Smokies Light

Just for the fun of it. Will be under construction a few days or so.

From the USGS:

As air flows over and around objects in its path, spiraling eddies, known as Von Karman vortices, may form. The vortices in this image were created when prevailing winds sweeping east across the northern Pacific Ocean encountered Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

More images from Landsat-7 here.

Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office

Kids, don't try this at home. You will go blind. This one was taken at sunset with a 400mm lens and a 1.3x teleconverter. With the camera's 1.6x factor the effective focal length is 832mm.
Here is the same scene at 27mm.

I have nothing else to post.

Taken at the Great House.

Working from home does have its disadvantages, like watching CNBC during times of market crises. The latest talking points from seemingly all the experts are for the government to bail everybody out. These are the same experts who spend most of their time otherwise trashing government regulation and taxes. I do invest, trade, have a mortgage, but something in my gut just says this channel, or at least the majority of the people who appear on it, are just plain vulgar. Not to name names like Kudlow, Cramer, etc.

p.s. You might see more politically oriented posts as I don't have many pics to post. It's not hard to see which way I lean by checking the blogroll.

Infrared imagery from the National Hurricane Center.

I should have a few less grotesque pics to post next week.

One of my fave songs from Tori Amos, and so appropriate for the season.

On all of my previous blog incarnations I've avoided discussing the "internals" behind the imagery I post, both in terms of camera exposure settings and Photoshop post-processing, reasoning that all that techie talk distracts and detracts from the imagery itself and whatever "it" is that I'm attempting to convey to the viewer. I've always viewed my work as art and not photography, and to me whatever "it" is that makes people go to art galleries, gawk a few moments at paintings, and come away perhaps a little bit uplifted and enlightened..well that has been the goal with my work also.

But, since the viewership now is extremely small, and because this stuff is more interesting than doing what I should be doing at work, this week I'll be posting a few pics but also describe in more detail what goes on behind the scenes, both in the field and back at the desk with Photoshop. So if you're reading this post, consider yourself enrolled in the Smokies Light School of Art, and you didn't even have to send me a drawing to see if you qualify for admission.

The image above was taken standing on a boulder in the middle of the river in the Greenbrier section of the Park last Saturday, mid-morning well after the sun was up and very hot. In most cases I apply some kind of artistic filter in Photoshop to the "normal" image out of the camera. The image above has the watercolor filter applied. The normal image is taken in RAW mode, a digital negative, then processed in Photoshop. Processed means setting the white-balance in the raw-image converter, then usually toning down the bright areas a little with the shadow/highlight tool, then sharpening. Usually this is all I do to get the normal image, but if I do miss the exposure in the camera, I'm not beyond adjusting it with levels in Photoshop, but this is somewhat rare. Usually I miss the exposure if I'm in a hurry trying to capture a scene that will disappear quickly such as with shooting wildlife. I'll post an example of this later. The problem with the normal image, at least for me, is that I find them extremely boring. If it weren't for the artistic interpretation allowed by Photoshop I probably wouldn't even take pictures. Here is the same image above with just the normal processing applied. Boooring. I have been accused of attempting to hide photography mistakes with artistic filters. While that's rarely the case, I see nothing wrong with it. It's not hiding; it just making an otherwise flawed image visually interesting. For me the camera is just a tool to record data which can later be manipulated to something that pleases me artistically. Sometimes it requires no manipulation to please me, so then I guess that would be photography rather than art. Well, that's enough for the first day of class. Below is the same image with a set of filters applied to create a dry brush oil painting on canvas. I find both the one above and below to be more visually appealing than the normal one, but maybe that's just me.

Watching the hummingbirds fight over the feeder just now....

There are four drinking "fountains" on the feeder which is full of water. When the water gets low I always fill it up again before it runs out. Yet the hummers seem to spend more energy fighting each other over the feeder than they actually obtain from the feeder. If they would just share imagine all the stress relief and energy savings that would occur. I'm sure glad we humans are smarter than hummingbirds.

After taking several thousand pics following the rules, I began to ask questions about those rules like a rebellious teenager. What if your subject was backlit by the sun? What if you shoot water with a slow shutter speed in bright light, or even with the sun shining directly on the water? What if parts of the image were so overexposed that those parts get "blown out", meaning the area is so bright the camera couldn't record data so it's completely white? Is it possible to make a pleasing image breaking all those rules? Is this too many questions? The answer to all of these questions is yes.

The image above breaks all the rules. The bright August sun was shining directly on parts of the water, with the sun upstream in the direction of the subject. I discovered a couple of years ago by mistake when shooting flowers that some images actually looked better with bright sunshine splotched on them. The blown out areas actually draw the viewer's eye to the subject and provide a sharp contrast to adjacent dark areas. The blow outs at the bottom of each plunge in this image are actually THE focal point of the entire image, the subject itself. With a little imagination you can visualize how this image would look without the blow outs if it were taken on a cloudy day. In my opinion it would be a much duller image, technically correct from a photographic perspective but more boring from an artistic perspective. The watercolor filter was applied to this image also and left very strong. By that I mean most of the time the filter is applied then the opacity or strength of the effect is reduced usually around 50% or more. In this case the filter at full strength enhanced the stark contrast between the light and dark areas and emphasized the texture of the rocks. I really like this image. Here's the normal image, shot 6/10sec at f22 with a polarizing filter (on a tripod).

The lesson for today is: learn the rules, obey the rules until you understand why they are rules, then blow them away and do your own thing.

If you have limited time to pursue a photography hobby you just have to make do with whatever nature gives you have when you do have the time for picture taking. Last Saturday was a horrible day for taking pictures with a cloudless, very hazy sky, and a brutally hot sun. The cardinal flowers above might have made a great shot in the right conditions. The conditions were not right however. I wanted the bridge to be in the background but that meant shooting into the sun unless I wanted to wait for a very long time. To reach this spot required a steep descent down a bank and leaning up against the bank while taking the pic handheld. Butterflies were all over the flowers but it was too hot and uncomfortable to wait for the perfect butterfly pose while baking in that miserable sun. The sunshine on the flowers contrasting with the dark background gives a slight initial shock value at first look, but a second look just doesn't do it for me on this one. I mainly posted this pic to illustrate the difficulties in gettting an acceptable shot in miserable shooting conditions. The view downstream at this point with the sun behind me in that case just wasn't doable due to the terrain, and the bridge does add a human element.

About composition, the bridge is intentionally out of focus using a shallow depth-of-field. If it were sharp it would have been a distraction from the flowers. The bridge although out of focus is as important to the overall composition as the flowers are and was intended to be that way. The small piece of sky was intentional also. Subconsciously it tells the viewer that everything is ok with the world, the sky is still up, and the river is still down. I did this in the Greenbrier Morning image also, and you will see this practice in a lot of my pics. Managing the sky in the composition is one of the most important aspects in taking decent pics. The point is: to make a decent pic requires attention to every detail in the viewfinder. Take your eyeball, force it off your intended subject and on to each section of the viewfinder. Look for any object or sunny spot that might be a distraction from the subject and recompose if necessary. Nothing happens by accident in a good composition. Every pixel should be planned.

In the image below, the flower is in the shade and the rocks in the river are in the sun. For me the bright rocks are a distraction from the subject. Ideally the sun would have been on the flower and not on the rocks. With artificial shading on the flower I would have had control of the light, but it wasn't to be. The subject is dull resulting in an overall dull image, a dud, but sometimes you just have to make do.

B&W is great for emphasizing textures like the moss and wetness on these boulders. Here's the colorized version. The image below is a little further away, with a heavy watercolor effect applied. Most Photoshop filters have a good number of variables you can tweak, like brush size, stroke pressure, direction, etc. The possibilities are infinite and not as messy as real paint.

Straight from the camera with minor shadow/highlight adjustment and sharpening. I took about a dozen pics of this cascade at different angles and focal lengths but the very first one was the best. Below is the tripod setup, with the rear legs high mainly for my aching back rather than for the composition. The pic below reveals the secret reason why I take so many pics of cascades: I just like to play in the water and the camera gear is just for cover. Now you know the rest of the story.

In this composition, notice how the musicians and audience are just plain enjoying themselves thoroughly, especially in the last third of the video. This is called the "rule of thirds". Now, go thou and do likewise. Have a great weekend.

One drizzly day way back in 2003 I was driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, pulled into an overlook, and met Tim Pegram pictured above. Tim is a retired park ranger and at that time was backpacking the entire 469 mile Blue Ridge Parkway, with only a few miles left to go at the time this pic was taken. Tim told me he was planning to write a book about the adventure and well, he did it. The book is now published with the title "Blue Ridge Parkway by Foot: A Park Ranger's Memoir", available for purchase at the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation and other internet bookstores. I believe Tim was the first person to walk the entire length of the Parkway. I just got word that the book is available so haven't read it yet, but I'm sure it will offer a unique and interesting perspective of the Parkway one step at a time. Also, I'm told that lil' ole me has a mention in the book so it's definitely a must read.