Might There Be Morels Here?

Some 23 odd years ago a good friend introduced me to morel hunting. You go out into the woods, look around a while, and hope you find some mushrooms. More often than not we came up empty-handed, but it was so much fun when we scored. It was like finding treasure amongst the trees. And the taste... ooh, the taste. Crispy, Nutty, buttery goodness. If you have never had them then you just don't know, and I can't describe them properly. Suffice to say that there is nothing quite like a lightly breaded and fried-in-butter Morel.

In fact, looking back on it all, it's hard to say which I preferred more, finding them or eating them. Because for me the two always went hand-in-hand. And to this day I have never eaten any without having found them first.

For several years we were avid hunters. We noted the change in seasons, the amount of rainfall, the severity of the winters, all in an attempt to make some magical connection that would lead us to another big score. Ultimately, though, what we found was that we could never predict things worth a damn. Those freakin' mushrooms would pop up in places and at times when we weren't even looking, and often fail to surface in the same soil that had them in abundance the years before.

Such are the trials of Morel hunting in Arkansas.

Eventually my friend moved to Tennessee, I moved to south to Little Rock, and Morels became a fond memory of times past. I'd still think about them when the season rolled around (March to June in Arkansas... dependent on where in the state you were looking) and I always kept my eyes peeled for them when I was out, but it's been a long time since I made a concerted effort to find them. Not surprisingly, then, its been a great many years since I have tasted them.

The other night I happened to sitting around chatting with my Daughter when we caught a show on the Travel Channel about hunting Morels. She has never been, so this is the year I begin searching again.

And the image... well, this is one of the places I plan to look. Though it was taken years ago and I have never seen a Morel in there, it's all about the timing. And luck. Lots and lots of luck.

Coco's Coming to Town

It's been a couple of years now since I last saw one of his performances. He always puts on a great show, and I just learned last night that he will be in town this weekend. Yippee!

I got this image at the Hot Springs Blues Fest in '86. Great fun.

Maybe I should do up a print and see if I can get him to sign it?

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.