Rest Stop Redwoods

The Rains have Started...

The autumn rains have started here in Crimea. We go from not a drop in 3 months to daily downpours and the shock is major. My lungs, on schedule, have started to get really bad as the raw, damp weather soaks them to the core. I'm sucking on my inhaler in a somewhat wasted effort to keep thing working but it's only partially effective. If I keep to plan, in a month or so I'll start coughing up globs of goo and it'll be time to start seriously planning the next trip home.

Speaking of which ... I'm hoping to spend more than a month in LA trying to get enough footing for 2 videos. One will be dedicated to timelapse and hyperlapse where I'll really work on my technique and on covering as much of the city as I can. I'm creating a long list of venues where I hope I can shoot. I'm hoping to get enough footage for 8+ minutes which is a big deal for such a short time. The other project is my animation study and I'll be shooting more raw videos with the new Canon 5D mk 3 I'm buying. I'll use the Magic Lantern hack to get 14 bit color at 24p. The videos I've seen are amazing so I'm looking forward to testing that out. I'll also use some of the footage from the other project so I won't need nearly as much work but it's still a big undertaking. Along the way I'll also be shooting my photos so there'll be lots of raw material for my return in the spring. Should be an exhausting but exhilarating 3 months.

Rest Stop Redwoods

My last stop in California was at a rest stop near the Oregon border. It was an interesting stay for sure. I arrived late in the afternoon and spent the night. Now, I've pointed out before the restrictions on stays in California rest stops. They have an '8 hour' rule which means you are only allowed to stay for 8 hours in a single day. I planned on staying a bit longer as I wanted to eat some dinner and catch a good night's rest and take a few hours to get breakfast and fire up my computer to transfer a ton of images from my camera into safe storage. It was more like 14 hours but who's counting? Well, the guy who cleans the rest stop for one. As I was setting up my computer he wandered over and reminded me of the 8 hour rule. After a few moments to consider what he said, I told him I had no intention of 'living' in his rest stop and was just doing a few housekeeping chores before heading down the road. Also reminded him that it wasn't his responsibility or part of his job description to be telling me that ... he was, after all, the janitor. That put him off just enough for me to finish my work and leave. Arrogant little prick.

I digress ... what was unique about this rest stop was hidden behind thick hedges and trees. I followed a path through the trees to discover this absolutely amazing grove of mature redwoods and a world that couldn't have been more different from the asphalt and dirt of the rest area that most travelers saw. The colors were spectacular. So, being the photographer, I set up my gear and took some pictures. What a peaceful and amazing place this was. And the moss cover on the sidewalk was just icing on this marvelous cake.

Rest Stop Redwoods - 18 mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Horseshoe Bend Redux

The Russian Airliner...

The news today indicates it's highly likely the Russian Airbus A321 was brought down by a bomb planted in the cargo hold. I guess this isn't really a surprise. After Russia came in to help defend Assad it was only a matter of time until someone found a way to take revenge. The Arabs are nothing if not persistent ... especially the fanatics. I'm curious how president Putin will react. This is one of those times when he has very little choice. He can't admit he made a mistake and pull out. He really can only double down and keep bombing ... this time seriously targeting ISIS and their associated groups. He's walked into a quagmire (as did our president Obama) and now he's stuck. Funny how sometimes the enemy becomes your friend ... as now we see Lavrov and Kerry surgically attached at the hip and walking the same path together. Ukraine is forgotten as it probably should have been long ago. It was and is a mess with no easy solution. So now the US and Russia face a common enemy and an equally messy and dangerous path to vanquish this foe. It should get interesting as we go forward.

Horseshoe Bend Redux

Was going through my photos from the first cycle and came across the images from Horseshoe Bend in northern Arizona. This was one of my first panoramas and, although amazing, it was not the best work. Some of the colors were over saturated and there was distortion around the center feature. Not sure where that came from but it really damaged the overall image. I also did extensive work in Photoshop and I probably overdid some colors. So, I redid everything, using the techniques I mastered later in the trip. Went back into Photomatix and found a better set of adjustments and then, avoiding Photoshop except for stitching together the pano, I used Lightroom to find the proper color balance. I've gotten comfortable using the color adjustment tools and don't push the saturation nearly as much. I also let the depths remain somewhat dark although I did lighten things just a bit. This gives the image greater depth (almost 3D) and mystery which is something the canyon has in spades. I enjoyed my time in Page so much I may add this area to my second cycle, around the same time as this image was taken (mid-April). That was a nice time ... not too hot and not too cold. We'll see.

Horseshoe Bend - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/14,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Vidae Falls at Crater Lake

The TPP and our Doom

This isn't nominally a political blog but sometimes events happen that are politically driven and impact me (and you) in such a way that a protest must be lodged. I'm talking about TPP, the "Trade Pact" between the US and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. The text of this mess was released yesterday and it's a disaster. This clown (or should I say crook) Obama has produced an agreement that will, pretty much, destroy us all. It's all about corporations and their power. He's basically given them everything they want and more. Forget laws and the rights of the citizen to any protections. If a state legislature passes a law that a corporation objects to, they can take the dispute not to the courts but to a private arbitration board comprised of ... wait for the drum roll ... corporate lawyers. Who do you think these people represent? Do you think for even a second that their allegiance lies with the citizen and the state? Of course not. They make their living serving the needs and desires of corporations so they will always decide in the favor of their bread and butter. So any protections that threaten the profits of our corporate masters can and will be shot down. Forget environmental protections, forget worker's rights, forget any consumer protections ... they are all subject to this special, private court. Sovereignty is gone. For all your conspiracy types, this is your feared one world government coming in through the back door. Any country that signs on to this agreement will be compelled to do whatever the corporations want. Even simple municipal regulations can be thrown out and there's no recourse to correct even the most egregious outcomes. Corporations will have tremendous power to influence how government works. Is this really what you want? This is the moment when you need to get up off you ass and scream "ENOUGH". Write that worthless congressman and tell him that he'll be seeking employment somewhere else if he votes for this piece of crap. We need to make it very plain to these corrupt morons that we will not accept this sellout without a fight.

Vidae Falls at Crater Lake

I didn't know there was a waterfall at Crater Lake. It's not all that big or impressive but it's there. Take the rim road to the east (before you get to the Visitor's Center) and you'll see the signs for the waterfall. I like to use my 10 stop ND filter whenever there's moving water as you get such a creamy, almost misty effect. However, this technique tends to eliminate any structure in the water and that's not always a good thing. So, I've developed a technique where I combine a long exposure with a very short exposure (one that freezes the individual drips). I bring both images into layers in Photoshop and then use a simple adjustment of the opacity on the top layer to bleed through just enough of the underlying image to get both the creamy and stark together. I also did some contrast adjustments around the edges so I made the moss and rocks stand out and some Lightroom adjustments to bring out the colors. A nice image overall. You should try it if you have the filters.

Vidae Falls - 70 mm(1.6 crop), f/18, 50 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Griffith Observatory

Ideas...

This last week I've been concentrating on what comes during the next cycle. Right now it still looks like I'll head home in mid-January with the intention of staying until mid_April. I'm already starting to wheeze and suck on my inhaler more and that will intensify as winter approaches. Some things are very predictable, especially my health and how my body reacts to certain irritants.

I'm still pondering exactly what the agenda is once I arrive. LA plays big in all my thinking so I'm working on the tasks to accomplish once I'm on the ground there. There's a big video to film and tons of images to be taken. I'm looking at high quality videos from the new 5D Mk. 3 along with timelapse and hyperlapse sequences. I've also been looking at Blender a lot this week ... for those who don't know what that is I'll give you the short explanation. Blender is a 3D modeling application (free as it's open source) which can create entire stories in virtual reality. Think about any of your favorite fantasy movies (Terminator, Transformers ... you get the idea) and those fantastic creatures were all modeled in programs like Blender. I've been looking to see if it's possible to create a virtual human who can be my homeless lead. Why, you ask? Because it's easier to get a virtual human to do the things I want him to do than it is to get a homeless guy to do. The homeless tend to be somewhat unreliable and difficult to manage. They tend to do what they want to do and aren't really interested in listening to (or following) someone else's direction. There's also the risk issue ... working with the homeless can be dangerous as they tend to be unpredictable. Drugs and alcohol can make them crazy. And I have a lot of equipment which I'd like to keep. So a virtual actor has some appeal. I'll gauge the situation on the ground when I get there and decide which way to go based on who I find. But I want to be prepared should the facts dictate using the virtual character. So I've gotten a human 'rig' (from a free software called MakeHuman) that allows me to design the character I want and then bring it into Blender. I've already created "Screw" (my main character) and am now working to improve him so he's fully rigged (able to move) and looks almost believable. It's a lot of work and there's a ton of stuff to learn so I'm very busy these days.

Of course, there's also those photos to take so, while I'm in LA, I'll be using my spare time to visit interesting locations and to get amazing images. I'm also intending to work on my TL and HL sequences as they can be interesting and challenging. Learning new techniques is never going to stop as long as I'm still breathing.

Beyond LA things get a bit more iffy. I want to visit lots of places throughout southern California and Arizona in the time I have left. At the very least I want to see Joshua Tree, Death Valley and the White Mountains in CA and maybe a return to several places in AZ. If I have time I may work further north but I don't want to duplicate the 10K mile wander I did last spring. That's just too hard on me and my truck. I may also just hunker down in either Joshua or Death Valley for a while and work on all the images and videos I'll have accumulated in LA. I need to do preliminary screening and color correction on all that stuff. So it's highly likely I'll get a place in either park and just spend most of my time doing that. Maybe a week or more. This may change but the basic framework seems to be gelling nicely.

Griffith Observatory

During my stay in LA I spent several afternoons and evening in Griffith Park. The Observatory, high on a hill overlooking downtown, is especially interesting. Edwin Hubble did all his groundbreaking work there (yes, that Hubble from the space telescope fame). It's now a major attraction in the city and every night it fills up with an overflow crowd who come to see the amazing views of LA and the Hollywood hills.

The last night I spent in LA I decided I wanted a timelapse sequence that combined the observatory and downtown. To do that I had to walk a steep road high into the surrounding hills. As I'm asthmatic it was a challenge but I took my time and manged to find the perfect place. I set up the camera with my telephoto lens at 70 mm focal length and framed both locations. The sky was filled with clouds and the threat of rain was ever present but I felt getting the sequence was too important to worry about some water. As the sun set I started shooting and this went on for about an hour. I got some really nice images. This is the last image in that sequence. If you look carefully there's rain already falling downtown. I grabbed the camera and walked 'briskly' down the hill, arriving at my truck just as the sky opened up. It wasn't rain ... it was buckets of water and soon the road was a river. I sat patiently, waiting for the deluge to stop and then headed out of the city and toward the coast.

Griffith Observatory - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/11,13 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

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