Tag Archives: Photoshop

Before The Mist Clears

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Sometimes people will ask “Where’d all the color come from in that picture, then?” Or they’ll say “I was there. I never saw anything like that.” This is usually accompanied by a suspicious glare. Other times they’ll simply say “No way, dude, That is a load of condensed owl manure.” What they don’t know is they are not looking in the right places for these images, or at the right time.”

These images exist in nature by the quintillious millions. You are literally walking through them every time you are someplace like the Firehole river here in Yellowstone. The deal is, it takes some practice to see them in their full glorious color like this. For instance this particular image was lurking within the mist just waiting for someone to stop and photograph it. Think of it like this. You know how a movie is made with 30, 60, 120 frames per second and when it is played back the rapid display of the individual images or frames merge into a flow that shows the movement and creates the scene or movie.

Well that’s exactly what nature does. These images are lined up one behind the other into infinity and as you look at the scene they are speeding by you so quickly that you don’t see each individual frame. An individual image like this is often missed. It had already gone by so fast you didn’t have a chance to get your camera up to your eye let alone take a picture.

The secret to taking a picture like this, aside from a rapid dunking in Photoshop, is to kind of check out where the next image might appear, then slowly walk by the place being very careful not to glance at it directly. If you do look it tips the projector guy off that you have seen what’s coming, and he’ll speed the film up, so to speak, making it that much more difficult to take the shot.

While you’re fiddling around pretending you don’t see the picture coming up, surreptitiously set your camera to all the proper settings, then whirl around and snap the photo. That’s all there is to it. The settings for this shot were 1/800,000 of a second at f 2100. Make certain you have set the HISS (Hidden Imaginary Scene Selector) switch located on the lower left side of the lens housing on most professional cameras, to Automatic. If you don’t have this switch on your camera then it is time to upgrade as it is nearly impossible to catch an image like this without one.  Check with your local camera dealer for the most up to date information So there you have it. Photography made easy. You’re welcome.

Virga

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Virga or the art of teasing as played by Mother Nature, is when the rain falls from the sky but doesn’t reach the earth below. It evaporates right before it should hit the ground. It’s like a giant game of “She loves me, She loves me not” where she pulls the petals off her garden of clouds and when she pulls one while gently singing “She Loves me”, the rain will fall to the ground and the dry earth knows she loves it. However when she pulls the “She loves Me Not” petal the rain falls to within inches of the thirsty earth but does not touch it. This is bad. It indicates that she is in a capricious mood and things can go either way. Since Mother Nature knows which petal it is before she pulls it and she’s feeling slightly out of sorts she can pull the “She Loves Me Not” petals all day long. This is what is happening in California right now.

I don’t know what those folks did wrong, it probably has something to do with Nancy Pelosi, but they better get their mind right and straighten things out. Mother Nature has a lot more will-power than all of California, even those parts like Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and can do this as long as she wants. Like hundreds of years if you really tick her off.
 
Marble canyon didn’t do anything wrong though, it just happens to be in a spot where there isn’t much rain, and what rain does fall is used sparingly. Mother Nature actually likes Marble Canyon and the surrounding area so she only teases a little. This time the Virga is sort of a wake up call saying “I’m bringing you some rain guys, get ready”. This moment in time was just a short tease however. When the canyon needs rain she pulls the right petal. The dark clouds in the background were moving in and before you knew it Mother Nature had pulled every “She Loves Me ” petal she could get her hands on and Marble canyon had all the rain it needed and more.

In the mean time anyone who wanted to could sit back and watch the spectacle unfold. The canyon is actually a couple of miles from where this image was taken so the rain didn’t reach out this far. The close-up appearance of the canyon comes from the magic a telephoto lens and the stitching power of Photoshop to put the 13 photos together needed to create this panorama. Click on it to enlarge the image somewhat for a closer look yet. Is this a great world to live in, or what.

Move Along – Nothing To See Here

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Lots of times you’re in the heat of the action and you look up and there is something so different from what you are presently doing that you have to stop and just stare at it. Such was the case this September afternoon on the Madison river in Yellowstone National Park.

We had been shooting Otters as they swam back and forth in the river, hunting, catching big fat trout, there are many big fat trout in the Madison river, the young otters playing, bickering amongst themselves, making up, otters can’t stay mad for very long and generally just displaying all the behavior that makes otters, otters.

There are many animals in the park and usually everyone is focused on the big exciting ones. The grizzlies, wolves, bull elk fighting and they tend to lose sight of some of the more elusive, but equaling exciting species like the otters. And when you do see them it is normally just a glimpse as they flash by, barely giving you time to lift your camera for a grab shot. Which is why when you get to spend some quality time with them it is very special indeed.

But this day was different, the otters decided to stay around and hunt the area known as the log jam, a wide place in the river that catches all the logs and trees floating downstream and once one log is caught it catches another and so on until you have a large collection of logs and other debris stretching halfway across the river. Trout love log jams, there’s shade, plenty to eat, and places to hide when they need to. Otters love log jams for exactly the same reasons.

 Unbelievably we had the opportunity to stay with this family of otters for several hours, moving with them as they traveled up and down the river. Around noon they’d eaten enough, fooled around enough and it was time for a nap. They climbed in the middle of a particularly dense group of logs and became invisible once they were asleep. It was a cloudless day and the sun had been very hot making the noon-day light very contrasty, washing out the color of the water, even washing out the color of the dark reddish-brown of the otter’s fur. This made for poor shooting so looking for a shady spot to wait out our sleeping subjects we found a large pine to sit under and wait for their reemergence.

Whenever you set up your equipment, which consists of a large camera and telephoto lens on a big tripod you become a subject of interest for those passing by, an indicator that something important must be going on. “What do you see?” is the first question, then “What’s out there? I don’t see anything?”  or ” What a ya just sitting there for?” You try and answer their questions, explaining that there were otters here just a little while ago and they’re gone now but soon you get tired of answering the questions and dealing with their irritation that they missed something cool and somehow it’s your fault, and you begin giving short answers like “Nothing.” or “Scenery.” They hate that answer, the scenery one, because you have robbed them of seeing something really cool, like a wolf crossing the river, or an osprey in the act of catching a fish, and therefore have tricked them into stopping and wasted their time when you were only looking at scenery.

Sometimes, if you are a grumpy photographer and they are particularly obnoxious you reply with something like “Oh, you should have been here a few minutes ago. A mountain lion was crossing the river with a wolf pup in her mouth and an eagle swooped down and stole it from her. There was a hell of a fight.” We always throw “the hell of a fight” in there as that makes them really mad that they missed it. However if we’re feeling in a really peckish mood we often just say “Move along people. Nothing to see here.” this in a curt voice that doesn’t leave much room for other conversation.

In the mean time, while we have been feverishly shooting the otter family in this bad light, disgusted that we have to settle for what we know are going to be marginal shots that will be hell to deal with in Photoshop, yet ecstatic that we’ve had this time with these otters, you need a moment of decompression time to process all that you’ve seen. You need to find that shady spot and take in what else is going on around you. The spot we picked to wait for the otters just happened to be near a bend in the river where some large pines blocked the sun. The shadows and dappled sunshine produced this intense area of bright emerald light on the river’s surface in the midst’s of the deep shadows. The illumination of the trees reflected in the water produced a calming almost zen-like experience. It put everything back into perspective and perversely made us wish for the otters to take a little longer nap.

It wasn’t long before a new group of those visitors wanting to you to do their work for them by finding the next cool sight came up and the questions began again. The answer this time to “What do you see?” was “Nothing much, just some scenery.” It wasn’t long before we were alone again just watching the river.

Going To The Sun

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Valley7037-7050Panoclick to enlarge                                                                                         © Dwight Lutsey

Since we are waiting for the 8000+ images taken of the North American Indian Days event to come out of The Institutes proprietary image developer. The one we had constructed under the auspices of our own Hardware Development Group (TI-HDG) and specially built to handle large jobs by a triumvirate of IBM, Apple, and ACME Pixel  Burner and Screendoor factory to finish the initial processing, we thought we would share another shot from Glacier National Park.

This is a 14 image panorama stitched together in Photoshop under a license with Adobe systems and The Institute, which has been carefully monitored by our own staff of  panorama techno nerds using our own casually leased monitors throughout the process. At the risk of boring you stupid with the technical details we realize that are at least three of you out there that actually care about this technical stuff, so we decided to share the details to enlighten the unenlightened and to fill up page space as we don’t have a lot to say about this image otherwise.

The original images were taken with a professional digital camera set to stun and the resulting pixels were ported to The Institutes own diesel-powered mainframe computer where they were checked for robustness and cohesiveness before being divvied up into equal quantities and parceled out to the 14 techs used for the initial joining process.
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The next step is the labor intensive part of the procedure where the individual techs who have each been given the amount of pixels  to complete one image, lay out the pixels one by one in numerical order on a large clean white piece of poster board. When one image is fully laid out the next tech steps up and begins to lay out his pixels adjacent to the first image so that the pixels touch at the long edge of the orientation. Then a specially formulated glue developed by The Institute and the Amalgamated Glue Workers Union under the watchful eye of NASA, because this is Space like science we’re working with here, and each individual pixel is glued to its matching neighbor on the other image until the two images edges are joined. This entire procedure is then repeated until all 14 images are joined into the one big image you see on the screen today.

The resulting panorama must be left on the poster board for at least 3½ hours for the glue to set and another 5 days for it cure properly so that the images do not separate when you lift them off the paper. At this point the utmost caution is required as the image has the consistency of a freshly molded sheet of very thin jello. This is the hard part. The waiting, because you really want to pick up the image and hold it up to the light to see what it looks like. But just like a fine wine, no image can be picked up before its time, otherwise it will fall apart and you have to start all over again. There is nothing more discouraging than to see the thousands upon thousands of pixels drip off the page and gather together like beads of mercury to fall off the table and scatter to the edges of the room. Grown men have cried at this sight.

Usually the whole process is worth the time and expense, not to mention the nerd power tied up in the project, but it still must be used sparingly. You don’t want to waste this on taking a panorama of your sock drawer. This is the valley seen from the Going To The Sun highway just before you get to the visitors center, and it carries Reynolds creek downstream toward Heavy Runner mountain way off in the background there. Now you could have taken this image as one shot with your smart phone, without going through the panorama business, but had you done so everything in the picture would be itty-bitty scrunched up, tiny little pixels and you wouldn’t have been able to see nothing. Just a bad picture, even though your friends would probably say it was beautiful, trust me, it isn’t. They just say that because they’re your friends and they like you.

OK then, we expect to have images popping out the developer soon so we can begin posting them for you to see everything that happened at the North American Indian Days celebration. Hang in there.

Hiding In Plain Sight

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Mountain goats aren’t really known for being stealthy. They don’t have a lot of need to be. There aren’t that many predators up here at the top of the world at over 14,000′ to get them so they usually just hang out not caring very much about who sees them.

Yet Nature, who is in charge of animal protection here in this world, has chosen to give them life saving camouflage anyway. When you enlarge this image by clicking on it, and you know you should, you’ll see that even with them standing out in plain sight your eyes will drift right over them and you’ll often miss seeing them. This effect is even more pronounced when the herd is scattered out and the individuals take on the coloring and look of the boulder field they like to forage in.

Occasionally a coyote and on the rarest of occasions a mountain lion will find its way up here in the hopes of catching a lamb or a sick billy-goat but they’re usually so whacked out by the lack of oxygen up here that their efforts are half-hearted at best. Still the camouflage is there in case they need it.

This is Mt. Evans by the way, and it is 14,264′ up in the air. It is also one of the tallest of our national parks with all kinds of neat facts that you can read elsewhere about how cool it is. The road up here is not for the squeamish and will often involve some or all of the passengers in your vehicle crouching on the floor to avoid the sheer terror of the incredible drop offs just inches away from your tires. Drivers Pay Attention! Gravity is not your friend up here.

For those of you who are going to ask “Is that blue real?” the answer is no. It’s actually bluer than that. I had to tone it down in Photoshop from the real color because it is SO blue, and that is the famous Colorado blue you hear about, that my staffers walking by catching a glimpse of it on the monitor would be frozen in their tracks, stunned into immobility, so totally hypnotized by it blueness, that they would be paralyzed and fall over in what we call the Blue Coma. Since some of you may be viewing this on portable devices and doing things like walking or chewing gum I thought it best, in the interest of your safety, to bring it down into a more tolerable color.

Soon and that is in a couple of weeks, the ewes will start having their lambs and the tourists will start arriving to see them. The park opens later in the year than most other parks because this geography and weather up here are similar to arctic conditions. There’s tundra scattered around everywhere with arctic plants growing and biting winds and fast-moving storms that race in just to catch everyone unaware, so they, the people in charge of these places, want to give the inquisitive tourists every chance of making it up and back down alive. Plus the roads are mostly snowed shut until sometime in mid June. But life is an adventure and you’re alive or should be so jump in the old Celica and get on up to the top of the world. There’s views, and vistas, and far-reaching sights that will make you say “oh Wow” or even “Holy Moley” and you can see the Mountain goats hiding in plain sight. It’s worth it.

RainbowNomics

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click on image to see it larger

Since everyone is budget conscious these days I’ve decided to indulge in a little RainbowNomics. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, it goes like this. Its very simple really, whenever you order a rainbow make certain that the little box called “make it a double please” is checked and you get two rainbows for the price of one, thereby doubling your investment and your enjoyment at the same time. Why settle for one garden variety rainbow when you can have two spectacular, incredible, stupendous rainbows just as easily and for the same amount of effort. It just makes good sense. Any questions? OK then, Let’s everybody do it and really help the economy.

This picture is actually a panorama of 18 separate images taken one after the other from the left to the right then stitched together in Photoshop to make one very wide picture. A panorama shows the entire scene much closer and clearer than if you took a single image with a wide angle lens. How come? well in the wide angle lens image the subject, the rainbow, would be further away due to the magic that happens inside the lens and you wouldn’t be able to see the rainbow as well as it would be smaller and kind of puny looking. If you read my authors page then you know that I told you that occasionally I would sneak some technical stuff into these posts and there it was. National Geographic will do it sometimes too, take panoramas and then tell you about it. I want to give you the same quality information here. This scene was shot from our deck looking out over the plains right after a small rain storm went through. We frequently got rainbows before only they’ve always been the single ones, but since we began practicing RainbowNomics we now get these fantastic double ones absolutely free. Isn’t it great to be an American.