The shutter is open so long that momentary movement is ignored by the sensor. Moving tourists seem to disappear in the piazza because they moved too fast to be registered on our sensors, which only caught the things that were there the whole time. And recurring movements, like waves at the beach, get evened out, because the camera is recording all of the waves as a "still average" over a much longer period of time than any one breaking wave.
FIRST SHOT : f8.0 @ 1/350 second - A TYPICAL APERTURE/SHUTTER SPEED
Taking such long exposures that will yield images of things we really can't see in real life require a few accessories. You really need a stable tripod because you can't possibly hold or even place your camera down to stop camera shake when your exposure lasts for multiple seconds. We want to see the movement of our subject, not the apparent palsy in our grip on the camera. We put our cameras on a two-second delay when we push the shutter, because even that subtle act of hitting the button might actually register as shake, so we let the camera "settle down" before it takes the shot.
To lengthen the time of exposure, and not just get an over-exposed image, we must cut down the amount of light that is getting to the sensor. We can't turn off the sun, so it's time to put on sunglasses to cut out the light. The sunglasses aren't for us, but for our camera - in this case it's not what we see, but what the camera sees, that is important. A neutral density filter placed over the lens will hopefully reduce the light by a measurable amount that will enable vastly increased exposure times by convincing the sensor that the sun has gone down. While reducing a waterfall to a gentle mist might require an exposure of a couple of seconds (still far too long to hand-hold), stopping the ocean might require an exposure lengthened to minutes. Now the problem is not hitting the shutter, but having to close it again. Most cameras will not automatically close the shutter after 30 seconds, so for longer exposures you need a gizmo to both open the shutter and close it again after your watch registers the appropriate excruciating time required. I cannot explain how long a two-minute exposure can seem, when we are used to the exposure being over before we are really concious of having pushed the button at all.
SLOWER : f16 @ 1/45 second, off-center, one stantion
There is one physical problem I haven't yet mentioned. You have painstakengly determined the perfect composition, and accurately focused - but then you must engage in some lower-level math to take a photo you can't see. The filter is so dark that when you place it over your lens you can no longer see the scene through the viewfinder, and you cannot see what your subsequent setting changes are doing to the image before you take the photo. You are literally in the dark. You must change your focus to manual focus, because the camera will try to adjust the focus to the new midnight lighting, and it won't be able to auto focus. Even worse, your viewfinder is going to stay black no matter how you change your settings. Fortunately, the neutral density filters have ratings on how much light they are stopping. To stop the ocean, you should have a ten-stop filter, which reduces the light by ten stops. Remember that we are trying to reduce the light to the sensor. Thus you have set the sensor sensitivity to it's lowest native setting, exactly opposite what you would do to take a night-time shot. You have also set your lens to a very small aperture to reduce the size of the hole that light can get through. You then click your way down to the lower shutter speed, doubling the amount of light with each click, because you are letting in more light by extending the duration the shutter is open. Count ten clicks, and you are somewhere in the neighborhood of properly exposing an image that you can't see. It's time to experiment, and to see what happens.
That's what it comes down to, and why it often seems that photographers are just overthinking the entire affair. Our digital cameras will now let us see our results right after the shot is over, so after our long exposure is finally over, we can see how close we are to what looks a reasonable exposure. Adjust as required, and probably wait even longer. Something to read is highly recommended.
FASTER, BUT ALMOST SYMMETRICAL : f16 @ 1/125 second
You are not searching for a "proper exposure" once you are in the ballpark, but are actually trying to see if you have positively affected the image enough by lengthening the exposure. If we have a "proper" exposure at our first ordinary view through the viewfinder, then we will have another "proper" exposure if we keep doubling the exposure time while we halve the light getting to the sensor with our neutral density filter. But since we cannot see the exposure until we take it, we are in the dark until we take the photo.
I used to think that long exposure photos were just a gimmick, a way of easily creating an arty image out of nothing. This might be true to some extent, but now having experimented with the technique I can see that the rules of composition are not suspended just because we have changed the amount of time we are recording. This image would not be as strong without the central placement of the groin, and I for one think that the presence of the stanchions is crucial. And I regret that the rain caused enough discomfort that I refrained from getting out the electronic shutter release. A thirty second exposure was just not long enough to completely flatten the waves and eliminate their variations near the groin. But for a first experiment this wasn't bad.
TEN STOP FILTER : f16 @ 30 SECONDS
The exposure of the photo will not change, but the photo will. The waves will disappear, and the clouds will seem to streak across the sky, while stationary objects will still stay sharp. Once the viewer notices, they will frequently get fascinated, because you can't see this stuff on the beach. Our photographic experiment has yielded a new view of a familiar subject.
TEN STOP FILTER : f16 @ 30 SECONDS, B&W
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APRIL 15, 2022
CAROLINA BEACH, 7:15 PM : FINAL VERSION
I'd like to return to North Carolina this week to discuss four images I created there. My overall theme is that most of my photography is based on noticing things - paying attention to light, shadow, forms, and geometry - that others might not see. What's funny is that this either leads people to really appreciate "my eye" or to not get my imagery at all. While I do not search for the obscure, I must accept that my way of seeing is not for everyone, and that's okay. I would suggest that this attitude can be very liberating to the rest of you out there - it takes a lot of the pressure off if you have a little faith in your vision and do not care as much if the public responds. With about 97 million photographs downloaded to Instagram every day, it's a miracle if anyone notices your efforts at all.
In that spirit let me try to explain what caught my eye in taking these four images, and how I tried to emphasize that act of paying attention in my subsequent post-processing. A big part of "proper" landscape photography is waiting for the light. This doesn't just involve waking up real early or staying late, but bringing along a book or just meditating while you wait for the light to hopefully change and transform a good image into a potentially great one. I usually lack the energy or patience to accomplish this goal, which is why I firmly believe that we take our best shots close to home, wher we can easily return for better light another time. But patience is not the only virtue; sometimes just noticing something can suffice. We stayed at a true beachfront property at Carolina Beach just outside of Wilmington, and it took only a few days for me to notice that the best light of the day, without a doubt, took place at 7:15 PM each evening. While some days were a little better than others, if you managed to be on our deck at that time you would be greeted with what Mountain people call Alpenglow, the pink shades in the sky that do not really require mountain views. It's just kind of a reverse sunset, and usually lasts only five minutes or so. What was so much fun was that this was so reliably predictable that it required no patience at all - just show up, and there you have it. Of course you can't have your camera set to auto white balance since your stupid expensive machine will wipe out the pink glow as a "mistake" instead of celebrating it. This image is all about color, so that I even violated my secret identity on 500 pixels by posting a color photograph. The world didn't come to an end, although there were probably some people in Eastern Europe who were shocked, just shocked. As usual with my landscape images these days, I've cropped it down to 1:2 to more fully emphasize the horizontal aspect. The pink glow was nicely confined to just over the horizon, so cropping didn't affect the image in any negative way.
THE RED CHAIRS : FINAL VERSION
The obverse of the beachfront stroll is to observe the state of that beach's architecture. I am always on the lookout for "architect was here" as a relief to the usual structures that don't even to seem to notice that they are located on the beach - there is a damn ocean over there! I noticed this relentless grid on one of the larger condo towers on the beach, which was a lot bigger than we are used to on the Oregon Coast. Then I focused on the rebel on a certain floor who was going to have red balcony furniture no matter what anyone else might think. Once you notice something, it really doesn't matter if no one else does - your job becomes merely how to emphasize what you have noticed. In this case the only requirements that I had to meet were to crop the image so that the grid could go on forever, and to do my best to straighten and align the grid in post-processing so that the photo looked like I could have taken it from a helicopter hovering way above the ground. The viewer is then left to decide if any of this means anything at all. And of course the image must stay in color since the red chairs are what's holding it together.
REFLECTIONS ON WILMINGTON : FINAL VERSION
REFLECTIONS ON WILMINGTON : FINAL B&W VERSION
The next image was a happy accident. I could claim that I knew what I was doing, but that would be a lie. What appears to be an elaborate double exposure is in reality just a wild conjunction of interior and exterior reflections in a coffee shop. The most credit I can take is that I noticed something was pretty strange and I lined up an image that I really didn't understand at the time of exposure. This stands previsualization and the "decisive moment" on its head; it reminds me of the admonition to "say something if you notice something" as the least a photographic witness can do when confronted by the unusual. I only noticed what was going on in this image when I looked over my photos a few days later, when I was charmed by the many juxtapositions that occurred in one ordinary image of a typical apartment house. I am unsure which version, color or black and white, works better here. The color version is "lighter" and more lively, but there is enough contrast in the black and white to overcome the lack of color. Neither image is much more confusing than the other;it helps that the central light post is just as black a presence in each version.
ANTEBELLUM DETAIL : FINAL B&W VERSION
Finally I present another image from the plantation house we visited near Wilmington. Here I am just a retired architect,"nothing to see here", who is overwhelmed by the classical detailing on an Antebellum mansion. This image must be in black and white, since the off-white natural color is completely underwhelming, and we all know that the vegetation is actually green, and who cares? I found two things intriguing about this "subject". One was that this stone detail was so obviously painted, carved wood, which seemed to hearken back to the classical originals, whose leaves were actual leaves. The other was that while this detail certainly came out of a "pattern book", it was built by enslaved artisans more than two thousand years after other slaves had probably built the Classical originals. All I did was to notice their handiwork, and for this image, that was more than enough.
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MARCH MADNESS
APRIL 8, 2022
ENSLAVED PERSON'S VIOLIN : FINAL VERSION
ENSLAVED PERSON'S VIOLIN : FINAL B&W VERSION
March and April 2022 have proven to be a very interesting time for this writer, photographer, grandfather and birthday boy. In no apparent order I had a wonderful trip with Fran to North Carolina to see Benjamin, Margaret, and Isaac; started off the art year with a nice few weeks at the Market; spent a wonderful time on the beach with our extended family, Vinny and Steve; created several nice images without driving myself silly; celebrated my 66th Birthday; and caught Covid. I am fine, and my week on the couch is over, and I am trying to take it easy and realize how lucky I am that I caught it in April 2022 instead of April 2020 or April 2021. To say it was anti-climatic would be to overly dramatize my bout, which was somewhere between a bad cold and the flu. Of course I was vaccinated and boosted, so the reaction of my doctors was muted; call us if you feel bad. I probably caught it either on the airport trips or at the Market, and felt much worse when I had double-pnemonia a few years ago. Mostly just tired to the point where napping and going to bed early could be done without much guilt.
ANTEBELLUM STAIR : FINAL B&W VERSION
ANTEBELLUM STAIRCASE : FINAL B&W VERSION
We spent our time in Wilmington on the beach about a half-hour from Benjamin's apartment in town, and though our accomodations kept going up in price each time we delayed our trip, the decision to book actual beachfront property was wonderful. We really lucked out with the weather, which was basically better than any week on the Oregon Coast any time of the year. It rained one day out of ten, and most days we could walk into the surf.
GROIN DETAIL : LONG EXPOSURE B&W FINAL VERSION
Wilmington is opening up nicely, and while it never was as buttoned-down as Portland, it also didn't seem like it was completely ignoring the fact that there had been a Pandemic. North Carolina seems to be stuck in purgatory somewhere between the Yankees in Virginia and the yahoos to the South, ashamed at the obvious problems with its history but unwilling to cow-tow to Northern superiority as well. Thus a considerable chip on it's shoulder that goes along with a pride in difference, and an urban/rural split very familiar to this Oregonian/New Yorker, with even less urban to leaven the overall countryside. Consider that Wilmington was really the only city in North Carolina for most of its history, and that Charlotte is so close to the border that it might as well be in South Carolina, and you can see why the overall ambience is distinctively rural.
PLANTATION SEATING : FINAL VERSION
PLANTATION SEATING : FINAL B&W VERSION
We had a wonderful time with everyone and my grandson is just a pistol. He is very different than Benjamin, with a sly side-eye, and you've got to watch him like a hawk. Thank god that his digital photo efforts do not cost me any money, since he is completely enamored with the camera and actually sometimes seems to be better than Grandpa in taking pictures of people, as long as you discount his interest in taking pictures of the floor with an attention to detail that borders on the obsessive.
ISAAC AT REST : FINAL B&W VERSION
I still have to go through most of the images I took on the trip. I'm beginning to realize that no matter how much I endeavor to experiment, my best images seem to be close to my wheelhouse, despite or in spite of their purported subjects. Most of these images come from the end of our trip, when we spent a few hours at a Plantation House near Wilmington. The tour guide was a wonderful woman who rightly emphasized the stories of the enslaved people who had actually built and lived in the house, rather than the purported owners. While I certainly did not "work" the subjects, I am pleased that post-processing has brought out some of the artistic value of ordinary domestic objects; hopefully these images can honor their lives lived in the shadows.
WILMINGTON COUP MEMORIAL : FINAL VERSION
WILMINGTON COUP MEMORIAL : FINAL B&W VERSION
This detail of a new memorial for The Coup that took place in Wilmington in 1891 - the only documented coup of a legally constituted municipal government in the United States - brought to an end a successful Reconstruction administration and led to Jim Crow for seventy years. While the memorial seems ill-placed at an ordinary suburban intersection, it actually might someday play a more important role at a site that might be central to the city's future growth. It struck me that the site might one day be as central as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin - a permanent reminder that precludes commercial use of the site.
BACK STAIRS : FINAL B&W VERSION
MARCH 11, 2022
MOORES CREEK NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD : FINAL COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
It's a lot of fun to misquote Thomas Boswell's ode to baseball, even if the powers to be have conspired to destroy their opening day. Last weekend was Opening Day at Saturday Market, and it was fun to be back exhibiting and even sometimes selling my art. I had anticipated a lousy day, weather-wise, and feared that the monetary results would correspond. Instead it was about as nice a Pre-Spring day as Portland can muster, and the crowds seemed just as excited as the vendors to be back under the Burnside Bridge.
SOOKE LIGHT : FINAL B&W VERSION
My new space under said bridge has a lot of possibilities, a corner space with three open sides in a good vendor neighborhood. The three open sides offer a lot of different areas to show my work, and also relieve any feelings of claustrophobia. Since I have resolved to try to be a "fair-weather" vendor this year, I am not as worried about being blown away by the wind - I will just be mature enough to stay home.
CENTRAL OREGON COAST : FINAL B&W VERSION
It is amazing how your location in the market can affect your mood. Some of the most exacting urban design experts I have ever met are my fellow vendors at the Market, who are convinced that a difference of ten feet can spell happy days or financial ruin. I have never thought it made that much difference, as long as one understood that the emphasis on seniority made monthly rents vary by location. But since everyone pays the same daily rent, no matter how good or bad your location, and daily rents dwarf monthly over the course of the year, the fix is in. After twelve years I have reached about as high as I ever will get on the seniority list, as young whipper-snappers attendance gains over me will make up for retirements among those vendors still above me on the list. And even I have realized that even my view from the booth will affect my mood, so that my new view of the sun beyond the bridge will certainly beat last year's view of a homeless encampment.
ENDANGERED PLOVERS : FINAL B&W VERSION
There are only four photographers left at the market, and we are a collegial bunch, since we each fill a different enough niche that we can actually send customers on to our "competitors." And the economy has eliminated the people who either existed by giving their work away, or just sold the same product as everyone else. Of course there has also been a certain amount of attrition due to a new-found sanity among even artists under the bridge. As I always say, the real insanity among artists is our continued belief that anything about the selling of Art makes any economic sense at all. As I slowly lose those beliefs, it is becoming a lot easier to have fun at the market.
SOUTHERN OREGON MOUNTAINS : FINAL STANDARD 2:3 RATIO - TOO MUCH SKY?
SOUTHERN OREGON MOUNTAINS : COLOR AND B&W FINAL VERSIONS - JUST RIGHT?
SOUTHERN OREGON MOUNTAINS : 3:1 RATIO - TOO SKINNY?
There were even some tourists about, although I can't imagine how anyone is actively visiting our fair city at this time. Maybe I'm just naive about how bad the rest of the country is doing. After two years of Covid, it takes a lot of optimism to see how downtown will soon recover, even though I still think it doesn't pay to bet against Portland. Our leaders seem to lack any understanding in pursuing both short-term and long-term solutions, resulting in complete stagnation. There is a complete lack of attempting anything, and different factions decry solutions that actually even work because they are ideologically suspect. What is exceedingly weird is that no matter how incompetent our local leaders appear to be, the relative intelligence of our citizens seems to have so far preserved human lives. Most of the rest of Oregon resembles the Deep South, seemingly intent on ensuring that the virus will always have unvaccinated hosts to prey upon.
GORDON BEACH : FINAL B&W VERSION
Our food carts have reopened too, so that I can find a good lunch again. At the end of last year it was slim pickings indeed, but most of my favorite choices are back again. Lunch at the Market is always problematic, since I'm supposed to be in my booth, not on a twenty-minute long line waiting for lunch. What's funny is that the second you start lunch, business picks up, so that you are torn between eating a too-late lunch and actually making money.
WINDY OREGON COAST : FINAL VERSION
Inflation has begun to take a toll, although as a small businessman with very low profit margins it also has provided an excuse to finally raise my prices for the first time in five years. What is interesting is that my emphasis this year is to find a way to create some lower price points to raise sales. The coasters sell themselves. The metal prints are extraordinary, but are too expensive for me to buy to sell them at a low enough price to really increase sales. As a premium product, they just cost what they cost. What is interesting is that customers seem to understand that the basic food cost equation of 3x costs is fair, but is just too high. Thus I am trying to see if I can sell larger laminated prints at about half the price that the metal prints must cost. Frustration has reared its ugly head in that the laminate prints were designed to "get the coasters on the wall." They have been successful, but my attempt to sell the small prints that are not "squares" has been a failure. So 4 x4's are cute, but 4x6's or 4x8's are too small. So I am going to try larger and more expensive 9x12's and 8 x16's to see if laminated prints can sell at half the price of similar sized prints in aluminum.
NEW VOLCANIC BEACH ON BIG ISLAND : COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
Most of the images in today's essay are processed at a 1:2 aspect ratio, which I have decided is the best "panoramic" ratio available. Ordinary photo prints come out of the camera as 2:3 or 3:4 sizes; the 1:2 ratio is significantly wider without being too wide. The wider 1:3 ratio only seems to be justified by a mountain range or a real urban skyline; most of the time there is just not enough "subject" for such a wide aspect ratio. But for a photographer who shoots mostly square images, the 1:2 ratio offers a different enough view of the world to stimulate my creative juices. While I can certainly stitch together shots for this wider view, I have found that most of the time I can justify a wide 1:2 ratio by just cropping out the wasted space in the foreground or sky or both. The historic "panoramic" ratios of 16:9 or 16:7 were functions of film sizes and are close enough, a little wider and a little shorter, to 2:1 to prove my point that 2:1 is wide enough.
BIG ISLAND LANDSCAPE : FINAL VERSION
I will have to see if this 1:2 aspect ratio, at a larger print size, is attention-getting enough to attract customer interest. But it has been interesting enough for me to crop some of these images to this new ratio to see if they work at this "wider" perspective.
EMPIRE STATE : FINAL VERSION AT STANDARD 2:3 RATIO - TOO WIDE?
EMPIRE STATE : FINAL VERTICAL B&W VERSION AT 2:1 RATIO - TOO SKINNY?
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MARCH 4, 2022
EASTSIDE ESPLANADE : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to take a deep dive into post-processing one image. I hope to show how important it is to take your time with an image in an effort to improve your out-of-camera results. I have no doubt that almost every image you or I take can be improved immensely in just a few steps with some attention in post-processing. And this can go double for those images which you might have ignored in their original form. In my latest foray into my archives, I discovered this image I snapped Pre-Covid on a walk on the Eastside Esplanade, a highfalutin name we have for a walking path on the East Bank of the Willamette, stuck on a tiny sliver of land between the river and a freeway. Despite its location, it somehow works as part of a three-mile loop downtown, albeit a noisy one. This image shows the most romantic part of the journey, a boardwalk that juts into the river to avoid some train tracks (!) that had first claim on this portion of the river bank. The row of pre-rusted Corten steel piers show how far the floating boardwalk can rise or fall depending on the height of the river.
EASTSIDE ESPLANADE : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Here is the original overlooked snapshot from 2019. The crop is all wrong, as is the color balance and the exposure. But as I looked through the very small icons of the dozens of shots I took that day, I was intrigued by the several loops of curves that floated through the image. It is very useful to view your images at very small sizes, both to divorce them from their "subjects" and to see if any more important compositional aspects can grab your attention. I know photographers who make a pass through images after first de-saturating them, or even viewing them upside down, so that they are just looking at lines, or shapes, or tones, or negative spaces. If something grabs you at a very small size, there is a good chance that you can find something compelling at full size.
EASTSIDE ESPLANADE : FIRST SQUARE CROP
So I noticed those three or four or five curves floating through the image, and realized how much stronger they would appear without the wasted space to the left and right. The curves included the boardwalk rail on the right, the boardwalk itself, and the line of piers, especially their tops. Secondary curves included the two segments of freeway above and to the right, and the roof of the Rose Garden Arena beyond the river. The question became where the square should be placed. I had to include the tops of the piers, but how many were necessary?
EASTSIDE ESPLANADE : PIVOT RIGHT
I first tried to pivot right, to ignore the Rose Garden andto include more of the lower freeway curve on the right. But there is clearly not enough breathing room on the left, so I then pivoted left to lose what I thought was the distraction of the Convention Center tower on the right.
GOLDILOCKS : FINAL SQUARE CROP
You have got to learn to look closely at the edges of your frame, even if you didn't look closely enough in-camera. My final decision was based on losing all of the right freeway curve to include all of the Rose Garden roof, and more importantly not to cut the boardwalk bench on the left. Just like portraits, where you have got to pay attention to amputating limbs, landscape photographers must pay attention to disconcerting distractions at the edge of the frame.
WHITE BALANCE REVISIONS
Light has color, which our brain subtly understands and interprets so that we can exist in the world and not get eaten by the saber-tooth tiger. Our cameras, although technological miracles, are still not as smart as our brains. The digital sensor, like film before it, is much too literal for the real world. It actually pays attention to the exact color temperature of the scene, or more frequently doesn't show the same latitude as our brains in adjusting to changing light. The image has now been "corrected" for color, and the auto setting, frequently a disaster, has not done too bad a job here. While the result might be a little too warm for Portland reality, it is clearly much closer to the truth than the original which was way too blue - notice the top of the piers, which are now white. The clouds are now white as well, even though the sky has reverted to grey instead of its false blue overtones.
BLACK POINT
Things will start to get more subtle from here on in. In many ways the most important thing about post-processing is to manipulate your image, and improve it, without letting your viewers in on the secret. Like a magician, viewers want to be amazed, even deceived, as long as they don't notice the sleight of hand. Here I have lowered the black point, which forces more of the darker tones toward pure black. Viewers perceive this as a richer image. They think you've made it more saturated, even though you haven't touched the saturation slider. While the deeper tones have shifted, the mid-tones and lighter tones have not been touched. In general, the more you move away from "global" changes which affect the entire image towards more and more selective changes, the more you can change while keeping the illusion of subtlety.
LIGHTEN THE SHADOWS
Sometimes you can even feel that you are at cross-purposes in the pursuit of Goldilocks. I've just darkened some potions of the image. and now I lighten it back up. But I've lightened the shadows, which are different than the darkest part of the image down at the black point. Obviously everything overlaps to some extent, and the boardwalk has clearly gotten lighter. More importantly, the piers have now emerged more strongly as several shades of orange rather than dull brown.
GRADUATED FILTER
Landscape photographers, even of the urban variety like myself, frequently have to deal with problems in the sky. Skies, even in Portland, are much brighter than the rest of the world around us. Our brains adjust, but our cameras don't. Thus the sky is frequently much too light in comparison with our subjects below it, and the image is out of balance. In the past, photographers would place graduated filters over their camera lenses, kind of like bifocal sunglasses which would gradually go from dark at the top to clear at the bottom. We can do the same thing now on the computer. Here I've lowered the exposure in the sky by one full stop, so there is now much more detail in the clouds. Again it's subtle, because if I went too far you would notice and not believe.
ADD A VIGNETTE
We are now almost finished, at least for today. As I've said before, a good strategy sometimes is to present two versions to a bystander to see if they can see the result of your incredible efforts. If a sane person like Fran is confounded by her confrontation with two images which "are exactly the same!", then maybe you've reached a point of diminishing returns. Here I've added a "vignette", a hopefully subtle darkening of the edges of the photograph. You can see it in the bottom of the boardwalk and the top of the sky. What is funny is that vignetting is frequently cited as a fault of less-than-stellar camera lenses, but that photographers will gladly do it themselves, thank you. The theory is that the viewer will be attracted most by the lightest part of a scene. Thus if you can subtley darken the edges, the viewer's attention will now be drawn to the comparitive brightness at the center where you wanted them to look! Oh, the webs we weave. Of course, if one goes too far, the viewer will wonder if you took the photo through a periscope on a submarine.
EASTSIDE ESPLANADE : B&W FINAL VERSION
Now we reach for the abstraction of black and white. What can we achieve by eliminating color entirely from the equation? Remember, I was really concerned with those flying curves, not the color of the boardwalk, or the trees, or the river. While I didn't really care about the colors, I do miss the orange piers, but I really like orange. The green trees, and especially the green highway signs, which I now hate so much that I want to get rid of them from the color version as "distractions", are not missed at all. My curves are still there, and I do like the sky, but the tops of the piers have lost a certain amount of contrast with the rest of the piers. It is clearly a matter of taste.
You will have to trust me that this final black and white version is also a lot better than the original conversion to grayscale. While I am getting better with the On One software, I still can't figure out how to save steps to show the process. I started off with the "Paparazzi" preset, which is even funnier than its name. These presets, unlike Instagram filters, are just a starting point, because all the changes are revealed in the usual sliders, and you can change them and reduce the settings to your heart's content, which is usually a very good thing. "Paparazzi" applied a red filter, darkening the blues, but less so than my usual choices like "Machinist" or "Ansel in the Valley". Don't ask. In any case I added four more filters to varying degrees. Dynamic Contrast is a very good algorithm that just heightens mid-tone contrast while leaving everything else alone. The "Sunshine" filter adds a little glow of missing Portland sunshine to the scene. Sharpening and Vignette supply the finishing touches. A very important control that On One adds to its software is that you can select which parts of the photo will be affected by these filters with tools that can work much faster and more exactly than any brush you might wield yourself. The 'luminosity' control allowed me to use these filters just on the darkest portions of the image, so that the sky and the river were not affected at all. Controls like these allow for much more control in the digital darkroom, without that bitter chemical aftertaste.
I hope that you have enjoyed seeing how this photographer "makes" a photograph as well as "takes" a shot. It might not be important considering the news of the day, but we must do our best to at least keep us sane in this crazy world.
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FEBRUARY 25, 2022
CHRYSLER SPIRE : FINAL B&W VERSION
This week we return to New York in 2011, when Fran and I visited to plan Benjamin and Margaret's wedding. Through the power of the photographic archive, we can return to a simpler time, when people still crowded the subways, and Donald Trump was just an asshole local developer. Most of the images featured in this essay have never had a second glance since I captured them eleven years ago; it's a tribute to the opportunity that awaits you when you return to your archives. It's not like your original selects were not your best, but that your editing and post-processing skills have now allowed you to see the possibilities in images that you originally ignored because they weren't your "best."
THE BAT SIGNAL GONE AWRY : FINAL VERSION
Take these two images. I love the Chrysler Building more than any other skyscraper, and I am not alone in this sentiment. This image only began to sing to me after I cropped and straightened it in a deliberate manner that had nothing to do with the original capture. The power of monochrome is that the image looks a lot more realistic with a black sky than it does with a "real" blue one. The Empire State image shows the power of having to be there on a certain day at certain time, when some random contrails seemed to have marked a certain point in the sky. You wouldn't believe it if you didn't get to see it.
ST. PATRICK'S DAY #1 : FINAL VERSION
It happened to be St.Patrick's day, so you get a rare action shot by yours truly of a rare coed bagpiper squad. This was one of my few parade shots that came out at all; most of the rest of the day was spent trying to avoid the worst displays of drunken louts since I braved a soccer match in London in 1975. This parade featured a controversy over blessings at St. Patrick's, and of course my future daughter-in-law had something to say about it.
GOOD TROUBLE ON FIFTH AVENUE : FINAL VERSION
THE IRISH BRIGADE ON THE MARCH : FINAL VERSION
The Irish Brigade from the Civil War also made an appearance to honor their service for the Union.
EXCESS AT EATALY : FINAL VERSION
Public drunkenness was not the only addictive behavior on display - we also took in lunch at the newly opened celebration of all things Italian, which included this minor display of Parmigiano, which might constitute the entire supply available in most American cities. Again, this is before we had to deal with Batali's indiscretions. A simpler time.
GRAND CENTRAL #1 : FINAL VERSION
GRAND CENTRAL #2 : FINAL VERSION
WAITING FOR THE 11:52 : FINAL VERSION
A New Yorker has a special relationship to the city's landmarks, especially after a lifetime away. There is no need for "the shot", since you have not only seen it duplicated thousands of times, but you have it implanted in your brain even if it was taken before your existence as a New Yorker. As Fran frequently reminds me, I never had to wait for "next year" because I hadn't yet been born. So our brief visit to Grand Central yielded these three snippets; only the last image has been seen since 2011.
PATIENCE : FINAL VERSION
I have shown a square. black and white version of this guardian of the Main Library before, but I now find this full-length "tourist " version a more surrealist take on its appearance on Fifth Avenue. It just belongs there among the stores, offices, and apartments that are just as out-of-this world as the statue.
A VERY PERSONAL CENTRAL PARK : FINAL VERSION
Now some landmarks are so personal as to defy translation. I have always been fascinated by the granite outcroppings in Central Park, perhaps the only "natural" things in that very contrived natural landscape. How many other places offer a potentially dangerous rock scramble within site of skyscrapers? There are only two more personal shots I can think of, and am almost sure I don't have, the view through the front subway car, which I am told is no longer available. The other is a detail of the steel-trimmed stairs encountered upon entering the subway; this tells me more than anything else than I am back in New York, and I better pick up the pace if this "corn boy" is to avoid being swept away in a tidal wave of urban angst.
MADISON SQUARE DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
I always thought it was so helpful to be able to know the time even if your watch was a little inaccurate, and it seemed to connote a certain sense of adult responsibility if a company was willing to stand behind their clock. I only recently realized that I was old enough to remember the "Old Garden" even though it wasn't actually at Madison Square either. The name "Boom Boom Geoffrion" somehow appeared in my brain, and it took a trip to the Google to confirm to Fran that she shouldn't yet make a reservation for me at the Memory facility on Division Street. Of course the fact that she soon cited "Rod Gilbert" was no cause for worry.
FLAT IRON WITH LAMP POST : FINAL VERSION
FLAT IRON DETAIL : FINAL COLOR VERSION
Here are two of my out-takes of the Flat Iron Building, which might be the most photographed building in New York, if not the world. In fact, one of favorite photo books ever is one coffee table volume which just contains images of the Flat Iron throughout the history of the history of the photographic medium itself. It's hard to find fault with my modest efforts if your competition includes Alfred Stieglitz in 1904. I especially like my black and white version of the side of the building, which of course is in color. The clouds have created a beautiful pattern which is enlivening the stone facade and its oh so subtle bay windows. It's only when you see the real black and white version that you appreciate the colors.
FLAT IRON DETAIL : FINAL B&W VERSION
PROUD PARENTS : FINAL VERSION
I would be remiss to leave out the other reason we were in town, to see the premiere of the Box Colony's one-and-only production on Broadway. To say that Fran and I were walking on air a few stories higher than the pavement as we sauntered down 45th Street past Daniel Radcliffe in one theater and Benjamin and Margaret's production a few buildings down was an understatement.
So I hope you enjoyed a walk in Manhattan with me eleven years ago. It pays to revisit some of the old photos you rejected many years ago, because some of them are in fact keepers. Every image can't be the "best" you took that day, but it can still be yours.
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FEBRUARY 18, 2022
OMSI SIGN : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to discuss the various reasons, or excuses, depending on my mood, that propel artists like myself to pursue our calling. The Market is about to start again and I have been thinking about my justification for getting up so early on Saturday mornings to sit under a bridge and try to sell my art. I admit that "Why We Fight", which I have taken from a famous documentary (propaganda?) film made by Frank Capra during WWII, might be a little too serious for this question. Yet historians have tried to explain why men are willing to fight, or to make art, since war and art began. In the end it seems to come down to be based not on politics, or ideology, or greed, or lust, but on the simple idea of not letting the guy next to you down under fire. Artists also have several motivations - money, prestige, fame, or just love of craft - but it often comes down to a simple desire for self-expression that can overcome every obstacle along the way.
OMSI SIGN : FINAL B&W VERSION
I think I've struggled with four questions about my art since I decided that for better or worse I was an artist about a dozen years ago. Lately i have begun to decide that discovery and self-expression are the best explanations I can come up with for pursuing my photography, since most of the other answers seem to lead to various forms of frustration. In this spirit I am going to contrast color and black and white versions of some of my images in this essay, as I try to illustrate the delights of discovery that can play a part in your artistic expression. I have related before how I've been creating an alter ego on the website 500 Pixels, where it seems that my avatar has never even contemplated taking a color photo. It has been interesting to see how I have been accepted by photographers around the world who find this perfectly understandable. At this point I am rapidly running out of photographs in my archives that I can convert into credible black and white images, or at least I had thought I had. But I have found that some images that I had long thought that couldn't possible work in monochrome defy my expectations. Now you can judge whether you think they still work better in color, and that's okay, but my point is that I didn't think a black and white conversion would work at all. The discovery that I was absolutely wrong has provided me with a lot of pleasure these last few months.
EAGLE CREEK MOSS - FINAL COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
The fact that I have a lot of affinity for these two black and white versions is not related at all to questions of art versus commerce. After a dozen years of banging my head against the wall I have absolutely no doubt which version has any chance at all of selling no matter what I think - and it doesn't really make a difference that the color versions aren't exactly ringing up sales either. I have finally come to realize that my art has a small but devoted following, and that some images work well at different scales, and in different forms, and it makes so little sense that "marketing" is even crazier than I have always believed. While I have been more successful than most artists can even dream about, actually selling my art has always seemed a delightful accident more than anything else. So as commerce has grown even more mysterious, I am finally going to use any commercial success as an excuse to just do what I want to as I pursue artistic discoveries of my own.
ST.JOHNS BRIDGE : FINAL COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
While I will insist to my dying day that my silhouette has elevated what is at best just a well composed snapshot into something else entirely, I no longer feel any regret in selling much more to said snapshot.
STUMPTOWN EVENINGS & STUMPTOWN NAKED CITY : FINAL VERSIONS
Here the conversion to monochrome has completely transformed the image - it seems to be two different cities, and I know which one I don't want to break down in.
So if business is as problematic as my fair city's current reputation on Fox News, that puts me back in the hobby category where any self-respecting pensioner wants to be. It is a lot more settling in not worrying how I will make this week's rent and instead contemplating which image to print next. While I am not so calm as to agree with the famous street photographer Gary Winogrand who declared that "he captured images to see what they would look like as a photograph", it certainly seems to make sense to explore without worrying about commercial possibilities at all. And somehow it seems less crazy to go across town, as I did yesterday, to spend another $180 on three ink cartridges (my printer has twelve different colors) in spending on my "hobby" instead of racking up yet more business expenses.
FREMONT 4 : FINAL COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
In the end an artist, like anyone else, just has to enjoy the process and not worry about anything else, within reason. I have to enjoy myself, both in creating my art and trying to sell it. It pays to have a good woman who lets me be myself; Fran has even declared that she looks forward to missing me on Saturdays after working beside me for two years at home. So here's to the next phase in our continuing Covid struggle - please stay healthy and discover how to pursue your art, whatever it may be.
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KAUAI BLUE : FINAL VERSION
Since Fran and I did not get to travel to Hawaii this year, I thought I would take you all on a virtual vacation that I took this week through the archival files of our three trips to the Islands since 2015. I hope in doing so that I can encourage you to also take a virtual return trip to some vacation spot - you will enjoy some memories and I believe that you will find some images that you formerly overlooked. I frequently find that my initial edit of images from past trips has been a little too severe - there were a number of images, especially after some post-processing, that deserved another look.
LONE TREE, BIG ISLAND : FINAL VERSION
At one point in January I think at least half a dozen people we knew were traveling in Hawaii,and that doesn't even include our friend Miriam who moved there a few years ago. But when I found a few hundred photos that I had "lost" in my frequent explorations of what I call "The Missing" in my archives, I went on my own virtual trip, where I rediscovered some worthy images.
BLACK SAND BEACH : FINAL VERSION
NEIGHBORHOOD VOLCANO : FINAL VERSION
BIG ISLAND INVERSION : FINAL VERSION
JUNGLE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
These first six images already were part of my Hawaiian portfolio. It's not that I want to replace any of them, but that I found some more images that I had overlooked. Sometimes an image only reveals itself years after a trip.
KAUAI GREEN : FINAL VERSION
Upon reflection, this image seemed to exemplify Kauai as much as my seaside image, Kauai Blue. Just like that image, the colors were not enhanced, and in fact I almost de-saturated them since they seemed unnatural in their natural state. In this image, the correct white balance actually increased the intensity of the green forest - my camera had initially felt that no forest could actually be that green. In Kauai I often got the feeling that no matter how wild a place Fran and I got to, the surrounding vista had rarely seen a human at all.
DR. SEUSS SILHOUETTE : FINAL VERSION
This image immediatly jumped out at me when I looked through my archives, because I love a good silhouette much more than the next guy. This tree on a cliff looking down from the Napali Coast Trail seemed to symbolize the Island's unusual vegetation. My post-processing efforts improved the image in my humble opinion, by deepening the blacks to emphasize the silhouette, and by eliminating some vegetative "distractions" on the left side of the image.
RARE SHOT OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER : FINAL VERSION
FRAN GAMELY TACKLES THE NAPALI COAST TRAIL : FINAL VERSION
The two participants in our travels. This was just the start of the trail, before the right side dissolved into a drop of hundreds of feet to the sea. Fran was smart enough to bring her walking sticks, while I was smart enough to insist that she did not have speed up or leave the comfort of the uphill cliff face so that young whippersnappers could pass us on the trail.
NAPALI COAST TRAIL :FINAL VERSION
NAPALI COAST TRAIL : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
One of the best hikes in the United States. This was our turn-around-point, about a half-mile in on an initial dozen-mile leg of the trail. It was more than enough, since it's mostly downhill from here, there's nowhere to stay, and once you get to the very dangerous beach down there, you must hike back a dozen miles uphill. I heartily recommend this hike, as long as it hasn't rained for a few days before you head out; recent rain would make it very dangerous. Color or black and white is a matter of taste.
LATE AFTERNOON IN HANALEI : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
In this case I thought that the monochrome version was much more dramatic, emphasized the silhouette, and elevated the image above the typical postcard. Hawaiian skies are more interesting than the clear blue skies of the stereotype.
JUST AN ORDINARY TRAIL-SIDE SCENE : FINAL VERSION
One of the things I love about Hawaii is that scenes you might think only a gardener could create are just natural occurrences along the trail. Sometimes it seems that it is harder to kill something than to grow it.
STUDY IN BLUE AND YELLOW : FINAL VERSION
Just because I'm in Hawaii doesn't mean I have to ignore details that while they don't scream "Hawaii" do demand my attention.
VOLCANIC PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
While I tried to create even larger panoramas of the latest lava field after our last trip to the Big Island in 2018, this small detail seemed to exemplify the destruction of a suburban subdivision more than my larger efforts. When I returned to my archives, I was even more impressed by this less "arty" shot. By the way, my horizon is not slanted, because my friends, the humans added for scale, are standing up straight.
LAVA FLOW : FINAL VERSION
This lava flow to the ocean was about half a mile wide and seven miles long.
THE WAVE : FINAL VERSION
I thought I would end this essay with another image that seems to yell "Hawaii" without attaching itself to any particular spot in the islands. I don't even remember where it was taken, but I sure was having a great time.
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FEBRUARY 4, 2022
MT. HOOD ON THE COLUMBIA : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to discuss the opportunities that await when you take a walk in a location where the photographic possibilities are less than stellar. Ordinarily new locations will engender creativity by their intrinsic novelty. Some places almost defy you to take a "bad" shot, resulting in an embarrassment of riches. There a photographer is faced with the problem of the tyranny of choice, with the result that when we are reviewing our images later we realize that had we taken just a little more time it would have allowed us to improve a particular image. But what do you do when you arrive at a location and realize that there is not that much to photograph?
MT. HOOD ON THE COLUMBIA : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
Are we getting farther from a snapshot with black and white or am I just fooling myself?
MT HOOD WITH GEESE : FINAL VERSION
My answer is to fall back on what I am ordinarily interested in, and try to create an image that appeals to me, even if it hasn't much to do with the location itself. Of course you can take the few obvious shots, but I believe your best success comes when you concede defeat by the location and just see what you can find despite the apparent banality around you. This also is a good strategy when you discover that the location has some possibilities, but that you lack the equipment or the experience to take advantage of it - you didn't bring the wide angle or the telephoto lens, or maybe you have very little experience in wildlife or sports photography.
Having watched some incredible football over the last few weeks, I'll try a football analogy. The best coaches are adept at taking what the opposition is willing to give them instead of banging their heads against the wall. On the other hand, they also do not abandon the tactics or players that "brought them to the dance." So when you are confronted by a less than stimulating location, rather than just putting your camera away, try to both experiment and fall back on your visual strengths, to take what the location has to offer and to create imagery that is not location dependent. By distilling your vision, by concentrating on your particular way of "seeing", I feel that you can create images out of thin air - let others worry about "what or where it is."
MT. ST. HELENS OVER VANCOUVER LAKE : FINAL VERSION
Right now I'm thinking that my readers are thinking that Rich is more delusional than usual - I'm showing you images of glorious mountains and complaining about a location. These images were captured on one of the few nice days we had in January, when I walked along the Columbia near Vancouver, Washington. The park was pleasant enough, the weather was wonderful, the birds were abundant, but in general I was having a rough time finding something to shoot. Part of this was the casual response I might have to what visitors would find extraordinary. I'm not saying that the mountains aren't beautiful, but that after thirty years of capturing Mt. Hood sometimes it can be hard to find something new to say. So familiarity can be part of the problem at a location others might find very stimulating. So sometimes take what you can get. Are these the best images I have ever taken of Mt. Hood? No. But are they mildly interesting? I tried to use the river's reflections and the flight of geese to generate something new. Someone might think of these images as "studies", reminders to come back sometime at a better time or with different equipment. If I was a "proper landscape photographer" I might return to the river at dawn to capture a better reflection, or rent a very long lens to capture the geese larger above the mountain. And my very aggressive panorama cropping also makes these images more than a casual snapshot. But come on, how many photos of Mt. Hood can you take? Even a Mt. St. Helens portrait, from such a far distance, is mostly useful to scare Easterners when they realize that lump was once far more pointy than Mt. Hood.
DID SOMEONE HEAR A SHOT? : FINAL VERSION
Another problem I had with this location was the very thing that attracted most of the visitors - the birds. I like birds as much as the proverbial next guy, but I have long realized that nice bird images require a lens at least of the 400mm length. My 200mm zoom will not suffice, and it actually pains me to see people taking birds in flight with their phones, although i know it shouldn't. Here I tried to compensate with a long distance look at the reaction of ducks across the river in Oregon when some hunters intruded on their lunch. No one has to know that I actually miss-timed the shot -there were at least twice as many ducks a moment before. A tight crop removed most of the sky and the sun behind my well-placed Oak.
THE SENTINEL : FINAL VERSION
This image shows how I finally achieved one good shot after many meaningless snaps of a large flock of geese in a field nearby. The first solution was to get closer, to cross the road and get right up to the gate about twenty yards away. 200mm would now suffice, with a lot of cropping. I finally got somewhere when I crouched as low as my knees would allow, which put me down to geese level. Just like portraits of children, it pays to get the camera down to their eye level to appreciate their view of the world. I took the image when I realized that one goose had been volunteered for guard duty while his comrades pecked at the grass.
BOLLARDS : FINAL VERSION
Like I said, take what you can get, especially if it falls within your comfort zone. If my specialty is noticing things that others might not, for better or worse, then why stop when you are on a walk across the river? Who cares if this "says nothing" about this park, or Vancouver, or my feelings about the state of the world? It just excited me to see perhaps my first shadows of the year. Remember, just because you might thrill at mountains, a resident of Portland might just get giddy at a shadow. I also wondered about how so dangerous cyclists could be that would require such a phalanx of bollards to protect the adjacent field from harm.
WHO'S GOT NEXT? - FINAL VERSION
This was my best image of the day, in my opinion, which might mean nothing to you. I was attracted to this slightly surreal scene of a beach volleyball tournament venue ready for action at least four months before anyone in the Pacific Northwest would conceivably desire a chance to play. My telephoto lens only increased the absurdity by reducing the distance between objects in the scene. It looks like it would be impossible to play on these courts, just like photographers make New York streets appear to be crowded by millions instead of mere thousands of pedestrians. I also enjoyed the photogenic net borders, and the way the very white poles contrasted with the dull sand. The panoramic crop also seemed to fit with the subject. If this image is about anything, it's about the nets, so who cares about the sky, or the trees, the river or the sand?
WHO'S GOT NEXT? : ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
Photographers must learn to judge their own images without concerns about how much trouble they took to get the image - most viewers certainly don't care, especially when it comes to post-processing. Some people still feel it's at least cheating, but I feel that it is my art, and while I still have not replaced a sky, I have gotten more liberal about "distractions." At least at this scale of enlargement, software can enable the disappearance of distractions like monkey bars or cargo ships that do not contribute to the subject of the image. Of course, some might feel that these distractions aren't really that important, but it is my image. What you don't know can't hurt you, right?
WHO'S GOT NEXT? : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
I did my best to convert this image to black and white, but I couldn't achieve the impact of the pink nets. I used the On One preset that is somehow called "Machinist" for some reason, that rendered the pink as the lightest shade of grey than any of the other poetic presets available in the program. I'm getting more comfortable with this program for two reasons. I have realized that while it's effects might seem ridiculous at first glance, all it takes is to just lower the opacity to a more reasonable level below 50%. I have also finally discovered a book on the software, which allows me to use my best learning method. I'm still learning to cope with the fact that it is an "e-book", but I have begun to reconcile with the Twenty-first Century. After all, I doubt that many of you are printing-out my musings, and I am grateful for my "readership", no matter how you receive my essays. Thank you.
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JANUARY 28, 2022
I've been spending a lot of time in the archives lately because I've been having fun there, but I must admit that the alternative of actually going outside and taking photographs has been forestalled by the weather and the mood of the city. Downtown Portland, my usual subject, while not the urban dystopia as it is portrayed on Fox News, has lost a lot of luster across the course of the pandemic. I don't need to get angrier at my city's leadership, or lack thereof, by walking through Downtown these days. In any case, I can't remember a longer run of depressing weather in a long time. Nothing dramatic, and no snow or ice, but a windy, dark, and rainy 42 degrees in Portland doesn't propel any journeys outside longer than picking the newspaper off the porch.
So the first really nice day all of this young year prompted me to get out and create some images. It was so nice to be out in the sun that I ignored the fact that it was pretty cold out, a rare case of sunny, cold, and dry "Football Weather" that doesn't quite seem natural in our fair city. The blue skies in some of these images, while out of character, were not created in post-processing.
I chose to take my walk through a neighborhood about a mile from my house, a dozen square blocks of American Urban Paradise named Ladd's Addition. Ladd's is one of those neighborhoods in Portland that renders suburbia even more absurd than it usually is. I would challenge any metropolitan resident in America to find a real reason they wouldn't gladly move into Ladd's tomorrow. An historic district, Ladd's was created as an early suburban development near the turn of the Twentieth Century across the Willamette, a half mile from Downtown. Portland Mayor William Ladd platted out the neighborhood from family farmland in 1891. While it took longer to "build out" than the Ladd family probably hoped, by the the 1930's the former farmland was a thriving community. Developers moved on eastward in Multnomah County, but rarely if ever achieved a neighborhood as nice as Ladd's Addition.
These images show some of the character of Ladd's Addition. The first is a detail of the central Circle in the neighborhood. I chatted there with a Chinese woman who had moved with her husband to America only two months ago and somehow found herself in the neighborhood. The trellis and front door are typical of the details found on speculative houses for working families back in the day. The two towers on the apartment building, built only as a "gift to the street", would not be allowed by today's zoning rules for violating height restrictions.
While the housing stock is nice, their are grander houses, better small apartment buildings, and I daresay even nicer Bungalows elsewhere in the city. Ladd's strength is the urban design of the neighborhood itself, with an attention to detail and amenities that puts other neighborhoods, even "richer" ones to shame. Other nice neighborhoods contain or border beautiful parks - Ladd's Addition is in many ways its own park. In some ways it is an urban American version of Venice; you will wander, get absolutely lost, and not care a whit.
These are two views of a larger civic building on one of the four Rose Gardens in the neighborhood. It was probably once a church, now a club of some kind. While it resembles a contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie House, it's all one big room, so it is not residential.
Architects who peruse a city map pride themselves on their ability to "read" a city, finding a city's soul in the street grid, the path of the river, or the location of highways and parks. A map can frequently reveal truths about an urban area before you even view a photograph of the city, much less walk the streets. I am no exception, and when I took a look at the street map of Portland and hoped to find an apartment, I concluded that Ladd's Addition was either one of Portland's best neighborhoods or yet another blighted urban renewal district. On the map it resembled nothing more than an arbitrary and desperate dislocation of the ordinary street grid that surrounded it. This New Yorker feared that it was another "project" that was divorced from the city.
This is a window on another large scale building which seems to now be a residence.
These were my prejudices, so I was blown away when I met the real place. Yes, the streets were suddenly all diagonals, and you were destined to get lost in the car or on foot, but the only thing that separated it from its surroundings in Southeast Portland was the immediate uptick in the urban experience once you passed into the un-gated community. It was the streets themselves, not the houses, or the lawns, or the fancy cars, that caught my eye. These diagonal streets led to a central park roundabout, but the grid also included not one, but four (!) single block rose gardens. The angled street grid led to many unusual lots, which led to architectural solutions far beyond the ordinary 50 foot wide by 100 foot deep Portland lot size. I walked on and on before I realized that one of the reasons these street seemed so damn pleasant was not due to the century old trees, or to the architects that proceeded me, but to the absence of curb cuts. Their were no driveways to break up the streetscape! Ladd's Addition is one of the few neighborhoods in Portland that contains a system of alleys that parallel those diagonal streets. Even the most modest bungalow will back on to an alley, which allowed for the new-fangled automobiles to either be parked in front or back, but not to carve up the lots. Both the mansion and the bungalow will have a proper front garden, and a path for humans to the front door. Amazing!
A modest apartment building of quality, whose right angles really show off the shadows created by an unusually sunny day.
So Ladd's Addition was really a triumph of urban design. The design quality even increased in the details. The major streets were bordered by street strips of planting that measured 8 feet, twice as wide as the strip in front of my house. Thus those gigantic trees move less of the sidewalks than they do in most neighborhoods, which saves homeowners lots of cash, since we must maintain the sidewalks broken up by the trees required to be planted in the strips which are actually city property. The preponderance of architecture from the early Twentieth Century, whether mansions, bungalows or apartments, insures a certain level of quality and detailing that is missing from Postwar housing much less than the crap built today. As an architect, I was inducted into the "Ladd's Rules" when I put an addition on a house in the neighborhood; not only were there quality rules for windows, siding, etc., but anything viewable from the street had to relate to the historic fabric of the neighborhood. It was shocking to me that the planner could tell the architect that my addition would never have been allowed if I had exceeded the roof ridge of the original house, despite no written rules to that effect. When he demanded an additional small window to "balance" the facade, I could only laugh since I have never met a window I didn't like. His insistence overcame my client's resistance to a window in her new shower.
The "Missing Middle" in action. Somehow the quality of a one-story duplex allows it to coexist with a Four Square three times as big and probably twice as expensive as both of the units in total.
The neighborhood also benefits from its moment in time. While Jews and Blacks were not allowed, the times also resisted the idea of large scale development, even of single-family homes. Thus pretty much every house was designed by a different architect, or at least in a different style. Thus the streetscape is a collection of very different houses, even if they are mostly from the same era. More important than style is the fact that the individuality of the homes extends to their very size and market themselves. On the same block there will be three-and-a-half story mansions sited next to one-story bungalows, some smaller than my own 1200 square foot home. This kind of housing designed for very different social classes at very different prices would never be allowed in today's market. When socialists like me advocate this type of mix, even in an affordable development, we are shouted down as hopelessly naive. Yet Ladd's has allowed for different price points since the beginning, and now the racist exclusions are now gone. This inclusionary idea extends even to the presence of what Portlanders call duplexes and small apartment buildings in the neighborhood, right next to similar-sized single family housing. This is the "Missing Middle" that has become the flavor of the month in planning circles which consider single family homes as somewhat fascist at best. The concept works in Ladd's because of the quality of these projects, which I have no doubt would never fly in today's America. Why would a developer put any effort into a small house when he could make much more money building a large one? The "Missing Middle" works so well here because for the most part it is just as attractive as the neighboring single family houses, just smaller and attached. If developers would build to these standards today, I couldn't see any arguments against density beyond parking. The trouble is that you could drag the typical developer to Ladd's, show him the duplex, and he would refuse to build it today, just like they refuse to build my bungalow, even though every young couple in Portland would literally kill me and my wife to get ours if they thought they could get away with it.
Yes, it's just a front stoop. But a curved front stoop leading to a porch on a small duplex? If you don't think this is important, think of today's typical shoddy wooden stair leading up to no porch on a comparable small house that the middle class can't afford.
The downsize of all this quality is that it comes at a price. Fran and I could only dream of Ladd's Addition in 1993. We finally found our bungalow in a working class neighborhood one mile to the east. I can map the gentrification of Portland by which neighborhoods young architects could afford over the decades. We "missed out" on Ladd's by 1993; we probably could have afforded it a few years before. Now our bungalow is one of the lowest valued houses in my neighborhood at around 600K; if it was transported to Ladd's Addition it would probably fetch 800K. Thus Ladd's is obviously not affordable, unless you think bungalows at 800K are more affordable than larger houses at 1.3 million. The benefit of a historical neighborhood is that the neighborhood is protected from demolition much more than my neighborhood. A single-family house will not be replaced by an out-of-scale duplex, each half costing multiples of the original. Rant over!
If you can't get a tattoo, at least you can smile. I don't know what the billboard is selling, but I liked the shadow of the cross that is now part of the advertisement.
January! Why not?
That branch probably died way before I was born.
Ladd's Addition is still part of Portland, so my walk included a few amusing signs, engaging tree trunks, and flowers in January. The unexpected is to be appreciated and sort of counted on in a strange way. It is impossible to convey the cacophony of a murder of crows on Elliott Avenue. Let's just say that if you live on that street you better like "caw" in a multitude of accents. There were literally hundreds of crows ensconsed on each block, and since I am not a nature photographer these two examples were the best I could do in the cold. I missed the one time they all flew at once, since they don't seem to be afraid of much of anything. Three passersby referenced a certain Hitchcock film.
Ladd's Addition is just beautiful, and I heartily recommend that you Google it to get some overall photos of the neighborhood to give you a sense of the ambience. I am an artist, so my images reflect my own concerns and my tendency to focus on details. I would encourage you to shoot what you love, even while wandering in a different neighborhood. These images reflect one person's experience of one nice day walking in the cold in one of the nicest neighborhood in America.
NEVERMORE : FINAL B&W VERSION
Now that's the mood I was looking for!
]]>JANUARY 21, 2022
STANFORD ARCADE : ORIGINAL SNAP
This week I'd like to briefly explore the possibilities that are revealed when you look back to your archives to find images that you captured long ago and for some unknown reason never bothered to care about enough to see if they warranted post processing. Last year I finally acquired a scanner that allows me to convert my old prints and negatives into digital files. Thus I can rescue them from the purgatory of the one-hour photo processor. I will exhibit three different images that I believe I have rescued from the shoe box graveyard. I have utilized the On One software I have explored in my last two essays. While I could just have easily used Lightroom, I have been practicing with On One to improve my skills. I still have to discover a way to show you each stage of my editing process in On One, which seems to lack the "history" function of Lightroom, but I have done the workarounds required to at least show the original scan, the color On One version, and the black and white conversion. I will describe the various steps in the On One process; there is no guarantee that you will like one version better than the other, but at least I hope that you find something in these images to justify their rescue from the archives.
STANFORD ARCADE : FINAL ON ONE COLOR VERSION
This first image is of a loggia on the campus of The Stanford University, taken on a field trip with Benjamin to check out his prospective college prospects two decades ago. While my son had little chance of admittance at Stanford, I thought it was worth it to show him what a large campus felt like. We were both blown away by Stanford's size and beauty, and how unsuited it seemed for my son. Stanford was designed in the early twentieth century to both mimic European models and to show that culture had arrived in California. It's recent expansion signals the absolute dominance of nearby Silicon Valley; we had to sit down and stare at the entire newly-built Science Quad endowed by Gates, Packard, Google et al. This image is of a part of the earlier main campus, designed to evoke medieval precedents of the Spanish persuasion, as if the Conquistadors had decided to endow a college while they were subjugating the natives. I enjoyed the one-point perspective of the colonnade, and the harsh shadows of the Californian sun. The original image was good enough that I wondered why I had ignored it at the time, but Post processing allowed for several subtle improvements.
I opened up the shadows a bit to allow for some more detail in the wooden ceiling, while also deepening the blacks to highlight the loggia shadows on the floor. The usual sharpening algorithms revealed more details in the columns. On One contributed its "Glow" effect, which is part of its "Sunshine" preset. This raises the white point, lightening the highlights present in the sun/shade contrast without effecting the shadows. The glow slider adds a bit of halos around the edge of the shadows, like an overflow of intense sunlight. While I enjoyed these effects, the important thing to remember is to reduce their initial power by reducing the opacity of these extra adjustment layers. What you see in my On One color version is only a subtle effect, no more than 50% of the original. If you don't reduce On One's adjustments your image will look a little garish. It is a very good strategy to work on an image, take a break, and then return - I find that I will inevitably reduce the post processing a little further. You get used to things while you work on them, only to be "shocked" when you return. If the viewer is too aware of your techniques, you've probably gone too far. This is why black and white can be much more fun, since the viewer seems to accept more manipulation after the initial abstraction of black and white.
STANFORD ARCADE : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
I personally find this much more satisfying. Black and white reveals much more detail in both the columns and the ceiling. Yet it revels in the real subject of the image - the contrast between sunlight and shade. The shadows are better delineated even while the glow filter makes the sun in the courtyard seem as oppressive as it was that day. The glow spillover actually reveals the subtle pattern of the floor tiles for the first time.
MT. ST. HELENS IN WINTER : ORIGINAL SNAP
This image of Mt. St. Helens jumped out of the archives as a rare, at least for me, winter view which I had forgotten about. I could not remember that day at all. The image didn't need much post processing; I increased both the blacks and white points to increase the contrast, and applied a one-stop exposure reduction in the sky. I will understand if these seem very subtle.
MT. ST. HELENS IN WINTER : FINAL ON ONE COLOR AND B&W VERSIONS
Again, your reactions might differ from mine. I can live without the brown tones in the valley, in exchange for the raw detail revealed in the black and white. The shadows on the mountain also seem to be emphasized in the black and white version.
WASHINGTON : ORIGINAL SNAP
Several years ago I took this shot at the Reflecting Pool on some no doubt too hot summer day. It shows the juxtaposition of the Washington Memorial and the Capital, which reveals the off-axis placement of the memorial. Washingtonians will also realize that I must be on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, since the higher viewpoint shows more of the Capital in the heat haze than the dome, which would be the only portion seen if I had been on the ground. The post processing tools available in On One allow me to remove all of the distractions present on the Mall, such as the temporary fences. I left the people for scale, but also removed the ducks, which at this scale appear as sensor dust. I even lopped off the tree-top in the distance, which seemed to be ruining the shape of the trees. Distraction is in the eye of the beholder.
WASHINGTON : FINAL ON ONE COLOR VERSION
All gone, at least at this scale. I've learned to work at the real 100% image size to make sure that it still looks good if you print it at larger sizes. I think you will agree that a little clean up has not distorted the image. De-haze controls have also brought back some detail to the distant dome, which is more than a hot mile from my location.
WASHINGTON : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
What can I say? Emotionally, black and white seems more serious to me, more "Meet the Press" if you will. I also feel younger, because the image seems older, or something like that. It's been said that images that are older than fifty-years-old are inherently more interesting, so even though this image is not fifty years old, who cares? You can even pick out the masonry on the monument, and the shift in color of the masonry one third of the way up is more apparent in black and white than in color!
These three images are not earth shattering, but they are not bad either. I hope you have seen that you too could resurrect some memories of your analog past into the digital age. Finally, I would like to kvell in the appearance of our house, which at the age of 111 years finally received what we think might have been only its fourth paint job. In any case, your government's largess allowed Fran and I to finally repaint the house. It was an adventure, but we are very pleased. Our painter was exactly what we deserved, absolutely meticulous but the worst businessman that I have ever met, outdistancing even myself in that department. What should have been maybe a one-month job at most turned into at least four, and finally one of his friends had to come to the rescue to finish the job. On the other hand, he did a better job at less than half the price of any sane painter in Portland. And he had to deal with us too - I've dealt with our unique color-picking in an essay last year. If you reopen the blog you will see that the color comes from one of my most popular images, "Go By Train." This vibrant red-orange now adorns our house, and we are so glad that we resisted the Portland greys, blues, and tans that define our neighborhood. It is so different that most of our friends can't even find our house, which I for one don't understand at all. We now live in the Orange house in the middle of the block, and we love it.
1993 : We have just moved in, and I have proudly placed a Betsy Ross flag on the house on July 4th to honor our roots "back East." It was stolen the next day. Twenty-nine years later the house still needed the paint job it needed when we bought it.
Red/Orange with a Yellow Gable and Trim, a Black porch, and "religious" stark-White trim on the porch and windows. Fran knew that she could have any window trim she wanted as long as it was White, since that's about the only commandment that her heathan husband actually believes in.
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET!
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JANUARY 14, 2022
BAMBURGH BEACH : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to continue my discussion of my attempts to come to terms with a new piece of software to use to process my photos. Once again, I understand that many of you do not use any of these software techniques, but that this discussion can have broader implications on the topic of learning anything new, irregardless of the subject. My struggles with "Lightroom" and "On One" could mirror your attempts at learning a new language, mastering a sport, or doing your taxes. Remember, you don't have to necessarily like these black and white conversions better than the color originals. And just because On One is a Portland company doesn't mean you or I should give them my money, or even yours.
BAMBURGH BEACH : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
The first point I'd like to make is that taking on a new learning curve doesn't necessarily mean that your old way of doing things was irretrievably flawed. I have my problems with Lightroom, but have largely mastered the program, at least to my level of required competence. I feel confidant that I can process my photos with enough control that I can do anything I need to do within Lightroom's limits. I am just trying to learn to use On One to see if it had certain advantages to Lightroom, in the spirit that It's sitting on my hard drive, and I might as well learn it. I think that both programs are very useful and could be the answer to your prayers; you can try both, as well as most other software, with free trials.
HECETA HEAD BEACH PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
My main problem with Lightroom has been one of its major strengths, organizing my archive of images. This is almost totally my fault. Lightroom functions in a way similar to iTunes, in that it catalogues your images, or songs, without touching the original photos on your hard drive. Thus your Lightroom catalogue only refers to the photos on your hard drive. You must make sure to keep your catalogue healthy (don't ask about the many ways it can get sick) as well as understanding that the original photo files should be backed up and disturbed as little as possible. The analogy is to the old card catalog in the library, which shows how ancient this whole thing is. The book might be in the library, but if the little card is missing, you won't know about it unless you go look on the shelves. Lightroom soon falls apart if for some reason you allow the catalogue to lose its tether to the photo file.
HECETA HEAD BEACH PANORAMA : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
Since I am one of the least organized people on this planet, my Lightroom catalog is a total mess. This is compounded by the fact that my original photo files are spread over four external hard drives, one of which is in hospice. I've spent the last month trying to make sure that I haven't lost too many files, and in that effort I have saved some, but probably re-catalogued thousands of files onto Lightroom that I had previously culled! I have listened to most of Lightroom's gurus on how to remedy these problems, to no avail. It has gotten to the point that my latest gambit is to put each of my important photos, let's just say several hundred out of tens of thousands, in their own individual "collection" composed of just that one image. Needless to say, this is is not the way Lightroom is supposed to work, but I pray that it might work for me.
ROSE CITY : FINAL VERSION
ROSE CITY : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
On One tries to solve this problem by not organizing your photos at all. It functions more like a browser, looking at your photos on your various computers and hard drives where ever they are, no matter how "lost" they are. The trouble is that no organization means no organization, and so you are reduced to looking through your whole archive, organized or not, in order to find a photo. The photos are all there, arranged in folders that correspond to the mess of your original photo files on your hard drive. You can organize those original files better, but any attempt to organize On One threatens to bring up all of the problems that plague your Lightroom catalog! Since On One started as a Lightroom plug-in, they didn't have to deal with a catalog, since Lightroom already had one, thank you. When Lightroom went to the subscription model, and photographers went ape in their desire for an alternative, On One tried to incorporate all of the things that Lightroom had formerly been responsible for; the most blatant attempt was to introduce a "switch" button that would supposedly bring your entire Lightroom catalog into On One, intact. I think you can see how this might seem to be a shot in the dark, and risk bringing your Lightroom problems right into On One. Talk about a nightmare!
TANNER SPRINGS 2 : FINAL VERSION
My biggest problem with On One relates to my personal learning style. Everyone has a preferred way of learning things; some of it is individual, some might be related to gender, some to your age. Some like to learn on their own; others through classes. Some can learn from You Tube videos, others from magazines, others from a co-worker. Some learn best by trying things on their own, no matter how badly; others thrive on systematic, organized classroom experiences. I learn best by reading books, and gleaning new knowledge at my own pace. A book allows me to pick and choose, and refer back, and I just find it comfortable. There are literally hundreds of books on Lightroom, and no matter how contradictory or repetitive they are, I can usually learn at least something new about the program from each one. Unfortunately, and I will check with Mr. Google today, I have yet to find a book, no matter how lousy, on On One's software suite. That is the price you pay with trying a relatively new software, which just doesn't have the "ecosystem" of the industry leader. For me, all of the videos in the world are mostly unsatisfying replacements for one good book, and this has set back my personal On One education program.
TANNER SPRINGS 2 : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
This is compounded by my problem with most computer software, which is the ungodly search for "intuitive." I have come to appreciate that it is only intuitive to the idiot that designed the software, but of course that doesn't help in unlocking any secrets. I am flummoxed by most intuitive solutions, which don't even make sense to me after I've learned them. My son Benjamin's learning method, "just try that button", fills me with both the horror of breaking something and my indignation that uninformed speculation is now a learning method. His admonition that "help" is the route to hell doesn't help matters, if you excuse the pun. After overhearing a group of programmers discuss the "human interface", and thinking that was clearly the whole point, I once asked why programs didn't just include step-by-step procedures as available aids. This group of well meaning experts declared that my "geezer button" would obviously be wonderful, but would put them all out of business.
STREETS OF HOPE : FINAL VERSION
STREETS OF HOPE : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
So what have I found to be the strengths of On One as compared to Lightroom, based on my haphazard learning curve? I took at least one of Benjamin's precepts to heart, and resolved to convert all of these black and whites using the On One software and just trying something to see what happened. This experiment in terror yielded very good results, and I now feel somewhat confident in using the program, mostly based on not knowing what I don't know. I do know that it works best for me as a plug-in, because it allows me to continue to use what Lightroom does best while integrating some things that On One clearly does better. And of course I am more comfortable with my tried and true Lightroom solutions, which might change with more On One knowledge. The plug-in solution also allows me to use Lightroom's cropping and printing controls, which seem to me clearly superior to On One. And of course, the plug-in will return the new On One version to Lightroom, instead of leaving me with the sinking feeling that all was lost when I realized that if I started with On One instead of Lightroom, I had to then export the image to my hard drive and then import it into Lightroom myself.
SALT & STRAW : FINAL VERSION
On one has several features that justify its cost on their own. One is the "Magic Eraser", which can eliminate "distractions" in an image, whether sensor dust, errant branches, electrical wires, or Aunt Mildred, literally just like magic. They are just gone. Even if it doesn't work, a second pass will do it. While Photoshop has similar controls, Adobe has never granted them to Lightroom. The "Resize" controls in On One are far superior to Lightroom's ability to enlarge a file way beyond its original size to allow for larger print sizes than the original out-of-camera file can support. While there are still enlargement limits based on the laws of physics, it is remarkable how much larger you can print an image using "Resize's" algorithms. On One allows me to stitch together panoramas out of several shots, which also was not included in my old version of Lightroom. And it also includes the capability to work with Layers, so that you can combine several images into one. I do not usually do this, but it is still the one thing Adobe will not allow into Lightroom.
SALT & STRAW : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
What is interesting about competing software is that of course there is a constant battle of reverse engineering going on, so that new versions will at least attempt to include a new feature based on the competition's previous innovation. Sometimes, like cell phones in the Third World, one can skip an entire level of software innovation. Thus Adobe had to invent a new kind of Layer, "adjustment layers" to handle parts of the same photo; On One went straight to adjustment layers, which I use all the time. These are not really layers, but increasingly sophisticated ways to select just parts of an image to apply with that particular control. On One allows you to portion out an image by color, brightness, or myraid other ways, and apply your changes to just that portion, without resorting to artistically skilled methods requiring "brushing." Specificity of this kind has always been restricted to Photoshop.
MR. JEFFERSON : FINAL VERSION
On One's "effects" filters are similar to Lightroom's presets, but much more sophisticated and also allow for adjustment layers. Both can be used as unthinking shortcuts, but since the sliders actually move, you can see what the poetically named preset has actually done to achieve its effects. This transparency allows you to then tweak the preset to your own ends and taste. Lightroom, seemingly in an effort to provide employment for individual gurus, has steadily included less and less presets, while On One just keeps adding them. On One's can be so all-encompassing that they can seem less transparent than Lightroom's, but eventually you can see exactly what the program has done. In addition to the adjustment layer capability, On One includes a percentage slider for each part of the preset, so that you can tweak it down immediately to your taste.
MR. JEFFERSON : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
And tweak them down you will, since they are all heavy-handed to some degree. But as long as you learn to do that, and to only apply them where you need them in the image, they are very useful. Of course some are just idiotic, but we are artists, so we can avoid those, just like we can ignore their "names." Some are very good indeed, and they are previewed before you apply them. The Black and White conversion controls are more complete than Lightroom's, with many more "chemical" processes included, as well as adding "grain" (from specific film stocks!) if you are so inclined. The "Dynamic Contrast" filter offers another algorithm which combines contrast, de-hazing, clarity, and sharpening into one slider that sometimes works wonders on an image. The "Vignette" filter offers far more controls than Lightroom's, and the "Sharpening" controls are so complete that they seem to require a book on their own.
OREGON TRAIL : FINAL VERSION
This has been an interesting process for me. There are no magic bullets, but I haven't broken my computer or ruined any images. I have realized once again that there is more than one way to do something, and that I needn't apologize for a particular method, if it works for me. All of the images in these past two essays have been processed with On One. Are they better? No. Are they different? Probably, but not to a large degree. Are they inferior? No. Are some things easier, and others harder? Yes. As usual, a combination and a judicious application of post-processing seems to be the answer. The long-standing rule of working on an image only up to the point that a viewer does not recognize what you have done still applies, at least for me. And while I am still "in the box", I've opened the lid a little bit.
OREGON TRAIL : FINAL ON ONE FINAL B&W VERSION
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JANUARY 7, 2022
PAC MAN : FINAL VERSION
This week, in honor of the new year, I'd like to discuss the trials and tribulations and opportunities involved in learning new ways to do the same things you've always done in the same way. This old goat has been attempting to actually master a "new" software, to see if I can actually improve my workflow or find some advantages in an alternative product. In this process, I have been trying to "learn" in new ways as well. Some of the details of my process, and even my goals, might seem pretty esoteric to many of my readers, who are not as involved in post-processing their photos as I am. I do think that some of these strategies are transferable to learning any new skill, way beyond photography. These new skills can enhance or replace the old way of doing things, for better or worse. Often it just gets back to square one anyway, but one must "trust the process."
PAC MAN : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
Make no mistake about it, I am a firm believer in not fixing things that are working. Fran thinks that I am not even just "stuck in the box, but that I often actually invented the box itself. I don't experiment as much as I should, and I have never been comfortable in just trying something new for the heck of it. But in the past few months I have made the effort to break out of the box to feel more confident when I use a software called "On One" to supplement my steady post processing path based on "Lightroom", the tried and true industry leader. All of these images were converted to black and white using On One, and this week and next I will tell the story of what I have done and why. Most of the time there is very little difference between a Lightroom black and white conversion and a version done with On One, and that might be both the point and not the point at all.
STILL LIFE WITH LILLIES : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes my hesitancy actually helps solve problems that occur with the introduction of new software. It is often said to above all avoid "beta" software releases that are experimenting with your data, but these days I would consider even new release or updates of software to be unproven despite their designer's approval. Let early adopters deal with the inevitable bugs, and wait for the real software, which will be 2.0 if you and they are lucky. Thus my "new" version of On One is from the later half of 2018, and I see no real reason to update to On One 2022 in the near future. I look at each new version, and it's not the monetary outlay that stops me, but the idea that I am facing a learning curve on software that I already "know" without seeing any real gains in the software. But it would be nice to feel more confident when I am using a software, even if it is "out of date." By the way, my Lightroom is version 5.8 which is so old now that it not only has been superseded by 6.0, but it is now the last Lightroom that you can actually buy!
STILL LIFE WITH LILLIES : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
BLOEDEL RESERVE PARK BENCH AND POND : FINAL VERSION
Lightroom still exists, but newer versions can only be "rented" via monthly subscriptions. Having spent thirty years warning Benjamin that he should avoid never-ending monthly bills like the plague, it has been impossible for me to pull the trigger and rent new advanced versions, even if I do acknowledge that there have been improvements that might justify the monthly $10 bucks. After all, I am a professional, and it would be a business expense. It's just the principle of resisting corporate pick-potting, especially when my ancient version of Lightroom still works fine. In fact, the $100 dollars or so that I spent on On One brought me most of the new tricks of Lightroom's newer versions, at a savings of hundreds of dollars since 2018.
BLOEDEL RESERVE : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
So I have successfully stayed off the software carousel now for awhile, and thus also avoided the problem of newer software not being compatible with my old laptop. The last time I went to the see the geniuses at the Apple store, the guys gathered around to gawk at my 2013 MacPro which they alternately declared the best one ever made, while not believing that it still worked. They solved all of my problems, which were totally due to "operator error", and sent me on my way. So I won't change my software until my hardware breaks down, and I am forced to find new software that the new hardware can deal with. I am no longer even really scared by rumors that Adobe will no longer "support" Lightroom 5, since they actually stopped doing so long ago. I am confident that I can transfer my files to On One in case I have to, which is one of the reasons I felt that it might be nice to actually learn this "back-up" software.
SOUTHERN OREGON PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
Photoshop, despite its name, was originally conceived as a killer graphic arts program for art creation of all kinds. Adobe couldn't believe it when photographers rallied around expensive software and became "gurus" even though they only mastered about 10% of a program that was so hard to learn that these gurus were now making most of their money by teaching others how to use the software. Adobe kept improving the software for photographers, and it just kept getting more complicated and forbidding. It was also so expensive, at $700 dollars, that many people were more than willing to steal it rather than pay for something that was both necessary and beyond the means of most photographers.
SOUTHERN OREGON PANORAMA : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
Adobe responded in two ways which for all I know are still studied in MBA programs as either incredibly stupid or brilliant. Some of the software engineers looked at Photoshop and started dreaming about what their software would look like if they just started from scratch and just designed a software just for photographers! It could be easier, quicker, leave out all the stuff photographers didn't need, and be inexpensive enough to encourage purchases rather than larceny. At $100 instead of $700 it seemed like a winning proposition, and the program was deliberately not designed as "Stupid Photoshop" but marketed as just faster and oriented to working photographers rather than artists. It allowed for "batch" processing of many files at once, to make life easier for wedding and sports photographers who typically take hundreds of shots an hour. Nobody at Adobe believed that any ordinary photographer would actually try to use this new software to intensively post-process one image at a time. They assumed that those photographers "knew" that that was what Photoshop was for, and wouldn't try to make do with Lightroom.
ECO-TRUST : FINAL VERSION
The second move that Adobe made was to allow other software companies to design software to piggy-back on the base programs of Photoshop, and then Lightroom. The thinking probably ran along the lines of "why don't we allow other companies to think they were improving the program while still requiring customers to buy the original program?" Adobe was in some way outsourcing their own research and development in order to make their own software more and more a required purchase. They probably figured that no one would actually try to design a new Lightroom if they could make money just tacking things on to the mothership.
ECO-TRUST : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
This might have worked if their own engineers had resisted adopting all these new ideas to the Lightroom software itself. Each new version would include more new features to show how Lightroom was such a value proposition that these "plug-ins" were no longer required. Adobe was now competing with the same new companies it had spawned in the first place. Each new software company soon found some small niche that was obviously better at one thing than stodgy old Lightroom, and then Adobe was forced to respond. It was like the nuclear arms race, but the USA was competing with Costa Rica instead of the Soviet Union. As Lightroom improved and improved, Adobe was even competing with itself. Why should you buy Photoshop at $700 if you got an ever-improving Lightroom at $100? Adobe started to obviously artificially limit what the new versions of Lightroom could do in order to preserve Photoshop sales.
BAMBURGH BEACH : FINAL VERSION
This was a recipe for disaster, especially when plug-ins started including the features that Adobe resisted adding to Lightroom. Now I could purchase Lightroom, and then buy a plug-in that would include most of the features that were included in Photoshop. I might be the world's worst businessman, but I now had serious competition at Adobe headquarters. When Adobe finally realized that they had ruined both Photoshop and Lightroom as products they could sell at a profit, they threw in the towel. As a "public service" they announced they would no longer charge for new versions of their software, and would instead improve it constantly, for just $10 a month, forever.
BAMBURGH BEACH : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
Like I said, this obviously upset everybody over the age of about anyone who actually would use the software. Most of the customer base was just speechless, and began a valiant search for new software so they could shove it to Adobe. The problem was that all of the other software alternatives were plug-ins to Lightroom, and it would take years for the other companies to respond to cries to include more of the things in their software that made Lightroom Lightroom. The trouble also was that there was actually nothing wrong with Lightroom -Adobe was just holding it for ransom. Eventually the kidnappers succeeded in getting most to give in, and geezers like myself have had to make do with old software that actually meets my needs on an old computer that, knock wood, still works.
BEAT-UP FORD : FINAL VERSION
I have obviously gone on far too long, and will again divide this essay into two parts. As I have grown older, I find more interest in the Business Section, not in pursuit of investment acumen, but mostly in engaging morality tales of the sins of the greedy. The more I try to be a good businessman, the less respect I have for business. And I even read the sports pages as a disguised morality tale of organizations run by billionaires that are now actually competing in a better-designed merit-based environment and coming up so short that I wonder hoe they made their money in the first place. Having told this tale of software boom and bust, next week I will discuss my journey to actually include On One into my workflow. All of the images included this week and next were post-processed with On One, but what's fun is it still is all my fault.
BEAT-UP FORD : FINAL ON ONE B&W VERSION
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DECEMBER 31, 2022
GORDON BEACH, VANCOUVER ISLAND : FINAL B&W VERSION
This week I'd like to end the year by continuing my round-up of what I consider some of my best work of the year, along with some more thoughts on my attempts to actually make money as an artist in America. On the whole my last eight weeks at Saturday Market went very well. After some initial doubts about my sanity, I enjoyed being back at the market, while resolving to change some of my ways next year. I remain convinced that I am a very good photographer, and a lousy businessman. I think the answer lies somewhere around the idea that if the businessman can compromise on his search for another "magic bullet", and just go with what actually works, I can afford to enjoy myself by not compromising on the actual art, and make my work even more personal. Above all, I need to work to make things easier for my workforce, namely me.
JAPANESE MAPLE PANORAMA : FINAL B&W VERSION
The first priority for next year is to continue my struggle to "bring less and sell more", which has become my goal ever since Fran introduced me to this novel concept several years ago. I have slowly become convinced that this is the way to go, that customers are more receptive if they are not overwhelmed by choices. The people who want more choices can be tricked by making them themselves, which I have been somewhat successful by leaving more stock in bins that they can explore to their heart's content. Even more important, I am reconciling myself to the idea that a person who really is moved by my art can show their appreciation by working just a little by ordering it off my website. Large art purchases are rarely done on the spur of the moment anyway. Fundamentally, by reducing the stock of what doesn't, or rarely sells, and also reducing set-up time for the stock that does sell, my enjoyment earnings will probably go up without affecting my actual earnings very much.
MOORES CREEK BATTLEFIELD : FINAL B&W VERSION
If all this sounds pretty easy, well remember who is talking. I have also resolved to pay more attention to price points, those elusive points where quality can seem a small price to pay for art. I have discovered that I am now at a price point lower than my less accomplished competitors on the low end, while at the high end I just can't compete with my fellow photographers who seem to be hell bent on giving it away. My answer seems to be threefold - possibly raise my lower price points, because I can, and keep my higher end the same because anything but drastic, and unrealistic reductions have never seemed to make any difference. The real trick seems to be finding that middle ground which I can persuade a possible buyer that they are getting a real steal, while also acquiring my art. Thus I am searching for a price point of about $100, which seems to be the upper limit of a random purchase, while not cannibalizing on what I already sell. I have enough failed concepts already taking up space in my basement.
These first three photos illustrate a few trends in my artwork this year. I have fallen in love with the 1:2 Panorama format, either through stitching several shots together or cropping into a strong horizontal perspective. I believe that it has real advantages over the typical 2:3 format, in that if an image is in a horizontal orientation, it probably deserves to be a true horizontal. For a person who usually crops to a square anyway, I find that this panoramic crop really says something different. It hones into the world in front of my camera without introducing the excessive overview of a wider 1:3 panorama, which is hard to fill with enough subject to justify its breadth. The other trend in my art is my love for the monochromatic alternative. All three of these images looked fine in color - but they all worked better as black and whites, so that is what they shall be.
CRATER LAKE DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
I have also learned some marketing lessons in the value of strength in numbers. The market works best when there are more vendors, not less, and I can even stand more photographers, since it will take them years to know what they are doing. On this theory I will become even more of a "fair weather vendor" than I already am - I am just not willing to put up with real discomfort anymore. I am also probably going to go only on Saturdays in the future, except possibly on incredibly beautiful Sundays in the summer. After fearing that setting up, and taking down eight hours later would feel impossibly stupid, I now realize how much fun it is to not have to go back on Sunday. While my hard work has gotten me enough seniority that I am out of the weather under the Burnside Bridge, I will never make it into what I call the "penthouse", which I believe is the only location which appreciably improves sales. Thus it makes even less sense than before in accumulating seniority points when I have achieved my place in the heirarchy, such as it is.
SMITH ROCK REFLECTIONS : FINAL VERSION
Despite our frequent complaints that Saturday Market is not really an "art market" that promotes visual artists, I learned a valuable lesson on my last day of my selling year. A new local art gallery(!) on Division Street invited me to show some of my wares in an outside space (think outside dining) that they had procured in a parking spot in front of the gallery. It was covered, heated, and right outside the front door. Yes, it was a horrible rainy day, but that wasn't the problem. My art was very accessible, well lit and displayed, but the public was not expecting to find me there. It wasn't just that after three hours and no sales and finishing the newspaper that it was time to leave. I had not had any interaction, much less a meaningful one, with any one at all. It wasn't like anyone was making any money. The barber down the street had about six customers in three hours. The gallery owner paid her son much more in minimum wage than the gallery made while I was there. What was very illuminating was that even though about one hundred people actually went into an art gallery, they couldn't even take a second to look at my art right outside, even with eye contact and a hello. While Saturday Market vendors frequently grouse that "it doesn't seem that people are aware that these objects are for sale", at least they have been trained to at least give them a look-see. It's all about the expectations of the selling environment, and I will try to restrict my involvement to those times where I can sell more, or at least have a pleasant time. Such dreams.
A number of my "best" images this year were taken many years ago. I have always had a lot of fun post-processing my images, and part of that exercise has always been trying to find some hidden gems in my archives. This year I had the additional desire to find images for my latest photo book, a survey of my images of Oregon beyond Portland. It provided an excuse for my latest toy, a real scanner that allows me to convert my old prints into digital files so that they can be useful in this digital age. More importantly, it allows me to process the image, rather than relying on the minimum-wage one hour technician of yore. It can be amazing what you can get out of an old print that you were ready to throw away, once you have actually processed it yourself. My God, I wasn't that bad twenty years ago after all.
SOUTHERN OREGON MOUNTAINS : FINAL VERSION
EASTERN OREGON LICHEN : FINAL VERSION
VINTAGE CANNON BEACH : FINAL VERSION
These five images all were included in my new book. Upon inspection of my archives, I discovered a few images that surprised me. Despite the lack of a wide angle lens, I had made a few nice images at Crater Lake. I had made an image at Smith Rock just a little different than my own rendition of everyone else's Smith Rock shot. Even though I couldn't tell you where those mountains were until the New York Times published an eerily similar shot in their coverage of this year's forest fires. My attention to detail found some color in the High Desert. And it turned out that I was capable of taking a fairly conventional image of Haystack Rock and post-processing it to be as timeless as it really is.
GRAND CANYON OVERLOOK : FINAL VERSION
CHICAGO : FINAL B&W VERSION
Even more interesting to me was to leaf through thirty years of prints and to find a few images that struck me as seriously "not bad at all." The Grand Canyon is notoriously one of the hardest places to photograph, since its overwhelming majesty seems to defy expression as a small two-dimensional image. But among the numerous failures, I did find this image which believes in some way conveys the power of the place by concentrating on one beautiful tree on the edge of the North Rim. The other image seemed to leap into my hands as "Chicago", especially it is a rare (for me) original black and white film rendition. The giant Calder statue is very red and is usually seen in front of a modern Miesian skyscraper on the other side of the square; I like my black sculpture in front of an older type of Chicago skyscraper.
REAR WINDOW : FINAL VERSION
These final images shows how black and white can benefit a long-standing image that I had always seen as a color shot. I took this image from a downtown parking garage when I realized that it was right across from a dance studio on the third floor of an old office building across the street. Uncharacteristically I took some action shots of one dancer peacefully practicing. I of course recognized the surreptitious nature of the image by labeling it "Rear Window" as an homage to Hitchcock, but I had been careful to not show the young lady's face, and this image was right smack in the center of one hundred years of street photography in both legal and ethical terms. As a coaster, it was reasonably popular, especially among dancers as you might expect. Then one day a middle-aged woman showed up in my booth and literally started screaming that she would sue me for all I wasn't worth if I didn't remove her daughter from my art gallery. Rather than argue, I stopped selling it even though I was well within my right to do so. I didn't even remember the image until I started looking for black and white photos to show on my 500 Pixels site, where I only showcase my black and white imagery. I have garnered some interest as I am what my "public" there assumes as just another old geezer who has never taken a color photo.
REAR WINDOW : FINAL B&W VERSION
I feel this rendition is much, much better, and I might even risk Mom's ire again to show it. The straightening out doesn't hurt of course, but look how much black and white allows me to concentrate on the dancer. It realistically allows me to cut down on the interior clutter and the reflections in the window by just reducing the exposure beyond the dancer to near zero. The reflections and scratches on the window are still there but all attention is on the white shirt, which was actually a beige that matched the brick color. Mom must be mistaken since her daughter now has black hair.
So that's another year of photographs, and I am grateful for all of the readers out there who read what I write on "Blog Wednesdays." Like my books, it has given me something to do during these pandemic years, and I appreciate your interest. Unless there are some literate bots out there, about 119 people on average read this blog every week, which is pretty amazing to me. If you are interested in my exploring a particular topic next year, or just want to tell me off, I encourage your comments on these postings. Happy New Year!
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DECEMBER 24, 2021
ROSE CITY RAIN : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to indulge in two end of the year activities, and I hope you find them interesting. The Market has closed for the year. I can rethink for the next few months, so I will try to tell some stories of marketing art this second pandemic year. In an effort to provide some images during that discussion, I took a stab at presenting some of my favorite images from this year. Ansel Adams famously said that a photographer should be very proud of coming up with a dozen good images a year, and in that spirit I went through this years crop, allowing myself two caveats - I could include some images from 2020, since these past two years have sort of run together. Since Ii have spent a lot of time this year going through my archives and extolling the value of taking a new look at old images, I've also included some of my best vintage images that were either transformed through post-processing this year, or even just rediscovered.
FLORAL EXPLOSION : FINAL VERSION
After being away from the Market since March of 2020, I returned for the last eight weeks of the season, and it was a shock to the system. The Market has only been open on Saturdays since the pandemic originally closed it down in 2020. Since I was getting unemployment from my gig at the hardware store, I couldn't afford to go to the market even if I had wanted to. So, despite unbelievable reports that business was great, I stayed away until unemployment finally ended. Of course that was the end of October, so the boom immediatly stopped upon my return, but I'm not complaining. It was a lot of fun to be back selling my work, and on the whole I did well.
BLACK AND WHITE FLORA : FINAL VERSION
Which is not to say that my return to the Market was not without it's frustrations. That first weekend I had the impression that ten years of experience meant nothing, and that I couldn't do anything right. I found myself literally staring at a bungee cord, not remembering how it worked. The alarm at 5:30 AM was the least of my problems, and I finally "finished" setting up at 12:30, two-and-a-half hours after the market actually opened. I was so fashtummeled that it was a miracle that I sold anything at all.
CHERRY BLOSSOM DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
The next few weeks were better as I gradually re-knew what I was doing. It remained a very long day, since I had to pack up everything, including my tent at the end of the day. Even Fran admitted that I was allowed to be tired even though I worked only one day a week, since that day was over twelve hours outside. I gradually finally started bring less to the market, something I had been struggling with over the last five years. It's not only me, since the photographers have two problems at the Market, both of which lead to bring more and more stuff despite logic. The only vendors who need more "sizes" than photographers are T-shirt people, since customers inevitably love an image but want it bigger or smaller, and there goes another sale. Since photographers are making art out reality, we also face the problem of not bringing an image of a subject that a customer suddenly realizes that they need, but is back in my basement - they kind of think that a Portland photographer should have that image. It's not the same as a painter, who more closely follows Fran's retail theory of a customer not missing what they do not see - "if they don't see the red one, sell them the yellow one." Unfortunately, potential customers actually know what is missing. The result has been that traditionally the only vendors who take longer putting their wares away are the potters, whose work is even more fragile.
These first four images are all floral portraits, which while I enjoy I had largely left aside in recent years. The problem is that I lacked three key pieces of equipment that could improve my images. I do not own an expensive macro lens, so that in many ways an Iphone is actually better for this work than my SLR. Even more specialized is the expensive ring flash that really separates the men from the boys. And while I will bring along the tripod, I don't have an assistant to hold the black foamboard behind the blossom that gives that great black background. But the pandemic so limited my usual travel that I found myself taking floral portraits again, and I liked these four the most. I spent a day by myself in the rain at the Rose Garden, but also found subjects in Fran's garden. I even limited my view of this year's Cherry blossoms to just a couple of blossoms instead of even one tree. I've also had fun converting flower images into black and white, a perversion that is challenged only by black and white sunsets.
BEACH GRASS DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
Another problem that I face at the Market is my over-exuberance on subject matter, especially when I discover a new "magic bullet" in my marketing efforts. Despite my resolve to limit my efforts until they have been proven, I still run things up the flagpole even when the flagpole has fallen down. My photo coasters have kept me in business for over ten years, but this year I finally reached something of a compromise with myself by cutting down on coaster production in an effort to reduce the "tyranny of choice." Over the years I have tried over 500 different images on coasters, both in an effort to keep me amused, and to actually appeal to different audiences. I realized that by allowing customers to pick out the images they wanted, to mix and match, I was allowing an "unpopular" image to actually provoke the purchase of a set of four. Thus car guys, and flower gals and animal fans could be coaxed into a set of coasters that also included the most popular images that went along for the ride. The trouble was that by the end I was actually displaying 200 images, and usually selling one each of dozens of different shots. It was all too much, and this year I finally held it down to fifty or so, and what they didn't see didn't hurt sales.
A RARE NICE DAY AT FLORENCE : FINAL VERSION
My second magic bullet plodded along at the Market this year, but again I think I learned something. I was the first photographer at the Market to display metal prints, with my images printed on aluminum sheets. These are so beautiful that people can't help themselves, except that the premium prices required usually keeps them just looking and not buying. They set up a completely bifurcated market, with rich people wondering why they are so cheap (they are a reproducible product) and regular people wondering why they are so expensive, which they are. Thus I am left with an inordinate amount of what vendors call "billboards", which bring traffic into my booth but rarely leave it. So while I have sold thousands of dollars of metal prints over the years, I usually have thousands of dollars of stock on display in my booth on any one day. The real problem with the metal prints was that they ruined the value of every paper print I had created. Despite any logic, customers refused to buy a paper print after they saw the metal print that I couldn't sell a paper print until I had reduced their prices to nearly below my cost to produce them. They wanted the best version of my work, but they refused to pay the price or to settle for a version that while it wasn't the "best", they could actually afford. After years of frustration, I have finally resolved to concentrate on the lower price points of smaller metal prints, and stopped replacing any large prints that actually sell, which they haven't. I also raised prices on the large prints, since after some experimentation lowering or raising the price didn't make a damn's worth of difference. And my price to buy the metal prints went up as well. So I will, I swear, bring more smaller prints and leave the big ones at home. We'll see how it goes.
COASTAL SUNSET : FINAL VERSION
My third magic bullet, which I call the miniature, has cooled down as well. Another element of frustration that surrounded my coaster success was that I never could translate the coaster to the wall. I couldn't add any "frame" that seemed to make sense to convert the coasters to wall art, especially since any customer with half a brain realized that of course they could do it themselves. Thus the coaster, which originally was a mistake when I ran out of wall space and put some of my small prints on a table, now could never make the transition back to the wall. People looked at me and said they couldn't put them on the wall because they were coasters, after all. Then they would graciously email a photo a few months later of their brilliant installation of four coasters on the wall! I finally came up with the miniature, a coaster on a thick wood block, that finally seemed to be the answer, even though several customers insisted they could work as coasters. They obviously are more accurate with their glass than I am after a couple of beers. Even though I refused to make more than one copy of a miniature until I had to replace it, you know what happened. I soon had made more than I could possibly display. The problem was compounded because since they were no longer coasters, I could finally make miniatures that weren't squares, so I soon had three more sizes to display. I then realized that people really only seemed to want the square ones! So I have finally resolved to canibalize the unsold images when I need to replace the rare sale of a miniature, and maybe just display the other sizes at home.
NORTH JETTY PARK, FLORENCE : FINAL B&W VERSION
My final magic bullet is almost dead. I created posters in a fit of creativity when I realized that I could have a poster if I just straightened out the four coasters I printed on a sheet of photo paper, finally came up with a common theme, and printed Portland and my name on the bottom of the paper. This unused portion had been formerly used as the world's most expensive shopping list. You can see why market vendors can proclaim themselves geniuses and five minutes later realize they are dufusses because it took them years to come up with such an obvious idea. I allowed myself to think that I could always just cut up the unpopular posters into coasters if they didn't sell, and I was off. They sold, because I framed them with cheap frames I got at Walmart that were cheaper than any I could buy online, even at Walmart.com! The price was so low that I could give the poster away, and still make about 8 times what they cost. I only raised the price when customers proclaimed that my price couldn't possibly include the frame. After I had nearly doubled my price, and was spending too much time at Walmart, I faced an unsolvable problem. I had justified my low prices for my art on the theory that it was only a poster, and it had my name on it after all, so it was kind of an advertisement. The trouble was that my fellow photographers were suffering so badly that they kept reducing their prices for matted paper prints to the point that they were now competing with my cheap posters, and of course taking up valuable counter space. So now in an effort to reduce inventory, they have been reduced to packing material, with no worse for wear, serving to separate metal prints in their boxes. I have to still decide whether to re-introduce them, or just to use their back sides to print more coasters. We shall see.
GEORGE BEACH, VANCOUVER ISLAND : FINAL B&W VERSION
Well I hope that has given you some insight into the struggles of this particular artist. Remember that I am among the world's worst businessmen, so I am actually proud that I actually make money, if not a living, selling my art. These coastal images were taken on the two trips that Fran and I were blessed with this year, to the coasts of Central Oregon and Southern Vancouver Island in Canada. I will now call it a day, now that I realize that next week is still this year, so my year-end blog post will end with a stunning wave, and you will have to wait for next week to see those gems I rescued from the past in 2021.
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DECEMBER 17, 2021
AUTUMN RAIN : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to explore the idea that an image can support many interpretations, not just the one the photographer has labeled the "FINAL VERSION." There are many decisions that photographer makes along the way, and most of these are not "wrong" even though that photographer might eventually choose another path. Often it's just a matter of taste, or a desire to explore different interpretations of the same image. While you might actually like one of these paths better than my final version, that also doesn't prove that either of us is wrong. A fine image can support a number of interpretations, as I hope you will see in these examples. Most are carried out in the alchemy of post processing, and each of us has a different limit on what we can accept in the process of changing an image, and that is also okay - after all, this is my art. While the image could appear in the New York Times as the quintessential image of autumn in Portland, it didn't, so I'm allowed as much deviation from the "truth" as I want. Remember that is in my lifetime that the first color image appeared in the paper of record; now when a black and white photo makes the front page photographers sit up and take notice.
AUTUMN RAIN : ORIGINAL COLOR VERSION
As you compare these two images, you can see that I didn't change much from the original color version. About all I did was increase the exposure by about 3/4 of a stop,well within the range of what you can do when you don't completely blow the exposure, which a professional like me doesn't admit to doing that often. The mood has been lightened, but it is still pretty somber. This is the view from my tent at Saturday Market at the end of October in 2015. I am not having a very good day, revenue wise, and have enough time to take out my phone and take this snap. This image proves how much detail you could get out of your phone seven years ago, even when taking an image that the phone is not really made for, like this urban landscape. I've done all the usual adjustments, like sharpening and it's opposite, noise reduction, and will attempt to keep these constant as we explore these options.
AUTUMN RAIN : HIGH KEY COLOR
Here we've lightened the mood about as far as we can go. There only areas of the image that have blown out, even though I've increased the exposure by two stops, are the specular highlights of the streetlamps that have just turned on. The only trouble is that in color we've lost a little realism, since we don't know why the lights are on at all.
AUTUMN RAIN : MUCH LATER THAT DAY, LOW KEY
While I took this image at about 3:00 PM, it now looks like it's at least 8:00 PM, and I'm safely back at home. What is again interesting is that the only area of the image that is actually underexposed is the nearest light pole. While our vision is used to the idea that color saturation fades as night sets in, I think you will see that these two extremes look much more realistic when we convert to black and white. That is why black and white can allow the photographer much more range for interpretation.
AUTUMN RAIN : IN THE RAIN
Before we head into black and white, I'd like to show a brief foray into deliberately changing the mood of the image. Here I've actually lowered the "clarity" of the image, using a tool that is normally used to subtly sharpen the image. By lowering the clarity, it now appears even more "rainy" than it actually was, almost as if the rain had hit the lens of my camera. Interesting.
AUTUMN RAIN : BLACK AND WHITE
Here is the straight black and white conversion, with a little more detail perhaps, but also a touch more dismal in mood. From here we can get much more out of this image.
AUTUMN RAIN : LIGHTEN THE MOOD
We can move toward a high-key interpretation by lightening the lower portion of the image. The foreground has now become more reflective, which implies that the sky above is actually lighter than it was at the time.
AUTUMN RAIN : HIGH KEY
Here we've gone all the way - it now appears that this is a sun shower, and maybe in early March rather than October. You would swear that the Cherry Blossoms were pink rather than orange. The portion of the city across the river has completely disappeared in the fog, which is really heightened exposure.
AUTUMN RAIN : LATER THAT DAY
Moving towards low-key, and the mood has gotten a bit grimmer. I think this version is more realistic than the color version, but that's only my opinion.
AUTUMN RAIN : MYSTERY
I've increased the contrast so much that even though the sky is brighter, it now appears that the lights are set for later in the day. In my opinion, it lends an air of private-eye mystery to this river bank in Portland.
AUTUMN RAIN : 'ROUND ABOUT MIDNIGHT
I'm back in bed again, and I swear that often the night sky in Portland is this bright long after the lights come on, especially when you are near some streetlights.
AUTUMN RAIN : BLACK AND WHITE IN THE RAIN
What is interesting to me is the same strategy to lower the clarity and to increase the"rain" seems to just muddle everything instead of heightening the humid mood. This is one of the few times that the technique seems to work better in color.
AUTUMN RAIN : WARM TONE
It is now time to enter the wonderful world of toned images. These are still black and white, but with an added tone that subtly or weirdly colors them, depending on your point of view. They are monochromatic, but no longer true black and white. Most of the time the lightest portions of the image are most affected, which can affect the mood of the image. The fact that they can appear to make the images appear even more nostalgic is due to their origins in the darkroom. Prints were toned with additional toxic chemicals in order to increase their durability, and photographers either accepted or delighted in the color shifts these chemical preservatives lent to the image. The fact that we no longer need to do this speaks to their becoming a part of photographic history that speaks to mood rather than just nostalgia. Most black and white photographers I know actually prefer this warm tone, but I am in the minority who prefers his whites whiter, even though I know I'm being picky.
AUTUMN RAIN : AGED PHOTO (GOLD TONE)
Lightroom calls this preset "Aged Photo" which is just a little too poetic for my taste, but it resembles a gold-toned photo. If you're going to used a chemical toner, you might as well go for the gold. This was pretty expensive, until platinum printing came along.
AUTUMN RAIN : SELENIUM TONED
Now this is more to my taste, but you might not share my opinion. The chemical selenium lends a subtle blue note to the proceedings, and since I love Jazz as well as cooler tones, it is a natural for me. I equate the blue tones with water, so this water-logged scene speaks to me.
AUTUMN RAIN : SEPIA TONE
This option, in my opinion, is to nostalgic for its own good. The brown sepia tone was the most popular chemical tone, and almost screams 1886. This scene would not contain the park, or the sea wall, but would show plenty of wharves and ships. My taste, as I said, tends toward cooler tones anyway.
AUTUMN RAIN : SURREAL BLACK AND WHITE
While I don't think by any means that we've explored all of the possibilities, we have gone pretty far afield from the original image. This final image explores the surreal by only selectively de-saturating the image. Only when you have inspected the image for awhile do you wonder why those vintage streetlamps seem to be in color on an otherwise bleak black and white day. I just de-saturated everything except yellow, and only a little of the fallen yellow leaves follow along with the lights. Black and white allows us to go way beyond reality without spoiling our fun, since we have already accepted the abstract notion of black and white itself.
I hope you have enjoyed this trip through some of the possibilities of an image, once you accept that you are in fact in control of the viewers perceptions through post-processing manipulation. What is funny is that this grim day seven years ago was a lot more fun than last Saturday at the Market, which saw me abandon ship for the first time in a dozen years. I shouldn't have gone at all, but after two hours of set-up and two failures of trying to erect my booth, I showed enough maturity (my wife's words) to give up and come home. I had to sprint to catch my runaway tent, saved only by the port-a-potties from ending up in the middle of Naito Boulevard. Please feel free to comment with your favorite interpretation , and wish me luck this last weekend of the year at the Market.
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DECEMBER 10, 2021
GRAND CANYON, NORTH RIM : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to take you on another excursion through a tiny portion of my archives, courtesy of my scanner. I took a few minutes last night to resurrect a dozen images from obscurity, some more than thirty years old. I recommend you try this every once in a while, because you might be surprised what you might find. Often you find "rejects" that deserve a second look, either because they were overlooked because another image was deemed more worthy, or because the one-hour photo technician so mangled the file that you never even considered the image. These happen to be film photos that have been converted to digital with the scanner, but you could also find gems in your digital files. Either way a short post-processing session could bring back some pleasant memories along with a renewed respect for your formerly forgotten photographic endeavors.
KIVAS AT MESA VERDE B&W : FINAL VERSION
These first four images come from a trip to the Four Corners area about twenty years ago. This part of the country is so varied and beautiful that two weeks barely scratched the surface. In fact, I could easily fashion another month of travel by visiting the areas we skipped on this trip. These images were placed in albums and rarely viewed, but upon inspection deserved another look, especially since I didn't have the ability to process the images myself at the time. The Grand Canyon image, like most, has no chance of delivering the magnitude of the canyon, but it's attention to one wonderful tree on the edge shows what you can do by avoiding the wide view, which seldom works anyway. I have found that Grand Canyon images either depend on a magnificent sky, or an intense view into the canyon that avoids the horizon altogether. My effort follows that pattern, which depends on coaxing detail out of the background which is completely lost in most snapshots. I've been to the Canyon only this once, to the North Rim, which I recommend only because other people sometimes diss the South Rim, which I'm sure is also fantastic. By the way, the best photographer of the Canyon is Alan Briot, who proves that you shoot what you know best, since his "booth" is on the porch of the El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim, where he sells prints to tourists that know they cannot approach his artistry. Google him to see that images can begin to convey what you remember about the Grand Canyon.
The next image is from Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, home to one of the largest cliff dwellings in the area. This detail focuses on several kivas, sunken ceremonial portions of the ancient apartment house. The conversion to black and white really brings out the details and textures that were not apparent in the original print.
BRYCE DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
You have got to get to Bryce National Park in Utah if you haven't gotten the chance to visit this magnificent landscape. The sculpted hoodoos that fill up an entire valley will blow you away, especially if you are an orange fan like myself. The park allows for hikes into the canyon so you can get detail shots like this one instead of just the ordinary spectacular overall view. Try to get some of the pine trees into your image, as the contrast of green and orange really brings out the colors more than just a sea of orange. This image in no way resembles it's one-hour forbear, which was completely overexposed and washed out. You would think that I didn't know what the heck I was doing.
CANYON DE CHELLY DETAIL B&W : FINAL VERSION
The big surprise on this trip for me was the Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. I was unaware of this remarkable area, a place of refuge for the Navajo in their long march pursued by the American army, and since then an oasis in the High Dessert of the Colorado Plateau. The canyon is a multi-pronged depression that is lost in the vastness of the reservation but contains the best farmland in the entire area, with a micro-climate unlike the surrounding desert. We had the wonderful opportunity to take a guided jeep trip into the canyon, led by a Navajo man who was only allowed to lead trips because he had married into a family that lived in the canyon. I will never forget when this gentleman showed this New Yorker his hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling lost somewhere in the distance, and declared that he was moving because the immediate area was getting too crowded for his taste. If you want to learn more about Navajo history and culture, you should pick up a mystery by Tony Hillerman or his daughter, Anne Hillerman, who explore crime and punishment on the vast reservation.
GEHRY LANDSCAPE B&W : FINAL VERSION
We will now take a whirlwind tour of Urban America, in a series of images taken across the country. These are not my best images from these places, which is one of the reasons why they were forgotten. But every image can't be your personal best, and other images can expand the story or bring out different aspects of the site. And just because an image is not "your best" doesn't mean it can't be explored now that you have more control over an image's interpretation. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is like a gold mine for photographers; in fact, if it wasn't actually such a great piece of architecture, it would almost be a crime that it is so photogenic. It is pretty hard to come up with a bad composition, especially if you are content to focus on individual moments of its swirling form. I've left out the ground plane and the sky (and the almost inevitable fashion model walking through) to concentrate on the curve and its reflection. I especially enjoy the "fish scales" beloved by Gehry which are just reflections of straight lines and exist in my photograph despite their absence in the real world.
BIMBO'S B&W : FINAL VERSION
CALIFORNIA LINE : FINAL VERSION
Here are two images from San Francisco which in some way sum up the city's appeal for this observer. The first shows how the city subverts its own classical Mediterranean style by its casual embrace of hedonism. The Coit Tower on top of one of the hills co-exists somehow with Bimbo's on the bottom. A New Yorker can only gasp when he realizes that these people were crazy enough to put a grid on a mountain and then invent a mass transit system to overcome it.
CHICAGO IN BLACK AND WHITE : FINAL VERSION
This snippet of Chicago plays with a monumental sculpture in front of a prototypical early Twentieth Century Chicago skyscraper. If I focused the other way through the sculpture I would no doubt have a mid-century Mies skyscraper as another backdrop. When you also throw in dozens of Frank Lloyd Wright houses, you can see why Chicago is an architectural mecca.
SEATTLE CENTRAL LIBRARY : FINAL VERSION
This is just one image from an entire afternoon spent in Seattle's new downtown library. It remained in the archives because I made so many images of this incredible building that some had to be left on the cutting room floor. This is a view of the largest reading room at the top of the space-frame structure, complete with sloping columns (why not?) that didn't seem to have much to do with the actual structure. I enjoyed how the varied angles of the ceiling seemed to change the color and structure of the grid, which is actually uniform. All in all, this is one building where the architects seemed to have an illegal amount of fun.
HEY BUD, CAN'T YOU READ THE SIGN? : FINAL VERSION
TKTS : FINAL VERSION
And onto my hometown, whose attitude knows no bounds. It is a miracle that anyone gets through Manhattan unscathed, especially when such clear instructions are provided at important intersections. Upon further inspection in slow motion, I wonder why "no turns" doesn't cover angled turns, or why one should walk to the next sign, which is only two feet away? Add in the fact that most pedestrians will certainly not follow any rules that are not convenient at the moment, and you get NY chaos. The other image shows the power of graphics in a photograph, especially super graphics; the tkts booth is a rite of passage for any experienced New York theater patron. Every monument is not monumental, and this version of the booth is now historical as well.
ALPINE : FINAL VERSION
You didn't think I could get through this essay without an ad-hoc detail of my own? This colorful automotive graphic hides the sad fact that the Sunbeam Alpine was one of the worst cars ever made, despite the joyous color and graphics. Research has revealed that Rootes was the overall corporate parent of Sunbeam; 1725 probably refers to the awesome displacement of the engine, which usually lasted longer than the body panels rust resistance.
BENJAMIN INVESTIGATES TUPPERWARE : FINAL VERSION
My son the college professor conducting an early experiment in kitchen organization, proving once again that the International Toy Complex stands no chance against simple plastic objects. The scanner and the computer have allowed me to time travel back to a simpler time on a kitchen floor 33 years ago and 3000 miles away. His father has promised his mother to organize our chaos of a Tupperware drawer this week - hopefully I will do a better job.
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DECEMBER 3, 2021
YOU ARE HERE : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to discuss Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS), a common malady among photographers and hobbyists of all types. I participated in a discussion over a Chanukah meal the other night over whether a ninth kayak purchase by my friend's son was merely idiosyncratic or downright insane. This conversation seemed particularly apt during the holiday season, although most camera gear is expensive enough that most purchases are made for ourselves. Like most hobbies with expensive toys, it is difficult to resist the feeling that you are just one purchase away from your true photographic destiny. Which is not to say that modern, even vintage image-making technology, is nothing short of miraculous. Most of us have only a hazy idea of how our equipment actually works, and epochal changes like film to digital are muddied by the vintage terms still used to describe new processes that have little to do with their analog forbears.
LAN-SU BAMBOO B&W : FINAL VERSION
Take ISO for instance. Formerly an obscure international measurement of film sensitivity, which no one understood even back in the days of film, it was printed on the film box and that was that. Over the years, new chemical formulations made it possible to produce speedier films, and ISO 25 was joined by 64, 100, 200, 400,1600, and even 3200 before digital replaced it all. We weren't even fazed by the "competing" ASA which meant the same thing but was determined by a different international cabal. Since the rating was printed on the box, it was considered a given until professionals realized that it was just a "suggestion", and they began to push or pull film for various reasons that required extra payment to the labs if they weren't doing it themselves. It actually became a "pro secret" to under-rate your film, let's say from 100 to 64, which just increased its saturation a bit by underexposing it. In fact, the ISO of your film only really affected two things - the amount of grain in your photos, and the contrast of the negatives. Some people liked grain, or at least tolerated it, as the price to be paid to take photos in lower and lower lighting conditions.
DROVE MY CHEVY TO THE LEVEE : FINAL VERSION
The digital revolution came, and chemistry was overtaken by electronics and computer technology. But how were we to describe how sensitive the digital sensor was to light, especially now that we could change that sensitivity on the fly? Somehow ISO was retained, even though it now longer connected in any way to its origins. Which is not to say that more sensitive sensors did allow even lower light levels than ever, which did open up more opportunities for niche pursuits like astro-photography or police stakeouts. But why are we still talking about ISO 100 or 102,000 (not kidding), even when the basic rules have changed enough that we now have to teach the exposure triangle (aperture, shutter speed, and ISO) instead of just aperture and shutter speed? Even though sensor noise doesn't have the vintage charm of film grain, and we can successfully eliminate most of it in post processing?
MAPLE AND BRICK WALL : FINAL VERSION
Obsolete terms continue to exist because people hate change even when they are embracing it, and they still have to somehow communicate basic concepts. The trouble is that while the machines are more and more sophisticated, the concepts don't really change that much. A camera is a light-tight box which contains a flat plane that is somehow sensitive to light. The lens at the front regulates how much light that plane receives by changing the size of the hole (aperture) or how quickly it opens and closes (shutter speed). If this seems too simple, imagine how hard it is to sell you a new version of this device. Unlike automobiles, it is hard to say how a new camera will have any attraction to the opposite sex.
DICKENS - ONE THING WAS FOR CERTAIN... : FINAL VERSION
Yet GAS is still a problem because photography is a technological wonder, and people, even photographers themselves, can think that new and improved gear, even if only marginally, will have an impact on the images they eventually produce. Once in a generation change can be obscured by subtle improvements that mean little or nothing to 99% of photographers. This is only compounded by the public's misunderstanding of the relationship between the photographer and his or her equipment. You might be amazed at how many of my customers, even while graciously complementing my images, declare that I "must have a very nice camera."
SOUTH PARK BLOCKS : FINAL VERSION
Of course I have a very nice camera. It is nearly exactly what I need to take the type of photos that I take, even though it might not meet your needs at all. Some of its capabilities are in fact way beyond I need myself. While it was near state of the art when I bought it, that was 14 years ago; without me paying much attention, Canon has "improved" it at least a dozen times since. Most of my customers enter my booth with "better" cameras than the one that I own. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't.
FIAT : FINAL VERSION
And that is not because I am some idiot savant who triumphs over his outdated equipment. Newer cameras have improved, but only marginally as far as my needs require. Given unlimited funds, and nothing else to buy, of course I could justify a newer camera, or more lenses, or some new accessory - but I realized long ago that my images would probably only marginally improve, if at all.
FLOUR ON BROADWAY : FINAL VERSION
I take photographs of things that are usually far away, do not move, and do not talk back. Thus I need a longer lens than most people, but I don't need to take 10 photos a second because buildings hopefully don't move. I don't have to have a lens that will separate the supermodel from the creamy out-of-focus background; my urban landscapes usually require as exact a focus as I can achieve front to back anyway. The way to avoid GAS is to procure the photographic supplies you need for your type of photography, and to avoid new purchases only if they are obviously revolutionary or will allow you to do something new. I own a Canon 50D. There is a Canon 90D, four generations later, plus some other numbers they slipped in when people forgot that we were supposed to go by tens. Then Canon went full-frame, which meant they made sensors as big as old 35mm film. There are about half a dozen of those models. Then Canon finally reacted to market forces and went mirrorless, and another half dozen of generations have passed. The total result has basically been an increase in ISO range, an increase in megapixels, and the advent of better stabilization in camera.
VESPAS : FINAL VERSION
My camera will go to 1600 ISO. Newer cameras will go to 512,000 ISO, but that's only for photos so noisy that the only suitable subject would be First Contact - nobody would look at anything else that noisy. Yes, they can be used at 128,000 instead of just 1600, but for best results you should still stay less than 400 anyway. My camera has only 18 megapixels instead of 50, but I can already produce prints that are beautiful at sizes that my customers cannot possibly afford. While better stabilization reduces the need for a tripod, I know I still need one to achieve the sharpness that only a tripod will produce. My one lens is very sharp, thank you, has been improved only once, and its zoom range equivalent is just what I need - about 50 at the short end, 200 at the long end. 50 is a lot wider than I used to have, while the difference between 200 and 300 is marginal. I own three other lenses, all of which are broken and would cost more to repair than to buy new versions, which I do not need. My lens has stabilization in the lens, which I consider crucial at telephoto lengths, so I don't absolutely require a stabilized body.
DOES THIS MAKE ME LOOK FAT? : FINAL VERSION
Your needs might be totally different, and I would be surprised if they were not. Sports or birds require much longer lenses to "be in the game." Subjects that move benefit from more frames per second. Portraits, especially in the environment, require faster lenses and benefit from full frame sensors. Street photographers require cameras that are much smaller and less conspicuous than mine in order to not intimidate or attract as much notice.
ECO-TRUST : FINAL VERSION
The important thing is to get what you need, and leave it at that. The real evil of GAS is that almost anything else you could spend money or time in an effort to take better photos is much better than new equipment once you have the equipment you need. A photo class, a photo book, whether how-to or just a monograph of a similar minded great photographer, even a you tube video (no gear reviews) will be much better paths to actually improve your photography. As will a vacation. And the most useful thing you can do is go out and take pictures or work on post-processing. It's called practice. Aren't you better than when you first picked up a camera? How did that happen?
DONUTS + COFFEE : FINAL VERSION
It also depends on what you are used to. We all hate change. I picked Canon many years ago because all things being equal, and they are, I liked their logo better than Nikon's. The newer cameras are smaller, but I have big hands, and many of the new cameras are actually too small for me. I would have to buy the extenders, which of course they sell, just to use the camera which would then be closer in size to what I have now. I am one of the few people who actually benefit from the extended grip that allows me to take vertical shots (most people don't) without contorting myself into knots. Once you buy that extra grip, who cares how small the camera is? Even if you forgo the tripod, which you know you should have taken, and substitute a one-legged monopod, (think of pros on the sidelines at football games), who cares what your camera weighs if you routinely attach a one-pound weight to it? And speaking of weight, that's mostly due to metal versus plastic, which directly relates to cost and durability and how much you abuse your tools. As does ability to withstand the weather. If like most sane people, your idea of fun is not taking pictures outside in the rain, then why do you need a tank of a camera that can handle those conditions? When I bought my camera all those years ago I could have saved $1000, bought a Canon with the same specifications but not quite as robust. Considering how I abuse my camera, I would have replaced it twice in the ensuing years.
SUNFLOWER : FINAL VERSION
So as usual, buy what you like, but if you complain, you must explain. And yes, some photography does require special prices for admission. If you want to take very long exposures, you will need that tripod and neutral density filters (sunglasses for your camera) that will slow down the lenses you spent good money on to be fast. If you want to take better flower portraits you will need a macro lens, OR you could just use your phone, which will take better flower pictures than my camera unless I do buy that $1000 lens. By the way, none of the images in this essay, like them or not, required any better equipment than what they were taken with, and would not look any different at these sizes no matter what camera I owned. Do you really think that most of these images have more to do with my camera than my particular way of seeing and responding to the world around me?
SHOP 'TIL YOU DROP : FINAL VERSION
I just picked up an old book at the free library around the corner. "This Is Photography" dates from 1947, and except for the "glamour" shots that hint at what my father saw in my mother, it actually is absolutely relevant to photography 75 years later. My father's Leica was six years in the future, is still the inspiration for many of today's equipment, and is absolutely ill-suited for what I need as a photographer. Even that Leica, so state of the art that my father's camera was exactly the same as most of his photographer heroes, didn't have anything to do with the value of his photographs. Rest assured that your camera is technically superior to the vast majority of the cameras that were used to take every famous image of the past 150 years. Your gear has very little to do with your photography, as long as it works.
FRAN AND FRIEND (DAUGHTER?), LONDON 2008 : FINAL VERSION
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NOVEMBER 26, 2021
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to take you on a journey to the culmination of one photo to at least six different images, if you count black and white versions as separate creations. Sometimes I think I make the process of image making sound too easy, as if my final stunning creation appears out of whole cloth, instead of as the end of a long process that could have easily ended up somewhere else. This is not to say that I'm some genius at post-processing - I could probably teach you "my secrets" in less than an hour. The real fun in using programs like Lightroom is that they put you in command of the processing of your own original photographs, so that your original intentions, or maybe completely different ones, come out in you final printed interpretations. Since I don't work on a computer all day, I even have fun; the second it stops being fun, I just stop. Artists certainly don't make a lot of money, but they can control their own working conditions.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : OVERALL COLOR VERSION
Ira's Fountain is one block of Downtown Portland, converted as if by magic into an acre of the Columbia Gorge. The world famous landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was asked to design a fountain to sit in front of our new Opera house. Instead he landscaped the entire block, and took advantage of what seemed like a design obstacle of a drop of twenty feet from one corner to another, to create an evocation of a gorge waterfall right in the middle of downtown.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN OVERALL VIEW : B&W VERSION
These three different visions of Ira's fountain are derived from the same original snapshot taken on a clear day at the end of October twelve years ago. On a hot summer day the fountain would be filled with dozens of children and their parents wishing and hoping that they wouldn't meet an early end playing on the waterfall. In fact the pools at the top are designed so that a swimmer would really want to jump rather than just make a mistake, so it's a lot safer than it looks. On performance nights, you can escape our hot barn of an opera house and take your expensive glass of intermission wine across the street to the Gorge. I'm taking this empty view on a pleasant fall day before the wind and rain have denuded all of the trees in the park.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : ORIGINAL
This is the original shot taken that day. At least it is straight and in focus, but it is nothing special. The exposure is off, the colors seem wrong, and the overexposed apartment building beyond is certainly adding nothing to the image. The concrete is a rather bad shade of brown , in my humble opinion, colored that way to resemble the Gorge's basalt after value engineering nixed the real thing. By the way, if you want to see the real thing, go to the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is very confusing to Portlander's, who don't understand why that memorial seems to be four renditions of Ira's Fountain. Due to the vagaries of national politics, Halprin's original idea for the memorial, with one outdoor room for each presidential term, accompanied by fountains to eliminate traffic noise, was held up by Republican opposition for so long that he eventually used the idea in Portland. Ira's Fountain, "copied " by the designer, was built a generation before the original design was finally realized in Washington. Of course a federal budget allowed real basalt, so there you go.
SQUARE CROP, WHITE BALANCE
I could have tried to save the upper portion of the image, but I didn't think it was worth it, and coasters are square, so I solved the overexposure problems by just eliminating that portion. I then corrected the white balance, eliminating the blue cast by reconsidering the original which had been swayed by the sun in the eliminated background. The "shade" setting corrected the blue water, but unfortunately it reinforced that brown concrete.
Only two changes still remained. I used the magic of the replacement tool to eliminate the white sign on the concrete block above the waterfall. Look back at the previous version to see how annoying it is once you notice it. When there is a distraction in your image, there is no rule against eliminating it - this image is not destined for the New York Times. A subtle graduated filter darkened the top background of the image to draw the viewer's eye back down to the subject. It's as good a color photograph as yours truly can make it, a big improvement over the original, but now it's time to see if monochrome can help.
ORIGINAL BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION
This conversion at least eliminates that distracting brown. All of the other changes are already baked in, but it is a little too bright for me.
DEEPEN BLACK POINT
One technique to affect the exposure is to just deepen the black portions of the image, without affecting the lighter parts as much as changing overall exposure will. These selective changes allow more control on the way to more delicate changes that you brush in to small parts of the image. The image is now near where I want it - you are allowed to disagree.
FINAL BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
As I can as well, so I subtly increased the overall exposure. Frequently the transition to print will darken the image because it is not backlit, so if an image appears dark, it might need some brightening. The spot removal tool also eliminated all of the dots especially on the dark stone on the right. They are probably water drops, but since they appear as sensor dust they must be eliminated. As usual, the black and white image can allow for more exposure manipulation without appearing unrealistic. And I did hate that brown, so I like this much better.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : ORIGINAL CLOSE-UP
I always say that a good photograph has more images inside it. Once I looked at the image, I realized that a closer view would tell me more than the overall view. This is frequently a strategy that I try, and it fits into my usual way of viewing the world as a collection of more interesting parts. I am not alone in this, as a classic admonition is "to get closer."
BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
I still hate that brown, so there you go. I have gotten closer, but now it's time to get even closer by cropping to a square.
FIRST SQUARE CROP
I first cropped to the bottom of the image, but I then I decided that I wanted to include more of the top that I thought was more dynamic. These are always interesting decisions on the way to a final image.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : FINAL VERSION
So there are three journeys to a final image. You are allowed to disagree, but they are mine, so you can only vote with your cash, and you don't necessarily get to see your other choices. I like my final image as an abstract, but as usual only a small number of people will even catch that this is Ira's Fountain, so sometimes I can get too close. The overall black and white image allows someone who has been to the park to appreciate my image-making; my abstract will only appeal to those who like the fountain as much as I do. What is very interesting is that some people have concluded that the image must be a close-up of an actual Gorge waterfall, which seems to bring the entire art imitating nature argument all the way round to the beginning. I hope that Halprin would approve. I also hope that Ira Kellar, the planner who fought for the park design, appreciates that Portland, in it's informal way, finally felt that it should be simply named after him.
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NOVEMBER 19, 2021
SURF BOOKMARK
This week I'd like to discuss the art of cropping your photographs, and how it relates to both commerce and art. Cropping has always been shunned by purists, who insist that the real artists always get it right in camera, even when they don't. Two genres of photography were responsible for this point of view - street photographers and photo journalists. Street photographers were out on the street, photographing snippets of real life, and considered their framing, done in the heat of the moment, to be the true measure of their art. Nothing could be done to improve their compositions, and some even included the film frame sprockets to "prove" that there was no cropping involved. Photo journalists, dedicated to "the truth", were not allowed to crop their images in case they changed their meaning. It didn't help that the State Department's only clue to Russian affairs was who had been cropped out of the latest image from the Kremlin.
IN THE PINK BOOKMARK
Well I'm just an artist, and I get to crop with impunity in the service of my art. I get to both subtly recompose my images after the fact to correct for in camera mistakes, and to crop so much that the image doesn't much resemble the original photo. In fact the message of the image is sometimes unchanged, just focused, while other times it is completely transformed from the original. I am of the firm belief that most fine images, especially landscapes, probably contain the seed of several other fine images inside them if you are willing to look for them. And this is from a photographer who already usually captures snippets of the wider world.
PORTLAND WATERFRONT BOOKMARK
Most of my readers already know that I make most of the little money I make by creating photo coasters, so I am no stranger to cropping. God decreed that coasters come in squares, so most of my in camera rectangular images have been cropped to squares. Now I happen to like the square format for its ability to calm and focus imagery, so it was fine with me that I seemed to be using an old and expensive square format Hasselblad camera. I actually had to learn to relax my in-camera framing in order to allow for square crops, since some of my favorite images were so "well framed" as to not allow for cropping to another format. But most of my imagery was now created with at least the idea that it was probably going to be transformed into a square.
SOUTHEAST OREGON BOOKMARK
So commerce had some effect on my art, but then the mere process of making coasters started to exert an influence. Frequently at the Market vendors go through mental gymnastics surrounding their marketing ideas. I am very guilty of suddenly getting a brainstorm that will of course allow me to make millions, or least make my life easier, only to get depressed when I realize how long it took me to discover what seems in retrospect to be an obvious notion that I should have come up with years before. How quickly I can go from genius to nincompoop even when I've finally hit upon something.
PORTLAND SKYLINE BOOKMARK
You see that for years I struggled with the fact that I could print four coasters on a sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" photo paper, but that I was "wasting" the bottom 2'' or so of the sheet. These are the kind of thoughts that run through your head when you have made and sold more than 15,000 photo coasters. For nearly a decade Fran and I had the world's most expensive shopping list paper as hundreds of these strips accumulated and I couldn't bear to throw them away. But I never figured out what to do with them. It took years for me to realize that if just wrote a title and added my name to that bottom strip I could create a line of photo posters. That worked for awhile as a way to market a cheap framed poster, but as the depression hit, my competitors at the market lowered their prices so much that suddenly my posters were no longer cheap.
PORTLAND OVERLOOK BOOKMARK
It was only when I changed my coaster process to include lamination that I was forced to change my ways. I was not only wasting the bottom of very expensive photo paper, but now I was also wasting the bottom of expensive laminating pouches! What could I do? As I inserted four more coasters into the laminating pouch, a very dim light bulb went off in my head - why couldn't I insert a skinny photo underneath them? Since I was throwing away the paper, and now throwing away the laminating sheet, my costs had finally achieved parity with my time - as an artist, virtually zero. I was only paying for ink, which amounted to about 25 cents for that small print. The game was afoot!
FREMONT BOOKMARK
How could I market a small, long, skinny image? It was even less substantial than a coaster. As I bought yet another book at Powell's, and they handed me my free Powell's bookmark, I suddenly started laughing and then apologized to the cashier and assured here I was not laughing at her hair color or piercings. I had hit upon the solution for my skinny images - yet another product that was seemingly designed "out of time." I already make prints for people's walls, when most images never leave our phones. I produce photo books while others write e-books. Who actually still uses coasters? Now became my adventure of producing bookmarks when most people had moved on to Kindles. On the cutting edge as usual.
BOOKS BOOKMARK
As I entered the bookmark game, I naturally used the Powell's bookmark as my model, even though I realized their dimension was probably completely arbitrary or related to their printing parameters. But I had to start somewhere, so 2 1/8" x 7 3/8" became the answer to a question that nobody else had asked for awhile. In photo terms this became a very panoramic 3.44:1, skinny even for a panoramic photo, which usually is somewhere between 2:1 and 3:1 in dimension. If you can believe it, most panoramic photographers still use the even more obscure ratios of 16:9 or 6:17, which are based on the original panoramic film cameras that most photographers have never even seen much less used. To each his own, and my first bookmarks used horizontal images that could be made even skinnier than their originals without losing too much.
COMING HOME (MT. HOOD) BOOKMARK
Now I would be lying if I actually thought about this too much while I added the bookmark to my sheet of prospective photo coasters. Since the idea was that these came free, I was prohibited from actually "making" bookmarks, and they were only products of the printing layout. I couldn't even change the haphazard framing of the printing program, and just tried images until something worked. It was only in producing this essay that I actually had to go back and actually crop these images to create this 3.44:1 crop, so that I could actually manipulate the image to fit into the crop! Remember these accidents were free!
Accidentally, of course, it occurred to me that I could go beyond horizontal panoramas. After all, bookmarks were used in a vertical orientation in books, so why shouldn't they be the verticals that I naturally am oriented to? They just had to be skinnier. These three images, slices of a San Francisco museum, sunshades on an office building, and a portion of the stairs at Pioneer Courthouse Square, seemed to work.
Snippets of verticals seemed to focus on the real center of interest in the image while keeping to the vertical orientation, whether it was Fran on the beach, a sculpture in the Pearl, or a portion of the twilight sky in the park.
It was only when I allowed myself to follow my rule that it was not necessary to include the entire subject in the frame that the bookmarks were liberated further from their original images. "If Only" became an even skinnier slice of New York madness, and the Ferris wheel revealed itself without showing more than a small part of its circle.
But when I started to include portions of my pattern shots as coasters these images truly became free interpretations of images that already had no real orientation.
Rocks on the coast, water drops on glass, and fallen Gingko leaves are magnified when they appear as a bookmark, now that they are actually larger than their coaster originals. I hope you have had fun looking at my latest marketing brainstorm. So far I have only given them away with purchases of my books, but I'll soon try for $5.00, or 6 for $20.00, so wish me luck.
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NOVEMBER 12, 2021
STRAIGHT-ON MOMA : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to take another walk down memory lane, courtesy of my latest battle to preserve my photographic archive. The failure, maybe, of another hard drive caused another disruption to what I thought erroneously was a fool-proof system. I would encourage everyone to abandon the belief that it is possible to create such a system. In reality what everyone should do is to determine which images are really important, let's say 100 to start, and then ensure that they are backed up six ways to Sunday. Once you prove to yourself that this is true, then you can move on to the next important 100 images. Remember that even Ansel Adams' magnum opus only amounts to 400 photos. I think that my problems stem from trying to preserve too much instead of concentrating on what is important. That's why I have a list of important images called "The Missing" while at the same time I have multiple copies of unimportant or downright horrible photos numbering in the thousands. Just saying.
PURPLE TOWER : FINAL VERSION
I've had the opportunity to revisit San Francisco, which I last explored during an AIA convention in 2009. While saving some old images I have also had the opportunity to find some images that I had previously ignored. As usual, most of these images are the result of my singular way of looking at things. I have no illusions that most people might agree with me, and encourage you to create images that please yourself. If anyone else salutes, that's just a bonus. Most people are totally consumed with the image's "subject", which restricts what your image might really be about. Anything that is a detailed look at something, or even worse an abstract, will cause most people's eyes to glaze over. Including other photographers. Your art is your own, and it can be very liberating once you begin to acknowledge that your audience might be very limited.
CONCRETE CURVES : FINAL VERSION
These first three images exemplify what I mean. They are not at all typical tourist images of San Francisco. In fact, unless you are unfamiliar with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, there might be no way you could place any of these images at all. And that's all right, since they are not meant to be part of a collection of the city's greatest hits, just my reaction to some of the things I saw there. The first image was my take on a new building that I loved. It is so tightly cropped not only because I thought this fragment was interesting, but that I felt that the overall image of the museum was clearly ruined by the building just behind it. Twelve years later my vision has been justified in two ways. The first instance is when I realized that a famous photographer, John Paul Caponigro, had made exactly the same image of the museum. At least someone had agreed with me. The second was when the museum subsequently spent years and millions to erect an addition behind the museum that solved the problem by serving as an architectural backdrop to the original building. The subjects of the other two images are completely unimportant. I reacted to color and then to the absence of color. I also was interested in the conjunction of curves with the rectilinear world. I didn't even park in the parking garage, which I appreciated because it unapologetically showed off its concrete slabs by holding back the railings; the only color in the entire structure were the yellow light bulbs which I lost in the black and white.
LIBRARY ATRIUM : FINAL VERSION
LIBRARY ATRIUM B&W : FINAL VERSION
This was another newer building at the time, and I just loved the exuberance of this skylight and the reflections off of a glass meeting room that interrupted the grand space. Curves and rectangles make another appearance. The black and white version has subtly different framing that clarifies the reflection in the meeting room.
CATHEDRAL CROSSING : FINAL VERSION
This is another famous San Francisco interior of a slightly older era, but about as unashamedly modern cathedral as you might find anywhere. A concrete tour-de-force, it's pretty hard to convey the power of the space in just two dimensions. Here I follow one wall of glass, which is really inseparable from the arched roof structure that leads to the culminating central tower. Not bad for someone without a wide angle lens.
THE GREEN BLOB HAS A HUNDRED EYES : FINAL VERSION
Okay, I think you might have noticed that most of the tours that I participated during the vacation were centered upon the newest buildings, especially the museums, that had recently been constructed in San Francisco just after the turn of the century. This enigmatic monster is just part of the roof of the new home of the city's science museum. One of the world's first large green roofs, the planting was interrupted by dozens of circular skylights that lit the main space below.
LOST AT SEA : FINAL VERSION
Across the way in Golden Gate Park was the new building for the De Young Art Museum; construction tends to boom following earthquakes like the one that interrupted the World Series in 1995. This was a very interesting building, an early work by a French firm Herzog and de Meuron,which specializes in coming up with entirely new facade systems which seem to frequently be the entire raison d'etre for their designs. Here the entire building is clad with an outer copper skin which is laced with holes in front of the glass curtain wall. Kind of an architectural Swiss cheese if you will. I always appreciate it when another architect gets away with a completely arbitrary move, since my clients usually never let me indulge myself in that manner. The De Young is a very spacious two-story building. The architects convinced the museum that they needed an architectural symbol, so they designed a tower for offices to jut above the rest of the building. They got their tower, provocatively shaped it asymmetrically, and accomplished even more power over design and budget since they now had to design the roof as a fifth facade, since most of the tower's view was of the roof below. The result was even more acres of copper, and the building now achieved its final form as an aircraft carrier complete with conning tower. The architects belatedly justified their tower as a viewing tower for all of San Francisco. My image, taken in a fit of laughter when I exited the Science Museum across the way, proves, at least to me, how misbegotten this notion was in this foggy neighborhood.
ORIGAMI : FINAL VERSION
I have never met a skylight that I could resist, especially in a cloudy climate like San Francisco or Portland. Most of the time I just wish there were even more; I once convinced a client to install 24 skylights in her home, having lost only a few to budget and sanity. She didn't need electricity during the day. Here is a sculptural skylight at the new Asian Library at the Cal's Berkeley campus which cleverly lit a second floor reading room.
ON THE LINE : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes I actually got outside. Here is a new park Downtown which I fell in love with, especially in the way it managed to create separate zones within the same park. I focused on one of these boundaries, a change of height and materials which diagonally cut the park into lounging and looking zones.
BAMBOO IN AN ORANGE ENVIRONMENT : FINAL VERSION
I loved this grove of timber bamboo placed against a contrasting orange stucco wall, and tried to make a natural abstract.
FLORA #1 : FINAL VERSION
It was only while investigating "The Missing" that I realized that this purple flower came from San Francisco.
SAN FRANCISCO FOLIAGE: FINAL VERSION
I had never seen flowers like this, which were one of the main plantings at Union Square Downtown.
WISTERIA : FINAL VERSION
I was also overwhelmed by the exuberant patches of wisteria which I encountered throughout the city.
THE KING GEORGE : FINAL VERSION
Just in case you think I can't take a street photograph, I include this view of my hotel, which is my home away from home in San Francisco. I heartily recommend it, as it is around the corner from the grand St. Francis Hotel, at a savings of literally hundreds of dollars a night. It's a great old hotel, as long as you don't mind the oldest, smallest,and slowest elevators in the city. Just look for the Union Jack. San Francisco loves Breakfast almost as much as Portland - I would never eat lunch, since Breakfast can hold you over until Dinner. Dozens of such places abound in the neighborhood.
TURQUOISE : FINAL VERSION
But I love abstraction, so the final two images today are abstracts drawn from another pair of new buildings I encountered on my walks through the city. They have little to do with the buildings as a whole; I might hazard a guess that few besides their architects could instantly recognize their buildings as the "subject." Like most abstracts, viewers immediately want to know "what it is" and then are disappointed that they guessed wrong. I sometimes feel like a magician who has revealed the trick. I was interested in the color and the pattern. By withholding the context, viewers can rarely tell that these are glass sun-shading fins on one facade of a new courthouse in San Francisco. Each fin is a story tall. Viewers love the image and never buy it. What can you do?
JEWISH MUSEUM JUXTAPOSITION : FINAL VERSION
KIND OF BLUE : FINAL VERSION
This two images were my take on Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in San Francisco. A tilted metal-clad square colliding with a century-old brick office building, the building disappointed me even as a sculpture when I realized that the interior had nothing to do with the provocative exterior shape. But I loved the metal panels, so I focused on just a few and named the image after Miles' seminal album. Proving once again that your images can show your love for the parts without caring about the whole. Your images are not necessarily documents of what you saw, or where you went, but can achieve artistic merit if they can express what you felt that was important to you.
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NOVEMBER 5, 2021
ST. PAUL'S B&W : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to continue to encourage you to back up your archived photos, especially the important ones, and to explore new paths in processing them. I recently had another hard drive begin to act up, and at least I had the presence of mind to by a new one and start to transfer things around. Unfortunately the "seamless" system I had set up was anything but, and I have spent a week rescuing images from the ranks of "the missing." In order to make some lemonade out of lemons, I have also taken the opportunity to convert some of these saved images into black and white and have reinvigorated them, at least in my mind. I invite you on a tour of Great Britain, circa 2008, when Fran and I visited Benjamin, who was finishing up a semester at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich.
PEDESTRIAN TRAINING B&W : FINAL VERSION
The first thing we noticed was that efforts to save "colonials" were advancing apace throughout London, even if the cautionary sign painters hadn't yet refined the proper spacing between words. Black and white often works well in night shots because we accept higher levels of contrast than in color images, and of course they look more natural, because we tend to think that the sky is black, even if it really is not.
HORSE GUARDS PARADE B&W : FINAL VERSION
We also usually accept white skies, even though they are usually the result of misbegotten exposures. We learned to accept them long ago because early black and white film was not very sensitive to blue, so rendered it in white. By the time the chemists improved the films, we had accepted this abstract notion. This area behind the government buildings in "White Hall", is where the Queen's Horse Guards prance before the public, hence its name. The recent London Wheel provides an interesting geometric contrast in the distance.
STAIRS AND STRIPES B&W : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes I convert to black and white out of shear obstinacy, to allow for the inclusion of an image into a collection of monochrome images like this one, or to challenge myself. This image is all about color - the contrast between the red and white bricks on this office building somewhat out of place in the white district of Whitehall. Polychromatic architecture plays on this contrast, especially when it is literally striped across a facade. With black and white I lose the red, but can make it any shade of grey I desire, and can also cut down the glare on those windows. It doesn't take an architect to surmise that they light up a staircase within.
CHELSEA CATHEDRAL B&W : FINAL VERSION
While the color version of this image is very attractive, with golden hour enhancing the sandstone's hues, the black and white version has its own charms. Since I feel the real power of the image is the shadows of the flying buttresses, black and white will enhance this contrast. Emphasis on the stone's color is gone, but the texture and age of the stone is really brought out in monochrome.
ST. STEPHEN WALBROKE B&W : FINAL VERSION
This Hawksmoor church in the East End shows the ability of black and white to remove color's distractions and to subtly remove historical context. While we know that this image is not a Nineteenth Century image of a Seventeenth Century Church, the image itself offers few clues. Black and white allows me to mute the red car in the foreground when magic processing efforts to remove it failed.
THE MUFFIN MAN B&W : FINAL VERSION
"Do you know the Muffin Man, he lives on Drury Lane?" This nursery rhyme come to life is in Covent Garden, and the only thing in the original photo that is not grey is the red brick surround. Since I want you to appreciate the folk sculpture, the red brick only distracts. Black and White also lets me realistically darken the sculpture's background, literally highlighting it within the stone frame.
TWO WINDOWS B&W : FINAL VERSION
The color version of this image shows off the beautiful shades of red brick masonry. But the black and white version emphasizes the textures of the facade, and the exuberant nature of the detailing. And of course my overexposed sky looks better as white in black and white than white in color we just accept the abstraction, instead of noticing the mistake.
TURBINE HALL B&W : FINAL VERSION
Black and white allows me to convert what might be just a tourist snap into my attempt at art photography. This is one of the newer grand interior spaces in London, at the Tate Modern, an art museum which adapted a defunct power station in a noted example of adaptive reuse. I've made the image about the contrast between the windows and the skylights and the dim interior space. This contrast is overblown, but doesn't "look wrong", as it would in color. The murky shadows only seem to emphasize the vastness of the interior. My fellow humans are now only for scale - the lack of color reduces our concern with their sartorial choices.
BRITISH MUSEUM CHARMS B&W : FINAL VERSION
Black and white is frequently the answer when the real world is already pretty monochromatic. Does it really matter if monochromatic tan stone is replaced by shades of grey? Black and white allows me to deepen the shadows and emphasize the textures, which is really what I think this image is about. Black and white also lets a photographer deal with harsh mid-day "bad" light, since the excessive real life contrast can highlight black and white's ability to turn it into a positive.
BAMBURGH BEACH B&W : FINAL VERSION
Moving on from London, more rural areas of Great Britain can also benefit from converting to monochrome. The tans and greys in this image were not very attractive. The grey skies of Northumberland yield grey seas, so black and white is useful for bringing out the light rays in the sky, the shafts of light on the water, and the shadows what seem like monumental pebbles on the beach. For example, that shadowy cliff in the sand was all of three inches high.
BAMBURGH CASTLE PANORAMA B&W : FINAL VERSION
Okay, so we're not on Cannon Beach. When I turned around from the previous image, I saw the real reason to visit Bamburgh. Bamburgh Castle is right on the beach, still on the look out for invading Vikings or Scots, depending on the century. It was part of a chain of castles every 20 miles or so on the coast, all within signaling distance of each other, like Lord of the Rings. If you look in the distance in the previous image, you can see the small silhouette of the next castle in the distance.
THE EDGE OF THE MOOR B&W : FINAL VERSION
This is the edge of Dartmoor in Southwest England, a thirty-square mile uninhabitable wilderness in the midst of England's "green and pleasant land." Black and white actually looks more realistic than color in this image, because the unworldly orange gash in the middle of the landscape is here just rendered a light grey. Black and white also plays up the brooding cloudy sky.
BATH B&W : FINAL VERSION
The Circus in Bath, one of the first multi-family developments in England, is a collection of identical curving row houses set around a circular garden. While we lose the beautiful tan Bath stone color, we gain enormous detail in the facade and the gates. And the vintage-looking bicycle looks even more timeless in black and white.
STONEHENGE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
This sepia rendering of Stonehenge accomplished two things. It seemed more alive than the straight black and white, since the shades of brown achieved more contrast than the shades of grey in this instance. Monochrome also helped me clone out at least a dozen fellow tourists, since it is a lot more forgiving of manipulation than color.
HADRIAN'S WALL B&W : FINAL VERSION
It's about 4 degrees below zero centigrade, which certainly sounds more dramatic than the mid-twenties, but it still is plenty cold here on Hadrian's Wall overlooking Scotland, the inspiration for "The Wall" in the "Game of Thrones." Try to imagine the wall at twice its present-day height, since dust and dirt and Englishmen have built up the surrounding ground in the fifteen centuries since it was built. Black and white loses the green fields beyond, but adds detail and texture to those ancient stones.
HOLYROOD ABBEY B&W : FINAL VERSION
DARTMOUTH BURIAL GROUND B&W : FINAL VERSION
Black and white is really great at conveying a mood which can be undermined in a color image. These two images are all about death and remembrance, high and low. The first image is of a ruined chapel in Edinburgh which contains the remains of all of Scotland's kings before unification with England. The final image is of a modest but ancient church burial ground on the banks of the River Dart in Dartmouth in Southern England. The color images are also somber in mood, but the absence of lively blues and greens in both images certainly contribute to a deeper meaning in both of these images which capture Great Britain's long history. I hope that you have enjoyed this monochromatic tour.
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OCTOBER 21, 2021
MAPLE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to highlight some of the delights Fran and I recently discovered on a stop in Bellingham,Washington on the way back from Canada. It's no secret that I like both art and gardens as photographic subjects, and I hit the mother load when we noticed a garden on the web as we looked for something to do in Bellingham before we hit the hotel. The Big Rock Sculpture Garden more than lived up to its name.
This 2.5 acre garden sits in a quiet suburb of Bellingham, seemingly unknown amidst a typical community. It was founded by three members of the Drake Family in 1981, and subsequently bought and preserved by the city in 1993. After our visit, I believe it can serve as a model for cities throughout the nation. The garden is subtly Japanese, but not overly so; it really highlights vegetation over flowers, with more than 100 varieties of Maples. While there is the attention to detail that is found in most Japanese gardens, the real focus is on the 37 sculptures of varied artistic intent spread around the site.
These sculptures are so enhanced by their settings in the garden that I can't imagine any sculptor in the world who wound not be delighted to be included in the collection. This in what is a city park, with just an open gate, run by volunteers, with no admission fee, open year round. To say that I was flabbergasted is an understatement. The garden is beautiful as just a garden, and then you throw in the sculptures and it is elevated to a higher level. I can only hope that these few images do it some justice. These are just 6 of the 37 sculptures on permanent display.
"UNITY" : FINAL VERSION
"UNITY" AND FRIEND : FINAL VERSION
The conjunction of art and garden can sometimes be confusing, since "big rocks" are a standard feature of the Japanese esthetic. Two images of the sculpture "Unity" by Russ Beardsley and Cameron Scott are a case in point. Like a miniature Stonehenge, some granite and marble stones are balanced along a path in the garden. Yet there is another big rock very near the foot of the sculpture, and for the life of me I couldn't decide whether it was part of the sculpture or not. Most of the other sculptures are not as ambiguous, although some of them that are very subtle "land art" types start to fade into garden art rather than art in the garden. But most are enhanced by their garden settings.
"LIPCHITIZIANA" : FINAL VERSION
This blue totem, "Lipchitziana", by Sebastian (one name) stands in contrast with the surrounding greenery.
"UNTITLED BY SCULPTOR" : FINAL VERSION
"Untitled" by Pat Kuchner, in stainless steel, stands apart and focuses your attention on the garden through its hole. Located at the beginning of the garden route, it thoroughly confused me since its nameplate was located across the garden path near a nice big rock. Was this Big Rock Garden going to be devoted to naming Big Rocks?
"TURN #1" : FINAL VERSION
"TURN #2 : FINAL VERSION
This large wooden sculpture resembled something you might find in a playground, and it is a tribute to Bellingham parenting that it is not abused by children who want to play on the construction. It is entitled "Turn" by Lee Imonen, and these two views show how it is transformed from a drunken staircase to a drunken dinosaur by the simple act of walking a few steps.
"STABILE" : FINAL VERSION
"Stabile", a metal construction by Jan Zach, asserts its place in the forest in a much more direct manner. It seems to move even while it is standing still.
"TREE OF LIFE" : FINAL VERSION
Muter still is "Tree of Life" by Michael Jacobsen, which really is another "big rock" which proudly stands on its pedestal, only showing its sculptural origins in the bronze bite taken out of its top.
FENCE DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
Some of the garden's details approach sculpture as well. This is the top of a fence which borders the garden and tries to nicely delineate its boundary from the suburban surroundings.
These final sets of images are my effort to express some of the beauty of the gardens as gardens alone. This is mostly done with specimen Maple trees and with engaging varieties of vegetation. These contrasts express themselves beautifully in both color and black and white, depending on your taste. I would point out that as usual the contrasts in the black and white versions can be played up far beyond what would be seen as realistic in a color image. There are few constraints once you accept the abstraction of black and white. You could even reverse the luminosity of different colors with no one being "the wiser."
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LEAF NECKLACE : FINAL VERSION
LEAF NECKLACE B&W : FINAL VERSION
MAPLE HIGHLIGHT : FINAL VERSION
MAPLE HIGHLIGHT B&W
AMONG THE GIANTS : FINAL VERSION
AMONG THE GIANTS B&W : FINAL VERSION
In this final image, I used the panorama format to highlight the beautiful shape of the maple. The black and white version allows for subtly more contrast between the leaves and the surroundings.
MAPLE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
MAPLE PANORAMA B&W FINAL VERSION
I hope you have enjoyed this brief tour of the Big Rock Sculpture Garden. I would encourage you to use the web to head off the beaten track in your travels. You could be pleasantly surprised.
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OCTOBER 22, 2021
SOOKE POTHOLES PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to wrap up the coverage of my foray into British Columbia that I started last week. Fran and I had a wonderful time in a small town called Sooke, about 35 miles west of Victoria on Vancouver Island. It was wonderful getting out and seeing something new beyond Portland and our usual vacation spots. Vacation imagery holds many rewards but also contains the seeds of a few problems. Sensory overload of new opportunities is balanced by the twin problems of taking the same shots you have already seen on Instagram, and the feeling that you are just skimming the surface, which is of course true. One also wants to actually experience the place, as opposed to just covering it, since you are not currently on assignment for National Geographic. Also traveling with your significant other usually precludes getting up at dawn, etc., which one would do as a "proper landscape photographer." With these qualifications in mind, I'd like to again suggest a few tactics that will allow you to bag some keepers on your next trip.
SOOKE POTHOLES TRAIL #1 : FINAL VERSION
These first two images, and the majority of the rest of this week's photos, were taken on a beautiful hike in the woods along the Sooke River about ten miles north of town. The river, which will eventually meets the Pacific at Sooke Bay, runs through a series of small waterfalls and rapids into pools (Potholes) that supposedly function as swimming holes in the summer. Swimming or not, it's a beautiful trail, even in a light rain that kept most people away. Sometimes, as in the first image, the river widens the channel, while often it is more gorge-like when it meets granite deposits. The second image shows what you can get on the way to the overlook, which is frequently more interesting than the overlook itself.
POTHOLE ISLAND : FINAL VERSION
One strategy for finding new imagery is to frame the scene in a different way; a horizontal, vertical, or square crop will emphasize different aspects of the same scene. This island is at the center of the first image in this series - here it is the center of attention in a vertical image. Everyone has a different way of looking at the world, and I tend to the more distinct detail at the risk of losing the context. But remember, you are foremost making these images for yourself, and don't need to make any excuses for your particular vision. You aren't selling them, and your only obligation is making the best images out of the ones you see, even if most people might ignore that scene.
GRANITE AND LICHEN : FINAL VERSION
Feel free to ignore the actual river in pursuit of subjects, since I wasn't going to risk life and limb in the rain on those slippery rocks to view the water in that narrow channel.
POTHOLE PORTRAIT : FINAL VERSION
But sometimes a pothole is clearly a pothole, and deserves respect as such. It's important to get as much detail in the original capture, (exposing to the right of the histogram without clipping the highlights) so that you can deepen the exposure in post processing to keep water detail while brightening up the deeper tones of the forest to reveal details like the changing vegetation and the red leaves on the rocks.
SOOKE POTHOLE TRAIL #2 : FINAL VERSION
Try to not forget the forest for the trees, or whatever. Yes, only I might remember that this image was taken on the Sooke Pothole Trail, but does that really matter? Can't it just say "Pacific Northwest" without being any more specific? And do I need a passport to show the image even though I needed one to take it?
SOOKE POTHOLE TRAIL #2 B&W : FINAL VERSION
Remove the color and you get a different interpretation of the same scene. This is another way to find new images in new places. Black and white has taken away any early Fall ambience in favor of more detail in the leaves of the forest.
SOOKE ISLAND : STANDARD HORIZONTAL ASPECT RATIO
This version of the scene was the original, standard horizontal view. The first image in this essay was a second version, a panorama. Just because you create a panorama doesn't mean it has to appear as a panorama. The first image subtly expands the scope further up into the forest. This allows me to widen the scene without using a wide angle lens.
POTHOLE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
When you are out in the field try to experiment with different techniques when confronting a scene. I happen to like this vertical panorama, which puts the pothole into it's context in the forest while ignoring the horizontal context of the river. It reminds me of the Japanese screens which I admire, which encompass the whole without fiddling with perspective.
FERRY SIGHTING #1 : FINAL VERSION
Another solution for vacation imagery is to experiment with a subject normally not available in your usual environment. This image is not going to be a cover shot on a yachting magazine, but I could practice my timing in taking a moving subject, which is not usually in my wheelhouse. After some post processing, it's a credible effort, with a nice reflection in the water and shadows on the sails.
LIGHTHOUSES CAN BE CUTE TOO : FINAL VERSION
By removing most scale indications in this view of this lighthouse, I have further confounded any sense of scale in this image. The actual lighthouse looked so small on its island that it looked like it belonged on a miniature golf course. For a lighthouse, it is small, maybe two stories tall - notice the rail around the red top. The surprise I felt was only when I realized that it was an actual lighthouse and not some whimsical lawn ornament.
A FOREST OF MASTS : FINAL VERSION
These masts caught my eye, even if the overall view of the boats at the marina was too confusing. It's not an image for every one, but it is to my taste. The near silhouette further simplifies the scene.
FERRY SCULPTURE : FINAL VERSION
These four images show that you do not have to abandon your point of view even if you are on vacation. I was willing to capture imagery on a beautiful ferry ride that might not appeal to most of the people on that ferry. That's okay. It's my imagery, and it's your imagery that you take on your vacation.
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OCTOBER 15, 2021
FRENCH BEACH B&W ; FINAL VERSION
Fran and I spent a delightful ten days across the border in Canada, visiting Vancouver and then taking the ferry to Vancouver Island to stay a week at the town of Sooke, about 35 miles West of Victoria. Just like on the Oregon Coast the week before, it was absolutely fantastic to take out the camera again and have some new landscapes to explore. I always say that a photographer does his best work in his home region, but there's no doubt that a new place can get your juices flowing. While the coast of British Columbia is really just another string of beautiful Pacific beaches, as we started to explore different areas there were some locations that spoke to me.
GORDON BEACH B&W : FINAL VERSION
The real difference on this coast was the absence of people and most of the typical tourist trappings found along 101 in Oregon. While Sooke is 5 times as big as Cannon Beach, most people live in neighborhoods inland that most tourists will never see. Most tourists seem to go to resort areas isolated to certain parts of the beach, and while I admit it is October, I couldn't find one Sooke t-shirt anywhere in town. We had most places to ourselves. Since Sooke is only 35 minutes from Victoria, it is slowly becoming an exurb instead of a beach town; yet with only one road along this coast, traffic jams resemble those on Hawaii. Then you get to your destination, and no one is there. The two images above show how different the ocean can behave, depending on the exposure of the beach. French Beach faces Southwest on Strait of Juan de Fuca, while Gordon Beach faces South. In general, both face the Olympic Peninsula, but Gordon Beach is so calm that it hosts a thriving kelp forest offshore, While French Beach's rocky shore generates a rare clacking sound (at least to us) as the waves retreat from the shore.
FRENCH BEACH WAVE B&W : FINAL VERSION
The land in the distance is Washington State, but this is clearly the ocean. Every beach is covered with enough rocks and driftwood to remind you that these locations are no place to storm watch - there is just not enough room. You probably have noticed my wide angle crops and monochrome pallet, which suit the locations and the light, which was not that dramatic. The scenes are mostly monochromatic anyway - substitute shades of blue and grey for black and white. Unless the foreground is really picturesque or the sky is so overwhelming that it would be a crime to crop any of it, a 1:2 horizontal crop expresses the coast very well.
BILLINGS SPIT, SOOKE BAY B&W : FINAL VERSION
Black and white allows me to to concentrate on light and shadow. We are now on a spit Fran found in a residential area seemingly known only to local fishermen. Sooke Bay is protected from the ocean and will eventually lead inland to the Sooke River. This sky is very dull, but I can focus on the sunlight on the water without showing its source, and can render the dark green forest as a black silhouette.
SOOKE BAY FISHERMAN : FINAL VERSION
A few minutes later the sky opened up to reveal a preview of fall cover, which will probably peak in another few weeks. This fisherman was the only one without waders, since he can probably stand in the water. I took a few shots of these guys, standing stomach deep in the water, but they were too far away for it to make any sense or get any detail.
SOOKE BAY KELP : FINAL VERSION
I had a wonderful time taking sea/horizon/cloud shots, but part of the trick of getting something new from these shoreline environments is to constantly search for something different. This could be orientation, like this vertical that concentrates on a bit of the spit even fishermen won't walk on, and tries to make something out of a rare spray of color in the blue/green environment.
PACIFIC SHORE : FINAL VERSION
Here the seagull came to lend a hand to my composition, and while by no means a "nature" shot, you can see how even a seagull's behind can add some atmosphere, and a vertical orientation, to this headland image. The sun had come out, so I left the water and sky blue and the trees green.
WHIFFEN SPIT : FINAL VERSION
Now we will adjourn to Whiffen Spit, another long arm of land that divided Sooke Bay into an even more calm area. We found it by accident looking for a restaurant that no longer existed, but found a mile-long spit that we shared with most of the town's dog walkers. The spit was just wide enough to accommodate a wide path and two shore fronts. There was plenty of vegetation, but enough driftwood to assure that this spit was definitely underwater during a storm. This image looked out to sea.
SPIT SHRUB : FINAL VERSION
Looking towards the inner bay, I found this burning bush and driftwood to highlight. Just because you are on the beach it does not stop you from looking at other things.
WHIFFEN SPIT MOSS : FINAL VERSION
WHITE BERRIES, WHIFFEN SPIT : FINAL VERSION
SPITFIRE FLOWER : FINAL VERSION
SPITFIRE FLOWER B&W : FINAL VERSION
Here are several examples of the foliage found on this narrow spit. I just found them beautiful and a welcome respite from water and sky. The flower image really shows off the different strengths of color and black and white - the colors are beautiful, and while the black and white loses the subtle yellows, it really shows off the structure of the flower.
BAY CLOUD : FINAL VERSION
BEACH ROCK DETAIL #1 :FINAL VERSION
BEACH ROCKS #2 : FINAL VERSION
When all else fails when you are looking for an image, don't neglect just looking at your feet - you will be delighted with what you might find. One cloud reflected in the bay, the incredibly varied shapes and colors of beach rocks, and a composition literally found while I was sitting on a log proves my point. The fact that they do not shout "Sooke" in particular is not the point.
FERNS, ED MAGRUDER PARK, SOOKE : FINAL VERSION
TREE DETAIL, ED MACREGOR BOARDWALK TRAIL, SOOKE : FINAL VERSION
ED MACGREGOR PARK BOARDWALK, SOOKE : FINAL VERSION
These three images come from a park almost in the center of Sooke, which somehow the city does not trumpet but even ignores. Maybe it's another example of how un-touristy Sooke is. We were standing in a small park with a bandstand, which looked like it maybe hosted a farmer's market at best, when we noticed an unmarked trail off to the left. Suddenly we we on a wooden switch-back boardwalk which plummeted at least 100 feet down to the water and then continued as a boardwalk/dock out into the bay. It was as if Portland kept Laurelhurst Park or Mt. Tabor Park off the tourist map. Macgregor was Sooke's first mayor; Sooke was only incorporated in 2000.
THE PORTAL : FINAL VERSION
THE PORTAL B&W : FINAL VERSION
Finally, in the spirit that we each see what we see, and shouldn't hide it under a bush, I offer two versions of a curious piece of driftwood that I came across on Whiffen Spit. Since the black and white is more abstract I think I like it better, but to each his own. Enough people on both Instagram and 500 Pixels are Trekkies, so they presumably recognized the resemblance to the time-travel portal on the "The City on the Edge of Forever", and these images received far more "likes" than I anticipated. You never know where you will find your inspiration, or your audience, so you might as well just go for it.
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OCTOBER 8, 2021
A WINDY DAY ON THE OREGON COAST B&W : FINAL VERSION
It was a real pleasure spending a week with Fran in Florence, on the Oregon Coast. She found a wonderful house to rent, a short drive to the beach, whose only problem was the 28 steps up from the car to the living room; I found that counting them relieved some of the misery. We had mostly wonderful weather, which means it did not rain horizontally, and explored a lot of the nearby beaches on the Central Oregon Coast. A crowded beach meant we had to share it with ten other people - most of the time we were nearly alone. The image above was taken on a typical day at the beach closest to home, which was situated at the North end of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, a forty-mile long stretch of North America's largest sand dune formations. I learned on this trip that the dune grass was introduced in the early 1900's to try to control the dunes, and remains the only thing that really keeps them at bay. Our local Freddie's, a mile from our house, was backed by a four-story sand dune beyond the store.
PATH TO THE BEACH : FINAL VERSION
This section of the Coast presents a different beach experience. Even in sections that are not totally dune-bound, the path to the beach is rarely straight forward. This was the first path we were supposed to take, nixed by Fran before I had the chance to sprain my ankle; we discovered an easier path at an adjacent resort we were "checking out" for the rest of the week. Small bodies of water, ranging up to real lakes, frequently are trapped inland of the dunes.
TYPICAL HEADLAND ON AN ATYPICAL SUNNY DAY : FINAL VERSION
Heceta Head Beach, north of our house, was one of the few parts of the nearby coast that was easily accessible. It's a cove protected by two headlands, typical of the Coast, which are cliffs that project into the ocean and divide the miles of coastline into separate stretches of sand. The Northern headland sports Heceta Head Lighthouse, reputed to be the most photographed lighthouse on the Oregon Coast.
HECETA SQUIGGLE : FINAL VERSION
I noticed this s-curve in the surf while walking up to the lighthouse, and thought it was a nice minimalist view of the cove. You can decide which version works better.
HECETA SQUIGGLE B&W : FINAL VERSION
You could make a serious argument that both versions are monochromatic, since the color version contains only blue, white, and brown. The black and white version highlights the surf a little better, but the only "subject" that feels dissed in the seagull at the bottom left corner, who gets completely lost without his black silhouette against the blue water. He certainly would opt for the color version.
LONG EXPOSURE EXPERIMENT : FINAL VERSION
Although I was a total failure as a "proper landscape photographer" since I never was up for dawn, I did try some experiments on the coast, especially on the beaches that were uncharacteristically flat and endless. Here I focused on this log while with the aid of my tripod and a 10-stop neutral density filter I slowed the shutter speed to 8 seconds on a sunny day. The surf is now rendered as a milky substance instead of the separate waves of reality, while the lump of a log, which refused to move, is rendered as sharp as the original 1/30 of a second version. If I stuck around till twilight, the speed would turn into several minutes, and the sea would be one glassy surface.
OREGON COAST ABSTRACT : FINAL VERSION
This abstract was achieved through experimentation without any technological hocus-pocus. Faced again with a pretty featureless beach, I simply moved the camera sideways while taking the ordinary correct exposure. As my first experiment in ICM (intentional camera movement) I consider it a success. The waves and beach puddle are rendered as out of focus brush lines, which highlights the color bands since there is nothing else left to focus on. Don't be afraid to experiment, since pixels are free, and you needn't show anyone anything anyway, unless you write a blog. By the way, this is the best exposure out of ten, for what it's worth.
COAST SKY #1 : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes the only thing to do is to photograph the sky, even if there is no suitable landscape around. On the Oregon Coast, you don't neglect interesting cloud formations, since a completely gray sky will probably return tomorrow.
HECETA HEAD SEA STACKS : FINAL VERSION
Never miss a chance at a reflection, so this pair of sea stacks back at Heceta Head Beach is now four sea stacks. I like the color version which shows off the sea bird preferences on the rocks, because of the white guano, which could be mistaken for highlights in a black and white rendering.
TIDE'S OUT, WINDS UP : FINAL VERSION
Here I used a slightly slower shutter speed, but still hand-held, to emphasize the pretty strong wind which was fortunately at our backs. Like that downhill hike, you will inevitably have to climb back up and face into the wind, but here I can try to show the shifting sand in a still photograph. the incoming fog bank adds some mystery, and our lone companion on the beach adds a sense of scale. You also might notice my frequent employment of the 1:2 horizontal crop to emphasize the panoramic view. For a guy who is strongly oriented towards the vertical or to the square crop, I'm finding that I enjoy going wider when I go horizontal. Coastal imagery encourages this horizontal crop, since you can frequently lop off large sections of blue sky or brown sand, or both, to focus on the real subject, the wide expanse of the shoreline. Now I find myself somewhat disappointed when I can't lop off sections of my carefully framed images because the sky and/or the foreground is too interesting, and I am left with the original horizontal 2:3 out of camera frame!
COASTAL CLIFFS : FINAL VERSION
In this case the vertical extent of the cliffs would not allow a wider view without a wide angle lens which I don't like and don't have. Sometimes you can really see the limits of the beach and are just happy you aren't there when the waves are actually eroding the cliffs. This section of beach was at the bottom of a half-mile long "crowded" trail called the "Hobbit Trail", where we shared the beach with about a dozen other people. I know it's now fall, but I don' think this trail would really be crowded even if you had hundreds of people on this beach.
HOBBIT TRAIL : FINAL VERSION
Now you can see why some wag named this trail down to the beach the "Hobbit Trail." Another illustration of why the Oregon Coast is not really a boardwalk lover's dream; we require a little work before you get to the beach.
FLORENCE NORTH COAST JETTY PARK B&W : FINAL VERSION
I will take my verticals where I can find them on the Coast, and when the sun and a passing seagull cooperate, I'll be there. This is the North jetty at the entrance to Florence harbor, which shows that even a half-mile long pair of man-made spits can be pretty wild place when they are on the Oregon Coast. Black and white allows me to tame the sun and more realistically render the foreground as a near silhouette without the viewer wondering why I've underexposed the shot. And the seagull gets to show off without the distracting blue sky.
FLORENCE NORTH COAST JETTY PARK #2 : FINAL VERSION
Looking the other way on the same jetty reveals its winding shape, emphasized by this square crop. You can appreciate the hundreds of tons of rock brought here by the Army Corps of Engineers, all a year ahead of schedule and under budget, according to the historical plaque!
SIUSLAW RIVER BRIDGE, FLORENCE : FINAL VERSION
ALSEA BAY BRIDGE, WALDPORT : FINAL VERSION
Some of the best man-made highlights of the Oregon Coast are the bridges that allow Route 101 to span the few rivers that cut through to the Pacific. C.B. McCullough designed most of these spans, and most are still there, but his bridge at Alsea Bay was replaced by this modern design reminiscent of Portland's Fremont bridge in 1992 by Walter Hart. The Siuslaw Bridge from 1936 is said to be Art Deco, but I find it to be romantically vaguely Egyptian in character. It is also a rare drawbridge on the Oregon Coast. The modern bridge at Alsea also kept some of McCullough's fanciful towers at the bridge's two approach segments as an homage to McCullough.
ENDANGERED PLOVERS ON THE COAST : FINAL VERSION
These Plovers are quite cute, and can run fast, but do not seem to like to fly, which restricts your god-given right to watch Rover play in the surf at some times during the year on this section of the Coast. We couldn't have dogs think that they could actually catch a bird, and subsequently ruin their self-esteem, would we?
UNEXPLAINED MYSTERY IN THE SAND, OREGON COAST : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes you look down and find a natural feature that defies at least my uniformed explanation. What would cause this formation of God's potato chips to form in the sand. I used my characteristic square crop, but believe me, these stretched on for dozens of feet, and then just stopped.
OREGON COAST SUNSET : FINAL VERSION
We did get to see one sunset, but it was characteristically through some interesting cloud formations, which leads to some interesting sunlight reflections in the surf and on the beach. No standard red ball diving into the ocean for us.
FRAN AT THE JETTY B&W : FINAL VERSION
Finally, a view of the most important subject on the Coast. Black and white shows off the Reba McEntire stripe in Fran's hair.
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2021
SAN JUAN LIGHTHOUSE B&W : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to continue the discussion I started last week concerning the benefits of putting your work in front of other people to see if their reactions have anything to do with your expectations. I have been experimenting with a photographic alter-ego, a throwback who has never seemed to have taken a color photo, in order to gauge the reactions of other photographers to my work. So for most of this year the people I have met on the website 500 Pixels have commented on my photographs, all of which have been presented in black and white. I have benefited most from two aspects of this project. One is that I almost never can predict what will bring out the most positive reactions from my fellow black and white aficianados. The other, more important thing that I have learned is that I have had so much fun converting a lot of my images into black and white. These range from images that I had thought might work in black and white to those that I thought didn't have a prayer of working without color. As usual, I was often dead wrong. Sometimes I realized to my surprise that an image worked so well in black and white that the original color image was completely superfluous.
The image above of a lighthouse on the Western edge of San Juan Island was taken about four years ago on a wonderful week-long-vacation where I must have taken several hundred images each day. The historical average of "keepers" is only about 1%, so it's not like I anticipate a winner each time I snap the shutter. After all, in order to keep trying, you must convince yourself that it is all in the process, and of course it is. The initial snap is just the beginning, and I caution you to avoid throwing things away unless they are completely useless - I have often found interesting images months, even years after I initially loaded them on my computer. Which is not to say that they don't need some massaging in Lightroom to achieve some goal which you might not have even had when you made the initial capture. Let's look at the stages of this image, which much to my surprise achieved the second highest "score" than any of my images have ever achieved on 500 Pixels. Last week I put in the website, having converted it to black and white, with no feeling that anyone would salute. I think I have sold only one coaster of it's color cousin, so it has never found any traction in the booth.
SAN JUAN LIGHTHOUSE : ORIGINAL, OUT OF CAMERA
This is the original image. I was intrigued by the sky, and placed the lonely lighthouse way on the edge of the frame to emphasize its loneliness as well as to avoid some ramshackle structures to the right of the lighthouse. Upon reflection, I felt that I had gone overboard on the out of center placement, and that it was a little too much like a postcard for me. But the public loves lighthouses, so I felt it was worth trying to get something out of this image. In any case, lighthouses are like waterfalls - photographers just cannot resist picking up their cameras.
CROP TO A SQUARE
First things first was to crop the image to a square, both to prepare it for its future as a coaster, and to eliminate most of that loneliness to the left. The Lighthouse still looks plenty lonely, and larger, in the square crop, and its placement in the frame does not seem so arbitrary. I will now show you some of the next stages in a typical workflow, where I try to make the image the best it can be, or at least the best I can make it. Some of these will be fairly subtle, but bear with me.
RAISE WHITE POINT
This will only affect the lighter parts of the image - any lighter shades, especially white, will become whiter, without affecting the overall exposure. So the clouds, and especially the lighthouse, will become lighter in relationship to the darker tones.
ADD GRADUATED FILTER
Because the sky is often the lightest part of any landscape image, photographers will often add a graduated filter, sort of like a progressive sun glass lens, which will darken the upper part of an image but gradually not affect the rest of the image. We used to do this with glass filters attached to the lens; now my software can do it after the fact. The sky has gotten darker, and the clouds pop out a little better.
LIGHTEN SHADOWS
The last thing to do (again, as far as I was concerned) was to lighten the shadow areas, mostly to gain some detail back in the rocks below the lighthouse. This is subtle, and I left the naturally black areas in deep shadow as black. Typical HDR renditions would show all of these details, which makes the photo look unrealistic, because our brains are used to seeing some areas as very dark.
This is the culmination of my efforts to make more out of the initial snapshot. I've left out some of the usual steps in my workflow since they were either unimportant for this image, or that they would be impossible for you to perceive at this size. The image was correctly exposed, so exposure changes were unimportant. The same went for white balance adjustments, since there was no color casts. Customary corrections like sharpening are not shown because they are not perceptible at this enlargement size, although they would be necessary if the image was seen at 8" x 8" instead of on your computer. I've succeeded at making the image closer to my original perceptions, balanced the sky and the foreground, increased the "whiteness" of the lighthouse, and brought out some additional details in the sky and the rocks. The most important change, for better or worse, remains the crop, which shows how important the frame is for an image. In order to make any additional changes it is necessary to journey into abstraction so that the image is relieved to some extent from its origins in the natural environment.
STRAIGHT DESATURATION
The easiest way to predict what your image would look like in black and white is to just desaturate all of the colors, removing all of the color information in the file. Beware that this will almost always leave you with a dull, washed-out sea of grey that would cause you to reject the process. More importantly, as we will see, removing the color information will not allow you to use the original color differences to change the black and white rendition of those colors. In the real world, a lot of our perceived contrast is based on color contrast - which is lost if we uniformly desaturate the colors without keeping this information. Thus the red roof of the lighthouse might end up as the same grey as the blue sky and contrast would be lost. So a far better black and white conversion utilizes the software algorithm to render each of the colors a little differently; while the first rendition might no be a revelation, we will then be able to change the luminosity, the shade of grey, of different parts of the image based on the colors we can no longer see.
ALGORITHM BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION
Okay, in this case, not that different. The red roof is lighter; the green tower roof is a little darker. You could be excused if you don't care. Wait.
MOVE BLACK POINT
My initial effort to increase the apparent contrast by only adjusting the darker portions of the image; in this case not much happens because most of the image is actually pretty light. Only the rocks, the shadow side of the lighthouse, and those roofs are affected. You see that the struggle for contrast is answered in different ways for different images. We move from "global" changes which affect the entire image progressively to more and more specific changes which affect tiny parts of the image. The problem is how to restrict those changes, either by original luminosity, original color, or just painting them in to specific areas. "Painting" is always available, but has to be really subtle so as not to be noticeable by the viewer. Remember, if the viewer is aware of the changes beyond shear appreciation of the image, you've lost the battle. That is why I usually head first for the graduated tools, designed either as a line across the image or as a circular spotlight of a certain size. The important thing is that these are gradual, moving in power from 100% to 0%, so they are more subtle. There is no "right" way to do something, although there are certainly more efficient ways to accomplish the same goals. I want to make the lighthouse stand out more from its surroundings. It is already about as white as it can be - any more would make it glow. The solution seems to be to darken the surroundings without affecting the lighthouse. I could do this with a series of graduated filters all around the lighthouse, but why don't we go back to the color information, since most of the original photograph was blue?
LOWER THE BLUE TONES
Well, will you look at that. All of the blue tones - the sky, the sea - in other words, most of the image - have been darkened without affecting the rocks, the clouds, and most importantly, the lighthouse. I've made the lighthouse "whiter" by rendering everything else darker. The clouds also stand out more, but the most fun for me, and this is subtle, is that for the first time you are aware of the reflection of the lighthouse in the water in the foreground. Oh, the places you will go!
This is pretty much the final black and white version. At larger sizes you would notice sharpening; also you would notice subtle differences in lowering of the purple and aqua tones to create a smoother "curve" of color tones which tend to reduce artifacts which might result from drastic shifts in only one color.
I hope you can see and appreciate the vast differences I've made in this image. That doesn't mean that you have to agree. You might think that I've gone too far, that you can see my brain's gears moving. Or you might wonder why I haven't lightened the rocks a little more, or removed the "distractions" that remain, like those highlights on the waves, which might strike you as sensor dust, or those two seagulls in the water on the left, which will only resolve as birds at larger enlargements. Some photographers would also "turn on" the lighthouse light, which is going a little too far in my opinion. I know people who would introduce a nice too large full moon in the upper left corner to "balance" the image - to each his own. I might agree that the leaning tower of clothesline on right is not adding anything to the image. Sometimes you've just got to call it a day.
The important thing, at least for me, is that the image is now all about the original subject, the lighthouse. And I think that most would agree that the abstraction of black and white allows for more manipulation than a color rendition because we accept those changes as realistic even though we know the sky is not really black. An equivalent deep blue sky would just look a little silly.
So that is the story of one image. The very positive reception on 500 Pixels will probably lead me to print the black and white in lieu of the color version in the future. It struck a chord, with more than half of the "likes" coming from people who had never "liked" any of my images before. While I know people like lighthouses,I don't think that accounts for most of it. The Instagram response was not as overwhelming, but the black and white version did get a more positive response than the original color version had a year before - this is very unusual on Instagram. So I would encourage those out there with the means to do it to try processing your own work, and to pursue different versions of the same image. I believe you will be pleasantly surprised at how only a few minutes on the computer will transform your image beyond what you might enjoy at first glance. Remember that your image has been interpreted in the past, either by a JPEG algorithm in your camera, or even worse by a disinterested one-hour photo guy wondering about lunch and proud that he has at least not cut into your negative again. I swear that you can do better, even if you do not know what you are doing. Lightroom is non-destructive - you are not touching the original file - and like most software, is available for a free trial. Try it, you might like to be more in control of the your image's final destiny.
SAN JUAN LIGHTHOUSE B&W : FINAL VERSION, AT LEAST FOR TODAY.
]]>SEPTEMBER 3, 2021
WATERFALL MIST : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss the dilemma of judging your own work. It seems obvious to me that my own opinion is the most important, but the pressures of trying to market my work for sale lead to a constant effort to try to understand what the public likes. Now I don't mean "the public" as a global groundswell that will lead to fame and a large bank account. I am only concerned here with trying to reach "my public", the people who actually have proven to be receptive to my work. Even for an "anti-marketer like me, it would be nice to know that I'm at least having a positive impact on the people who like my work. Readers of this blog, for instance. What directions of my work intrigue you? That doesn't mean that if you demand cats, I will deliver cats, because I won't, but the insights might be useful. I have been extremely lucky in the past ten years in that I have seen which examples of my work actually reach a receptive public, since I meet them each weekend in my booth. Not everyone will purchase my art -in fact, even most people who like it will not open their wallets. But it is interesting to be able to actually understand why people react well to some examples of my work more than others. When you sit in a booth all day, it's nice to exhibit work that promotes a discussion, if not a sale.
VANISHING POINT : FINAL VERSION
Now I'm not such a dimwit as to not understand that I am selling photographs at a craft market in Portland, Oregon. Saturday Market is the oldest craft market in the country, but it is not primarily an art market - two dimensional wall art is in fact the hardest thing to sell at the market, which is half jewelry, and mostly other craft staples that Fran calls "market crack" like pottery, which she just shakes her head when I wonder why I can't compete with them for sales. But mostly I feel that I just compete with the dozen or so other photographers who exhibit at the market. My work is my own, but it just so happens that i was an architect, and that I love Portland, and that I've lived here thirty years, so it stands to reason that my work might appeal to an audience that is visiting our fair city. What I take some pride in is that my Portland photographs actually appeal more to Portlanders than tourists per se, so that a print is usually a gift for the visitor rather than something the visitor might be expected to pick up on their own. People who live here can see and appreciate that my take on local subjects frequently is pretty unusual if not unique. So I naturally fell into a niche of "artistic" local photography that is actually a good fit for a market that is the second most popular tourist attraction in the entire state. While I understand that it would be nice to think that a fine image of Paris would sell as well, I'm not that naive. And since my coasters allow me to experiment with many images, it's usually pretty easy to at least respond to public demand, even if I've never been able to predict it with any accuracy.
REFLECTIONS ON BURNSIDE : FINAL VERSION
So I know how to sell coasters, but efforts to sell larger prints are still a constant struggle to find the images that people must have, despite the high prices I must charge to sell them in the beautiful, large versions they profess to want. Since the most popular of my images accounts for only 6% of my sales, it is not as easy to figure out which images to invest in as it is for some of my colleagues. I know that only a few of their images account for the vast majority of their sales; they could leave everything else at home. So they fill out their booths to look legitimate, while I fill my booth with a host of images that just might sell, maybe, someday. Yet these "billboards" are the things that attract most people into my booth in the first place. Frustration, anyone?
HUG POINT : FINAL VERSION
In an effort to acquire some useful marketing information, I finally joined a photographic community online this year that I had resisted in the past. I was not trying to sell anything, since this website, 500 Pixels, is marketed as by photographers for photographers. Since it is almost impossible to sell photography to other photographers, all marketing pressure was gone. I was just trying to see what might appeal to a different, "knowledgeable" audience. And 500 pixels is a space for mostly very good photography of a standard much higher than Instagram, although there is some overlap. It is basically still a place where people can go to see great imagery, even though I have discovered some serious quirks in the algorithm that rival Instagram's. I still believe that if you want to find very nice imagery on a certain topic, just type it in the search bar and you will find something to aspire to, whether it' s Paris, or football, or tulips. In an effort to further stack the deck, I invented a new persona on the site with my curation of my own work. 500 pixels doesn't really lend itself to comments as much as Instagram, but I decided to only show Black and White images. As far as 500 pixels was concerned, I might be still using my father's Leica film camera, since color has never appeared - or else I used a Hasselblad, since so many of my images were in the square format, and they don't know from coasters.
HIGH-KEY ARCH : FINAL VERSION
So how is the old codger doing on 500 Pixels? What has this new audience revealed, or obscured, or confused me in their taste for my imagery? I must say that is has been revealing, but mostly just another form of confusion. I usually have no clue on whether any particular image will "find" an audience, much less grow one, and am frequently surprised as heck as I review my feed. While the algorithm is no less obscure than Instagram's, it does have a certain "permanence" that can be insightful. I have put over 200 images on 500 Pixels, and they are all still there on my "Profile" for anyone to find. The thing is that they are all still on my feed as well, along with all of the images of everyone I have followed. They do not disappear, and you better like the imagery of anyone you follow, since unlike Instagram, it still appears every day they throw something out there. Like I soon learned on Instagram, be careful who you follow. But it is different than Instagram in that you can "like" anything you want without it affecting your feed. It is more like the "permanent record" your teachers threatened you with in Junior High. You will only see what you want to until you explore, and even if you like something, or even comment, you will not be followed around by that momentary opinion. 500 Pixels actually seems to function more as a sounding board. There is a lot of information on the public's reaction to your image, but not as much search for followers or even likes as there is on Instagram. Or maybe I'm just naive, since I couldn't even figure out how many followers I have until I started researching the site for this essay. It turns out I have only 21, which is less than any other person I have ever even checked out on the site, much less followed. These are just photographers, not celebrities, but some people have followers numbering in the thousands, so it's not like I'm catching on like wildfire.
MASONRY QUILT B&W : FINAL VERSION
But it has been interesting. Just like on Instagram, I'm not really concerned with followers, but more on seeing who has actually liked my work, and what they are like, since their profile is now readily available for my inspection. 500 pixel people are usually very fine photographers, and it is very endearing when someone from Uzbekistan, much less a fine photographer, finds one of my images even worthy of a "like." Of course this is a self-selected group with a penchant for black and white imagery, but at least I can be surprised at what that group will react to or what they will ignore. For you see on 500 Pixels each of my images is constantly tracked, forever, on its impact, long after even I have forgotten submitting it to the site. Or maybe I just don't know how to find that info, although I can get lost in my "statistics" which appear if I hit that button. And it's always changing, so that even with my paltry following, I can see that a certain image received another tow likes last week, months after I posted it.
TURBINE HALL : FINAL VERSION
This constant quantification is enough to make even a life-long baseball fan cry, except it applies to everyone else too. The easiest way to see new work each day is to hit the popular button, which takes you through a feed of thousands of photos rated every few seconds(!) by their "pulse" on the site, which is determined by that pesky algorithm, but which is most certainly determined by how many people have clicked on, liked , or even commented on that image today. You can even watch the order change while you are on the popular feed. The rating starts at 99.9 or so, and I have never wasted enough time to get below 95, and by then I've seen hundreds of photos. By the way, I've never hit higher than 94.6, and only higher than 90 a few times, so most people fortunately have much more time to waste than I do, since most of my images are rated "popular", even though they usually settle in the mid-80's. So I don't even know how my fans find me.
CRATER LAKE #3 B&W : FINAL VERSION
So what is popular? Exactly what you might think. These are photographers, but they are still human beings. Don't think cats, for heaven sakes, but don't think too hard either. If you want to see the most beautiful photographs of very beautiful women every day, there you go. And just like Instagram, it's a constant challenge to present the most provocative imagery without nudity, even though that option is available with a double click. These are beautiful images, and you begin to recognize the photographers as well as the models. I hope that Ivan from Moscow has a good relationship with his muse Anna, since I see another beautiful image of her everyday. Shockingly, at least for me, the second most popular form of imagery seems to be bird photos; if you can get a bird eating, whether it's an eagle or a chickadee, you will be rated above 95. My black and white imagery of the city has no chance whatsoever. It reminds me of the point in my evenings at Last Thursday when the "Fire Girls" came out to do flaming hula-hooping, and I knew it was time to start packing up my photography.
OREGON COAST SUNSET B&W : FINAL VERSION
While I can't compete with models or birds, it has been enlightening to see how this group of black and white purists respond to my imagery. Unfortunately it seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with what has been successful at the Market. What is even weirder is that certain images do not follow any fate I might have projected for them. While I could predict that Portland imagery might not get as big an audience in the wilder world, it has been hard top fathom what "my public" will find more or less interesting. All of the images above have gotten far more attention on line than in reality, especially when you consider that there color counterparts would get far more interest. The first image, Waterfall Mist, as Oregon an image as you could hope to find, is the most popular image in the year I have been on 500 Pixels; I have never sold a print of this at the Market. Some of the others, like Turbine Hall, or High-Key Arch, obviously will do better with a national or international audience.
MULTNOMAH FALLS BRIDGE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION
Another big success on line, with no real sales at the Market. I know it doesn't make any sense. I think it might have something to do with a 500 Pixel prejudice in favor of panoramic images, which seem to do well in general.
TIES UP IN WILMINGTON : FINAL VERSION
Okay, so this was an anticipated fluke. This photographer's photograph, very popular on 500 Pixels has about as little chance of sales at the Market as just about anything I could think of putting up on the wall.
EDINBURGH PASSAGE : FINAL VERSION
Another image that wouldn't get a second glance by most dedicated customers, but almost broke 90 on 500 Pixels. It is evocative, but I don't think even most natives of Edinburgh would "get" it without close inspection. I can only figure that I should try to include more humans in my imagery, since several shots like this one have stirred some on-line interest.
INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY : FINAL VERSION
Now I admit to being totally flummoxed. Of course I like this image - I don't exhibit anything I am not proud of. What shocked me about its online success was that neither the color version or this new black and white version has ever even provoked any response by anyone. How can I interpret this input, beyond wishing for a more "sophisticated" clientele? What does this mean?
FOUNTAIN FUN : FINAL VERSION
I have never had much success with this image, even though I display it more out of spite than anything else. It's one of my images that should sell, god-dammit, even though it doesn't. It is the second-most popular image of mine on 500 Pixels. Again, it contains human beings, and it is high contrast, which helps when you are competing with thousands of images, much less women and birds.
So what do I know? Not much. This experiment hasn't really led to any profound revelations. I have sold art all around the world, from my little booth under the Burnside Bridge, and still don't have much of an understanding of my public. I'm beginning to conclude that I need to have even more of the strength of my convictions. I need to show what I want to show, my public be damned, since I don't seem to understand them anyway. But I will say that it has been an awful amount of fun to adopt another photographic persona for awhile. The most important thing I've discovered is that some of my best images actually work much better as black and whites, as I have converted them to promote my monochromatic alter ego. That has kept me going, even when I contemplate rebellion, abandonment or heart attacks among my 500 Pixel fans if color should ever appear on my feed.
My lack of marketing skill, even when I'm marketing, has certainly kept me humble. To conclude, you might ask which image has received my lowest score on 500 Pixels since I started this experiment? It is only that image, albeit in color, that constitutes my biggest seller at 6% of my all-time revenues:
GO BY TRAIN B&W : FINAL VERSION
The public has spoken! A score of 40, approximately 25 points less than any other image! It's enough to make this grown man cry, or at least have a drink. Fran has been wondering why I don't take up Scotch like most of my troubled British detectives, although I know she would be aghast if I ever did.
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AUGUST 27, 2021
HAWTHORNE NOCTURNE : FINAL VERSION
Its been said at least a million times that photography is all about light -good light, bad light, light painting, natural light, artificial light - but what about photography under the conditions of little or no light? What about taking photographs when we ordinarily wouldn't consider it - under the cover of night? From the dawn of photographic history, photographers have tried to extend the time and lighting conditions that allowed them to create images after the sun went down.
PAY ATTENTION, BLOODY FOREIGNERS! : FINAL VERSION
There are several problems with taking photos with little or no light. Focusing the image can be a problem, where the absence of contrast makes it hard to find the edges that are necessary for properly resolving focus, whether manually or with autofocus. Low light levels frequently require shutter speeds slow enough to either blur moving subjects, or even worse, to reveal camera shake caused by our own failure to hold the camera steady for longer than we usually do when hitting the shutter button. Finally, even successfully taken low-light photographs can suffer either from a general murkiness, or from excessive contrast between light and dark areas of the image. Either circumstance will lead to the absence of the detail in the shadows that we were after in the first place.
DARTMOUTH CASTLE AT NIGHT: FINAL VERSION
My readers know that I am a fan of high contrast images, so that night-time contrast does not scare me off. But we still have to deal with it, either by raising our ISO sensor levels and introducing more noise into our images, or bringing along our annoying tripods to eliminate camera shake by allowing the slow shutter speeds that our hands will not allow. But we also have to deal with the differences between our eye/brain connection and the different way our cameras can register light, especially when it is darker than daylight. Our eyes can perceive many more light levels in the low tones than our camera sensors can, and our brains are better able to deal with the idea that highlights, especially artificial light, are expected to be very bright. Our sensors respond in several different ways. In an effort to not blow out the highlights, they reduce the exposure of the darker areas to just black. Conversely, and even more weirdly, in an effort to render the world in our average 18% gray, the images can sometimes appear not to be taken at night at all.
LIVING ROOM STAIRS : FINAL VERSION
So we find ourselves in the quandary of fooling both our cameras and ourselves, which makes these night-time sessions problematic. I have found that the only real answer is to increase the experimental quotient, with lower expectations than under ordinary conditions. This is also usually a solitary activity, since the spouse doesn't even understand what you are doing out there, and the shutter speeds that sometimes exceed minutes will render them speechless. Urban night-time photography introduces the realistic concern of being out in the dark alone with thousands of dollars of equipment. I have found the answer in making it a winter activity, since at least night is earlier, and there are more people around. Of course you have to be more social, since the public is naturally interested in your idiosyncratic activity, and it is cold. But cold and jovial are much better than warm and paranoid. The image above was taken at a photo meet-up with dozens of photographers spending an hour milling around Pioneer Courthouse Square.
TWILIGHT : FINAL VERSION
Urban landscapes lend themselves to night-time shooting because of the miracle of artificial light. While modern cameras can shoot at candlelight, or by a campfire, it was the introduction of electric light early on in the history of photography that allowed enough ambient light to light urban areas, even without focusing on the light sources themselves. Urban areas were suddenly not so dark as humans had come to accept, even if we were a long way from worrying about "light pollution." The photo above, although labeled "Twilight" to take advantage of young vampire afficianados, was really taken at the end of what photographers call "blue hour", that magical period, usually about an hour at least in our geographical position, where the sun has gone done, but the sky is not yet black, and Mr. Edison has turned on the lights in the city. I'm depending on the ancient source of night-time light, the full moon, to provide a focus point through the trees. The camera has rendered the sky a lot lighter than reality, so I am really relying on the street lights to allow me to see my camera and not trip over the curb.
STUMPTOWN EVENINGS : FINAL VERSION
Another example of "blue hour". All of the tourists have left for dinner after sunset, and it's pretty cold, but at least since it is February it's only about 6:00 P.M. The sun is still lighting up Mt. Hood's snow, since there is no light out there, and the camera reveals all of the varied shades of artificial city lights that our brains do a better job of averaging.
STUMPTOWN NAKED CITY : FINAL VERSION
This alternate interpretation shows how our brains can be fooled by the photographic process. The black and white rendering has not only increased the contrast, and created a new moodier photo, but it has also convinced us that it is later in the evening; black and white has fooled our brains that it must be later because our "eyes" can no longer perceive color. As the sun goes down, we lose our ability to see colors far earlier than we lose our ability to differentiate between darker levels of light - this is masked by the brightness of artificial light, especially neon signs.
THE SCHNITZ : FINAL VERSION
Yet sometimes the camera's eyes can reveal more than our own, because the primitive computer brain cannot adjust to reality as readily as our own. My exposure of this neon sign is so heavily based on the artificial lighting that beyond throwing everything else into blackness (there is a city behind the sign) our eyes can now perceive the actual structure and blue shade of the neon letters, which I assure you is not the reality of the sign's appearance.
HUH? (LONDON) : FINAL VERSION
MADE IN OREGON IN THE RAIN : FINAL VERSION
Both of these images show how the camera can be fooled by both the brightness and color of neon light. The neon is so powerful that it has caused a color cast that while subtle in reality has now completely clouded the images. While this heightens the mood, it is more a product of my imagination than my eyes - the night sky was not red in London or orange in Portland.
CUP AND SAUCER, 8:20 : FINAL VERSION
Here i have adjusted the ambient light temperature of this Hopper homage to set the mood and correct both the color cast allowed by the camera, and the excessive contrast cause by the natural color correction that dealt with that color cast. The original shot was unbelievably orange, because the camera reacted to the real orange tone of the restaurant's incandescent lighting which our brains are able to "ignore." Yet when I corrected for that, the straight black and white introduced "unnatural" levels of contrast that made it impossible to see what was going on either inside or outside the storefront. I then toned the image to cut this contrast, using a blue tone that said night to me instead of the usual sepia that rendered this scene as 8:20 A.M. instead of a winter night. I assure you they're still eating breakfast.
"OVERTIME" : FINAL VERSION
Now it's so late, that both the camera and my eyes cannot perceive any color in this office building which has just been emptied by a bomb threat. Of course this is my black and white version, but really there was only shades of brown in reality. We had been in an adjacent museum.
POWELL'S : FINAL VERSION
Here for once I've dramatically reduced the contrast and increased the exposure so that the viewer can perceive more detail than in reality. It is much darker on this corner, but I've allowed for far more detail both inside and outside the store, while still keeping it "night." The part of the image I actually like best are the glowing Max tracks in the foreground.
EDINBURGH EVENING : FINAL VERSION
Finally we have returned to the roots of night-time imagery, where photographers revealed the "darker" side of life in the Victorian city. Except for the pedestrian's out-of-focus plastic bag, and the fact that these are not gas lights, this alley scene in Edinburgh could be more than a century old. Nothing untoward is going on, but my perceptions that something "might happen" have focused both my street smarts and my photographic attention. Of course I'm just a New Yorker, but you can't be too careful. And my imagination shouldn't stop you from trying tocreate your own nigh-time imagery.
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AUGUST 20, 2021
THE SAILBOAT : FINAL VERSION
I'd like you to bear with me this week as I take a deep dive into the creation of just one photograph. The news is so depressing that I have taken refuge in my art, and want to show you, in a limited way, what goes on between pushing the shutter and pushing an image out into the world. I would encourage all of you to try escaping into a hobby, a game, a book, or your own art, in order to cope with the real world outside your head. I realize that many of you have never actually tried to improve a photograph in this way, thinking it is just too hard, or too expensive, or not worth the effort. I want to assure you that all of that is not true, as is the belief that images should come straight out of camera. They never did, and all of the digital techniques I am going to show you had their direct predecessors in the darkroom. The only difference is the lack of toxic chemicals, and the substitution of a computer program cleverly called Lightroom.
I will try to show you some of the steps that led to the final version above. Although some of this might seem pretty anal, I can assure you that I left out many of the steps. In the real world, a lot of art is composed of steps that go back and forth, or even in futile paths that contradict each other, all in the Goldilocks dream of getting it "just right." And some of the usual procedures photographers go through would not register at all at the small scale of these images, so I will mention them while skipping showing those particular stages.
My procedure, or "workflow" for the initiated, is just the way I do it - and anyone who tells you that there is a "right" way to do things is both arrogant and wrong. Everyone develops a different way of doing things, and one of the virtues of both software and art is that there is multiple ways of getting to multiple ends, none of which is wrong, only your choice. In fact, you can always change your mind, so when I label something the "final version" I'm just giving myself an excuse to move on to something else. I frequently decide enough is enough when I show Fran two different versions of an image, she gives them a good looking over, and then rolls her eyes and declares that they are exactly the same. While I "know" the last version is obviously superior, I also know that it is time to stop.
OUT OF CAMERA, ON THE FERRY
This is the original image out-of-camera, taken on the ferry back from the San Juan Islands. I'm kind of kidding myself standing outside on the deck, but not as much as the sailors, and it is a nice day since it's not yet raining. We are heading back to Seattle, and that white mountain on the right that looks no bigger that the hill to the left is in fact Mt. Baker, more than ten times as big and over sixty miles away. I hope you guys are thinking what an ordinary shot, because it is, and can only achieve some higher level with some artistic coaxing.
SQUARE CROP
The first step is to improve the composition through cropping the photograph. I don't take photos for the Times, and I'm not cropping out yet another victim of Kremlin skullduggery. The original vertical framing leaves way too much sky and water, for no apparent reason - the subject is the sailboat. And I have coasters to sell, so a square crop it is.
LEVEL THAT HORIZON, SAILOR!
The next change is to achieve the first goal for almost every landscape image, a level horizon. Unless you want to prove how drunk you were when you took the photo. If the horizon is not level, it better be so out-of-whack that it can show how avant-garde you are, and you will still make your viewers uncomfortable if not queasy.
WHITE BALANCE
The next correction is to adjust the white balance of your image. Our eyes and brains are a lot smarter than your camera's, no matter what you might think, so you need to correct the camera's rendition of the light temperature, which might be completely wrong. If you really blow it by leaving it on automatic, you will let your camera ruin every sunset by "correcting" that awful orange glow that attracted you in the first place. And even though we are so used to seeing our interior lighting as warm that we don't notice it, you will probably be better off removing some warmth even after you reacted to the "correct" setting by wondering if everyone was pale from fever. In this case, the overwhelming blue actually fooled the camera into removing some blue, so we put it back - and the white boat and sail is now a little whiter, although they are still too dark.
LIGHTEN THE EXPOSURE
We adjust the exposure, just a little, to brighten things up.
HIGHLIGHTS
OK , now we are entering subtle territory. I've increased just the highlights in the image, trying to lighten up just the boat, the sail, and the bright portion of the sky. Yes it is subtle, and later you will see how it can be more dramatic in black and white. I've left out some other moves, like making the dark parts of the image darker (this only affected the mast and the crew) and all of the various ways that photographers use to sharpen the photo, which are absolutely necessary for almost every image, but just won't show up at this scale.
GRADUATED FILTER
Here is a move that works to highlight the subject in a way that is somewhat counter intuitive, like a lot of these adjustments. Photographers have always used filters to affect their images in camera, by placing filters over their lenses to reduce the light, or affect the colors, or with graduated filters to balance the exposure. In landscapes the sky is frequently so much lighter than the land that it is impossible to balance the exposure. Expose to get some detail in the sky like those pretty clouds, and the foreground will be much too dark. Conversely, expose for the land and you will "blow out" the sky. Your photo will now look like a Nineteenth Century shot with a blank white sky because early black and white film stocks couldn't render blue. We pull a dark veil over the upper part of the image - the graduated filters that faded to clear have now been replaced with software exposure adjustments that gradually disapeare in different parts of the image. By making the upper portion of the sky darker, we have"lightened" the light portions of the image and hopefully brought the viewer's attentions back to the boat.
THE SAILBOAT : FINAL VERSION, UNTIL JUST NOW!
Now it might be tempting to further whiten up the boat and the sail, but the problem would be that a color photo can only take so much manipulation before it starts looking a little too "cooked" for my tastes. That is the problem with HDR images, where in the effort to reveal more detail and color in darker parts of a scene, the image becomes unrealistic since we "know" that the world is not lit that way. This is not a wedding photograph, where that dress better be white or the photographer might not get paid. The overall scene is so "blue", that it seems natural that there is an overall blue tint. A whiter boat and sail might look weird.
THE SAILBOAT : FINAL VERSION
Or maybe not. I just changed it again. Subtle, but not as blue, and hopefully realistic. What do you think?
Now we move into black and white imagery, whose original abstraction of the real world seems to allow for far more manipulation.
ORIGINAL BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION
When you hit the black and white conversion button in Lightroom this is what you get. It's a lot better than just desaturating the color original, because the original color information is still lurking in the black and white. This allows you to manipulate the relationship between the gray tones by only adjusting the exposure of the individual original colors, even if they are now hidden. Black and whites can just look "muddy" or "flat" because the colorful scene we remember has now been rendered into very similar grey tones. The struggle is to get back the abstract contrast in any way you can, since black and whites need contrast to shine. While you might love that blue water, you have got to admit that in some ways the original image was pretty monochromatic, almost all blue. This might actually hinder the conversion to black and white, but let's see. Right now the image is pretty flat and disappointing.
BLUE FILTER
Since, everything was so "blue", adding the software equivalent of a glass blue-colored filter over the lens really doesn't help much. In fact, the lightest and bluest parts of the image have even gotten muddier. Let's regroup.
WHITE POINT
The most important part of this image will be making sure that our white is white. We manipulate the lighter parts of the image by making them as white as we can without actually blowing out the highlights and losing any detail. We have now achieved a white boat, sail and sky without raising up the exposure in the darker portions of the image. But of course we have, so we now lower the black point, in search of a true black. This will make the photo pop.
BLACK POINT
You might think it's subtle, but notice how the waves are back, and the trees, the mast and the crew are more defined. The whites are still white.
LOWER THE EXPOSURE
Now we begin to try to highlight the whites by lowering the overall exposure. We might have gone too far, but there's other ways to get some light back in the places we really want it. We are now going to use another kind of graduated filter, whose radial shape can range from a circle to a very oblong oval. Since it is again graduated down to zero, it can be a lot less exact than actually using a "brush" to lighten only parts of the image, but it might come to that. The problem of using a brush is not that is so artistic as to require real technique, but that it must be very subtle and built up slowly so as to avoid detection. The whole point of all of these techniques is to improve the photo without letting anyone else see what you've done.
RADIAL FILTERS
What I've tried to do here is to raise the exposure of Mt. Baker, the boat, and the sail to further highlight them. I want you to see that white boat, and try to make the sail glow. I have gone too far, but if I lower the overall exposure again, it might all blend together.
NOT AS MUCH "GLOW"
I think I'm getting there. Not so much leakage of the glow around the sail and the boat. The mountain is still too bright.
THE SAILBOAT B&W : FINAL IMAGE
I do believe I've got it, or at least as close as I'm going to get today. The mountain has been calmed down, and I still like the sail and the boat, at least at this size. Obviously, this is all to taste, and feel free to disagree. I always think it is a good idea to go back the next day or the next week and to see if you have perhaps gone too far, since we obviously get very involved with the process. Color versus black and white is also a matter of taste. I think it is clear that the real value of black and white is that it does allow for more manipulation than color, while emphasizing shape and detail and mood. It's colder, choppier and more dramatic, which is what I felt that day on the ferry deck, much less on that little sailboat. And I think that I've come along way from that dull sailboat tossed on crooked sea.
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AUGUST 13, 2021
MULTNOMAH FALLS : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to try something different. I am going to explore the business of photography, I think it might be interesting to the readers of this blog to learn of some of the trials and tribulations of an artist who tries to sell his work. I have been engaged in this pursuit for a dozen years, and it is both a source of great pride and frustration. Before I begin, I'd like to set a few ground rules:
1. I am one of the worst businessmen I know. If you want to say you are worse, you've got to prove it to me. My wife Fran has concluded her opinion of my business acumen in Star Trek terms - in marketing terms, I am "anti-marketing."
2. Selling art at Saturday Market is unlike selling anything anywhere else in the world. It has nothing to do with any other product or venue you might consider as an MBA exercise. While I have always considered any well-meaning business advice, my long-standing rule has been that until you sit in my booth for a couple of hours you really have no idea of what you are talking about - it's that different.
3. I respect and love almost all of my customers. The artist/customer relationship has always appealed to me as much "cleaner" than my years of negotiating the frequently fraught architect/client dynamic. I offer my work to the public; they either buy it or not, no hard feelings. While I will be talking about selling art in this essay, I would assure you that despite all of the evidence to the contrary, my marketing silliness is clearly 100% more than any craziness among my customers.
4. I have made money in the last twelve years as an artist, which almost universally is greeted with surprise by my fellow artists. Most of the fine art photographers I have met make almost all of their money by teaching people photography rather than selling their own prints. Almost every consultant I have encountered has basically said that they can't believe how successful I am, and don't know why I might want to broaden my efforts beyond what "works." While I have made a profit, and take great pride in that, I have come nowhere near "making a living". My wife has totally supported me in my artistic efforts, and I'd like to once again thank her for that.
KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD! : FINAL VERSION
A dozen years ago, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, my wife suggested one day that maybe I should try to sell my photographs at Saturday Market. Like many other people, I was totally at a loss of what to do, since my solo architectural firm had ground to a complete halt. I had always thought that I was so "micro" that I had nothing to with the "macro" economy, but I obviously was completely wrong. My income had dropped 90%, and with the chances of me getting a job as an architect somewhere between zero and nil, mostly because I had no recent experience working for anyone else, and i had allowed myself to miss the computer revolution. I couldn't imagine doing anything else, so the prospect of selling my photography seemed a lot more fun than getting a "gig" that paid minimum wage. After experimenting at several street fairs and not being laughed off, I finally decided to try the most legitimate venue, Saturday Market.
MADE IN OREGON : FINAL VERSION
So in October of 2009 I went down to the Market - or in the words of one of my market friends, I ran off to join the circus. I arrived to the chorus of Canadian Geese, which I know now really means in the Fall that "why don't you fly off with us since you won't make any money till December anyway." Since I didn't know what I was doing, any money I made was more of a surprise than anything else, and I just muddled through until Christmas without any real idea about really selling my art. I literally would take the art of my walls in the house on Friday night and bring it to the market to sell on Saturday. The idea that I was not showing my "personal work" was ridiculous, since that was all I had. And much to my amazement, some people actually liked it enough to purchase it.
VESPAS : FINAL VERSION
Fran eventually caused some professionalization simply by accident. I was forced to buy some storage boxes because she progressively put up some of her quilts to replace my photographs - the photography department was losing wall space to the textile curators. But I still didn't have the barest idea of a business plan, a marketing strategy, or anything else that might convince anyone else that I knew what I was doing, At the end of that first three months the extent of my business records was my delight that I had a "winning record" as a pitcher at the market, a 7-5 record of days that I had made more money that I had paid to be there. Christmas had netted me a total profit of $632 for about 120 hours at the market. Who needs minimum wage when you are selling art?
LEWIS AND CLARK: FINAL VERSION
It was only after a the first few months of the new season in 2010 that I finally began to realize that this was not a going concern. While I had never been "skunked", which is what we called making zero all day, I was not really covering my costs. By the time I had really outfitted myself to approach a legitimate business, I had spent over a thousand dollars that I didn't have in the basic costs of setting up a booth and coming up with a real stock, most of which was not selling. Like a lot of my fellow artists, I had not solved the Market problem; the red information booth at the Market represented our rental costs to appear at the Market, and by extension all of our business expenses. "Are you working for the Red Booth or are they working for you?" was the basic question I was not answering correctly most weeks.
STUMPTOWN EVENINGS : FINAL VERSION
I had been trying everything to encourage sales, exhibiting many different sizes and prints and just losing money increasing my stock. One day I literally had too much in the booth, ran out of real wall space, and resorted to placing several new very small 4" x 4" prints lying flat on an IKEA table, embarrassed by my unprofessional gallery display. Something weird began to happen -everyone who entered my booth asked me whether these small prints were coasters, and were clearly disappointed upon discovering they were not. I sat there and realized that if I had gotten a dollar for every time a customer asked that question that day, I would have made several hundred dollars without selling a thing. While I might be a fool, my parents didn't raise an idiot, and with all apologies to fools and idiots, I went home that night resolved to somehow make them the coasters they seemed to desire.
POWELL'S : FINAL VERSION
It took a few weeks, but I finally perfected the crazy process that I would ensure a reasonably reliable photo coaster. The really funny part of the whole affair was that the least fragile part of the coaster was the the actual photograph, which of course ran counter to any reasonable expectation. The low point of my experiments in terror, when I almost called the chemistry department at Portland State, was when the coasters worked, then failed and bubbled up with much tears and consternation, and then miraculously worked again. While this was a miracle, it obviously wasn't a real product, and the experiments in water-resistance, if not water proofing, continued. Somehow I made it work, but not before I came up with a 12-step process that most people would reasonably declare so crazy as to call for another 12-step program. But my career as a coaster-monger was about to begin.
COMING HOME : FINAL VERSION
Despite my ridiculous process, I did get a few thing right from the start. Since I had always liked the square format anyway, I had plenty of images to choose form to create my first coasters, and I soon learned that most of my other images could also be cropped to a square without completely violating my artistic principles. I also absolutely refused to do the obvious and make sets of themed coasters - i just said that customers could choose any four they wanted. While I would eventually realize that this resulted in fights between couples, I found that I could steer my customers to resolution most of the time. By making the set a free-for-all, I avoided any dangerous curatorial decisions beyond just seeing if an image had any traction at all. It became every coaster fending for itself, and while some were popular and some were not, they all seemed to find some audience. What actually happened was that an individual coaster would grab someone's attention, no matter how weird, and then they would build up a quartet.
DROVE MY CHEVY TO THE LEVEE : FINAL VERSION
So I soon realized that while an abstract image like the '55 Chevy above would never challenge a tourist landscape image, it could engage a car nut even though I might not have four auto images. The object became to inspire interest more than to curate my own collections. In any case, I was now actually selling things all day. Even more important, I now had a easy way to engage with customers, because I could answer that original question. Even when I provided signage that assured them that "Yes, These are Coasters", I finally had an easy way to talk to potential customers. Before this I had relied on a seven-hundred page history book to show customers I wasn't going to "sell" them anything, since a simple "Hello" seemed to drive most people from the booth. I was on my way!
DAISY, DAISY : FINAL VERSION
While I resisted any marketing efforts, I couldn't argue with the obvious facts emerging from my new coaster sales charts. I had always avoided making any images "for the public", since my own personal work sold better and all of my colleagues at the Market already made all of their sales from those same images. Why sell the same things? So I continued to exhibit images that I had made for myself anyway, and learned that any artist's best work falls in that category. I knew that photos of Paris would probably not sell in a Portland market, but since I had lived in Portland for seventeen years, most of my best work was on Portland or architectural themes. But the coasters allowed me to easily try new things, and flowers, which I had always loved, became a new obsession. It actually was so easy to sell flower portraits that of course the "anti-marketeer" began to resist, out of concern for feeding the addiction of little-old ladies. The flower series actually became the only thing I ever sold anywhere else besides the market, despite all of my entreaties of dozens of Portland shops to try to share in my good fortune. I didn't realize that since shop owners make so little money too, their only pride came from curating their shop, and they didn't want to sell something that they hadn't thought of. But Portland Nursery agreed to try my flower coasters, and when I quietly asked if I could get store credit instead of cash, I was handed a piece of paper that allowed me 20% off as a supplier. When I came home and told Fran about her new discount, you would have thought I had won a Pulitzer or something. My art was finally worth something, and "the letter" became the holy grail in my house. It got so bad that when coaster sales began to trickle down at the nursery, Fran came up with an "I Love Lucy" scheme that involved me "reverse shop-lifting" more coasters into my display at the nursery to show how popular they were. I resisted, and soon the discount was history, although we mad a lot more off the discount than I did off the coaster sales.
FISH PARKING : FINAL VERSION
Of course I went overboard, and although coaster sales were now most of my business, I soon had so many different images that I couldn't display them all, and more importantly, the sales statistics no longer meant as much, since they were now as divided as the FM radio dial. Almost all of the images made some sales, but the newer ones could never compete with the old favorites, and my charts soon resembled the Top 40 charts, with some former favorites falling off the charts, while a few others were moving up with a "bullet." The lunacy that eventually created more than 400 coaster images led to a perverse pride that my most popular images never accounted for more than 6% of my total sales; I knew that my colleagues relied on just a handful of images for all of their sales. I also took pride that even though I was now selling what could be called tourist trinkets, most of my images seemed to speak to natives, who would steer their visiting relatives to images they wanted them to buy, or would be taking coasters to far-flung places they were visiting.
WHAT'S WITH THE CARPET?" : FINAL VERSION
Coasters kept me in business, so they were in some sense the magic bullet that ensured the viability of my art business. I never was successful in selling them anywhere else or on line, but they clearly paid the rent and usually much more. I was surprised that it took a few years for me to get any coaster competition, but my images are better, and the coasters allow me to sell other things, so there you go. The coasters allowed this photographer to finally answer what I believe is the ultimate Saturday Market question, which I characterize as "The Illusion of Use." If you walk through the market, you will observe 250 artists passionately selling their art, while all the while carefully assuring their buyers that it is really something else. It is my belief that unfortunately most people don't think they "deserve" art. Art is for rich people with too much money, and its purchase is frivolous if not downright immoral. You can admire it, but you must come up with another reason to actually purchase it. Now some art is really easy to justify its use, like jewelry, or pottery, which my wife calls the introductory drug of all crafts - everyone has their first mug. I came up with an excuse for people to buy my art because they were buying something they could use - a coaster - even though probably half of my customers don't actually use them as such. They graciously email their coaster installations - on the wall! - even though I have never made any headway in selling them that way. When I assure my customers that they can display them on their walls, most just look at me and declare "but they're coasters! You really can't win.
BEER HERE : FINAL VERSION
But of course I've won. The coasters, and my wife, have allowed me to be an artist for the past dozen years. I've learned a lot as a coaster-monger, and I have actually gotten even more cynical about "business" as a result. I have sold more than 16,000 coasters from my little booth, and can't convince anyone else to share in the wealth. My competitors either wildly price their products so that mine look like bargains, or go the other way so much that I am speechless. When I finally saw coasters at Powell's, I was embarassed as I cursed not really under my breath. I then started cackling when I realized that the price was so low that I would actually lose money on every coaster I sold to Powell's at that price, and wished my competitor all of the luck in the world. I have now sold my art to over 3,000 households in Portland, and to people in every state in the Union, and to places in 67 countries around the world.
INTO THE WOODS : FINAL VERSION
Which doesn't mean I actually know what I'm doing. While I have improved my coaster routine - they are actually far better and it's now only a four-step process - I still retain my anti-marketing cred. I finally realized that a good portion of the public are still "flippers" - even though they have never been in a record store - so that I can restrict the unpopular coasters to one copy in a "rarities" box that customers can flip through to make their own "discoveries." I started making magnets out of coasters on the spot as a "service", at no charge(!) once I realized that I could sell these coasters at twice the market price point for magnets as long as I didn't stock them. Yet I resisted selling an image of the St. Johns Bridge for so long that once I finally did I sold 36 of this image in only three weeks!
DONUTS AND COFFEE : FINAL VERSION
Ok, sometime you know a good coaster. But often it has eluded me over the years is what kind of image actually makes a good coaster. I have been reduced to just putting them out there and seeing if anyone salutes, because there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for why an image will succeed. The minute I think an image will be catnip for tourists, or will be an irresistible joke, or just happens to be one of my most popular images in other forms, it fails as a coaster. Some of my most famous images totally fail as coasters, while other popular coasters, and not just obvious tourist images or my attempts at humor, have never sold in any other form. I've remained perplexed that a 4" x 4" image on the wall will not attract any interest, but put it on a table and I can sell it until the cows come home. In some regard I have come to the conclusion that some images are made for the small format, that arrogant photographers who will only sell an image at its one proper size are in fact on to something. I realize that my small images, which I call my "little Jewels", actually look their best as a small image rather than blown up. Other images, mostly with more detail, only shine when printed at larger sizes. And still other images look great at several sizes, or even change and look great fro different reasons as they are enlarged. Finally, when I think about it, since most people never see an image bigger than their phone display, or printed slightly larger in a book, a fine image doesn't need to be blown up to billboard size. And while I love selling my large metal prints, most people can't afford what I have to charge for them. I'd rather profitably have my art in homes around the world than just sell it to a few rich collectors - that would just bring back all of the angst of the architect/client relationship!
YES, THESE ARE COASTERS : FINAL VERSION
Finally, we get to a meta-coaster, and we have entered the twilight zone. I decided to try some new form of advertising to replace my venerable booth sign. So I found some background images and inserted my self-deprecating advertisement over the image, to create a new coaster version of the sign. Imsgine my absolute delight and horror when these coasters started actually selling as coasters! I didn't know what to say, but as Fran says, take the money and smile. It turned out these are popular with customers who have relatives who refuse to use coasters. I have created the first passive aggressive coaster, and I am now ready to call myself a marketing genius!
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AUGUST 6, 2021
KUBOTA MAPLE #1 : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to describe in words and images a delightful visit we had last weekend to the Kubota Garden, a park in Seattle that I had never been aware before our visit. Fran and I were visiting our old college friends Amy and Bill, who have recently moved to Seattle from Boston to pursue grandparent-hood. They suggested the short trek to the garden in South Seattle. I'm a sucker for gardens, but I must say I was literally blown away. I hope this series of images comes close to conveying some of the beauty of the garden. As usual, I'll be focused on small snippets of this beautiful environment.
KUBOTA #1 B&W : FINAL VERSION
The Kubota Garden is a very large garden, constituting 20 acres of hilly terrain in the Rainier Beach neighborhood at the southern edge of Seattle. 95 years ago, it had just been clear cut, and Fujitaro Kubota,(1879-1973), a Japanese immigrant, thought it might be a good place to start his landscaping business, since it was so far out in the boonies that with hard work he could run a business in an area without a lot of residential pressure close at hand. Washington State's Alien Land Law of 1921 prohibited anyone who could not become a citizen (Asian) from owning land, so Mr. Kubota relied on friendly Caucasion straw buyers to assemble the property. The family could not own its own nursery until 1938, when Tom Kubota, (1917-2004), Fujitaro's first-born son, an American citizen, turned 21 and was allowed to buy his father's land.
KUBOTA FOLIAGE #1 : FINAL VERSION
When Mr. Kubota bought the swampy 5 acres in 1927, there were only 12 trees left on the property. He cleared the land, drained the swamp, and started to create both a garden and a base for his landscaping business, which soon became known for it's skill at transplanting mature trees that had grown on his planted property. By 1946, the property had expanded to 20 acres, and in 2021 the Garden contains 140 different Japanese Maple varieties alone. The astonishing variety of leaf shapes will cure you of any idea that you knew what a "Japanese Maple" is supposed to look like.
KUBOTA BAMBOO #1 : FINAL VERSION
The Kubota Garden has gone through a lot of transformation since its humble beginnings. It's hard to imagine a 48-year old man with the vision and energy to set out on such a journey, until you realize that he was still building the garden and his business into his 90's. And that he lost three years of his life in his 60's when his family was "invited" to spend three years at the Minidoka Internment Camp in Montana from 1942-1945. His son Tom was allowed to leave the camp in his twenties to serve in the US army, which was jailing his family at the time. Unusually, Tom served in the Intelligence branch in the South Pacific, which probably meant he was either interrogating prisoners or listening in on radio transmission. Most Japanese Americans served in Europe, where their regiment suffered the most casualties and received the most medals of almost any unit in the entire army.
KUBOTA FOLIAGE #2 : FINAL VERSION
When the Kubota family returned to Seattle after the war, they took up residence again at their garden/nursery only after determining that it was safe to do so. Many of the Japanese families had lost their properties in the hasty move out of the city three years before. The Kubota business prospered, and their private garden began to take shape. Fujitaro had never been trained as a garden designer, and even though he had frequently visited Japan before the war, he always felt that the guild-like garden knowledge was beyond his reach. In any case his garden began to be an interesting hybrid Japanese design principles with Northwest plantings. Alongside the maples and rocks and foliage typical of Japanese garden design, he planted a lot more colorful flowers than would typically appear in a Japanese garden.
KUBOTA FOLIAGE #3 : FINAL VERSION
Mr. Kubota's skills as a designer and businessman eventually translated into extensive work throughout Seattle. He was best known for his work at the campus of Seattle University, and his supervision of the Japanese Garden portion of the garden at the Bloedel Reserve. When his son Tom turned 70 in 1987, extensive support from the neighborhood and several local politicians ensured that the garden would remain intact. The Planning Commission had already approved a 246-unit housing subdivision, but the Garden was deeded in whole to the Seattle Parks Department and a private foundation to keep it intact.
KUBOTA GROVE #1 : FINAL VERSION
The garden today is a total delight. At 20 acres, it contains many different environments, as different as the standard "red bridge over the lake" to the mysterious grove pictured above, hidden in a standard green forest. Its public/private hybrid, combined with the ravages of Covid on volunteerism, have created both a relaxed and scruffy environment untypical of the anal perfection of most Japanese gardens. So there is no map, as there is no admission charge, so you can easily get lost and feel that you are not seeing important parts of the garden even after a few hours. Fran was ready to begin attacking several vines that she had successfully eliminated from her own garden, so maintenance has obviously suffered somewhat during Covid. On the other hand the place is so beautiful that two large wedding photo teams were out in force during our visit.
KUBOTA #4 : FINAL VERSION
Make no mistake - there are plenty of vignettes available to make this a splendid Japanese garden. Mr. Kubota's final achievement was a hillside garden built around a six-story waterfall feature that you encountered multiple times as you walk up or down the hill - it's only at the bottom that you realize the monumentality of this feature, although it is steep enough along the way that you appreciate the multiple paths available to get you to the bottom at different rates of apparent danger.
KUBOTA TREE #2 : FINAL VERSION
Some of the charm of the garden is apparent in the boss's ability to select especially unique specimens to keep for himself rather than to sell to clients. Some of these trees almost have personalities when you confront them on what was just a walk in the woods.
KUBOTA FLOWER #1 : FINAL VERSION
And if you like flowers, there are more of them than in the typical Japanese garden, and the overall green foliage provides better backgrounds than most flower gardens.
KUBOTA STONE #1 : FINAL VERSION
For you detail fans, Kubota affords more than enough opportunities to highlight your efforts, whether in individual plants, flowers, trees, or this Japanese dry-laid stone wall, which just relies on gravity, with the careful fitting of stones that will also not let gravity work against its stability.
KUBOTA FLOWER #3 : FINAL VERSION
I hope that these images have conveyed my love of this garden, and maybe inspired you to visit it or another local garden. Gardens are a unique hybrid of nature and man's will to shape nature - both natural and man-made. The result of all this artistry is either hidden or highlighted in different garden styles, or sometimes even within the same garden. I would encourage all of you to try to capture this artistry with your camera, in the same spirit as the garden's designers. These photographs were all captured in one visit without really making Fran or Amy or Bill exasperated; yet they only scratch the garden's surface. They all are true representations of the garden, and they all have been edited in Lightroom to enhance what came out-of-camera. As a result they are all closer to what I actually saw and felt on that day. Remember, no matter how wide your frame, you are always editing reality, and creating a photograph, which is a subtractive art. You don't start out with a blank canvas, but instead must organize an often chaotic reality to create the "wow."
And that "wow" is always subjective and can be as abstract as you want it to be. This last image succeeds for me in expressing the magic of the Kubota Garden even more than the one above, but each to his own. Fran and I are donating $50 to the garden, and would in Amy and Bill's name if the form didn't imply that they were dead. We hope to visit it often in the future.
KUBOTA FLOWER #3 B&W : FINAL VERSION
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JULY 30, 2021
GORGE WATERFALL : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss the tricky problem of editing our work. If you've ever faced the problem of narrowing choices of what to include in a photo album, or deciding what to print, or what to frame, or what to keep, then you know how difficult these decisions can become. We frequently abdicate the process rather than cull what is after all our artistic work, and leave it for another day. Notice my title - it is rather easy to edit someone else's work, to pick out the obvious keepers and rejects. We have nothing invested in the process, and our decisive process is often a rather transparent symptom of our inability to edit our own work. This is not just limited to our photographic archives. In every marriage there are inevitable conflicts between one person's "stuff" versus the other person's "junk." On the geopolitical level, it is much easier to conduct a social revolution in another country rather than your own.
HUG POINT #2 : FINAL VERSION
So let's get the easy stuff over first. How should you edit your work? With fierceness, firmness, and finality. The first round should be getting rid of any mistakes that honestly you will not be able to "fix in post" no matter how much of a digital editing genius you are. Then take a look at what are essentially duplicate shots. Then decide what is the best shot of a sequence, and get rid of all of the inferior ones. Now you have eliminated most of the shots you clearly don't need to consider any more in the future, even if the future is only five minutes from now.
OREGON COAST SEA STACK #1 : FINAL VERSION
Now the hard part begins. Take a deep look at what remains; the most important consideration is to divorce yourself from your own work. Make believe you are looking at some random snaps, forget about how much fun you had getting that shot, or how hard it was, or how good the ice cream cone was just after/before you took it. It is just a photograph - how good is it? And by the way, how large will this project be? Is it the best one to frame, or one of ten in a portfolio, or one of the fifty you will include in a photo book of your vacation? The lower the number the fiercer the competition.
BANDON BEACH : FINAL VERSION
Why all the angst? We weren't supposed to care about your photo decision making - but I'm just trying to help. The operative mission is to cull your image files to your absolute best, so that it will be easier to decide what that is, even if it's just going on Instagram. Your cat is very cute - how about just the cutest slice of his life? Storage is cheap these days, and while I don't really care about saving you money, I want to make sure that your life of backing up, and then backing up again, and checking your backups is restricted to your best shots, so that you won't go mad worrying about the fate of junk. if you've done much photography at all, you have realized that only music files rival your simple snapshot in their ability to quickly fill up your hard drive(s).
FORT ROCK #1 : FINAL VERSION
While I finally have my archive under reasonable control (knock on wood), it would behoove everyone to simply try to eliminate some small percentage before you purchase yet another hard drive, even though you do get twice as much storage for the same price each time you have to do it. Surely there is something else you would rather spend $150 or so on? If I can eliminate 500 photos from my collection, I would avoid that next purchase by a few months at least. Since my Lightroom catalogue supposedly contains 51,000 images, this should be just a simple organizational chore. Do as I say, not what I do. The most important reason you should edit your archive, for whatever reason you set out to do it, is so you simply never have to look at that image AGAIN!
MACKENZIE RIVER FALLS : FINAL VERSION
My current editing dilemma concerns my attempt to come to to terms with my current book project. I am finishing up a volume of Oregon photographs, after having done two books on Portland. A lot of my favorite images will now finally hit the page, and my travels throughout the state, especially with my son, Benjamin, can now see the light of day after my concentration on the city. This effort led me to finally purchase a scanner to digitize all of work that was done on film. After the initial pass through more than a decade of work, I now finally have reduced the price of a "saved" image to about $2.00, so the scanner has more than done its due, since there are another two large boxes of prints, negatives, and slides to go through.
DESCHUTES RIVER : FINAL VERSION
All of the images you have seen today have been eliminated from my book. While you might not like all of them, and will hopefully feel that my choices were correct when you purchase the book, it seemed a useful exercise to give them one more look before they were culled. There are various reasons they did not make the cut, not all of them fair, but it had to be done. In order to make the book somewhat of a rational exercise, I had to keep it to about 100 pages total. Partly this was to have it approximately match in length and price with my other three books, and I finally settled on that length as a goal. I won't bore you with the more anal considerations of layout, and the need to have not only an even number of pages, but a number divisible by four, that has led to some decisions unrelated to art or content. Throw in those more serious considerations, and you end up with some pretty good photos on the cutting room floor.
DUNE GRASS DETAIL : FINAL VERSION
There were various reasons an image fell on the wayside. Often I just had another image that I felt talked about a subject - the coast, the mountains, etc. just a little bit better than the one I rejected. Sometimes an image was rejected because I simply liked the color or black and white version better, and now was not the time to discuss why I liked both. And sometimes there was just too many images on one subject for a book that I felt should cover most of the regions of the state, so the Gorge might suffer to show more of Eastern Oregon that my readers had never seen.
SMITH ROCK #1 : FINAL VERSION
Harder choices revolved around my desire to make sure this was my book of Oregon. When you are showing a broad selection of images of our beautiful state it is pretty easy to get stuck on the iconic images that I have taken along with the rest of you. It doesn't really matter if my image is a little better than the average - I call this the Instagram problem. There are some places in the world that I have never been to , but now have little mystery, since I have seen "the shot" thousands of time on Instagram. Thus this image above lost to my other Smith Rock image because the one above is more similar to the standard Smith Rock image, while my other one seems slightly more unusual, at least to me.
HAMBURGERS : FINAL VERSION
This has always been one of my more popular images, and I could now include it, along with a funny story, because the sign is atop a famous ice cream parlor in Cascade Locks. Yet it just didn't seem to fit in with the rest of my Gorge shots, no matter how I tried to justify its inclusion.
ANOTHER COASTAL HEADLAND : FINAL VERSION
Other images lost out to my limit, no matter how much I liked the individual image. This would eventually include some personal favorites.
SAUVIE ISLAND #1 : FINAL VERSION
Unfortunately this included some of my "quiet" shots, because their inclusion could not be justified for editorial reasons. Even some of my characteristic detail shots didn't warrant consideration because they didn't seem to be "Oregon" enough. And of course I could be wrong.
FRACTAL POND : FINAL VERSION
What became most interesting was my decision not to include some images, even though they were perfectly fine, and beloved by customers, and were demonstrably "mine", just because I have grown so sick of them. It's my book after all, and in the immortal words of my wife, "I JUST DON'T WANTA!"
LEWIS AND CLARK : FINAL VERSION
Both this image and the first Gorge Waterfall image have always been among my most popular images. For some reason I am just so sick of them that I can barely look at them while I hand your the coaster. I even know that they aren't that bad, but I just can't stand them, and was not going to include them at the cost of another image that I thought for some reason deserved a broader audience. And I have somehow gotten the book down to the target 100 pages, so the finish line is in sight. Although in the process of writing this essay, I have discovered another two images that should be included. The struggle continues.
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JULY 23, 2021
GO BY TRAIN : FINAL VERSION
This week's essay will be a peak under the hood of an artistic trick which I have picked up in my work after observations of artists far better and more celebrated than yours truly. I have found that it invariably works, and the more casually and unobtrusively it is applied, the better. I am referring to the inclusion of the printed word in a visual image. What is interesting is that these words, letters, or numbers do not have to have any relevance to the "subject" at hand. While the inclusion of signs in urban landscapes has a long tradition, it soon became apparent to me that these letters did not have to be complete, make any real sense, or even be in a language I understood. I was just drawn to them, seemingly against my will - attention must be paid!
PORTLAND, OREGON : FINAL VERSION
Here is an early and obvious example, a famous sign in town which is the subject of almost any visitor with a camera. While I can take pride in my framing, the angle, and my capture at "blue hour", when the neon comes on but the sky is still blue, it is really not that much different or better an image than any competent tourist can take with their iPhone. Yet the image works as well as the actual sign in the landscape - you must read it.
MADE IN OREGON B&W : FINAL VERSION
Now we're getting a little more complicated. The abstraction of black and white has relieved a little of the postcard problem, as has the fact that we are now dealing with an historic sign, the predecessor of the existing Portland sign. Tourists will only be confused, while Portlanders will nod their heads in sentimental recognition and show me their tattoos in places which I really shouldn't see. So now the act of reading has become a pleasurable act of nostalgia.
KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD! : FINAL VERSION
Another example of the power of a sign, our informal motto. The only selling point of my version is that I found the smaller East side version at Music Millennium and then as is my practice, cropped it within an inch of its life. The sign is now so out of context that I have created a photographic bumper sticker, with only limited hints that it actually exists, or that it really appears in this manner only in my photograph.
RIP CITY : FINAL VERSION
Early urban photographers realized the visual power of the neon sign, especially once they got over the problem of proper exposure and just let everything else go black, with limited information concerning the signs' actual location. This example celebrates the neon technology, ignoring the context, which happens to be a local bar window, and excluding the beer brand which is trying to show its loyalty to the Blazers. I am as usual finding myself appealing to locals, for the tourists are in fact totally confused, worried that we all are really the nihilists they have been warned about.
THE SCHNITZ : FINAL VERSION
This is about as simple as it gets, and the only pride I can take is my exposure which carefully darkens everything else so that the sign hovers in complete blackness, devoid of any acknowledgement of its surroundings or in fact its existence as a physical object. My jaunty angle is the result of the need to get my subject in a square coaster, but it is interesting to me that I have never seen another image of this ubiquitous sign at this angle.
PDX XMAS : FINAL VERSION
Another take on the Portland sign, again reducing the exposure so that the neon is disembodied from the warehouse it is attached to. Probably only locals will realize that is the holiday season, when our white stag becomes Rudolph every year.
MADE IN OREGON OBVERSE : FINAL VERSION
A little more sophisticated, or just too clever by half? The power of the letters, and the stag, can survive even though they are now backwards. Of course it helps that everyone knows what the sign actually says.
So far we have seen how I use the power of print to grab the viewers attention, and subtly include them in the sanctum of shared reference points so they can feel part of the "background" meaning of the image. This is why the Union Station shot focused so closely on the side of the clock tower that does not say Union Station. Locals are included in the "club" because they have seen the plaintive plea to try the train for as long as they have been in Portland. And my very tight framing shows the viewer that the only important thing about the clock tower is that neon plea, and that they might have just missed their train. If this image is enlarged to a size to rival reality, it will always be ten after three wherever it is displayed. Like print, clocks always get our attention; have you ever noticed that every clock or watch advertisement always shows the time as 10 after 10 because someone decided that that position of the clock hands was the most aesthetically pleasing? Or that the concerned atomic scientists knew we would respond to a few minutes before midnight?
IN THE PINK : FINAL VERSION
Such is the power of lettering in the visual field that I can color the cherry blossoms and reduce the sign to a tiny fraction of the image, and still your eyes must read the sign despite the visual cacophony. Black and white actually makes the sign much more readable in this image.
Now it's one thing to take pictures of signs - can we show even more how these letters grab our attention? Scientists have long known that our brains are wired in certain ways to pay more attention to certain things in our visual fields. Viewers will always focus first on the lightest portion of an image, so it better be important or it will just distract the viewer. That is why some of the most successful images of the forest always try to avoid showing the sky, since it is so much lighter than the woods, and will take the viewer "out" of the picture. Human beings also will latch on to any representation of a human face, whether it's their mother or not, which human babies recognize even before their own bodies. And once we learn to read, or even recognize letters as symbols that are theoretically important, we are drawn to them like moths to a flame. Artists take advantage of this fact.
PEARL MEMORIES : FINAL VERSION
I'm an architect, so an old brick warehouse in the Pearl District will probably appeal to me as an aesthetic object more than the next person. But I can try to seal the deal by including some faded letters into the equation. It doesn't matter that some younger folks might not even know what crockery is, and that glassware or whatever is just the product of your crazy brain trying to complete the word. I fooled you once again.
GUGGENHEIM #3 : FINAL VERSION
Frank Lloyd Wright labeled his building, perhaps with the hope that New Yorker's would not think that a spaceship had landed on Fifth Avenue. Notice how he has spaced the letters so far apart that he is almost fighting legibility, yet you can't look away from that small part of the image.
BEAT UP FORD : FINAL VERSION
The subject of my image is the incredible pattern and colors of the rust on this old truck, but you know what caught your attention despite yourself, even if you are a Chevy man. Why do you think they put labels on cars anyway?
HAMBURGERS : FINAL VERSION
Such is the power of print that even sign makers can get confused. What are they actually selling at this roadside stand? Ice cream or hamburgers? And what's with the penguin? This sign reminds me of the joke about the husband who gets in a pickle when his wife asks for the pink shirt in the dryer that is blue, but is labeled "Pink" by the brand. What's a poor male supposed to do?
UNDER THE "L" : FINAL VERSION
Letters are in fact so powerful that you sometimes need only one to completely draw the viewers attention. Portlanders might recognize this vintage skyscraper as the Wells Fargo Building in Downtown, even though Vanna has only revealed a single "L".
ROOMS : FINAL VERSION
Walking the mean streets of my native New York, I have brought the socioeconomics of the city right smack in your face. You think this ancient SRO sign is only a memory, but you're not so sure, and that "double" is even weirder, as are the multiple fire escapes - does this building even have hallways?
STREETS OF HOPE : FINAL VERSION
Of course i was a complete sucker for this "tromp l'oeil" (fool the eye) painting on the side of a warehouse near the Portland State library, but it is interesting to me that this viewer (me) was drawn to the most optimistic title of this pile of books.
IF ONLY : FINAL VERSION
This street scene, which I viewed from forty floors up in my sister's New York office, seemed to exemplify an urban angst so confining that even contradictions were proscribed, the relentless march of the street lamps seemingly out of touch with the roadway's instructions to toe the line.
WINTER IS COMING : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes we can read the words, know the inspiration, without even understanding what the hell these words to the wise are all about. Is this just the mood of Washington, D.C., or a grim reminder that the daily specials really don't matter in the big scheme of things?
BOOKS : FINAL VERSION
Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to place a neon sign on a clear plexiglass background? Or is the joke really on me, and the prospective customers of this bookshop, who can't resist the lure of the printed word, even when it is backwards?
MOLLY BLOOM ON DIVISION STREET : FINAL VERSION
I'll end this review of the power of words in imagery with this enigmatic image near my house. And to think that some people think that Portland is not really that weird after all. What are we to make of this one-word declaration on the side of an innocent telephone pole? Who's asking? What are we signing up for? And why am I supposed to understand this at all? But consider how depressing the alternative would be as we walked by on our street?
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JULY 16, 2021
WILLAMETTE PANORAMA: FINAL VERSION 1:3
This week I'd like to explore the possibilities afforded by computer post-processing to create a different kind of wide angle image than photographers could make even in the recent past. All of the images in this essay are the result of this computer daring-do, and would be impossible for me to create in camera. While they might have different final aspect ratios, they are all the result of creating a panorama image.
Everyone has a different "way of seeing", and most artists as they begin to differentiate their work and gravitate towards their style realize that their best images seem to embody their natural viewpoint. I realized that I have long been disposed towards the telephoto end of the scale, focusing on what I call "snippets", parts of the whole, rather than the grand viewpoint that seeks to capture the entire vista. It's just what I seem to like and find visually satisfying. I also tend to gravitate towards vertical images, which began with my interest in architectural subjects which tend to be vertical, and expanded from there. It is often said that a photographer who tends toward the vertical dreams of the magazine cover instead of the two-page spread, and that might be true as well. It finally occurred to me how vertically-oriented I had become when I realized that even most of my square-cropped images, destined to become photo-coasters, were actually taken as verticals. It was then that the cheapskate in me finally let myself purchase a vertical grip for my camera. This accessory allows you to capture vertical shots without doing a yoga move to push a shutter button which is now in the "wrong place." They usually allow for an extra battery, and provide duplicate controls which allow for shutter release, focusing, and exposure modification with your right hand on the top right corner of the camera when it is vertically oriented. Of course this adds more bulk and weight to an already large rig, which as usual makes me wonder why the average horizontally-oriented photographer would ever opt for this accessory.
PITTOCK MANSION PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 1:3
Another reason for my telephoto bias is simply because I never really allowed myself to purchase a real wide angle lens, even though I actually needed one. I started out honing my photographic skills because I needed to take photos of my architectural work for my portfolio. I couldn't begin to afford the fees of a professional architectural photographer, so I had to do it myself. Thus I inflicted myself on my clients, who generally played along and even staged my shots to some degree, even while they couldn't understand why I needed to spend hours taking four or five rolls of film of their new addition. Of course most of them didn't realize that a "real photographer" would have arrived with a staff and taken most of a day to take two photographs. The real problem I found in substituting for a pro was that I didn't own a wide angle lens, the kind of lens that allows a Manhattan kitchen to look like someone could actually cook dinner there instead of just opening the fridge for left-over takeout. Even when I bought a reasonably priced wide angle lens, a 28 mm, I soon realized that I really needed 24mm or even 20 mm for interior architectural shots. I finally bit the bullet and rented a real wide angle zoom for my camera to capture a project, and probably doomed my chances forever of purchasing additional lenses. My wife Fran noticed the new lens, and not so peacefully inquired if I had made such a flagrantly willy-nilly luxury purchase. When I assured her that I had rented the lens for the weekend for $30 instead of buying it for $1800, she made a "lady Justice balancing the scales" motion that became a standard in our house.
WEST HILLS PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 1:3
So when I encountered the grand vista in the landscape, I usually couldn't take the standard wide-angle shot. And when I did take out the 28mm, I was invariably disappointed with the results. You see a wide angle lens takes in more of the view because it reduces the size of the actual main subject - the stereotypical mountain appears smaller in the landscape than in your memories. I won't bore your with the inevitable debate that the focal length of the lens doesn't really change the perspective - rest assured that the actual appearance of your image changes. The relationship between distant objects and the foreground changes drastically. Thus landscape photographers realize the importance of foreground interest since the boulder two feet away appears as the same size as the mountain in the distance. And urban photographers soon revel in their shots of NYC streets that appear to contain ten times as many pedestrians as they already do in reality. Telephoto views flatten perspective, so that I realized that my vertical, telephoto images frequently resembled Japanese screens more than anything else. My standard "walk-around lens" became a 100-300 mm zoom, and my perspective was set.
STONEHENGE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 1:3
It was only when I shifted to digital that I realized something had to change. My new camera's smaller sensor had converted my lens into a 160-460 mm zoom, and even I realized that 160 mm was a little too narrow view of the world at the wide end. I purchase a new zoom which was 28-135 mm, which converted to about 45-200 mm on my new camera. 45 mm is about the natural eye viewpoint, which of course seemed incredibly wide-angle to me. But while I appreciated the new wide angle views of the city, those grand vistas still seemed as disappointing as ever. You see I had gotten used to the level of detail I achieved in my telephoto images, which was not available in a wide-angle shot until you somehow enlarge it beyond the size of my walls, the pixels of my camera, or my budget for purchasing prints of enormous size.
BURNSIDE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 1:1.7
Enter the possibilities of digital post-processing. I have been a devoted Lightroom user ever since Lightroom 2, and even though I make do with Lightroom 5, from about a dozen years ago, I still rely on the program for most of my editing needs. I've read most of the hundreds of Lightroom books on the market (reading books is the way I learn best) and even follow a lot of guys on You Tube who assure me that their way is "the way" to achieve post-processing greatness. My age and cheapness has not allowed me to subscribe to the newer versions of Lightroom, in the probably mistaken belief that above all, always avoid recurring payments. At $10 a month, I've probably saved the thousands of dollars over the years to actually afford the ink I have bought to print my images. And since Lightroom 5 seems to still work for me, and Adobe still hasn't pulled the plug, I have not seen the need to "improve" my software.
FREMONT BRIDGE PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 1:3
My contrarian tendencies were helped when I did purchase another software suite on a very big sale a few years ago from what turned out to be a local Portland software company, On One. This was designed as an "add-on" to Lightroom, and some of the features appealed to me, since they were exactly what was missing from my ancient versions of Lightroom. The most important included a feature that allowed for completely unreasonable enlargement of images with very, very little loss of detail, perfect for the enlargements of my images that high rollers wanted for their vast Pearl District walls. Another feature allowed for the quick erasure of offending sensor dust, visual distractions, or even people from images which sometimes seemed almost miraculous. So even though I have stopped getting new versions of the On One Suite since my old laptop can't handle them (if it isn't one thing, it's another), I still recommend it for photographers who want some newer miracles without a subscription.
WILLAMETTE PANORAMA #2 : FINAL VERSION 1 :3.5
One of these miracles which I began to investigate was the opportunity to create wide-angle images from a combination of normal or telephoto shots taken by seemingly applying the principles of creative multiple views that fascinated Modern painters. While Picasso might confuse the issue by showing a face in profile and frontally at the same time, the Cubists showed that multiple views could elucidate as well as complicate our views of a subject. Photographers had long taken advantage of the possibilities of the formerly mistaken multiple exposure. There was also the virtues of the photo essay, where multiple story-telling images combined to show more of the "truth" than one single image could.
GORGE WATERFALL PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 3.5:1
Around the turn of this century the painter David Hockney began to experiment with what he called "multiples" which showed much more of a scene than was seemingly possible by combining multiple images into a grid of Polaroids, with no attempt to hide the grid. Thus a Scrabble game could be shown as one image that showed all of the players, the room, and multiple views of the board all at the same time. Hockney soon tried the same thing with grids of 4x6 drugstore prints - now he could get more cubist by overlapping images. These assemblages relied on glue, and were one-offs, although I only saw them because they were then photographed themselves.
EMPIRE STATE PANORAMA FINAL VERSION 3.5:1
Enter the computer. While I had experimented with some Hockney assemblies, they were very expensive and hard to produce, and I lacked the confidence in my cubist eye. But my new computer program promised the ability to assemble multiple views into a seamless image that would defy anyone to tell that these were multiple images. I wasn't out to fool anyone except the salesman that wanted me to buy a wide angle lens. As I experimented with these stitched panoramas, I got better at what are actually pretty easy techniques that will allow your computer to assemble multiple images into one larger, wider image than your lens can achieve. All of the images that have appeared in this essay are the results of these efforts.
BRIDGE AT MULTNOMAH FALLS PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION B&W 1:2
What is very interesting is that this process is a lot simpler than it looks - in fact, it is very easy to overthink it. All your are doing is holding your camera steady and level, while you pivot around your central subject, taking multiple shots that the computer will assemble into one image. The problems to watch for are even more basic than you think. The need to keep the camera level will make it easier for the program to stitch, and you will be amazed at first at how much you will naturally pivot downward from left to right. While a leveled tripod will of course eliminate this problem, so will practice. You also must make a decision on the overall exposure, since you don't want your stupid camera to adjust the exposure as you circle around the scene. Figure out the exposure for the brightest part of the scenes so you don't blow that out, set it, and go to manual so it doesn't change. The same thing applies to focus point, since you don't want the camera auto focusing as you pivot either. Pick a focus, switch to manual focus, and start shooting. But first, and I kid you not , take a photo of your hand so you will know later when the sequence started and stopped. You are overlapping the photos somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3, so the computer can match things up. Not enough overlap and gaps will be apparent, while too much overlap seems to confuse the program and create artifacts that you can only eliminate later with way too much effort. You must give the computer enough information to work with, so clear skies are a no-no, and even a seascape with a clear horizon is not enough.
DARTMOOR PANORAMA #1 : FINAL VERSION 1:3
You hit the panorama command on the computer, and prepare to wait. I'm not talking about the proverbial cup of coffee, unless you are walking ten minutes sit at Starbucks for half an hour. The panorama files are huge, and I've taken to reading a novel while they are being assembled. And once the preview is created, and it actually looks good, then it takes far longer to actually render the file into something that you import into Lightroom. In fact, sometimes the best thing to do is to hit the command and go to bed.
RADIO CITY PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 2:1
The result is a file that is so large and detailed that you could print out the image at billboard size, and still pixel peep up close. At even extra large "normal" sizes, the prints will be far more detailed than any regular wide angle image. The perceived resolution is enormous, which allows you to even crop into you panorama again to achieve better resolution than a normal photograph, even though you now have a "standard" aspect ratio. It's actually very easy to go overboard. Photographers who used to use expensive panoramic film cameras soon realized that the panorama aspect ratio required a subject with many, if not a continuous point of interest, to hold the viewer's attention - the view was just too wide to accomodate too much emptiness. Thus enter the mountain range or its urban equivalent, the skyline, with enough going on throughout the wide span to keep the viewer's interest all the way though the expanse. The best aspect ratios seem to me to be either 2:1 or 3:1; anything beyond that is very hard to compose, no matter how grand the view. While there are purists, or crazies, who still use the legacy ratios of 16:9 or 6:17 that were produced by their panoramic film cameras, 2:1 or 3:1 achieve the same basic results.
BURNSIDE & BIG PINK PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION 3:2
The problem with these ratios, despite all of the detail, is that when we scan the grand view, our two eyes are moving around, while the single camera eye does not. Thus the problem becomes that the view becomes too narrow - we are not seeing enough of the scene above or below the narrow band the camera and computer is creating. The first solution is the last bit of advice I left out of your panorama instructions - you will hold your camera vertically as you pivot and overlap horizontally, to get the biggest possible amount of the "short" dimension of your panorama. Conversely, if you take a panorama of a waterfall or a skyscraper, you will take a series of horizontal shots as you pivot in a vertical arc.
HAYSTACK ROCK PANORAMA : FINAL VERSION B&W 1:2
We are one short step from the madness of a panorama with multiple grids to "solve" this short-dimension problem. Include more of the sky and the foreground by taking a double pivot, but realize that you now need overlap in two dimensions, and possibly a new computer. Essentially, panoramas are a lot of fun, and even revelatory, but they should be considered as extra, bonus shots, because they just might not come off, and are very hard to correct if something goes wrong. So two tries might be in order, and always take a few regular images before you leave the mountain top, because the panorama might fail. When I first let the computer loose on the Dartmoor image with the tree, it somehow produced two trees so realistically that I could just shake my head. When I eliminated the extra tree, it took hours to reduce the artifacts that both surrounded and were within the branches of the remaining tree. Depending on the print size of these images, you are actually forced to process them differently. At 4x12 inches, what appears as unsightly sensor dust that must be removed is revealed to be an extremely in focus bird if it is viewed at a potential 12 x 36 inches. At 4x8 inches, especially in black and white, the amount of detail is so intense that it starts to hurt your eyes, so that it almost demands larger prints that you or anyone else might want to look at.
DARTMOOR PANORAMA #2 : FINAL VERSION 1:2
So some of this begins to defy logic even though its a lot of fun. I once produced a 4 feet x 4 feet enlargement on fabric, a tapestry if you will, that unfortunately looked fantastic from 40 feet, or four booths away, from my booth at the market. Even though the level of detail allowed it to be viewed up close, nobody but yours truly could even understand the image when viewed within my booth. I never sold it, and now it is usually draped over my drafting chair in my studio. There are practical limits to magic.
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JULY 9, 2021
LAN-SU MAPLE (MY MAPLE) : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to explore the topic of a long-term photographic relationship with a particular place, and how it can focus and expand your photography. The place that has captivated me for over ten years has been one of my favorite spots in Portland, the Lan-Su Chinese Garden. I remember my first visit to the garden many years ago. I was so blown away at the end of this visit that I ended up with my first annual membership in the Garden before I had left that day.
These successive annual memberships, along with my self-employed and self-unemployed lifestyle, have enabled a pretty special relationship with a major cultural institution. The annual membership, along with living within 20 minutes of the garden, allows me unlimited visitation during the year, whenever I want, for as little time as I want, all for one very reasonable price. Thus what could be a unique visit for a tourist or just an occasional trip for a Portlander showing off their city has become a wonderful ordinary part of my life in the city. That is what I mean when i call the Garden "My Chinese Garden" - frequent visits have allowed me a sense of familiarity and ownership, so that I can approach the garden as a domestic space - an extension of my wife's bungalow garden.
LAN-SU AND BIG PINK : FINAL VERSION
The garden is located in Portland's Chinatown neighborhood, a part of Old Town just north of Burnside. Once a thriving residential area for Asians, along with the neighboring Japan Town, these areas suffered after the suburban exodus from Portland after the Second World War. In point of fact, the areas never recovered from the emptying of the neighborhoods by the forced evacuation of the Japanese population, both immigrants and citizens, from the West Coast to internment camps in the big empty of the American West during the War. This hysterical racist response to Pearl Harbor, with no evidence of disloyalty ever put forward, economically crippled the neighborhood. The prevailing ignorance of the time meant that the "othering" of Asians extended to the Chinese, our allies in the war, since most Americans had to receive instructions in how to tell the difference between different Asian groups.
The image above shows the relationship between the Garden and its place in Portland, but in some ways is very misleading. The Garden, like many of Downtown's parks, takes up only one block of the standard 200' x 200' miniature urban grid. These small blocks in many ways allow for the occasional denial of commerce in the city based on the realization that Capitalism is only being asked for one small block. Yet the real genius of the Garden's design is that it feels absolutely cut off from the city. Somehow in the space of one small block one can easily spend a couple of hours in China, with very little idea that you are in Portland. In fact, this view of Big Pink to the Southwest is about the only large intrusion of the surrounding neighborhood into your visit to China. The rest of the low-rise neighborhood is mostly screened by the garden itself.
BAMBOO, LAN-SU : FINAL VERSION
This detail of a very small planting of bamboo at the garden illustrates how the typical historical design of a Chinese Garden serves to create a separate world. The Chinese Garden was always considered a piece of urban design, an integral part of the city. Though varied in size, these gardens were typically conceived as large courtyards, surrounded by buildings, or at least walls, that would shield views of the surrounding city. The white background to the bamboo is a ten-foot high stucco wall that surrounds the garden, either by itself or as part of a pretty complete shell of one to three story pavilions that make up the perimeter. In fact, Portland's urban design regulations confounded the Chinese designers because our anti-blank wall rules required a certain amount of windows on the street elevations. These "windows" were accomplished with small screened openings in the wall which allow the occasional glimpse of the city. These views are carefully mitigated because the wall is in fact not on the sidewalk, but a few feet inside it, which allows for further planting outside the walls to screen the "windows."
LAN-SU PORTAL : FINAL VERSION
This traditional "Moon Door" arched opening occurs early in the Garden's processional sequence. While the route is not exactly proscribed, it is strongly encouraged by the design strategies that isolate the garden and encourage planned views. The entire idea is create a sequence of garden "rooms" which will focus visitor's attention on smaller planting areas, highlight varieties of planting, and hide the fact that you are twisting and turning on the perimeter of one small block. These gardens in China were domestic in the sense that one family or institution would be in control of the courtyard - and thus both "secrecy" and an exaggeration of the actual scale were in order. The route would strive to stretch the walk around the perimeter, presenting carefully controlled views that led to a climax of an interior courtyard that seemed larger than the space the rest of the garden could possibly contain. In Portland, this largest space is placed on the diagonal of the block, and filled with it's own pavilion on a central island on a pond that provides vistas across this central space. These different garden rooms are small enough in actual dimension that they could be transported to a typical urban lot in Portland and not really have to be shrunk in size. A typical Portland lot is 50' x 100' - do the math and you will realize that the Lan-Su Garden in fact constitutes the same area as eight of the houses on my street in Southeast Portland.
LAN-SU POND : FINAL VERSION
This image is of the island pavilion, carefully placed near one end of the pond, not in the middle, to increase the pond's apparent size. Here you can see that almost all of the garden's components were designed and created in China, and then carefully brought to Portland to be assembled by the same Chinese craftspeople. The architecture and ornament of the garden is based on traditional models of gardens found in Portland's sister city in China, Souchow, known for it's gardens, some almost a thousand years old. I was once looking through a giant coffee table book of world garden design, when one of the photos of a Chinese Garden seemed weirdly familiar. I have never been to China, and I was in fact looking at a familiar view because I had already made my version of the image from Portland's garden. It is known as the most authentic Chinese garden outside of China. All of the plants and the Koi in the Pond are authentic Chinese varieties, even if they didn't come from China. And all of the weird and revered natural carved stones found in lakes in China were directly bought from Souchow to be placed in our garden.
LAN-SU POND B&W : FINAL VERSION
The virtue of this black and white version is the replacement of vegetation color with texture. It is also interesting to see how the increased contrast in the monochrome version has highlighted both the reflection in the pond and the openings in the stucco walls of the pavilion. The lack of color has also completely obscured the brick high rise across the street, and further down played the one aspect of the design I really hate, the concrete base walls that surround the pond.
VEGETATION AND ORNAMENT : FINAL VERSION
Once you start exploring the garden, the photographic possibilities endlessly expand. I become fascinated by the interplay between vegetation and architectural detail, which seem to bring out the best in each other. This one corner of another pavilion features weeping willows that contrast with Chinese ornament that grabs my attention even though it is totally alien to me. Take one away, and the image suffers to the point of no return.
LAN-SU WEEPING WILLOW : FINAL VERSION
Here another view across the pond highlights color and texture variations, along with those reflections that a pool can provide. Notice some of those weird rocks that line this part of the pond, and the actual hills beyond the tree that form one of the corners of the block.
LAN-SU PERSIMMON :FINAL VERSION
Throughout the year the garden presents different varieties of vegetation on display. Winter reveals the garden's "bones" the best, while Fall will give you the best Maple colors. Spring highlights the new burst of color, while Summer features the pavilion interiors as shady respites from the infrequent Portland sun. Most of these structures are one room deep, feature cross ventilation and "exterior" views to rear planted mini-courts surrounded by the perimeter wall. The fiction of the garden is that you are temporarily a Chinese scholar in your own garden, and it is amazing how the garden can carry it off. The fact that this particular "Chinese scholar" can come any time, with today's New York Times in hand, only enriches the experience.
I only wish that the Garden was a park with free admission, but maintenance, etc, probably makes that impossible. Finishing the Garden was Bill Naito's deathbed request of Mayor Katz, and she deserves lots of credit for making it happen. And an annual pass can be paid off after only a few visits anyway. The Garden will be here long after all of us, even if the pond has sprung a leak or two.
FALLEN GINGKO LEAVES : FINAL VERSION
This intimate landscape was discovered by your intrepid photographer outside the walls of the Garden near the entrance. The Ginkgo tree in the garden had provided the overflow leaves for this tableau. It shows how repeat visits can show a photographer some new points of view.
LAN-SU MAPLE #2 : FINAL VERSION
This image is the opposite side of the Japanese Maple at one edge of the pond. One of the weird rocks stands alongside what I call "my tree". You see the first image in this essay was my answer to what is actually known as "The Tree", a world-famous image of a Japanese Maple at Portland's Japanese Garden. Every Portland photographer, and seemingly every one who has ever visited that garden, has taken that image. Until the world's worst businessman, yours truly, showed up at the Saturday Market. Since I couldn't bear having the same image in my booth, I finally substituted "My Tree" for the "The Tree" that was a fixture in every other photography booth at the Market. Such are the lengths an artist can go to achieve some amount of sel respect in a cruel commercial world.
CHINESE GARDEN WALK : FINAL VERSION
Finally, here is one of my favorite images from the Garden. It shows the play of light across one of the typical paved courtyards of the garden rooms that make up the Garden. Paving stones from China are placed in various different patterns in each of the rooms - this is the "Garden of Cracked Ice." The light shaft grazing the pebbles makes the scene, which can cause considerable disorientation for some visitors to my booth. They are convinced it is an aerial view of some unknown dense ancient cityscape until Ishow them the leaves and return them back to Earth. While this image has the appearance of a black and white photo with colored leaves, it is actually what happens when you turn the contrast in a color photo of a brown stone floor up to "11." The hyper contrast has turned the browns to black and highlighted black, while the brown leaves have turned radioactive. An example of the fun you can have in post-processing when you "break the rules" just to see what might happen, and then enjoy what you have created by admiring someone else's artistic talent.
And that is the real lesson for today. If you find an environment that you enjoy, whether natural, or man-made, don't be afraid of allowing yourself to repeatedly enjoy it, and create new images of that place you know more than the average visitor. In that way you can hopefully deliver to your viewers some of the magic you feel when you visit your special place.
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JULY 2, 2021
CRACK IN THE GROUND #1 : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to discuss one trip I made with Benjamin to Central Oregon about seventeen years ago. Our usual "plan" was to drive for about four days into the unknown, in no certain direction, the only proviso being that we wouldn't sleep in the car, (avoided only barely sometimes), and that we couldn't drive farther away than it would take us to get back by the end of Easter Vacation. In retrospect we always had a great time, even though my frequent forays beyond normal routes would often drive my son nuts. He never got used to the idea that my object seemed to be to take the road much less traveled, with only a vague idea that there would be something interesting at the end or on the way. Now I can't believe that I had the stamina to drive through an empty state alone, since my son had absolutely no interest in driving way after he could have legally taken the wheel. Of course most of the places we went were so empty that in an emergency he could have taken the wheel even as a ten-year old. In any case, Benjamin has finally gotten a license as a 33 year-old college professor, and he drove the whole way on our last road trip through rural North Carolina.
Even though I failed my duty as a parent in training him for transportation beyond taking the bus, I will say that Benjamin might be one of the few Millenials who knows how to read a map. As navigator, he was in charge of at least setting us off in the right direction, albeit with fatherly checking that declined as he got older. Not that much has changed on this map, but I just realized that the copy I still have features Governor Kulongoski. Benjamin mastered the state road map pretty quickly, and was especially delighted when he got to turn it over to check for the detailed "city" maps, since they meant that we had returned to some semblance of civilization and that lunch might be in his future. But he was very suspicious when it became time to turn to the 88-page oversize map book of topographic maps of the entire state that I had procured in Powell's. This fount of all geographic knowledge, useful or not, only promised that we were about to enter places that most maps would fill with warnings or blank space - "here be monsters."
CRACK IN THE GROUND #2 : FINAL VERSION
These maps were so detailed that it sometimes seemed that if it wasn't on the map, it didn't exist. On the other hand, it led to even further exploration once we had reached the middle of nowhere, since there always seemed to be a more obscure road to take us further afield. Each page of the book was only about 10 x 25 miles in size, so every feature of the landscape was highlighted for our edification. Almost every hill, stream, or lake was acknowledged by name, which lent a degree of certainty to routes that otherwise didn't inspire confidence. Benjamin quickly began to realize that a good half of the named towns were still aspirational, and it spawned a parlor game when we had already passed the town we were looking for without realizing it.
Overall routes were still planned with the state road map, since the map book was too detailed to understand where you were actually going to beyond the next half hour, no matter how slow the state of the road lowered the speed limit. But the book also provided two further planning devices in its "gazetter" section. 30 Scenic Drives outlined routes of 35-160 miles that promised adventure, landscapes, and directions so detailed that they could only be followed on the book's maps. But I really fell in love with the list of "Unique Natural Features", most of which I had never even heard of, and were found on no other maps than those contained in the book. This "bucket list" provided our intrepid explorers with some reasonable excuse to drive way-out-of-the-way.
CRACK IN THE GROUND #3 : FINAL VERSION
One of these features that inspired a trip was delightfully and laconically named Crack in the Ground, the atlas' homage to the classic "Snakes on a Plane." The atlas quietly promised a "fracture" 2 miles long, 40 feet deep, and ten feet across, and so off we went. I have only met one other person since who has ever been to the place, or even heard of it. I would recommend it as a way station on a trip even farther afield, since it is not really very near anything else of interest or easily reached by the most popular routes into the Outback. I guess you could combine it with a trip to Paulina Lake, or as a stop on an adventure farther into Eastern Oregon. While it is actually close to Bend in theory, you are required to take some sketchy dirt roads off Route 20, and I might suggest a longer, but mostly paved trip on Route 31 out of La Pine. In any case you will end up in Christmas Valley, another "town" that might be now more than the mere gas station it was at the beginning of this century, or maybe not. At least the young attendant pointed out the dirt road that led out of town to our destination, which had not even been cited in the map book!
Eight more miles of featureless high desert sagebrush later, we arrived at a small wooden sign that cited a "parking area" no different than anything else surrounding it. Benjamin was reassured by the two other cars in attendance, though we never saw any other people. Fortunately there was a smaller arrow sign that pointed the way, since the "park" provided no information on what was about to happen. The trail was at least clear, because it soon became apparent that the crack in the ground might have been discovered simply by someone unlucky enough to fall into it.
CRACK IN THE GROUND #4 : FINAL VERSION
As shown in the first two images above, the people who named this curiosity weren't kidding. You are walking along, minding your own business, across the flat, featureless, sagebrush High Desert that extends for miles in every direction, only occasionally relieved by a lava flow, a tree, or a dried-up lake. And then you come upon what can only be called a crack in the ground. We descended until we were about 40 feet below the surface, and soon were encountering snow in our sneakers, since the shadows had protected the snow long after it had melted up on the top. While the chasm varied in size, it never narrowed so much as to encourage doubling back, nor widened enough to achieve canyon status. This was a crack, and I stated to wonder if we would encounter an animal skeleton of a sheep or cow who had met an untimely end up above. The crack extended for nearly two miles before it rose and petered out on the surface after a couple of miles I remember us walking back up above, carefully keeping our distance. The images from above were taken on the trip back, for the trail in doesn't provide any such preview of the crack.
CRACK IN THE GROUND #4 : FINAL VERSION
As advertised in the gazetteer, the crack's walls featured "unusual wall outcroppings", with some nice areas of different mineral flows in varied colors enlivening the views. I know some of these images seem to be dead ends, but my memory tells me they were just bends in the crack. I remember it as just your usual cloudy day, but I don't know how much sun you get in this crack when it's sunny any way; for all I know we might have avoided excessive contrast that day. Benjamin's respect for the map book's wild understatement encouraged further adventures afterwards, for he now knew that something lay behind the promise of "unusual natural feature."
CRACK IN THE GROUND #5 : FINAL VERSION
We walked out of the crack to find the lone tree in the landscape, and then trudged back to the car, staying well away from the crack. I didn't trust the stability of the edge one little bit. For the life of me I do not remember where we ended up staying or eating afterwards, but that might have been the time we were so pathetic that the restaurant we ate in allowed us to sleep in a day room off the kitchen. All in all, the map book had served us well once again. And while I'm not sure that these images do the crack justice, since I have never seen another image of this place, what do I know? I just recommend that the next time you find something on a map, even if it's on your phone, you feel okay in striking off in a new direction. You just might find something as weird as Crack in the Ground.
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JUNE 25, 2021
OREGON COAST SUNSET : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss a recent purchase of mine and encourage you to follow my very belated lead. After many years of my usual plodding and indecision, I finally purchased a photo scanner. My official excuse was the need to scan multiple photos for my latest photo book that is a collection of my photos from around the state of Oregon. A lot of these photos date back many more years than I care to think about, when I took my son Benjamin on yearly Easter Break road trips around the state. He's a college professor now, so these predate my conversion to digital photography. These memories are now confined to an incredibly unorganized series of binders of prints, negatives and slides that have emerged from my basement. As I have started to reconnect these images to today's digital world, I now realize that I actually purchased a time machine.
OREGON COAST SUNSET B&W : FINAL VERSION
It is a commonly accepted truism that any photograph 50 years or older is intrinsically interesting because it reveals the changes in society, from clothes to hairstyles to buildings - the stark changes are now right in our faces, and we really can see that "the past is another country." Well, let me tell you, it kind of works with mere decades as well, when they are your own images. Even with what most might call relatively timeless imagery like the images above. The Oregon Coast is known for horizontal rain, but there have probably been thousands of sunsets since I captured this image decades ago. The time machine aspect is that I have absolutely no memory of when or where I took this photo, except that it was somewhere on the coast. And after finding it in my archives, and scanning it with my new machine, I am very pleased with this newly discovered artifact.
This image has never looked better than it does now, even though I had forgotten it existed. Part to the joy of scanning old photos, even if they exist as prints, is the realization that the one-hour photo place, a miracle of the late Twentieth Century, was in reality an awful place where any photographic talent you might have went to die. It is positively appalling how extremely bad the typical print you are holding in your hand, your photo memory, is compared to even an early effort with the scanner. It is like night and day, and I am just experimenting with the new machine. Scanning the photo now allows me to use the hard-earned skills at post-processing the image. I know can not just crop it the way I want, but actually achieve an exposure that has nothing to do with the mediocre efforts of the one-hour machine. Often it is like you are seeing the image for the very first time; with the added bonus that you can try something new, like converting it to monochrome. I happen to like the black and white version of my sunset a little better, which almost sounds crazy even as i write this sentence, but there you go. The value of this "second chance" image is not only that it was forgotten in the archives, but that it didn't even stand out as a "keeper" until it actually received the attention it deserved.
SOUTHERN OREGON COAST B&W : FINAL VERSION
Another forgotten image, taken on an ill-fated camping trip down the Coast on another Easter Break. I don't remember where this beautiful beach actullay was, but I do remember that it ws one of the few days that weren't totally besotted. I had eagerly and compulsively planned our trip, reserving all of our campsites to ensure no trouble with the anticipated crowds. Needless to say I didn't realize that camping at the Oregon coast in March without an RV was a fool's errand. The low point was when my preteen son announced that our reserved site in an empty campground was completely underwater, and that perhaps with could just choose anther one. Yet images like the one above have reminded me that I should take the trip again, because the Coast really gets prettier the further South you go.
OREGON DUNES #1 : FINAL VERSION
Another forgotten image from the Coast, this time somewhere at the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, where you might never get to the beach, but you can play Lawrence in Arabia without a script. Can I point out again that that young man is now entrusted with the education of college students? While this image might not be the best image I ever created, that in itself brings up a very important point about scanning which seems to trouble a lot of people. The scanning nightmare is usually the one where you are faced with an uncountable amount of images whose scanning will take up the rest of your life, and reduce you to a blithering idiot. This is related to the key-wording nightmare, or the printing nightmare, or the worst one, the backing-up nightmare, which can beset photographers whether they are backing up or not. The truth is that you are in control of what you will scan today, tomorrow, or next year, and you can be as selective as you want. No one is forcing you to scan all of those images. Remember that they are all forgotten right now. And that if you are running at your usual ratio, probably only one out of a hundred were any good to begin with. What makes you think that you used to be so great that even a tiny minority of your images actually deserves the light of day? Relax.
EASTERN OREGON SIDE CANYON : FINAL VERSION
I took several road trips with Benjamin to Eastern Oregon, mostly to places where most Oregonians have never gotten to see because the prospect of driving for days beyond Bend through the outback has not taken hold. And I have never returned to most of these areas, despite the fact that we loved the desolation. I remember the night we doubled the population of Diamond, Oregon, and ate our wonderful steak dinner with the rest of Diamond in their kitchen instead of the hotel dining room. So images like the one above can bring back memories even when you don't remember where you took them.
Let's talk about "real world scanning". I took a class on scanning so long ago that I can't find the notes I carefully took, and know that I almost don't know what I am doing. It doesn't matter. For one thing, nothing prevents me from, Oh my God, re-scanning the image in the future once I realize what a dufus I am. So for what is really a modest investment in time machines, go buy a moderate scanner like the Epson V600 for $229, delivered with no shipping from New York in two days. Pro Photo here in Portland didn't have any in stock for months, and even NY was beset by Covid delays, but within an hour of arrival I was scanning. Take comfort in the fact that Epson makes far newer and more expensive scanners, but this model, or another one that can let you scan prints, negatives, and slides is all you need. And yes, there is far better software that you can buy than the free Epson software that comes with the machine, but at least the "professional" option will give you all the control you need for a perfectly wonderful scan. There are so many lessons on You Tube about scanning with this particular machine that I just set them on a perpetual background loop without video while I made my first scans.
WALLOWAS #1 B&W : FINAL VERSION
An image from my one trip to the Wallowas Mountains, which is nicknamed "Little Switzerland" by local boosters eager to spike tourist travel from Portland. The area is absolutely beautiful, and is so isolated that it is beyond Eastern Oregon, kind of a dead end at the borders of Washington State and Idaho. Days and days of driving from Portland, and almost all of the vista shown above is wilderness area accessible only with mule team camping outfits. But I am on a ski lift up from Wallowa Lake, where we stayed in a very nice cabin, glamping before there was "glamping."
All a professional scan will require is to set a DPI on the software high enough, lets say 2400, so that the result file will allow you to eventually create a print a lot larger and more detailed than the old 4x6 in your hand. Take one look at the histogram, adjust the end points of the scan to get any parts of the image that the stupid program would have neglected, and after pushing the button to enable the Digital Ice spot removal program, hit the scan button. The computer will then ask you if you really want such a large file that will take so long to create, and you will answer "hell yes!" and about 5 minutes later it's finished. Of course you will be multi-tasking while this interminable process is going on. While I have no doubt that I can probably make a better scan for the 24" x 36" Metal print that you will no doubt order, so far my efforts have yielded scans with enough information to achieve beautiful small images after post-processing in Lightroom.
CRATER LAKE #1 : FINAL VERSION
I'v had the opportunity to take the long drive to Crater Lake only twice, and really would love to give it another try with my recently acquired skill at "stitching" wide angle views from multiple images with my telephoto lens. Crater Lake and the Grand Canyon are the only to places I've ever been where I really missed having a wide angle lens in my bag. But this scan pleased me to no end, despite the horrible sky (forest fires), and the lack-luster light. It is certainly not an epic view. But after seeing so many Crater Lake images over the years, none of them mine, I was absolutely shocked when I found that this image, which I did not remember, in fact satisfied my criteria for a proper Crater Lake shot. Countless Crater Lake images had taught me that it was absolutely crucial to have gained enough height on the rim trail to see above the peak of Wizard Island. Despite my lack of memories, there was clearly blue, a palpable blue, above the cone. So I'm not completely incompetent after all.
The only thing I have to warn you about is dust. I am not the most anal photographer around, and I have already misplace the squeezeable air blower that my wife looked crosswise at after only a week. I never did buy the the disposable white gloves. So despite Digital Ice, you will find an entire new level of dust spots on your file - just think of it as another example of the "zen of nothingness" as you get reacquainted with Lightroom's dust removal tool. There is a new button you can push that converts your image into a kind of black and white negative that makes it too easy to see all of the dust spots and remove them. You can always go back and remove some more before printing that wall-sized print.
MT. HOOD REFLECTION : FINAL VERSION
I don't remember if this was Trillium Lake or its aptly named and more obscure cousin Lost Lake, but in any case it is fairly similar to something you will find in most Oregonian photographer's portfolios. The value of scanning a small selection of your old images is that you can rediscover that you too have such a shot in your portfolio, and that you can now process it so that you can make it stand out from the typical post card view. I didn't remember that we stayed so late in the day before we headed back home, but my scanner revealed that Dad had led my son astray. I remember the time I valiantly led Benjamin on a short few miles around Lost Lake on a very obscure trail that we discovered would be "completed" in another month or two. And I wonder sometimes when my middle-aged son holds tightly on to the map, despite the fact that he can finally share with the driving.
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JUNE 18, 2021
CASCADE LAKE B&W : FINAL VERSION
Today I'd like to discuss my love of monochromatic imagery, usually referred to as Black and White. While I am not a black and white purist I have increasingly seen the value of this kind of abstraction in some of my imagery. I think as you experiment in converting some of your images into black and white you will also see its value beyond nostalgia.
The image above is nostalgic, in that it was taken about fifteen years ago on a vacation trip to the Cascade Lakes area in Central Oregon. I forget which lake we stayed at, but there were cabins for glamping (an unknown term back then) and boats to rent. I recently purchased a scanner to resurrect some of my old prints and negatives for use in my latest photo book project concentrating on my imagery all over the state of Oregon. I scanned the old print, corrected for some color shifts, and cropped to the square which I thought was best for the image. Here is the color version.
CASCADE LAKE : FINAL VERSION
This is on example of one of the reasons I sometimes choose to go black and white - I simply hate the colors. I don't make any apologies for this, and have used this excuse even for landmarks that have beloved colors (by most people) that I happen to find unattractive, like the St. Johns Bridge, for heaven's sake. I tried to like the original, and semi-believed Lightroom's assurances that I had achieved the correct color balance, but those green boats just didn't do it for me. I find the black and white version much more calming, and don't miss the dock, which we all know is wood anyway.
Sometimes I'm confronted by what is actually a monochromatic color scene, and will almost immediately try a black and white conversion because I don't think there will be much of a difference - I didn't take the image because of the color.
MT. BACHELOR : FINAL VERSION
This image is in color, but it was such a blue day that it almost appears monochromatic.
MT. BACHELOR B&W: FIRST VERSION
I tried a monochromatic with a blue tint, which is reminiscent of the protective toning we used to do in the early days in the darkroom. You can see it only really lightens the bright blue parts of the sky, and tints the rocks blue. It somehow still looks a little more realistic than the real color photo.
MT. BACHELOR B&W : FINAL VERSION
Yet I prefer the straight black and white, which highlights both the clouds and the volcanic rock in the foreground without any color to get in the way. This version is much more satisfying to me, especially the snow on the mountain.
Sometimes the different versions are more of a matter of taste, or will feel better when placed in a collection of other color or black and white images.
REFLECTIONS ON A GRID : FINAL VERSION
REFLECTIONS ON A GRID B&W : FINAL VERSION
As the cops would say, "nothing to see here people, move along." Maybe the reflection is stronger in the color version, but the black windows seem more relentless in the black and white. They are very similar images, although if I didn't like the blue or the tan I would not hesitate to go with monochrome. Sometimes the choice is obvious, at least to me, but I don't go looking for black and white out in the field. Modern cameras will allow you to shoot in both jpeg and raw at the same time - memory is now cheap, so I would try it. On the back of the camera, you're looking at a black and white scene, so you "know what it looks like in black and white" but the raw file is always a color file, so you have a choice later to go back to color. In any case you should never shoot in your camera's "black and white mode" alone, since I can guarantee you that you and your computer can post-process a better black and white than the incompetent computer in your camera.
THE WHITE HOUSE : FINAL VERSION
THE WHITE HOUSE B&W : FINAL VERSION
This is closer, but I still prefer the black and white. Maybe you are a real fan of red rocks, but I think the contrast of the sunny ruin and the dark cave is better expressed in the monochrome than in what is really a monochrome brown of the color version. It would be even closer in a square crop, because that would eliminate the distracting blue sky that the black and white avoids.
HEADLAND : FINAL VERSION
HEADLAND B&W : FINAL VERSION
This comparison brings up other issues. Which is more realistic? Yes, we lose the green trees, but we gain more definition in the cliffs in the monochrome. And really , do you actually believe that perfect blue sky - does that scream Oregon Coast? The color postcard view somehow hides the real feel of the coast, even on such a nice day. I only had to clone out one lone surfer in a wet suit to reveal the "truth" of how cold both the blue or the grey water was on that day. And now you can't tell whether it's 1872 or 2002 - the scene is exactly the same.
HUG POINT : FINAL VERSION
HUG POINT B&W : FINAL VERSION
Now we have achieved what I believe is equilibrium, with both versions having different charms. The color version's sand is more evocative than the monochrome beach, and the color reflection is a little stronger. The monochrome's rocks are a little better defined, especially the background rock and cliff. But the tan sand and blue skies are nice complementary colors. To each his own.
FRACTAL POND : FINAL VERSION
FRACTAL POND B&W : FINAL VERSION
While I can make the water more realistically dark in the monochrome, I still think I'm losing too much of the sparkle of the the color, even though I think the image is all about the pattern, not the color. The image is already abstract enough in real life to go even more abstract in monochrome.
So, to summarize, be open to trying black and white, after the fact. There is nothing magic about "seeing" in black and white. That's one of the ways we can take advantage of the miracle of digital post-processing. There are so many different kinds of papers now that I'm really beginning to think that darkroom afficianados are approaching the obscurity of the absolute sound fanatics with their analog turntables. I know that the digital darkroom gives me much more control than I ever had over my images when I manipulated chemicals in the darkroom, and now I do not have to choose black and white film.
In fact, I think that the only time you have to "think in black and white" is when you are confronted with "dull light" or even "bad light" - these inopportune moments in mid-day during your trip to Paris are perfect for black and white, and you can shoot away, knowing that yes, the scene might end up in monochrome anyway. You are simply looking for contrast in any case, and as we've seen, both color and black and white have their place.
FLORAL EXPLOSION : FINAL VERSION
FLORAL EXPLOSION B&W : FINALVERSION
Am I supposed to pretend that I didn't see those beautiful flowers, in all their colorful glory? But am I unaware of the even more powerful contrast, still realistic, that I can achieve in black and white, which defines the shape and pattern while losing those orange stamens? After all, I'm only human, not a pollen-hunting insect.
PEDESTRIAN GRIDLOCK : FINAL VERSION
PEDESTRIAN GRIDLOCK B&W : FINAL VERSION
It sometimes come down to "Keep it Simple Stupid." Is this a fashion shot? Do we really care how many colors of shirts and pants there are here? Black and White is perfectly capable of showing how many different races there are at this crosswalk. And all of those white men in their dark suits all look better in black and white too. We know the cab is yellow, we weren't born yesterday. And we know without seeing it that the light is most likely red, and that there is strength in numbers, especially when you are jaywalking. Black and white allows us to focus on the important issues, like the fact that all of these people have never heard of Covid. PLEASE PEOPLE, GET YOUR SHOT. PLEASE.
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JUNE 11, 2021
COASTER DISPLAY : A RANGE OF ORANGES
I would like to discuss color today in the spirit of just how impossible it is to actually discuss color, or to come to an agreement on how to duplicate a certain shade in a photograph or in real life. Colors are based on the reflectence of different wavelengths of light, and our own perceptions based on the receptors in our eyes and the perceptions of our minds. Color perception can be divided into three categories. Hue is the actual "color" - the "ROYGBIV", shall we say, that makes up the rainbow - red, yellow, orange, green, blue, Indigo, and violet. Even here, some people would start to hesitate at indigo and violet, wondering what happened to purple. Hue is like the Crayola box, and it is quickly obvious to any child that 64 colors were better than a slim 8. It's all of the colors in between the primary and secondary colors of the rudimentary color wheel that cause all of the confusion. Even "colorblind" people can probably distinguish hundreds of different colors, while experts and computers soon expand that into the thousands. Saturation refers to the purity, or strength of the color - in other words, how many other colors are really mixed in to make that color. This is easiest to think of in terms of paint - the more saturated shades will contain more pigment (hue) of that color in the mix. Children soon learn that the real frustration of mixing colors is the near certainty that an ugly brown will be the result. Luminance refers to the perceived brightness of the color, which is affected by how much white or black is thrown in. And even though this sounds complicated, just remember that I'm trying to keep it very simple.
What are the real world implications of this? Rich, why in hell should I care? Well, it's really important if you print your photos, and even more important if you are paying good money to someone else to make you a large print of one of your favorites. Now of course maybe you just put your photos on the web, and have never seen what they look like on someone else's phone or computer. Heavenly ignorance/bliss! But let's just say that your are painting your house for the first time in 26 years, and you want to pick a color - how do you describe it, even to yourself, much less your wife?
I've admitted before that I just might actually like orange more than the next guy. After all, isnt it the only color that literally names a fruit? Strawberry doesn't count, wiseguy, because it doesn't make any sense at all. Looking at the assemblage of orange coasters I put on the wall of my bathroom, I think you can begin to see the problem here. Most people would describe every image as "orange", even though the shades are very, very different. So which orange do you want, sir?
BAMBOO #2 : FINAL VERSION
Here is a rather pure orange, which is heightened by it's direct opposite, the green bamboo. If you think the designers of this garden in San Francisco just happened to pick this wall color behind this bamboo, then you are colorblind! This contrast makes both colors pop. Having searched through oranges lately, I also am wondering where the designers came up with a shade like this, which most paint companies will not even certify for exterior applications. While some of you might think that this is due to aesthetic considerations ( I can't believe he's painting his house orange!) it probably has something to do with fading more quickly than other shades.
BAMBOO #1 : FINAL VERSION
Well, look at that. Even the same shades of some of the bamboo look very different in front of a white wall, and we haven't even discussed which "white" that is painted on this wall.
AUTUMN #3 : FINAL VERSION
What attracted my attention here was another beautiful orange heightened by the painted white brick in the background. Start to look closer and an entire range of oranges will soon confuse the issue.
DROVE MY CHEVY TO THE LEVEE : FINAL VERSION
Another orange conumdrum. While this is clearly an orange '55 Chevy, there are probably at least four different shades of orange present in this one door panel, even though we know in our hearts that the car is painted with only one shade of orange. Which one is "correct" , and more important, which one do we "like" the best and how do we describe it and duplicate it on my house?
As you might imagine artists, designers, paint companies, and printers all might worry about this, because they are in the business of picking colors or making them, and have to achieve a certain degree of consistency in order to be trusted by their customers and clients. All kinds of scientific color ranges and charts and systems are the result of this never-ending search for "true color" matching, and while it is scientific, it's also based on a big lie.
FINDING NEMO : FINAL VERSION
Another famous orange, at least in some circles. Did the candy maker get it "right"? How would they know, if they cared? One way would be to pay the Pantone company hundreds of dollars for their system, which contains thousands of colors, no names thank you, for printers to duplicate a picked color, although I doubt that they work for pastry cream. The ultimate in science, the Pantone system contains more oranges, or any other shade, than you can possibly need, and they are so close to each other that most people will just pick one and call it a day to avoid a color headache.
While certainly more scientific than allowing your judgement to be affected by the poetic, confounding, silly, or just plain stupid names that paint companies will use to denote a shade, all these systems also rely on the big lie. Try not to let your head explode. At least two problems render these systems rather moot. One is what we call light temperature, which is based not on the color of the object, but on the color temperature of the light that is being reflected. Whoa! That particular shade of orange, the one we just picked out of thousand of oranges, might not be the one we actually perceive? Sorry, Horatio, but you knew this even if you didn't know you knew it. You know that two walls of the same room will be two different shades of the same color depending on the amount of light falling on them. Compound this with the less obvious but real "quality " of light which is a subjective reaction to different shades of the "white" light of the biggest light source we know, the sun. We know that the same colors will look different in sun and shade, and at dawn, mid-day or sunset. We have already seen how color perception can also be affected by adjacent shades. Nemo's brown and white racing stripes make the orange pop to different degrees.
CUP AND SAUCER, 8:20 : ORIGINAL
Here color temperature really rears its ugly head, because now we've introduced our arrogant attempt at the godlike "let there be light!" The incandescent lights in this cafe glow white in their lamps, but clearly produce an orange haze, heightened by the fact that it is 8:20 at night, so sunlight is not part of the equation. The trouble is that the patrons would not think their environment was orange at all. Our minds are much smarter than our camera's computers. We can adjust, and usually do to a large degree, to color temperature ranges, even though are cameras know better, or worse. Thus we will probably only perceive this interior orange when we shut of the lights and light some candles, since candle light is even more orange. We even think we look terrible under "daylight" bulbs, which are cooler and more accurately approximate sunlight. Which doesn't change the fact that the scene above looks very strange. Using the magic of post-processing, I will subsequently change the sensor's color sensitivity so that the tones will be rendered more neutral, and the orange will quiet down. Don't fall into the trap of what your camera calls "Auto White Balance" because then your camera's idiotic computer will be neutralizing the very sunset you are trying to capture.
TANNER SPRINGS : FINAL VERSION
This railroad rail sculpture exhibits various orange tones of rust, but positively glows because I took the shot in late afternoon, when the Western sun was positively baking the rusted steel. It might never look so good in any other light, and it certainly wouldn't be as "orange." But here is the final straw that breaks the camel's back. I have no real faith that the scene really looked like this beyond my memories, and I certainly have no idea that either my laptop or my printer or your phone will produce the same orange as I see, or my camera sensor saw. This is the problem that can be described with some of the following terms: color space, color gamut, and/or color profiles. Our camera's sensors can differentiate between thousands of colors, and express them in zero's and one's. The sensor is more accurate than our eyes, or at least more "scientific", but it probably still sees less colors than we do, even if it might be better at defining them. The trouble begins when the sensor tries to tell the computer, or your computer, which orange that it saw. The screens, no matter how accurate or expensive, cannot reproduce all of the colors in the color space. In other words, the computer's means of communication, its screen, cannot produce all of the colors that the computer has captured. Then photographers try to print them. Every different photo paper, and there are hundreds, interprets color information differently. If you haven't downloaded your paper's color profile, for your particular, printer model, you do not have a chance at all. Your print will be a god-awful mess, as it will be if you just rely on the printer profile and let your printer pick the colors. So you load the profile, and now your computer is talking the same color language as the printer, and you still don't have a chance. The trouble is that even if your software allows you to simulate what your image will look like on that paper, and you might be shocked enough to tweak your file to adjust it, you will still only be looking at a simulation.
SWIMMING UPSTREAM : FINAL VERSION
In fact we are swimming upstream, and there is probably a brown grizzly bear, with orange highlights, waiting for our copper salmon selves, and we have about as much chance of "accurately " producing these colors as a salmon has in breaking through an orange brick wall. We have struggled long enough with the myth of "What you see is what you get", our desire to believe that our screens can accurately show us what our images will look like on another person's screen or on that expensive piece of photo paper we are printing on.
The trouble is that we are fundamentally looking at an image on our screen that is the result of transmitted light - it is back lit by a screen - while the print will be seen in reflected light. It's not even the fact that these two different color profiles - the screen and the environment in which we are viewing the print - might not have much in common, but just the shear physics of transmitted versus reflected light. The first thing we need to do would be to reduce the brightness of our screens by half, which would cause our spouses to scream and ourselves to go blind. Thus the first step is to automatically increase the brightness of the "print file" by 20% or so, so that it now looks way too bright on the screen. That will get us in the ballpark at least, but we still don't have much of a clue over which colors our printer, or are paper , will have no chance of reproducing, even though our careful artistic editing efforts are based on that lying screen. Any colors which are "out of gamut" for that particular printer/paper combination will be replaced in some way behind the scenes by the software so that they will print. There are even two ways to do this, by either just changing the offending color, or changing every color to keep the color relationships closer to the original. In my opinion,that second way will only lead to deeper madness, but in any case what you see id positively not what you are going to get.
STAIRS AND STRIPES : FINAL VERSION
And then their are certain colors that are just difficult, or like certain spouses, "a handful." One of those is the red/orange combinations that I happen to like. You can see at least five different shades in this image, all helped by those beautiful bright white stripes which approximate the trim color choice that is as close as I get to religious dogma. But notice how different these orange bricks are from the orange bricks the salmon swam through.
GO BY TRAIN : FINAL VERSION
Or are one of the many red/oranges in this image the answer? Benjamin Moore, whose paint I am using, was not much help. Even though I brought home dozens of different chips of different sizes, and used their computer program to pick oranges out of my images, nothing helped until I bought four different oranges to actually put on my house's siding. What you see is definitely not what you get - the colors on the wall did not have much to do with either the colors on the web, the paint chips, or even the colors of the paint in the can! The truth is that you don't know what the color is until you actually see it in reality, and by then you are probably a lot crazier than you were when you started on this color adventure. At least my house won't look like every other house in Portland, and the orange will look great behind the greens of my wife's garden which cover up most of my one-story bungalow anyway. Did I mention that I'm having my house painted?
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JUNE 4, 2021
JUXTAPOSITION #1 : FINAL VERSION
Today I would like to discuss the concept of juxtaposition as it relates to photographic composition. Juxtaposition is defined in the dictionary as "the act of placing two or more things side by side in order to create an interesting effect." For an English major, the blue book invitation to "compare and contrast" sums up the entire enterprise of literary criticism. For photographers it can be an effective visual strategy, highlighting visual differences of scale, texture, color, or shape through these contrasts, which can be more interesting than just a singular focus. I myself have started to use it in my forays around the city, searching for new compositions in very familiar places. It allows me to see the city differently, once again ignoring the documentary "subject" to produce images that are uniquely my own.
JUXTAPOSITION #2 : FINAL VERSION
I'm experimenting with finding disorder out of order, which is the opposite of most photographic pursuits. I am creating collages, but I have to deal with the real world collisions I find in the viewfinder. My standard lens choice in the telephoto range allows me to do two things to heighten the effect I'm going for. It encourages the framing of distant snippets of visual information with its reach, allowing me to see further than the naked eye. It not only foreshortens my distance from the various parts of the collage, but the telephoto effect also crunches the apparent distance between the various parts. The result is a personal city whose graphic collisions, relieved in some respects from ordinary perspective, can occur despite real distances of blocks or even miles. The camera's eye, an immovable two dimensional plane, has replaced the three dimensional human perspective. My framing has also prevented the viewer from "looking around" to increase their frame of reference. It's like trying to catch a football with one eye closed.
JUXTAPOSITION #3 : FINAL VERSION
In this compare and contrast sweepstakes, I can use several visual cues to generate the collage. These include textures, colors, architectural styles and materials, and the opposition of lines that will reduce the perspective, in some instances so much that it will lead to viewer disorientation. Fragmentation and the resulting shapes that these fragments take can become more important than the real facades. In the example above, what appears to be three colliding buildings is in fact parts of one structure, the apparent differences of color owing to light and shadow. Big Pink's historical distance is distorted by the fact that it is at least a quarter of a mile in the distance, not across the street.
I think that my first attempt in this series is the most successful. The color palette helps, with enough differences to go along with the harmonization; thus the yellow curve moves forward and those weird red balconies behave themselves in the distance. What's funny here is that my contrast is actually heightened by reality, since what appears to be four different buildings are actually only three - the light grey building is actually a contrasting penthouse addition to the brick building with its ancient painted advertising. But I think that the most important decision was to eliminate any sky, which increases the graphic quality of the image - this first image doesn't "leak."
I do not believe any of these images work better in black and white. The usual increase in the textural detail of the shot does not make up for the loss of color contrasts. Perhaps #2 works best in monochrome because the white building fragment is as white in color as it is in black and white.
JUXTAPOSITION #2 B&W : FINAL VERSION.
I never thought I'd say this, but I really miss the green marble elevator shaft in the monochrome version, especially its glow through the foreground windows. I would also emphasize the importance of framing in these collages, since they are invariably graphically stronger than the original frames.
JUXTAPOSITION #3 : ORIGINAL
The original framing was not tight enough; the photo seems to be about Big Pink, complete with its top, and reality has reared its ugly head.
There are other ways I have used juxtaposition beyond this named series. Sometimes I use color contrasts, especially when that seemed to be the original strategy of the designer - I'm just going along.
OMSI MATRIX : FINAL VERSION
Here I pose the famous "red or blue pill" question by juxtaposing these two elements of the OMSI Science Museum, its newly created blue glass entry hall and its painted legacy turbine smokestack. My framing places them much closer than they are in reality to heighten the choice of colors, and the fragments make it all about those colors.
PANCAKES ON BROADWAY : FINAL VERSION
Here I let reality supply the collage. These flour package murals ornament the side of a grain elevator located beyond the Broadway Bridge. They are not this close, but my telephoto makes it look the bridge narrowly missed the grain elevator. My framing centered on the bridge truss, rendering it vertical and symmetrical, avoids the reality that nothing is really straight here, since the bridge is actually sloped while the grain elevator is not leaning.
DULLES SCULPTURE : FINAL VERSION
How do you comment on a building that is actually a sculpture? Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C. is just such a building. Absolutely beautiful and simple to the point that any functional reality of an "airport" is a jarring jolt to a visitor's sensibilities even while the frustrations of actually getting on an airplane drive you crazy. My interpretation contrasts the structure's two elements - it sloping concrete ceiling and pristine curtain wall of glass and concrete pillars. Notice how the columns seem to have nothing to do with the ceiling - they just collide. This juxtaposition is my subject. I've avoided people, ticket counters, and doors, all of which just annoy in contrast with this incredible space. Is there much more to this place? Not really, because only one element of the entire composition, the vertical control tower, is missing in this interior view. Eero Saarinen, the architect/sculptor here (he also created the Arch in St Louis) so wanted to isolate his pure form that he had to create special double-decker articulated buses to get passengers to planes to avoid the usual gangways. Even when they expanded the airport, the new terminal was only reached by a subway tunnel so as not to distract from this cathedral.
ANGLES AND SHADOWS : FINAL VERSION
This isolated collage of elements of one building - the Bagdad Movie Theater - reduces a portion of the structure to a contradictory assemblage of angled roofs, walls, volumes, and strong sunlit surfaces with contrasting shadows. Most of the architectural order has been lost, and if you didn't know it was the rear corner of the theater it would be completely anonymous. The graphic quality is helped by the sepia toning, which renders the sky as maybe just another part of the stuccoed structure.
AUTO ISOLATION : FINAL VERSION
And finally here is my attempt at getting something from a very beautiful nothing at a classical auto show. I have tried to so isolate the elements of this incredible sheet metal sculpture that once graced the street to the point that it's barely a car anymore. Only an expert could possibly tell you what this collection of shapes was part of a celebrated model of automobile. These fragments of color and shape are my attempt to convey luxury beyond reason without actually revealing the object - or the floor, the stanchions, the ropes and also the people ogling the automobile in question.
I once again encourage you to try finding subjects for your photography without being a slave to the real object in your viewfinder. Remember, sometimes the parts are the most important subjects of all.
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MAY 30, 2021
LIVING ROOM STAIRS : FINAL VERSION
This week I'd like to discuss a strategy you might adopt on your next foray out with you camera. It is based on the age-old question of "what the hell am I going to shoot today?" This is not especially applicable on your first trip to Paris, a portrait session, or a still life - although I could argue that even then it might loosen your photographic angst. I'm talking about going for a stroll in a very familiar location, one in which you've already taken all of the "bucket list" shots, such as they are, and are looking for an excuse to carry your camera and practice your hobby. How can I open my eyes today?
TANNER SPRINGS : FINAL VERSION
Please note that I am not telling you to actively plan to shoot shadows, or yellow colors, or silhouettes, or people's hands - I'm just suggesting that you might try something like that in a relaxed manner, as an additional excuse to find something to shoot. The object here is to expand your vision, as is my usual goal, beyond the documentary approach - can you find the "wow" factor without giving a hoot about the subject? This is not dependent on how abstract your eventual product is; just because a "subject" might be still apparent, that is not why you made the image. A photograph is simply an artifact of your eyes being at a particular place at a particular time. You decide what to express in your image.
CENTRAL LIBRARY #1 : SKYLIGHT DOME
I have found it very helpful to allow myself to see other things besides the obvious subjects of my image - even if those are important to me too. I would put it this way - I'm taking a walk in the woods, or Downtown, and today I'll take anything I want- but I might allow myself to see colors, or shapes, or juxtapositions, or anything else, in addition to taking anything I want. In freeing yourself of subject constipation, don't put additional pressure on your mind - these are liberating SUGGESTIONS, not more rules to follow. If they result in a few experimental attempts, that's good enough.
These first three images line my entry foyer as a large tryptich, so I am obviously proud of them. They used to form the back wall of my tent at Saturday Market as well, until I became tired of carrying three large framed and mounted prints to the Market, and answering the inevitable questions questions concerning the image's subjects. Now , the subject is right there in the title, because I am interested in these subjects, even if nobody else is, and I am not interested in playing games. "Untitled #18" is a title, whether the photographer likes it or not, and in my mind just denotes a lack of wit. So, yes, these photos happen to show a portion of a public square, a sculpture in a park, and a part of a library skylight. They are all in Portland, and I have used them in photo books about Portland.
But I will admit and insist that the subject of all three images are LINES. Even though that might not be their only concern, once you study them for more than a second, and either succeed or fail in figuring out the "subject", you will probably appreciate them because you see the same lines that I saw when I was there. If you do, then I have successfully communicated my "wow" and I am happy, especially if you take one home.
Did I go out on a mission to find lines? No. People usually say that I have a "great eye", which I happily concede even though I think they probably do too if they would only free their mind from the subject paradigm. As an architect I was trained to "see" like an artist, and then battered down by program, budgets, and clients until I often couldn't see my art at all beyond getting paid to do something I could love, if they only gave me the chance. That is why being an unalloyed artist, while even less helpful to my bank account, is usually much cleaner - the viewer either is moved , or they aren't.
TANNER SPRINGS B&W : FINAL VERSION
Just because an image is about lines, doesn't mean it can't be about anything else. This black and white version is even more about lines, and maybe texture, because I've eliminated the color - even the grass is now just calligraphy, and the pond is simply a mirror. The trouble for me is that the image was also mainly about color - that orange - even though you don't have to know that you are looking at a railroad rail sculpture. The orange is all important to me (I happen to like orange) because for once I was in the right place at the right time, the late afternoon, when the western sun bakes the rails in golden light to heighten the sculpture's intrinsic orangeness.
CENTRAL LIBRARY #2 (STAIR) : FINAL VERSION
I'll illustrate my search for line with several other images which vary in their abstract quality to show that seeing lines doesn't have to reduce a photo to a graphic exercise, though there is nothing wrong with that. This view up the stairs is just below the skylight dome in our Main Library, and the intrepid photographer has actually succeeded in getting three diagonal lines to "line up" with the corners, more or less. In color the image becomes more about the warm wood of the railing and the fake marble of the column.
LAN-SU BAMBOO : FINAL VERSION
This image from our Chinese Garden is not really about bamboo, although I do like the five different shades of the stalks. The isolation of the stalks against the stark white stucco wall was what I was after, which shows that the artist who designed the garden also effectively communicated his or her design strategies to me - sometimes you are seeing what someone wanted you to see. Actually this image mostly reminds me of the old-school five scratch lines I use to count up things before I bow to the computer gods.
SHADOW LINES : FINAL VERSION
Yes, it is about shadows, and it's not about the bridge, but this image, in my mind, is mostly about the lines. The hint is the way the photographer has not shown the vanishing point further down the bridge, and that I at least tried, more or less, to line up the main line with the left edge of the frame.
STAIRS AND STRIPES : FINAL VERSION
My title of this image hints at my motivation, in addition to providing a bad musical pun. This detail of three windows lining a stairway is really about the polychrome ( many colors) masonry which the architects wrapped this building in seeming defiance of its neighborhood in London, Whitehall. The architecture, and my image, is all about the lines. The photo loses something in black and white because what it gains in masonry texture it loses in color pop - I do like orange more than the average fellow.
SUNBURST : FINAL VERSION
This closeup of a dahlia is all about the wonderful lines that only nature seems to supply us if we learn to look for them. It also helps to use black and white to remove the color, which was so overwhelming that it was actually kind of painful to look at. It would be even more abstract if I cropped out the borders, but I like the contrast too much. It is a slippery slope when lines turn into patterns, but so be it.
DOODLE #1 : FINAL VERSION
I will end this essay with this last image, one of my personal favorites which I have shown before. Its title was provided by my muse, my wife, who declared her skepticism by labeling it "Doodle #1". I kept that title in an act of artistic defiance, and much to my surprise it has become one of my more popular images. It is all about lines, a little about color, and represents my appreciation of the art of the skylight at Portland's Center for the Performing Arts. In pursuit of my lines I deliberately "blew out" the Portland grey sky by overexposing more than two stops to get that white background.
I would encourage all of you to open your eyes to see things beyond, or in addition, to the "subject" of a photograph. I believe it will free up your artistic juices, especially if you don't think you "deserve" to be called an artist. Like I always say, you haven't begun to be a photographer until the person next to you, usually your spouse, asks you "what the hell you are photographing?" It then becomes your problem as an artist to communicate your enthusiasm, which sometimes is hard. But if we wanted instant and guaranteed emotional responses, we would all restrict our photography to cats, dogs and babies, and that's what Instagram is for.
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MAY 21, 2021
GO BY TRAIN : FINAL VERSION
This week I would like to try to convince dear reader that you are in fact an artist, despite all your efforts to dismiss any notion that you have some talent as a photographer and that someone, somewhere, might find an enjoyable few minutes confronting your art. Now, don't get me wrong - I am not encouraging you to quit your day job, or to even dream that you might actually make money, much less a living, marketing your photographs. That is a subject for another day, after your successful opera career, or your retirement from major league baseball. What I am encouraging you to believe is that your photographs deserve a better fate than the web, and that there is a way of showing off your talents that requires far less of an investment in time than actually making images, and far less money than you spent acquiring your camera equipment, even if you only use a phone.
Most professional photographers would encourage you to print your work, myself included. There is nothing like seeing a well printed image attractively displayed on your wall, and I try to convince most customers in my booth that the image they just showed me on their phone, with some editing, would look great in their house, despite my mission to put one of my images there instead. Working at cross-purposes, you say - well that's why I am a better artist than a businessman.
STUMPTOWN EVENINGS : FINAL VERSION
I am not advocating that you go out and spend a thousand dollars on a fancy photo printer, which is in fact a pretty silly purchase unless you are going to be printing enough that you will in fact have to sell or give away most of the prints because you won't be able to fit them in your house. But if you have several images that you are proud of, find a professional lab and "pay the man" as my wife would say. Your dining room wall will thank you.
AFTER THE RAIN :FINAL VERSION
What I want to recommend as a cheaper and more satisfying alternative for showing off your work is for you to put together your own self-published photo book. These three photos were included in my first book, MY PORTLAND, which I produced three years ago. If I exaggerate a lot, it took maybe one hundred hours to conceive, write, edit, and produce this 90 page volume. I assure you that your book, unless you really want to be an author, will take far less time to produce. More importantly, you will be just as proud as I was. If you go to your library or bookstore, you will find that most photography books, even the "famous" ones, contain very little writing beyond an introduction and some captions - after all they are books of photographs which are supposed to speak for themselves. In fact, most photographers are hard put to come up with a caption, much less writing that might expand on an image, so do not overthink your task. Assemble a couple of dozen images, put them in some kind of order, and use one of the layout themes provided by the publishing house, and lo and behold, a week later you will have a book in your hands so that you can discover the wonderful world of typos - remember, the less writing the fewer typos. All this will cost you less than $25, I assure you. After another round of editing, you can give away some copies to your friends - you are now a published author, and nobody has to know that their copy is one of the only 3 or 5 or 10 that exist in the world.
iNTO THE WOODS : FINAL VERSION
The important thing of course is to make sure you are having fun. No one is awaiting your tome, you have no deadline, and you can stop for that day any time you want to. In fact I recommend that you do everything in your power to actually trick yourself into making your book, no matter what your topic or theme or project that you start with. After enough assembly and energy, you will discover that you actually have more than enough for your book, and that the hard part, editing your work, is all that is left. It's useful if you find a few photo books that you admire to use as models for your work - steal like an artist - and use their strategies, layouts, and form as starting point
. LIVING ROOM STAIRS : FINAL VERSION
I found inspiration in the work of Freeman Patterson, whose has written several books that followed a set pattern unusual in photo books - an image. followed by a short paragraph or two that illuminated that image while hopefully contributing to a central argument. I could do that! You already know that I am at no loss for words, and after kidding myself that I was just writing long captions, what's the big deal, well there was over a hundred pages at two or three photos a session, tops. I had written a book without ever actually having to entertain the frightening thought of "writing a book."
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : FINAL VERSION
A couple of years later, full of the knowledge that if anything , being an author was even less lucrative than being an artist, the Pandemic gave me an excuse to create my second book. The last three images come from that volume. In assembling the first book I had quickly realized that one way of cutting stuff out was to eliminate all but a few of my black and white photos of Portland, so in many ways my second volume, PORTLAND : NOIR ET BLANC, literally wrote itself. I again concentrated on telling anecdotes about Portland, with some additional thoughts about why I thought monochrome was a better strategy for these selected images. I allowed myself a little more freedom in my layout, and found something to do for a couple of hours a day for six weeks in the first half of Covid.
BEN'S WINDOW : FINAL VERSION
I want to encourage you to come up with any excuse you want for your photo book - you do not need any grand project or theme that will shake up the world - it could just be a collection from one trip, or one grandchild, or just the best from last year, or even just your "Greatest Hits" - who cares? Really!? They could all be flowers, or trees, or just blue - and who is to say that your artistic vision is wrong? It's your book, after all, and if they don't like it, let's see them write one!
VENEZIA SUNSET : FINAL VERSION
I have published my books using the BLURB platform, which I would recommend for their printing standards. There are a number of other print-on-demand companies which have allowed this kind of small, essentially micro publishing, to exist. Of course you are paying more than you would at a vanity publisher, but you only print a very few at a time, eliminating the need to invest thousands of dollars for at least hundreds of books that would sit in your study. Remember, it is a fool's errand to think that you will really sell your book - If you sell 2,000 copies of a photo book, you will be on the photo book best seller list most years. When I put out my first book, I enlisted the aid of a bored cashier at Powell's to tell me how well a recently published photo book of Portland, a photographer's twentieth published book, was doing. I had already used it to decide how much to price my book, which I thought was far superior, thank you very much. When I discovered that pre-pandemic, his book had sold only sixty copies at Downtown Powell's, I realized that once again I had failed to discover the magic bullet to fame and fortune. Think about it - a famous photographer puts out a photo book of Portland photographs, and in six months can only sell sixty copies at a world famous store that attracts every visitor to Portland! Add to this the insider's knowledge that if I actually convinced Powell's to put my book on the shelves, I would actually lose a dollar for each one I sold, and you can see why you are not doing this to make money, just to provide incontrovertible evidence that your photographic efforts have some worth.
YOU ARE HERE : FINAL VERSION
On dealing with BLURB, I have a few suggestions. The printing is great, you can use their layouts with only a modicum of frustration, and they offer a variety of sizes and formats. Your book starts with 20 pages, and the pricing depends on the size, paper, covers, etc. The books are all too expensive, especially at just a few copies, so I recommend using their "magazine" format, which is 8 1/2 x 11 inches, and which they created because they knew their books were too expensive. Go for the more expensive paper, because the standard paper is actually exactly the same as the New Yorker's, and you will realize that you can see through to the next page. The magazine with the deluxe paper is virtually the same as the soft-covered 8 x 10 inch book, at a lower price. The other strategy is to never, never by a BLURB book without waiting for the sale, which will happen at least once a month after you visit the website. In my continuing struggle to understand capitalism, I do not understand why people won't wait a few weeks to get 25-40% of on their book or magazine order, or why a company would continually discount their full price, but you've been informed. You also get discounts for larger orders, but never as much as the sale unless you order more than 100 copies. Since you do get 40% off on books, and only 25% off on magazines, there probably is some math that could encourage you to order a hard-cover for Mom.
The latest book I've just published, A IS FOR ARCHITECTURE, breaks the mold of my first two books.These are a few of the photos included in this book. I decided to write an ABC book for my grandson Isaac, who is 3 1/2 and loves his letters. After some research into the world of ABC books at Powell's (who knew?) I set out to use a collection of some of my architectural images from around the world to illustrate architectural terms. Again, the biggest problem I had was editing, and what started out as a projected 52 page book (2 pages a letter) blossomed into more than 100 pages before my wife got a hold of it and cut it down to 76 pages. I found that I was labeled a war criminal for violating the "rule" that the term must start with that page's letter, and even though I loosened my usually anal layout style, my biggest problem was realizing that the same image could go with several different letters, depending on which term I put to the image.
FISH PARKING : FINAL VERSION
I kept myself interested by adapting the Sesame Street principal that I would try to provide some commentary for parents beside the simple captions illustrating that i knew which words started with which letter. I also was inspired by Ambrose Pierce's THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY to inject some thoughts for parents with footnotes which could be ignored by children or censored by adult readers. Thus the long captions of my previous books were replaced by snarky footnotes, and the book again wrote itself.
So now I am beginning to produce another book of photographs, this time of Oregon subjects, mostly produced on the annual Easter Break road trips that I would take with my son Benjamin. I will have to buy a scanner, since most of these images are pre-digital, but I am looking forward to tricking my self into writing another book. As usual, my lack of technological competence in converting the Blurb files into something I can use in this blog has not allowed me to show portions of these books here today, but I assure you they exist. They are available for purchase on the Blurb site in their bookstore under my name, Richard Neal Lishner. Or you can write me at [email protected] and I would be glad to sell you a copy of one of my books, all available at $30.00 + shipping, which is usually 3 dollars or so. And remember, you can do this too, no doubt about it - it's not my photo album, it's my BOOK! I AM AN ARTIST!
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MAY 14, 2021
ISAAC -WHO KNOWS WHAT HE'S UP TO?
I've been away for two weeks visiting my son and his family for the first time since Covid. My thoughts of composing the blog while on cross-country flights were quickly dashed by the reality of delayed, chock-filled flights, so I missed my self-assignment for the first time this year. What is interesting is that after missing two postings, and not promoting on Instagram for two weeks, the numbers of blog readers are up instead of down, so as usual I am just mystified. I am astonished that on average these posts are getting more than 40 readers every week, and am very grateful, despite the fact that I have no idea who my readers are. I think that my limited technological skill allows for comments, but so far absolutely no one has revealed what they like or don't like about my essays. At the risk of trolling, I would love to know what you guys think, and what you would like me to concentrate on. If I haven't set the blog comment settings up correctly, you can send me an e-mail at richarchitect@gmail .com. Again, thanks.
This week I would like to explore the subject of vacation photos, or travel photography in general. It is more than a two-edged sword, for our powers of observation are heightened by the exotic, while we stand little real chance of getting something beyond the cliche because we really don't know anything about the new place. That is why I've always thought that the best images are made by locals, not withstanding the visual excitement of Paris, London, or New York over Wilmington, North Carolina, where I have spent the last two weeks. Don't get me wrong - Wilmington seems like a very interesting, real place, which is a giant step up from the first two stops on my son's early teaching career, Minot, North Dakota, and Murray, Kentucky. Wilmington is a coastal port with a small historic downtown, a variety of nice neighborhoods, restaurants, museums, parks and easy access to a variety of beach towns which are close enough to be suburbs. Yet after two weeks I would not pretend to know anything about it beyond the route to the nearest coffee shop from our rental house.
Of course seeing the little guy featured at the top of this essay was the prime motivation of the trip, and we had a great time seeing him every day in person instead of on the computer. Isaac is 3 1/2, and while he is subjectively gorgeous and a genius, you've got to admit he is objectively damn cute. My readers know that most of my photography is of subjects that don' move and can't talk back, so the first thing I would say about vacation photography is that you might consider it an opportunity to try something different. This goes along with the theory that most of your efforts will probably backfire anyway, so what's the harm? My portrait skills are rudimentary at best, so combined with my desire to not spend my vacation behind the camera, I didn't take very many successful shots of my grandson. He moves too fast, and is so close to the ground that I usually feel like an NBA center trying to find a guard. Grandpa's knees work against meandering down to his level, but I tried. And since this "professional" photographer barely knows how to operate his on-camera flash, the odds were against me.
ON THE MOVE
PREPARING TO SIMULATE LEBRON'S PREGAME TALCUM POWDER ROUTINE
These images were among my most successful, and I think you can see that striving for technical perfection, or even competence, can be the enemy of capturing the joys of a grandchild. The unfocused image with blurred movement probably is the best of the bunch. I found I was better at showing Isaac's interactions with others.
SWIMMING WITH MOM
AT THE OCEAN WITH DAD
WAITING FOR GIGGLES - MATURITY CONTEST WITH GRANDMA
My other thought on vacation photos are to just go with what you are comfortable with, on the theory that our ways of seeing are so ingrained that a new venue really doesn't make much of a difference. Our individual perceptions of a new place will probably reflect our predilections, so just go with the flow and follow your photographic bliss independent of the place you are visiting, since you probably don't understand it anyway.
NEWCOMER TO THE LAND OF MASONRY
TIED UP ON THE WATERFRONT
ON THE SHORES OF THE CAPE FEAR RIVER
These images reflect my taste, and while they don't have much to do with Wilmington, that doesn't mean I can't practice away from my usual Portland haunts. When you go visiting, it doesn't mean you need to abandon comfortable strategies.
WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?
While waiting for my son at his academic office, I could appreciate a detail of the new theater building. I then took a more abstract view. This overhang is on the other side of the building, and is an example of what you can glean from a completely unusable grab shot. This high-key image was completely blown out in camera do to operator incompetence. The image is now supposedly one stop underexposed, and to this artist is completely intriguing. By the way, two more stops of underexposure reveals a very ordinary architectural move. I would also add that nothing in the above image is blown out - it's just a mysterious white object taken against a bright sky.
RAIN CATCHER
This is an image of a portion of a modern downspout on campus, completely divorced from reality, much less Wilmington.
Things can get even more interesting when you go to tourist spots, because you are placing yourself in front of interesting things. You can document, but you can also try some interpretation, because again, you really don't get what you are looking at. About two hours from Wilmington my son found the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, the result of a retired farmer's fascination with windmills, a very understanding wife, and a lot of "folk art" talent combined with a lifetime of mechanical ingenuity. Think of it as a rural Watts Tower - and the only reason to ever visit Wilson, North Carolina, which in fact has done a very nice job of celebrating a local talent. We spent an hour there, and couldn't even begin to convey this collection of windmills - and even deciding how to capture the fact that that a big part of their charm is that they are constantly moving!
PORTIONS OF THREE WHIRLEIGIGS
We also traveled to three other spots on our road trip where I took my usual abstract studies of two museums.
UNDERSIDE OF A WWII PARACHUTE AT THE AIRBORNE MUSEUM
DOG TAG SCULPTURE AT NORTH CAROLINA VETERANS MEMORIAL
I will end this essay with two landscapes, one at an Arboretum and one panorama at a Revolutionary war battlefield. When you are faced with the unusual, at least give it a try - you might get something memorable, even though natives might overlook it.
PANORAMIC VIEW OF THE CREEK AT MOORES CREEK NATIONAL BATTLE FIELD PARK
I hope that I have conveyed some of the ways you can practice travel photography. Enjoy our renewed freedom to travel, and the various ways you can enjoy making images away from home.
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APRIL 23, 2021
BICYCLE SHADOWS - FINAL VERSION
The spirit of today's essay will be play. Sometimes it is hard to describe the goals a photographer has in going out with their camera, especially when they are not in some far-flung exotic location. What are you looking for in a place where you have already spent a good deal of time, that threatens to yield no new images beyond what you have already taken? Yes, I can harp on the "process", on the need to get those 10,000 exposures under your belt to get enough practice to ensure your bona fides as a photographer, but that kind of motivation strikes me as about as much fun as walking laps on the track. I feel that the least a photographic outing should provide is some fun. And I don't just mean a good walk, although there is nothing wrong with that. But remember that as "golf is a good walk spoiled", it is a good idea to juice up your expectations when you head out with your camera by coming up with some artificial thing you might be looking for that day. Of course if an award-winning shot crosses your path you will take it, but is there is something, like a certain lens, or just taking verticals, or shooting black and white with intention, that can motivate you to take a walk in the neighborhood?
One of the ways I've found to play over the years is to go out and look for shadows as a subject in and of themselves. I find them interesting, if occasionally confusing, and of course they are almost always around. Shadows are the yang to light, which is of course the yin photographers are supposed to be painting with. What's also nice about shadows is that they are frequently best when the light "is bad"; photographers who can't stomach sunrise or want dinner instead of sunset can find great shadows at more civilized times of day. This can be very useful if your spouse, like most humans, seems to prefer hiking on a beautiful sunny day, when a "proper landscape photographer" would prefer to be editing their sunrise shots or grabbing a siesta.
The shadow shot can prove that there is no such thing as bad light, and is a boon to the graphic images that I prefer. The shadow is a cousin of the silhouette, in that no detail is expected in a shadow, just a well-defined shape, and a certain amount of soft focus is almost expected. And since the subject of the photo is the shadow, black and white is frequently just as good if not better than color, since shadows, if they have any color at all, are at best just a darker shade of the general environment.
The first photo above is a great example of play. I'm enjoying my croissant on Division Street, way after the light has gone bad, because my idea of breakfast renders brunch quite useless as a slacker construct. I've noticed the shadow of a bicycle locked to a generic publicly mandated bike rack that us urban design types have labeled a "staple". Now I didn't go out to shoot shadows, but the only reason to take this shot is the shadow, and the only reason this take won over the other half-dozen I shot off was the coherence of the shadow. When I looked at the photo later I knew that Black and White was a given.
BICYCLE SHADOWS - OUT OF CAMERA
Now I'm not saying that it might not have been fun to meet the cyclist of this fanciful rig, reality is certainly appalling if you're interested in shadows. Black and white has eliminated all of the distractions of the "color scheme", as well as the blue of the staple and the yellow curb. Monoochrome has allowed me to deepen the shadow, lighten the pavement, and has even seemed to clean up the street and sidewalk. The texture of the wicker basket really comes out, and the shadow play includes a bit of confusion over the gender of the bicycle, since the staple seems to imply a boy's bike. Black and white has solidified the idea that the shadow is the real subject.
M*A*S*H SIGN - COLOR VERSION
Sometimes color photos can be good shadow shots, especially if they really are a monochrome photo, just not black and white. Here is the shadow of what I call the MASH sign in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square, which highlights the distances and directions of places like sister cities, other notable public square around the world, and throws in a few bad dad jokes to spice things up. By the way, if you want to age yourself, one of the great ways is to call this the Mash sign, because the pretty young thing will have no idea of what you are talking about. In my usual search for abstraction bordering on obscurity, I've now take a photo of a sign without taking the sign itself - only those who have noticed the sign will be in the know. I happen to be an orange fan, but this is a monochromatic image.
M*A*S*H SIGN - BLACK AND WHITE
Now you see what I mean. Black and white does allow me to deepen the shadow, and to lighten the bricks, thus increasing the contrast within Portland's realistic grey range. And you don't have to enjoy orange.
CHELSEA CATHEDRAL : FINAL SQUARE VERSION
Yes, it's a beautiful window, and the texture on the sandstone is certainly benefiting from that great sidelight, but the real subject of this image is the shadow of the flying buttress, whose decoration is only revealed in the shadow. The ace of spades has been played, much to the dismay of your opponent, who just throws up his hands in defeat. And although shadows really don't have color, notice how they can change the white balance - the shadow has brought out the blues in the window glass that are missing in the warmer sun.
BALLPARK SHADOWS : FINAL B&W VERSION
We are at Seattle's ballpark, and we can see why hitters hate day games. In a few minutes that shadow will cross home, and it will be very hard to pick up the pitch when the hitter is in shadow and the pitcher is in the blazing sun. I like the shadow's opposition to the strong curve of the diamond. Black and white allows me to realistically increase the contrast, while eliminating any and all distracting colors in the crowd.
GRID OF SHADOWS : FINAL VERSION
I'm out for a hike with my wife, the light is "bad", but that doesn't mean I can't find shadows on the bridge while she looks at the river like a normal person. By cropping down to remove all context, it becomes all about about the shadows, with some further discussion about their formation. Again the monochrome just exchanges black and white for different wood tones, but does get rid of some potentially distracting wood grain.
WASHINGTON METRO : FINAL VERSION
Shadows require light - that doesn't have to mean natural light. As an urban landscape photographer, it can help to use shadows where you find them, even underground. This detail of the typical concrete coffers of the Metro takes advantage of the lighting scheme , where the ambient light comes from below, and the shadows are reversed from what we normally are used to - kind of like the Halloween lighting of a scary portrait lit by an upturned flashlight.
LIVING ROOM STAIRS : FINAL VERSION
You can even find shadows at night, as long as their is a light source. This shot of the amphitheater at Pioneer Courthouse Square relies on the deep black shadows to define the stairs lit by the lighting at the square's periphery, beyond the curve. While shadows in nature are frequently just confusing, like in the forest, in urban environments shadows can actually clarify and simplify. It's analogous to reflections in the landscape, which are toned down by the use of polarizing filters (think sunglasses for your camera). Urban landscape photographers delight in the reflections that these polarizing filters are supposed to eliminate! Where is the thin line between reflections and shadows? I think it has something to do with the color of the reflection - black turns it into a shadow, in my opinion, but it can be hazy.
RUINED PIER : FINAL VERSION
This is a silhouette, and it's reflection in Puget Sound, but I think its charm is its charm is the shadowy nature present here. Black backlit logs reflect as black shadows, and the imperfect reflections of the wavy water cause some confusion over where the waterline actually is - only the shadow knows. Please forgive me.
COASTAL SHADOWS : FINAL VERSION
This shadow portrait of my backlit wife reflected in the wet sand also plays on the boundary of shadow versus reflection.
BERT AND ERNIE : FINAL VERSION
This is more silhouette than anything else, but what makes the photo for me is the grid of shadows, beyond the herons on the Willamette, which for the life of me I couldn't understand at the time or later. Yes they are shadows of waves, but why do they cross? It's almost as if God is having fun like the landscape crew mowing the ballpark outfield grass.
BRITISH MUSEUM CHARM : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes shadows can help your composition even if they are not the main subject. Here at the British Museum they help in three ways. The side lighting emphasizes the fluting of the columns. The soffit shadow highlights the Ionic column capital in the sunlight. Finally the column's shadow gives me a row of three columns instead of two; our mind's usually like three of a kind much better than a pair, like a poker player. Here the shadow stands in for the third column.
OLD GROWTH MEMORIES : FINAL VERSION
And finally we can play with shadows so much that we can confuse ourselves as much as our viewers. I will try to explain what's happening here, but don't worry if it doesn't make much sense, since it is pretty damn confusing. We are inside the Cathedral, which is what I call our Downtown Apple store. Thousands of dollars are literally being pushed into slots in the tabletops as adherents to our digital religion get their latest fix. I know it's a cult, but the stuff is beautiful, and more importantly, it actually works. As I contemplate the buzz, I notice this apparition in the huge end window wall of the store. It seems that I am looking at a reflection of a large tree superimposed on the window, shadowing the office tower across the street. I cannot see the tree out of the window, and when I go outside the shadow disappears. It's almost like I'm seeing the reflection of a shadow that isn't there. I now I'm beginning to blubber, but in the end I decided that I was seeing the memory of the old growth forest that the building replaced a mere 150 years ago. I'll stick with that explanation, Go have some fun with shadows.
]]>APRIL 16, 2021
SILVER FALLS : FINAL VERSION
Welcome to Waterfall Wednesday! If you are at all acquainted with Instagram, you'll recognize that sobriquey from your feed, for every Wednesday brings forth another gusher (downfall?) of waterfall shots from around the world. Human beings can't seem to get enough of falling water, which seems to be the goal of most every hike in a lot of parks and natural areas of all kinds. This is a total victory for aesthetics, as waterfalls don't seem to serve any useful purpose other than to gaze at with an awe that goes beyond the simple appreciation of a cliff face. Since I live in Oregon, you can't even swim in the pond beneath the waterfall without a wet suit most of the time, so tropical visions of skinny-dipping at the end of a hike are even more of a fantasy than in most places. In fact, the coldest water I have ever felt in my life was not off the Maine coast, but in the pool at Proxy Falls in Central Oregon. This waterfall, off Highway 22 on a side road available only in the summer, emerges as glacial run-off on a cliff face from an unknown source, and then disappears just as mysteriously from the pool below the falls. I think the water temperature has been measured at 32 degrees; it doesn't freeze only because it's always moving.
The other thing about living in Oregon is that our waterfalls are so ubiquitous and beautiful that they mostly ruin other waterfalls around the world for us, even while we take ours for granted. Today I'd like to discuss this most common type of woodland photograph, with an eye for showing you how you can move beyond just documentation, even when it's sometimes hard to even get the shot at all. The first photo above is of one of the waterfalls at Silver Falls State Park on the edge of the Cascades between Portland and Salem. I don' remember which one of the falls this is, but consider that there are ten falls on one trail. If you look closely half way down you will see that the trail even goes behind this particular waterfall.
SILVER FALLS : ORIGINAL
Here you can see several of the problems with waterfall shots. These include framing, exposure, and aspect ratio. Framing a waterfall shot is frequently hard, because it is a waterfall after all, which implies height. Thus either you use a wide angle lens, which tends to make your subject too small in that wide view, or you have to make a decision on which part of an impressive waterfall to exclude. I've found that the most difficult of images are the ones that only cover a portion of the waterfall, especially when you just miss getting the whole thing in the frame. Now in this example I did just manage to get the whole thing in, but I would love to have a little more space, especially at the top. The larger problem seems to be that good quarter of the right side of the image doesn't seem to add much, and the bright pool at the lower right draws your eye away from the subject. This is why I prefer the final cropped version I showed at the beginning, taken a few feet to the right to get rid of the green slope on the left and the bright pool on the right; I still know that I've got the bottom even though I've lost most of the splash. You might also notice I've cloned out those pesky hikers behind the falls, but that's me just being anal. I have also lowered the exposure a bit, which brings up the other problem of waterfall shots - how to deal with the tremendous differences between the usually dark forest and the much brighter waterfall. Straight-up shots usually lose a lot of detail in the fall itself, as it is very easy to clip the highlights in the effort to lighten up the surrounding shadows. Post-processing, which most people don't attempt, is usually the only way to deal with this, especially if you are so silly (!) as to hike on a nice sunny day.
GORGE WATERFALL : FINAL VERSION
The other source for Oregon waterfall shots is of course the Columbia River Gorge, so close to Portland that it is probably the only excuse to live in our Eastern suburb Gresham, which cuts the trip to almost nothing. This is a partial shot of what I think was Latourelle Falls, one of the first of probably half a dozen falls on the original tourist highway to the biggest waterfall, Multnomah Falls. I have come to some degree of certainty of its identity by matching my photo to one of a collection of literally every waterfall in the Gorge that I found on the Google. In any case I feel that it conveys the power of the falls even without including the entire affair. Oh, by the way, it's hard to get a vertical waterfall on a square photo coaster without rendering the waterfall so small as to hardly make it worthwhile.
GORGE WATERFALL : ORIGINAL
Here I think you can see that the original framing out of camera is not convincing, since I have not managed to include much more of the waterfall at all.
GORGE WATERFALL : BLACK & WHITE
Here is the monochrome version; of course its a matter of taste. I like it better because the parameters of monochrome processing allow me to show more detail in the water at the loss of lichen definition on the rocks. But what do you do if you want the whole waterfall?
WATERFALL PANORAMA #1 : FINAL VERSION
The answer is to try to create a panorama. Remember, no one said that panoramas has to be horizontal! Treat waterfalls like natural skyscrapers, and take a collection of shots, overlapping about a third to include all of the waterfall from top to bottom. Just reverse the usual rules for stitching panoramas - take a series of horizontal shots to include enough of the the surroundings lost to the vertical crop. Remember to scan the scene before, deciding on one focus point and one exposure before setting those values to manual so the software can create the pano without obvious seams. And appreciate the mystery of not knowing how well you've done until the computer has delivered its magic - while realizing that the water is moving, which only increases the complications of stitching multiple images together. The image above is at a 4:1 ratio, which is about the limit before you make your viewers dizzy; 3:1 or 2:1 is more like it, but it is a waterfall, so you have to live with its dimensions.
WATERFALL PANORAMA #2 : ORIGINAL
Here we have a more comfortable 3:1 ratio, and I actually like the dark exposure, which creates a bit of mystery and controls the bright sky. But the white balance is all wrong, because we get used to the cool light in the woods. It is frequently necessary to play with the light balance even if you have gotten comfortable with the scene - water is just not that blue.
WATERFALL PANORAMA #2 : FINAL VERSION
Not as dramatic, but certainly that water is a lot more convincing. In opening up the shadows I've revealed a lot more rock detail.
WATERFALL PANORAMA #3 : MONOCHROME
Of course another down-and-dirty cure for white balance problems is to convert to black and white. I've moved slightly further away to include more top and bottom. Black and white allows for more realistic exposure control for the bright sky and foreground tree, which was in sunlight. The white waterfall is still the star, and unless you're a bright green lichen fan, the light grey patch on the rocks will probably do.
WATERFALL AND ROCK : FINAL VERSION
Sometimes you can concentrate on the foreground if you find it interesting enough to forego the top of the waterfall. I was intrigued by the idea that that rock once fell down the waterfall. Again the "correct" white balance was a lot warmer, but I made it cooler because this looked more realistic to me. It's your photograph!
ANOTHER ROCKFALL
This scene was sunnier and warmer as I included more rocks; the patch of green shows that scene is correctly color graded.
WATERFALL MIST : FINAL B & W VERSION
This is one of my favorites, since I think you can get wet by just viewing the image. Those rocks under the waterfall have created another series of cascades on their own, and the overall flow seems almost misty instead of plummeting water. By the way, the scene was so dark that monochrome only substituted very dark shades of grey for near-black shades of green. This image highlights another decision for a lot of waterfall shots - the shutter speed will strongly affect the appearance of the water, ranging from stopping the motion to creating a silky otherworldly effect of a very long exposure. I've found that as usual the Goldilocks compromise of somewhere in between makes for the most realistic rendering of moving water.
ISLAND IN THE STREAM : FINAL VERSION
Here is an illustration varying water speeds in one image, which can be very effective. The water is certainly moving at a rapid rate, but the foreground rapid has a lot more detail than the background swirls, and the crisp vegetation on what looks like a totally submerged island heightens the feeling of water movement. And yes these are mere rapids, reminiscent of what English photographers label waterfalls.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : ORIGINAL
Finally, let's look at this artist's interpretation of another artist's vision of a waterfall. This is a pretty standard overall view of Ira's Fountain in Downtown Portland. Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conceived of this Portland one-block park as a Gorge Waterfall in the city, with tons of water collecting in pools and plummeting below to create an oasis of humidity and sound that would provide a respite from urbanity and highlight intermission drinks for the opera fans across the street. He succeeded in creating a monument while scaring every parent in Portland whose children loved to cavort in the pools, appearing to risk certain death on hot days. Halprin subsequently had to create a nearby "safer" fountain which proved a lot more capable of causing skinned knees etc. In fact the upper pools are pretty deep, and you almost have to try fall down these cliffs. The waterfall successfully negotiated the more than one-story grade differential between opposite ends of the park. The Fountain was later named, in the usual informal Portland fashion, "Ira's Fountain" after Ira Kellar, its most important cheerleader during its long design gestation.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : VERTICAL
We're getting closer to my interpretation of this park. As usual, I'm concentrating on what is important to me while conceding that the ordinary viewer might not get my abstract interpretation.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : ORIGINAL SQUARE CROP
MONOCHROMATIC "BASALT" VERSION
Coaster mongers require square images, so we are further on the way towards abstraction. the only remaining problem is that brown concrete, forced on Halprin due to municipal budgets. If you want to see the original Basalt conception, go to Washington, D.C.'s FDR Memorial, which is really four Ira's Fountains, one for each presidential term. Only Portlanders and landscape architects know the long story of a Portland Park arising from the design ruins of a national monument, which then was finally built decades after Ira's Fountain was built. Federal budgets allowed for the original Basalt to replace the "original" concrete.
IRA'S FOUNTAIN : FINAL VERSION
In converting to monochrome, I replaced the ugly brown concrete with cool grey stone concrete; black and white completes the circle to total abstraction. My Portland customers can delight in their "in-the-know" knowledge this is a favorite park, not a waterfall, while the tourists can posthumously validate Halprin's original idea by asking me which Gorge Waterfall is depicted in my detailed view. The "idea" of a waterfall delights humans where ever they happen to find it, even in their misconceptions.
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APRIL 9, 2021
STUMPTOWN : FINAL VERSION
Today I would like to explore six images of basically the same scene, taken nine months apart over a couple of hours. Three of the images were taken at different parts of the day, while the other three are the result of post-processing. What is interesting to me is that they are all very different, even though they are the same, and that they show how patience on the photographer's part, and the investigation of various interpretations, can yield such different results.
On April 28, 2014, I finally took the time to head up to Pittock Mansion in Portland's West Hills to see what I could get out of a classic view of Portland. Pittock Mansion is preserved as the ultimate McMansion of its day, built on an estate at the top of the West Hills overlooking Downtown. The editor of the Oregonian, Mr. Pittock, conceived of the place as the symbol of his family's domination of the city; he managed to live only a short time after it was finished. You can tour the home, which is quite large but not overwhelming; the only thing I remember of the interior is the quite elaborate, ornate, and curiously clinical Master Bath. Lots of tile, some advanced bathroom contraptions, and all of the built-in cabinets were lifted off the floor to allow the servants to sweep and clean under them, which is echoed in the IKEA cabinets in my own remodeled bathroom.
But the interior of the mansion is not the point at all, for its site is the reason it exists. What's nice about the Portland Park that now encompasses the site is that the bluff overlooking Downtown does not even require an admission fee. You drive up Burnside, past 23rd, past the entrance to Washington Park , and just when you've begun to feel that the nice photographer at Saturday Market has totally led you astray you notice a very small sign on the right leading up a small hilly street past some pretty nice houses to a parking lot for the Mansion. It's open 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, with some very strict warnings not to come too early and park on the street, or to stay too late since once the gates close you'll be leaving your car and walking a long way home.
STUMPTOWN BLACK AND WHITE : FINAL VERSION
This classic view of Portland tells you a lot about the history and the sociology of our town. While you can't quite see the river, you can certainly notice the abrupt change in character between the two different banks of the Willamette, with the Downtown still defined by the river and the West Hills you are standing on. Height is a shorthand for social status - once the city grew past its first twenty blocks or so, and roads extended up into the hills, you wanted to enjoy the views down into the city so that you literally could keep an eye on your factory, your office building and your workers huddled on the flats below. The mountain was also a nice touch, on the days that it revealed itself. Portland became one of the rare cities in the world that really revealed itself from above - San Francisco and Hong Kong are similar - rather than from the Waterfront. In the days before aviation, much less drones, or very tall buildings, our natural topography allowed us to see our city as a jewel in the Wilderness.
My interpretation of this view was of course dependent on the square crop that fit my coasters. Unusual in a place where most try to show the entire city below, but there you go. The entire view is about four times as wide. I tried to summarize by including two of our icons, Big Pink on the left, isolated as in real life from most of our other skyscrapers out of the frame to to the right. And looming over all is Mt. Hood, seemingly just across the river and taking up at least a third of the horizon. Its size in my frame is due to the compression effects of my telephoto lens, which shrinks the actual sixty miles to the mountain. The square format worked for me because I like Big Pink, hate most of our other towers, and could get the mountain in the same frame. I hope you would agree that if the mountain isn't out, you might as well stay home; and that it pays to go before Summer, when global warming reduces that snowy crown to dull gray.
Color versus black and white is a matter of taste. Obviously it's nice to have Big Pink pink, and to celebrate a rare blue sky, but black and white adds a sense of timelessness to the image, although most Portlanders will be able to tell the date by which buildings are ther and which are missing. The important thing to me is that black and white seems to allow for a closer inspection of each building without the cacaphony of colors confusing the issue. The snowy white mountain still stands out form the grey sky.
STUMPTOWN ALPENGLOW : FINAL VERSION
Six months later I returned to the scene of the crime to see if I could get something new. The only thing that had changed was that finally the Second Depression (excuse me, the Great Recession) was over, and that our new skyscraper was finally emerging on the far right. This site had languished as a four-story hole in the ground for five or so years, a local symbol of economic catastrophy that mirrored holes in big cities around the world. I seem to remember Chicago leading the pack with an eight-story hole so overwhelming that it prompted a design competition to use it for something while we all awaited recovery. In any case Big Pink still takes up the left, and the mountain has again made the trip up Burnside worthwhile. February was even better than April, for it fit into my schedule as a "Gentleman Photographer." I leave sunrise shots to my younger colleagues, and if you want to get sunset shots when it isn't cold you have park on the street and hop the fence, since the bluff is closed before Summer sunset. And don't get me started about snow scenes, since I will not risk my life or my car or put on chains to get up Burnside. It was interesting to experience the bell curve on the bluff that day. I arrived to the bluff at about 4:30 to find it pleasingly empty so as to allow me to set up my tripod at nearly the same spot as in April. The scene and the light were nearly the same, so I took a few shots in the daylight. I don't think I even bothered to process them because they were so similar to April. But as the minutes passed, the bluff filled up, with about two dozen others there to catch sunset. Now since we are facing East, this is not your classic sunset but it's Western counterpart, alpenglow. The setting sun lights up the Eastern sky into varying shades of pink, depending on the cloud cover and elevation - higher works better, hence the alpine derivation. And any real mountains in the scene will be lit up beautifully as well, since they are still catching the sunlight which is rapidly disappearing in the valleys below.
Sunset came, and despite my protests to the tourists that the real fun was just getting started, they all left for warmth and dinner and I was again alone I knew that "blue hour" was soon to commence, so I put on my gloves and waited for the usual best shot of the day. "Blue hour" is beloved by landscape photographers because of the special light of dusk which highlights sky colors in camera long after our eyes say its dark. Now of course you need a tripod, because it actually is pretty dark, and you can't handhold a camera for a several second exposure. Urban photographers like me are even more enamored of "blue hour" since that's when the lights of the city come on. The skyline looks its best lit up before the sky goes pitch black, and the contrast becomes very problematic.
STUMPTOWN EVENINGS : FINAL VERSION
This is "blue hour"; the lights have come on, you see rush hour snaking down Burnside, Mt. Tabor Park on the East side has become the first dark hill on the way to Mt. Hood. And the mountain looks glorious, because the sun is still lighting it up against a dark blue sky. My batteries soon ran out, but the cold was telling me it was time to go home. This is the most popular version of the image with my customers.
STUMPTOWN "NAKED CITY"
I couldn't resist converting this view into a black and white version, despite the beautiful colors of the original. Black and White seems to heighten the dramatic contrast between the city and its natural surroundings. The Mountain glows in the distance, and the pitch black foreground contrasts with the dark grey of the sky. The mood is deeply "Noir", and I feel there is more danger than glamour present in the city below. I like this one the best.
A few years later I created a series of images that I called "Portland Icons", in which I imagined iconic Portland scenes against a gold leaf background. My experiments with real gold leaf are still unsuccessful and ongoing, but I have developed several digital versions.
STUMPTOWN ICON ; FINAL VERSION
I've used the graphic quality of this image to allow me to tone it gold without losing all sense of reality. The daylight black and white is placed as a layer above a gold layer, and the composite replaces all the greys with variations of gold.
That's about it, but I wanted to say something about "Stumptown" which was probably our city's first nickname, coined by derisive visitors soon after Pettygrove and Lovejoy flipped coin and settled on "Portland." You see that the city that they had platted out in the wilderness was in reality an old-growth forest, with Douglas Firs so large that you could cut them down, but not easily remove the stumps. One of the first laws enacted required that the stumps left on your homestead had to be painted white so that you and all your fellow drunks would not hurt yourself stumbling around after dark. That left a sardonic journalist to nickname the resulting young city by the river "Stumptown." If they could only see it now.
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APRIL 2, 2021
DOODLE #1 : FINAL VERSION
Today I'd like to discuss the loaded topic of art criticism, and its relationship with photography. Most people do not care that much about art criticism, but then they are neither critics nor artists. They appreciate art, visit museums, sometimes hang posters on their walls of art they enjoy, but do not engage in debates about what is art, or how it can be exhibited, or commented on by other artists. As an artist who likes to think he creates art of some value, and hopes others will appreciate my work, maybe even purchase it, I am cognizant of the problem of people using other people's artistic creations without attributing the original artist. While I do recognize the various levels of "commentary" on art by other artists, I do not think that this is all part of a slippery slope. After all, I am a photographer whose principal subject has always been my appreciation of the work of other architects, (who I would claim are artists) it would be hard for me to say that my photographs of their work should not be "allowed", or that I am "using" them in the pursuit of monetary gain that clearly does not exist when you peruse my Schedule C. To various degrees in the examples that I will show here, I firmly believe that my photographs show my appreciation of this artistic work, and my interpretation of that work - which makes them my art, even if it is based on theirs. To the degree that my art diverges from documentary work, its value becomes based on my viewers appreciation of what I have to say about the art, rather than the original work of art.
The first photo is my interpretation of a piece of glass art that is a feature of the lobby of the Portland Center for Performing Arts, part of our attempt at a more modest Lincoln Center. This skylight over the lobby is embellished by both its pattern of structural framework, and the colorful pieces of mostly blue glass bars seemingly casually strewn over said framework. I think it is a beautiful piece, and a wonderful example of "1% for art" which funds art in public buildings. The artist, James Carpenter, is one of the most famous glass artists in the world, which means that he is not really that famous, since this kind of work, like large sculpture, usually requires public funding - you can't pick one up for your home. It sometimes causes conflicts with those other artists, the building's architects, who might not like the art chosen to embellish their work or at least might be jealous of its power in their space. Once I was volunteering in this building and encountered the architectural detail of the skylight. I just couldn't stop laughing when I realized that that pattern of glass was supposedly specified in the drawing. This implied that the workers were actually following a plan when they laid these strips, when in all probability they at most responded to the artist's desire to move that piece "a little to the left" as he guided construction from five stories below.
Now I happen to love this particular piece of art, and as a photographer I "transformed" it in several important ways. I removed the context, the extent, and the scale of the piece. While you might not have to be an architect to realize that you are looking at a skylight, there are no clues to its placement, overall shape, or size. My framing is my interpretation of the art, changing its circle to my square, using only a portion of the whole work, and placing the center of the "spider web" where I want it in my frame. I also made a personal exposure decision, "over-exposing" the scene by 2-3 stops, to bring out the glass of the blue bars and mostly to render the Portland sky as white instead of the usual dull grey. I am arguing that this image is my take on Carpenter's art, and I truly do not understand why my photographic interpretation is somehow less pure than a critical essay in an art journal. My title is actually my wife's comment on my art - she does not understand it at all, so I of course used her less than enthusiastic reaction as its title.
BEAT-UP FORD : FINAL VERSION
This is what the purists would reduce photographer's "proper" subjects to. I am creating art (you don't have like it) out of thin air, suggesting the beauty in an old rusted truck. I don't think the Ford Motor Company would attempt to challenge my copyright violation in this case, but most people would clearly recognize this as my art. In writing this essay I have actually realized how interesting it can be to actually discover the origins of the public art that I have noticed, and how easy it often is to acknowledge the creators. Yet my Google research has also led me to realize how much my art is my art. As my research into the public art has shown me how much my photographs have changed the documentary, straight-up view of the art, its convinced me that few viewers would argue that I have not put enough of myself into my commentaries of other people's art.
BIKE CITY : FINAL VERSION
Uh, owe, grab those handlebars, we are heading down the slippery slope. I made this image a few years ago of a clearly recognizable mural in Old Town. I do not remember if there were any words attached, but I clearly responded to the Portland branding efforts on the old brick wall. Do I know the muralist? No. Again do you know the murals location (four stories up) or how big it is - only if you count the bricks. You do know that some artist, or at least sign painter, better than me, used a recognizable traffic symbol on a bare brick wall in Portland, Oregon. It actually was originally a mural advertisement for a neighborhood bike rental store, Pedal Bike Tours. The city made the owner Todd Roll (how's that name for a bike shop owner?) remove the words proclaiming Portland the bike capital of the USA because the sign was "too big", so I never saw the words. The art was copied off the store's t-shirt logo so there the artistic trail ends. Recently the mural has been covered by a five-story office building, so now my art is one of the only records of this piece of public art. Does this enhance its value?
ORANGE MONSTER : FINAL VERSION
Another mural, somewhere in Portland. I was scared, and not showing the full extent of the jovial monster just increased my apprehension, as did my inability to interpret those curious symbols below his mouth. This is public art, out in public, designed to elicit a public response. It doesn't matter if it wasn't part of a 1% of art program - yes I didn't pay for it with my taxes, but to say that my 4" x 4" photo coaster is an unfair use of this wall-sized art piece is somehow infringing on the original work is a little too much for me. It turns out that the artist goes by Yoshi47 and has painted numerous monsters on walls around the world. This one is on the ADX Building in SE Portland, and it was only when my research showed me the horizontal block-long original that I realized how much I had changed it.
OREGON TRAIL : FINAL VERSION
Now lets move away from "folk" art to maybe more serious works. The image above is my take on what should be a famous piece of wall art, a mural at a party wall adjacent to The Oregon Historical Society that shows various symbols from the settler's journey along the Oregon Trail, as well as the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This is a portion of a "trompe de l'ioile" painting, a "fool the eye" work done by one of the current world masters of the art, Richard Haas. None of what you are looking at is real. The party wall is mostly tan concrete block and some brick, but that sculpture, its setting in a curved alcove, those shadows - are all fake; it's just a painting, a remarkable one. There is one real window in the wall, and I don't even remember if that is the real one, or one of the fake ones, and I hesitate to declare that curtain real or artistic. All I know is that this piece is wonderful, I responded by showing one portion, and that I can't even take credit for being there when the light was "best" since even the light is fake.
STREETS OF HOPE : FINAL VERSION
Another piece of "trompe de l'oile", this one a full block long near Portland State University. It obviously has something to do with the PSU library, but I don't know its origins or purpose except for making a bare wall beautiful. I picked a particular portion for it's colors, and its collection of seemingly unrelated volumes - and included a portion of the real street so my viewers could appreciate the art's deliberate out-of scale reproduction of the pile of books. The work was conceived by Harrell Fletcher and Avalon Kalin, and the resultant piles of books, selected by PSU faculty and students, were photographed and enlarged by Motoya Nakamura. It is actually entitled "The Knowledge."
TANNER SPRINGS : FINAL VERSION
On to sculpture. This is a small portion of a block-long, 15-foot-tall sculptural wall at Portland's Tanner Spring Park in the Pearl District. This work is composed of 368 or so pieces of the railroad rails that were part of the railroad yards that formerly covered our attempt to convert an industrial wasteland into SOHO West. The rails curve and rise out a pool to form a fence at street level a story above that adjusts for the change of grade across the Portland block that became the park. The pond represents one of the existing creeks covered by the growing city - this one no doubt heavily polluted by the tannery that stood by it, thus Tanner Springs. I love the sculpture, and my framing divorces it from its surroundings, especially the walkway across the pond, which i personally think is the park's only real mis-step. The rails really look somewhat like this if you catch them when I did, when the western sun is rally beating down and lighting them up. I haven't been able to find an artist, so credit must go to Peter Walker & Partners, the lanscape architecture firm for the park.
SWIMMING UPSTREAM : FINAL VERSION
Okay, I like orange a little more than the next guy. This very creative and amusing sculpture bursts through a corner of the Park Blocks above a seafood restaurant. It took dozens of questions from tourists for me to finally realize that this was a corner of Salmon Street. I isolated the sculpture, as I usually do. since I didn't see how how the adjacent industrial windows, or it's real location above the street, enhanced my take on the sculpture. The sculpture is called "Transcendence" and is by Keith Jollum, who seems to lkie obscure titles as much as I do. This is one of the few images that does not improve with much enlargement at all - it's not that the sculpture is not great, it's just that as the salmon gets too large it gets too ugly.
LADY LIBERTY : FINAL VERSION
Now let's talk about fame. Sometimes we forget that a symbol is also just a piece of art, which deserves to be looked at closely and interpreted even though we all know what it looks like, or at least think we know it, since it seems to have been seared into our collective brains. Few know who the sculpture was, and until you visit you can't even appreciate its enormous scale or its placement on an island in New York harbor. Leave it to me to focus on her back, maybe to emphasize that it is a sculpture that does have a back, or maybe because that's where the ferry went. I also converted it to black and white to emphasize detail and form, and because I dislike the particular shade of green that the largest copper statue in the world has become after more than a hundred years of humidity. Does this toga make me look fat?
PORTLANDIA : FINAL VERSION
This is the second-biggest hammered copper statue in the world. It is Portlandia, a representation of the mythical queen of the mythical kingdom of Rosaria, which if you can believe it was conjured up by upstart city boosters to preside over our annual Rose Festival. What a load of hooey, but 1% for art bought the good citizens of Rosaria, uh Portland, this statue by Raymond Kaskey to preside over the front of our misbegotten Municipal Government Center. This building, a Post Modern monument by Michael Graves, was the result of a rigged and under-funded architectural competition that saddled us with a leaky, unstable structure never even lived up to Graves' original conception and made life miserable for the city workers stuck in there. Don't get me started. The only good thing that came from the whole affair was this statue, but ever since Mr. Kaskey, bless his heart, has made life miserable for every other artist in town. He seems to think that this piece of public art, paid for by the public, can never be interpreted, or even recorded, by any one on the street. So I long since stopped exhibiting this image, or selling coasters which carefully acknowledged Kaskey on the back. It just doesn't seem worth it, because this guy doesn't seem to be mollified by the idea that a sculpture by Raymond Kaskey can be interpreted in a photograph by Richard Lishner. He doesn't respect my ability to comment on his art, so to hell with him - I won't put his sculpture before the public, who know that my photo is probably better than the one they took..
CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR : FINAL VERSION
I thought this was a Henry Moore sculpture. After much research it turns out to be a work of an Australian sculptor Clement Meadmore. It stands outside the Portland Art Museum, so it's about as public as art can get - you don't even need a ticket, although I'm sure some guard would eventually respond if you circled around on the raised lawn to see how the other side looked. The work is entitled "Split Ring" and is actually a twisted ring of Corten Steel in real life. Meadmore found some way to resist the usual orange tinge of Corten Steel, so I guess he didn't like orange as much as yours truly.I love the way the two strands almost touch but don't, and my interpretation ignores the other facets of the work. So while I know that Meadmore thought that this was really important, I feel that it is REALLY important, so I can try to draw my viewers attention there. So much so that the nature of the actual sculpture is actually lost.
I like the image even better in black and white, which seems to be even more graphic - the bricks are just a field of texture, and I no longer remember what color or colors the two segments are in reality - it now seems to be even more about light. Especially since the steel is only one color.
REBAR MEMORIES : FINAL VERSION
Finally we come to a special case of the critical question of "whose art is it anyway?" I have what at best might be characterized as a love/hate relationship with this example of public art. In this I am unusual, because for most Portlanders, to know it is to positively hate it. This is one of three sculptures that stand at the East end of the Hawthorne and Morrison Bridges across the Willamette River. They are collectively titled "Inversion: Plus Minus" and were created by Annie Han and Daniel Mhalyo They represent the memory of the warehouses that once stood in the district, and well, I guess I can understand that. I am sure that Annie and Daniel are very nice people. They got the money for the sculptures from a 1% for art program although I don't remember what project they were 1% of. I do know that my fellow citizens think that they are the most god-awful waste of money, especially their money, in living memory. You see, they are made of various sizes of rebar, and they almost can't help being ugly, no matter how historically inclined your memories can run. Rebar strengthens reinforced concrete, and no matter how ugly you might think concrete is, the hidden rebar is even uglier. The sculptures are huge, and they are rusted rebar, and while I am waiting for the light at the end of the bridge, my thoughts frequently involve what might happen if an errant semi-truck happened to hit the sculpture - as long as there was no injuries, would it matter? They are that ugly.
Now I actually love this image, and so do most people who notice it in my booth. They cannot believe what is pictured once they realize its subject. They HATE the sculpture, but they love the photograph. They are actually almost shaken in their hatred of the original work of art. You see my image is all about the light - the beginning of a sunset through the sculpture. My exposure rendered the sculpture as the silhouette that who knows, maybe the artist actually had in mind - and renders the rebar invisible. The rebar that so repels is now just a series of intriguing black lines. I've created an ink sketch on a golden background. And I honestly can say that this particular work of art will never look as good in real life. This is as good as it gets. In my humble opinion, my work of art has actually elevated the original that some would say I have no right to interpret in a photograph. Intriguing.
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MARCH 26, 2021
OLD GROWTH, NEW GROWTH : VERTICAL
This week I'd like to take a detailed look at two of my images that sum up most of my feelings about shooting in the forest, or as our English friends say, "woodland " photographs. I believe there are certain helpful hints, not "rules", that are useful when you are attempting to show your wonder at forest scenes. These two images are among my most successful, and for once the public seems to agree with me since they are among my most popular images.
The first image above was made on or near the Mackenzie River in Central Oregon on a reasonably long hike that followed a ridge line and allowed for long-range views of the forest edge. This area is quite beautiful, with some great hikes, places to soak in mineral springs, see a Clear Lake so clear that you will not believe it, and generally follow the Mackenzie on the way to Bend. What attracted my eye was the phenomenon seen in Spring, when you can clearly see the new growth at the branch ends of our native fir trees. The contrasting shades of green against the overall dark forest clearly told me it was Spring, and the forest was renewing itself.
Why do I believe this image works? It follows my three hints for making woodland photographs:
1. Whatever you do, try not to include much, or if possible, any sky, unless the photo is really about the sky. Humans naturally are attracted to the brightest parts of any scene, and even on cloudy days the sky is probably much brighter than the woods. Any sky included, unless it is a very small part of the scene, will attract viewers attention from the subject at hand. So just leave it out! The lack of a horizon in any landscape image will focus viewers attention elsewhere, and this kind of immersion is especially helpful in conveying "a walk in the woods."
2. It's probably best if it is a cloudy day, since the bane of most woodland photos is the excessive contrast that is often part of the scene, even if you are smart enough to lose the sky. Our eyes adjust much better to high contrast scenes than our stupid cameras do, so often we review our images with a disappointed sense that the scene was a lot more chaotic than in real life - the camera registers, and cannot smooth out, all that sun and shade that our minds adjust to. So that great beauty dish, otherwise known as cloud cover, is great for a walk in the woods.
3. The woods are quite a chaotic place, even if it's not the Amazon Rain Forest. There is hell of a lot going on, and our job as image makers is to distill and make some kind of order out of the chaos, to offer our viewers a point of view. In the woods it is often not just why am I interested in that, but something even more basic, like what the hell am I looking at? The viewer was not there, was not looking, so we have to orient them, find some order in nature. This is the artistic element, bringing a composition together that will show the viewer where to look, and what to recognize in the scene that caused you to go "wow." Compositional elements like line, form, and color will as always play a large role, if you can find them and make them apparent to the viewer. Otherwise you are risking ARAT, the derisive acronym some photographers use for these landscapes, "Another Rock, Another Tree." So since we want our images to be about something in addition to "the woods", this involves leaving things out in such a disorganized natural environment. Like most photography, we are trying to take things out, a distillation process rather than an additive one like painting.
As you can see, the woods are hard because some of the things photographers look for, like contrast or light itself, can only cause problems in such a setting. A fine landscape photographer you can find on You Tube, Adam Gibbs, specializes in the woodland, and has even entitled his recent monograph "Quiet Light", because that is what he is looking for in the woods. It also helps if you can conjure up fog, the ultimate forest simplifier, which most English photographers seem to encounter at the drop of a hat.
In this image, i ve left out the sky, went on my walk on a typically cloudy Oregon day, and tried to respond to the overwhelming pattern I was seeing in the forest. I wasn't looking at one tree, but at all of the trees, and as far as the viewer is concerned,this pattern was never interrupted, because I deliberately did not reveal its extent - no sky, no riverbank, no bare patch. These two versions show two subtle exposure differences as well as the square coaster crop. In the first slightly darker exposure I showed clearly that I didn't care about those deep dark woods, letting them go pretty dark. I went lighter in the second attempt to try to emphasize the light tips even more, but maybe that lightens the woods too much. Like most things, the Goldilocks spot is probably somewhere in the middle. Although I have gotten used to the square crop after selling so many coasters, I like the original vertical since these are trees after all, and they "look better" as taller objects, even if you don't show their bottoms or tops. Sort of like skyscrapers in my usual urban context.
4 x 5 CROP
Well here I have done two things. I've taken the compromise position between the basic 4:6 ratio native to my camera, and the 1:1 coaster ratio, by going to that classic 4:5 ratio beloved by framers everywhere, who still cling to the historic 8 x 10 or 16 x 20 ratios which were once natural enlargements of 4 x 5 view cameras. This squarer ratio seems to work here, and the monochromatic treatment allows for darker woods and brighter tips. But I'm really missing the shades of green brought out in color, and it's interesting that Lightroom can't differentiate between these two shades, so that I can't treat them as different colors in black and white, just different light levels. So at least here I think the color version has more to offer.
NEW GROWTH, OLD GROWTH : FINAL VERSION
He' so clever isn't he, with his captions - too clever by half, since I'm always confusing these two images since I named the second in relation to the first. Thi image was made in Olympic National Park In Washington State, but of course it could be taken in most any forest in the Pacific Northwest. The square crop, the light, and the natural color differences between the young Vine Maple and its older and darker fir trees, places Vine Maple front and center. Since even my focus was on the bright green leaves, the Vine Maple literally jumps out of the composition, in both sharpness and illumination. These contrasts give the viewer something to focus on. I've again denied viewers both the ground and the sky and even the top of my subject. But you are there, even though you don't exactly no where "there" is, because you can almost touch the tree.
Not bad, if I say so myself. Black and White allows me to highlight the contrast to the degree that the Vine Maple still jumps out of the darker woods, even though all the greens are now shades of grey. I'm actually only troubled now by the lighter fir in the middle background, whose natural grey color no longer contrasts as well as a background for our green leaves. But upon further work, Lightroom should be able to darken the grey tree more than the green leaves - but not bad, since contrast was really the organizing principle. I still like the color version better. And since I have of course misplaced the original file, you'll have to take my word for it concerning the incredible power of my square crop.
I'll let that be it for today, but I will throw in a few more shots to let you look for more organizing principles in the woodland. Among the most important is the water that makes the forest in the first place. This subject is readily available since most of our hikes are usually oriented around watercourses of various scales - the operating principal of most hikes being to try to follow the most walk-able grades, even up mountains. Thus a river is usually a good bet, although "Waterfall Wednesday" on Instagram makes it clear that most people are most excited when the grade abruptly changes. Water's organizing power is offset by its vast difference in luminosity to the forest, but if we can control that through exposure choices it can provide great focal points on our walk through the woods.
Streams can work as well as rivers, and its often more credible, since you are on a bank, not standing in your waders in the rapids.
And finally you can use a very intimate view to still say forest, even if it just some rain drops and the trees are upside down. Notice how the recognizable geometric circles clue you in on to what you are looking at, even as you have fallen through the looking glass. Enjoy your next walk in the woods.
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MARCH 19, 2021
DARTMOOR #1 - FINAL IMAGE
Today I'd like to explore the opportunities, frustrations, and the humble enjoyment of the products of travel photography. We all have missed the opportunity of travel in this past year, when a trip to the grocery store became an anxiety-producing highlight of the week. Landscape photographers endeavor to search far and wide for beauty not readily accessible to their potential patrons. We try to leave no trace but at the same time come away with a unique, or at least different take on a place. This is not easy. We are often experiencing a place for the first time, encountering sensory overload, and soon realizing that despite our best "research" efforts, we have no idea of the true nature of this new subject.
I have reflected often that photographers usually do their best work in the places they know best, are intimately connected to, and have frequent opportunities to try something different on another day. This makes the very idea of attempting to come up with something worthwhile when you encounter a place for the first, and probably the last time in your life, somewhat ridiculous. But of course we try anyway, and it really helps to lower expectations, enjoy the process, and realize that although part of the reason that you came was to capture images, you are really trying to enjoy the trip. It's a good idea to consider any "keeper", no matter how rare, to be unexpected gravy. And to remember that the National Geographic photographer, one of the "best " in the world, took thousands of shots over far longer than you could afford to stay in that place; it probably wasn't their first rodeo either. So in the spirit that in order to improve your photography do not buy some new piece of photographic gear, but to go stand in front of some more interesting places, let's talk about a few images of one of my favorite landscapes.
Dartmoor is a very special place in Southwest England. I have only been their twice, but have very vivid memories, most of which I was not able to preserve on film. It is not an easy place to photograph, because in some ways it is a bleak, forbidding landscape that only reveals its beauty upon close inspection that might even be dangerous to the unwary. A moor in England is a piece of countryside that for some very good reasons has never really been used by humans, (except to deforest) for several thousands of years. It's a funny kind of "wilderness" in that it is certainly very wild, but people have tried to use it, and just gave up - and while it is protected to some degree now as parks, it is usually right in the middle of England's "green and pleasant land". Moors are so weird in that an American is not used to the typical English rural landscape which has been cultivated for thousands of years to within an inch of it's life - and then encounter literally next door a patch that has been forgotten for just as long.
DRY STONE WALL - FINAL VERSION
This is not Dartmoor, but a typical English rural landscape, if there is such a thing. It's not Times Square, but that stone wall was laid block by block, usually without mortar, hundreds of years ago, to divide agricultural land of varying amounts of immense value. That's an awful lot of work, and signals the land's value even to a casual American visitor who is just trying to drive in an empty landscape on the wrong (right) side of the road. In England the next village with its choice of pubs is usually right around the corner; it is very difficult to be in the "middle of nowhere" - that's why you go to Scotland.
And then you get to Dartmoor. I had already gotten the basic introduction in reading one of the best Sherlock Holmes tales, "The Hound of the Baskervilles." This mystery sends Sherlock and Dr. Watson far away from Baker Street to investigate a murder with strange supernatural overtones on Dartmoor, which might as well be on the Moon. The novel is so creepy that it is hard to do it justice on film, although I've seen at least three versions. Dartmoor is not only the setting, it is one of the main characters.
ON THE EDGE OF THE MOOR - FINAL VERSION
Dartmoor is a patch of moorland that is only about 30 miles square, right smack in the middle of Devon, a prototypical English county with market towns, cathedrals, pubs, vicars, gardens and Bed & Breakfasts to satisfy any visitor. There is nothing in Dartmoor, and there has never really been anything there. It is empty. There are some ring roads around the moor and only two real roads that cross it. At their junction is Britain's highest security prison, which is not high security. Unless a helicopter came along, or you had a get-away driver at the prison entrance, then any escaping prisoner would die before they got off the moor. It is bleak, featureless, with few landmarks that can guide you, especially when the mist comes up, that visitors are warned to not venture into the moor beyond sight of the road. And beware of the bogs, that can swallow you whole!
Okay, I'm being a little dramatic, but only a little. You can go on You Tube and accompany hikers across the moor, but realize that it has to be done in one day because there are no towns or campgrounds. And your headlamp will be the only light for miles around. The first time I went to Dartmoor was in 1976, when I happened across it on a three-week Easter break journey around Britain. I was so young and "poor" that I traveled mostly by bus, with a bus pass so obscure that I usually introduced it's existence to each bus driver I showed it to. Other wise I hitched, usually alone, until I realized the utility of having a young lady along to encourage rides. I found myself at a small town on the southern border of the moor, and decided to walk that day to the nearest hostel on the northern border, about 15 miles away. I did not see another human being all day, unless you count the two fighter pilots that boomed past me a couple of times. I did encounter thousands of sheep, who seemed to keep to the road as much as I did. The place was beautiful, in that edge of the world way, and listening to my trusty guidebook, I did not venture very far from the only road that I was traveling on. That was probably a very good thing, since I later found out at the pub that night that this idiot had walked alongside a RAF bombing range for most of the day.
Well after that adventure I was hooked, so that 33 years later I dragged my wife back to Dartmoor. Now at least I had a rental car, and we spent one day on and around the moor. Of course it had not changed a bit, and we could only stay in the very nice town of Dartmouth which was on the coast about 20 miles away. But we did get to go to some more of the sites around the moor, and my wife was suitably impressed with the bleakness, which is her cup of tea when it comes to landscapes. Dartmoor did not disappoint.
We met some of the wild horses along with the sheep. This is a wild animal, minding its own business a couple of miles away from town. This was the big intersection that day. You can see that there are farms at the edge of the moor, but beyond that last hedge is 20 miles or so of nothing. Princetown is where you go visit Cousin Harold in prison. At another edge of the moor we found a large church, medieval in character but constructed of mostly cinder block.
I mostly just tried to capture some of the feel of the moor, and mostly failed. But I did try. This is the road around the moor, and you can see that parking is really easy - its figuring out where to go and how not to get lost is the hard part. In fact most of my shots that I did actually try to make a little more of that day came just off the same section of road near that road sign we saw before. And I actually put in a lot of work just this past year in post-processing to really come up with some images that I can be proud of. I don't own a wide angle lens, which leads me to avoid the "heroic" landscape image, the all-encompassing view, because I don't have the equipment, which is because I really don't see that way. But I have been experimenting with the digital technique of "stitching" together several shots, taken with a regular, or even telephoto lens, to achieve a wide angle view. This is harder than just using a wide lens, but it is not that hard. You take a range of shots, overlapping 25% or so, so that the computer has something to "match." While you can be pretty scientific, or just anal, and use a tripod and make calculations, I've begun to believe more experienced stitchers than myself when they say to just have fun and wing it. The software is pretty darn good and usually works to some degree - and again depending on how anal you are you can really work to make the edges of the meld more seamless. There are only a couple of things to remember. You will soon get the feel of the correct overlap - sometimes too much overlap will confuse the hell out of the computer and you will get an ugly multiple exposure effect. You also must go manual in both focusing and exposure, since you don't want the camera in its infinite wisdom changing either one as you move across the scene. So pick focus point (these are landscapes, so 1/3 into the scene is the usual) and switch to manual to hold it there. The same with exposure - move your camera across the scene, find the brightest portion you want to hold detail in without clipping, and go to manual with that exposure before you take various different shots so that the only light changes are the real ones across the scene.
I think It is pretty remarkable what you can come up with. These panoramic photos are much "wider" than you can get with most wide angle lenses. It is pretty easy to achieve aspect ratios twice or three times as wide as the height of the image. Once you do that you realize how unrealistic it is to compose and print a meaningful image at larger ratios - 4x or 5x wide begin to lose compositional focus way before you've "run out" of images that you are trying to stitch together. 2x or 3x is really quite a panoramic view. Back in the day panoramic film cameras, dependent on realistic divisions of rolls of film, achieved ratios of 16:9, less than 2:1, or 16:7, still less than 3:1. The problem becomes achieving a good height so you can include enough foreground and/or sky without cutting off parts of the world we are used to seeing when we "take in the view." Thus you take the horizontal image with a series of vertical images, to get the maximum height for your "pano"; that's another reason to use a tripod, or at least practice at steady hand-holding, because the natural tendency is to slope downward as you move to the right across the scene. The more level your pan, the less you will lose when the camera has to crop out missing edges on a succession of shots.
If you look at the hill above, you will realize how narrow the normal view of my lens, about the "natural view" of our eyes, is in comparison with the stitched image. You can also clearly see how big the panorama could be printed, because this portion could take quite an enlargement and keep detail, and it's only about half of the panorama!
The computer allowed me to create this image out of these various views:
THE TREE ON THE EDGE OF THE MOOR - FINAL VERSION
I like this composition better - I'm a little further back and to the left to include that tree. Now how remarkable is this software magic, you ask? Consider the fact that I took these shots twelve years ago, way before anyone, much less yours truly owned the software required to do these things. I was dreaming of doing what was called a "combo", inspired by the English artist David Hockney, who had shown the way by creating very interesting mosaics of scenes by combining grids of Polaroid instant prints. Inspired to dream, but I never did anything until years later when I thought of giving it a try with this new software. So I can say that I literally did not know what I was doing, did not do much "right" and still got these results. Not that there weren't problems - the first time I tried this image I was very confused when I ended up with two trees! As it is, I spent a few hours after I resolved that in manually correcting the exposure on the right side of the tree, and I'm not convinced that I've done enough if I enlarge it much beyond the 4" x 12" print I have successfully made.
JUST THE TREE - A TINY PORTION OF THE PANORAMA
The amount of information that these images contain involves opportunities as well as pitfalls. You better like coffee, because these files are measured in gigabytes, and Lightroom slows to a crawl - you have to have something else to do, and you can't do anything else on your computer while these images are being assembled. You must inspect the file at 1:1 because there might be artifacts you can't see while you are looking at the whole image. This image could be printed at 40" x 120", so that's lots of inspection. It works the other way too - what appears as a sensor spot, a piece of dirt, on a 4 x12, is revealed to be a very sharp bird in flight when you enlarge the file to a size you could print , but you could not display.
This is my personal favorite. We are a little more to the left, have lost the tree and the hill, but we have gained the final section of stone wall at the last farm. with it's forlorn gate. That enigmatic pile of stones in the middle ground suggests either an abandoned project or a natural barrier to further cultivation - who knows? Now a revelation is in order - stitching is not the only way to create a panorama; you can also do it the real old-fashioned way, by cropping a mediocre shot without mercy until you get what you thought you had seen.Here is the original, at my camera's standard 2:3 ratio:
Well if you eliminate a little of the boring foreground, and a large part of the really boring sky, as they say in old-time Hollywood, "Now you've got a picture!"
DARTMOOR #2 - FINAL VERSION
This panorama is 2:1, under control, with more than enough detail to ponder, now that the photographer has actually taken the time to correctly frame his panorama to focus on the subject at hand.
So there is my all-to brief foray into both Dartmoor and the possibilities of this "new kind of wide angle." I'm experimenting, but I still like the close up. Here's my best take on the tree, in my opinion. I wish there was more separation of the tree from the background, but I really like the back lighting on the scene as a whole. Don't give up on your images of favorite places, and treasure the memories they can provide and the way they can communicate your delight to viewers who unfortunately will never get a chance to experience these wonders themselves.
DARTMOOR #1 - FINAL VERSION
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MARCH 12, 2021
GOTHAM - FINAL VERSION
Now I know that the title of this essay might strike different people as provocative, or even wrong, in many different ways. Let's just say that in my usual way, I'm being brutally blunt, even if might not agree completely with this personal identification. I've settled on this label after 64 years, in the spirit that I might as well embrace it in a positive manner, since a lot of people are going to think of me that way, depending on the circumstances.
I take this title from the third volume of Alfred Kazin's memoirs. He had started out on his life by being just "A Walker in the City." By his third volume this great American literary critic summed up his career by embracing the term that he felt that most of his contemporaries in American Intelligentsia had used for decades as a shorthand insult. I think he felt that he had triumphed over their condescension and now could proclaim his representation even while he suspected that it really had little to do with his successful career.
I guess I feel pretty much the same way - especially when you put these identifiers in context. When I lived in London in 1976, I was clearly an American - nothing else mattered, even when I might be an Australian until I opened my mouth. When I worked behind the bar in a pub, I was the resident Yank, and no one cared where in America I was from or where I went to "church." I grew up in a New York neighborhood so Jewish that an unenlightened person might think that of course think that condition was near normal, unless you were another ethnic minority. I don't think I consciously met a WASP until I went off to college, since all of the few Christians I ever knew were Catholics. And when we moved to Portland, we confronted a reality that our neighbors couldn't even tell if we came from Boston or New York, and that our Jewish community had now expanded as part of our lives, even while its representation in the city had of course gone way down. The fact was that the vast majority of the Jews in Portland were also from somewhere else, and that everyone in town seemed so excited that we were not from California.
So I must say that as a Jew, for me its really all cultural, or as my wife might say, even just culinary. I'm not really religious, or even spiritual. I'm not sure I believe in God, although I admit that I complain to the man upstairs a lot for someone who doesn't believe he exists. After reading a lot of history, I guess I just take some pride in being a member of a tribe which on the whole has made some positive contributions to history, and has somehow survived to this day, long after all of our enemies have bitten the dust. On the other hand, I don't think that my photographic efforts are at all related to my ethnicity in either subject matter or technique, and would resist any effort to label them as such. When the local Jewish newspaper in Portland described architect Daniel Libeskind with pride as a "Jew Architect", I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.
PEDESTRIANS - FINAL VERSION
Its more as a New Yorker that I stake my claim, although as a New Yorker I'm pretty weird. The last time I really lived in New York I was seventeen years old; I have never lived in Manhattan. The only time I worked briefly in the city was a short summer as the worst secretary in New York City, for a theater ticket agency whose head was so obnoxious, even for New York, that most of my job consisted of standing on box office lines to obtain tickets to shows which had resolved to never deal with my boss again.
So I am a member of the vast New York Diaspora, and feel that my relationship to New York is conditional on that long distance relationship. The daily paper on my porch is the New York Times. When you read it religiously (!) every day, from three thousand miles away, you can begin to see how "Jewish" it is, as well as how truly parochial. You notice all of the ads on the first two pages are for items that not only you can't afford, but that nobody you know can afford either. It's only when I read the Sunday Times online (I'm too cheap to pay to get it delivered) that I get to read the sections not delivered to Portland, like the real estate section, that I realize that while I grew up in New York, I am no longer a real New Yorker. The joke in my house is the question someone once asked when confronted by New York prices -"Is it the same currency?"
GRID ON GRID - FINAL VERSION
My reactions to New York are thus based on my personal history, my ties to family and friends, and my continued affections. This is coupled with my reality of living so far away, and realizing that New York is for most a grand illusion. I will always be a New Yorker, and am glad I grew up there, even though I can't understand why most people stay. I even find it unimaginable how people who didn't grow up there can survive at all. I love it from afar, which causes some weird incongruities, like the fact that I was a "regular" at a wonderful little Italian restaurant down the block from my oldest friend in Park Slope, even though I visited only every six months or so when my wife and I would visit New York. Or that my wife, when confronting my slow gait when staring at all of the skyscrapers, or my hesitancy in joining in the jaywalking, declares me "Corn Boy"!
So what do my photographs of New York reveal of these strange contradictions? After all, I've already related that one takes the best images of the places that one is most familiar with, so Portland, not New York, is in my wheel house. In no way am I a "New York photographer" - but I think my images say something about my special relationship.
LADY LIBERTY - FINAL VERSION
I think it manifest itself in three ways. One is how I react to the landmarks, which I have known all of my life. I need to come up with a different, unusual, or some might say even strange perspective in order to justify creating the image at all. Thus my take on the Statue of Liberty. Or the Empire State Building.
EMPIRE STATE - FINAL VERSION
Or an old bridge in Brooklyn.
BROOKLYN SILHOUETTE - FINAL VERSION
The second way is the things that I notice, as a New Yorker on an occasional visit. These details can show appreciation of things that are no longer part of my environment, but are now even more special.
WATER TOWERS - FINAL VERSION
ROOMS - FINAL VERSION
BROWNSTONE DETAIL - FINAL VERSION
CAST IRON - FINAL VERSION
MASONRY DETAILS - FINAL VERSION
These details are the kinds of things that an architect from Portland - the land of wood - only remembers with fondness. Sometimes I carry my references to further limits - details that only a New Yorker might be expected to understand.
GRAND CENTRAL - FINAL VERSION
LAW AND ORDER - FINAL VERSION
THE BID IS 7 NO TRUMP - FINAL VERSION
PATIENCE - FINAL VERSION
My faraway attitude allows me to understand that it would be okay if non-natives did not get these references. Real New Yorker's would be appalled. Although if you ever watched Saturday Night Live, or Law and Order, ridden the subway, or knew what the Trump Tower looked like above the horrible name plate, or ever saw a New Yorker cartoon that had anything to do with libraries, you would probably understand.
The funny thing about living in Portland lately is the weird way that New Yorker's have embraced our city so much that I sometimes think that they think Portland is the sixth borough. Some cynics describe us as Brooklyn without Black people. Others realize that "Portlandia" really only represented the hipster condition that was plaguing all of America. Most visiting New Yorker's just can't get over no sales tax and the comparative rarity of the $30 entree on our menus - they've found urban nirvana! I only understood this new fascination when I started noticing a new byline in the Oregonian, back when there was an Oregonian. The name Sulzberger leaped off the page, and I soon learnt that Pops had sent the future publisher of the Times to the backwoods to learn the reporting side of the business. After all, the kid couldn't write for Dad's paper - that wouldn't be right. So know i began to see why that other paper I read every day was so fascinated with Portland - the cub reporter's efforts had led The Times to treat Portland as the only true representative of urban America beyond the Hudson. It got so bad that sometimes I couldn't tell which newspaper I was reading, like when I noticed an article decrying the layoff of fifteen workers at Powell's and realized it was The Times and not The Oregonian. Or when the food section - of the Times (!) - highlighted half a dozen restaurants within six blocks of my house, only 3,000 miles away from most of its readership.
Finally the third way this once and always New Yorker reacts to the city is just an all-knowing horror of the urban angst that I know I miss.
IF ONLY - FINAL VERSION
I found this image looking out of my sister's old corner office above 51st Street off Broadway. It was something she saw every day, just part of her world. Her visiting brother saw that unique combination of order in chaos that could result from the simple decision to restrict automobiles from Times Square a few blocks South. New Yorker's can complain about things that most people wouldn't even notice, but they also listen to rules, as long as everybody else must suffer along. I doesn't hurt if you paint these rules in big letters on the street, with no explanation of the restriction. You see, New Yorker's attitudes towards life's vagaries veer quickly from astonishment to resignation to a triumphant "urban professionalism" - "What's wrong with you, don't you know what's what?" And of course the final stage of New Yorker's (and mine) "special relationship" with urbanity is my alternate title for this final image - "ONLY IN NEW YORK."
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MARCH 5, 2021
BLUE OAK - FINAL IMAGE
This week I'd like to devote a little time to the graphic impact of using silhouettes in your imagery by investigating several of my images. I could have chosen several more because I frequently use this strategy, either by noticing it in the field, or by later manipulating exposure in post-processing.
Silhouette is defined as an image represented as a single color, usually black, set against a uniform background, usually white - what would be called a two-bit image in digital speak, just undifferentiated black and white. The only detail is the definition of the boundary. Originally silhouettes were simple portraits, whose contours could represent a subject without detail, and were first cut out of black paper. They traditionally differed from a line drawing of the contour of an object by focusing on it's mass, with no attention to it's inner makeup. As photography developed as an art form, the silhouette broadened in definition to any image that was backlit, with varying degrees of detail in the parts of the subject in shadow. Also accommodation with the real world allowed for different colored backgrounds for silhouettes as well as white. The emphasis remained on the graphic description of a subject. Amateurs frequently encountered silhouettes due to messing up their exposures because they forgot the "rule" of making sure the sun was to their back; it was left to artists to decide they sometimes actually liked these mistakes.
This first image happened on a walk near Portland's Central Library. It's an example of "Portlandia" in that the subject is what we call a "Century Tree", cited and protected as an honored citizen because it's been here for at least one hundred years. That's not bad since the entire city was an old-growth forest when it was founded 172 years ago in 1849. So trees like this have been here since almost the beginning, and thus get a small plaque somewhere if you take the time to look. There are also "Century Farms" and loads of unacknowledged Century Houses like the one I'm sitting in, which is part of Portland's charm, in that a very young city has a large stock of houses older than ones found back East in older cities.
I was struck by the incredible intricacy of the Oak, characteristic of natural design and only simulated by something an artist would conceive because they feared it would seem too contrived. I also loved the characteristic Portland sky, blue and white, with maybe a bit more blue than usual. My exposure more or less deliberately concentrated on this sky, rendering the tree mostly without detail.
More or less? I didn't realize how correct, or incorrect my exposure actually was at the time. In order to get any detail in the tree, with the sun to my back, I have had to overexpose by four full stops to get this pretty pathetic rendering here. Yes, the tree has texture, and a lot of ivy that probably should be cleared, but who really cares? The image has lost everything that made it special.
Here I've converted it to monochrome, and as usual it is a matter of taste. There is still no detail in the tree, but without the color even more emphasis on the convoluted shapes, and you might convince yourself you can pick out the pesky ivy. It also seems obvious that you could replace the real sky with almost any color you wanted, depending on your placement on the realistic/graphic continuum.
THE THIRD MAN - FINAL VERSION
Another example of a silhouette shows that some detail in the subject is allowable, given the overall power of a recognizable shape. One evening my camera club was allowed to stay after closing at Oaks Park, an historic Portland amusement park. I discovered several things that night , including the fact that there are a few houses still there that have only the river and the park as their neighbors, making for a very quiet neighborhood, at least at night. My favorite scene was this view of the old Ferris wheel; the shape is so recognizable that it is immediatly decipherable, no matter how much detail is present or how much of the wheel I've left out. The small amount of detail left does not detract from the overall graphic image. I swear the sunset gold is reality, even though you might be forgiven if you thought this was a black and white image with a sepia tone.
VENICE SILHOUETTE - FINAL IMAGE
Here is another silhouette, whose weird color range and chromatic abberation - notice those weird outlines at the edges - can only be the fault of the camera operator. I have no idea where those colors came from, and realize the amount of noise is unconscionable, but I still like the image. It says more about Venice to me than most of my other images - this is my interpretation of the Doges Palace, which is featured on most visits to Venice, and it's very graphic quality appeals to my love of the mysterious.
I think we can all admit that the massively underexposed image, the final version, is vastly superior to the merely underexposed original. The murky details of the facade add nothing - it is just a reject, even though the square crop, already applied is a vast improvement on the real original!
Well I've no eliminated the colors, that weird orange/pink gradient; again a matter of taste. The chromatic aberration is gone of course in a black and white photo - it now seems to just be a little out of focus.r
COASTAL SHADOWS - FINAL VERSION
Here we have a characteristic view of my wife, forging ahead on a coastal hike due to her husband's insatiable need to take yet another shot of Haystack Rock. Taking a "proper" exposure of the backlit scene renders her in silhouette. Of course only she, me, and maybe her son and a few of our friends know that is Fran, which makes it pretty useless as a portrait - but I've sold numerous copies of this image as an Oregon Coast poster, because that generic silhouette and its shadow can represent every visitor's walk on the coast. Any details would just destroy the illusion.
Would you like to purchase a bridge? This original is one of my attempts to take a "different" image of the Brooklyn Bridge, something we can all aspire to even if we know it's pretty impossible. Now the amount of detail in this image made me wonder how I can so consistently "blow" an exposure, and what might happen if I would use that to my advantage.
I am lying here, because if you pay strict attention to the clouds you can see that this is somehow a different image, although it is really the same one. I've converted to black and white, and all detail in the silhouette is gone - but somehow the image seems very realistic, and now timeless, since it could have been taken on pretty much every day since 1883.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE - FINAL VERSION
I have lightened the exposure to brighten the image and make it even more graphic while still not revealing any unwanted detail in the tower. Again, every New Yorker or anyone who has ever had the pleasure to walk across the bridge knows exactly what they are looking at.
Finally, I would like to propose the concept of the "reverse silhouette." Not a negative per se, but the placing of a light object against a dark background. This is very popular with portraits, and your new iPhone can even do it on its own in "portrait" mode. But it can even happen in landscapes.
INTO THE WOODS - FINAL VERSION
My rendering of the St. Johns Bridge is yet another attempt to try something different, although how different is subject to interpretation. I am such a bad businessman that it took me three years before I put this image in my booth - I would just send customers to the colleague at the market who I thought had the best current version. Finally I gave in and sold 38 coasters in three weeks. It's different for only a few reasons, and not very important ones. Most photographers seem to take the shot facing North against the sky, or include both towers. Young, intrepid, and foolish photographers achieve symmetry by standing in the middle lane, risking death from both directions by passing semis - I've been told you can certainly time it, but one lane was good enough for me. Finally, and don't hate me, I just don't like the beloved bridge's shade of green! So black and white it was, and is, and if you want a color shot, there are usually half a dozen other photographers at the Market who will be happy to help you. But it is not my stubbornness, no matter how legendary, that makes me love this image - it is the way that it shows that how well reverse silhouette, with lots of detail, can still pop out of a dark background. The documentary shot, with it's bridge green against the forest green, would lose all of the punch.
I would encourage all of you to give silhouettes a try as a way of creating unique images that your eyes and brain, with their ability to perceive far more tonal gradients than our sophisticated cameras just do not see. Let your camera create those "bad" exposures.
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FEBRUARY 26, 2021
PUNCH BOWL FALLS - FINAL VERSION
Today I'd like to recount a hike I took in the Columbia River Gorge four years ago this summer using half a dozen or so photos that I took that day to recount the area's natural beauty, as distilled by one photographer. Some of these images are pretty characteristic of this particular hike; some are more related to my idiosyncratic style of landscape photography. I had a wonderful day, and came away with more "keepers" than usual. But the most important lesson I learned that day, or more accurately four days later, was to absolutely try to never take anything for granted.
My hike was not very heroic - just a couple of miles in and back on one of the Gorge's most famous trails which is hiked by tens of thousands each year. The Eagle Creek Trail actually extends for another twelve miles into the wilderness before it connects with even more trails in the back country. Punch Bowl Falls, where I stopped for lunch, is actually about the first landmark that wusses like me are allowed to turn back towards civilization while maintaining a modicum of respect with real hikers.
Yet no one has hiked this trail in four years, because four days after I enjoyed it a group of idiotic teenagers, playing with fireworks, managed to burn down thousands of acres of the Gorge while they were on this trail. Through the heroic efforts of firefighters and just plain dumb luck, the damage was barely held in check so that one can say it was a lot better than it could have been. But years later there are a number of beloved trails and whole areas of the Gorge that are still off limits.
Like most Gorge trails, Eagle Creek starts off with a pretty tame section just off the trail head, where I enjoyed the shade and the creek. It's less than an hour from my home in Portland, just off the highway. And it's usually ten degrees cooler on a hot Portland summer day, and my self employment allows me to go on a random Wednesday morning where I will encounter few other hikers.
EARLY ON THE EAGLE CREEK TRAIL
And then the trail begins to climb and becomes famous. As Gorge trails go, the elevation gain is nothing to brag about, but the sense of exposure is palpable. While there is very little real danger, let's just say that you begin to concentrate. You are walking on a path cut into the cliff, with a drop that gets progressively deeper the farther you go up the trail. On the left someone, probably Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, has provided a steel cable to hold onto; while it is often not "necessary", you really appreciate it when the path narrows and it suddenly becomes very reassuring. It's the kind of trail where you quickly resolve that any asshole who "needs" to pass you will do it on the outside, thank you very much.
This pair of women were a little ahead of me, and I had no desire to pass them on the trail. Eagle Creek reminds me of my family's trip across the country on the "Oregon Trail" in 1992. At our first stop in Badlands National Park, I watched my four-year old son casually jaunt across the parking lot to a viewpoint, no fence, nothing, and quickly held my breath, and his hand, when I saw an unprotected drop of hundreds of feet. We were not in Virginia anymore. The West relies on a more Darwinian recreational ethos.
ALONG THE TRAIL
In any case the views are breathtaking; here's a typical sun-dappled scene of the forest hundreds of feet below. It almost screams Oregon.
LOOKING ACROSS THE CANYON
A short time later the woods again surrounded the trail and revealed the complexity of the fight for sunshine in the Gorge, where many trees are completely overtaken by the moss. I later realized that this scene was very near where the fire started, only one mile up the trail.
This is my image, "Eagle Creek Moss" after post-processing; raising the exposure, cropping for a coaster, and sharpening to ensure the perception of the beautiful moss detail. Manipulating the exposure also brought out the darker tree to separate it from the lighter background.
The Black and White version exhibits the usual monochromatic strength in emphasizing details even more, but in this case I do miss the overarching sense of Green.
The culmination of at least my hike was Punch Bowl Falls, about two miles in. I sat on a broad field of rocks surrounding the pool eating my sandwich, and taking many photographs - should I include the rocks, or narrow the view? Should I care more about the reflection, or the overall scene? After a dozen or so alternatives, I focused on this image, knowing that I would probably concentrate on the falls and reduce the trees beyond. All of this while ignoring the young man who insisted on jumping into the pool from the top of the falls, wondering if he expected to me to come to his aid if he cracked his neck.
CORRECTING FOR WHITE BALANCE
Cropped to a square, emphasizing the falls and their reflection in the pool, but keeping the rocks in the foreground.
My usual post-processing brings out the "pop" through a more accurate white balance (the forest tends to the cool blue), subtle saturation, and darkening the foreground rocks a bit to further highlight the waterfall.
We lose the green against brown contrast in the monochrome version, but it allows for a darker pool and subtle darkening of the woods above the falls and the tree to the right; the rocks are even less distracting.
I also explored details around the pool (waterfalls aren't everything, you know) and came up with this intimate landscape near my lunch spot. A few days later a group of about thirty hikers near my lunch spot were forced to stay overnight in the middle of a forest fire, and then take the long way (twelve miles) around to get off the trail. The trail is still closed, and few know what these scenes now look like; we can only hope that we will soon be able to return.
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FEBRUARY 19, 2021
AUTUMN - FINAL IMAGE
Today I'd like to use several of my images to discuss the virtues of the intimate landscape. I use this term to describe a landscape photograph that highlights a very detailed view of the landscape. This view is not necessarily a macro view, nor is it abstract - it has a generally understood subject, is of a natural subject, but the landscape is so limited that the viewer can only sense a mood, or a time, or a season, while the geographic location is unknown or unimportant. The viewer knows what they are looking at, but has no idea where it is on Earth.
The intimate landscape requires an interesting subject in the sense that its elements are attractively framed and distributed in the image. In this it is like a still life, but the photographer has probably not changed the real scene, although moving a leaf or rock is not like removing a Soviet official from the annual Red Square lineup. And post-processing now allows us to remove "distractions" from our captured images, so one must keep their own consciences intact when presenting "reality" as they saw it. Always remember of course that the mere act of "framing" is a personal artistic decision, as is the exposure that can emphasize different aspects of the image. My view is that an intimate landscape should remain close enough to the truth because its real value is what it reveals about the photographer's ability to "see" order in what is frequently a chaotic natural world.
This image is a portrait of a small part of a wetland, also known as a swamp, at the Brietenbush Nature trail in the Columbia Gorge. Of course it could be anywhere in the world, unless you know more botany than I do. And if someone said, "I know where that is" they would either be me, lying, or a psychic. The colors and arrangement and the rain drops attracted me, and made me look and shoot. I subsequently made a framing decision to create a square photo coaster, added my usual subtle saturation, vibrance and sharpening modifications which are pretty reasonable to make a digital photo "pop." Most importantly I reduced the exposure and the shadows since I was not at all interested in seeing the tangled swamp bottom below the surface of the water. Beyond that, it was important to me, and probably no one else, to not cut off that bottom leaf. Way later I realized how much I liked that red branch i near the center.
Look what happens when I reduced the saturation of that branch (which Lightroom informed me was "orange" , just like the brown leaves). I feel the image suffers, but maybe it's just me.
And while I love black and white as much as the next guy (and probably more) I think we lose a little here, although I really like the deeper black water. I might even be tempted to go back to my final image and further reduce the shadows, but lets look at another image.
I noticed a pile of Gingko leaves before I even entered the Lan-Su Chinese Garden, one of my favorite spots in Portland. It's important in these intimate shots to try to avoid any borders of the pattern to try to convince the viewer that this scene goes on forever, or at least far longer than in real life. This is the result of my post-processing:
Now I've cropped to my coaster square, raised the contrast and the saturation high enough to highlight the different yellows and oranges that were present in real life, and sharpened enough to really see those drops and the distinctive shapes of the leaves. While some might think that I've gone too far, they wouldn't be those people who know Gingkos.
Fractal Pond - final image.
You can see here that my square crop went for as much water as I could find; then I increased contrast and saturation to highlight the leaves. The necessary sharpening actually bought out the fact that the leaves have almost concave edges that keep them afloat.
I am not really a green fan, but I will admit that something has been lost here. The shapes are still here, but there doesn't seem to be enough variation between the leaves to make up for the lack of color.
So I hope you can find some inspiration to look closer the next time you are out in nature, to try to see the intimate landscape within the overall view. It can really help you find more images out in the world that will especially be your own, not those views duplicated in everyone's instagram feed.
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IT'S THE LIBRARY
FEBRUARY 12, 2021
Central Library #1 Skylight: Final Version
Today I'd like to again discuss "working the subject", in this case returning to the same location to try to gain some additional insight into your take on the subject. It helps if the location is photogenic of course, and if there are many different parts of its appeal. And if there are other compelling reasons for you to venture there besides taking photographs, so much the better, because it's likely that you will continue to end up there again and again.
The last year has been a difficult one for most people, and in some ways I've been blessed. My family and I have been well, and the safety net, though frayed, has seen me through the loss of the three ways I used to try to earn a living. I'm not complaining in the least. But I realized in thinking about this essay today that one of the most important things I've missed this year is my trips to the library. These include my branch at Belmont, the other branches I visit in different neighborhoods around the city, and especially my explorations of Portland's Central Library Downtown.
In my humble opinion the idea of the library is one of the most important ideas man has ever come up with; the institution of the "free" library ranks right up there with the free press and freedom of religion. The library predates the printing press, which seems kind of backwards except that libraries collected scrolls and tablets before there were books. I love the library so much that I frequently contemplate how the "idea of the library" could transform the rest of society, even before we finally get replicators. The more I think about the idea of the free library, the more I realize how incredibly lucky we are that they were created before the Conservatives realized how they pointed the way towards an easier system of distributing knowledge than charging for it. I don't even mind paying library fines. blaming it on my own inability to get organized rather than "the man." In fact, the library system is about the only survivor each year at that one time of year I allow myself to turn Republican for a moment, when I open my property tax statement and try to understand what I'm paying for this year. The library is obviously not "free", but the amount I pay in taxes is an incredible bargain. As with the park system, if you don't take advantage of the library, well thanks for paying so I can use it.
The Multnomah County Library system is one of the best used libraries in the nation, always competing with Seattle (it's the weather) and New York and Washington, D.C. (college graduates) each year for library devotion. Our system has two great strengths. One is a lot of branches in a lot of neighborhoods, being almost as ubiquitous as post offices, fire stations, or Portland's specialty in neighborhood organization, primary schools.The other is the renewal system, which allows you to keep as many books as you want in your own home, as long as nobody else wants them, and you can get your act together to renew them every three weeks before the system "breaks down" and you have to pay a quarter a day for each of the thirty books that are spread around your house. Think how brilliant this system is - I would suggest that there would have to be twice as many library buildings if we all didn't store all those books in our own homes.
The crown jewel of the system is the Central Library Downtown. The current version of the Library was built in 1911, the same year as my modest bungalow 47 blocks away. It is a giant brick pile, five stories tall, with basements of course, that takes up an entire city block. It was designed by one of the best architects in Portland's short history, A.E.Doyle, whose name you can still touch on the pedestal at the end of the right side of the entrance stair. It's style is what you might call Federal, more than one hundred years after Jefferson quoted Palladian ideas at Monticello from the fancy Classical architecture he saw in France. But in general, the idea is brick with a smattering of stone, and lots of large windows, although they are certainly punched in the brick, not replacing it. And in lieu of actual sculpture, you get lots of carvings; the benches around the exterior give you a curated 1911 version of great authors, and of course a certain art deserves pride of place at the corner of the subject frieze shown in the detail above. You don't see Accounting or Advertising or Business Administration up there, do you? Respect must be paid!
This building was completely restored a few years after I arrived in Portland. This restoration revealed the big difference between Portland and Seattle. Seattle is the younger and now richer city, and when it needs to renew its institutions, it looks at the crap it contains and just tears it down and builds 21st Century monuments. Portland realizes that its higher quality architecture probably is better than what it can afford to build now and pays for restoration - notably the Library and City Hall, among others. It is interesting that Seattle's new main library is almost exactly the same size as ours, but resembles a glass spaceship that badly landed in Downtown. And I like it! Seattle "reinvents" the library while we spend millions to get back the one we always loved. When I showed up in Portland, a trip to the building involved jury-rigged interior scaffolding that was going to "protect" me in the event of an earthquake. When the building was evacuated for remodeling I was one of the hundreds who attended the auction of the old furnishings. I scored one of the library newspaper poles used to display today's paper, which still stands in my office today - its sister is in a local coffee house on Hawthorne. My son was really disappointed when I dropped out of the bidding on one of the return book carts after it passed the $100 mark.
Circulating through the Library involves a pilgrimage worthy of a palace of books. This is an interlude on the main stair about when you realize that there is a mezzanine between the second and third floor, and that each floor itself is really a double-height space. While the interiors are plush, let's get real - that column is not marble, but sfagrito, an Italian painting technique to simulate stone. But the spaces are grand, so much so that my lack of a wide angle lens as usual leads me to concentrate on details.
Here you can get some appreciation for the size of the six reading rooms - you don't need to dust the top of those bookcases, which are clearly a good dozen feet below those monumental light fixtures. As you move through the building, other details stand out.
This is one of the columns in the Second floor lobby, before you confront the next stair. They surround one of the 1% for Art additions, a massive chandelier.
When you finally descend the stair with your armful of books, you can appreciate other details, like this newel post, while equivocating on the Grandma carpeting.
And even though you promised not to disturb other patrons with your camera (Don't worry, just another architect!) you can occasionally grab some of the action.
Well let's talk photography. These photos, (and there are too many more to show) were taken over a period of ten years, mostly because I happened to have my camera with me. Which is not to say that I haven't made attempts to improve them, or that these were not the result of extra attention in shooting or post processing. For example, here are three repeats which I believe are much better as Black and Whites, both due to the real paint colors and the fact that the "real" color balance in these interiors, which is a lot more cool, usually looks wrong. This is overcome in monochrome.
I happen to like these renditions better. You lose the wood handrails, but the column looks more agreeably sterner, and the chandelier is rescued from a certain gaudiness in the color version. Now let's take a look at my favorite image, the skylight. This skylight dome is not that monumental. It is at the top of the stairs at the third floor, where you literally get to choose between Art & Science, depending on the reading room you choose. The skylight is probably only 20-30 feet wide, and it looks smaller if you show the whole thing.
It covers the lobby that serves as the library's exhibition space, and if you look very closely in real life you will realize that it is at the bottom of a light shaft courtyard, with two more administrative floors surrounding the skylight above. Those are the4th and 5th floors on the elevator that you are not allowed to punch. Thus the frosted glass in the skylight. It also cuts down on the glare, which brings up exposure. Film or sensors, despite advances, will not allow for the dynamic range that our eyes can achieve, especially when you consider how our brains can "adjust" our perceptions way before we squint, turn away, or just accept that we can't look at the whole scene at once. The camera of course is not as smart, and we must make choices, because it does see everything at once.
This is the color version. Yes that white surround is now on the way to a sickly grey. But even here I'm not accepting the reality of the exposure situation.
Whoa! This is "reality." That awful beige ceiling color is back. The dome is revealed as not much bigger than the reading room entrance beyond. And what are those lights surrounding our skylight? And why can't I barely look at the glass or the trim on the shaft? It is paper white, containing no detail, because the camera wanted to show us the ceiling, and it can't look at both places without losing detail in one.
Now I hope you can see why the final image is one of my personal favorites. I've shown only a portion of the skylight, which allows the viewer to imagine an enormous dome, way bigger than our modest skylight. I've converted to black and white, removing both the hated beige and the sickly grey shaft. I have lowered the exposure a full two stops below "correct" because I couldn't care less if you see the ceiling at all - it's all about the skylight. You can now see the subject better than you can if you are actually on the third floor, because I have made my choice on whatI want to show you. Thanks for coming to visit, and I hope we can all go back to the library soon.
FEBRUARY 5, 2021
FIRST VERSION: FINAL EDIT
I'd like to discuss the topic of "working the scene." Photographers use this term in several different ways. Most of the time it refers to the admonition by experienced photographers to take some time to explore alternatives when you encounter a subject that you initially find interesting. This could mean moving around for different framing possibilities, exploring alternative exposures beyond the "correct" one, changing apertures or shutter speeds, rotating for a vertical crop,or simply crouching or climbing to change the perspective. Since you're carrying many expensive lenses in your camera bag, it could mean taking another one out. The overarching theme of all of these exercises is that your first take on the subject is probably not the most compelling one you can come up with, so don't go anywhere until you've exhausted the possibilities. Every photographer has a different capacity for this exercise before they move on to another subject entirely. This is most important in landscape photography, my specialty, (mostly urban landscapes) but it has its place in other photographic genres. You only take one portrait of a subject if you work at the DMV. Sports and nature shooters face the fact that you've got to shoot continuously to get the one shot you're looking for. But landscape photographers frequently drive themselves nuts looking for alternatives because so many other things are out of their control - the time, the location , and the weather being the three toughest nuts to crack.
Now of course serious photographers, especially those who have convinced themselves (if not their spouses) that they're out to make some money, tend to consider themselves more responsible for everything. If it's not the right time of day, come back at the right time. If the light isn't the finest it could be, come back. Similarly, you've got to choose the best season. And of course the weather, which you can't control, must be dealt with. Pity the poor photographer who must deal with the fact that they have spent their first week in Paris, they are leaving tomorrow, and it's time to go to dinner. This is the reasoning behind one of my rules of photography - the best photos of an area are almost always taken by great photographers who live there. The rest of us almost don't stand a chance, because we are stuck with the current conditions - we can't easily go back. The converse of this rule is that each photographer best work is probably close to home. This is true even if you are not religious about "working the scene" because there will be subsequent visits even if you are not obsessed with the subject. Some of my best images have been "grab" shots - not because the building moved, or I was on a bus, or the light changed, but because my long-suffering wife "grabbed" me because it was time to move on. Even when I declare that as an architect I could be actually "sketching" the scene, she says that I should take that up with my next wife.
Another day, another take.
So let's open the discussion to allow for successive visits to the same subject, in a more or less obsessive desire to "get it right." You need to combine an attempt to learn something from your earlier visits with a desire to try something different. So it is with my various attempts over the years to come to grips with the remodel of one of the federal office buildings in Downtown Portland.
The Edith Green and Wendell Wyatt Federal Office Building (let's just agree on EGWW for now on, OK?) is named for two former Oregon members of Congress. The building, like a lot of modern Portland office buildings, takes up the whole of one of our miniature blocks Downtown. It was a grim concrete office building, so mediocre that I wouldn't remember what it looked like if you put a gun to my head. In the midst of the Great Recession, the poor federal workers who knew what it looked like won the lottery. As a "shovel-ready" project, the long-planned renovation was put to the head of the line; its parameters were then advanced so that it would be as extensive, transformative, and "green" as your federal money could buy. The result was truly extraordinary, and I think it was probably the best thing that came out of the Great recession in Oregon. The HVAC systems and the facades were brought up to 21st Century standards, and the building's roof acquired what is probably the biggest south-facing solar-array "hat" your likely to see to liven up the skyline. Since the building was still the same square block, with a new glass face, the most prominent aspect of the remodeled building became how to shade those new glass facades. The architects had a field day, and the three different shading systems ( you don't need one on the North facade) became the highlight of the design. The East and South facades were mostly under control, with external shades pretty standard for current office towers, although they make for a nice play of light and shadow and reflections.
Extensive, but pretty standard, on the South Facade.
But the West Facade of the building was special. Let's talk about Western facades; they are critical in the Pacific Northwest, where the sun seemingly doesn't behave like it does "Back East" - and woe be the person who doesn't understand this when choosing an apartment or a house. As compared to the East Coast, it is pretty hard to overheat a house with too much glass in Portland, except for the Western facade. I say this as one who has done this twice, and as my wife frequently says "and an architect, too". Our first apartment Downtown was west facing, with a pretty view of the West Hills; unfortunately, the shades were permanently down from 2 P.M. on in a vain attempt to control the heat and glare. I then bought what can only be described as an example of a "stupid house" in Southeast Portland. Now we love our house, and it's probably the only correct economic decision we've ever made. It is a beautiful 110-year old bungalow; we're only the fourth family ever to live there, and we're not going anywhere. Its so prototypical of Portland that its almost a cliche, but it is on the wrong side of the street. Our garden faces west, and on the rare days when you want to enjoy it, it is literally impossible to sit back there. I was used to a climate where typically the day warms up to early afternoon, and then cools off. This is not our pattern - the sun takes forever to go down, and the hottest part of the day is the six hours where a western garden bakes until the sun finally goes down at 9:00 P.M. And an architect will tell you that western light is the hardest to control because horizontal shades have almost no effect as the sun heads almost horizontal towards sunset. Yes, you can roof the whole thing, or put up vertical walls, or plant huge trees or bamboo, but that doesn't seem to be a good strategy in a 25 x 40 foot garden.
Even more abstract.
So I've shown you three version so the Western Facade, and you don't even know what the hell you are looking at. Am I obscure, or what? The Western facade sports five vertical sunshade arcs that run up and down the entire face of the tower, extending a dozen or so feet from the building. These arcs form a vertical trellis with irregular vertical lengths of aluminum fins. The structural supports that connect these arcs to the building look like they contain more steel than the building itself to prevent the wind from blowing them down. The result is a varigated swirl of metal that covers the facade in an abstract pattern while allowing the office workers to see out, especially if they appreciate a forest of steel. The architects originally proposed this as a scaffolding for climbing vines to complete the green curtain, but I think they subsequently decided to restrict the greenery to the first four stories, because how the hell were you supposed to trim it further up?
A view from below at the entrance entitled "Vertigo."
This view might provide more understanding of the complexity of these arcs. Due to the recent "difficulties" at government buildings, you might not be allowed to linger any more at the front door to get this vertical view. You can see that this is not a simple exercise in metal, and that even four different views don't begin to cover the possibilities.
Initial unprocessed view of original image.
You can see that my initial take probably tried to control the highlights, and lower the blues to reflect a more realistic color temperature. The result was certainly more "green" although upon reflection it doesn't appear any more "realistic." The "coaster" square-crop doesn't seem to change much, since it's just a smaller portion of the same indecipherable facade. What's also funny is that my attempt to "straighten" the right verticals leads to even more skewed verticals to the left.
A few years later I decided to move my angle so as to show more support structure and thus more arc and underlying skin. I also allowed the verticals to "blow out" to emphasize their brilliance as opposed to the same steel in shadow. Sunlight and shadow also play a role in changing what is really a uniform glass facade. This view has become my favorite over the years.
I titled this version "The Gates of Mordor."
Here is an example of how raising the contrast to 11 can seem to convert an image to monochrome. Only upon closer inspection is the now navy blue of the windows revealed in the shadows. I admit that this is so abstract that the viewer only understands if they know the building. Which you do now, to some extent.
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JANUARY 29, 2021
Holyrood - final image
I have been lucky enough to visit Edinburgh on two occasions, once as a college student, and then again more than thirty years later when my son was finishing up his turn at a semester abroad. On both trips we didn't get to the Highlands because it was snowing, and the days were already short enough without venturing further North. This past year our chief Covid disappointment was that my wife had to forego spending a month with me at an isolated cottage on the Isle of Skye for nearly a year isolated in our bungalow in Portland.
Edinburgh is an absolutely delightful city for anyone who is not from Glasgow. The sense of history is constant, far beyond the usual castles and churches and what not - what can one say about a city whose "New Town" neighborhood is from 1815? My first trip included delights such as walking the Royal Mile and having my pick of the nicest sweaters that I had ever seen that were literally piled on the pavement outside of the shops. I also discovered a "magic telephone" for the first and last time - I joined a cue a block long at a phone box which somehow allowed all of the backpackers present to take turns making long-distance calls overseas on Her Majesty's dime, or whatever. My girlfriend, now my wife, was suitably surprised at hearing my blubbering as well as the entreaties of the bloke from South Africa behind me to get on with it already.
"Slate and Stone" - a view of "Old Town" from the castle.
When we returned in 2008 the city was even more charming to me because the scale was almost exactly the same as Portland. In fact if you change the beltway interstate around Downtown Portland for the remnants of the Medieval wall around Edinburgh, you would find about the same boundary size around the two cities. We visited Edinburgh near the end of the year, so we could experience Hogmanay, a Scottish rite that seems to combine Christmas, New Years, and Mardi Gras in one spasm of urban debauchery. We also got to stay in an apartment in New Town across from a park, with fifteen foot-tall ceilings, that I told the anxious landlord "would do" for the 100 pounds a night. We had a wonderful week.
Downtown Edinburgh during Hogmanay. Don't stint on the drink.
One of the highlights of the week was a visit to Holyrood Palace, at the opposite end of the Royal Mile from the Castle, where out tour guide had uncorked his well-rehearsed tidbit that the dungeon had welcomed many traitors, including one John Paul Jones, as guests of His Majesty. Holyrood Palace is the Royal Residence when the Queen visits The North on the way to her favorite castle, Balmoral, in the Highlands. We joined a tour of the place available when the Queen is not around. I must say that the Palace was not terribly impressive, especially the interior, which seemed at least to this observer as dowdy if not run-down. I snapped a photo of a nice central courtyard, which could have been lifted from a college campus, especially an exclusive college campus.
THE COURTYARD
But on the whole, I was unimpressed, and was taking a turn through yet another corridor, when I encountered an unsigned black door. I'm an architect as well as a photographer, and one of the unwritten rules of professional conduct is that until someone objects, you have the run of the place to "pursue your critical responsibilities." So I ventured to try the door, which seemed to be of the exterior variety, and rehearsed my surprise if an alarm greeted my insolence. I thought I might encounter another courtyard, a garden, or merely a car park. Imagine how I felt when I was suddenly alone outdoors here:
What have we here?
I had come upon the ruins of Holyrood Abbey, burned down by a religious mob in 1600 (I don't recall which sect was responsible). It was a strangely intact ruin, attached to the Place by that unmarked door, and while the roof and the windows were gone, I could stand under a porch and check out the place in the pouring rain. It's very hard to capture rain in a photograph unless that is your intention, but believe me it was coming down. As I moved around, I encountered what I considered this overall view:
First take
Of course I was impressed by the stonework, the remains of the window arch, and the tombs. I took a stroll and discovered that most were of Scottish Kings who ruled before the "invitation" to join England in the United Kingdom in 1707. But it was pouring, I was getting cold (my coat was checked), so I went back inside. Now, as a "professional" I can't believe that I didn't "work the subject" and these were the only two shots I took that day on my private excursion. I wish I had given the top of the arched window a little more room, but there you go.
I wish I could show you subsequent stages of post-processing, but having lost the "original" and thus lost the "history" of my editing (don't ask - just back-up, back-up, and then back-up again) I only have the first and last versions. This doesn't stop me from editing it again, or coming up with new versions, but it does prevent me from showing the process.
After some editing.
You can see that I increased the exposure to lighten up the mood and bring out some variation in the stonework. I also hopefully subtly increased the saturation a bit. This brought out the greens, especially the moss on the raised monument. I would point out that Edinburgh shares a climate with Portland - that green was there, and it was December 17th, after all. What you can't see in the shot is that I had to darken the sky a lot, since it was totally blown out. Since it was blown out, I didn't find any additional detail in said sky, but I at least gained some detail in the trees in the background. Sharpening helped a lot to bring out detail, especially in the stonework and the gravel in the foreground. Sharpening is very much to taste, although you can get better at it. The first thing you should learn, and most teachers forget, is that the first slider you should touch is the last one on Lightroom's sharpening panel - masking. Press this slider, press the option key (alt on Windows, and why don't you have a Mac?) at the same time, and move the making slider to the right, successive areas of the photo will now go black, showing you what parts of the photo will not be sharpened, which allows you to concentrate on what you want to sharpen without fear of creating artifacts in those areas of more uniform color and uniformity, like the sky, where sharpening should be avoided. Then use that same option key trick when you move the amount slider which turns your photo's view to black and white. The lack of color makes it easier to see when you've gone too far, as does increasing the zoom to 100%, which can reveal artifact creation a lot sooner. As with diet, moderation is usually the best policy, although one must remember that every digital photograph requires some degree of sharpening because of the very nature of the digital process
I'd like to point out another thing photographers must avoid, especially when they significantly enlarge their photos. I've printed this image at sizes up 12" x 18", and it looks great at that size, if I say so myself. Especially since the native resolution of my 18 megapixel camera is in the 8" x 10" range. And I haven't even applied any up-sizing programs yet, so you can print bigger than you think. The trick again is to view your proposed enlargement at 100% on your monitor, because that is the level of detail or distortion that you will see in the final print at that size. If it is unacceptable, print smaller. On the other hand, as you get bigger, other faults appear. My customers always exclaim how colorful and sharp my photo coasters appear, because they forget that they are looking at 4" x 4" versions - 24" x 24" enlargements are a horse of a different color. And of course we are all guilty of "pixel peeping" to varying degrees, risking touching large prints with our noses while inspecting details when we can no longer recognize the subject of a print. It's another rule of Physics - perception of the whole for humans usually require a viewing distance at least equal to twice the diagonal dimension of a print. Remember when your mother told you to move away from the TV - she told you it was because of radiation, but it really was proper viewing distance. If I got a larger TV, I would have get a bigger house. I have printed one photo as 4 foot square tapestry (don't ask) and it looked beautiful, but only from 40 feet away, which makes exhibition in an 8' x 8' booth problematic at best. I finally achieved the billboard effect, where a billboard photo appears indecipherable if you get close enough to apply graffiti.
Another problem that can appear at larger enlargements is "chromatic aberration", where strange color lines appear at the borders of sharp changes of color in a photo. Your ridiculously expensive lens is supposed to eliminate these, and it usually does, but then physics asserts its primacy once again. At 4" x 6" OK; not so much at 12" x 18". This is only important if you've spent good money buying or printing the image without examination beforehand.
Now this is at 100%, so i am being picky - but not if I am printing this big. Notice those ridiculous purple and green outlines at the window edges? You've just spent $200 for a metal print and I daresay you would not be amused.
CHROMATIC ABERRATION REARS IT'S UGLY HEAD
Ok, we've finally done it. Remember, at less than 1:1 at larger than 8 x10, you wouldn't have seen these at all. But don't you feel better?
This image has always been popular with my public. While it has not sold that often (it's hard to sell non-Portland or at least non-Oregon at Saturday Market) it is one of those images that does attract notice in my booth. And this is beyond the customers who wonder where they can visit this "local" site. While many people have been to Edinburgh, and some to the palace, I have only met one other person who has been in the ruined abbey - so my unsigned door might not have been in my imagination after all. Most viewers think the image positively oozes romanticism, but I admit I went into rare salesman mode when a customer inquired whether I thought the image would be appropriate in a funeral chapel. "Of course" it would, and then personally delivered a large framed print to the mortuary.
Finally, the black and white version, hot off the presses. We lose the green of course, but as usual monochrome emphasizes the forms, light and shadow, and especially the textures of the stone and the loose gravel floor.
So the next time you encounter a mysterious door, it might pay to see if it is locked. How are you supposed to know if there is a photo on the other side if you don't give it a try?
Holyrood: Final version
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JANUARY 22, 2021
"COMING HOME" : FINAL COLOR PRINT
I would like to discuss what I call photographic luck, which is embodied in an image which is clearly influenced by a conjunction of circumstances that include a large quotient of "luck" surrounding its capture. Every photographer has taken some images that to one degree or another has seemed "lucky", which usually include both outside events and their grace in humbly conceding that they took advantage of those events to capture a compelling image. These "events" can include anything from a pedestrian entering a shot at just the right time, to an animal making any appearance at all, to the clouds suddenly parting over a landscape, to the briefest smile on your toddler's face. The photographer then has to take advantage of the "lucky break", as well as learn how to increase their "luck" by planning to duplicate it in the future.
Photographers have wrestled with this concept for a long time, because most photographs are not created out of whole cloth, subject only to the whims and control of the photographer in the studio. They have reacted to luck in many ways. These range from the humble, and fatalistic, mantra of "F8 and be there" - ie., just show up ready for anything, to those photographers who try to pre-plan everything, now equipped with apps that will tell them when and where the moon will show up over Stonehenge, just like the Druid priests of old. And the same photographer will both acknowledge their "luck", while proclaiming their ceaseless attempts to "make their own luck". in explaining the "lucky shot", they will resist some of the public's belief that every shot is lucky, while flatly stating that they caught that serendipitous moment simply because they had been taking photographs "before you were born". The truth is obviously somewhere in between.
Now let's get to talking about a certain mountain of my acquaintance. I captured this particular moment on a flight back to Portland eleven years ago, and it has been one of my most popular images ever since. "Coming Home" came to be for a number of reasons. As usual, my wife and I made seat reservations with the hope of securing an empty middle seat on our cross-country flight. As we assumed our positions, and hoped against hope that they would close the cabin doors already, I noticed that the window next to my wife was the cleanest, clearest, positively virginal airplane window I had ever seen. I reached up to the overhead, grabbed my camera, and successfully entreated with her to take the aisle seat instead. I had visions of mighty rivers, skylines, deserts and other assorted topographic phenomena filling my image ncard all the way home to Portland.
In the years since I have done my personal reconnaissance on every flight, and have found that most planes seem to have one or two "newer" windows; obviously it's the luck of the draw. All you can do is reserve a window seat, not over the wing, and on the "right" side of the aircraft, depending on your photographic target. Inevitably your window will be as cloudy, foggy , and scratched up as usual. A few years after this flight I spied another great window which would soon overlook our mountains to the north, revealing a sister shot to my own, but it was across the plane and three rows up - and if I had gotten up, and announced that my fellow passengers must move aside because I was a "professional", we would have diverted back to Portland and I would soon be a "professional" in the hoosegow.
So I had my camera at the ready, I had my telephoto zoom lens on (the only one I own), and over the next five hours I waited. I knew that my lens hood would cut off a certain amount of glare, and that I would have to try to not touch anything, especially the window. Despite years of Kung Fu training, I could not levitate, but I could try to avoid the plane's vibrations as much as possible -don't touch that window!
OK, you are in a plane, these are nice clouds, but so what?
This was about as good as it got all the way across the continent. The seat-back map just showed me what I was not seeing while we traversed the country. What a bust. I could claim that I was at the ready the whole trip, but my frustration gradually led me back to pretzels and my novel. I gradually gave up, and then the captain announced we would soon be beginning our landing approach. Then the skies parted, the music came up, and I tried to control my excitement.
Initial vertical attempt.
I tried my usual vertical orientation, figuring that this would more easily avoid the window edge. I quickly realized that this shot required the landscape orientation, and that my zoom lens could avoid the window edges without too much trouble.
Initial horizontal.
Well OK, but I've got to get rid of that wing. We can't have people knowing we we on a plane, can we? So I proceeded to snap about another dozen frames as the plane moved towards Portland. I of course remembered taking a lot more images than I actually did over the next minute or so. Part of the problem was that it actually was a pretty bad day down there, so as we went along we were headed towards the clouds, and I gradually lost the mountain to the cloudy horizon. But I did get rid of the wing.
When I got home I surveyed my shots and found only one or two had been successful; it was only then that I realized that I had captured three mountains, since I had been so focused on Mt. Hood. Hopefully the pilot was about five miles away from the peak, which meant that Mt. Jefferson was sixty miles away, and that the Three Sisters were another sixty miles beyond, just peaking above the clouds. 125 miles in one photograph, and I soon made some changes in post production to deal with the problems that I discovered through research that affected most aerial photography. This image predates the "de-haze" slider in Lightroom (I'm too old-school to subscribe, so Lightroom 5 suffices) but I used the dual strategy of brightening the exposure and subtly increasing the saturation to achieve the same ends.
Fortunately the mountains are part of a range, so that the square crop required for my photo coasters still managed to keep all three mountains, just osing a little foreground and Mt. Hood's flanks. Over time, and familiarity, I gradually grew more accustomed to the square crop, and have sold about 449 coasters of this image in the last ten years, as well as many square-crop posters.
I also tried to evoke Ansel Adams with this monochrome version. I like the way it treats Mt. Hood, but I do admit that the other mountains suffer in contrast without the blue skies above the clouds.
Over those same years I have "lost" several metal prints to my own clumsiness. The only way to really damage a metal print is to drop it on concrete, and have discovered unbelievable ways to drop this print and others while at the market. Recent debacles include an heroic sneeze, as well as hitting my head on a table while getting up from below said table. I try to save such metal prints by suffering jibes from my printer while he nobly tries to crop the damage away. This 16:9 crop, the old Hasselblad Xpan panoramic camera ratio, is about as far as you can go before you lose too much foreground or heaven forbid, lost the the upper peaks. A 1:2 crop, which is what I usually use for my panoramic images, is just a little too wide.
This image has always been popular. It is one of the "billboards" in my booth, drawing in appreciative crowds, despite the ubiquity of Mt. Hood images in the ether. But I have discovered that it actually sells less than you would think, especially in heroic sizes. The only people who feel absolutely "compelled" to buy fall into two camps - those who have actually stood on the summit, and those residents who are about to leave town forever. These market segments are actually smaller than you might think; it doesn't help that most Portlanders are actually not used to this view of the mountain, since we see it from the West. I've had people actually argue with me, and it is constantly amusing to hear men mansplain to pretty young companions about the identities of these peaks that betray their ignorance of basic compass directions. The only thing scarier is to hear guys point out their climbing routes, since climbing the North slope shown here requires actually risking their lives. The wildest story I've heard was from the couple who bought my image in the late afternoon because they had climbed down from the summit of Mt. Hood that morning! And to think that some people think I don't meet the needs of my public.
Last thing - I would like to recommend a photo book very relevant to this post. Julieanne Kost, a long-time Photoshop guru and part of the software's development team, has written what I feel is one of the best essays on photographic creativity I have ever read. It is entitled "Window Seat - The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking". In it Ms. Kost, who has accumulated far too many air miles, exhibits her many window seat photos and more importantly discusses the pursuit of photographic projects in general.
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JANUARY 15, 2021
Today I would like to discuss what I call the "graphic" image. I do not mean images that are NSFW (not safe for work). I would describe a graphic image as one that is so direct in its content as to easily allow multiple interpretations without changing the essential meaning of the image. These interpretations are thus a matter of aesthetics, and while you or I might like one or another better, there is no "right" answer, and a lot of freedom to experiment before one goes off the deep end. Graphic doesn't necessarily mean "minimal", another category which is similar; but graphic images do not require the level of simplicity (or if we are being critical, meaninglessness) that a lot of minimal images exhibit. And I am a fan of minimal images! I think you know a graphic image when you see one because you instantly see how easily it could be manipulated without actually changing it.
This image is one of the most taken and iconic images in Portland. I hesitate to estimate how many exist. I myself have taken this shot, or something very similar so many times that in contrast to most of my photographic zen moments, I remember this shot as more of a concept than an actual photographic event in my life. In fact I have told so many of my customers at Saturday Market where to stand to take this exact shot, or had to wait while loading my car so somebody else could take the shot, that these instances have further clouded my memory of actually creating this photograph.
This image of the "Portland Sign" is now an historic image, in that this shows the sign in one of it previous incarnations. I took the photo in 2010, about a week before the sign was changed. The sign, probably one of Portland's first experiments with a big neon sign, was originally made for Domino Sugar, and somehow the outline of the state was periodically "filled" with neon sugar to amuse Model T owners on their way over the Burnside Bridge. The sign then passed to the White Stag clothing company, which removed the sugar and added the prancing deer to stake their claim. After the Second World War ownership of the old warehouse under the sign passed to Bill Naito, recently returned from internment camps for Japaneses citizens and subsequent volunteer service in the US Army in Italy. One of the Naito family's entrepreneurial efforts became a chain of retail stores that sold products "Made in Oregon". To promote the store, and Old Town, where he had purchased many run-down buildings, saving an entire neighborhood from continued demolition, he changed the sign again. By the way, any time you see a gold-lettered building in Old Town, it was one of Mr. Naito's; there are a lot of them.
Original Color
By the time I took this image, the sign had become so iconic that most people had forgotten its commercial origins, and considered it a state symbol rather than a private billboard. It had become something that just "was", like the "Citgo" sign that most baseball fans know as a symbol of Boston and Fenway Park, even if they have no idea that Citgo is an oil company. The "Made in Oregon" became so beloved that I don't remember how many prints I have sold that were destined for nurseries of proud Portland parents. I do remember how many times young ladies would suddenly show me their tattoos of the sign on body parts I normally wouldn't have been allowed to view. When Mr. Naito died, the University of Oregon did a very nice job in reviving the old warehouse as the new location for its architecture school's semester program in Portland. Then talk began on what to do with the sign. When the university broached the notion that "University of" might replace "Made in", suddenly people began to pay attention. And it was not just Oregon State alumni. Most Portlanders asserted their ownership, despite the fact that the real ownership, maintenance, electric bills, and whether the sign was actually part of the building below seemed to be lost to History. In the end, the reasonable compromise that replaced "Made in" with "Portland" was agreed upon; I don't remember how the legal issues were resolved, although it is obvious that Portland, rather than Oregon was the big winner. The State kept its outline, and the deer still romps above Old Town.
Now let's talk about my image. As usual, I go a little tighter than most, looking for some pop. I ignore, or am not cognizant, that I have cut off some of the sign. It was a nice day, with a bit of blue sky surrounding the usual clouds. The sign's painted colors are recognized even though the neon is not yet turned on. And yes, the sign is on a jaunty angle, but that is more due to my location five stories below than any artistic strategies on my part. I did choose the framing, the time of day, and managed to hold the camera still, but I dare say that this is just a nice snapshot. And it isn't even the only one available as a photo coaster, although in that category I feel it reigns supreme.
The monochrome version is a different animal. The level of abstraction is now paramount, even though it is the same picture. By removing the color, I have now emphasized the sign as a steel structure; the framework is now more important. Of course the power of print recognition in our brains make sure that the lettering is still easily recognizeable, especially due to the contrast with the lighter clouds in the background. I think I could argue that the lettering is actually clearer in the black and white version. This image is not just de-saturated; I worked pretty hard to make that blue sky as black as possible, which the conventions of monochrome allow even though we "know" that the sky is not black. I won't show you the many different monochrome versions possible with just a few moves of the Lightroom sliders; this is just the one that I chose ten years ago.
Let's look at several other versions of the sign I've made over the years:
Finally some neon!
A few years later I finally got around to taking the sign at night with my cell phone while I packed my car after Market. I was even closer, on the street instead of in the park. I converted again to black and white, since I felt all of the colors just confused the issue. I moved the exposure all the way to the left, rendering everything but the neon as completely black, since I wasn't at all interested in the warehouse and especially the obnoxious "To Let" sign that is covering the upper left portion of the left industrial window. The red nose that I brought back from the original color version and then saturated, is another part of the sign's tradition, since in December the deer magically becomes Rudolph for Christmas.
As part of the "Icons of Portland" series.
Recently I tried experiments with using gold leaf to try to create "individual" prints to sell my images as "one of a kind". This is a common dream among photographers, who search for an answer to the question "is this an original?" No it is a photograph! My usual answer to customers is that if they add three zeroes to the price I will eliminate my ability to make further copies; no one has taken me up on the offer. In any case, I have ended up just using layers in my computer program to add the "gold leaf".
Note the power of lettering - again unlit, and now backwards, but still recognizable!
A rainy Xmas a few years before.
A few years before I took this image on a nasty December evening, as I shivered on the Eastern end of the Burnside Bridge. I actually think this the best place to take the sign, at least pre-drone. It illustrates that focus and camera shake cannot ruin an image, as long as you "get the shot". On the other hand, I am now too smart to be out in the rain, by myself, on a cold December night, despite the attractions of a color balance that is clearly not of this world. I leave this kind of image now to the young guns.
Current version, at a different jaunty angle.
At some point my status as the worst businessman in Portland was finally overcome and I took another goodbye shot of the current version of the sign for visitors that didn't believe me when I said that my usual image must be of a different sign. I took this at "blue hour", the theoretically "best" time to take urban landscapes, since the city's lights have come on but the sky is not completely black. This shot is actually harder than you think, because the sign goes through a series of different colors and flashing states, so that for me this is an "action shot".
The monochrome "original".
So there you have it. A final word on the need to try to take an original version of a subject that is so iconic that it resists interpretation. It is worth a try, since its yours. And if somebody says that it is illegal to take an image of a public sign that is literally ubiquitous, that is somehow beyond the bounds of a photographer celebrating his city, well tell them you'll see them in court. I live in a city that actually "signs" its skyline, so that it is actually hard to try to take a photo of Downtown without actually including the sign. To say that it this shot is somehow out of bounds is actually begging for a Supreme Court case. "If it please the court..."
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JANUARY 8, 2021
" MULTNOMAH FALLS" - FINAL IMAGE
I'd like to discuss a massive conundrum in what we might call "the reason" of photography. Since it's creation, there has been a debate among photographers (and only much later, others) about what the heck we are up to when we practice photography. The basic distinction has been between documentation and art, or how much "truth" is being revealed in a photograph. Is the photographer merely a pusher of a button of a machine he/she barely understands, or is the photograph an image which is the creation of the maker, interpreting reality in their image, regardless of the actual subject?
Now we can get as heavy or simplistic as we want, but the basic theory of photography as an art is subtractive, in that the artist does not start with a clean slate, or a blank canvas. I am viewing the real world, and mostly deciding what I want to leave out of a photograph; the actual scene is almost always too confusing or at least unfocused, so I must try to simplify reality to direct the viewer's attention to the subject at hand. The beginner doesn't deal with this, usually only attempting to document that they were somewhere and took a picture - the selfie is just a less sophisticated version, proving they were there by putting themselves in the frame, making their presence explicit. Once a photographer realizes that they are capable of taking an image which is focused and well exposed, they then face the beginnings of the artistic dilemma - how and why is my image any different? And pray tell, as the image becomes more interpretive, at what point does it become so unattached to reality that it ceases to be about something that was photographed?
There are obviously different "rules" dependent on the individual photographer, and what they are communicating to the prospective viewer. These range from photojournalists, who are selling the "truth", and who rightly are worried about anything that might call the image into question - even if what they might do is routinely done to every other photograph ever taken. Cropping is a slippery slope towards eliminating the out of favor Commissar from the annual Red Square lineup; even exposure decisions can be "too interpretive". I've even talked to photojournalists who couldn't convert their photo to black and white from the original color because it "sent a message."
Some few photographs are additive - a still life is assembled by the photographer, and a product shot attempts to present as clear and beautiful a rendering of a widget as possible. Other genres are combinations - fashion images are selling clothes while trying to convince viewers that they will appear as absolutely stylish as the model 8" taller and 50 pounds lighter in that same frock. It is only recently that we've started to admit that even the most beautiful women in the world are routinely "retouched" so as to be worthy of our gaze.
Where does this leave the landscape photographer, who is trying to interpret a part of the real world for viewers who have never been there, or more frequently for people who have fond memories of having seen the same thing "in real life". Each person must make their own rules, or at least not try to obfuscate how far they have left the reality of what they saw behind. Everyone "frames" an image, leaving things outside the frame that will contradict, or at least not contribute to the image. Most people will manipulate the exposure to some extent beyond the "proper" exposure, especially since the machine is trying it's best to render the scene as 18% gray, which is why snow is often different shades of dirty white, even outside New York. With the advent of digital post-processing, photographers can now eliminate "distractions" along with dust spots - but they always could "dodge and burn" in the darkroom to emphasize whatever part of the image was important to them. Even replacing whole skies - substituting a dramatic sky for Portland partly cloudy - was anticipated in the black and white darkroom, and often didn't even register to most viewers. The skies in the original "glory shots" of the American West were so gloriously white because the photographic chemistry of the day was very deficient in rendering blue. When Ansel Adams interpreted the same scenes, somehow the sky became increasingly black - it wasn't bad exposure, but it was dramatic, and it became such a convention that it finally didn't look "wrong."
"MULTNOMAH FALLS" : A VERTICAL ALTERNATIVE
My modest rendering of Multnomah Falls is now in almost 500 homes around the world, mostly as a 4" x 4" photo coaster under someones drink. Why is it mine? Well I took it on one of the many trips I've taken out there, accompanied by family and friends and several thousand other people that day. Anyone with a camera has taken something like it, but I'd like to think that my particular interpretation strikes a chord somewhere.
"MULTNOMAH FALLS" - I FINALLY FOUND THE ORIGINAL COLOR FILE - DON'T TELL ANYONE!
It is timeless. There are people present to provide some scale, but no one is recognizable, even to themselves. The alledged subject is Multnomah Falls, but since I've left out most of the waterfall, the tallest in Oregon, you could speculate that I'm relying on viewer's memories to fill in the "truth" they actually saw on the scene. Or has the subject become the man-made intervention, the wonderful bridge that crosses the falls at the intermediate pool? As usual, at least for me, I've concentrated on a small sliver of the scene, rather than the entire panoramic view, which in this case would be a vertical panorama. I actually like vertical panoramas, very Japanese screen-like, but I chose not to go that route this time, for several reasons.The most basic is that everyone does it who can, thus making my potential shot even more identical to every other one in history. I mean, that waterfall is way tall.
I took a portrait of my old friend who was visiting and most certainly taking the same image of the falls - but just a little different.
Another Multnomah Falls portrait taken that day - but processed so that a young couple, my son and his wife, appear as "Ma and Pa" passing a landmark on the Oregon Trail.
The other problem, besides sheer boredom, is that the wide angle view almost always diminishes the awe one feels in a breath-taking landscape. In the attempt to "take it all in", the actual subject of the shot, what caused the "wow" in the first place, is so reduced in size that the photographer is unavoidably disappointed, even if the viewer doesn't know what they are missing. In my view at least the viewer is now looking at the bridge, which they might have even stood on (it's only about a ten minute hike), but they can appreciate the scale of the bridge, and "remember" the rest of the scene without seeing it. And if you don't think that bridge is important, google an historic image of Multnomah Falls before the bridge was built, and you will understand. Oh, by the way, I don't own a wide angle lens, so I can't take the usual image anyway, but one of the reasons I don't own such a lens is that I know my view of the world isn't oriented in that direction.
The image is square, like the vast majority of my images, mostly because I make photo coasters. God declared that coasters must be squares (or God forbid, circles) so the square crop became required, even though I can claim that I actually liked it before I made my first coaster. Some photographers even suppose that I am a long-time Hasselblad user, a Swedish medium-format square frame camera that was responsible for the views of Tranquility Base on the Moon. I only wish this was true, but a digital version costs more than all of the cars I've ever owned, combined. And if you are going to take a partial view of a very tall subject like a waterfall, it probably helps to make it square, rather than just a vertical that comes up short.
The Coaster Lives! And I sold a metal print of it yesterday!
Finally, my image is in black and white because I liked it better that way. The bridge was getting lost in all of the green. I could realistically manipulate some of the tones to balance out the image, which usually fails in color but is more than acceptable in monochrome. The image is now more abstract by removing the color, further from a snapshot, and now a more acceptable purchase, because the customer doesn't have one like that. And I can even maintain a certain artistic arrogance by not having a version in color, even though you wanted one. Of course my customers don't know that some idiot (me) lost the original color file, so the obtuse businessman they are dealing with couldn't even satisfy them if I wanted to. I JUST FOUND IT!
A year later I went back to the falls and somehow managed to stitch together three photographs for a twice-normal wide angle view - and still concentrate on the bridge! You can't keep an architect from contemplating the built environment, even in the midst of such natural beauty.
But the dirtiest little secret of this entire affair is that of course the reason this image is around the world is because of it's subject. Just because photographers want people to buy their images as artistic creations doesn't mean they aren't drawn to a certain subject. My Multnomah Falls might be better or worse than your Multnomah Falls, but they are still both about a beautiful waterfall. As Scott Kelby says, if you want to take more interesting photographs, make sure to stand in front of more interesting subjects. Only then can you interpret the scene that might be worthy of your efforts, and possibly of interest to someone else. See you at the falls.
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January 1, 2021
AFTER THE RAIN
I have finally decided to bite the bullet and try my hand at blogging this year. I'm interested in providing more content for my website beyond a portfolio and a store, and after a year of pandemic and the closing of Saturday Market, I'm trying to provide a way for visitors to virtually visit my booth and talk to the artist. I have always resisted the idea that only I could sell or explain my art, rather than letting it work by itself, but I have come to realize that people love to understand an artist's motivations and process beyond the silly artist statement.
I will use this blog to try to discuss a particular image, it's origins and the route to the final print. I hope the viewer can gain some insight into my motivations, techniques and artistic struggles by delving into the development of an image. I'm not an earth-shattering artist, but I have been taking photographs longer than most of my viewers have been alive, and I have been crazy enough to exhibit and try to sell them for more than a decade. I have sold images to people who have brought them back to homes in all fifty states and 58 different countries around the world, so I feel that a lot of people see their value and might want to learn more about my photography.
I am a self-taught photographer, constantly aware that I probably could and should improve, and also realizing that photography is both an easy and difficult form of art. Everyone is a photographer, but photography is very hard, especially as you improve and realize how hard it really is. Like most things in life, it takes awhile to understand that the process, the journey, is a lot more important than the final product. I enjoy taking photographs and working on images and I hope that comes through in my writing.
This image has always been very popular; it is also interesting in how it changes focus when it gets enlarged. In addition, it is something that is easily duplicated by other photographers if they so desire, and in fact it is part of what might even be considered a genre - the raindrop photo. Mine is not extraordinary, but it is mine, and has given lots of people lots of pleasure. That's all one can hope for.
AFTER THE RAIN : FINAL IMAGE
The image is titled "After the Rain"; it was taken on March 6, 2012 during a walk in Downtown Portland. What the hell is it? An artistic hint - if you can get someone to show even that much interest, you are half-way there. The only problem is to keep them interested in an abstraction, which most people do not appreciate, especially when you reveal what the image really is. And if you don't reveal the subject, it better be damn good to make up for your arrogance - we are photographers, not magicians.
The image is a photograph of a pattern of raindrops on a new type of bus shelter on the Transit Mall. These new shelters intrigued me as a citizen and designer, in that I had finally lived in Portland long enough to see a renovation of the original structures. As they were brand new, I was confronted by a virginal example, which had not been subject to graffiti of any kind. Although I must say that Tri-Met's anti-graffiti efforts, which involve artistic etchings into the glass to hide the original tag, have attracted admiration from transit agencies around the world.
The rain drops are not streaked because they were on a horizontal surface, the skylight of the shelter. Of course the viewer doesn't know that, and relies on the primitive parts of their brain to surmise that the black shapes must be trees on the Mall in the distance. A big part of the fascination effect (the "wow") is that we usually don't view rain in this way. I've frozen something in time, allowing for an inspection process that is not part of our ordinary world.
This wasn't that hard. It's just slowing down and observing, which is something I'm good at, and usually I am mostly confused at why other people don't seem to be able to do it. I guess I'm a better slacker than I give myself credit for, and most people have more important things to worry about than how pretty the rain looks on the new bus shelter. The critical decision here was the focus point, which I had to control - it's a different photo if the trees are in focus instead of the drops, and probably not as good. What's fun with auto focus is that you frequently have to fight your camera to achieve focus on what you want to be in focus, but that fight can itself reveal more interpretations. My camera is now considered a near antique, so it doesn't include 489 focus points or whatever, and things like Eye focus are even more in my dreams. But since most of my photos are of things that are far away, don't move, and don't talk back, I can usually take all the time I want to frame the shot, make exposure decisions, and hold still.
The framing was pretty simple, once I had as usual decided to remove most of the context. I didn't design the shelter - why should I care to show it in all its complete glory? When you are interested in details, like I am, the problem becomes how to make sure that you exclude anything you don't need, like the skylight frame. I did remove one small leaf in post-production, which bugged me but probably no one else would have noticed. The included blue sky was not really a conscious decision, but I like it, and it sort of reveals that we are looking up after all.
Another interesting facet of "After the Rain" is that it changes when you enlarge it. Most photos do not change very much - yes, a landscape can have more impact at a larger size by revealing more detail, and some photos do have a "best" size, but they usually are about the same thing. This image's subject changes as it gets larger. As a 4" x 4" photo coaster, it's about the original idea; it stays that way until about 16" x 16", when it becomes more about the pattern of drops; at 24" x 24", the subject has become the in-focus(!) trees within the drops! So I actually took a raindrop photo, which is about the raindrops as additional lenses for the subject beyond, without really trying, for better or worse. I can't show you larger images here, but additional crops might explain:
SIMULATION OF A 16" X 16" ENLARGEMENT
SIMULATION OF A 24" X 24" ENLARGEMENT
The subject of the photo has subtly changed, even though you could argue that the image was never really "about something." It certainly wasn't about the new bus shelters in Portland. But I will say that when this image is viewed in the proper context, like my booth on a typical "nice" day in Portland (only threatening rain) that it certainly catches the mood of our fair city.
Finally, what happens when you go even more abstract, by eliminating color? I did this for a customer who wanted a portfolio of black and white images.
BLACK AND WHITE VERSION
It's a little more somber, but the lack of color forces even more attention on the raindrops. I hope this has been interesting, until next time, Rich.
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