Daily Image - Jun 2015 Archive

01 Jun 15. The "local" community, by which I mean a few specific individuals, is putting together an early history of the area comprising the northern most section of the peninsula on which we reside. Through a process of which I have only sketchy knowledge, I got volunteered to provide some photos of a few locations of which the group thought the project was in need for the book. I agreed to so do with the proviso that it would not be a last minute effort which I was assured would not be the case. Somewhere along the line it was understood that I could do a little photo restoration as well and somehow that got put in the mix. "We" are now facing a deadline of two weeks to finish a project that has a backlog of perhaps 20 old photos that need restoration as well as several photos that need taking to replace those that are not of publication quality. No last minute stuff here. I find the work interesting and in some cases the restorations rewarding, but the time crunch is taking its toll. PLUS the photos need the cooperation of old Sol whom it seems is taking the week off which means that everything I capture this week will require some additional work with the skies, otherwise folks might actually believe we have lots and lots and lots of gray overhead. On Saturday however Sol was in a cooperative mood in the afternoon and I was able to get this 7 shot panorama of Buck Lake, a local lake (one desired for the book) from where I took the lily pad and flower shots last year as well as that of the mating Damselflies. Based on images I've already reworked, a century ago this lake would freeze over in the winters and was used for ice skating by the local communities many members of which were very accomplished ice skaters, having learned as youth in their native Scandinavian countries. Something I tried . . . . ONCE! All 7 images were adjusted for max color, then blended together to form a panorama. I've cropped the pano for best presentation and that's it. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/400 sec @ f /10

02 Jun 15. This is another of the images for the book, except that the book version will more than likely be in color. But that could change with the cost of color reproductions being significantly greater than that for B&W. This is the Point-No-Point light house in Hansville, WA, the oldest of all the light houses on Puget Sound. It has an identical sister on the Seattle side located in what is now known as Discovery Park but was originally an Army base, Fort Lawton. The one in Discovery Park was built from the plans used to build the Point-No-Point - an interesting name and one I'll discuss later - original and was done to save money. This light house still blinks but no longer uses the oil lamps that were employed when initially constructed and now sits in what has been converted to a county park. I've added a little texture to counter the effects of the buildings being photographed in heavy shade, a welcome situation as it means we were having a very nice sunny day, but otherwise, other than being in B&W, it is virtually as I took it. The base image was adjusted for max tonality, then a bit of texture added to the buildings, the colors adjusted for best display, and then converted to B&W. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/2000 sec @ f / 5 (I was tired and lacking a tripod for stability).

03 Jun15. Head east on the road through Lamar Valley and travel almost to Cooke City. About 10 miles before reaching that entrance you will come to a travertine formation on the right hand side of the road. It is impossible to miss and has a signboard telling you about it. This was our first visit to this section of the park and on the afternoon we were there a group of 8 or 9 large adult male - perhaps that's redundant - bison were enjoying the area with us, they having dinner and we just observing. The setting was about as pastoral as one could be, and had we not wanted to see what remained on that end of the park, we might have stayed there for several hours. Had we owned any form of motor home I would have and tried for some star pictures with the travertine mound in the foreground. But we don't and it was a good 100 miles to get back to the condo, so we didn't hang out. When you visit the park don't miss the opportunity to travel to the far northeastern end of the park; it is worth the drive. The base image was adjusted for max tonality, then given some micro contrast adjustment, and finally a little catch light placed in the animals eyes. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 320; 1/640 sec @ f /11.

04 Jun 15. It being Theatrical Thursday, we'll go with a water color today that is also a composite of 9 shots. The "pure" image is one that will be going in the book, and the desire was for a shot showing all of "downtown" Hansville, WA. This one does it quite well, and actually includes a bit more than the at most two blocks total that comprise the "downtown" area. Perhaps the most important element in this image is the cloud bank that identifies the convergence zone that occurs right where it is in the image. Weather coming up from the bottom end of Puget Sound converges with weather moving in from the Straights of Juan deFuca and creates a very unstable area, one which good aviators avoid and the rest are no longer aviators. Looking into the picture, where the road in the center ends, was the entire business section of Hansville when I was a kid, and that was all owned and run by my aunt & uncle. I've written sufficiently about that in many previous mailings, but now you have a "face" to put with it. The long blue band in the water is Whidbey Island, touted by virtually all Washingtonians as the longest island in America, actually it's #26, and home to Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. This was a fun place to visit when we were young and my memories of it will last my lifetime. I started with a 9 image capture, adjusted all at once to have the same look, then blended them together, cropping and cloning as necessary to get a clean rectangular image. I then adjusted for max tonality, and ran a filter against that to get the watercolor effect. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/400 sec @ f /10.

05 Jun 15. All around our local area the wild flowers are displaying in abundance! It is hard to drive anywhere without stopping a time or two to grab a shot of this amazingly beautiful spring. Driving straight down Eglon Road and crossing Hansville Road continuing west, there is a steep hillside bordering a section of the road simply covered in lupine. We've been passing it for several days saying we need to get a shot of those lupine so this afternoon I did just that. It was immediately obvious once I started to climb the slope that I had waited too long for the majority of the plants, but here and there were small groups or individual plants still in their glory, and this shot is of one of them. The light was coming from the side and lighting the plants beautifully so I sorta hunkered down against the hillside, so I wouldn't slip and slide off, and snapped a few frames. Just to make it interesting, there was a stiff breeze blowing enticing the plants to join it in a rumba. I cropped of part of the image that was not needed, cloned out a few annoying areas, and adjusted for max tonality. That was it. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 5.6.

08 Jun 15 . This was my last image taken for the book but it got rejected (it was also the end of my work for the book) so I thought I'd try it out on all of you. Just down the road a ways, let's say farther than most of us would be willing to walk, is a small nature preserve that has far more rules than anyone needs, but which offers an open beach with a nice view of Puget Sound, a pleasant walk from the road to the beach through a second growth forest, the history of which is another story, and a decent sized marsh supporting lots of wildlife from salamanders to eagles. While we were visiting on Saturday we watched two Osprey successfully hunting, a couple of Bald Eagles looking for something tasty - one flew through this scene but was to soft and too small to be left in - a group of Canada Geese, and several species of song birds the most lovely of which were a few Red Winged Blackbirds. Jan discovered a salamander, as well as a tiny frog, and I'm sure we missed more than we saw. This is a 6 frame pano of the marsh which is a bit more overgrown with grasses than we've encountered prior. My guess that within the next two decades it will have fully filled in as is the custom with these things although I'm sure there will be hues and cries about how it is the fault of us humans as more and more of the save-the-world folks from the big city move into our local community. As I was comparing this current set of photos from what I took last year, I couldn't help but think about Picture Lake at Mt Baker which is getting smaller and smaller each year as it fills in with plant life. There however you will find a display describing what is happening and why. I initially adjusted all 6 frames in camera raw to make sure they would blend together properly, performed the blend, and then cropped the resulting image for best presentation. To that I added a tiny bit of micro contrast adjustment and called it quits. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f /10.

09 Jun 15 . Today's B&W submission is something I've never tried to do before, and it turned out sufficiently well enough that I thought I'd share it with you. Some of you will likely not appreciate it at all, but others of you I believe will. The original was a shot I took in color for the book -- it got rejected because an individual did not like the color of the geese (I actually thought about making them pink) -- but I liked the basic composition sufficiently well and thought it would be fun to experiment a little. Before I tell you what I did, you need to know a bit about the setting. Friday was a bright sunny day with little cloud cover but VERY hazy. That resulted in a few problems for a color shot, namely, most of the colors were as if they were off an old faded color print, there was virtually nothing interesting in the sky, just a clear washed out back drop, and things distant were quite soft. So while the shot could be crafted to look quite nice, and it was, even if you don't like the natural colors of geese, I felt there was more lurking inside. And that was what I wanted to tease out. Now the look I wanted isn't natural, that is to say, you could never find the lighting situation that would give this look, although everything in the composition is natural, i.e., it is just what was there on the beach. What I set out to do was to add a large amount of depth between the bluff on the right and the water behind it because that is how it actually is, and to bring out all the elements of the sky, such as they were, which wasn't much! AND, I wanted to do this using only a minimal set of tools. Which is exactly what I did and which I'll describe in the details section below. The results are best viewed from perhaps 30 - 36 inches from the screen. I took the color image and adjusted for max tonality, then manipulated that with a levels correction. Next, I added a lot of global contrast enhancement and then masked it out of everything except the sky. This brought out the sky detail without overdoing everything else. I then used some noise reduction to smooth out that effect. Finally, I used targeted micro contrast adjustments for different portions of the scene, the trees on the right, the group across the body of the water, and the water with the idea of creating separation via contrast levels. It should result in your eyes immediately going to the grouping of trees below the geese, then bouncing your eyes to the stand of trees on the right, and then to the band of water once again looking at the geese and continuing around and around. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/1000 sec 2 @ f / 7.1.

10 Jun 15. Over the past three years that we've been in this house - my how the time does fly - I have mentioned on occasion that we had a local amateur meteorologist who has a web page called Skunk Bay Weather which provides lots of weather info plus a lot more such as visual tracking of all the marine traffic on Puget Sound and the Straights of Juan deFuca, all the local commercial air traffic, and a myriad of other useful things for us PNWers. The site is a wealth of info about where we live, and if you are the curious type, this is a great place to start learning about our specific location. His work is such that the the local "official" newscasters and weather men have his site up and running on their stations and frequently reference it as opposed to the national weather service. He is a frequent speaker and an interesting individual. Last Friday I had the opportunity to visit his home and the site for all his weather gathering and we chatted for perhaps half an hour. My purpose in visiting him was to ask permission to take a picture of the bay (Skunk Bay) in front of his house for the book. I got his permission to do so as well as a open invitation to visit as desired. This was one of two locations I visited in my attempt to get an acceptable photo and this one was the one accepted of the two. If Columbus had had this shot available to him it might have ended the flat earth discussion a bit earlier although it is obvious that in this small an area of view the curvature of the earth would not be apparent. The curvature you are seeing is due to the poor job done by the photographer in snapping the 15 vertical frames hand held used to make the image. The long blue band you see snaking across the middle of the image is Whidbey Island, the details of which I wrote about a couple days back. All 15 frames were adjusted together to ensure they all had the same characteristics, then merged together to form a single frame. That was then cropped to get the best presentation, and then that was given some targeted contrast adjustment and by targeted I mean that different parts of the image such as the sky, the water, and the land receive differing amounts. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 8.

11 Jun 15. The morning began with a walk with Miss Maggie down our main road; as we turned around to return we were greeted by two beautiful does who were walking in the direction from which we had come, one per lane, taking their time, and going nowhere fast. Eventually they caught sight of us, stopped, watched to see what we were going to do, and then, after perhaps 5 minutes, decided to take a right and mosey into the woods. We began to walk again only to catch sight of another doe to our left with a fawn of perhaps two, maybe three, days old doing its best to reach a teat. With youngster busy with the task at hand, mom watched us for a couple minutes, they getting I guess a good lock on Maggie, called breakfast short and both began a fast walk back down the driveway in which they were standing. Not bad for a morning walk. A couple hours later returning from a local errand, I almost hit a three point buck as I was coming up to our main road. He is apparently a little more road smart than most as he elected to step back as he and the SUV came close instead of trying to beat us across the road. In between these encounters I spent some time at one of my favorite local nurseries shooting the latest arrival of daisies and lilies. Having left the camera at home while taking the walk, but not while at the nursery, I've selected one of those lily shots and applied a bit of 19th century painting technique. The base image was adjusted for max tonality, then given a small amount of micro contrast adjustment, and then passed through the painting "filter." Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/160 sec @ f /11.

12 Jun 15. Some of you may recall my saying that among my favorite alpine flowers is the Pasque Flower. I've shared several shots of this beautiful flower off and on over the 10 years I've been doing this and you've seen the plants as individual flowers and as groups of the seed heads, some of you in person. My delight in these alpine beauties is more the seed heads than the flowers, but both phases of the plant are quite striking, at least to my eyes. Depending on how well I time a trip to Mt Rainier this year, I may get to share more of them with you. A few weeks back I shared a cultivated (nursery) version of the flower as a pair of blossoms facing each other against a black background. Today's close up is of the seed head of that flower, which turns out to be somewhat different from that of the wild version. In both cases I think I like the cultivated flower better than its alpine "cousin" in part because it grows in my yard environment and more so because of the seed head. For those of you with a bit of imagination, I think of it as a designer seed head, like our "designer" dog, Maggie, a Labradoodle. In this case, a combination of Pampas Grass and Dandelion. Take a gander and see if you can identify with me. If not, perhaps you may come up with a different set of qualities. Starting with the base image, I adjusted for max tonality, then cropped out a little material that wasn't adding to the image, and finally gave it a smidgen of micro contrast enhancement. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/800 sec @ f / 8.

15 Jun15. Drive into Yellowstone from the west entrance, follow the Madison River to Madison Junction, then take a right turn at the junction where the Firehole River joins the Madison River. Follow that road, take the Firehole River Loop Road if you desire, well worth it!!!, and continue along the road looking to your right at the Firehole River. With not much driving, and a little bit of luck, you will come upon a few Trumpeter Swans. They are hard to miss being LARGE birds with black beaks and pure white plumage. They like the shallow water of the Firehole River and can be observed causally paddling around while feeding on the abundant plant life on the river bottom. We have generally found them in pairs on the Firehole River but in groups on the Yellowstone River. Either way they are beautiful birds and always a treat to watch and photograph. These two were for the most part oblivious of our presence as long as we didn't get too close to the shoreline. One of them had a single feather that was sticking up as though the bird was under sail and I thought with the breeze present at the time it would blow off but it refused to do so. As it provided a point of interest with the bird I decided to leave it in the photos. I cropped the base image for better composition, adjusted for max tonality, added a tiny bit of micro contrast adjustment as always, and that was it. Nikon D300s, 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/640 sec @ f /10.

16 Jun 15. I debated about going with a repeat image for comparison of B&W vs color or something original and the original won out but just . . . .barely. This is a very red lily that grows in a planter box on the rear deck but one which needs to be either moved into a bigger planter or given a home in the yard. I find that every year I'm attracted to it and wind up shooting the same kind of shots every time, basically what I'm sharing today, but this time around I've removed all the color hoping that what remains will draw your attention to the structure of the flower rather than just its brilliant colors. A critical look will have your eye finding a number of very tiny white spots which interestingly do not show up in the color version. I switched back and forth more times than I want to admit and cannot find any trace of them in the other versions. I'd like to think that they are pollen spores that are masked by the red colors but if so I would not expect to see them in the monochrome version. I'd be curious to know what some of you think they might be, that is, if you find them. The base image was cropped for content, given a tad bit of micro contrast adjustment, and then I created a B&W gradient map and adjusted that for max tonality. That's it. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 9.

17 Jun 15 . You will recall that on the first day of our return drive from Yellowstone we met the artist who made the set of bleu horses and that we had a nice chat. He told me directions on how to get up with the horses and although the weather was less than ideal, we made the short drive to the backside of the hillside on which they stand whereupon Maggie and I made the trek up wet hillside to roam amongst the herd. I recorded almost the entire group and some of the local flora as well, which was quite a surprise it being cactus. A few of the mares had foals with them and this was one of the nursing foals. You will get an idea as to the weather from the image and this shot was taken as the storm was beginning to break up. I spent the better part of an hour getting the photos and from my perspective, although perhaps not Jan's as she remained behind in the vehicle, it was well worth the time. Maggie had a pretty good time too running amongst many of the critters. We both got rather wet in the process but it was something I'll not soon forget. The base image was adjusted for max tonality, varying amounts of contrast adjustment were then applied to individual aspects of the photo, and that was it. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f / 8.

18 Jun 15. For this week's Theatrical Thursday we'll take another look at the horses on the central MT hillside. This time it is just a lone stallion making his presence known to all. This guy's head and tail move with the wind and in the right conditions I'm told it is almost life like. From the roadside they actually do look real, but when you get up close you get a somewhat different perspective. I've tried to present this guy to you in a way that you can make out most of his parts, that is to say, you can see them although I'll wager you can't identify all of them; I know I can't. The road in the background - light tan band - is MT highway 287. From the pullout on the west side of the highway, the one you are not supposed to use, your view would be of the other side of this stallion looking across him, right to left, from head to tail. Take this photo along with you as a reference when you go to visit them. I've given it a poster-like look so you can add your own text. The base image was adjusted for max tonality, given some small micro contrast adjustment, and then adjusted to give this poster look. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/200 sec @ f / 8.

19 Jun 15. I'm going with something for today's close-up shot that I haven't done for almost 5 years, and that is a high key shot. In this case a very high key image but this time created by removing almost all of the detail except for the outline of the flowers. This was done on a layer sitting above a layer with the full color image. The outline layer was blended with complete color version layer to give just a hint of the underlying color and structure. Not for everyone I realize, but I know there are some of you who like this kind of stuff. The original was a full color shot of a set of three very vibrant red-orange calla lilies and deep green leaves which I shot in a nearby nursery. The original was adjusted for max tonality, given a small amount of micro contrast adjustment, and saved as a layer. That layer was duped and the copy was run through a plug-in (filter) to create the outline image. The two images were then blended with a screen mode blend set at 93%. The result of that set of steps created the final image. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f /10.

22 Jun 15. In the process of acquiring images for the book, I made a deal with one resident on the peninsula that in exchange for being able to shoot from his property, I would shoot for him a few images of a pair of nesting osprey in one of his trees. This Father's Day was my first opportunity to do so and I spent roughly two and a half hours sitting in the partial shade of the SUV with Maggie at my feet while waiting for the pair of birds to grace my lens. In that period of time they made three landings between them, one early on in the vigil and the other two within two minutes of each other at the end, two hours later. This shot is from the initial landing; after perching, I assume comfortably, the bird remained in the nest for perhaps 30 minutes whereupon it flew off to return almost two hours later. The original shot was cropped to get rid of a lot of empty sky, adjusted for max tonality, then given a tiny amount of micro contrast adjustment. Nikon D300s; 150 - 600; ISO 200; 1/800 sec @ f / 8.

23 Jun 15 . Last week I shared with you a high key image of a group of calla lilies which I photographed sitting on a display bench at a local nursery. While I was working on the image set one of the cherubs was given an opportunity to pick out her favorite color swap from a group of approximately 100 choices. She looked them over carefully, narrowed it down to five, and selected this one from the five. It isn't a B&W obviously, but I thought it was close enough to a black and white approach, being fundamentally mauve and blue, to fit the category if you are willing to stretch your definition of monochrome a little bit, well, perhaps a large bit, but at least fun to do, and no lilies will be hurt in the process. ;-) The original was adjusted for max tonality, given a small amount of micro contrast adjustment, and saved as a layer which was then manipulated with a filter that swaps colors. You can swap out up to five and in this instance I swapped five different ones to get the final look. D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f /10.

24 Jun 15 . The day we left West Yellowstone in the snow storm that had turned to rain by the time we located the Bleu Horses, remained such and accompanied us to some degree all the way to just outside Haugen, MT. From heavy rain to drizzle and slightly cloudy to totally socked-in, we experienced it all. As we drove the last 30 miles of the trip approaching our favorite stopover, the storm was blowing itself out and we were treated to some beautiful light, stormy clouds, and mist rising up from the hill (mountain) sides. I stopped a couple of times to capture those sights. This is one of them. I've enhanced the hillside just a bit to make for a more interesting image. Six frames were combined together in an HDR tone mapping program, that result was run through a creative filter to give it a little punch, and then I added a cures layer to darken the sky and masked that so it affected only the sky. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 500; 1/800 sec (mid exposure of the series) @ f / 5.6.

25 Jun 15. Many years ago, during our first tour in the Navy, while stationed at the Naval Air Development Center, the wives club put together an annual art auction that was conducted on-base by one of the New York art houses. It was a fun occasion each year, and each event added to our growing art collection. On a few occasions there were bidding wars by some of our close friends, and even though during the bidding one might have expected some hard feeling on the part of the losers, it never happened. We were not part of the high rollers so our purchases were usually below the $100 mark, and never entered into a bidding war, but we still managed to get what we both felt were some nice pieces of art at a good discount. One of those pieces was an acrylic on glass of a street in Williamsburg, a place we often visited over the almost 20 years we were stationed on the right coast. For today's Theatrical Thursday's submission I thought I'd like to play with an image, just for fun, with no starting ideas as to how I'd wind up, to see what I might come up with. One step led to another and along the way I got the idea of the acrylic of Williamsburg art piece and thought it would be fun to make one version of the image I was playing with in that form. And that is what I'm sharing for today. If you stretch your imagination a little you might even see a comparison with stained glass, although the stained glass would have much bolder borders and substantially brighter colors. A few of you might even see the possibility of a puzzle in this one. You may find this looks better a few feet from your screen. The base image was first cropped for composition, then some small amount of chromatic aberration was removed from the logs, then it was adjusted for max tonality. That became my new base. Next I added some strong detail enhancement to the water and bison, and then converted that to a sketch outline that provides for the black outlines. That sketch piece was reduced in opacity to let the underlying color image bled through a small amount giving the final result. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200: 1/400 sec @ f / 7.1.

26 Jun 15. Today's macro/close-up submission is an example of a close-up as the subject definitely fills the entire frame. When we first got these critters, of which I'm showcasing only one, if we kept the proportions the same, it would fill maybe 1/20 of the frame. Pretty soon one leg will fill the entire frame, and within a few decades one of the spikes will do the same. I made a couple versions of this image to show of the character of the shell, this one I'm sharing and a slightly creative one that places more emphasis on the shell but also makes the fleshy parts look a little odd. So in this case reality won out. This is an African Spurred Tortoise, also known as a Sulcata Tortoise. They live a ripe old time, great to buy and gift to your great grand children or anyone with a really nicely landscaped yard you don't like as these guys are digging machines! But the little kiddies can ride on them when they mature as they are just one size smaller than the Giant Galapagos Tortoise. Not hard to keep either, as long as you own the produce section of the super market. All that aside, they are very interesting animals and they do provide us with an ample amount of entertainment. Wonder what that says about us? The base image was first cropped, then adjusted for max tonality, and completed by giving it a very small amount of micro contrast adjustment. Nikon D300s; 18 - 20; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/800 sec @ f / 8.

29 Jun 15 . With our early warm weather the grain crops have been maturing early as well, and all over the area the mowers, mower conditioners,and bailers are hard at work. This year the fields have been some very lovely shades of gold, reminding one of parts of the song America the Beautiful. I thought it would be nice to record how the fields looked pre-harvest, and this shot is one I took last week. Some of you will recognize the location from prior mailings or even visits to the area, but none of us have seen it quite this lovely before, at least as far back as my memories go. Of course that excludes perhaps half of my lifetime, but for the years I have seen these local farms this year has been by quite some the prettiest. I took the base image and corrected some perspective distortion due to the photographer not holding the camera perpendicular to the scene, added a little micro contrast enhancement, and called it quits. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 500 (neglected to reset from a previous shoot); 1/1000 sec @ f /10.

30 Jun 15 . About mid way between my cousin's farm and home, there rests part of an old tug boat. It isn't just an old hulk of a vessel, but someone's home. I've been curious about it since my youth and have wondered why anyone would want to live in an old boat. I've never stopped to take a picture of it before, but it was one desired for the book, so I grabbed a couple of shots a few weeks back for that purpose. Alone on the road, just as I was about to take my shot(s) another car pulled up, stopped directly in front of the home, and just parked there as one of the occupants got out and proceeded to dilly dally around taking snap shots. After about 10 minutes the driver figured out that she might just be in the way and drove ahead by a couple of car lengths. It was, and wasn't, amusing at the same time. This is my preferred of the shots I took and the one used in the book, although the book version may be in color. Haven't seen the final version, so I don't know which provided images remained in color. The base image was corrected for some perspective problems and cropped to leave just the boat house. I then gave it a bit of micro contrast enhancement, converted it to B&W, and then added some detail enhancement to the hull to show the aging that a simple B&W didn't reproduce well. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority;ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 5.