Staying Busy

Winter is here and I was able to take this break from snow shoveling to take a few pics around the homestead. I knew right away that this one would be a good shot. It's better to have some clouds in the sky, rather than having that deep oversaturated blue dominating.

Here's an old picture I scanned from up near the White Mountains Bristlecone pine forest. It was the next morning after a stormy afternoon and evenng the day before. The view stretched from Yosemite to Mount Whitney (and beyond!).

This next one is one of my all-time classics. Blessed with the perfect light, I took what might be a perfect picture. In scanning the Kodachrome slide, I was able to very closely approach the brilliance of the original.

Here is the best view of the Half Dome cables. Like pilgrims "climbing the ladder to heaven", climbing Half Dome is a spiritual experience for all who succeed. Some falter when they first see the way you have to go to get to the top. I'll admit to being intimidated when I first stood at the bottom. You do, literally, have to "hang on for dear life".

Finally we have a smoke-enhanced sunset over the 12,000+ foot Mount Conness, taken from near Glen Aulin, on the Tuolumne River. While my fellow campers declined to come and see the sunset with me, my 5 minute walk was well worth it.

My Uncle

This picture will always remind me of my Uncle Ron, who passed away rather abruptly after the smoke from the San Diego fires irritated a previously hidden lung cancer. Whenever he came around, my brothers and I knew we were in for some outdoor fun. Death did not cheat him and he lived his life to the fullest. He leaves behind a wealth of stories and memories that will be passed on as legend in our family. After seeing all his children, all grown up now, I know that I want all of us to be as close as we were last week. The love felt great, even amongst all of the sadness. Your love will always be with us, Uncle Ron.

Son of New Scans!

I've been VERY busy in scanning some of my very best Kodachrome slides for inclusion into my Yosemite portfolio book project. I spent the last two days searching through my files, slide boxes and even the loose slides gathering dust in slide projector carousel boxes. You don't quite yet get to see the best of those because I had these others ready to go first.

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Yosemite's Budd Lake is in the High Sierra and nestled right at the base of the awe-inspiring Cathedral Peak. I fully intend to spend the night there and capture the beauty of the "Golden Hours". This is a perfect example of a "cirque lake", where a glacier had "ground its heel" and scooped out a depression then melted and formed a lake.

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While I do have successes in scanning, like the above shot, I also need more practice in using Photoshop Elements and the Nikon Scan programs. It's definitely an interesting task to revisit old places and recapture the scenes better than you did 20 years ago. This picture below lost a little bit of that warm yellow evening light that is in the original slide.

Here's another tough photo to manipulate. These contrasty scenes, like Upper Yosemite Falls, always fooled my camera and I into under-exposing the darker areas. Snow and white granite reflect more light and the camera sensors automatically adjust for those bright highlights. Ideally, one has to go into manual exposure mode and over-expose those bright features so the the blues and greens aren't so unnaturally dark.

Here's a "properly worshipful" view of Giant Sequoias that I didn't have to "fiddle" with to get it to look right. What is really interesting about these groves is that trees of other species often reach their maximum sizes in futile competition with the beastly Giant Sequioas.

This slide came out quite well, as I used the Levels controls and set the white balance by clicking on the climbers white shirt. Suddenly, the greens were enhanced and the blue sky looked more realistic, instead of like deep space. In the high-res scan, you can zoom in on those dozen or so people at the bottom of Half Dome's cable ladder. On the descent, my polarizing filter popped out of my cracked Tokina lens and bounced at least 80 feet to the bottom of the cable ladder. Except for a dent in the outer ring, the glass filter was undamaged.

New Yosemite scans!

To flesh out my new Mpix ( http://www.mpix.com/ ) book to use as a Yosemite portfolio, I scanned these old Kodachrome slides recently. It's really cool to be able to go back to those trips and, basically, re-compose many of those old shots.

This one below came out pretty well, without too much scanning trouble. I didn't crop this one of Yosemite's Natural Arch.

I was intrigued whether I could crop and improve on this interesting "rainbow" shot of Yosemite Falls from Glacier Point. I still need to be more skilled at sharpening these kinds of pictures without overdoing it. It just might work better as a black and white photo.

This shot, from Stanford Point on a skiing trip, took a lot of fiddling and I'm still not satisfied with the results. I was able to tone down a bluish cast and do some sharpening but, I'd be happy if the picture looked exactly like the original. More practice is needed to sort through all the jam-packed features of my Nikon scanner.

On the other hand, this pic came out looking almost exactly like the original. I still think this pic also has a bluish cast and could benefit from greener greens. I love the glacial polish and juniper trees are one of my few favorites. The Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne is a deep V-shaped canyon that was home to the Sierra Nevada's longest glacier, over 40 miles long at its largest during the Ice Ages.

I stumbled across this slide and looked for a way to crop a great picture out of the original. That afternoon and early evening had terrific light and Grant Lake was obviously perfectly glassy.