Daily Image - May 2011 Archive

02 May 11. An image today of a type I've never shared before. While we were strolling around Port Gamble on Friday I noticed something strange out in the bay so I made my way too a viewing platform to see what I'm providing. At first I wasn't sure what I was seeing, but then it became obvious that I was watching a nuke sub being escorted back to port. I watched for quite a while, got several photos that I won't share, but as this one has no discernible markings, I believe it is O.K. This was a first for me in my entire Naval career and before, so it was quite a sight to see. The two escort vessels are of special design being basically floating cement barges to protect the nuke. The closest vessel is the HOS Arrowhead of which there are a total of 8 such vessels. You will find little about them other than their size. Note also the presence of a USCG Cutter and a fast gun boat running circles around the nuke. Based on the news for Sunday evening I'm thinking the folks who arrived on Friday may be in for a short port call. ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 9.

03 May 11. It being almost post tulip season we took a side trip to see the tulips on Sunday and turned around just 3 miles short of our destination due to the obvious traffic. Weather and tulips permitting we'll try once more this week and then it will be too late. Meanwhile, I still have lots of tulip images not previously shared, and this one is from last year but not exactly as shot. I wanted to manipulate it a bit and started out by converting it to B&W which I liked a lot and may share tomorrow, but then decided to play with it a bit more. So I masked out the sky and inverted that to get just the flowers (much easier than trying to mask the flowers) and returned the color to them on a layer, then copied that layer, inverted the mask again, and slightly decreased the opacity to return a little color to the sky. Then I chopped off a fair amount of sky to bring it into the rule of thirds proportions to give the tulips more prominence than they had otherwise. Flattening and a bit of sharpening followed and you have the result. Not a lot of change, but just enough to make it a bit more interesting, I believe.

04 May 11. With the late arrival of spring this year, at least in our neck of the woods, most of the flowers have been quite late in making their annual appearances, and that includes the tulips. I called the tulip growers groups on Tuesday who informed me that although they are already topping the field flowers, their major display areas are still showing well and that they will all be open through Mother's Day, so Wednesday late afternoon/early evening, weather permitting, will be tulip time for us, and the weather is currently slated to be quite nice, so with luck we will still get some nice flower shots this year. The area in the Skagit Flats where one finds these fields produce daffodils first, then the tulips, and finally iris. We've never done an iris shoot so we may have to try that this year. While the iris come in just a few colors, and the tulips many, the daffodils come primarily in one color up there, and although the yellow fields can be beautiful, they can also be monotonous. For those of you 40 or older, you may recall in your youth the common practice of putting food coloring in water into which you placed a flower whose petals you wanted to be a different hue. I thought it would be fun to return to my youth and do that again with a daffodil, so that's exactly what I did, except that this time I exchanged the colored water for some electrons and came up with a new variety of daffodil. I kinda like it; Jan doesn't. ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 11. Hope you enjoy, dave

05 May 11. Well, the weather was as foretold, the tulips also, and the trip basically successful. We spent almost 3 hours in the Roozengaarde display area and I had ample opportunity to try out a new approach to my flower photography. Over a third of the time was spent answering questions for fellow photographers ranging from can you fix my camera to how do I do this or that, and even some tour guide answers for a couple visiting from Long Island who had just stumbled onto the grounds and were having difficulty believing what they were seeing. But I must admit it was kinda fun to be asked and to have been able to help all the folks I did. The only drawbacks to the day's shoot were the number of people I had to work around and that there was a bit of a breeze resulting in most of the tulips being less than perfectly still. All told however it was a very nice late afternoon / early evening outing. Although I shot roughly 500 frames, they comprise perhaps only 100 different images. Here is the first image I'll share from the shoot and I'll talk about how it was done tomorrow. ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 10.

06 May 11. As you may all recall from the days spent in math class, the approach of choice is calculating the area of a non-static (curving) surface is The Calculus for which we have many folks to thank but more generally we tend to think, inappropriately, just of Newton. The idea of course is that if we take an infinite number of finite slices we can think of each slice as being a perfect rectangle and thus get around the error associated with converting a curved surface into a flat one. In fact, with the slices sufficiently thin the error is virtually nil. Now the problem of calculating the area of a curving surface is akin to the problem of getting all of a picture totally sharp, something referred to as depth of field and abbreviated as DOF. In reality, there is only a vary narrow band across any image that is actually totally in focus. Generally it is such that the human eye can't fully discern how very tiny it is, and a much larger area is seen as being sharp. Still, that area seen as sharp is always a challenge to achieve, and very much so in close up work. So the challenge is to get the image as sharp of possible, circumstances allowing. Enter Heliconsoft, a company (one of several actually) which has written a piece of software that basically applies the concept of The Calculus to photography. The idea is to take a large number of shots of the same image but shifting the plane of focus incrementally from front to back as they are being taken. The group of images is then combined by the software in such a manner that it takes just the band that's crisp from each frame and stacks these pieces together to form a single image that is very sharp front to back. The image for today attempts to illustrate it using a group of 7 images taken at an aperture of just f/8. The camera is about 2 feet in front of the circular garden display and the spent daffodil fields (dull yellow band roughly in the middle of the image) about 100 years distant. All is pretty much in focus due to this process of combining the slices. The same technique was used for the image shared yesterday. A "small" drawback in this kind of photography is the need for total stillness in the air, and that was far from the case when these images were shot. Still, the software does a rather amazing job of dealing not only with the focus issue, but also the movement of the subject, in addition to the problem associate with apparent size changes from the shifting focal point. This was not the strongest shot of the day, but it does serve well to illustrate the point. The approach has some great potential which I hope to exploit in future work. ISO 200; 1/640 @ f / 8.

09 May 11. Returning from a Mother's Day dinner at Fisherman's Terminal, we were stopped for a third time today on the Ballard Draw Bridge as sailing vessels, participating in the festivities of the opening day/weekend of boating season, passed under, but not until the double span had raised sufficiently to provide them safe clearance. While watching them pass by Jan commented on the beautiful Crepuscular Rays falling on the Olympic Mountain range, so we scurried up to Sunset Hill Park to grab a couple of shots. I liked the pano shot the best so I elected to work with it a bit and share. It has been cropped to remove a considerable portion of the water and a bit of the sky, given some contrast adjustment and had a blending mode applied to further enhance that adjustment, and finally had a bit of noise removal applied. IF your monitor is color corrected, you should see a hint of green in the water. IF not, it will just be the more commonly seen blue gray of water in dim light. Either way, the rays of sunlight should be obvious. ISO 200; 1/640 sec @ f / 8.

10 May 11. After driving for a period of time you reach your destination only to find that the environment needed for the shoot isn't being provided; now what do you do? Well, if you like creative stuff, you rethink your approach for the intended images and alter it to meet the environment. Tulips (flowers) are best shot when there is no breeze, or anything stronger, blowing them around. If however you are having to deal with undesired movement, you can shoot with the idea that the image can be manipulated such that the movement will simply add to the result. Such was the case for the image shared today. Even at a fast shutter speed, the tulips shot during the session in which this image was captured were still less than fully crisp. So I elected to make the motion work for me rather than against me with the result that we have surreal pink tulips that could have just as easily been captured by Alice, had she had a camera, while visiting in Wonderland. ISO 320; 1/320 sec @ f/ 6.3.

11 May 11. Tucked in behind the ferry terminal at Kingston lies a breakwater that protects the marina, or maybe it is the breakwater that protects the terminal, but either way you view it, there is an abundance of life associated with that wall of rocks that separates the two. In my diving days of undergraduate school, my interest would have been with what was thriving in the water, but with that portion of my life behind me, I find that I am equally interested with the flora that is above the water line and to which I have easy, or at least relatively easy, access. Walking along the finger piers that are associated with the marina, one can observe a variety of plant life that has taken up residence in the crevices and valleys of the rock's surface. While awaiting the arrival of transportation a couple weeks back I happened to notice a clump of grass nestled in amongst a fair amount of mosses and other lower plant life. The light falling on the grouping of plants and rocks was such that it brought out the textures emphasizing all the minutia that might have otherwise been missed in less flattering light. I thought it was worthy of capturing and here it is for your consideration. The original has been cropped for tighter composition, slightly sharpened, and given a contrast adjustment for texture emphasis using a plug-in filter. ISO 200; 1/200 sec @ f / 10.

12 May 11. While discussing some building plans on-site yesterday we were notified of a large military platform being transported down Puget Sound to a Seattle based shipyard. It being a beautiful day, and we being about 3 miles from Hansville beach or 3/4 mile from Eglon beach, we scurried down to my cousin's home from which we had a front row seat as the platform passed by us. Known as a Sea-Based X-band Radar (SBX) vessel, it is part of our ballistic missile early warning system and is a floating sea based platform. It was making its way to the Seattle based Vigor Shipyard (formerly Todd Pacific Shipyards) for a three month $27M overhaul. Hopefully I'll be nearby when it departs for its return to operation for comparison shots. Associated with the SBX were two 72' USCG Cutters, two sea going tugs, and a couple other "support" vessels. Overhead were tactical jets and helicopters at differing stages of the transit. No way of knowing what might have been lurking underneath out of sight. Image received some cropping and a bit of noise reduction, otherwise straight from the camera. ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 8.

13 May 11. It should come as no surprise to anyone that those of us who a) grew up in the 50s and b) lived near large bodies of navigable waters, would have as part of their childhood experiences some kind of acquaintance with tug boats. Now in my particular area of the country tugboats are as common as aircraft, and perhaps more so in some ways. I was a rather avid reader as a child and among my group of favorite childrens' books prior to my primary grade schools years and for a couple of those as well was a book about, you guessed it, a tugboat. Now this was not just any tugboat, but a book about Tuffy, the Tugboat. Published in 1947, its 36 pages was rather large for a children's book but I delighted in first having it read to me and then being able to read it myself. Tuffy was a little red tugboat with a bit of an attitude, and the story was built around his behaviors. More than that I no longer remember, but I do remember vividly enjoying the book. And so, without further ado, I give you, Tuffy! ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 13.

16 May 11. In between our rain and wind this past week have been moments of rather beautiful weather. To read the weather reports one would think that it was a constant stormy week, and although it felt like it more often than not, there were moments that were simply delightful. The majority of them came in the p.m. portion of the days, and the lovely evening light offered several opportunities for turning the lens on the local scenery. This image arises in our back yard, and is visible from where I type these tomes. When we returned in '06 we noticed that our daughter had planted a bleeding heart just outside the kitchen window, and we have watched it grow larger each year with some pleasure. This year it had reached a diameter of roughly 5 feet and perhaps 3 feet in height, so we get a delightful show of off season Christmas colors from it each year for better than 3 months. It is currently approaching its peak display, and as such putting on quite a show when the light is right. This image is highly cropped so as to show just a portion of one branch out of perhaps 50, but other than that it is basically as shot. Five p.m.light and almost no wind provided the colors as you see them. ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 6.3.

17 May 11. Throughout the several years that I have been sending this image I have on occasion mentioned that my cousin's parents were for a period of time ('34 - '77), for lack of a better term, the business section of Hansville, in that they owned and operated the resort cabins, boat house, post office, cafeteria, gas station, and general store. The general store always had a rather Plain Jane type of sign on its front which eventually evolved into something a bit more attractive which I shared a couple of years back. Recently the current operators of the store brought the store signage into the 21st century with the incorporation of a salmon carved into the word Hansville with the rest of the name Grocery and Provisions Co underneath and the main services listed on either side. Directly below the sign resides their Direct TV dish. It is a nice improvement over what was there prior and somewhat eye-catching. But not quite enough for me. So I took it upon myself to redesign the signage for them and came up with today's submission. If you look carefully you will perhaps note a bit of a repetitious theme in my remake. ISO 800; 1/400 sec @ f / 10.

18 May 11. Back to the tulip fields again before these lovely flowers are gone for yet another year. This image may remind some of you of the title of a 1998 movie (fictional) about Guadalcanal in World War II. It is a faked panorama in that it was created by severely cropping a single image to give the impression of being a very wide expanse. In truth the entire was field was just that, but a typical shot does not satisfactorily convey that well so I elected for the pano approach. This was taken last year prior to my work with the stacking approach for increased depth of field, and I think the difference will be very obvious should you elect to compare this image with any of those I've shared over the past 10 days. ISO 640; 1/500 sec @ f /11.

19 May 11. With record setting rains this month the rivers and falls are showing themselves off in a spectacular fashion. We took a quick run up to Snoqualmie Falls Wed late morning to see how the spill would look and were certainly not disappointed. While in attendance at a Photoshop course on Tuesday the presenter commented on a method of combining two different pieces of software to get a result that wasn't available with either of the programs individually, so I thought I'd give it a go to see if I liked it and I find I do, so the image for today is that approach to an HDR presentation of Snoqualmie Falls at noon on Wednesday. This time I've left in the surrounding countryside in the photo to provide for some perspective. It is hard to appreciate the 268 foot drop of the falls without some known object with which to compare, so take a look at the construction yellow Washington State bird (crane) in the construction area for some relative sizing. Also note the force of the falling water which is bouncing back up almost a third of the height of the falls. Although I've seen more water going over the falls on two other occasions, this is by far the furthest I've seen it rebound. I've made the HDR a bit on the cartoonish side for effect to give additional impact to the falling water. ISO 200; 1/641 sec @ f / 8.

20 May 11. Among our friends is an individual who used to work for me when I was on active duty and who, along with his wife, are avid Christmas people, such that their home plays host to 21 different Christmas trees. No, that is not a typo; they begin to set them up in October and have them in every room, and as you may surmise have some rooms with more than one. While visiting with us for several days this past week, we took a day (Monday) to travel to Leavenworth (WA, not the prison), to visit the big Christmas store there called, most appropriately, Kris Kringl. It is a beautiful store, and one in which you can enjoy Christmas 363 days a year, being closed on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. It proved to be a fun trip to the store with Jan even purchasing more than Brian. We hauled our stuff home and he, smartly, shipped his, saving our heavy tax burden. On the way to the store we passed over Stevens Pass to be treated to a freshly falling snowfall at the summit (4160 feet and 35ºF) and then followed the Wenatchee River into town. The river was nearing flood stage and looked primarily like a Class 6 rapids for its entire length. I have never seen the river looking as mad as it did, and we stopped several times along the way to photograph it. No picture can give you the feeling of what we experienced, but I'll try to approximate it with this one. The turbulence you see is how the entire river looked; and every so many meters there was water streaming down the hillside to add to the anger of the river.

23 May 11. Here's another from the Seattle Aquarium shoot and one that I considered converting to one of the creative images but never did. You could of course easily do so yourself if you desired, and it might be fun to try doing such with whatever software you like using. The intertidal zone display at the aquarium is one of the best around, and if you live anywhere near Seattle and haven't seen it I highly recommend it to you. Likewise, should you come and visit this area, I would suggest you spend some in the aquarium. Plan on several hours to do it justice. While there is much to see and do, I prefer to spend my time with this intertidal zone display and the accompanying tide pool display. One of the best parts of the intertidal zone exhibit is the Plexiglas sides that allows for putting the flash down low at the level of the animals while I shot from a slightly higher angle. It allows for the light of the flash to fully illuminate the animals without either hot spots or bounce back. and with the incorporation of some creative shutter timings, one can produce some really interesting photos. Next time I'll be looking for some neon lime green to go with the neon pink. ISO 200; 1/60 sec @ f / 11 with off camera flash.

25 May 11. Today's submission is one made just for fun. It is obviously tone mapped (HDR) and outrageously so, but it simply lent itself to such a manipulation. Almost everything in it is exaggerated, and especially the plant life on the side of the walls of the locks. You are looking west toward Puget Sound from a walkway, actually the top of the east end gate of the large lock, and the bridge in the background is a railroad bridge that is normally up unless it needs to be lowered for a train to pass over. On both sides where the green band stops you can see the west side gates. This is of course a photo of the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard, WA. There is much I could write about concerning the locks, but the link does a better job and saves me space to comment on its designer. Major Chittenden's final creation was these locks, but he was also involved in the "building" of the Oregon Trail among other things. I had an opportunity to meet his granddaughter while I was working at the camera store a couple years back; she had a few interesting comments to make about ol' granddad and I wish I would have had more time to talk with her. He was a colorful ol guy, so my manipulation is befitting such an individual. So when you are next in Ballard, come and see the locks, I assure you that you will find it worth your time even if they won't look "quite" like this representation. ISO 200; 1/125 sec (middle shot of 5) @ f / 13.

26 May 11. Planted around the base of one of our parking strip trees, actually they are now the city's as we only planted them and take care of them so the city can tell us what we can do with them, is a ring of Icelandic Poppies. These flowers rank as senior members in my top ten group of flowers, and I enjoy them immensely not only for their appearance, but also for the photographic opportunities they provide me. I took this shot last year with the intention of sharing it then, but never got around to it. The poppies in the parking strip are now at about the same stage as this one, so it seemed like an appropriate candidate for submission. While doing a bit of teaching tonight on image manipulation, the student saw this image and asked to see it manipulated. When I had finished so doing, we both thought it worthy of sharing, so here is the manipulated image of an Icelandic Poppy. If you are not familiar with this plant, the stalk has many little spikes protruding from the ground level up to the base of the flower, hence the lines extending outward in the image. ISO 500; 3 sec @ f / 40 on a tripod and done on table top.

27 May 11. Driving along state highway 7 in Washington on your way to the Paradise entrance to Mt Rainier National Park you pass through the tiny community of Elbe, WA, where you can't help but notice a significant number of old rail cars residing along the south side of the road. You might also notice the very small white Ev. Luth. KIRCH; if you don't, you should. Nestled in front and to the side of the little church sits the main (only?) building belonging to the Mt Rainier Scenic Railroad. Last February we were made aware of a special event being put on by this group via an ad in one of our magazines. I decided to look into it and the short of the story is we decided to participate in the event being held on the 28th of May. We got our tickets, clipped them to the kitchen calendar, and almost forgot about the trip until the day prior. We left in the rain, came home in the rain, and had some rain during the train ride, but overall it was a very interesting day. It was billed as a triple header and we did indeed get to ride with, in (I got to ride in the cab of one of the engines for about 30 minutes) and observe 3 different old steam engines. There is a lot to this story about the engines for which we could have said "take me for a ride in your car, car" (apologies to Peter, Paul, & Mary) last Saturday, and I'll pick up the story at this point with the next image. ISO 200; 1/250sec (middle image of 5) @ f /6.3.

30 May 11. I should be sharing something appropriate for the day but that will have to wait until tomorrow as I'll be spending time at the local veterans cemetery during today. Sunday was a get together for the NWCCC (NorthWest Council of Camera Clubs) and I had an opportunity to generally put it together for another individual (from Canada) whose idea it was to have a field trip called "A Day in Seattle." It was scheduled to go from 0830 - 2200, but the weather didn't cooperate, and it all came crashing to a sudden halt around 1700. Still, that left time for a lot of shooting, and most folks said they managed somewhere between 200 and 500 images (I managed to log about 300) with a desire for more of the same kind of thing in the future. The program was designed to be a self guided tour with the participants being provided a map for general locations and a handout with suggested areas to visit. In reality, if everything had been fully undertaken, there was perhaps enough material to fill three full days, so I doubt that anyone should have gone away disappointed, except perhaps for the Seattle ugly weather!!! Dinner was a regroup meeting at Fisherman's Terminal with time allotted to shoot the fleet before it departs in the next couple of days. This is an image that anyone could have captured post meal, save for the blue skies, but then, that's what imaging software was made to correct. ISO 200; 1/160 sec @ f / 16.

31 May 11. We spent about an hour this morning at a local cemetery that has a large section honoring our service men and women. Each year they decorate the entire area with hundreds of American flags and a 1330 service. It is always a bit emotional to be present at such a time. Returning home I worked up a set of four images, which was three more than the total of American flags flying in our community, from which Jan selected this one. All of the images I worked up are HDR, so you will see some disruption in the flags as they were moving. I've elected to leave them as they are, as I felt it symbolized the disruption felt in the families of those who gave their all for the country and I couldn't think of a more fitting way to express it. Even though I think the image says it, I'll put it a words; a huge thank you to ALL who have served the country in uniform, be it for a single tour or a career. ISO 200; 1/500 sec (middle image of 5) @ f / 13.