Bluegrass Mood

I'm on the sidewalk just outside the bar in Charlottesville, surrounded by what appears to be the entire photography staff of every major publication in the free world. Look3 is over, and this party is the last official event of the weekend. Inside was dancing, and I sat to drink a beer next to a table with about 25 pounds of cameras arrayed in front of three photographers.

And one very drunk girl. She was impressed by 25 pounds of cameras.




Outside, a band played the most frenetic bluegrass I'd ever heard. We folded ourselves up in the music, and left our lives behind for a little while.

Better Black-and-White Photos: Adjust Your Grayscale Mix

The Grand Canyon trip provided a perfect venue for landscape photography, and I think I shot 300-400 of them during the trip. After I got back home and started to review them, I was able to winnow it down to just a few that had any real drama, and set to work on the post-processing.

Landscapes, at least for me, are particularly hard to color-correct. I love a good black-and-white print, and prefer the deep blacks of selenium toning on a bright white paper to really bring out the contrast in the light and shadow. These effects are harder to achieve in digital form, but fortunately, Adobe Lightroom gives you fine-grained control over how the grayscale conversion is performed (you have this ability in Adobe Camera Raw, and I believe also in Aperture and other apps as well).

It's pretty simple to convert to grayscale in Lightroom: go to the Develop module, scroll down the panel on the right, and in the HSL / Color / Grayscale panel, click Grayscale. Voila! You now have a black and white image. But almost always, you can do better. Lightroom lets you adjust the "grayscale mix," which is the formula it uses to convert color into grayscale.

Why does this matter? Let's turn to the expert, Ansel Adams, from "Examples: the Making of 40 Photographs" (Little, Brown and Company, 2004):

The sunlight was slightly hazed. I used a yellow Wratten No. 8 (K2) filter to lower the bluish shadow values within the water. (p. 16)

I had a clear visualization of the image I wanted, but when the Wratten No. 15 (G) filter an the film holder were in place, I could not find my Weston exposure meter! (p. 41)

I knew that, with the low color saturation of the cliff rock, the panchromatic film would not adequately separate the yellows and light reds; a red filter would make things worse. A blue filter like the No. 47 would have given values very similar to those of the O'Sullivan photograph, but I had lost my blue filter. I used a green filter (Wratten No. 58), which better defined the sunlit areas; it also darkened the shadows in the recess. The green filter lowers the values of red and blue but lightens yellow and green values. (p. 129)

If we are shooting black and white film, we still need excellent color sense. Film, and paper, will not always respond to all colors equally, and — perhaps more importantly — we can maintain greater control over the final image by choosing which colors to lighten and which to darken in the final print. Adams did this using filters, at the time the image was captured. In the post-film world, almost always this processing will be done after capture, in the digital darkroom.

The Grayscale mix sliders allow you to adjust independently the luminance of eight color channels: red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta. You can simulate the effect of a yellow filter by raising the luminance of yellow and green, and lowering the luminance of red and blue.

Here's the image above, but adjusted two different ways. First, with an "orange filter" — lighten orange a lot, red a little, and lower green and blue:



and here's the same image again, but with a "green filter" effect which raises green a lot, blue and yellow a little, and lowers red, blue, purple, and magenta:



Note the differences in these photos. It isn't just that one is darker than the other, which (on average) is also true, but that the highlights and lowlights are placed in entirely different spots in the image.

These aren't exactly what you'd get with those filters, but it's close, and I have the option of lightening or darkening individual channels to get exactly the look I want.

Grand Canyon Flora

We arrived at the Grand Canyon in late April, with snow still a recent memory, and although the rains weren't scheduled until later ("June 7," our guide proclaimed with authority), there was more water than I can recall ever seeing in a desert. Against the ruddy brown background, patches of green of varying shades appeared in abundance, and early flowering plants were on display for us.

The prickly pear cactus is a short, stubbly, ugly looking plant with fleshy oblong pads spiked with long, sharp needles. About this time of year (and perhaps at others, too — I should come back to test this idea), it yields beautiful red, yellow, or purple flowers. The flowers' petals are translucent, and they appear shockingly delicate for such a sturdy plant.



An amazing quality of these flowers is that they are touch-sensitive: stroke the inside, around the center, and the anthers (the small stalks that carry the stamen, where the pollen is produced) bend inwards, an adaptation which adhere pollen to the bodies of bees, wasps, birds, or interested humans.



On a lunch break we wandered off the trail somewhat, past dozens of sparsely populated agave. The "century plant" produces a towering phallic stalk on which grow flowers and seeds; the plant produces one of these in its lifetime, and the death of the plant coincides with the fall of the stalk, scattering seeds throughout the area. A relative of this plant, the blue agave, provides the mash that is fermented and distilled into tequila.



I have a fascination with the kind of yucca that grows in a spray of dagger-like leaves, often with curls of dead fibers hanging like tinsel around the plant. This variety I think is Spanish Bayonet. I saw Spanish Dagger in Santa Fe. I wonder if there's a Spanish Cutlass some place.

In any case, the yucca (like the agave, which is in the yucca genus) produces a tall flower stalk. This one has clusters of whitish-yellow flowers, a bit like certain orchids. The hills rising up to the canyon rim and our last views of the Colorado river made for a beautiful backdrop as we hiked away from Bright Angel camp, and onto Indian Garden.

Mailed by Mule at the Bottom of the Grand Canyon

It's hard out here for a mule.

Once, this was a white mule, stabled for the evening at one location or another along the trails in the Grand Canyon. A mile or two of dusty, red trail later and he's a horse of a different color: a pink mule. I sympathize; three days on the trail and I was sneezing rusty red for nearly a week. I thought first my nose was bleeding. It might have been, but there was too much red dust in the way to be able to tell.

Pinky here was at the ass-end of a roughly 12-mule caravan, packing garbage out of and people into the Grand Canyon. A vertical mile down, by the banks of the Bright Angel creek and only a short hobbling distance away from the 50-degree chill of a silty-green Colorado, are the Phantom Ranch and the Bright Angel campground. There are prickly pear, and rushing water, dusty trails, and, if you're a mule, a place to spend the night in mulish comfort.

As humans, my wife and I were entitled to a tent, and an early bed time. Luxury!



At the Phantom Ranch, you can buy a postcard and a stamp, borrow a pen, and write your offspring (who are safely at home with their grandparents) a note. If you put that note into the right saddlebag, it'll get stamped: Mailed by Mule at the Bottom of the Grand Canyon, Phantom Ranch. The mules do all the heavy lifting. We just walked there.

Mule trains take about 3 hours to get down from the top, and about 4 hours to get up. They do it a bit faster than we managed.

But I'll bet I had a better view.

One thing leads to another

Vacation last week ended in Las Vegas, with cocktails at 5, dinner at 6, and "O" at the Bellagio. Las Vegas is a city for the blurry.



These images are just experiments with focus (or lack thereof). I'm using a 16-35 f/2.8 L lens here, wide open. The aperture diaphragm produces circular "bokeh" even when stopped down, because the blades form a near-perfect circular aperture. Yay for Canon!

Photos from the hike coming soon.

Messy

Sara is still working out the mechanics of the spoon. She loves her yogurt .... Sara is still getting the hang of this spoon thing.

Santa Fe Flora

Santa Fe, NM, is the highest state capital in the United States. I hiked the Atalaya Mountain trail, which starts at 7600 feet (2134m) above sea level and rises to about 9100 feet (2773m) at the peak. The scenery is an odd mix of alpine and desert plants; Santa Fe is in the desert, but Atalaya Mountain is part of the nearby Sangre de Cristo mountains, and there's enough rainfall annually to support a lush pine forest.

Bright sunshine helped expose the lush, saturated colors of some of the local flora. Spanish dagger appeared in random three-foot clumps by the side of the trail, and multi-colored lichen peppered the mountainside rocks.





Check back in a few weeks, when I should have pictures from the Grand Canyon hike.