Category Archives: About the Photos

Information about the photos that appear in the header.

My Hero

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It’s a camera.

GoPro HeroAbout two weeks ago, I bought a GoPro Hero camera. This is a tiny, durable video camera designed for extreme sports. Real extreme sports. (The darn thing comes in a waterproof housing.) For the past two days, I’ve been testing it out.

I’ve been really dissatisfied lately with the quality of video coming out of my POV.1 camera, which I’ve had for about two and a half years. I wanted something smaller, easier to set up and use, and with better picture quality. The GoPro Hero has the POV.1 beat hands down.

I started playing around with the camera on Tuesday, in the car on the way to Phoenix. I wanted to get an idea of image quality. The Hero offers several resolutions, including true 1080p HD. I shot in a lower quality and was very impressed with the results.

But movies isn’t the only thing the Hero does. It can also be used to shoot individual snapshots, three consecutive snapshots, and snapshots a set number of seconds apart. Anyone who knows me, knows how much I enjoy time-lapse photography — this little camera has the timing built right in.

Yesterday, while stuck in Pendleton, OR waiting for weather to clear, I played around with it a bit more. I decided to try creating a time-lapse. So I set it up before departing the airport on my second attempt to get across the Blue Mountains. In this 38-second video, I travel nine miles from the airport, realize that I’m not going to get over the mountains, turn back, and land on the ramp again.

Salt Lake from the Air

Salt Lake City from the Air

Wahweap Hoodoos

Three shots from my Hero. (1) The last shot it took yesterday, as I was flying over the Great Salt Lake; the reflections of the clouds on the glassy lake surface were amazing. (2) Early this morning as I flew down I-15 near downtown Salt Lake City. (3) A shot from my E-ticket ride past the Wahweap Hoodoos.

Later in the day, I finally got out of there. I’d cleared the camera’s contents and set it up to take a shot every 5 seconds (instead of 2 seconds in the video here). It did this for nearly five hours — the time it took for me to fly from Pendleton to the Salt Lake City area. The battery died about 15 minutes from landing. I compiled the video and liked what I saw. It compresses a 5-hour flight through Oregon, Idaho, and Utah into only four minutes. This morning, I set up the camera again and captured shots for my 2-1/2 hour flight from Salt Lake City to Lake Powell, including a wild, low-level flight down Wahweap Creek past the Wahweap Hoodoos (see photo here). I’ll likely put the two long videos together and get the resulting video online once I’ve had a chance to add notations.

As you can see in these images, the quality of the photos is excellent. There’s great depth of field, making it possible not only to see perfectly out the helicopter’s cockpit windows but to read the instruments. It has no trouble dealing with exposure; it seems to get it right every single time. If I had the time to go through the 5000+ images shot over the past two days, I would find all kinds of neat views. The original images are 2592 × 1944 resolution — that’s better than HD — I just downsized them for this blog post. And with one shot every 5 seconds, the camera battery died before it filled the 16 GB SD card I bought for the camera.

What’s kind of unusual is the way I mounted the camera for these shots. I hung it upside down using a suction cup mount on the passenger side ceiling window. (You can see the front of the window in each shot; I hung the camera from the back side.) Because the camera has a very wide angle lens, there’s some distortion to the view. I think that just adds to the funkiness of the photo. The camera is smart enough to turn the image right side up when processing, so there’s no need to worry about upside down video if you’re shooting video.

As for video…if I can figure out a way to mount it in a good spot, I should be able to get some really fine video while flying. That’s the challenge. Believe me — if I succeed, you’ll see the results here.

A Real, Old-Fashioned Payphone

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Yes, these still exist.

A Real Phone Booth

A real phone booth. You can find this in the main post office on 2nd Street in Walla Walla, WA.

In this day and age when everyone has a cell phone — including kids — the payphone is dying part of our culture. Recently, I got into a discussion about payphones with one of my Twitter friends, @Jen4Web. I started photographing the real ones I saw. I knew there was a good one at the Walla Walla Post Office, where I’d be going in a few days, and told her about it. On Wednesday, I snapped a shot with my BlackBerry and put it on TwitPic.

That got @StuartOswald interested. Apparently, he’s involved with a Web site called Payphone Org UK that shares photos of payphones. He asked for the phone number of the one I photographed. I promised to get it and a better shot. That’s what this post is all about.

I went back to the Post Office to take a few better photos of the phone booth and get its phone number: (509) 525 – 9958. I also took a shot of the post office from the outside. You can see the best of these photos here.

Payphone Close Up

A closeup of the phone booth.

The phone booth you see here is one like I remember from when I was a kid. It’s a wooden booth with a sliding panel door, light, and fan. There’s a shelf under the phone and a shelf to sit on. There’s even a phone book. The only thing different is the phone — this one is modern; when I was a kid, phone booths like this still had dial phones.

The phone booth is in the outer lobby, adjacent to the post office boxes in the Main Post Office on 2nd Street in Walla Walla, WA. Don’t let the name of the town fool you — Walla Walla is a great little town with a vibrant Main Street (actually named Main Street). There are shops and restaurants, and enough wine tasting that you don’t need to get into your car and drive. The town is surrounded by vineyards and wheat fields. It’s located in southeastern Washington state, south of the picturesque Palouse area and north of Pendleton of blanket fame.

Walla Walla Post Office
The main Post Office in Walla Walla, WA as seen from 2nd Street.

If you’re ever in Walla Walla, stop by and visit this piece of history. Tell you kids about it.

On HDR Photography

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Overused as a crutch by people without real photographic skill.

I’ve written this post primarily to share some thoughts about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, along with three links to articles by knowledgeable photographers that echo my sentiments.

HDR?
Is this HDR?

If you’re not familiar with HDR imaging, it’s a type of photography that combines multiple exposures of the same image into one image, resulting in a greater range of luminosity in the final image. Shadow areas are brighter, bright areas are more detailed. The idea behind this is good and if done properly, the results are amazing.

The trouble is, it’s rarely done well.

Indeed, it seems that anyone with a digital camera and image processing software can spit out an HDR image. So they do.

And the result is usually crap.

Think I’m kidding? Check out I Hate Your HDR, which is a showcase of some of the junk people are showing off as great HDR photography. It’s crap.

HDR does have a purpose. When done properly, it enables the photographer to replicate an image as it might be seen by the human eye. Apparently few people know or understand this. Even fewer have the skills needed to do it right. As a result, most images created with HDR look anything but realistic.

Photographer Jim Goldstein discusses the technical aspects of HDR well in his article, “Why I Hate HDR: Photo Technology Porn.”

Photography Conquers Light

Photoshop Tools

For pete’s sake, they’re even labeled!

Think for a moment about the most important aspect in photography: light.

HDR is an attempt to artificially conquer light. The photo you want to make has bright spots that get washed out and shadowy spots that have no detail. HDR combines multiple exposures — ones where the bright spots aren’t washed out and ones where the shadows have detail. Through software manipulation, the multiple images are made into one. The result should more uniform exposure of the image so you can see all the details.

In the old days, in a darkroom — am I dating myself here? — we used dodging and burning to achieve this effect. The tools to do this are still available in Photoshop. But apparently it’s easier to let software algorithms automatically cook up something on their own, adjustable only by sliding levers in a cryptic dialog. We’ve seen the results.

A skilled photographer doesn’t need a crutch like HDR to capture images with good dynamic range. Best of all, those images are not likely to look as fake — or “cooked up” — as so many HDR images do.

Real Photographers Don’t Need HDR

“HDR is Stupid and it Sucks” by photographer Lewis Collard is a great blog post because it illustrates images that look like they could be HDR, but they’re not. That tells me that HDR simply isn’t necessary.

No, it's not HDR
No, not HDR. This is the original.

And that brings me to the image at the top of this post. When I first put it online, a Twitter friend complemented me and asked me if it was HDR. The complement pleased me, but the HDR question did not. It’s not HDR. Instead, I captured the single original, untouched image you see here, brought it into Photoshop, and tweaked the Shadow/Highlight settings to bring out some of the detail in the shadows and bright sky. I then did something I don’t normally do: I punched up the saturation just a bit to bring out the colors. Having the image mistaken for HDR makes me wonder whether I went too far with my minor touchups. Why? Because most HDR looks like crap.

Interestingly, while some photographers “get it,” others so obviously don’t. The comments on this post are a perfect example, with half the group raving about all the images in the post while the other half is more critical and realistic, clearly seeing how some images have done HDR right while others completely miss the point. It’s amazing how people can be lured into thinking that high contrast and outrageous colors equals good photography.

That’s not the way it is and skilled photographers — or at least the people trying to capture reality with their cameras — know it.

A Caveat

Some people use photography as a basis for artwork. They purposely distort photographic images in an attempt to make “art.” (News Flash: Photography is art.) In my opinion, that’s the only excuse most of these people have for abusing HDR the way they do.

Don’t show me an HDR image with unrealistic results. I won’t be impressed. Hell, anyone can cook up a photo with digital editing tools. Even me.

Show me an HDR image that doesn’t look like one. Then I’ll be impressed.

Construction Time-Lapses

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More time-lapse fun.

Here are two time-lapse movies I’ve done this month.

The Backhoe time-lapse shows my neighbor putting in his new driveway. Frankly, I liked the driveway he already had. Why tear up all that nice land?

The House Framing time-lapse was done today. My other neighbor has been framing his house for about a week. I’m kicking myself for not starting these sooner. I hope to make new time-lapses for this project for the rest of the week, so stay tuned.

More Birds of Quincy Lakes

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A few more photos.

Back in 2008, on my first trip to Washington State for cherry drying work, I spent a lot of time exploring the Quincy Lakes area not far from where I was based. I took along my camera and made quite a few photos. Some of them appear in my June 2008 and 2009 posts, “Flying Things of Quincy Lakes,” “Takin’ Pictures,” “Sometimes It’s Too Easy to Get a Good Shot.” All of the best ones appear in my Washington photo gallery (slide show).

I went back on July 12, 2010. I’d waited too long. Most of the baby birds had grown. It was very hot every day, making hiking an avoidable activity. But I still managed to shoot a few dozen images. The ones here are the best.

American Coot Family
This is a family of American Coots. These were among the youngest birds I saw that day. (View larger image.)

American Coot Family
The chicks of this family of American Coots had outgrown their nest. But that didn’t stop them from squeezing into the area at the end of the day. (View larger image.)

Brown Headed Cow Bird
A male Brown Headed Cow Bird. (View larger image.)

Yellow Headed Blackbird Family
A family of Yellow Headed Blackbirds. The youngster (in the middle) is still begging for food. (View larger image.)

Heron Reflections
This is my favorite shot from the day. This heron looks as if it had settled down for the night on this little island. I happened to snap the image just as a bird flew low over the water, adding itself and its reflection to the final shot. (View larger image.)