No Boundaries

Pepper: The Official Photography Project Dog

It has been a miserable spring here in the mountains of Utah. Very similar to the Cubs season this year, the weather has reached 500 (the statistical midpoint between a good year and a bad one) numerous times only to collapse into an abhorrent free-fall requiring a good sense of humor.

This unfortunate spring has been made all the worse by the fact that my children were attending different high schools and their vacations did not coincide. So the photography project should evolve into an almost year-long thing in this instance. Hopefully anyway.  This year, in particular, I’m looking forward to my kids’ release from academia more so than are my kids.

Right now I’m fleshing out my new site with photography and illustration galleries that have been long promised but not delivered. Something more important invariably pops up. I’m giving it a good go now so I should be posting quite a bit of the imagery that has been laying about my desktop for a while.

These should include some studio food and spirits and portrait work (separate projects), Vancouver photography from last November, Saline Environments project work as it crops up, and some more resort HDRI.  That’s all I can think of at the moment, but there are probably more bunches of unprocessed photos in hiding here and there on the occasional hard-drive.

I’ll also be posting the periodic babble regarding the state of the digital world, films and so forth. So I should be hitting the blog a bit more than I have lately over the next month or so.

I’m switching over to a Cannon 7D as my main camera and am tempted to include a bit of video here and there as well.

The Saline Environments Project, thus far, has brought Kate and I out on four short trips. One to Stansbury Island and the Saltair area on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, two to Antelope Island (an island on the southeast side of the lake populated with, ironically, bison) and a very early Spring trip across the Utah West Desert on Route 80 to the Bonneville Salt Flats ( in the vicinity of Wendover Nevada), which were, at the time, covered with water. It is a pleasure doing a project that has so many pieces so close to home.

I vividly remember my first trip to Death Valley National Park about five or six years ago. It was intended as a three-day excursion from a longer trip in Las Vegas. We drove well into the night, camped and, on waking, took a short drive in the middle, lowest elevation parts of the park, only to realize that we had gone so far and had ended up in what is, essentially, the Great Salt Lake (hotter, drier version). We do intend to make it back there as part of this project, but largely as a matter of completeness. It is, after all, the capital of the terrestrial-brine world.

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Things get strange on a Phoenix winter's evening.

I’ve encountered a few of the symptoms lately. I’m sure that, although unique, they are not unique to me. First there was the realization that a magpie had filled my ski boots with dog food. I wasn’t upset. It lives in the backyard of it’s own volition and had made it’s way into the garage every now and then. I’ve taken to calling it Frederick. Magpie’s have an historical Prussian aspect about them. I just threw out the old boots.

Then there was the time I saw the woman in the SUV in the Blockbuster Video parking lot and instantly recognized her as the wife of the American ambassador to China. (I think her husband may make a decent president some day; Just saying).

And, when given a choice between spending the week between Christmas and New Years skiing the finest snow on earth at my own doorstep, or venturing to a slightly chilly Phoenix, I chose Phoenix with only minimal hesitation.

Losing all regard for ski equipment, recognizing the local celebrities, skipping town during one of the best weeks of the year, I may have lived in Park City, Utah for too long.

Phoenix was a lot of fun.  My girls and I ascended all the requisite Phoenix promontories: Camel Back, Squaw Peak, South Mountain; visited the world’s first Windows Store (no big whup); did a little hiking around Tucson; visited the Sonoran Desert Museum and the University of Arizona (both girls want to apply to this one as well); and the whole family unit did the Tempe New Years Eve thing (the Doobie Brothers, absent one significant component).  It was in the low sixties most of the afternoons, so a  bit chilly.  But there was no snow.  And I think I’ve come to think of that as a good thing.

Two items, worthy of note, occurred.  First there was the marching band:

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The Sears Tower: Exemplar of American Ambition

Chicago has never looked better. I’m referring to the city and not my photography. I spent another couple weeks in the city; two days of which were given to wandering around the loop (the city’s lofty core) with a couple of cameras.  I had intended to spend five days photographing but found myself returning to Utah on short notice.  So the diversity of images isn’t as great as I would like. Everything, almost, is wide-angle HDRI of architecture.

I keep finding myself back there. So after another couple of winters I should have a good set of photographs.  The very urban provides a nice balance to the bulk of my nature-based work.

I’m fond of HDRI for a place like Chicago.  The world is crawling with images of the buildings of Chicago and HDRI offers a lot of artistic potential to make things weird when you want to go that way.  Also, the dynamic nature of a big metropolis, where people are of less significance relative to their environment, fits HDRI very well.  Walking people and moving cars on a city street become ghosted and part of the image in a way that suits the ephemeral reality well.

The images were all processed initially with photomatrix and then with camera raw and standard photoshop techniques.  The new photomatrix exposure fusion technique was used extensively (and I really like it).  Several images are blended composite panoramas.

Also I love it when it’s cold.  I think it is the low level of the sun in the sky and clarity of the air, in addition to the hard nature of the subject matter. Chicago photographs best when below freezing.

I’m not sure where the source of Chicago’s current good-looks lies.  The city may simply be all decked out for the Olympics that wasn’t.  Or it could be an artifact of the economy that shouldn’t have been.  Now, the general tone of the people I met, the conversations I overheard, and the chatter over the airwaves was decidedly down.  More so than when I was there this past summer or last winter.

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Sunrise in the Valley of Fire

I have a secret.  It goes like this: Valley of Fire.  Now the cat is out of the bag.  One of the great things about living in the west is the stumble-upon factor.  There are plenty of places that make the pages of national magazines (now being rapidly replaced by travel blogs) on a regular basis.  This is due to either: they are really cool places and everyone should spend some time there before their time is up, or they have retained superlative PR teams and have themselves mentioned in exchange for ad spending on as frequent a basis as they and their guests can afford.  The later creates a less than virtuous cycle.

There is an entirely different category of places which are either intentionally not publicized because the people who visit them realize that publicity would bring catastrophe or those that  can’t be monetized (in terms of touro-dollars) usually because there is nowhere to locate a hotel right nearby.

I’m not sure of the reasons why, but the Valley of Fire, located between Las Vegas and Mesquite, Nevada is one of these places which goes without a whole lot of mention. It used to be almost completely unheard of, but is becoming less so of late.  It offers a taste of the Colorado Plateau experience within easy driving distance of the Las Vegas strip.  You’ve seen it a thousand times even if you’ve never heard of it, because it is often used as the setting for television commercial and print ad shoots.

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Park City at Night

I’m about to begin a fairly extensive period of  new photographic work now that the “summer of code” is behind me, so I want to get a bunch of older images processed, posted and removed from my desktop clutter. This is the first series of several which have been hanging about and waiting to be fooled with.

They constitute the third part of an experimental evaluation of HDRI for the resort market.  The general idea is that it is much easier to set up and take HDRI photos than to lug about bulky and intrusive lighting equipment. This is more important where many present are paying guests and not very interested in being inconvenienced for the sake of the photographer’s mission.

HDRI is unique also and provides imagery which complements other styles well and, in certain cases, is superior to anything that can produced by non-HDRI methods. The photos shown in the linked gallery are all exterior and HDRI has been used for aesthetic rather than practical reasons.

Several of the shots are shown more than once in the galleries because they have been composited and tone-mapped by more than one technique.  The techniques used/evaluated include:  Photomatrix Details Enhancer, Photoshop Local Adaptation, and Picturenaut Photoreceptor.

The images were then processed using conventional methods in both camera raw and photoshop.  In some cases I did get a little carried away with image modification beyond that necessary for purely comparative purposes.

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