Upcoming Shows
January 4th, 2012
I’m going to take a break from posting the slot canyon photos and tell you about a couple gallery shows that are coming up that will have my work on display.
First, when I entered the landscape show at the Darkroom Gallery in Essex Junction, Vermont, I had actually gone to their site to check out a call for entries to a nude show they were planning. Of course I also entered the nude show, The Human Form. The results of the jury process were announced just as I returned home from my visit to Vermont. I’m very pleased that I will have three photos in that exhibit, which opens later this month. I’m particularly pleased about this show because the juror was Elizabeth Opalenik who is a wonderful photographer. It’s fun to know that she liked my work enough to chose three of my photos for the show.
You can find all the details about this show at the link, and see the entire show on line.
These are my photos that will be included in “The Human Form”:
This one is a special photograph for me because it marks the beginning of my work with the figure in nature. It was at this shoot on the coast of Maine that I had the epiphany that this was the work I was meant to be doing as a photographer. It’s been nearly 10 years since I took this photo and I’m still doing primarily figure in nature photographs.
This second photo is the most successful photograph I’ve ever taken, at least if you count popularity as success. I love this photo and many others seem to share that love. I like it in particular because it is exactly the photo I had pre-visualized and went out to capture. And it features one of the best models I have worked with, Lani, who understood just what I was trying to do with the photo and knew exactly how she needed to look as she laid there in that freezing mountain stream.
And, finally, she chose this more recent photo featuring my favorite model, Brooke, also freezing in a mountain stream.
If you are in the Vermont area I think you’d enjoy seeing this show. Check it out.
And, I also received notice that I’ll again be in the Dirty Show in Detroit next month. I’ve been in this show many times now. At first it took a bit of arm twisting to even get me to enter it. I didn’t think it was an appropriate place for my work. But they kept after me to enter saying they wanted work like mine to “class it up.” I don’t know if I do that with my entries, but I keep getting in the show. Every year I shoot a few things that are more erotic than my normal work and enter some of it, but also enter some of my regular figure work. And it seems that every year they chose the more tame, non-erotic work for the show. This year they chose one of my shots from Coyote Buttes from the trip this past fall, featuring, of course, the lovely Kat and Brooke:
And one last note. That photo that is going to the Dirty Show is also the January photo on my Coyote Buttes 2012 Calendar. You can still get my calendars at that link or by clicking the calendar photo over to the right.
Welcome to Twenty-Twelve
January 1st, 2012
“You cannot see wilderness from a road.
What you see from a road is something different- a scene, a panorama, a picture;
but you do not feel anything.”
–Edward Abbey
Getting this new year started off with a post. I’m looking forward to 2012 with hope. It could be a great year. A lot of whether that is true or not depends on us. Let’s all do what we can to make it a great year.
These are a couple more photos of Kat and Brooke as we wandered on down Wirepass Canyon toward Buckskin Gulch. It’s a beautiful canyon and Kat and Brooke are beautiful and talented models. A photographer like me couldn’t really ask for much more. It doesn’t get much better than this.
But what isn’t getting any easier is figuring out the best way to edit these slot canyon files and what software to use. I worked these first with Nikon’s View NX2. But when I got done I didn’t like what they looked like. So I started over using PhotoShop Elements 9 this time and doing the RAW conversions in Camera Raw. I liked those results much better. That is what you are seeing here. The rendering of the colors in the canyon is much different. I think these are more realistic…a better representation of what it really looks like. It looks so simply unearthly down in there that it is a real challenge. But I was seeing artifacts and blocked up patches of color in what the Nikon software was doing, so I didn’t want to use that.
I’m on the road for family visits right now, so I’m working on my laptop…which adds another element of variation in what I’m doing…though the laptop screen is calibrated with the same instrument as the desktop computer that I usually use.
Once again, your comments on how these look to you are encouraged. The photos in the last post were processed with Nikon View NX2, if you want to compare. But I didn’t have the problems with artifacts and color blocks in the last batch.
Happy New Year
December 30th, 2011
I hope you are enjoying the holiday season. It has been keeping me pretty busy, which is why I haven’t done a post for a few days. Sorry about that.
Here are Brooke and Kat still in Wirepass Canyon. It’s a beautiful place that I’ve been to several times. This was the best shoot there ever, though…thanks to these two fantastic models. Made all that ugly stuff with the deer seem almost worth it.
In the photo below Kat is posing below one of those rock falls that must be climbed to get through the canyon. It wasn’t all that big a challenge. Looks good, though.
Today I had the pleasure to visit and have lunch with Ken at Darkroom Gallery in Essex Junciton, Vermont. Ken is a really great guy…and his gallery is beautiful. I’m so pleased that some of my work has been shown there. I can highly recommend this as a gallery whose juried shows are very much worth entering. Check them out.
And, one last commercial message for 2011. My 2012 calendars are still available in my store. Click here or on the calendar cover over to the right to see the calendar previews and order them.
Happy Christmas
December 24th, 2011
A quick post to wish you all the best at this holiday season. Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, I hope you enjoy yourself and think of others who are not as fortunate as you.
This has been a season for celebration for as long as humans have been celebrating. The sun has stopped retreating and has begun to stay longer and longer each day. Winter is here, but spring is coming. We have much to celebrate. In honor of this ancient tradition that reaches into our time in many ways, this seems like a good time to enjoy beautiful nude women dancing around Carhenge.
And here’s a clip from youtube of my favorite Christmas song. Sad to look at the video and realize how tragically timeless it is. Let’s all hope and work to make this video a relic of the past.
Playing (In) The Slots
December 21st, 2011
After we escaped from the simply awful San Juan Inn and stopped for a great breakfast at Gouldings we drove on through Monument Valley and headed toward Page, Arizona. But we drove on through Page and continued on to St. George which was the closest place I had been able to find to rent a 4WD for our upcoming desert adventures.
The rental place was at the St. George airport. You’d think that would be easy to find. St. George isn’t that big a place. Well, I had google maps directions and the GPS seemed to know about the St. George airport, so I didn’t expect any problems. Wrong. We arrived at the place both google and GPS thought would be the airport. It was obvious that there had been an airport there, but clearly it was no longer in operation, at least for passenger service. After some driving around aimlessly I called the rental place and got directions to the new airport. It’s out in the middle of the desert way south of town on an entirely new road that isn’t even on google maps, let alone the GPS map.
But eventually we picked up a RAV4 and drove back to Page. We stayed where I’ve always stayed in Page, at the Motel 6. It’s a nice, new Motel 6. Even has an elevator. Big step up from the San Juan Inn.
The next morning we headed out to the ranger station where we got our permits for the following day to visit South Coyote Buttes. Then we drove on down to the Wirepass trailhead and headed into Wirepass Canyon. The permits for this area can be picked up at the trailhead. This is also the trailhead for the famous Wave. I’ve been there, almost 10 years ago. It has now gotten to be so popular that it’s almost impossible to get a permit to go there. On the morning when we picked up our South Coyote Buttes permits there were more than 50 people at the ranger station for the morning drawing for 10 permits to go to the Wave. I’m glad I went when I did. I doubt that I’ll ever go back there.
The ranger station had some photos and warning signs about rock falls in Wirepass. They didn’t look like too much of a problem, but I wondered how different it would be from the last time I was there, about 6 years ago. Turned out there was really nothing new in the way of obstacles. There have long been a couple places where you have climb up and down some drops in the canyon floor of about 10 feet or so. No big deal.
Wirepass Canyon is a short canyon that connects to Buckskin Gulch. We hiked down to Buckskin and first went left, then right in Buckskin Gulch. Even though I felt like all three of us were a little off our best game on this day after so much difficulty on the trip, still when I sat down today to edit what we shot that day I ended up with 75 keepers. That’s an incredibly high number of photos for one day of shooting. I’ll be posting photos from that day for the next few posts here. Brooke and Kat did outstanding work. I used my 12-24 and my fisheye, both of which are well suited to the slot canyon environment. I couldn’t be more happy with this day of shooting.
Getting back to technical issues, I think I’ve found the solution to my editing software problems. It was sitting here right under my nose all the time. My good friend, Tim, read my blog and called to offer his advice. Tim really knows his stuff, so I always pay attention to him. He asked why I didn’t just use Nikons ViewNX2 software to do my conversions.
Well, I already had that program loaded on my computer, but I never use it. I pretty much hate all software from Nikon for the simple reason that it all really sucks. ViewNX is buggy. It crashes with disturbing regularity. The user interface seems like it must have been designed to deliberately confuse the user. I really hate it. I’ve paid for Capture in the past and will never do that again because it’s equally awful. At least View is free.
But Tim assured me that View could do a pretty good job with my RAW files if I could stand to use it. He agreed with me about the user interface, but said it is possible to get used to it. And, I immediately realized just what my problem was and knew that it was likely View would solve it.
The thing is, I really, really like the way Nikon renders jpegs. That’s one major reason that I resisted shooting RAW for a while…that plus the fact that the D100 which was my first DSLR was essentially useless when it was set to shoot RAW files. I could have worked faster with an 8×10 view camera. But, of course, that problem is ancient history. And the thing about View is that it will do the RAW conversion in essentially the same way that the camera produces jpegs.
So I fired up ViewNX and used it to edit the photos with this post and all the rest of this day’s shooting. I think I’m getting the results I was after. Comments are welcome, since I’m always interested to hear how things look on other peoples’ monitors. But, despite not liking the way I have to interface with the software, and not liking that I have to output the converted files as tiffs, I think I’ll be using View for my conversions from now on. That solves the problem and requires no purchases, which is always a good thing.
Snapshots
December 18th, 2011
The season has gotten to me. Sorry, but life and Christmas have been keeping me from doing new posts here. I’ll be back at it soon, but since I haven’t had time for editing and playing around with software to try to get the files to look the way I want them, I thought I’d just share some snapshots and tell you a bit about our trip.
After we finally got the truck repaired and escaped from Alliance, Nebraska, we made a wonderful drive through Denver and on over the Rockies at sunset, arriving late at night in Green River, Utah. Now, Green River isn’t much of a town. In fact, it made Alliance seem like a teaming metropolis by comparison. But, Green River is only a few miles from Goblin Valley and Little Wild Horse Canyon. There’s lots of other stuff in the general area. I had planned to spend three days here exploring many of those spots and doing photos. But, because of the deer in Nebraska, we only had two nights with one full day of shooting. And that still left us behind schedule.
Based on a great-looking web site, I had chosen the Robber’s Roost Motel for our stay in Green River. That’s their sign up above. Even the sign looks interesting. And I have to say that the folks running the place were very nice. The rooms were, unfortunately, barely adequate. Just an average ’50s motel room with not much to make it interesting. Served the purpose, but a little of a let down from my expectations.
Above is Kat doing some shooting in “downtown” Green River. The place seemed pretty close to a ghost town. That is a real shame, given its location so close to so many great locations and right on I-70. It looks like the downturn in the economy has really hit Green River pretty hard. Below is my shot of one of the local former establishments. The town really needs a good simple little diner…just finding a place to eat was a challenge.
Another of the great points of interest near Green River is Arches National Park. It’s just up the road. When we finished our shooting at Goblin Valley and Little Wild Horse we spent the night and headed out the next morning, stopping first at Arches. Arches is way too popular to be a place where shooting figure work is possible, so we just spent much of the day shooting the scenes there.
When the models are also photographers it’s good to take an occasional day off on a trip like this to let them have time to shoot whatever they want.
Both Kat and Brooke shot quite a bit at Arches.
The matching hats came from the gift shop at Arches…both ladies really needed a good desert hat.
Of course, just outside the entrance to Arches is the town of Moab. It’s pretty much the opposite of Green River. No sign of a depressed economy there. If you like yuppified food and overpriced shops full of kitsch, this is the town for you. Lot’s of places to stay, lots of places to eat. All kinds of food. Everything grossly overpriced. Kind of a ruination of everything I love about this part of our country. But, hey, it seems to be what people like. Not for me, though. We had lunch there and walked around a bit.
After lunch in Moab we headed toward Monument Valley. Our destination was a motel in Mexican Hat. It was dark by the time we reached it. If the Robber’s Roost was a bit of a let-down, our motel in Mexican Hat, The San Juan Inn, was a total disaster. Seriously, if you are traveling out to the Monument Valley area and look at this place’s web site you will think it is a very nice place. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Well, it could be a nice place. It’s built right below a beautiful red rock cliff and faces a scenic river. If someone who had a clue how to run a hotel owned it, it could be a gold mine. But the owners have created a nasty disaster of a place. The rooms have been horribly “re-muddled” in what appears to be an effort to make them as inconvenient and uncomfortable as possible. The view of the river is obstructed and access do get down to it, or even see it, has been blocked deliberately. And then there was the question of internet access. I’ve never encountered such an idiotic situation before.
When we checked in I, of course, asked how to get on line. The surly woman who checked us in (I assume she was an owner) snarled, “Bring your things down here and I’ll tell you the access code. But I don’t want you writing it down!” Well, we did surreptitiously write the code down, and it’s a good thing because we kept getting bumped off and having to re-enter the code to get back on. But we soon gave up because the speed of the connection made dial-up seem fast.
Eventually I went to the office and asked what the problem was.
“There’s something wrong with the dish,” was the woman’s snarled reply. “They are supposed to send someone out to fix it, but they have to come from Tennessee, so I have no idea when they will get here.”
Oh, and that same dish apparently provided the TV for the rooms. Only one fuzzy channel with no sound was available.
So we gave up on the internet and went to dinner at the restaurant beside the motel which displayed signs saying it was not affiliated with the motel and there were no discounts for motel guests and no free breakfast. Well, ok…that might be good. And they did have a sign saying there was free wi-fi for customers.
So, we go in, sit down and when the waitress comes we place our orders and ask how to get on the wi-fi.
“You have to go next door to the motel and ask the woman at the desk to give you the access code.”
The next morning we got out of that place as fast as we could. We had no interest in trying to get breakfast at the restaurant there, we just wanted to put the place behind us. The first place we came to for breakfast was Gouldings in the heart of Monument Valley. A great place. I had looked at it as a possible place to spend the night, but passed because their room rate is outside my budget. But, if you can afford it, it’s a great place in a perfect location. Great restaurant, great views. I’m sure the rooms are fine, too. There might even be internet and TV, who knows. Seems like, if I remember right, we were able to get on line and catch up on e-mail while we were having breakfast.
But if you can’t afford Gouldings, don’t make the mistake I did and plan to spend the night in Mexican Hat. Instead go to the other side of Monument Valley and stay in Kayenta, Arizona where there are several reasonably-priced motels, any of which will be much, much better than the San Jose Inn.
That’s Brooke enjoying the view of Monument Valley from Gouldings in the final photo.
Kat in Little Wild Horse Canyon
December 12th, 2011
“Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.”
– Edward Abbey
Here’s Kat being beautiful in a couple narrow twisty bits of Little Wild Horse Canyon. These were shot with my 8mm fisheye lens. In fact, this canyon and another that you will be seeing soon were the reason I decided to buy this fisheye lens. I thought the combination of the fisheye effect with the curves of the slot canyons and the lovely curves of my models would be an unbeatable combination. I’m pretty pleased with the results.
I’m also still trying to figure out the best workflow with the new software I’m testing. I made some more changes and I think it’s working better now. These were processed in DxO Optics Pro with no color adjustment (leaving white balance set to “as shot”), just keeping DxO’s automatic adjustment for highlights and shadows, noise reduction and sharpening. Then I exported the file as a DNG file and opened it with Camera Raw where I adjusted the white balance to “cloudy” which gives a more accurate view of what the red rock looks like.
I think this has eliminated the problem of Camera Raw not recognizing that I had adjusted the white balance before I opened the file in Camera Raw. Camera Raw was treating the adjusted white balance as “as shot” and really screwing up the colors as a result. I usually keep my camera set for auto white balance which tends to try to remove the red from the rock and make it a more neutral gray. Auto white balance usually gives me just what I’m looking for, but the red rock desert is a major exception.
So, I’d be interested to hear what you think of the colors in the last few posts. There are so many variables involved in showing photos on the web that it’s very helpful to hear what others are seeing. In the next few days I hope to find time to play around with some more “normal” files and see what I get with this new version of a workflow. A slot canyon in the red rock desert is such a major departure from anything that might be called “normal” lighting that it’s hard to tell if I’m on track or not.
Brooke in Little Wild Horse Canyon
December 10th, 2011
“The artist’s job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.”
–Edward Abbey
Here are a couple photos of Brooke down in Little Wild Horse Canyon. This canyon is fairly shallow and open, compared to some others, and we were there at mid-day, so we had a lot of sun down in the canyon. Direct sun is, of course, problematic, especially in a situation like this that presents dark, deep shadows. DxO Optics Pro seems to be doing a great job of holding the shadows and highlights from my raw files, though. But I’m finding that it is creating some other issues.
This shoot may not have been the best one to use to learn this new program. Figuring out what to do with color in a slot canyon is a serious challenge. The rocks are red. The light is red. So what’s a correct color? Anything that works automatically tends to remove the red…including DxO. On the last post I tried to adjust the color simply by adjusting the preset color balance…setting it for cloudy, which gave pretty close to a feel of what it really looks like.
But I seem to have caused a problem when I exported the files from DxO as DNG files. I then opened them in PhotoShop, through Camera RAW. And Camera RAW did not like what it saw in the files that had already been processed in DxO. I think Camera RAW took the adjusted color balance and treated it as “As Shot” which made everything too red. I tried to adjust that in PhotoShop, but was less than totally successful. I think Camera RAW was also applying some sharpening that I didn’t want as well.
So, I’m working on a different approach. These two files were exported from DxO as Tiffs, which avoided sending them through Camera RAW on the way to PhotoShop. The color seems to be more in line with the real look of these canyons. And you have two different situations to study, one in full sun with deep shadows and the other in a fully shaded area of the canyon wall.
Figuring this stuff out might have been a little simpler if I’d been working with a more “normal” lighting situation and subject matter. Back in the film days these would have just been shot with daylight film and they would have come out red, red, red. But digital allows for more subtle treatment of the light. Now I just have to figure out how these software programs are interacting with each other so I can get what I want out of them.
Of course the one constant in all of this is the lovely Brooke doing her usual great job of posing and relating her pose to her environment. And, slot canyons are a place for wide angle lenses. These were both shot with my 12-24 at pretty close to the wide end of the zoom range. I’ll have some fisheye shots to post soon.
Little Wild Horse Canyon
December 7th, 2011
“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”
–Edward Abbey
After our pause at the twin trees we headed on down into Little Wild Horse Canyon. This was my first time in this canyon, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but found it to be well worth the hike. Beautiful red rock walls, scoured by flash floods that create wonderful curves in the surface of the rock. And, as in all the slot canyons out in this desert, the light becomes intensely red as it filters down into the bottom of the canyon, bouncing off the red rock walls on the way down, getting redder and redder. By the time it reaches the bottom everything simply glows red.
These photos were took at one of our first stops after entering the canyon. Kat is lovely posing on a tiny ledge in the rock wall.
These files were processed in DxO Optics Pro and then received just a little touch-up in PhotoShop CS4. I’d be interested to hear what you think of the file quality. Of course, they have been greatly reduced to fit through the tiny tubes that are the internet, but you can get a general idea. I’ll be printing some of these from the full-resolution files soon. I’m very interested to see how they look printed large.
Blog Note:
Well, that was an unpleasant surprise. Ever since I moved my blog to wordpress a major annoyance has been that photos uploaded at a size wider than the column of the blog would be distorted and crammed into the space available. So I always resized photos after they were uploaded to make them fit. Recently I noticed that photos were being properly resized so they fit without distorting the proportions. All good, right? But shortly after I made this post, not resizing the photos, I was watching Jeopardy and checking e-mail on my i-pod when I clicked over to see how the blog looked…and found the photos in this post all scrunched up. So I just now fixed it. I wonder if other browsers were also showing the photos in a disproportionate manner. If any of you faithful readers out there have noticed this problem could you please let me know? And let me know what browser you were using when you noticed the problem? Thanks.
Edward Abbey
December 5th, 2011
“Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance accross the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.” – Edward Abbey
