Motion of the Ocean

Thought I'd upload an image I was playing with last night. In it's color state it's a rather cool image. The sand golden yellow, the water has a rather dark hue even on a brightly lit day. It had potential. I'm really not sure why I had to make it a darker, more contrasty, maybe a little more sinister image. Maybe I'm in a dark mood? Maybe I like the contrast between the water and the sand? I'm not sure at this point. What made me even take the time to play with this image though was the motion, the movement from, in my perspective, left to right. The dark water and the dark hill all flow together in a funnel towards the monolith and then pour right out the side of the image.

I cropped it from it's original ratio since there was a lot of sky in the image that wasn't doing much for it. Now I'm not so sure.

Finally, the heavy contrast and lack of detail in the shadows reminds me of film days of the past, where in broad daylight that detail was sacrificed for properly exposed images. Plus, the monolith certainly seems more intimidating in its darkened state. Cool. 

A Random HDR from the High Desert Plains

I picked a random HDR to work out tonight just for the fun of it. This was taken last winter on the high desert plains of Oregon near an on-the-verge of ghost town called Dufur. We actually really enjoy Dufur even though it has an odd vibe about it. The Balch Hotel is there and it's one of the coolest hotels we've ever visited. Three floors, no elevator, half the electrical outlets are original installs from somewhere around 1910. But still, what a wonderful place to stay for a night or two!

So this particular structure is an old schoolhouse that has been abandoned for nearly 100 years. It took us hours to locate it too. It is, as you can tell from the surroundings, in the absolute middle of nowhere. The winter wind was blowing, the air was so dry you could feel your uncovered skin crack, but as far as we could tell there wasn't another human being within 30 minutes drive in any direction.

While the structure had been maintained by one or two caring folks over the years, the inner walls and internal structures had collapsed. The outside looked surprisingly strong though, which wasn't a big surprise. Many of the abandoned structures Beverly and I have come across in the Oregon desert are surprisingly well preserved. We attribute this consistently preserved nature to the incredibly low average humidity of the Oregon desert. Without the mold normally seen in the low lying river valleys  west of Mt. Hood the wood stays healthy and strong for decades. Maintained or not, we abided by our policy to never enter these structures and happily explored the landscape in the bitter air.

One day we'll head on back to the plains, probably as soon as Autumn rushes by as it's threatening to do in Oregon this year. Once the colors leave the Gorge we'll head east to the nearly always colorless plains for even deeper exploration of Oregon's hidden past. 

Beach Weddings can be brutal!

We're hitting the tail end of another couple of weeks of post-wedding post-production. It feels good to be nearing the end of our last wedding of the 2011 season with deliverables on the verge of complete.

This was our first wedding on the Oregon coast and the environmental conditions were less than ideal. While we were thankful it wasn't pouring rain on us, the wedding was scheduled when the sun was still rather high with strong light and strong contrast. Depending on the direction we were shooting we'd have to change techniques by up to four stops. This lead to a lot of quick retakes since setting cameras on any sort of auto-exposure in starkly opposite lighting would have yielded unfavorable results as soon as you changed directions. For instance, setting a camera on shutter priority and shooting into a strongly backlit scene guarantees the subject will be underexposed when the meter shuts down prematurely. With the sun to my back though shutter priority would work fine, albeit with very small apertures like f16, which is not my ideal setting for portraiture. Like I said, a tough day to shoot a wedding.

Regardless, we made our adjustments throughout and still managed to walk away with many, many, many keepers. Like always, we wish we could have captured more, but that pesky thing called time doesn't relent for the most expedient of shooters.

I'm looking forward to posting some more work on this blog of non-wedding related material soon as well. The smell of Autumn is in the air and the gorge is calling our names, it's time to pursue bronze colors, photograph leaves in a downward angle rather than up to the branches, and capture nature headed towards its inevitable winter slumber. And then, the darkness of winter will be around us once again! Ugh. =)

HDR: Here for the long haul

In case you're not in tune to the photographic realm these days, HDR has taken center stage as the technique of the future. HDR, if you've got time to say it in the proper long winded fashion, High Dynamic Range photography is the process of smushing several differently exposed images together and using the combined tonalities to create one amazing image. Or an image so amazingly fake people wonder if you drew the picture in the dark with a felt pen on the back of a cat while it cleaned its ears.

At this time HDR requires specially designed software expressly made to combine those tonalities and present the user with a myriad of output possibilities, all generally more impressive than the three or more images you fed the software. Also at this time the effort to properly utilize the software and further refine the output image to even more amazing levels with a tool like Photoshop takes far more time than the average user is willing to spend. This, of course, will all change as photography businesses everywhere are sniffing the profit to be made by making HDR possible with nothing more than the press of a shutter button. Then HDR will be mainstream. At first its inclusion will command an extra $50 for that model camera; But within two months it'll be another standard feature like a lens or the Program setting. What will make it special at that point will thankfully be the same thing that made it special before it took the expressway to mainstream: the photographer.

Knowing what to point the camera at, how to compose an exceptional image, understanding the parameters at play and how to adjust them, still requires a talented individual behind the viewfinder. So while HDR is certain to go mainstream and be just a shutter press away, the likes of the image above will still be produced by a select few with the know how, and more importantly, the investment of time to output and refine the results of the technique of the future. Even when it's the mainstream of now. 

Cannon Beach, Oregon: On a Perfect Morning

Beverly and I drove to the coast on a random Saturday recently only knowing their COULD be sun and there MIGHT not be howling winds and there was LITTLE chance of it dumping buckets of rain on us. As luck and nature would have it though we showed up to pleasant coastal splendor Oregon is just not typically known to have in store for visitors. Granted, the surf was flat. FLAT. So this old surfer was a tad grumpy. Otherwise though, perfect. I drove Beverly to the south end of Cannon Beach and we found the beach had changed a lot since we visited last. Seems a late Spring/early Summer storm had deposited an extra six feet of sand along the south shore, which also created a large inlet where the water managed to enter at the base of the smaller monolith along the south beach. Not only that but the winds and light rains created amazing ridges on the beach surface. While it wasn't surfers paradise, it was certainly photographers paradise. We spent the better part of an hour working all over the sandbar until our coffee filled bladders demanded we shift our attentions elsewhere. Still, I can't recall walking away with more quality beach scenery than I shot in that hour.

Sometimes you stumble across nature at its finest. As Galen Rowell, one of my all time favorite photographers, used to say, "f8 and be there".