Gadget’s Airstream Chronicles

Nothing to blog on this morning, so I’m taking a page from so many blogs, and I’m taking a day off.

Go back, re-read, take a look at recent photos, etc.  This morning is slated for reading my new books! 

I’ll have something to blog on tomorrow!  Oh, and you can look back through the last few HDR experiments…..

Before work yesterday I stopped by Barnes & Noble again.  It’s almost like I can’t stop myself.  Fortunately I keep finding space for one or two extra books.  Well, I “sorta” find space.

In the back of my truck I’ve got a rubber maid bin full of books.  Back in New England I’ve got tons of books in a trailer.  Glad they’re not here right now (although I’ve wanted several of them now and again).

See, here’s the issue.  Recently I became interested in really learning Photoshop.  I blame Scott Kelby’s good writing.  So, I’ve gotten into using Photoshop, I’ve been reading tons, and I’m starting to get it.  Mission accomplished…..I’ll get better at using Photoshop, and I’ve got some great references.

With that mission well under way the next curiosity popped up.  These HDR images.  What are they, how do you do it, can I figure it out too?

The shot to the left is my latest HDR.  I’m actually digging it big time!  But after tinkering with it for a while yesterday I realized I need to read more about it…….

You know where you can read more about things…..in books.  Ugh!

So, 2 books on HDR were purchased yesterday.  I want to learn even more.  Why?  Basically just plain old curiosity.

Soon I’ll be sleeping outside to make room for the books in the Airstream.

Over the weekend I set up several HDR shots to work with.  I wasn’t sure what would be good or bad.  The shot to the left is another example of my experimentation with HDR.

High Dynamic Ratio Photography is growing in popularity.  I personally find it extremely interesting, and I understand how it can be used to create more interesting and sometimes accurate photos.

So, how does one take an HDR photo?  You don’t.  You take a series of photos, and then merge them together.  The photo to the left is composed of 3 different exposures.  One extremely low light photo, one properly exposed photo, and one extremely over exposed photo.

Once you have your 3, 5, 7, etc., exposures you pop them into something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Photomatix and merge the photos.  Once merged you still have to tone map the photo.

I have yet to find any in depth documents on the tone mapping process.  It seems to be a matter of artistic preference.  When I first open each of my HDRs I’m usually disappointed.  Only my recent shot of the courthouse worked out right on the first pass in Photoshop, no real changes in tone mapping (the photo is included in this post).  Others seem over blown, under exposed, etc.  That’s where the tone mapping comes in.

I’m willing to bet people who are great with HDR shots have some specific things they do while tone mapping.  I’d like to learn what those things are……

In the meantime, I’ll experiment and see where I can get these types of pictures to go.  I won’t concentrate too much on these though.  I think HDR works for certain types of pictures, but not all pictures.  So you won’t see this blog going all HDR all the time…..we’ll still talk about other stuff and present other pictures. 

Of course I got the truck washed yesterday.  It was my last day off in my “long weekend” and it really looked terrible after the ride into the Sycamore area.  So I took the truck in for a wash.

This morning I woke up to the light and soothing sound of rain on my roof.  Moisture.  Haven’t seen that in a little while for sure.  We always need it here, so I won’t complain.  But go figure on the truck being super clean!

Gotta say, the gray sky above is nice.  Still dark at 6 this morning thanks to the blackout shades and the lack of strong light.  I actually hit snooze on the alarm clock.  By alarm clock I mean my G4 IBook. 

The long weekend is now over, and today will be a work day.  Too bad.  I didn’t get to sort all my photos, no major edits, and only a little reading.  I think my next day off will encompass more reading…..after all, I’ve got plenty of books!

I was a little tired last night.  A long and exhausting day.  Of course, a good one.  But I left some things out I’d wanted to mention.

Saturday’s rodeo was my first rodeo ever.  This ain’t your first rodeo son, is it? Yup, it was!

The one thing that struck me at the rodeo had nothing to do with the bucking horses or bulls.  The working horses caught my attention, and I enjoyed watching them.

What do I mean by working horses?  I mean the ones that deal with the rowdy ones after it’s all done.  Two guys on horse back would round up the angry, kicking, jumping horses after “the ride” was over.  These horses were amazing.  Horse and rider would neatly manage the bucking horse right back into a gate.

Watching the working horses I could see they were all about management.  They’d shoot right up to a bull with their riders swinging a rope.  The horses didn’t flinch from their duties.  Pretty darned amazing if you ask me!  The blurry shot to the left is the back side of one of the working horses and it’s rider.  At the ready when someone gets bucked!

I can see how large herds of cattle could be managed by a few guys and their horses now.  With a horse like the ones I saw you could keep most anything in line.  Just amazing stuff!

Shifting gears - More horse talk.

Go figure, a horse heavy post.  In addition to the horses I watched on Saturday night I now want to talk about a few other horses I met yesterday.

As we were returning from Sycamore Canyon we rounded a bend in the road and came to a stop.  2 people on horseback were on the “road”.  2 additional horses were in tow carrying gear.  4 horses, 2 people.  They gave us a wave and we stopped to chat for a few.

The riders asked if we’d seen water up ahead.  They were doing an extended trip on horseback, and were looking for a water supply for their horses.  We’d seen nothing, and let them know.

We had seen troughs at the abandoned cabin a few miles up, and green water in the catchment system there.  Clearly people come up to ride in the area, and that seems to be what the catchment system was for.

The girl / woman (seemed awful young) mentioned that they’d heard of a creek not too far ahead.  We’d seen nothing, and let them know that.

Apparently the couple is crossing the country on horseback.  One of the pack horses had two plastic “Wal-Mart” style lawn chairs on it’s back.  We’d seen them in the morning camped on the Verde River, and now during the afternoon 17 miles from where we’d last seen them.  They were rugged looking, and clearly spend the bulk of their lives outdoors.  The man in the couple had leathery skin, and he was completely dust covered.  The woman was too.

I found myself wondering, “Is this a husband and wife or father and daughter?”  She seemed far too young to be a wife, and I expect she’s only recently out of high school.  What’s their story?  Riding to Colorado?  No major supplies?  Just a rifle on the man’s horse?  Plastic chairs on a horses back?  What’s that all about?

They said they were heading on to Colorado.  In 2002 they’d ridden from Washington state to the Southwest, and now their journey continued.  Once in Colorado they were going to ride the Great Divide.  Interesting trip for sure.  In the end, I was left with many questions about the nature of their trip, who they are, and if they were running from something, or like Thru-Hikers, just interested in a journey.  I sure hope they found some water for their horses…….

****By the way.  The last two photos are HDR experiments from yesterday’s shooting.  Not as cool as the courthouse, but interesting.  I’ll continue working with these photos and see what develops!  Pun intended.

Well, it hasn’t really felt like days off at all.  Busy would be the best way to describe things.

Yesterday I let myself rest a little in the morning.  A late start to the day, but then lots of running around.  The first big errand….well, not really an errand…..but it did involve running around.  Sadira gave me a call to let me know that an Arts and Crafts style event was happening on the square.  I had to go.

See, last year I noticed that there was a regular Bonsai dealer at the shows.  I’d been thinking about adding a little tree to the Airstream, and finding out the first big activity on the town square was happening I jumped in the truck and stopped by Sadira’s.

She was under the weather yesterday.  Sinus infection done, food poisoning in full effect.  One thought here gang.  Shrimp & Arizona….don’t do it.  Just don’t!

We hit the show and sure enough, bonsai trees were available.  I looked around, then wandered the square for a while deciding on what to do.  Finally we returned to the little tent full of trees and I picked my Airstream’s new resident.  You’ll see photos soon enough.

I once had a wonderful little bonsai for years.  High school.  It thrived.  Then I went to MA for a few weeks and my mom watched over the tree.  One night on the phone she told me she’d accidentally killed the tree.  She thought it could use some fertilizer (NOOOOOOOOO) and the tree went brown pretty quick.  Whoops!  Still, she was the best mom I could ask for and I still miss her.  Happy Mother’s Day mom.  A new little tree is along in the Airstream now.

I dropped Sadira off and headed for home.  Quick lunch and then I ran up to the Rodeo Stadium.  Yes, I got to photograph the rodeo.  No, I’m not satisfied with the shots.  I needed a 1.8 lens for this stuff, and I didn’t drag one along.  The rodeo started at 7:30, and even with the lights in the stadium the action was so fast that the lenses I brought didn’t cover it.  A few interesting shots that I’ll play with in Photoshop.  Maybe you’ll see them down the road.

I didn’t get home until almost 10, and I was starved.  So I sat up and made a late dinner.  Didn’t get to sleep until nearly midnight.  Ah yes, restful!

This morning was an early rise.  I headed out to the north side of Sycamore Canyon with Sadira, Tom, & DaNece.  2 hour ride in on the super bumpy roads through Perkinsville.  Nearly a 3 hour hike toward the canyon (no water already, lots of dry beds), hot sun, winds with some type of eye irritating  pollen, and a generally wonderful time!  Glad to have shared the adventure.

Our “haze” has returned to the skies, and the blues were really washed out today.  I’ve heard it’s hazy from here to Georgia, so who knows what is up.  So, many of the landscape shots today were sub-par to say the least.  But there was one thing that caught all of our attention.  The flowers heading into the area.  Blues, powder blues, oranges, and purples.  The purple really got me.  Cactus flowers once again (hey, they’re not red).

As we made our way in we began seeing new (to us) flowers that really stood out against the red rock background.  Small green cactus with purple flowers.  One here, one there.  As we neared our destination clusters of the flowers.  Big clusters.  They seemed to be everywhere.  Even along our hike we found more of these wonderful cactus (I’ll look them up in my book tomorrow).

I have dozens of good shots.  They’re all slightly washed out, but I’ll deal with them in Photoshop tomorrow.  High afternoon sun, even with haze, yields less than brilliant results.  But the shots here are currently unedited.  And they’re still stunning flowers in my opinion. 

Finally, after hours driving in, hours hiking, and hours driving back we returned to Prescott.  Sadira wasn’t feeling too well, and I was a little off.  Hot hike, lots of dust, lots of exertion, etc.  Plus I got too much sun.  So we basically crashed on the couch for a while, and finally got enough energy to get moving again.  Sadira headed off to Costco, and I went to do some shopping at Fry’s.  Groceries you know.

After some rest this evening I decided to head to downtown Prescott to try setting up a few exposures for doing an HDR (High Dynamic Ratio) photo.  My intention was to get Whiskey Row and the St. Michaels Hotel.  I’ve gotten many exposures this evening, and only started toying with them.  I only took one set of exposures of the Courthouse, and the result was the photo at the start of this post.  My first satisfying HDR photo (to me at least).  I only tone mapped it after feeding the 3 exposures into Photomatix.  No real tweaking beyond their basic tone mapper.  I like it.  There are places for HDR to be used……more will follow.

That’s it for the evening.  10 p.m. here and I’m beat.  Tomorrow, laundry, errands, and who knows what else.  Wonder if I can fit a 3 hour nap in somewhere?

Ah, time off. No racing around this morning. No radio on to find out the news of the day. Just a slow and steady start to the day.

Oh yeah….I slept in until 8 a.m.! I did wakeup around 5, some light coming through the vent cover, but I strategically placed a pillow and went back to sleep. Sometimes light can be overcome by the common pillow!

After getting up I made a few calls back to New England. Mostly I reached nobody! They’re all out doing stuff, after all they’re 3 hours ahead of me and I woke up late.

While I made my phone calls I did a little organizing in the trailer, and charged up all my camera batteries. Re-stuffed the new Crumpler bag, got the 30 & 40D cameras ready, and charged my flash batteries as well. The rodeo is tonight you know.

I also messed around with a series of photos I shot weeks ago. Remember my mentioning HDR images? Yeah, they’ve still been on my mind, but I’d been doing the 7 Point System. One major project at a time. The next major project is coming up. I now want to really learn about HDR. I’ve got a few ideas you see……

So, this morning I gave Photomatix Pro a whirl. I also tried the HDR setup in Photoshop once more. The image you see here today was done with Photomatix. I’ve only started experimenting, so cut me a little slack on this first true venture into HDR. I used their default settings, and didn’t get far into tone mapping.

Why?

Time for breakfast & a shower. Then to start the day. Plus I had to pop a post up you know.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been more than worn down.  Downright exhausted often.

No, I’m not sitting up all night watching sitcoms.  Late night blog reading….ha, I don’t think so.  Blog reading is a morning activity! 

A combination of things have made rest a little more difficult.  The other week I wasn’t feeling well.  That went a long way to disrupt rest.  But there’s been another issues that has finally been resolved.

The super early wakeup!

I’m not trying to get up early.  But I find myself waking up earlier and earlier.  See, the Airstream is parked with the rear window facing the East.  We all know what comes from the East.  The sun.  Sometimes I wonder about the sun.  It causes skin cancer, sun burns, dries out lakes, sends radiation our way, and causes early wakeups in Airstreams.  Something should be done about it.  Is any Presidential candidate currently campaigning against the sun???

Each day the sun is rising a little earlier.  And the shades that came with my Airstream are pretty flimsy.  Sure, they’re cute, but so much light pours through them it’s just not funny.  I mentioned this to Sadira the other week, and suggested that I needed to find some black out shades, or something like that.

Sadira had an idea.  And she’s great about putting ideas into motion.  Last night she popped over with two new blackout shades for the Airstream.  You know what?  They work!

I’ve left the shades up this morning (they’re Velcroed up, so I can pop them down at will), and the back of the Airstream has transformed to a dark bat cave.  Super cool!

The shades go on under my transparent shades.  I can close them and nobody even knows about my new little blackout shades!  But I thought I’d share them here.

By the way, there’s still light pouring in from my Fantastic Fan vent covers.  Yes, I noticed that this morning…..hmmmm……maybe one more shade wouldn’t hurt!  :

I’ve played with Scott Kelby’s 7 point system for a while now. Still, I’m only in the “Photoshop Experimentation” mode. It’s hard choosing photos to edit. Looking through my favorites I find myself saying, “I don’t think I need to edit that…..do I?”

Well, today I decided to apply some of the techniques.

The original photo I picked was one of Bert Gildart. You remember him, don’t you? Well, on our hike into the Promised Land I got a few interesting shots of Bert & Janie as we hiked around.

One favorite was Bert at the edge of a small cave we explored. I liked the photo right off and never adjusted it, just posted it onto the blog. You’re looking at the photo right now.

Unfortunately the lighting wasn’t the best. The sun was above us and slightly behind the rock formation. The plus was we weren’t staring into the sun, the minus was a lack of good light shooting into the cave.

Looking at the shot I thought a little more and found everything to be slightly bland. Except Bert of course, he’s just not a bland guy. The rock edges didn’t have the greatest contrast, Bert’s blue jeans looked even more faded than they truly were……I think you get the gist.

So, this morning I set about trying my hand at being “artistic” with one of my photos. I wanted the rocks to have more contrast, and I wanted Bert to stand out from the scene. I’m not sure if I achieved it or not. Then again, I spent about 6 minutes on the edits.

As you’ll see immediately, the colors have changed dramatically. That happened almost immediately. I shot this picture in RAW. That left me a lot of room to work with the photo after the fact. The first step I took was resetting the white balance. The original seemed a little too far into the blue range. And it was. I simply sampled an area that should be white to set my custom white balance. The white I sampled from was the piece of paper sticking up from Bert’s pocket.

After resetting the white balance I revealed some more detail from the shadows behind Bert. At first I revealed too much and it looked far too artificial, so I toned it down a bit. All of those changes were in the RAW editor in Photoshop (it always pops up when you bring a RAW image in).

I opened the image and created a new layer with adjustments. At the tone curve I set it to Strong Contrast. That really brought all the edges of the rocks out. It also over did it on Bert, so I created a mask and got Bert out of the strong contrast.

Finally, when resetting the white balance in the beginning I thought Bert’s jeans faded way too much. So I created one more layer, jumped into Hue & Saturation, and pumped up the blues a touch. Bert’s jeans became “new jeans”, and I touched up the blue pattern around his hat. Basically, I got the blues back to where they were in the original shot, while keeping a warmer yellow to everything else.

So, there’s the first real official edit attempt. I understand all the concepts from Kelby’s amazing book. The thing that he can’t do for you in the book is teach you what the correct lighting and colors should be. Sure, in his book he walks you through getting that great image, and he’s made all the decisions. Doing this one I kept asking myself, “Is that closer to the real color?” I guess in time I’ll get better with that as well.

I can say, I love the 7 Point System. It’s been a lot of fun. Now it’s time to really play with applying the techniques and get creative!

Monday I received a package in the mail.  It was expected.  After all, I ordered it!

Several weeks ago Sadira and I took a ride up to Sedona.  Sadira needed a case for her camera, and locally there weren’t many great bags available.  I’d checked Manzanita Outdoors, and the selection at the time was super slim (they must have had a run on camera bags.

Honestly I’m happy to say that our Sedona trip worked out great.  Rollies Camera had quite the selection.  They also had something I’d never seen before.  Crumpler bags.  Sadira ended up with a “4 Million Dollar Home.”  A cute little bag that will fit a digital SLR with a lens on it, one spare lens, and extra junk that you choose to load.  The pack got me thinking…….

The thinking continued to the point I finally ended up ordering a Crumpler bag.  I wanted to carry a little more, so I got the 6 Million Dollar Home.  I’ve already put gear in it too.  My Canon 30D with my 28-135mm lens on it, my 18-85mm Canon Lens, my 50mm Compact Macro Lens, and my 580 EX Speedlight.  Oh, also my off camera flash cable, my shutter release cable, several CF cards, and my battery charger.  I’ve still got some extra room, and I can lash a lens case to the outside of the pack.

Did I mention how compact the pack is, even with the room in it?  Probably not.

Gotta say, I’d heard about Crumpler last year, but I didn’t investigate them too closely.  After seeing the products in person I knew their cases would be something I would like.  Now that I’ve got one, I can tell you for a fact their cases are super!  I’ll let you know how it works over time.  I’ve had Lowe Pro packs for years, and they’re still doing well.  I’m hoping Crumpler will offer the same durability…..time will tell.