Rains bring…Shrooms!

We’ve had some great fall weather here on the coast, but we’ve also had some heavy rains. This time of year, that means the mushrooms are popping up everywhere. It takes a special breed of “nut” to go out and photograph these bizarre and wonderful forms. It means setting up a tripod, very low to the ground, kneeling in a range of awkward positions on soggy ground, and usually making multiple images to get enough depth-of-field, while inches from the subject.

Amanita Muscaria is one of my favorite subjects, wonderful form and color, makes them irresistable! This group included 2 that have just broken the surface, still with their protective coating and one in the background with full brilliant color! This required 10 images to get it all in focus, using Photoshop’s stacking ability to combine the images. The 16 bit tiff image with all 10 layers was rather large at 1.25Gb, the new computer handled it easily.

A very strange alien invaded our greenhouse this year! The local experts think it is a mutated boletus type mushroom, but we are still researching. This is just a 4 image stack.

It had some great forms and textures, with desert southwest colors that reminded me of Canyonlands.

Summer 2011, wow, that went fast!

Summer is my least favorite season! It seems like there’s always too much to do, and for me, it is the least photogenic season. Now that my favorite is here, maybe I can get motivated to keep up with my blog.

First, to get caught up. Over the summer, most of my photos were on the beach and it seems the sand went out of it’s way to form wonderful patterns. There’s a lot of black sand on the beaches here, which, combined with shadows and wonderful wind ripples, is irresistable.

Some of the driftwood caught my eye as well!

Quite a bit of my work over the summer was in black and white, which I’ve always enjoyed.

I expect to move on to a lot of macro work shortly, as the rainy season is starting, and that means mushrooms! I always feel very creative in the fall, hopefully, that will extend to writing as well.

For Fun, A Couple of our Earlier “Motorhomes”

Compared to the other “motorhomes” I’ve had, the Sunrader is a rocket! My first, built in 1973, was on a 1935 Chev flatbed truck. She had 68.5 HP and weighed about 8700 pounds. 0-30 was 3 blocks on the level with no headwind! Top speed was around 42 and on hills, she was a real challenge. Non syncro gears meant double clutching, which was slow, so starting on a hill, it wasn’t unusual to be stuck in 2nd at around 12-15mph to the top. a rocket compared to some of my former motorhomes. The 35 Chevy was rated at 67.5 HP and weighed about 8000 pounds.

Our 2nd RV was again, home built in 1983. It’s on a 47 Chevy, non syncro 4 speed, still weighed in about the same, but had more oomph @ 90 HP.

On the level, again, NO headwind, we could make about 52 with this one, the streamlining really helped, especially in windy conditions.

A New “Toy” to help with my Nature/Landscape Photography!

Toy as in Toyota Sunrader Mini-RV. It’s an older, 1984 model, only 17’8″ long, but fully self contained. It should be perfect as a base camp for hiking/exploring more of Oregon and Washington.

I’m buying it from a friend with 3 kids and a dog, it is just too small for them, but for my wife and I, along with our dog Tug, it should work just fine. We found that our little Play Pac trailer was truly too small for us, so it’s up for sale now.

Our campsite, with vintage fiberglass Playpak trailer

Oddly, our Honda, pulling the Play Pac gets around 14.5 mpg. The Sunrader, although only 112 HP has gotten our friends, on long trips, in the area of 19-20 mpg, although pretty slow. Slow is good when you’re a photographer!

Wow, a sunny day at last!

We’ve been cursed with an extremely wet and cold spring this year, so I’ve hardly managed to take a picture for weeks. Yesterday, it stayed chilly, only about 45, but the sun was out! Since there was a really low tide in the morning, we headed out to Cape Blanco State Park and walked down the beach to the mouth of the Elk River. The low angle light really accentuated the patterns in the blowing sand.

Looking north at the Cape, the water was super blue, breaking waves were sparkling white, if we hadn’t been chilly in the cold breeze, it would have been perfect. Still, it was pretty dang close!

Shadows, Sand and Surf

Time flies when you’re…Busy!

Wow, the middle of March and I haven’t even posted anything in over a month. Quite a day Friday, I was just getting out of bed when the tsunami siren sounded. Since we had a false alarm just a couple weeks ago, due to a wiring fault, I wasn’t too concerned, but did look online. Ouch, big earthquake in Japan, so it’s real, if not anything real soon here. Since we are at 214 foot elevation, no worries. The surge here was interesting, but did no damage anywhere around Port Orford.

South at Brookings, the harbor is a mess, with docks and boats loose everwhere, with many sunk. Crescent City, California’s harbor is even worse. Watched a video on youtube of a gorgeous big sailboat heading out to sea, then crashing into the jetty. Quite a few are out to sea, and others, still attached to docks in groups are just drifting. Now we have a storm happening, with winds in the 45-70mph range, gusts at Cape Blanco already around 60. Also, many put out to sea to avoid the damage that would happen in port, and now are stuck with no place to go, unless they can make it up to Coos Bay.

Of course, this isn’t even a drop in the bucket compared to the mess in Japan. What a terrible time for all those people, and with the infrastructure destroyed in so many places, along with the Nuke plant emergencies, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

I worked on another vintage photo colorization in spare time the last couple days. This is one of my favorite railroad photos in my collection. I bought this negative back when I was 15 (1966) and living in Tacoma, WA. I saw an, ad in Railroad magazine for NP negatives for sale in Troutdale, Oregon. I rode the morning passenger train to Portland, took a bus to Troutdale, and walked to the gentleman’s house. I paid $35 for about 50 negatives, this was a lot of money for me, I worked in a library for $1.25 and hour!

This is in Missoula, Montana in the 30′s, with NP W class Mike #1533 leading Q-6 Pacific #2254.

I’ll admit, it makes a beautiful B & W print, but I wanted to see how it would look in color too. So, with a few hours in Photoshop, I came up with this result.

I do have a tutorial on colorizing if you want to give it a try.

More info added to scanning textured photos tutorial

I’ve added three more examples, one dry scanned (the normal way), wet scanned and dry scanned then using the Photoshop Blur/Surface Blur filter to mostly eliminate the texture. Wet scanning works best, but if it’s not an option, this filter improves things quite a bit.

Although the rest of the nation is presently suffering under winter conditions, the southern Oregon coast has been blessed with spring weather! The last 2 weeks, we’ve seen nearly continuous sunshine and daytime temperatures ranging from the upper 50′s to 71! It’ll be a real booger when things get back to our normal rain, wind and gray skies.

Having come into this world near the middle of the 20th Century, it’s hard to believe the new date! Especially from the vantage point of a history and vintage image fan, the changes that have occured are mind boggling. In photography alone, who’d have ever thought?

Film would be nearly extinct.
Restoration of a damaged photo would be relatively easy in Photoshop, instead of hours retouching a negative or airbrushing a print and re-photographing it.
A 5 year old pro camera would be almost useless. In 1975 a 5 year old high end camera was still an expensive item.
Your $$$ darkroom equipment would be obsolete and nearly unsaleable, when 20 years ago a 25 year old enlarger was as useful as when it was new!

Would I go back to film and a traditional chemical darkroom? NO WAY!, although the nostagia value would make it fun once every few years.

I hope in the following few months to get more tutorials on image restoration online and some tips on using Adobe Bridge as an image cataloging tool. Of course, as time and weather permits, my main hope is for more hiking in the beautiful Pacific Northwest!

Visit my website to see my own photography, as well as my large collection of historic images of the area and railroad history also. Earth-Sea Imagery

Happy New Year All!

A Blending in Time

As you may have noticed, I really enjoy historic images. Odd coincidences also have quite an appeal to me! A chance to combine both, made my day!

The first image is one I took of the Tacoma waterfront in 1968 in B & W. I recently colorized it in Photoshop. I’m still in the process of scanning both my own and my father’s slides and negatives, and came across a similar photo that he took in 1980 of the same scene.

On close inspection, I realized that, not only had he shot from exactly the same location, but also with the same focal length lens, the 2 images would overlap like a stitch, perfectly. The only jarring note was the low tide in my photo, high in Dad’s.

I played around with layers and different ways of combining them, finally settling on a a 50% opacity in the overlapping areas and gently blend at each edge. Clicking on the image will bring a larger view.

I kind of doubt this was time well spent, in terms of financial gain, but it sure was a fun project!

We’ve now had our dog Tug for a year!

Since we found Tug, stuck in a trap, between 2 wilderness areas, last December 5th, he’s become a total part of the family. What a great friend he is! His only bad habit is out of his control, good grief is he a hair factory! Each day, there are wads of black hair on the floor, we brush gobs out of him, he never seems to have less than a super thick coat, where does it all come from?

He loves the beach, and we go down as often as time, tides and weather permit. He won’t fetch a stick, but loves to chase and pounce on fast rolling small rocks, usually in a spray of sand! When his 110 pounds pounces at a full run, something’s gotta give. Here he is yesterday in a typical pose after a bit of excise, and yes, his tongue really is that big.