HDR – Image Subjects, Revisited

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HDR – 1947 Ford One Tonne Tow Truck, McLure, British Columbia

HDR – North of 60 Bus Shelter Seats, Valleyview, Alberta

I have had a go at creating two High Dynamic Range (HDR) images in the last while. In landscape images my practice is to shoot with Automatic Exposure Bracketing (creating 3 images in succession -1, 0 & +1) and explore how the images will turn out in HDR. The images are of subjects I have shot before; but, they are not the original image shots included in previous posts. They are ‘also-ran’ images of the 1947 Ford One-tonne Tow Truck from McLure, British Columbia and the ‘would-be’ bus shelter seat, North of 60 style. In both the detail, lines and range of light are enhanced (or at least different).

Listening to – today it’s been the conclusion of Ken Follett’s ‘Pillars of the Earth’ on the long drive home from Edmonton to High Level. The narrative provides glimpse of Monarchy, Ecclesiastical ambition and all that was behind building cathedrals and parishes; the story moves from Life at the local/village level all the way to Thomas Beckett and King Henry and those who contested the throne.

Quote to Inspire – “Vision is that original spark that was ignited within you and made you pick up a camera to capture whatever it is you saw, that made you turn to shout “Did you see that!” only to find no one there–so you created an image to do the telling.” ― David duChemin, Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Fine Coffee, Wind Turbines & Rainbow

Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Journaling, Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Summer, Weather

1 Wind Turbines – North Shore, Oahu 1

2 Wind Turbines – North Shore, Oahu 2

3 Wind Turbines – North Shore, Oahu 3

Fine Ass Coffee Mill – Oahu, HI 1

Fine Ass Coffee Mill – Oahu, HI 2

More than a few times my daughter, my wife and I drove northward exploring Oahu’s North Shore and Haleiwa. We had rented a blue Ford Fusion so that we could explore and see the island. Using our Tom Tom GPS we found that both the GPS as well as traffic signs encouraged the use of U-turns along highway intersections as the best means to handle road to road transitions.

Our first excursion was a scouting endeavor, a drive northward that became our first trek around Oahu. As we moved toward Haleiwa we stopped at a locally grown coffee mill, its name cheekily playing upon Hawaiian dialect, Fine Ass Coffee resembling the words Finest Coffee. We took a tour and were introduced to live, growing coffee beans – usually coffee beans grow in dyads within one shell and occasionally are found on their own (one coffee bean within a shell). Singleton coffee beans (called peaberries) produce a potent coffee as they receive the nutrients that would feed what should have been a dyad.

What was also striking as we moved past Haleiwa was encountering wind turbines juxtaposed against big sky, cloud work, volcanic rock and farms. On our second drive to North Shore, we had done some shopping along the old Haleiwa road and came out of one shop to discover that a farm building one kilometre away was on fire – a brown-white plume of smoke rising into the air. And, just as in our remote communities distance to the blaze from fire departments determines rescue time and determines what physical assets can be saved. We followed our curiosity toward the fire but gave up on the endeavor realizing that the gas was toxic and that we’d likely be clogging the route toward the fire.

At that point along the roadway, I got my camera and tripod out and in directing the camera back to the way we had come discovered the wind turbines from a new angle … an extraordinary sight; I was able to catch the wind turbines within a rainbow. There were other shots in the Golden Hour where sun, landscape, cloud work and rainbows did culminate into extraordinary compositions, but being able to stop the car safely for a shot limited the possibility in the endeavor. Still, I saw what I saw – that’s good too.

Listening to – Bill Cutler’s tribute to Jerry Garcia with ‘Starlight Jamboree’ on CKUA Radio (streaming online).

Quote to Inspire – “Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.” – John Berger

HDR – Details, Paint & Upholstery

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Chevrolet Grain Truck – Edmonton, Alberta

The late forties-early fifties Chevrolet half-tonne grain truck is subject for this image and with Automatic Exposure Bracketing moving toward a final image becomes an exercise in creating a high dynamic range (HDR) shot. For me, unless shooting people within an event, my practice in creating most photos is to work with a tripod in manual (M) mode and to set the camera for the three settings of Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) – the regular or average exposure, an exposure a stop down (a darker, low key exposure) and an exposure a stop above average (a lighter, high key exposure).

Focus counts – the manual focus on my Canon EOS 60D allows me to focus upon that part of the image needing clarity, but it does so allowing me to focus upon that portion of the subject in three magnifications using the display on the back of the camera: first, what I would see through the viewfinder – normal magnification, next at 10 x optical zoom and then at 15 x optical zoom. Each level of displayed magnification allows me to adjust focus with greater and greater and greater precision. Stability also counts in focusing on the subject; the camera fixed to a tripod ensures that the camera does not move and that resulting images are tack sharp, free from blur.

Creating the exposure, creates not one, but, the three AEB exposures in succession ( – , 0 , + ) when the shutter button is pressed. After the exposures are brought into Adobe Lightroom, I am able to use HDR Efex to combine the three exposures into one image that allows the combined exposure to become an image accommodating greater range of light – more similar to what the human eye can see. I like the way Photomatix does HDR; but, NiK Software’s HDR Efex is a more stable and flexible program.

So, today’s image is an HDR shot. In the next few days my intention will be to try an HDR image that combines a larger number of exposures and to see what happens along the way. I’m reminded that the Shutter Time with Sid and Mac podcast has a couple of excellent pointers for HDR shots (somewhere between episodes 15 and 23). Mac and his wife Kasia would most likely have me using HDR for shots combining landscape, cloud-work and sunsets/sunrises. As well, Trey Ratcliff is the photographer who seems to have done most with HDR or at least has written most substantially (perhaps most helpfully) about HDR; two weeks ago he was in Vancouver and aiming to take on someone as protégé for an evening photographing the city, the water, the landscape and the sky from the top of a well-situated, tall skyscraper. It would definitely have been fun to hang out together for an evening creating HDR images – watch out for him on Twitter at @TreyRatcliff .

Listening to – Peter Himmelmann’s ‘Mission of My Soul.’

Quotes to Inspire – (1) “[…] That’s what HDR does. It adds details, paint, and upholstery to the Photograph. It’s still a photograph, but now enhanced [….] — GusDoeMatik (2) “To me, it is better to “guess” at how something works, experiment, fail, guess again, fail, and keep repeating that process over and over again until you either figure it out or you discover a multiplicity of other cool tricks along the way.” ― Trey Ratcliff

Waikiki – Dawn

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Morning’s Walk – Honolulu, Oahu, HI 1

Morning’s Walk – Honolulu, Oahu, HI 2

Morning’s Walk – Honolulu, Oahu, HI 3

Summer, summer break – vacation … settling into a new time zone five hours different from that of my year’s norm finds me out of our hotel with camera and tripod early in the morning, walking, gathering photos of Honolulu’s Waikiki – the day of the surfer and vacationer (from all parts of the world) prior to that day beginning. Surprisingly, even before 6:00 a.m., surfing instructors are out on the beach, with early morning animation, drumming up the day’s business, ready to take out the novice surfer. Looking from the beach to the ocean, before 6:00 a.m., finds surfers already surfing on moving and curling waves and along trails of the Waikiki strip joggers are already jogging. People conclude their sleep in city parks where they’ve been sleeping through a tropically warm summer night on the grass. Looking towards the buildings, Waikiki hotels are being restocked in daily essentials prior to the day’s formal start, Coca Cola products included. All this occurs before the sun crosses the horizon bringing us into day – fodder for photos.

Listening to – Glenn Miller’s band perform ‘Tuxedo Junction’ and Satchmo sing Happy Birthday to ‘Poppa’ Bing Crosby.

Quote to Inspire – “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” – Ansel Adams

Fenced Barbed-wire – This Side

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In the week following school year-end and the beginning of summer school break, my wife, my daughter and I find ourselves in Edmonton. A Sunday afternoon becomes opportunity for me to look around Edmonton with fresh eyes, this city I knew as child and youth, this city I grew up in. In my travels, parts of the city receive spitting of rain from moisture-laden skies, stacking cumulus clouds pushed across Edmonton by substantial summer winds. Less windy and wet moments provide opportunity to use clouded skies as backdrop to architecture and landscape. I’m needing to fall into sync with the opportunity of/for photos and the cadence of parking and getting out of the vehicle for possible photos.

Alongside the Anthony Henday roadway near Callingwood Avenue in Edmonton’s west-end, in a farmer’s field, on the other side of fenced, barbed-wire an older truck is parked, a truck that is likely to be a 1949 Chevrolet half-tonne with grain box, a vehicle that if rehabilitated could become vintage and a classic. The intention, as I’ve watched through these ten years, had been to use the retro look of this vintage truck with the side panels of the grain box to advertise location of a knick-knacks store in this west-end community. That store no longer exists and no one has set about moving the truck or dismantling the grain box and advertising. Erosion – rain, sun, snow and wind – has brought the grain box down and rusting to the truck’s body and cab has added deep, rough, orange peel texture to this truck’s exterior … all becoming fodder for photos.

Listening to – Jack White’s version of a U2 tune, ‘Love is Blindness,’ and the Tijuana Brass – ‘Lonely Bull,’ ‘Spanish Flea,’ ‘Taste of Honey,’ and ‘Tijuana Taxi.’

Quote to Inspire – “We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were. We don’t know these lost people but if you look around, you’ll find someone just like them.” – Gene McSweeney

Boyer Bridge & Buscaglia

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Boyer River Bridge – Fort Vermilion, Alberta 2

This edit of the Boyer River bridge connecting La Crete and Fort Vermilion to High Level and points North is one celebrating colour, structure, detail and lines creating perspective. The colourful rendering of the bridge recalls for me many lectures and presentations offered by Leo Buscaglia on Life, Living and Love and perhaps more potently on good teaching which embraces each. In one lecture, the idea of teacher as bridge, comes across fully as he quotes Nikos Kazantzakis, writer of ‘Zorba the Greek,’ on teaching – “Ideal teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.” The metaphor embedded as anchor, for me years ago, in terms of what teaching is about and teaching’s end state being something that always brings about change; engagement that bridges from the unknown to what is now known and understood is always an entity found in good teaching. Within this metaphor … perhaps extending it … it’s interesting to note that successful bridging often relies on the kind of stance taken in relation to the student – it’s always based on good current understanding of the student in the classroom context and beyond it in their world.

Listening to – David Gray’s ‘Shine’ and ‘My Oh My,’ Jack Johnson’s ‘Rodeo Clowns,’ Angus & Julia Stone’s ‘Big Jet Plane’ and Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs’ ‘Beg, Steal or Borrow.’

Quote to Inspire – “It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.” – Paul Strand

Electrics Strung

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Power Pole – Fort Vermilion, Alberta 1

Power Pole – Fort Vermilion, Alberta 2

Power Pole – Fort Vermilion, Alberta 3

Power Pole – Fort Vermilion, Alberta 4

Consider the electrics – electricity generated in one part of Alberta, moves around the province by power line strung from power pole to power pole to power pole, electricity to power your microwave, toaster and lights, electricity to power your iPod and computer, electricity to power you into a digital world through webcam and monitor, electricity to run your gaming devices and television. The power pole in this image is one of thousands following the highway from Wabamun Lake Power Plant to Edmonton to High Level and La Crete, Alberta.

Listening to – The Devlins’ take on a U2 song, ‘Love is Blindness,’ The Subway’s ‘Oh Yeah,’ ‘Open Heart Surgery’ by the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Greg Dulli’s ‘Pussy Willow.’

Quote to Inspire – “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” – Ansel Adams

Look On

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Looking On – Fort Vermilion, Alberta

A bird, high above on a transmission line, looks on. Perhaps resting, this bird recalls exhortation about living Life – “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them (Matthew 6:25-34).” The second day of summer, school almost done and enjoying summer’s warmth and light.

Listening to – Chris Whitley’s ‘Dust Radio,’ Robbie Robertson’s ‘Sweet Fire of Love’ and Lucinda Williams’ ‘Concrete and Barbed Wire.’

Quote to Inspire – “There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.” -Ansel Adams

Boyer Bridge – Bisection

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Boyer River Bridge – Fort Vermilion, Alberta

Looking south, through the bridge crossing the Boyer River en route from High Level to Fort Vermilion, this perspective, looking through the bridge to the incline and curve on the other side becomes my first opportunity to photograph a bridge straight on, from the roadway, along a center line bisecting the road and bridge structure; the place I’ve gotten to in editing recalls impermanence of things man-made.

Listening to – Peter Himmelman’s ‘Impermanent Things,’ John Mayer’s ‘Route 66’ and Ray LaMontagne & The Pariah Dogs ‘For the Summer.’

Quote to Inspire – “A portrait is not made in the camera, but on either side of it.” – Edward Steichen

Firebird – Pontiac’s

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1970 Pontiac Firebird – High Level, Alberta 1

1970 Pontiac Firebird – High Level, Alberta 2

1970 Pontiac Firebird – High Level, Alberta 3

1970 Pontiac Firebird – High Level, Alberta 4

At last week’s Show and Shine, in drizzling and spitting rain, my son stuck with me as my wife and daughter left for the warmth of home and school. As I scope out my next photo, Liam nudges me – “This one here is the one I’d go with, Dad.” The car he’s pointing me towards is low key, a General Motors vehicle, best thought of as companion or cousin to the silver and green 1967 Camaro SS Sport Coupes that sit at this Show and Shine. A 1970 Pontiac Firebird nestles between the silver, 1967 Camaro SS and the newer (by fifty years) green rendering of the Chevrolet Camaro SS … Transformers edition. Brown, the styling element that distinguishes this Firebird from all others is the hood scoop meant to drive air toward the filtered air intake of a 350 ci V8 engine, the same engine my father had in our green, 1969 Canadian-built Pontiac Parisienne … I know something about this engine. Moreover, this same car was the vehicle of my neighbor’s son, Derrick, who handy with tools and engines worked the mechanical elements of a 400 ci V8 and drive train to perfection before taking his Pontiac Firebird into the paint shop to add Turquoise colour to the body. Through two years (in my middle teen years) I was able to mark the transformation of his vehicle from my parent’s living room window in Edmonton … awestruck to see the vehicle in its final rendering. Understatement and power, my son is telling me about flying under the radar … enjoyably … with a muscle car. It’s the first time he’s told me about a car he’d like to own. Good schtuff!

Listening to – John Mayer’s ‘Route 66,’ Erick Morillo & Sacha Baren Cohen’s ‘I Like to Move It,’ Sheryl Crow’s ‘Steve McQueen,’ and Jason Mraz’ ‘Sleeping to Dream.’

Quote to Inspire – “I fell in love with taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.” Alec Soth