Daily Image - Oct 2013 Archive

01 Oct 13. As you travel east on I-90 in WA State you come to an area in what we'll call the SE portion of the state know collectively as the Palouse. This is a vast farmland whose vistas are famous, with photographers coming from all over the world to photograph the area. Most come in the spring for the greens of the newly growing crops or the late summer for the yellows of the crops ready for harvest. Both times offer some spectacular photographic opportunities. While they would shoot their material from the local hills, this shot is taken from the edge of the freeway. I've driven past the area many time driving across country but have never actually taken a photo trip there, YET! This time across we were treated to some fantastic clouds as well as fields newly mowed with the golden stubble really showing off both its color and mow patterns. I stopped the vehicle several times to try and capture the feeling one experiences when traveling along the sides of the farms. With today being B&W Tuesday, my first shared shot of the area will be monochromatic. I've prepared two others from the same image, one in full color and the other a "tinted" B&W either of which may make an appearance at a later date. To get to what you are seeing today, I started with the base image, created a curves layer to adjust the global contrast, combined these two layers into a new layer and used a filter to increase the micro contrast globally. Next I added a noise reduction layer removing the noise only from the blue sky. Recall that noise reduction is accomplished by blurring the image, and I didn't want any blurring in the details, so just the plain sky was manipulated. Then I ran another filter to get my base B&W layer, adjusting it to get just the look I desired. Then all the layers were combined (flattened) and the resultant image was saved out with an sRGB color gamut for computer and web viewing. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/640 sec @ f / 9.

02 Oct 13. Continuing east on I-90 through Idaho you come to an area known apparently, if only by the freeway signage, as Rose Lake. Since I've never made note of that location before, I don't know if the image I'm sharing is the actual Rose Lake or just some wetlands in its vicinity. Regardless, it is a beautiful area and located a short travel time before hitting the mountain area passes. As we were passing by we couldn't help but be aware of the continuously building vapors in the air around us, and at one point I decided that the roadside view was something worth attempting to record, so we pulled off the freeway sufficiently to be out of danger and I snapped a few frames as well as got a break from driving. The view was lovely, and I foolishly tried to capture the material hand held when I should have been employing a tripod as the lighting conditions were very harsh, so I unfortunately didn't get nearly as much properly recorded material as I wanted, but a couple of frames survived my shaky hands. This is one of them and the second of what I hope will be a regular Wednesday fine art effort; I made version in both color and B&W and we'll go with the color version. Of interest to me was that the clouds were actually picking up some of the color being reflected off the ground; gives you a little idea of how low they were in places. This image began with a single frame which I used twice, once for the highlights, and again for the shadows. The two versions were layered on top one another, one masked so as to remove the highlights in it allowing for one flattened layer properly exposed for both highlights and shadows. I then added micro contrast emphasis to the clouds on a new layer, combined that with the previous layers, employed some noise reduction to the clouds to balance the micro contrast manipulation previously applied, and finally did a global color and contrast adjust manipulating the blues ever so slightly. All that was flattened and given an sRGB color gamut for viewing. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 9.

03 Oct 13. Continuing traveling east on I-90, it isn't long before you come to the town of "historic" Wallace. When first we visited this little silver mining community back in 2007 Jan's eye was captured by a small building called the Oasis Bordello. It had closed 5 minutes before our arrival, so we promised ourselves we would visit it the next time we passed through. That first day of our trip was the next time but once again we missed getting there before it closed, so we made a point of visiting before we left for Glacier National Park a couple of days later. It was worth the visit, and should you be traveling on I-90 passing through Idaho I highly recommend it to you. The basement and main floors are open to all, but to really get the full story it will cost you $5 for a complete tour. Do take it! It finally closed its doors in 1988 in a hurry; you can see what was there in the working rooms on the day they left. It has been converted into a museum and a few years back a few of the girls who worked there, it was actually a circuit business with the girls spending several months in one location before moving to another, so the rooms were just given color codes and not names, came back to tell the story of how it was run. The madam was a good business woman, and each girl had a time card and a time clock (12 minutes per trick) and all business was both clocked and recorded. At the end of the day the monies accounted for the bookwork was destroyed; the madam took 40% of the listed prices on the menu for whatever service was performed, but the girls were allowed to charge any amount they could get away with, the 40% being taken on on the menu price. For the 40%, the girls were provided room, board, and (mandatory) weekly medical care. One young lady managed to earn the tidy sum of $100,00 in just three years. There is MUCH more to tell, but I'll leave it to you to go visit for the full story. To the base image layer I added another and ran a filter on it to get the creative look. Then I ran another filter to adjust the contrast, and finally, I ran the pixel bender application to give it to an oil painting look. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 4.8.

04 Oct 13. Out first venture out was to the National Bison Range. We traveled east on I-90 to the St Regis exit, then followed the Clark Fork river for a distance driving on MT highways 135 and 200. Our previous visit to the NBR in 2007 netted us lots of bison in a single herd, a nice group of elk, and one pronghorn. This time we found several smaller groups of bison scattered around the park, no elk, but they had been seen and heard bugling earlier that morning, and a group of three pronghorn that posed for us for the better part of 45 minutes. Unlike the previous visit, none of the bison were up close and personal, although most were within easy shooting distance even if the containing fences were frequently a bit disruptive for good photography. We came across several isolated bulls that made for a few good shots, and this is one of them. This guy was a couple hundred yards from a bigger group, and one couldn't help but think he had meandered away for a bit of peace and quiet. While we watched him and another a short distance away, it was hard to determine if he was more interested in lunch or partaking of the wallow beside him. The light was constantly changing while we were driving through the park on the roughly 19 miles that take you around the entire area. What started out as mostly blue skies with white clouds continuously progressed to more and more clouds with less blue sky and plenty of gray, eventually culminating in lots of rain, but not until minutes after we got back to our motel. The shot of this magnificent creature was taken while we still had mostly blue skies, but it turned out a bit more "bland" than I would have desired. so, starting with the original shot as a background layer, I added a curves contrast enhancement to darken the entire thing. Combining those two layers, I added some small detail enhancement to the bison, then ran another curves correction to background. I then added the vignette, added another curves layer this time just to ever so slightly lighten the bison, and then flattened the entire thing and set it to the sRGB gamut for the web and computer viewing. I also made three other versions of the shot, all different, and I think they would all make for good viewing. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/160 sec @ f / 8.

07 Oct 13. We'll take a short hiatus from the holiday images and have a look at some other stuff for a couple of mailings. Returning home on Saturday from a day spent walking Issaquah's Salmon Days arts and craft fair, along with the cherubs and a couple thousand other weary souls, we made the crossing across the sound just in time for a lovely autumn sunset. We managed to take it in from beginning to end, which was an end of blue skies and vibrant pink clouds. Unfortunately the pink occurred as we exited the boat and were driving the roads home, so my hopes of capturing that aspect of the show was not to be. But I did get most of the rest which was primarily of a cream to orange cast of clouds acting upon a sky of blue. A trip well worth remembering and with several dozen images having captured it, I won't have to resort to memory to do it which at times doesn't record as well as it should. This image is from the beginning of the voyage and has you looking roughly WSWbyW at the southern end of the Olympic mountains. I've cropped a small portion off the bottom of the original image, added a wee bit of contrast enhancement to some of the clouds, and slightly lightened the water for balance. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; 1/800 sec @ f / 9.

08 Oct 13. It being B&W Tuesday we'll stay with a monochrome image, but for today we'll substitute tan for the black and go for something more along the lines of sepia. The color will be a bit darker than what one normally associates with a sepia image, but that the closest I can call it. While visiting Glacier National Park, we collected the usual full color handout and the park paper as we entered the park. As we were traveling from Glacier to Yellowstone, Jam read in the paper a story about a historical site that was claimed to be mid way between the two parks and a must see for the kids. The idea didn't excite me much, but Jan really wanted to visit it so we spent a few hours at the Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site. This is a real ranch which is still in operation but is just a mere pittance of what it was in its heyday. A guided tour is available of the ranch house which has been maintained as it was in its prime thanks to family members who have donated everything originally there. I'd share some photos but you aren't allowed to take any photos as it might harm the interior of the ranch house. A bunch of crap of course as they are very willing to sell you photos, the taking of which by a "professional" photographer apparently didn't harm the interior. If you can get beyond the photo crap, the history of the farm is quite interesting and actually worth the visit. But the idea, as promoted in the paper that it is a great place for kiddies, is nonsense, and any kids I know would be bored to tears even before making it to the farm area of the property. However, there is a lot of history in the barns, bunk house, ranch house, and the fields where there are several old farm implements nicely displayed. I took several shots of the things allowed to be photographed and one of them is the image for today. You will immediately recognize the subject, or at least I hope you will. If not, you do need to go visit one of our old historical farms of which there are many available. This image was created by running a single filter on it to convert it from color to monochrome to which I added a slight curves adjustment to give it just a bit more contrast making it appear a bit less flat. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/125 sec @ f /11.

09 Oct 13. Hoping for something different today for fine art Wednesday, I wandered through a lot of the shots taken on the holiday until I came to this one. It is from a series I shot in Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, high in the Centennial Valley in the south west area of MT, about 33 miles from West Yellowstone, the majority of which is over some very unimproved road. It is part of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and the claims for its beauty are hard to ignore. We, however, encountered primarily very sticky mud and severe weather during our visit and sadly, very little color and just 5 deer for our wildlife viewing. Most of the visit was made in the clouds, but they eventually burned off and we got to see a bit of rather nice scenery albeit not exactly the fall color and huge flocks of birds we were hoping to see. This photo was taken around ten in the morning about the time the clouds had lifted off the ground and made it partially up into the sky. At the time the shadows playing on the fields reminded me of the fields in the Palouse area of WA/ID/OR. The ground was many shades of reds to browns, including a lot of tans, and the shadows were gracing the hillsides with patterns of blue. Large portions of the grounds were in various amounts of shadow, allowing for many shades of every color. Between the grasses in the foreground and the hills in the background, was a band of grain gold landscape and a few trees in bright yellow that appeared to have at one time been a windbreak. Contrasted with what we saw earlier while driving in the fog, it was rather striking to say the least. I made two versions of the image, one mono and the other in full color. Since I couldn't decide which to share, I let Jan choose. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f /11.

10 Oct 13. Leaving Wallace, ID in the rain, we drove to Kalispell, MT, just outside Glacier National Park. Well, "just outside" turned out to be a hour outside the park, but it was a nice community and our motel hosts were quite nice. The drive between the two cities provided little of interest save for a horse or two, one old building, and a city named for what we thought was a waterfall and but had no falls and only a river with a couple of scenic areas. We managed to pass by the old building in between rain squalls, so I stopped and took a couple images of it. I've chosen one for today's Theatrical Thursday presentation, and made some slight modification to it in the form of simply rendering it as a watercolor. Other than that and a small amount of cropping, it is as we saw it if one sees things in water colors. The location is about an hour out of Wallace but that is about as much info on it as I have. I thought the old derelict made for a nice composition against the trees when I saw it, but while I was working on it I could "visualize" a much more interesting work by making the conversion. When placed side by side, this version and the original shot, there is no doubt that rendering the scene in water color is dramatically more pleasing. One might even consider rendering this as a cross stitch work. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f / 5.3.

11 Oct 13. Many of you may recall a portion of what I write today, but that's O.K., as it forms an integral part of today's missive. When first we returned to Seattle following 30 + years of military service, we paid a visit to the Pike Place Market, Jan's favorite place in the city. While wandering amongst the many vendors, I kept seeing a view of Seattle on the photographer's tables I couldn't place. When one individual finally told me from where it was taken, I immediately looked up the location and drove to see where it was. To my amazement, it was across the street from where my Aunt Elsie had lived for several years, except, that at the time when she lived there, it looked quite different as it was prior to 1961 when there was an ordinance forbidding any structure in the city to be taller than the Smith Tower. That ordinance was waived for the erection of the Space Needle for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, and nothing in the city has been the same since. That same aunt, whom I used to tease all the time, and in fact always have, who had a positive impact on my life, died this week at the amazing age of 95, having substantially outlived her three siblings. Born in 1918 in the farmhouse built by her father and brother just 0.3 miles down the road from our new residence, she lived a full life, if a bit dependent on others, only because she never learned how to drive. But in spite of that one thing, she was a fiercely independent individual and very inquisitive. She loved to travel and learn about new things and always kept me informed about things back home while I was away on active duty. In thinking about how I might remember her, I've elected to use a photograph I took while we were at the National Bison Range in MT just a couple of weeks ago. So, my dear auntie, this one's for you! Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 640; 1/800 sec @ f / 7.1.

14 Oct 13. IF I were better story teller, and IF I had a bit of the Early American blood in me, I might be able to craft a believable story combining the subject for today and my aunt's memorial service. But as I am neither, I will have to just suggest that our ancestors would have had a way of explaining why this beautiful raptor spent a few minutes Sunday morning on a branch in our back yard. Being rather skittish birds, which I find surprising considering their size and strength, I had to shoot this shot through the bedroom glass door and under very low light conditions using a very high ISO so as not to frighten it away, so, in short, it isn't as sharp as I would have preferred. But the critter did make an unusual appearance, spent a few minutes looking around the property, then stared directly at me for perhaps 90 seconds, before departing. This was my best capture of 6 tries, and it is good enough to share, but as I said, not truly sharp. The story that I would tell, if I had the skill, was that the critter is my aunt come to say all is well, and that she is letting us know that she is satisfied with what will be transpiring later in the day. But it would take a better story teller than I to fully pull that one off, so we'll just have to go with my awkward attempt. Perhaps later in the day we'll be blessed with another visit. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 800; 1/30 sec hand held @ f / 7.1. Hope you enjoy, dave

15 Oct 13. There is an old saying in photography that goes "after you've taken the perfect photo you're after, turn around, and have another look." There are likely several versions of this, but they all convey the same message. Returning from our visit to the National Bison Range, driving along the Clark Fork river, I was paying particular attention to the reflections in the river and finally reached a bend in the road where I could no longer tolerate just looking at them and had to get out and shoot a few images. After so doing, I turned around to walk the few feet back to the SUV and saw the real photos of which today's submission is one. I wanted to share something dramatic today for B&W Tuesday and was flipping through the shots from the Bison Range visit; when I got to this series I immediately thought that one of them might be appropriate. I began by evaluating the color impact when converted to B&W, but quickly found that idea to be less practical than just doing an immediate quick conversion to a simple B&W and looking at that. Once I found the shot I felt would best convey the idea of being there, I just moved forward working solely in B&W. This is the result. To get the final image I started with the original layer in color, added a layer in which I both converted to B&W and added some detail enhancement, and then employed some noise reduction to add a little softness over all. Then followed the standard conversion to appropriate file size and color correction for web & monitors. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f /8.

16 Oct 13. In considering what I would do for today's fine art image, I began with a search for what is currently considered to be fine art. The short version of what I came up with goes something like "a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness, specifically, painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor, graphics, and architecture." There was more, as well as a bit of disagreement as to what constitutes fine art, but I rather liked what I've quoted and so will stay with that for the foreseeable future. I wanted to do something with the wildlife we photographed on the trip, and elected to go with another bison image, this time one of the woodland bison as contrasted with the plains bison image I shared previously. I spent almost an hour working to achieve exactly what I wanted, had one version saved, and was preparing to save out the remaining two when my graphics program crashed and over wrote my 10 layers of work with just one! Sometimes it seems the dragon wins and to say the least I'm not very happy with what happened. But I did manage to save one that is perhaps reminiscent of the time of the bison. To get to what I'm sharing, it went like this. Starting with the original image as the background layer, I duped it and then cropped out some unnecessary material and cloned out some other material interfering with the main subject. Then I added a layer of micro contrast enhancement but painted it onto only the areas in which I wanted it. Then I added a layer to which I added some heavy global, meaning on the entire image, contrast adjustment but gave it a 50% reduction to get the look I wanted. Then I added a curves layer to darken just the background but not the subject. To that I added a layer to give a particular color treatment and finally added a layer in which I added a custom vignette. Saved all that out for safe keeping, then added a B&W layer and did some selective noise reduction to that on its own layer. Once again I saved that composite file, and then started to do a creative effect with the subject in color and the background in B&W when the program crashed and overwrote everything with the creative file. But the B&W version had been saved out as two DI files, so I share with you that version. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/100 sec @ f / 6.3.

17 Oct 13. Having spent a couple hours today working on creative images for Theatrical Thursday, I found myself trying to decide which one I would use and finally decided that I should keep the chronology of the trip intact, at least for a couple of weeks, and go with something from the front end of the trip, and as it turns out, an image from day three. Part of the Oasis Bordello that is available for viewing for free is the basement, and aside from it being very poorly lit, we found it to be almost as interesting as was the tour to the upstairs working floor of the bordello. One of the items that was quite interesting was the old coal burner sitting near the far wall of the basement. At the opposite end of the wall was the sealed up coal chute, but there was little doubt as to what it had been used for in the past. The old coal burner was way past its prime, highly rusted, and of very strong character. One could only wish that it could tell its story. That not being possible, at least for the time we had to spend there, I took a few shots believing that I might be able to tease a little something out of it later. This is what I discovered and I did it in the following manner. Starting with the background layer, I employed a plug-in (filter) to simulate an HDR composite and then adjusted that to my liking. I combined those two layers into a new layer on which I painted out the new heating system that took away from the old system. Finally, I added a curves layer to partially lighten portions of the image. Then the normal flattening and color adjustment for viewing on your computer. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/60 sec with full flash @ f /4.5

18 Oct 13. Having been chased, and frequently overrun, by the weather since departing Eglon, we awoke early in the morning in Kalispell, MT to darkness, an almost full moon, and fog, lots of fog. But photography in the fog can be fun, and can also yield some rather interesting images. The foggy weather stayed with us all morning and into the afternoon, eventually dissipating around 1500. During that time it provided us with some beautiful scenery even if not what I had wanted to enjoy while in Glacier National Park. My initial shots, as we entered the park via the west entrance, of the fire damage from a few years back were a complete bust, but shortly thereafter I came upon a small stream, under the fog, that caught my eye as we drove over it. So I stopped the vehicle and walked back to where I could get a couple low level shots realizing as I did that this was a tripod situation without a place to safely work with the tripod, in that I was right at the edge of the road and the tripod would have put me in the road. In retrospect, considering the virtually null traffic at the time, it probably would have been perfectly safe, but I elected to work hand held anyway. The stream itself wasn't anything significant, but the stream bed was/is. Consisting of brightly colored rocks, it almost looks like it is an artificial creation. But what I'm sharing is just the way it looks, and the colors of the rocks are something that are hard to forget. The early morning light has given the image a bit of a blue cast, but I've elected to let it remain as that was the light at the time. A slow shutter speed allowed for the water to go soft, so that is part of the original capture. I've cropped out a fair amount of what was in the original as it added nothing, and I've added a fair amount of micro contrast to provide a greater appreciation of the detail in the rocks. The important thing to note is that I've done no color enhancement; these are the actual colors of the rocks in Snyder Creek. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/10 sec @ f / 8 hand held.

21 Oct 13. When we previously visited Glacier National Park a few years back, I was struck by the red color I saw in rocks alongside the road as well as those in a stream bed just beyond one end of the Many Glacier parking lot. The stream bed was empty and I took a 5 shot series of the location and made an almost over the top HDR image to share on this list. It was well received, as was, to a slightly lesser extent, one of the red roadside rocks. So I was hoping to play in those two areas of the park on our return this time, but sorta ran out of time due to weather conditions. But I wasn't disappointed as I was amazed at how much red rock there is in the park. The rocks in the stream bed I shared on Friday seem to be readily available throughout the park, and come in many sizes from pebbles to boulders. You just have to look a bit and you'll find them everywhere. Driving a short distance further along from where I took the shot for Friday's submission, we came upon a pullout to the left of the road that, based on the number of cars there, was going to provide some worthwhile shots, and I wasn't disappointed. From this location I'll share two or three, all different, and all from a few feet apart. This one was shot very near the edge of the pullout and required nothing more than maneuvering a bit to get the composition I desired. The road is immediately to the right of the frame and it follows the McDonald river as it meanders left and right for quite a few miles. I've added quite a bit of micro contrast enhancement to this image to give you a better feel for the amazing colors and textures that were present in the rocks. You can view it best sitting back about two feet from the screen, or at least that's how it best displays on my monitors. The weather was really overcast, the light dull and flat, and with a blue tint, so I've had to do a little work, as follows, to get the colors to show as they should. Starting with the background layer, I added a curves adjustment to darken the rocks in the foreground. Then I applied the detail extraction on a new layer, follow by strongly pushing the contrast to compensate for the flat lighting. Then I adjusted the hues of the red, magenta, and yellows to get everything in balance, finally adding an export sharpening layer, and then the normal reducing to 8 bit format ( I do the work in 16 bit), setting the color gamut for the screen and flattening all the layers for export as a jpg image. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/80 sec @ f / 9.

22 Oct 13. As we drove through the west gate to Glacier National Park, it was just minutes until we were driving along the edge of Lake McDonald. The light was still reasonably dim, but it was easy to see that across the shore there had been significant fire damage. As we continued along the Going to the Sun Highway we were frequently reminded that the park had seen some amount of fire in the past. The 2003 fires, the ones most remembered, burnt only c13% of the park, but the news made it seem like the entire park was ablaze. The fires are an annual event, and contribute to the health of the park, but all too often are characterized as something bad. While in the past the forest service attempted to put every fire out, they are now controlled and allowed to burn themselves out so long as they don't endanger lives or irreplaceable property. This shot was taken about 1/3 the way across the highway, and is an area in which there is a large pull out and parking along with kiosk and rest rooms for those wanting to take in the burn area from a strong vantage point. In as much as a fire leaves most things burnt, often to a crisp, I thought it served well as a candidate for B&W Tuesday. The entire area on the hillside facing you has been completely burnt. Starting with a color image, I ran a image correction filter on its own layer, then converted it to B&W adjusting the result to my tastes, the added some contrast enhancement to give it a bit more depth, and then added a bit more contrast with a curves adjustment layer. Then the standard conversion for sharing over the web. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f /10.

23 Oct 13 Turning around from the spot of yesterday's shot and walking about 30 yards gave the view I'm sharing today. As it turned out, this spot was the most color we saw on the entire trip. The fog, now and then as clouds, was still keeping us close company, so this shot was taken between the clouds so to speak. For those of you familiar with Glacier National Park, this location is where the signage for Heaven's Peak is located.This image has two parts to it, a straight layer and a creative layer with partial blending. As such, it is not critically sharp, intentionally. I did it by starting with the base layer, then transforming that layer to correct for distortion resultant from having to tip the camera backwards to get the shot, then some contrast enhancement and that followed by a bit of detail enhancement. Then I adjusted the blue sky just a bit to counter the washed out blue. All that was combined into a new layer and the creative filter run on that. The creative layer was then reduced in opacity to 24% and then the combined layers flattened. I then cropped off about 20% of the top as it added nothing of interest. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f /10.

24 Oct 13. One of the locations we were encouraged to go see/visit on the trip was Thompson Falls. Returning from our visit to the National Bison Range on day two, we were heading in that direction with the intent of making it our last stop for the day on a long drive home, but the weather was beginning to look really nasty so we put it off for a day. We made the correct decision as we just made it back to the motel restaurant, located across the parking lot from our room, when the heavens opened and the rail fell at somewhere around 3 in/hr. By the time we finished the meal the storm had abated, the parking lot was virtually flooded, and we waded back to our room. The next morning we headed out again towards Thompson Falls with a morning side visit to Historic Wallace to see the brothel before heading out. A rainy couple hours later we came to the town of Thompson Falls and immediately began looking for the sign(s) to the falls. No immediate luck, so we drove to the section of town with a bridge just knowing that we would likely be able to locate the falls from there. Nope! Crossed over the bridge and saw signs to a city park and diverted there just on hunch that there we would find the falls. Nope, no falls there either. Now, becoming a bit frustrated, we headed to the center of the town - the only road through it - and about midway down the road we finally found the sign for the falls which read "There are no falls in Thompson Falls." It was true, there are none, so our routing to see these beautiful falls was for naught, but at least we had a good laugh . The park we visited wasn't all that great either, but the river side offered a few nice views of the river, such as it was. This is one of the views we saw, but I have modified it a bit to make it even better looking that I thought it was. Starting with the background layer, I ran a filter on it to convert it to a watercolor, but masked out the rocks to keep them as they were naturally. Then I cloned out some small number of distractions, and finished up by applying a levels correction to adjust the highlights. Then the normal conversion for sharing with you. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 400; 1/200 sec @ f / 5.

25 Oct 13. After finding that all the color we had gone to shoot on the Colorado Plateau was about 10 days behind us, I made the assumption that we might have something similar occurring here and waited until this week to make our annual pilgrimage over WA Highway 2 through the Tumwater Canyon to Leavenworth to shoot fall color and visit Jan's favorite Christmas store. Just to be on the safe side, I called the Leavenworth Ranger Station Wednesday afternoon to check on the color situation. The ranger said that the colors were hit and miss, but that there was "still lots of color, the peak having been perhaps earlier in the week and that the colors at the top of Steven's pass were brilliant red." Just to my liking, so we set off very early Thursday morning to take it all in. Wow, what a stellar report. ALL the colors at the top of Stevens pass WEREN'T, the reds totally brown and there was little other color, save for a tree here and there, to be seen at all! So down the canyon we went anyway to find some patches of yellow, some of which were quite nice, but for the most part they were few and far between. In the process I met the photographer for the Leavenworth web page and we exchanged some thoughts on this year's color. He mentioned that there was still one spot worth shooting, I knew exactly where it was, and we proceeded there to see if I could get anything acceptable, the time for shooting this spot being around 0915 and it was now around 1130. It wasn't nearly as nice as it had been earlier (he showed many several of his images from the morning shoot) but there was still some nice color and reflections, but the glare from the sun was making it quite difficult to shoot anything reasonably useable. This is perhaps the best of the group, and it required considerable work to get it to this point, so much so, that I won't bore you with all the details this time. This is a small lake directly behind the Tumwater Canyon Dam which is used to generate a tiny amount of hydroelectric power but whose primary function is involved with the fisheries department for tagging, catching, and artificially spawning salmon. Depending on your time of visit, it can be a truly lovely location. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/200 sec @ f / 7.1.

28 Oct 13. As most all of you are probably aware, I intentionally refrain from indicating which software programs I use, but I'm making an exception for today. My reasons for not indicating what I use is that a) I'm not in the business of free advertising, and b) I don't want to suggest that any specific software will allow you to just load it and it will do everything for you. So doing can lead to erroneous expectations. Like when we purchased an exercise machine that claimed it would make us fit again; we bought it years ago, we still have and look at it daily, but so far no personal (positive) changes are obvious. Today I'm going to make an exception based on my experience over the weekend. Now those of you who come from a UNIX background will immediately identify with the philosophy of using many programs, all of which do one thing very well, employing each to accomplish something better than all the rest, then passing its output to the next program to do likewise until the final product, in this case an image, is complete. This is in contrast to the current thought, by the big corporation folks, that one product should do it all and that their product is the only answer. Some even going so far now as to no longer license you their product but rather force you to purchase its use on a monthly basis and keep track of everything you do in their corporate servers! I've mentioned before that I use a number of different programs, each of which allows me to do something better with it than I can with a competitor program. Last Thursday we took a trip over the mountains to eastern Washington as I mentioned in Friday's missive. The primary goal of that trip was to shoot fall color and the secondary goal some shopping. While the secondary goal was accomplished without any doubt, the primary goal appeared to have been for naught when I downloaded all the images and viewed them on my calibrated monitors. They appeared, in short, awful. That was a real shocker and a big disappointment for me. Looking over all the EXIF data (complete information on all the camera settings) on the captures I could find nothing to explain the disastrous results. That's when I started looking at all the images with each of the several programs I have. The result of that exercise was to realize that a couple of my least expensive programs out performed the others by more than an order of magnitude, and that the big names paled by comparison. So I tired a few combinations of approach and realized that one combination in particular was able to pull out information, and use it, far beyond the abilities of all the other programs. So based on the experience of this weekend, I thought I'd share what I learned with the idea that some of you might be interested. The two programs that combined together rendered the significantly improved output both have 30 day trial versions should you be interested in trying something new. However, IF you are satisfied with the software you currently employ, stop here, and just take a peek at today's submission. I always begin by looking at my images with a program called FSViewer which I've discussed many times before. I use that program to now load the image of interest, like that for today, into a program called DxO Optics Pro (enhancement software), the current version of which, just released, is 9. The output from that program is then loaded into Qimage (printing software) the current version of which is 2014.121, tweaked for output for both printing and viewing (web and screen), and saved as a tiff file. If I then need to do something clever to it, it goes into either photoFXlab about which I've written before or the onOne Suite 8. The combined cost of these programs is less than the cost of one of the big names, and they are capable of far better results. Should you be interested in any of these, the blue links will take you to their respective web pages. All of these programs will require that you invest some time in them to maximize their potential, but it is time well spent. I'm still learning both, but find the time commitment well worth it! And that concludes my discussion of workflow, likely the only time you'll ever hear this stuff from me. The image you see today, created in this fashion, is one from the Thursday trip that, when initially viewed, looked, for the most part, hopeless. It is part of a hillside that was mostly evergreens, but with this patch of color just sorta sitting around hoping you might take notice. The lighting was very harsh, and the original image pretty much washed out. You can decide for yourself if in fact there was/is something there of beauty. I'm not including any step by step instructions for this image as I wasn't recording any while creating it since I was just playing with the software. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/100 sec @ f /11.

29 Oct 13. Continuing along the Highway to the Sun, still being chased and frequently overrun by fog, we came to the area just about a mile west of the visitor's center where we saw all the mountain goats on our previous visit a few years back. No goats this time however, actually, no animals at all, but lots of moisture floating around in the air and a light frosting of fresh snow on the mountain from the previous night. Since there was nothing more than rock and water, I thought I'd play with the clouds as they played hide & seek with the rocks. It was a rather interesting show as the mounds of granite would appear for a few seconds, disappear behind the clouds, only to reappear again to repeat the sequence; on and on and on. After about 30 minutes of trying to capture what I was observing in a different fashion, and not succeeding, we moved on to the visitors center to have a look at what might be presenting itself in the meadows beyond. Starting with the base image, I added a little enhancement to the clouds, removed some unwanted side effects caused by the enhancement, converted the image to B & W, and finally made a global contrast adjustment to get the exact balance I wanted in the shadows (black) and highlights (white). Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 @ f /11.

30 Oct 13. For those of you familiar with Glacier National Park, today's submission was taken just beyond the viewing site for the 492 foot high Bird Woman Falls. I shot it standing in the road, so the road would be just below the bottom of the image. There was a very small portion of the road in the LRH corner, but it was more distracting than it was providing helpful information, so I loped it off. The clouds were really rolling up the mountainside, putting on quite a show, so we stopped and shot for perhaps 30 minutes in this particular location. Apparently a lot of others were also enjoying the show, because at times the parking area was overflowing. The color we had come to shoot was just barely beginning to show, so I've "cheated" a wee bit and enhanced it to what it might have been, and likely was, about a week to 10 days later. One of the most attractive aspects of this park for my taste would be the rock formations, be they pebbles or mountains. There is so much red, in various shades, in these rocks that one is hard pressed not to be spending a goodly amount of time just looking at them. Take a good look at this image to get an idea of what I mean. There is more color than you might realize with just a quick look-see. Since Wednesday is the day I'm supposed to try for something fine art, my approach for this image was to try and make the clouds "active." Slide back from your screen a few feet and perhaps you will get the feel that they are moving outward towards you, and they were us when I took the shot. Here is how I did this. Starting with the base image, I began by cropping out extraneous material, then did some global contrast adjustments. Then I performed some rather strong detail enhancement to the clouds and to a lessor degree the rocks. That effort was where I tried to make the clouds seem real. Next I did a slight red increase as I mentioned earlier, followed by a creative layer addition which was reduced in opacity to just 37% of the creative effort. Then I added a noise removal layer which was applied only to the clouds again to help make them jump out. And then finalized it as I do all the images for sharing. Nikon D300s; 18 - 20; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/80 sec @ f /16.

31 Oct 13. What with Theatrical Thursday and All Hallows Eve falling on the same day, I simply couldn't resist trying my hand at something for the occasion. So today's submission will bear no resemblance to anything I've ever shared prior. A small hint is that it isn't a static image, but you must take it from there. It required 16 layers to create, and was a bit of a challenge to do as I've never tried anything quite like this before. So that's all I'm going to say about it other than it started out as at ISO 200; 1/160 sec @ f / 9, Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture priority.