Saline Environments: Round One
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.
Please do forgive the large number of photographs of junk. It turns out that Kate is extremely fond of photographing abstractions built of junk. So I must photograph considerable junk abstractions as well. The saline deserts of the American west are first class places for finding photogenic junk. So be forewarned.
All of the images were processed in Camera Raw and Photoshop CS5. I personally still find the Photomatrix tools superior to the new CS5 HDRI techniques. So in cases where HDRI processing was utilized, it was done with Photomatrix before Camera Raw. About half of the images were not shot as HDRI. There are several blended panoramas using Photoshop methods. These were processed, flattened and saved as jpeg’s before Camera Raw manipulation. A few new CS5 features were used extensively. Content-aware fill used around the edges of panoramic shots works particularly well. New edge-detection techniques are very similar to a plug-in edge detection filter which was present in CS3 and removed from CS4. One thing I absolutely love about the new Photoshop is the zoom and pan technology. It’s a small but important thing, speeding up my work flow considerably.
A funny thing happened with the much-ballyhooed content-aware fill feature. In an image with several bison standing in a field I tried removing one of the bison because it was partially obscured by a large feeder or some other piece of metallic junk. When I removed both the bison and the junk, only a bison remained. This left me flabbergasted for a short moment because for all the world it appeared as though Photoshop had removed the junk and revealed the bison standing behind the junk. This would have been, to say the least, special. I then realized that it had found another bison with a back end similar to the removed bison (bison back-ends are generally of a similar form), warped the second bison to match the general shape of the back-half of the removed bison, duplicated the second bison, and put him just where the first bison had been. I got rid of the second fellow because it just didn’t seem right.
The first of, hopefully, five galleries on the Saline Environments of the great basin can be visited by clicking the image above.