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

Cape Blanco Light

Politics in America

I've always been interested in politics. I can remember watching the conventions leading up to the second term for Eisenhower. I was 12 that year if I remember correctly. It was hypnotic ... all the pomp and bluster just enthralled me. I was really hung up on the whole patriotic thing when I was a kid.

Now fast forward to this moment. We have a certifiably insane person in the White House and a building full of crooks and liars just down the street on Capital Hill. The Supreme Court is a joke and the idea of being patriotic is more like a nightmare.. I haven't voted in years because it makes no sense to even make the effort when I'm given the choice between 2 corporate bootlickers who are essentially the same except for a few cosmetic differences. I'm all for gay rights and a long list of social issues but it's really hard to focus on those when the political elites of this country are hacking away at the very roots of our most basic liberties. Because I travel around a lot I run into the police state all the time and it's very troubling. Drive around southern New Mexico or Texas and you come across BCIS checkpoints where a heavily armed border guard asks you very probing questions about who you are, where you come from and where you are going. Getting in their face is an open invitation to trouble. Did you know that there is a 200 mile wide "rights free" zone all along the border? You basically do not have your constitutionally guaranteed rights whenever you enter that zone. You are well advised to not pick up any hitch hikers in that zone as they could be illegals and you might find yourself in a cell being charged with transporting illegal immigrants. Now, maybe you think that zone just applies to the Mexico border. WRONG! It applies to the entire country and think just how many large cities are within 200 miles of a border. Most of us live in that zone and don't even know it. So far these check seem concentrated near Mexico but it wouldn't take much for them to expand. We live in a police state ... a fact I've been reminded of on many occasions when I talk to foreigners as I travel around. They are very concerned about the "in your face" presence of heavily armed cops. Even the National Park's rangers are starting to display gestapo tendencies. Something you and I should be thinking about whenever we tell someone we live in "the land of the free, the home of the brave." Neither applies I'm sorry to say.

The Fallen

I'm going to be adding a new section to this blog the next time I head back to the states. I see a lot of homeless people as I travel around and I want to start documenting their plight. I have all my camera gear and an ability to approach people as I often look like them as I drive around in my ratty clothes and beat up truck. They are in desperate straits and only a few people, like Chris Arnade, are talking about them. They need more places that are telling their stories. So look for "The Fallen" when I make my next trip to America.

Cape Blanco Light

There are lots of light houses in Oregon. I guess in the old days there was a light every 30 miles or so but many have been retired. Some are gone, some are in disrepair and a few have been turned into tourist attractions without working lights. Cape Blanco is an actual working light as far as I can tell. It was running while I was there. No one really needs them anymore as most ships have good radar and GPS so they know their locations very accurately. But in the old days they served a big purpose. As a ship navigated along the coast, it could tell it's location by finding the lights and triangulating relative to several at the same time. Each light had a distinctive flash pattern combining time and color so a ship could tell which light it was. They saved a lot of lives. It's both wonderful that some are being saved but sad when one is allowed to fall apart. The US Coast Guard mans most that are still working but the original Fresnel lenses have, for the most part, been removed as they are often broken and in poor repair and there are no shops anymore that can supply glass segments. I'll have more on this in later posts as I work through my collection of light houses from this trip.

Anyway, this is Cape Blanco Light. Beautiful isn't it. The weather was difficult but that's when I get the best pictures. I always try to show more than just the light. I think it's important to show the context for the light's function. I want people to see the hazards too so they can understand why the light exists.

Cape Blanco Light - 35mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-|NC 4.0

Point Reyes Light

Further Update...

Unfortunately, still not sure what happens with trip. Had talk with wife about it and she is resisting very much. Seems my asthma doesn't matter as much as her inconvenience. I'm still going and it will, eventually, come to a shove on my part but I'll keep trying for a few more days to get it done with diplomacy. I need to get a few months stateside to find out what's happening and to let the dry desert air work on cleaning out my sick lungs. There's no other way, short of very strong and dangerous medicines, to do that. I much prefer the dry air, thank you very much.

Point Reyes Light

It's a long drive from rt. 1 out to the Point Reyes lighthouse and the road isn't all that much fun. There are many dairy farms along the road and one has to be aware of all the cows. Plus, the winds whip up sand and make the road dangerous along with it not always being a safe road with lots of blind corners and whatnot. After all that effort, you arrive at the parking lot below the light. There's nothing there but a driveway leading upwards and a very long and exhausting climb. By the time you reach the top, you're exhausted and hoping there's something worthwhile at the end. Imagine how disappointing it is when you finally reach the end and find ... this.

Point Reyes Light - 121mm(1.6 crop),f/22,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Not exactly a classic example of lighthousing, is it? The explanation is simple enough ... there was no need for a tall base given the light was already hundreds of feet above the water. And, according to the explanation, the trip to the light by mule team took a looooong time and it just didn't make any sense to waste all that energy on frills. So they built a minimal light, powered by coal and steam. It did it's job for a very long time and that's why it's famous. Add to all this the light was closed, in the late afternoon, so we (there were several of us who made the arduous climb) were forced to take pictures from an overlook several hundred feet above the light. It was a gray day (fog again) and colors weren't forthcoming so I had to make due with what I was given. This is a 3 image HDR and I worked very hard to find color in the final composition but there's just not much there. If I push too hard the whole image goes to hell and that's not going to please anyone. So you see a nice blue sign (bottom center) and some pretty rust streaks (on the light) and a bit of oxidized copper (roof vent on the attached building) and that's it. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. That's life for the photographer. That's why it's so hard to get that amazing image that pops. Everything has to be perfect and all too often it's not. But still, it's an OK picture, isn't it? At least the composition is good.