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.