Hash... Re-Hash

As much as I hate to admit it I have come up completely empty this week. This was not for lack of effort. I went out into the world and snapped a good many images, but none of them tickled my fancy once they were back home on the monitor. All in all they amounted to a big, fat... Ack!

So I went in search of an image and came up with this one from the depths of my photographic past.

Titled Winterberry, this shot was entered into an online photo contest on a site called Dpchallenge back in November of 2004. The theme for the week was impressionism, and my image placed 21rst in a field of 39 with an average score of 6.2. Not bad, considering the talent that trickles through there.

Those were the days...

I used to spent a lot of time with sites like Dpchallenge, but I have largely given them up. Just like going to school, they were fun, a great learning experience and all that, but I am rather glad to be done with them. I still keep up my membership to read the forums, and I still feel compelled to enter a competiton once in a while, but for the most part I just don't have the urge to mix it up with that crowd any longer. There is some good stuff going on over there, though. Mighty good. Just be sure to look back through at least the top 100 (200?) images of each challenge. You never know where you'll find the real gems.

A Hair in My Soup

The bad thing about finding a hair in your soup is not so much noticing the thing before you ever put the spoon in... that's easy enough to remedy. It's finding it after you have taken a few sips. Somehow, for me at least, this is worse. Much worse.

Why should it make any difference?

I guess finding the hair before I get started prepares me psychologically to indulge in the soup without further concern. I found a hair. I removed it. No big deal.

But, if I have some soup, then find a hair, its like my entire dining experience has been tainted or sullied in some way. It doesn't seem to matter that the soup is just the same no matter when I find the hair (or if I find it at all) or that the fix--prompt removal--is exactly the same in either case.

Which brings me to todays image. Despite its size, I never saw the hair as I was framing the shot. Then, as I began processing it, I had to decide if I should clone it out or leave it in.

One the one hand, this critters hair (a deer, an opossum, a squirrel or a skunk... I have no idea) is certainly a part of the outdoor environment in which the shot was taken. It's natural. On the other, it distracts (if only a little) from the main subject.

In the end I decided to leave it in. I had no moral quarrel with either option, but once I realized I could spin an entire post around this silly hair the choice was made.

Of course, the hair was in my picture... not in my soup. This made the decision to leave it alone a lot easier to swallow.

Saturation, Sharpness, and Salvage

Like so many other film_to_digital photographers the first digital tools I experimented with were saturation and sharpness. With a few simple mouse clicks my previously dull and otherwise not so interesting image could be brought up to a new level. One that I imagined more closely matched my perceptions of the scene when the shutter was tripped.

After all, I was there, I ought to know. So was the sunset not truly as crisp and colorful as my newly saturated and sharpened image suggested? Did I go too far and step over some invisible line that took my work from photograph to digital art? To be honest, I worried about such things.

These days I don't worry about it so much, though I try to remain thoughtful whenever using these tools. They are easy to overdo, and I have certainly done it.

I should also mention that, early on with digital, I had a definite fascination with purposely going too far. Sometimes in the name of enhancement, and sometimes to salvage images that otherwise failed to meet my expectations. Ultimately, though, I decided it was not something that I wanted to do on a regular basis. My photoshop skills were sub par. I did good, in my opinion, to not oversaturate, to not over sharpen, and my early digital art creations were often disappointing given the mind-numbing amount of work required to create them. I still consider myself a photoshop novice, and the thought of layers makes me ill. I can use a few simple ones, but I have never really tried to master them. Kudos to those that feel at ease with these tools.

Part of my reluctance towards layers was in their seeming complexity. They may not be that hard, but they required more effort than I initially cared to invest. Besides, I usually work in RAW and developed a certain fondness for reworking the image several times. Once perhaps for web viewing, later as a print, then again as different crop or to try some other technique. The first few runs would be like practice, and once I started sharing the image it was like performing the same song to a different audience each time.

Another thing I began to work with after going digital was the ability to crop. I wasn't used to having so much freedom when it came to choosing the final composition. With film I felt bad if I shaved a little here or there, but with digital you could crop heavily with 3 megapixels and still manage a great web image and usually a decent 8x10. And now, with 6 or more megapixels being the norm, you can carve an image up like a butcher if you want.

Times have certainly changed.

Oh yes. Three images today. A old digital art piece (dogwood in fall colors on Petit Jean mountian), a sunrise image of rocks in Negro Bill creek, Utah, and sunset shot of the Arkansas river.

Dancing with the Devil

OK, not really. But the image today is one of the Devil's Walking Stick (aralia spinosa). It's quite common around these parts (central Arkansas) and it is a thorny, dangerous thing, to be sure. Resembling a small tree, or sapling, it's really more of a large shrub as it rarely gets over 15-20 feet in height and the "trunks" are usually no more than 10 to 12 inches in diameter.

They grow in clusters and don't branch much, and when isolated (especially during the winter months) they look like a a stand of thorny sticks stuck into the ground ( hence the name). They are usually found along densely overgrown river banks and in low lying areas where its often hard to notice the thorns before its too late. Yeeouch!

At first glance it might seems as though the thorns would be impossible to miss. And usually they are. But at times they are so interleaved with other vegetation that the thorns get hidden, and the trunks look like the most stable thing to grab onto.

The image was taken using what is perhaps my most favored "botany lens", an old Tamron manual focus 90mm f2.5. It's hard to beat this lens for woods walking. The reasonably fast aperture and excellent optics usually assures a crisp shot.

The Black Canyon

It's time for my first post of the new year and I'm almost ashamed to not be posting something new. As you know I have grown rather weary of mucking through the Utah images, so I'm offering up a few from the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.

I only dropped by the Black Canyon for one night before flying out. My companions, though, had spent several days hiking and camping in the canyon prior to picking me up for the trip to Utah. (Nothing like getting picked up at the Montrose airport by a pair of four-day-in-the-canyon, unshowered and unshaven adventure partners.) So while I didn't get to have a "real" inner canyon experience, I did get s small taste of it at the East Portal campground.

The first image is a view of the canyon from one of the many scenic overlooks. The other two are a before and after set. Sort of a photo essay of our dinner that night, smokey trout. It took four hours to cook them over our open fire, but it was worth the wait. I can honestly say I've never tasted anything quite like it.

My companions tell me the trout tastes even better from deep within the canyon... after you have hiked in. Maybe next time.

Moving On

First off I would like to apologize for being so unpredictable when it comes to blogging, but I'm lazy about some things (most things?) and blogging happens to be one of them. That being said, though, doesn't make it ok.

When I started this blog a year ago it was never my intention to post in a scheduled way, but then I never figured anyone would be reading it either! And now that some folks do, I feel the need to adhere to some sort of regular schedule. If not for myself, then to at least keep my faithful readers from wasting precious time by checking to see if mcmurma has done anything lately. Heck, if I can get to work on-time 99% percent of the time, then surely I can post in a regular fashion!

So what kind of time frame should I work on? Once a day is out of the question, I would never make it. Even though I greatly admire those who do. So I have decided to shoot for once a week--every Monday. It's more or less what I have been wanting to do, even though I have missed the mark more often than not.

Anyway, enough reflection, self-loathing, and what not... on to the last of the Utah images.

Now, about these Utah images. Frankly, I'm glad to be done with them. It was a great experience, to be sure, but it happened almost 6 months ago and it's time to be moving on.

This first image is of the Colorado river, shot a hour or so before sunset at Dead Horse Point. It's not the classic gooseneck shot (which was already in deep shade) but a view more to the east, towards Colorado.

The second is one was taken just minutes before sunset from a viewpoint along the scenic Islands in the Sky drive. Both parks are within a few minutes drive of one another, and Islands offered a much better all around view so we raced over there after taking in Dead Horse Point.

I still have an image or two I'd like to share from our visit to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, but for Utah, this is it. I reserve the right scare up the odd Utah image on some rainy day, but for now, I hope you all have had a Merry Christmas, and are looking forward to a Happy New Year!

Addendum: Ok, so I am slow. I just tried Advman's idea of saturation and clarity increase and I must say the results are much better than what I initially came up with. I had already increased saturation a little, and also done a clarifying, so I was skeptical that even more could still look so natural. Well, I was wrong. I really like the results. Compare for yourself... as if there is any real comparison.

Thanks Andreas. I was willing to leave well enough alone until I tried it. Now I'm glad I did :)

Arches Part Two

As our afternoon at Arches wore on it became increasingly evident that we were going to get some rain, the only question was how much? The wind was blowing fiercely as we scrambled through the park to take in as many locations as we could before the storms hit. In fact, I can't even recall exactly where we were when I took some of these images.

I believe the first image was taken near the Cove of Caves area, but I couldn't swear to it. I took dozens of shots of this scene trying to get one where the wind wasn't moving the brush too badly, but it was impossible. This was one of the few images where the wind effects weren't too bad. (In my previous post Ted noted that one of the images was over-sharpened. Can't argue with that, it was. I hope this is not as bad, but I suspect it may be a bit oversharp as well.)

The next shot was one that I was seeing in black and white even as I took it. There was so little color present in the original that using monochrome wasn't much a stretch. Besides, there was a parking lot in the foreground and I couldn't see any good way to blend it into this scene:)

The last shot is one of Balanced Rock. There was very little light actually on the rocks, so it made sense to treat them in silhouette. Also, the color is a bit fanciful. (As if you couldn't tell!)

The next stop will be a few shots from the Islands in the Sky area of Canyonlands. It's a wonderful drive that gave us an opportunity to look down upon the White Rim Road that we had taken earlier in the week.