Photo walk in Dolly Sods -- Day 1

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Last weekend we stayed home, partly due to the heat and partly due to the enormous amount of work Cindy has been taking home this summer.  By noon Saturday, both of us had decided that we needed a break from the grind and Cindy had been pining away for the mountains for many months -- so we decided to head to our favorite wilderness haunt on the terra firma here on the east coast...  Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia.

For those whom have never heard of it, Dolly Sods is an unnatural pine barrens atop a tall plateau that varies between 3,500 and 4,000 of elevation.  It was once carpeted with virgin forest, then completely denuded by the lumber industry in the early 1900s, leaving the scorched remains for nature to take over and recover on her own.  At one point the barrens were even used as a WWII aircraft target bombing range and rusted bombs are still being found there to this day.

Cindy discovered Dolly Sods back in the early 1980s and began wilderness tent camping here by herself... long before she met me.  Our first camping trip here together was in the fall of 1989 and we've tried to make it back at least once every year ever since.  For anyone that loves critters, nature, color, light and weather (especially weather), Dolly Sods has the best the Mid-Atlantic region has to offer.

An if you like intensely flavored wild berries, Dolly Sods has them in spades: blueberries, huckleberries, elderberries, blackberries, cranberries and wintergreen berries can all be found in an amazing abundance.

Photo tips for watery bloggers -- shooting RAW

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There is an ongoing debate in photo circles of whether to shoot directly to JPG and let the camera do all the work, or shoot to RAW and do all the work yourself in post-processing.  The straight-to-JPG route is undeniably fast and convenient, while the straight-to-RAW route is much more time consuming but can deliver images that are superior in every way.

Here is an example of what can be done with a RAW image:


I exposed the image above for the sky and didn't want any of the sunset to be blown out, knowing that I was going to be doing a lot of post-processing on the image once I got it back home.  But as plain untouched straight-out-of-the-camera images go, it's pretty unimpressive.

And this is what it looks like after post-processing:


This is the same single image.  No multiple-image HDR tricks.  What I've done here is the modern day equivalent of simply dodging and burning in a darkroom, performed electronically rather than with chemicals.

Photo tips for watery bloggers -- post-processing primer

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Due to popular demand, here is a brief primer on how I do some of my post-processing.  In this example, I'm using an appropriate image for a watery blogger -- a nice sunset over the water at our marina.

Only it doesn't look that impressive... Or does it?

Anytime I take photographs intended to be something more than just snapshots, I'm careful with my framing and exposure.  In this instance the framing looked good and the colors were gorgeous, but I wanted the water to be softer looking, which dictated a longer exposure and a smaller aperture.  So a little bit of trial and error gave me a good exposure:

• ISO 100 -- This low ISO setting is for the absolute best quality image; the higher this number goes, the more noise is introduced by the imaging chip.

• 18mm -- This is the widest-angle focal length I currently have, which I really prefer for landscapes; the wider the better.

• f/20 -- Because the water is going to be softened, the exposure has to be lengthened.  But to compensate for the longer exposure, the aperture needs to be smaller to let in less light.  This is the smallest aperture this lens can achieve at this focal length.

• 25 seconds -- This is the length of time I found the water to look at it's best for this specific shot.

So here is the final photo taken straight out of the camera -- without any post-processing work done to it whatsoever; all I've done is simply convert the RAW file to a JPG image from within Adobe Lightroom.  Note that the sky and water are both nicely exposed and neither has any section that's blown out; however, the grass and trees along the shore are too under-exposed and devoid of both detail and color.

From this point forward every step is performed using Adobe Lightroom 4.1.  A word to the wise: small changes to an image are much better than large changes and the smaller changes will help keep the image from looking over-processed.



My first step is to enable the lens profile, so as to eliminate lens distortion (below).


Next I remove chromatic aberrations (CA).  In this image (below) CA is not a big factor, so the effect is very subtle, though it can be seen when the image is greatly enlarged.  Lightroom 4.1 has the absolute best CA removal tool I've ever used and really takes a lot of the tedious factor out of post-processing.


Now I crop the image to straighten the horizon (below).


Now the real meat of the post-processing begins and I apply auto-tone (below).  Years ago the auto-tone feature was really bad in both Photoshop and Lightroom, and everyone recommended against using it, but Adobe has listened to the critical comments of their user base and adjusted the auto-tone algorithms to deliver much improved results.  Are they perfect?  No.  I simply use them as a quick stepping stone and refine the results myself.  In the case of Lightroom 4.1, I find that using the auto-tone feature still bumps up the total exposure too much, so I usually change that specific setting back to zero (0.00) before proceeding.


In this case, the exposure setting was slightly too high and I set it back to zero (below).  This gives me the balance between lights and darks that I want for the image.


I want more detail in the clouds and Lightroom allows me to knock down the highlights (below).


I want to begin adjusting the colors in the sky to be closer to what I remember them as being and adjust the tint to more of a magenta (below).


The sky isn't blue enough, so I adjust the temperature to be cooler (below).


That's looking good, so now I begin to play with vibrance (below).


Then an adjustment of saturation and clarity (below).


Finally I have the colors as I want them and the only step I have left remaining is to apply sharpening (below).  This is the finished image, which I have paired with the original so you can see them together at the same time.



Note that both color and details can be seen in the sections of grass and trees now and that nothing appears overdone throughout the entire image.  It's ready to share!

Childhood boat finds me

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I've posted here a number of times about the boat my parents owned for most of my teen years -- a 1973 Tylercraft 26 (and, yes, that's me in the photo above, prior to us splashing the hull for the first time in 1974).  As stated in prior posts, we signed the contract on the boat as a kit in October 1973 -- just days before the Arab oil embargo -- and it was one of the very last heavily-built, bulletproof hulls that Ted Tyler constructed on Long Island before the crisis upended the entire fiberglass boat building industry.  As it was, he took a huge loss on our boat because the cost of the raw materials skyrocketed beyond the scope of our contract (less than $10,000 for the entire package at the time).

We cruised with the Tylercraft in the coastal waters of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Long Island Sound, then moved to Maryland and spent many years gunkholing the northern Chesapeake Bay in and around the Annapolis area.  The last time I saw our dear boat (I truly loved that Tylercraft) was during the summer of 1981, just before I returned to college to begin my junior year.  That fall my Dad was promoted to a new position within his company and the rest of the family moved out to southern California.  By the time I graduated from college, the Tylercraft had been moved up to the San Francisco Bay area and ultimately was sold there.

Below is the last photograph I have of it.  On the back of the photo, in my Dad's handwriting, it says "Mac's Tac at Rio Vista, California. Fall 1986"


And below is where the marina is located where it was photographed.


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And that was that.  We never learned anything more about her and figured she had ultimately been turned into scrap about ten years ago.

But no...

Here she is today.  Don't believe me?  Check out the bow letters.  It even looks like the teak bow roller that my Dad installed is still there.


The current owner contacted me late Friday and has it for sale on Craigslist for $6,700, which you can read here.  He contacted me last year about the same boat, but I didn't know for certain that it was the same one as ours because our email thread never seemed to mesh.


Suffice to say, someone has spent some serious time and money fixing the old girl up; she's in much nicer condition than I remember her being in when I last saw her over 30 years ago.


Were she on the east coast, I'd be very interested in looking at her in person.  As far as coastal cruisers go, she's perfect for gunkholing in shallow water -- though I wouldn't take her on as a blue water cruiser as she was never designed for that.


Below are all the other photos I've posted of that wonderful boat.  Now you'll have to excuse me while I get something out of my eye...



















I always cherished the time I had with my family aboard that boat.  And I'm delighted that she's still around.  I hope another family is as lucky as we were to have her...