Lebec Cloud Formation

Tweedledum or Tweedledee?

I'm not real political as a rule. I hate getting my hands dirty in the shit that passes for discourse these days. In my opinion we've not had a good president since FDR and he was really a great leader by accident. A smart man, something quite lacking in most leaders unfortunately, he realized that in order to save capitalism and the US he had to make major changes in the way the government worked. He put his personal interests aside and did what he felt was right for the country. Such a noble act. His actions brought us back from the depression and guided us through most of the war. But since his time we've had a string of crooks, opportunists, grifters and simpletons. We've seen these clowns take a great nation and make it into the laughing stock of the world. Living in Europe I get to see this up close and personal. But nothing prepared me for what we have now. We get to choose between the ultimate grifter and the buffoon. Between the ultimate insider and an 'outsider' who is more inside than even Hillary. Both so obscenely rich that they are absolutely disconnected from the daily existence of all but the most wealthy. I'm so disgusted with them that I'm not even making the effort to vote. It really doesn't matter anymore who is president. Neither of them will be effective as the real power behind the throne sits in the C-suites of major banks and corporations. Big money and large corporations are in control now. In control, that is, until they run the whole mess off the cliff. The idea that only the investor matters is so corrupt and stupid that it's laughable were it not so tragic. Greed is not a good basis for society ... sorry Gordon Gecko. We all live on this rock ... a small, fragile stone circling a minor sun in a minor galaxy. It's all we have and we're destroying it so a few people can grab even more obscene wealth. But when the wheels come off ... and they will come off pretty soon ... all that money won't be worth anything. Sorry to be so negative but that's our reality.

Lebec Cloud Formation

When I'm in LA, especially in the northern suburbs, I drive north up I-5 to a rest stop near Lebec to spend the night. It's only30 miles but seems light years from the frantic climate in the city. The air is cleaner, there's open sky and I can let my system wind down just a bit. Round trip burns about 4 gallons of gas in my little truck so I save quite a bit over even the cheapest motel and I don't have to take all the gear out of my truck. All in all a good deal.

Anyway, this last trip into LA I was sitting in my truck reading on my tablet. It was just after 8pm. I happened to look up to the north and saw this cloud. It was amazing and the most unusual formation I've ever seen. I grabbed the 60D with the telephoto zoom and walked out into the surrounding brush. I tried to take a timelapse of the cloud but something wasn't right as I found major fluctuations in the exposure levels between shots. Even using my custom deflicker program I was unable to stabilize the footage so, for now, it's going to wait until I can figure out a way to fix the problem. But I did get some excellent stills of the cloud. It had formed over a series of low hills just to the north of my location. I'm not sure of the dynamic but have to assume there was some striation in the upper level winds interacting with the wind deflecting off the hills. The cloud was quite fluid and dissipated over a 40 minute period. The sun was setting to the west (to the left of the frame) and much of the fluctuation, I think, is the amount of light being reflected by the ice crystals in the cloud. The color changed too as the sun set over the coastal mountains. It was an amazing sight for sure. Anyone out there who can offer a reasonable explanation for why this happens?

Lebec Cloud Formation - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/11,1/250sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Mono Lake Tufa

Update

It's been almost 3 months since I came back to Crimea and a few things are becoming clear. The love affair between the folks here and the Russian government is ... let's be blunt ... on the rocks. Prices have gone through the roof so bad that people from Moscow and St. Petersburg are complaining about how much it costs to vacation here. Food prices are obscene and the government keeps raising the costs of utilities and other fees to the point where it's not even funny. People can't afford these prices and so many of our friends are struggling right now. It is now obvious that the crooks are in control of the economy and much of the life here. We have an election coming up in September but no one expects anything to change as the ruling party ... Russian Unity ... will not allow anyone else to gain power. I'm not sure where this goes but it has to improve or some serious conflicts are almost a given.

Adding to this irritation is the ever worsening asthma. Despite using a very strong steroid inhaler I'm still chronically short of breath. This leads to fatigue and a lack of desire to really do anything. Anyone who has asthma knows what I mean. I'm sleeping 10 hours a night and exhausted by early afternoon after only a few hours of exertion. Not sure what I can do ... can't afford the obscene prices the vulture drug companies are charging for some of their more exotic inhalers ... even here in Russia where the government controls prices to some extent. I'm really concerned about what happens once the summer is over and the fall allergens start popping up. Last year my problems started in the fall and got progressively worse into the winter but this year I'm already beyond where I was last year. Contemplating an early exit from Crimea (maybe as early as October) and not returning until late in the spring next year (if ever but that's another story for another time).

Mono Lake Tufa

Mono Lake is such an interesting place. I've written about it before so I won't rehash all that. This year it was very stormy around the Sierra Nevada Mountains so I got a very different look. I once again visited the south tufa field and spent a whole day wandering around the various structures looking for some new and interesting compositions. Much of the day was clear but in the afternoon storm clouds came rolling over the mountains to the west and it really looked like we might get some serious rain or even snow. I'd hoped to do some astro photography that night using the tufa as my foreground element but it soon became clear that wasn't in the cards. Hard to see the Milky Way when the sky is full of clouds. But I didn't want to go empty-handed. So I set up the camera and took some interesting pictures of the tufa and the storm clouds. Didn't have any big expectations for the shoot but I've come to understand that sometimes the camera sees things that your eyes don't. This is one of those cases. The colors and shading in the clouds are a perfect complement to the green waters of the lake and the snow covered mountains in the background. And if you look very carefully you'll see the sunset far in the distance ... a subtle hint of red on the clouds. That was the extent of the sunset but still, isn't the sky amazing? Taken with the Sanyang 14mm f/2.8 lens I bought this year. Takes very reasonable picture on the whole, don't you think?

Mono Lake Tufa - 14mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Upheaval Crater

Olympics...

When I was a young lad I really loved the Olympics. Would sit by the TV for hours, watching the most obtuse and weird sports and really, really enjoying it. Even went to the winter Olympics in Lake Placid. It was such a rush. Fast forward to the present and what a difference. I just can't gin up any enthusiasm for the games. Not interested at all, even in the sports I might have some connection with. Why? I think it has to do with all the controversy around the whole process, from the greed and corruption of the various committees to the professionalism of so many of the sports. Do I really want to watch basketball superstars who make millions go through the motions of playing the game? I enjoyed it when they required amateurs to play. Same goes for tennis and a whole host of other groups. Take track and field where there are very rich superstars ... most of them so doped up on performance drugs it's hard to see the human anymore. And who can overlook the politics these days ... the Russian doping situation for example. Why, I wonder, did the Olympic committee see fit to not punish the Russian athletes who are most likely guilty but throw the book at the para-Olympic team? Think maybe money had something to do with it? Just maybe? So I'm avoiding any Olympic coverage. Why would I be interested in Michael Phelps and his 21st gold medal? Been there, done that a long time ago. It just gets so uninteresting after a while. Quite frankly, it's much more interesting to watch the Russian Tank Olympics. Don't know what that is? Think big tanks and teams from various countries and obstacle courses and shooting at targets and ... you get the idea. It's really interesting to watch a huge tank going 60 mph while literally jumping into a huge tank filled with water. Some make it ... others don't. Now that's cool!

Upheaval Crater

Canyonlands National Park is one of those obscure parks that gets far too little attention. It's quite large and has some major attractions but I doubt most people have even heard of it. But I would guess you've probably seen pictures from there. Anyone who has Windows on their computer and uses the included landscape images as their screen's wall paper has probably seen the picture looking through an arch at the distant scenery. That's Mesa Arch in Canyonlands. I've been there and have some amazing pictures I'll show you later. It's definitely worth visiting if you're in the area. Just 'across the street' from Arches NP so do stop by.

One of the more interesting features there is called 'Upheaval Crater'. As one would expect, it's a big hole in the ground but that's where the similarity to any other similar feature stops. It's such an unusual shape and has such a strange composition that even the best geologists can't get a handle on how it formed. There are several craters, one inside another. The outer crater looks sort of like an impact hole but the edges are highly polished and smooth ... like one would expect to see in a water erosion canyon. That doesn't fit with an impact crater. Then there's the inner crater which appears to be blasted out of very hard bedrock. But there's very little blast debris to be found. It's not a volcano. It's really strange and mysterious. But, it's amazingly beautiful. I was lucky to get there on a day when the sky was unsettled and bad weather was threatened. I like those times. I get the most interesting images. The wind was blowing so hard I couldn't stand on the edge. Had to sit low with the tripod spread out so the camera wouldn't blow over. And the colors are really striking ... we're at the top of the grand cascade in Utah so we have lots of pink and red sandstone to work with. It's really an interesting place. I'd recommend it to anyone. Definitely add it to your bucket list!

Upheaval Crater - 24mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Old Woman and the Night Sky

Windows 10...

I've been holding off on upgrading my big workstation to Windows 10 because, quite frankly, I don't want to be constantly fighting with software and my operating system when I'm trying to do my images. It's hard enough getting everything right under the best of circumstances so adding in a balky new OS only makes things even more difficult. And, up until now, Windows 10 has been balky and strange. So I held off, staying with Windows 7 until the last moment. Well, yesterday was the moment. I really like Windows 7 but am not too enthused by the idea of spending $129 to upgrade to 10 after July 29th. It's always a toss up ... do I stay with what I have and am comfortable with or do I take the plunge and upgrade to the unknown. The real problem is compatibility ... I have tons of software that is really happy with 7 and much of it can't be simply upgraded without some serious expense or other issues (Adobe and the cloud SAAS they've foisted on everyone is one example). But I also don't want the headaches associated with an old, out of date OS either. The only redeeming policy from Microsoft is they made provision for going back to the old OS if I wanted to. That clinched the deal. So yesterday, after an overnight download of the install package, I bit the bullet and installed 10. No big issues with the install and I'm running on it as I type this post. It seems to be OK and all my software, so far, seems to be OK with it. I'll upgrade to the big bug release coming next month and see how everything is working. If there aren't any major issues I'll stay with 10 but still have a separate solid state drive with 7 just in case. This constant churn in technology drives me to distraction. Some of it is OK but the need to always come out with something new is really wearing over time.

Old Woman and the Night Sky

I was in Death Valley twice this trip. In mid-April I was on the salt taking sunsets but the full moon made it impossible to get any reasonable star photos so I went down toward LA for a few weeks and came back in early May. I spent a night on the salt and got some really spectacular Milky Way shots (including a long sequence of 268 images for an eventual time lapse clip).

There's a problem however. 268 shots of the salt are really boring. They had serious floods in Death Valley last fall and the old, interesting salt formations were all washed away. What's there now is really new and really white but there aren't any really fascinating shapes yet. Those will come over time if more flooding isn't in the works. And, to be really honest, a really nice time lapse of the Milky Way doesn't impress anyone anymore. What's needed (and demanded) is an interesting composition of the stars and a really impressive foreground structure. That's a wonderful idea, of course, but out on the salt there really aren't any cool foreground structures at the moment with the new, monotonous (did I say white ... really white) salt stretching out as far as the eye can see. So, enter the old woman.

If you head up the road from Badwater (and the salt) to Furnace Creek and keep going for a few more miles up 190 toward Stovepipe Wells you'll get to Mesquite Flat sand dunes. When you hit the parking lot you'll notice a small stand of dead trees, preserved by the extremely dry air and in amazing shape. One of those trees, the one most to the west, is the most interesting. Stand to the east and look at the tree and you'll see an old woman, her arms held out as if welcoming you to her embrace. She's truly a wonderful sight. I studied that tree for a long time, trying to find a way of incorporating it into a Milky Way sequence but I just couldn't see any angle that worked. First, to see the old woman you have to be facing west and everyone knows the Milky Way only shows due south so that's not going to work. On top of that, Tucki Mountain is due south of the dunes, cutting off any view of the rising galaxy. So I thought about all this for a while and realized that the only way I'd get the old woman and the Milky Way was to take shots of each one separately and then combine them in Photoshop. It took 3 days to make that happen. Mostly it was the building of the mask ... the black and white image that separates the tree from the background ... that took all the time. I had to break the process up into 8 separate areas because the bright background is too much like the tree to get a really strong contrast. The only way to get what I wanted was to work in individual areas and play with the contrast until I got enough separation to pick out the tree from the bright sky. There was a great deal of repair work even with all this isolation so it took 3 days to get everything right. But WOW, the result is really nice, don't you think? So I give you the old woman and the night sky. Isn't she spectacular?

Old Woman and the Night Sky - composite image, license CC BY-NC 4.0

Griffith Observatory Sunset

What Is Happening to my Country?

This has been a horrible week in America. Two senseless shootings by cops and then, yesterday, 5 cops died in Dallas due to snipers. Can someone please tell me what the hell is happening? Are we at war with ourselves? Can't we find a way to get along? Is the divide between us so deep that only more bloodshed is our future? Where are our elites ... don't answer as I already know where they are. AWOL! We haven't had a statesman in our country in most of my lifetime. Just greedy, corrupt politicians who sell their votes for money. What a bunch of crooks. And the current presidential candidates ... I hesitate to even say that word ... are atrocious. I'm now of the opinion that America is lost, falling fast into the abyss. We may very well be beyond redemption. Might it be time to just pull the plug and start over?

Griffith Park Observatory Sunset

I spent 2 evenings at Griffith Park Observatory. It's a really wonderful place and the views of LA are overwhelming. I highly recommend the place to anyone who's visiting the city. The view will blow your socks off.

Anyway, the second evening I had an agenda to do timelapse of the city but I wanted to wait until the sun was completely down. I had some time and could see that a really nice sunset was in the making. After you've done this for a while you get a sense of the clouds and the possibilities for a good sky. It seemed there was a nice display coming so I scouted around the place to see if I could incorporate the building into the sunset. I was lucky that there was a corner on the sidewalk where I could set up my camera and take a series of pictures without having to worry about people tripping over my rig. I had my 16-35 f/4 on the 6D (a really nice combination as you can see) so I set up the intervalometer and let the camera do the rest. I took 384 images over about an hour and the result was really nice. I'm incorporating the sequence in my video but thought it would be nice to show you one frame. This is really a composite of 2 shots, one at peak sky and one when it was dark enough so the lighting on the building stood out. I blended the two images in Photoshop and then used the NIK software suite (now free from Google) to fine tune the result. Then went back into Lightroom and tweaked the image until it was perfect. This is LA at it best ... a very beautiful location and the sky very near perfect. Enjoy!

Griffith Observatory - 25mm,f/11,1/4 sec,ISO 1600,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Death Valley from a different perspective

Update again...

It's taken almost a month but I'm finally able to get through the day without falling asleep. Not sure what was wrong but it seems to have passed. I'm working on my images (and videos) and learning a whole lot of new stuff. I've got a ton of new software which is both a help and a hindrance to getting things finished. I now have 3 new packages dedicated to video ... DaVinci Resolve, Fusion and Nuke ... and they are lots of fun and a huge challenge. I've been working especially with Fusion which is a high-end compositing program for making really impressive sequences. The first project was to take the Point Vicente Lighthouse in LA and combine it with a sunset taken at the same location to get a really stunning sunset behind the lighthouse. It took me over a week to get everything as I wanted since I had zero experience with the software and not much experience with compositing. It was a lot of work to get everything finished. I had to make a series of masks in Photoshop that isolated the lighthouse and a palm tree from the sky background ... 136 to be exact ... one at a time. That took 3 days of careful work. I also had to work around some limitations in the free version of the software. They limited 'output' to UHD (3840 x 2160) but I was working with DSLR frames that were much bigger. Despite trying to output UHD at the end, the software kept refusing to render the final images because at intermediate stages in the node processor the image size was much bigger. So I had to downsize my base images to UHD and even then had to do some fancy footwork to get the final images to output. Forcing me to downsize my initial images is really a bummer for me as I want to work with maximum resolution up to the very end. I'm not the only person upset by this and there's some griping on the forums about this limitation. I'm sure they will eventually change as getting this software into the hands of many amateurs who will say good things about it is important for them to compete against Nuke, the current standard.

Anyway, that sequence is almost done. I'm just tweaking things a bit to get the best video I can. I want it to be spectacular as it will be one of the lead sequences in my video. Only the best make it as I'm hoping this is a showcase for my work.

Death Valley from a different perspective

I was in Death Valley twice this trip. First time, in April, I wanted to take some astro sequences but the moon was full and not many stars appeared. To get the best star shots you need absolute dark and a full moon isn't going to get you there so I left and went on to LA. A few weeks later I came back to a new moon and things were much better. I spent a few days in the valley, sleeping in my truck and letting my camera run unattended. Not too many people wandering around in the desert at night although the hazards aren't all that bad so the equipment is very safe. No big, nasty animals out on the salt where I took my milky way shots. I did see a small coyote in Furnace Creek (he was walking down the main road in the morning, just ambling along at his own pace and didn't give me a second glance as he walked by) and a small red fox out near Bad Water but he was too hot to give a damn about me. Biggest problems are on the sand dunes with sidewinders and scorpions at night.

Last night in the valley I wanted to get a panorama of the entire valley from Dante's Overlook. You basically leave the park heading east toward Vegas until you see signs for the overlook to the right. Take a narrow, twisting, steep road 13 miles or so, passing several commercial mining operations and a very steep final climb of 15 degrees, until you get to the overlook. The whole valley is spread out below including the salt flats. It's a very impressive sight. As usual I waited until near sunset and then found a good spot for my pano. The sky had some interesting clouds but it was pretty obvious a red sunset was not in the offing. So I did what I could and took several sequences at different locations. This particular image shows the north end of the valley, from the salt flat to the sand dunes. It was a blue evening so what you see is what I saw. I could have warmed the image a bit but that's not true to the colors that were present and it looked fake.

Death Valley - 24mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Capitol Reef

Starting but...

I've been home 2 weeks now and, surprisingly, am still plagued by exhaustion. I'm sleeping a lot more than I should, much to the consternation of my wife and daughter. I just can't seem to get back on Moscow time no matter what I do. I've probably had one night of good sleep so far but most I get maybe 4 hours and wake up just as the sun comes up. Really not sure what's causing this but it's a major headache. I've been using a new asthma inhaler which sort of works but I still find myself short of breath much of the time. Maybe that's the issue ... the new med may be making me sleepy and I may be chronically short of oxygen. Oh well...

As for my processing, it's proceeding slowly. As I feared, many of my images are not all that impressive. I knew I had an issue with holding steady ... I've discovered that my sense of balance isn't what it used to be and that really messes with holding still during longer exposures. Even with stabilization turned on I find too many images are blurred and worthless. Add to that I wasn't really able to get in a groove with the new camera and too many of my images are not in focus or the exposures are wrong. Not sure yet what the problem was/is but I need to figure it out by next year. Probably just need to get time with the instrument so I can learn it's sweet spots. Really hope it's not the camera.

Photomatix & chromatic aberrations

Chromatic aberrations (CA) are the bane of  every photographer's work. They are a fact of life, an issue with every lens ever made. Because glass bends different colors of light at different angles, there are always issues with color fringing. This is especially an issue when an image goes from bright to dark. I'm sure you've seen them if you look at your pictures close enough. Photomatix, the HDR software, has the ability to remove CA but there's a problem. In some images, especially when there is a very strong transition from bright sun to heavy shade and it's very sharp, you tend to get bleeding from the bright area into the dark. This is an acute issue at higher f-numbers. Because of the way Photomatix works, it merges and tone-maps the various exposures before attempting to remove CA and that's an issue. If you have any of this bleeding in your brighter exposures, the resulting merged image has a very messy transition between light and dark and the CA algorithm can't handle the transition. That means you have an ugly fringe along the transition and it's really noticeable. You can't really fix this after the merge. So, to remove the issue you need to run a CA pass on the photos BEFORE putting them into Photomatix. I use the excellent CA in Lightroom which is available in the Develop module under "Lens Corrections". If you do this first and then use Photomatix the problem disappears. Check out the light/dark transition in today's image ... middle of the photo on the left side. No CA to be found but boy was there an ugly mess there without correction.

Capitol Reef

I had never heard of this national park until I saw it on the Utah map. It's been around for a long time but gets very little attention. It's really a hiker's park as there aren't a lot of things to see from the road. I also didn't have a lot of time there as the campground was full and there weren't a lot of places to pull off and sleep. All parks discourage your sleeping in the observation areas although I do on occasion break this rule in some of the larger parks. I even get a 'wink' from the rangers as they tell me it's not allowed. But Capital Reef was very adamant that I couldn't sleep in the park. So I decided to find a good spot for a sunset shoot and then move on. Little did I know that 'moving on' would entail driving for several hours on very dark mountain roads to find a rest area. Saw way too many large elk standing at the road's edge ... all it would have taken was for one to jump out in my path and I would have been ... literally ... roadkill. Driving at night in the mountains is not a good idea.

After driving up and down the only major park road I found a spot just south of the campground. These huge vertical walls just screamed out to be part of the image and the road had just the right curve to make it an interesting compositional element. I was fortunate that the sky cooperated with a massive, dark cloud bank in just the right spot. And the sky was completely open to the west so the sun could make it's contribution to the overall look. I parked and waited. As the show progressed I kept taking 5 image sequences, spaced 1 ev apart. It took a while but was worth it. The resulting image is the essence of Capitol Reef ... wild and utterly amazing.

Capitol Reef Sunset - 16mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,copyright CC BY-NC 4.0