Winter Wonderland

The Most Expensive Photo Ever

I read yesterday that a photographer, Peter Lik, recently sold a photograph for a whopping $6.5 million. The buyer is, of course, anonymous (if I'd paid that kind of money for this B&W photo I'd want to stay safely in the shadows too). The photo was taken in Antelope Canyon, Arizona and shows a dust cloud, shaped vaguely like a human form, being illuminated by a beam of light from above. Quite frankly, I've seen better and more pleasing images taken in roughly the same place and they've not sold for anywhere near that amount. I don't know much about Lik other than he's a very aggressive character who has several galleries around the world where he sells his images for very high prices. The approach uses high pressure sales techniques and targets the less than knowledgeable 'walk in' trade. He sells limited edition (if one can call 950 copies limited) and increases the price for each image as the number remaining dwindles. It's brilliant marketing but I'm not sure it's fine art. The article I read (can't find it again unfortunately) was highly critical of both this piece and his tactics in general. I can't comment on any of this but do find the idea of pressuring buyers is unethical at the very least. Of course, it's always nice to see photos sell for high prices but one hates to draw negative attention to the business as it hurts all of us. I'm not sure yet what the long term impact will be but wish the photographer's reputation didn't lend some uncomfortable color to the record.

A Strange Snow Day

Although Crimea is in the extreme south of Russia (as of last spring we're no longer part of Ukraine ... that's another interesting story I'll probably tell over time in this blog) but we get some very brutal winter weather. Earlier this year it was -27 degrees C (that's -17 degrees F for the metrically challenged) and, damn, it was cold. The tears froze on my cheeks as I walked our dog. Anyway, most of the time it's a bit milder and we get snow. One morning I went outside to walk the dog and discovered that sticky snow had stuck to all the trees but was mysteriously missing from the ground. I assume the ground temperature was just above freezing and the snow melted on contact but the trees had gotten cold enough to capture and preserve the snow as it fell. The effect was magical and I spent a long time wandering around, enjoying the beauty of the moment (fleeting as it was ... in a few hours the wind had knocked most of the snow down). When I got home I took my camera and shot down on the trees from our eighth floor flat. The image below was the best of the lot.

It was a dreary day and the initial image wasn't too exciting. The histogram was a single, broad hump near middle intensity with some strong side lobes at lower values. To fix this I created a luminescence mask that selected the snow and used a neutral overlay layer and a white brush to selectively paint in the highlights. When I finished I had 2-humped camel histogram which was what I wanted. My final step was to change the image to B&W.

I love how the main vertical branches seem to disappear into the dark background, as if the tree is floating in the darkness. It gives an ethereal quality to the image. The random scatter of the branches gives the image a surreal quality that I find very appealing. What do you think?

Winter's Beauty - 70 mm (1.6 crop), f/8, 1/20 sec, 100 ISO (license CC BY-NC 4.0)

Drifting as a way of life

I grew up in the Midwest, around Chicago. My childhood was anything but normal as both my parents died before I turned 10 and I wound up in a orphanage (they liked to call it a 'children's home' but under the covers it was very much a warehouse for lost, abandoned kids) until I graduated high school. Fortunately, one of the few perks from living that misery was they agreed to pay for my college education so I worked my ass off and eventually earned an engineering degree. I was a pretty good student which got me an invitation to Stanford where, after 4 years of hard work, I wrapped my hands around a nice piece of parchment declaring that I was a "Doctor of Philosophy" in engineering. The future looked very bright in those days.

But ... there's always a but isn't there ... I was a certified flake and had the attention span of a gnat. I'd work on some project for a few years and then grow bored until I got tired and angry and burned the bridges down as I left the place. I've done just about everything you can imagine over the years which is good for keeping your interest peaked but not great for building a long-lasting career. So you see, wanderlust is in my veins. I hate long-term commitments and the idea of staying in one place for an extended time really makes me itch. That's why wandering seems so interesting to me. I can stay just a long as I want and then move on. Maybe I'll shoot Death Valley for a month, working the options to exhaustion and then move down the road to someplace else for a few days or a few weeks. Maybe I'll chase storms in the spring (not looking for tornadoes but taking pictures of the awesome wall clouds that form ahead of the front) or maybe I won't ... whatever I feel like doing at that moment. Not having thick roots lets me quickly pack up and head to the next opportunity. My only aim is to take pictures ... lots of pictures ... and improve my skills and the quality of my images. And to end the day exhausted but happy.

A Sunset Worth Keeping

My wife lives in Crimea ... yes I was here when the little green men showed up and maybe someday I'll tell you about it. Her flat is on the eighth floor of an old soviet-era apartment block. My little balcony office faces west so I can see the sunset every evening. Unfortunately, Crimea isn't really a good place for sunsets. It's either no clouds or so overcast you can't find the sun so a spectacular sunset is a really nice departure. I was working on some pictures when I noticed that my office was turning a very intense shade of red. Opened the curtains and the image you see below blew my socks off. Quickly set up the camera on a tripod and snapped of a dozen images at various stages and orientations as the sun disappeared behind the buildings.

There's one big problem with the image ... you can see it in the first panel below (the raw image with minimal processing). They love to string wires between the buildings and the sky is absolutely filled with these image killing lines coursing back and forth. Some are even worse because the lazy workman skimped on the cable ties and you can see big loops of black cable everywhere. Fortunately, several hours in Photoshop with the spot healing brush and the cables are all gone. It's not perfect as the healing brush does impact the underlying image but still a much better image in the end. A bit of final tweaking and the bottom image is the result. Man how I hate wires in my pictures.

Original Raw image - 70 mm 1.6 crop, f/16 (-2/3 ev compensation), 1/50 sec (license CC BY-NC 4.0)

Crimea Sunset - same as above (license CC BY-NC 4.0)