10 Feb 15. One generally does not use the format of B&W to show off botany images, but I think that the removal of color from an image forces the viewer to take a more careful look at the subject and as a result get a better feel for what is being showcased. This is a very busy composition, but I'm hoping that the brighter fern in front is what pulls your eye into the image and, for the most part, holds it there. I'm also betting that the monochrome presentation causes you to spend more time looking at the detail and not just glancing quickly at it because one fern looks just like the next. That is as true of ferns as it is of snowflakes, albeit there is greater difference in the snowflakes. This is a roadside shot, the ferns being part of the shoulder vegetation along the edge of our county road. As it was shot in the winter time (Feb) the original is composed primarily of browns vice greens, but I'll bet that if you looked at it first, and then came back to read this, you were thinking that they were green. The base image this time was not altered for max tonal range, was just converted into B&W with a plug-in, and saved out. Nothing more was done to it. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/300 sec @ f / 5.6.

04 Nov 14. Today we look at the same image as yesterday except that I've removed all the frilly edge stuff and converted it to B & W. As most of you may recall from earlier mailings, I grew up with a B & W darkroom directly across from my bedroom in the basement of our house. I hold many fond memories of my room and the darkroom and among the best are those of watching the magic of a B & W image materialize on the surface of a piece of paper submerged in those strong smelling chemicals. Those were truly special times, and I'm only now beginning to fully appreciate the impression they made on a young child's mind. As I play with digital images I'm finding a strong pull to make them as B & W as opposed to just leaving them as color. So now I make a B & W version of every image I prepare for these mailings. Using the major digital imaging program around today, I have 7 different native approaches to creating that B & W image, along with an additional four pieces of software I've purchased to improve on the native capabilities. The 7 ways to do it are as follows for those of you who may be interested: 1) generic grey scale conversion, 2) desaturation via an adjustment layer, 3) monochrome channel mixer layer, 4) a B & W adjustment layer, 5) using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), 6) Lab color mode, and 7) employing a gradient map. Not all of these are equal in their ability to provide for a decent B & W image, and in fact they vary greatly. I employ method 7 on every image to ensure I'm getting the best color image possible, but why and how it's done can be another discussion. In addition to these 7 methods, I have available a set of actions called "The Digital Zone System" which attempts to replicate the work of Ansel Adams, another set of actions called "T K Actions" which works similarly albeit very differently, and two plug-ins for directly manipulating a color image into B & W, one called "silver Efex Pro 2" and the other "BW Effects 2." There are many more programs that could be employed which I don't have. For this image I've used the plug-in silver efex to achieve my desired result. I also made another using just method 7, but decided that I liked this version better. So for all you B & W lovers, here's your version. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 10 sec @ f / 6.3.

15 Jan 13. Over the weekend I had a chance to view a couple of training videos on working in B&W. One really got my attention and gave me some ideas on working on a few older color images that I feel might be good candidates for conversion. Today's submission is one such image. I originally shared it in the spring of 2010 as a color image of the tulip fields in LaConner. It was a fairly decent image in the original form when I shared it then, but it sorta looked like it might be more impressive it properly converted to B&W. Now the catch is the word proper, and while I'm thinking I have a lot to learn about B&W images, just about every time I attempt converting one I like it sufficiently that I think I should spend more time so doing. So perhaps this year you will be seeing a lot more of the B&W stuff than in past. The particular thing that got my attention in the training video was the photographer's use of alternating bands of shades of gray (B&W). Remembering this image and how I had intentionally composed for rows of colors, I thought it might be a good candidate with which to start attempting to employ that strategy. I think it worked fairly well, but you can form your own opinion. D300; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 400; 1/500 sec @ f /11. Hope you enjoy, dave

14 Nov 12. Having been in attendance at several photo conferences in the past 30 days, it is becoming increasingly obvious to me how little I know about this world of digital imaging. Each venue I've attended lately has only served to make me aware of my lack of skills in working these digital creatures, but they have also created in me a strong desire to try and fix that. Hopefully, once we get this house closer to completion and the holidays have passed, I can devote my full attention to the task of getting a better grip on digital editing. In the meantime, I have set a goal of attempting to work on one image a day in hopes of bringing out the very best of what there is in it. Having just finished reading both The Killing of Kennedy followed by The Killing of Lincoln, and having been a visitor to the D.C area earlier this year, I pulled up a shot of Lincoln - one of quite a few taken early one very chilly March a.m.- and tried to create something from it that I felt made a statement. Today's submission is that image and this is what I did. Starting with the base image, I duped the layer, ran a detail enhancement of it, then masked it and painted onto the dupe the enhancement effect to bring out Mr Lincoln from his surroundings. I then duped that layer and changed the blend mode to multiply, cancelled the mask, and reduced the opacity to 60%. I then flattened those two layers, duped the resulting layer, and removed a few little annoying bright areas. That layer was then flattened with the previous layer. Then I added a color adjustment layer, reduced the saturation of the yellow to -93 and the red to - 72. Then I converted what I had to a B&W image with a high overexposure look, reduced the opacity of that to 48%, and ran a noise reduction on that. I then did a tiny amount of brightening the eyes. Since the noise reduction also tried to remove my detail enhancement, I masked out the noise reduction on the area of Mr Lincoln. Finally, I ran to consecutive curves layer to darken the overall image but reduced the opacity of the second cures layer to 43%. Finally, I flattened it and converted it to jpg format for sending over the web. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 8 at 0639 for the original shot which resulted in an overall very rich yellow tint.

15 Oct 12. Traveling as we did on the 20th of Sept to Mt Rainier, I should have been more aware of the impact the smoke form the Eastern WA fires would have on the atmosphere at the mountain. But somehow I was totally oblivious to it all when I considered visiting there. The drive up to the mountain, I chose the eastern approach which was a total mistake, gave no suggestion of the problem, but as we got to the 180 degree turn and parking lot just prior to the summit it became immediately obvious that I had made a poor decision in my choice of where to visit. The mountain, which sits right in your face at that parking area, was appropriately white but was set against a milky background courtesy of all the particulate matter from the fires. A huge disappointment to say the least. The hillsides were covered in lovely fall colors, but once again the garbage in the air left the photography less than satisfactory. Nonetheless we worked the area to the best of our ability before leaving to visit Tipsoo Lake. That proved to be far more successful and included a serenade for perhaps 45 minutes of bugling elk. I haven't yet traversed the trail around the lake but plan to tackle it next year. Since I couldn't get anything of the mountain worth sharing from that trip, I'm providing a shot from last year in which the weather cooperated. D300s; Aperture priority; 18 - 200; ISO 200; 1/100 sec @ f / 9.

26 Jul 12. Just as there are now available multiple pieces of software that allow for bringing out the fine detail in an image, as we observed yesterday, there are also several software programs dedicated to the creation of B&W images. These programs allow for the imitation of old B&W papers, B&W films including the associated grain structure of the individual films and papers, plus other additional tools that give those talented enough the kind of control as employed by Ansel Adams, except of course that he did it by hand in the dark room during the processing of the film and print. If Ansel was fond of saying "the negative is the score and the print the performance", then today's digital captures are the score the the digital software the instrument of performance. Let's return to the image I used yesterday and look at it in a B&W version of the enhanced (right) side. The original RAW image was first converted to grayscale in Camera Raw, then "adjusted" using a piece of software called Silver Efex Pro2 to get the final output. I first increased the overall contrast and fine detail, then did some small selective fine detail manipulation, added a thin black border, and completed the work by applying a slight vignette to force your eye to the shell in the middle. Nikon D300s; Aperture Priority; 18 - 200; ISO 200; 1/100 sec @ f / 5.6.

06 Sep 11. As I mentioned yesterday, one of my goals was to get some extreme closeups of the flowers with the mountain in the background. I got one successful shot out of 5, and that was the limits of the opportunity on the Saturday trip. I still need to work on this approach but I did like the way the one shot turned out. I'm rather confident all of you have seen examples of extreme closeups made with very wide angle lenses, frequently of something like the nose of a cow or something similar. The approach here is not much different, save for the difficulty of either getting a flower close enough to "legally" reach with the appropriate background or just getting away with breaking the rules a "bit", as was the case for this image. A very wide angle lens is fundamental in creating an image such as this one, and I would have like to have been about a foot closer, but I did my best to keep my feet off all the plants stepping only in the dirt which resulted in my being about 18 inches from the plant. As this was the first time I've seen False Hellebore in full bloom, the opportunity was one I just couldn't pass by, and besides, for about 5 minutes, the wind was nil. So with Mt Rainier in the background, plus a couple of trees I couldn't work around, and the Hellebore in the foreground, we have today's submission. ISO 200; 1/100 sec @ f / 20, 12-24 Nikkor lens at 18 mm.

05 Sep 11. If there is one thing that being in the military teaches you, it is to be flexible. Three of us from one of my camera clubs, and friends to boot, had decided to go visit the property on Saturday to see the house progress and then to continue on to visit Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Mountains. That got changed on Friday evening, based on a couple of wild flower reports, to shift the trip to Sunrise side of Mt Rainier to photograph sub-alpine wildflowers. When we got there the flowers were "not quite" as reported, the wind was a major detractor, and it was quite cold at 44 F on a day that was supposed to be in the 80s. But we made the best of the situation, then moved on to Tipsoo Lake only to find that the flowers were 7 -10 days sub prime. After a walk around the lake we moved once again this time to the other side of the mountain and did some evening work at Reflection Lakes, sans mountain reflections, and completed the day with some sunset shots of Paradise Valley. I had two goals for the day: 1) to do a lot of close up and macro work with the sub-alpine flowers and 2) work with a wide angle approach to get the flowers up close, large, and out of perspective with the mountain in the background. As there were virtually no flowers in position with the mountain that were reachable, goal two was next to impossible and the wind did its best to prevent goal number one. So we worked with what we had. Walking along the Silver Forest Trail at Sunrise I was treated to a nice little show by a couple of chipmunks. Their behavior reminded me of a Captain and Tennille song called "Muskrat Love" that some of you may recall from the 70s. I spent abut 10 minutes with the pair and thoroughly enjoyed the show. And then it was time to move on to engage the wind. ISO 200; 1/640 sec @ f /11

Tax Day. As any of you who write daily, or find yourselves in the kitchen daily, producing the same thing day in and day out, you know it can get boring after a while. Most of the good cooks I know, Jan certainly included, find some small amount of satisfaction in creating something new now and then. In fact, like the kitchen being an organic lab where new experiments can occur on a regular basis if desired, so it is with the computer in the digital photography age where the software becomes the tools of creation should such be desired. Every once in a while it is fun to go all out and create something a little different, and the image for TAX DAY 2011 is one such image. I figure if the govt can get creative in how it defines things, so can I with how I define nature. So, starting with one large sized dandelion, and adding a hue/saturation adjustment layer, a Gaussian Blur layer, and a generous amount of selective masking, layered appropriately with some sharpening, then letting things set for a while to insure all is as desired, we have a new flower that looks somewhat like a cross between a dandelion and a carnation, a Carnelion, if you will. Jan's comment was if only they looked like this in the yard. Your comments may vary according to taste. ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 14.