Tower Creek at Tower Falls - Redux

Censorship...

I've been running into a very disturbing issue the last few weeks. I read a lot ... mostly on the Internet. I read from websites across the political spectrum because I want to get a broad understanding of the issues and to remove, as much as I can, political bias from my reading. But something really sad is happening. Because our government is very conservative now, there has been a strong undercurrent to eliminate "fake news". Now, I'm a reasonably smart person and I have no idea how one identifies fake news. I don't think anyone really knows what this is but our president has been humping this idea since his campaign days. He doesn't know what "fake news" is either but, by his definition, it's anything that disagrees with his position (at the moment). Since he tends to be conservative, he thinks anything from a "liberal" or "left wing" website or publication is automatically fake news. That, in itself, is a terrible position for a whole host of reasons. But what makes this much worse is the attempts by social media and search engine companies (mostly Google and Facebook) to translate this desire to eliminate "fake news" into algorithms in their respective online environments. Google, in particular, has made major changes to their search engine and many of the sites I read are reporting that their content has disappeared from searches. Many are afraid they will be forced out of business because they are losing hits and, as a direct result, advertising revenue. If you are a conservative and are cheering this outcome, let me remind you of something ... liberal ideas are all that stands between you and disaster. Think about all the nice things you have in your life ... 8 hour days, holidays, unemployment insurance, workman's comp ... those all came into being because of some "lefty" deciding that workers needed a break. Do you really want to return to the days when Pinkerton detectives gunned down striking workers at Carnegie's steel mills? Now I will admit that liberals do get it wrong sometimes. Welfare was a disaster on many levels. But we need liberal ideas now more than ever. We face problems unlike anything from the past and, I'm sorry, conservatives have no clue how to solve them. Going back to the "good old days" is not an option simply because, first, the good old days weren't all that good for most people and, second, America isn't the same country that it was back at the turn of the 20th century. We absolutely need new ideas and new approaches to get past where we are. And those nasty liberals are the only ones who have the ideas and the new approaches. Sorry, but that's just how it is. Conservatives need to "tolerate" liberal ideas and even give them a chance to succeed. How much success have the conservatives had in solving the health care mess? Anyone? They come up with these disasters that will never work because they are so wound up with their "philosophy" that they are unable to even try new approaches. So we get these twisted train wrecks that will never solve the problem and will kill a lot of people in the process. I'm not a liberal, a lefty or a progressive. I'm not a conservative either. I'm practical ... I want solutions to problems. I don't care where they come from but I do care that they fix whatever is wrong. I hate wasting money chasing stupid ideas and I hate giving money to people who already have too much of it. Fix the damn problems!

Tower Creek at Tower Falls - Redux

Last time I put up a photo of Tower Creek in Yellowstone. It was a clear day and I got one aspect of the creek. This time I give you essentially the same image but with snow! Winter stays late in Yellowstone and, despite it being late May, we had lots of snow. So, 2 days in a row I visited the Tower Falls area and the same spot on the river. This is also a long exposure (121 sec) with my 10 stop ND filter. It was overcast so the image is darker but also very interesting. I love snow because it covers up so many "warts" in an image. All the broken trees evident in the last image are basically gone. This is a single image, worked in Lightroom to bring out the best. I hope you enjoy it.

Tower Creek at Tower Falls - 35mm,f18,121 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Tower Creek at Tower Falls

Tower Creek at Tower Falls

I've not been doing much with my Yellowstone pictures and I can't really explain why. I would guess it has to do with 'Y' being late in the alphabet and my catalog is sorted alphabetically so I always find another image to process as I scan down the listings. Seems kind of stupid given there are so many amazing images from there so I resolve to try and process more Yellowstone images in the coming days and weeks. There's really some fabulous stuff in those files.

This image is one of those great shots. In the northwest corner of the park the Yellowstone river runs through canyons and eventually reaches the "Grand Canyon".  Tower Creek breaks from the river and runs to the west until it reaches Tower Falls. Just above the falls is where I took this image. The creek is really wild there, crashing through the boulders as it rushes to get beyond the towers. The noise is almost deafening. I actually visited this place 2 days in a row because it snowed one day and I wanted to see what it looked like with the boulders covered in snow. That's a picture for another day. To find this place, drive to the Tower Falls parking lot. Just before you enter the lot you cross a small bridge, next to the visitor's center. This cascade can be seen from that bridge. You can work your way to the water by walking to the left end of the bridge and easing down the rocks. For maximum impact, get as close to the water as you can.

Whenever I get around water I always bring out my 10 stop ND filter because I love how the water turns soft and mysterious. This is a rather long exposure, 90 seconds at f/18, so any turbulence has disappeared. The contrast between the soft water and the sharp, hard boulders really jumps out. This is truly a special place.

Yellowstone River - 35mm,f/18,90 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Heceta Light - redux

Cassini's End

I don't know if you are a space nut ... someone who hangs on everything NASA and others do in space ... but you can't be uninterested in the Cassini mission to Saturn. What an amazing piece of engineering and human persistence. Almost 20 years from beginning to end and essentially flawless. And the science they accomplished ... it is hard to even comprehend everything they discovered. Such an amazing place with the rings and the moons. There may very well be primitive life on at least one of those moons. And what a spectacular place Titan has turned out to be. An actual methane driven atmosphere with a 'water' cycle of evaporation, rain and flowing rivers along with large lakes of liquid methane. There will be more missions to explore this moon and all the others plus someone will eventually put a probe into the Saturn atmosphere that can survive for some time and see exactly what lies at it's core. Put the pressures and temperatures are extreme so it will have to be a truly magnificent machine. I won't be around for it but my kids will.

Heceta Light - redux

Last time I showed you a picture of the Heceta Lighthouse, in Oregon. It was done using HDR and Photomatix. I had some major issues with that image and finally was pushed to make the leap to blending in Photoshop as a way of fixing the problems. In particular, when you use tone mapping to blend different exposures, major defects show up. For one, if there is any noise in the images, tone mapping accentuates them horribly until they look like popcorn all over your image. The only way to eliminate this graininess is to either noise reduce all the bracketed images before you run through HDR or to aggressively noise reduce the final image afterwards. The image from last time used the latter approach. But removing all this noise also softens the image and it just doesn't look all that attractive. Second, any dust on the sensor really shows up in the final image. I had to remove dozens of these spots from the HDR image. It takes time and the results aren't always that good. I have some images that I can't even show you because the sky is just so "dirty" from the HDR process that it's embarrassing. Finally, the tone mapping process distorts the true colors in the image and I often see sunsets that are just "weird" and not nearly true to what I saw. So, especially with sunrise/sunset images I have to find another process that isn't so brutal to my vision.

A few months ago I found a photographer who has come to the same conclusion. His name is Jimmy McIntyre, a scotsman. He tried HDR and was not impressed. He has developed a complete set of actions for Photoshop that make blending bracketed shots almost easy and the results are really nice. Not to say there are's issues but one can always find ways to correct them. I bought a set of his actions a while back (RyaPro) that are a big help and he's put together a complete course that you can buy at the same time that shows how to use blending to get really spectacular images. I'm not shilling for him and not getting any compensation for telling you about his stuff ... just pointing out a nice resource to make blending in Photoshop a bit easier.

Anyway, a few days ago I jumped into this whole blending process and ran the bracketed images of the lighthouse as my first attempt. It wasn't easy and wasn't without some issues but the result, shown below, is a big step up from the HDR image I showed last time (I've included both below so you can toggle back and forth to see the differences). Notice how much sharper the blended image is. There were almost no dust spots in the blended image and the noise was much reduced. Also, notice how the water by the white walls is distorted and softened in the HDR image. I see that quite often in HDR images and am not sure what causes it. Almost always shows when transitioning between dark and light areas. It's called a halo and is a big artifact of HDR. I've lost count of the images I've had to throw away because a halo showed up when I got into Lightroom.

So compare these images. Don't worry about the contrails, I just didn't take the time to remove them from the HDR image. But look at the lighthouse and especially the light. The red roof is actually red in the blended image, not magenta like in the HDR. And the sunset just looks more natural, don't you think? I really like how this image came out. So if you use HDR and it's not really making you feel great about your images, look into Jimmy's stuff and study blending in Photoshop. There are a lot of nice tools there just for this process. It's actually forcing me to learn how to use PS ... not a bad upside to the whole process.

Heceta Light - HDR version

Heceta Light - Blended version

Heceta Light

The Cleanup

Irma is now history, except for some lingering rain in the southeast. We dodged a big bullet as the eye went to the west of Miami, sparing the city a big disaster. But the flooding and wind damage in the Keys and along the west coast of Florida is still extreme and it will take years to mend the damage. Not going to get on any soapbox this time, just extend my best wishes and thoughts for all those who were impacted by this storm. I hope you can recover and carry on with your lives. But I fear that Irma is just the first of many storms that will pound the US and the Caribbean in the coming years. I know we are not ready for any of this. Our politicians and far too many of us have ignored all the warnings and now we face the future with our heads firmly planted up our collective a$$. Welcome to the future.

Hillary's book

I see that the Clinton has penned yet another book. "What Happened" without the "?" is a good title but she should have put that extra punctuation there because it really is a question. Not one she wants to honestly answer unfortunately. So vain that she can't look inside herself and see what a horrible human being she has become. It's testament to her badness that, even now, with all the bad stuff we know about Trump, there are still questions about whether she would have been worse. That's really sad.

Heceta Light

I really like this lighthouse. The location is spectacular and it's location high on a cliff gives it so much more prominence. I spent much of a day there, shooting and just drinking in the amazing atmosphere. I spent some time talking with the guides who give tours of the house and tell the history. They were very helpful in showing me a hidden path up the hill, behind the light. where I was able to take this image. It would have been much better had the clouds cooperated and the ever present jet trails not been there but one cannot control that which is uncontrollable. Vapor trails are now a fact of life that all landscape photographers have to deal with. I could go into Photoshop and remove them, of course, but it would be a long and difficult process to get right. I've seen enough photographs with "ghosts" in the sky where the process was not correct and I've done enough repairing of images to know just how hard it is. This is especially true around clouds. I'll probably take the image for a spin in Photoshop sometime in the future and, if things work out, I'll repost the results. I also want to try blending the images to see if the funny "halo" around the white base goes away. That's an artifact of HDR that is hard to remove. Blending may just do the trick.

Anyway, this is composed of 3 bracketed images, run through Photomatix to blend them together and then finished in Lightroom. Amazing location.

Heceta Light - 35mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 200,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Point Cabrillo

Hurricane Irma

I'm starting to feel like a broken record, always talking about hurricanes, but they are the number one topic right now. Irma is within hours of pounding into south Florida and I have every reason to expect this will be another disaster. Florida has been ignoring the threat for a long time, building big hotels and resorts right on the beach and draining the Everglades in the stupid belief that they will never be needed to stand sentinel against a big storm. Well, now they are about to pay big time. It will be truly interesting to see how much of south Florida is left next week. Of course, the pundits, who have little skin in the game, are convinced that this is just another storm like all that came before it. Rush Limbaugh, the mouth who can't stop "entertaining" his followers with one bucket of bullsh*t after another, announced that this hurricane was all a liberal fantasy, not real in any form, and then, like the coward he is, ran from his Florida home to somewhere safe while those who listen to his bile are stuck there to ride out the monster. If ever there was a case for muzzling someone, this clown is a prime candidate. People are going to die because of his lies and I think it's time for him to pay up. What do you say .... Rush? Willing to put your money where your mouth is?

As always, my heart and thoughts go to those who are being hurt by this storm. And I hope some of our lying politicians are watching this disaster unfold with a new awareness that our country and others need to start taking climate change and these monsters seriously. Maybe it's a good idea to abandon much of the low lying parts of Florida ... to let it return to the barrier reef state it had in the "good old days". Maybe we should reconstitute the Everglades too while we are at it. This storm gives us the opportunity to rethink our development practices and to not throw good money after bad in some stupid attempt to regain our foothold on the beach.

Point Cabrillo, CA

Point Cabrillo light is a few miles north of Mendocino on California's north coast. It's now a museum but still functioning as a lighthouse. The association that keeps it running is sanctioned by the Coast Guard to maintain the light in first class condition and they do an amazing job. I spent an hour talking with the keeper on site and he filled my head with all kinds of neat information. I took lots of pictures of the light and will, sometime in the future, put one or more here for your enjoyment.

This image is of the rocks near the light and it shows why the light is there. I wanted to really show how it must have looked to an earlier mariner, trying to feel his way up the coast in a storm and at dusk and what he must have seen. Those rocks and the crashing waves gave me the willies and I was on solid ground at the time. Imagine what it must have felt like looking through an old telescope as your boat pitched and yawed beneath you. Crazy or insanely brave they must have been.

Anyway, I took this image at f/22 so the exposure would be long enough to show the breaking waves as a mist. In this case the view is very ominous, as the dark rocks thrust up through the surf. The noise was deafening. Put yourself in that mariner's shoes and feel the pounding water and the salt spray. Makes you feel a bit queasy, doesn't it? A picture can do that sometimes. That's the power of an image. Grab hold of the rail ... it's going to get very rough out here.

Point Cabrillo - 144 mm,f/22,10 sec, ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Mirror Lake - Yosemite

Another Hurricane...

Looks like another hurricane is heading into the Caribbean. And another is forming in the mid-Atlantic. Harvey was a disaster for Houston and now it looks like this next storm will trash much of the islands from the Virgins all the way to Cuba before setting its sights on Florida. The disaster budget for FEMA is already deeply in the hole and our do-nothing congress doesn't seem to have the ability to forget the politics and just help. Worthless bunch of c@#p as far as I'm concerned. But, we get exactly what we deserve and these clowns are just about perfect. So much self-interest in the world right now. My heart goes out for all those who are about to confront this massive storm and the ones that come afterwards. It's going to be a horrible season this year.

Mirror Lake - Yosemite

I was in Yosemite for 3 nights and really didn't get very much done. Because it was mid-April much of the park was still closed off and I was confined to the valley for the most part. Did hike up to Mirror Lake which was certainly an interesting experience. It was very near my camp so I was able to leave the truck there and make the trip by foot. The bad winter in California had washed out route 120 so driving into the park had taken me into the mountains and on some really challenging roads. Probably a good thing for me as many visitors had not been able to make the trip and there were lots of campsites open for the taking. Anyway, instead of a large stock of images I got less than 200 for 3 days. That's simply because much of what I wanted to see was still closed. Oh well, maybe next year I can get back and do more. We'll see what happens.

Anyway, I hiked up to Mirror Lake which is at the base of Half Dome. It was before noon when I got there and the wind hadn't yet picked up so the lake's surface was fairly still. In some places I had to get out my 10 stop ND filter to get long exposures to smooth out the ripples but in this spot I was able to just shoot normally. If you look closely at the sky there is all sorts of debris flying around plus many birds aloft so there is plenty to see there. Also the lake was fairly dirty and you can see lots of junk in the water. The trees were just starting to throw leaves giving them a very yellowish golden color which contrasts nicely with the blue sky. All in all a very nice image. This is a blend of 2 images, run through Photomatix and finished in Lightroom. Very pleasant for the most part.

Mirror Lake - 35mm,f/18,HDR,I|SO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0