King's Canyon Cliffs

Things are getting Strange...

If you've been keeping track of the news, you know that Russia is sending equipment and some troops to Syria. You also know about the disaster that's happening in Europe with all the refugees. As I'm in Russia right now (Crimea) I get these stories every day, with a Russian slant. Fortunately, the government hasn't limited my Internet (yet) so I can also read the Western press to get another perspective on these events. It would appear the two sides are headed for a collision, like two big horn sheep smashing heads. The noise is almost too much to bear but it's the underlying heat I worry about. There are too many hard heads and hardened positions at play in this mess and I really am concerned that the two sides may be getting themselves into positions where they have no reasonable way out. If Russia actually puts ground troops and jet fighters in Syria (a real possibility from the chatter I hear) they will cross a Rubicon that the West  has indicated is unacceptable. It could very easily lead to confrontation in the air at the very least as there are American jets (among others) bombing across the country. Russian pilots are highly trained and very effective and there would most likely be casualties on both sides and lots of destroyed hardware. What will these two bulls do in that case? There are massive egos involved and too much political capital to be lost should one of them back down. This is how wars start. It's getting very hairy around here and one false move could spell disaster. If you are religious, now is a good time to start praying.

Sometimes the Best Plans Run Astray...

It's funny but cameras sometimes don't see the same scene as the human eye. It may be the transition to 2D which flattens the image or it might be color and light ... sometimes it's not even obvious why the image from the camera is so different from what you remember. Today's image is a perfect example of this phenomena. I was in King's Canyon National Park (near Sacramento), traveling along the King River. There's a spot, about halfway between the park entrance and the far end of the road where a massive cliff rises from the valley floor to tower over the road. I noted this spot on my way in and, while driving out, stopped to take an HDR panorama. The cliff was super impressive with lots of texture and color. Down at the bottom, perhaps a 1000 feet below, was the river, raging through the narrow gorge. It was a really impressive spot. I grabbed the camera and tripod and very carefully crawled out on a narrow and dangerous ledge so I could shoot down into the canyon as part of the pano. The ledge was covered with loose gravel and dirt and I was very concerned that I might slip. But I felt the scene was too impressive to just back away. So I clung to the ledge and very gently took my pictures. I put them in my computer and waited for a time when I could process them into a majestic picture.

Jump forward a few days. I finally found time to set up the computer and did the usual work of merging my images into HDR and a huge panorama. Because the images were from the cliff face the pano software had a hard time finding matches. It took over an hour to get a final image. Imagine my disappointment when it finally emerged. To say it was lifeless would be an understatement. Several issues came to light ... first, the river all but disappeared in the distortions created by the panorama. What was an impressive torrent became an afterthought in the final image. It all but disappeared. And the cliff ... well, let's just say it was less than earth shattering. What I saw was a bland wall of gray with a few colors and one or two plants. Nothing like the massive stone wall I'd photographed. Maybe if I'd taken another row higher up, showing some sky, it would have impressed me more. who knows. So, disappointed, I put the image away and forgot about it.

King's Canyon Cliffs

A few weeks ago I was working through my backlog and came across the cliff picture. It was still bland and disappointing but I saw a glimmer of hope. Back into Lightroom it went and I started manipulating all the sliders I could find to see if something, anything, would emerge. Lightroom gives you a lot of power to tug and coax color out of your photographs. I didn't add anything (cheating) but used every bit of latitude Lightroom gave me to get an image that's not only acceeptable but even a bit tantalizing. This is, at some level, the image I remember as I clung to that ledge. It's not perfect but still ... perhaps worth teetering precariously above that abyss after all. I'll let you decide.

King's Canyon Cliff - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Los Padres Sunset

DaVinci Resolve

I've been spending the last week learning about new things. Lots of reading from the internet and dipping my fingers gently into new software. All in preparation for the next cycle when I want to get more heavily into video and extend my mastery of the photographic and the moving image. I'm not sure yet what type of project that will be but it happens in and around LA. I'm narrowing my choice for the next camera (hint ... it's between the Canon 5D Mk 3 and the Sony A7 Mk 2). I'm convinced I want to stay away from the really high resolution rigs for now as they are 1) very expensive and 2) fraught with issues. With the 5D Mk 3 I can get reasonable resolution (22.1 Megapixels) plus can install Magic Lantern and get 14 bit raw video at HD resolution and up to 30 fps. Imagine ... video with higher color depth than a professional movie camera costing a large fortune. I've seen some of the video from this hack and it's almost orgasmic. And I can color grade it in DaVinci Resolve (lite for now as the full package costs almost a grand). So, for the last several days, I've been reading and playing with a very powerful and capable system to color correct and grade my footage. It's not for the faint of heart as the software is the exact same code used by the major studios to grade their movies. But mastering this package gives me the ability to really extract the maximum from that raw footage. That's if I get the Canon ... no such capability from any of the Sony cameras unfortunately. All 8 bit and that's not all that good. One would get the impression I've made up my mind ...

Los Padres Sunset

I drove the California coast from north of LA to almost Eureka and saw an amazing number of beautiful shots. I've got thousands of images to work through and that's going to take some time. But one of the best images came from an overlook in the Los Padres National Forest somewhere south of Big Sur. I was just driving along the coastal road and came upon this place. As is always my way, I parked the truck, ate some lunch and took out my tablet to read while awaiting the sun's end. One never knows what to expect as the afternoon drags on ... will it get too foggy or will all the clouds disappear or ... will everything come together and give me a special image to capture. That's what makes this business so interesting and so damn frustrating. I've read stories of photogs who hung out in one place for days awaiting that perfect set of conditions. I didn't have time for that this cycle but next time I'll be doing just that ... spending days in one place, taking the same images each time but waiting for the best conditions. I'll be covering southern California very thoroughly so expect some really interesting results.

Anyway, this is an HDR panorama of the little bay as the sun set behind some really nice clouds. It wasn't exactly stormy but could have been. I think the plants at the bottom are a form of sage which was blooming at the time. It's always nice to have living ground cover instead of ugly rocks. Would have been nicer with some waves but one can't be too choosy given I only spent one afternoon there. So, grab a beer or something more refined and sit back to enjoy the view.

Los Padres Sunset - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Santa Monica Pier

Burning Man is Over

I guess the latest burning man ended on Sunday. I've always wondered what it would be like to spend a week in the dust and heat of summer Nevada with 70K other slightly crazy people. I've heard it was much better before it became a success so maybe I'm not really missing anything. That's always the problem with these things ... they start out as really cool ideas and then, because they're cool, they become popular and then mainstream and then ... they're toast because all the people and all the expectations destroy that which made them good in the first place. Every festival like this should have a limited shelf time ... a few years ... and then should be discontinued as a bad idea. Nothing good lasts forever. Humans attach themselves to anything that's too good and destroy it. So it is with burning man ... the extremely wealthy carve out their own little 'gated community' and fill it with million dollar buses and keep everyone else out and ... ruin the whole thing. There ought to be a rule that excludes anyone with too much money. Can't the rest of us 'little people' have something that's exclusively ours?

Santa Monica Pier

It's probably one of the most photographed ferris wheels in the world. Right on the beach, just below the million dollar flats and expensive homes and high class hotels ... there sits the pier. It costs a lot of money just to park there for a few hours. Fortunately, for us photographers, that's not a big concern. The parking concessions shut down around 7 at night and don't start up until well after sunrise so I was able to skip most of the costs. But I had to walk a long distance with my heavy equipment so that's the trade off one has to make. Anyway, I got to the beach just after 7 and lugged my gear down the beach sidewalk until I was pretty close to the pier. Most people had already abandoned the beach and most of the exercisers had already finished their routines and headed for the showers so it was just me and a handful of other photogs wanting to get that signature image. In the spring there's already afternoon fog so getting a blazing sun behind a thin layer of clouds is a long shot at best. And, the air is already pretty heavy with smog so it's problematic one can get that iconic shot. So I put the 70-200 f/4 on the camera and concentrated on the pier. It's really quite colorful with the lights on the wheel and the brightly painted rollercoaster so there's plenty to please the eye. It's a 3 exposure HDR and finished in Lightroom. I worked with the sliders quite a bit to bring out the colors. Hope you enjoy the ride. Keep your arms and legs inside the car at all time and absolutely don't scream!

Santa Monica Pier - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/11,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0