November 21, 2004
Early summer of cliches
My summer started off with photographing well worn subjects. In early June, I went to the "Wave" in th Paria Canyon Wilderness just south of the Utah border near Page, Arizona. The Wave is a geographical quirk of swirling sandstone that is quite striking. Here's a sample photo of one of the buttes at the Wave.
While it's a great photographic subject, I've seen many pictures of the Wave, so I was a bit uninspired when actually photographing it. Like many places in the Southwest, the "Wave" has been photographed so many times before by so many people that I'm left a little bit jaded by the whole experience.
That's not to say I didn't have a great time during the outing, (although it was a very hot hike in early June), and it's not to say I didn't get some good pictures, I just wasn't inspired by them.
I love being outdoors, and I especially love this area of the Southwest. I feel a great kinship with this land. But I really don't care to be taking the same pictures that everyone else is taking. I mean, how many pictures like that above does the world need? It's almost as bad as the proverbial cat picture.
Usually, in outings like this, I try to look for the unusual to photograph, the overlooked. I like to look the "other way" when confronted with a famous photographic icon. Alas, I didn't find anything this trip, partly because it's such an effort to simply get there. That was mostly due to the time of year. Don't go there in the summer if you can help it. It's just too blaming hot. If you do go, plan on leaving the parking lot way before sunrise, so that you can get there and back before late morning.
We left the motel about 3:00 am, figuring that would give us plenty of time. Alas, we weren't actually on the trail until after the sun was just rising, and for those of you familiar with the southwestern deserts in the summer, that meant it was hot from the get go. We met some hikers of questionable intelligence on the way back, around noon. They had very little water with them, and were carrying their young baby. I can't imaging hiking in this remote, hot desert in the middle of the day without water, or a hat, or at least a minimal amount of survival gear. It boggles the mind how clueless some people are.
Another popular spot near the Wave is of course, Antelope Canyon, the famous slot canyon right outside of Page, just south of Lake Powell. Amazing photographs have been taken of this canyon, by greater photographers than I, and while it was an outstanding experience to be hiking between these narrow canyon walls, I was left uninspired by the photographs I got back. I almost can't stomach to see another shot of Antelope Canyon.
I did manage to get a somewhat unique shot looking up, by combining two exposures together -- one for the glow on the canyon walls, and one for the sky.
While it sounds simple in principle to combine exposures like this, in practice, it's very difficult, at least with film. That's because when you scan the two images into the computer, they are always rotated and shifted a little bit with respect to each other. Also, the focusing mechanism of the scanner moves the lens a little bit between scans, making one of the images larger or smaller. So lining up said images in Photoshop is a real challenge.
I probably spent the good part of a day getting the two images lined up exactly, so that there was no fringing around the edges where the canyon meets the sky. Part of the reason it took so long is that I was working with two, 530 MB, 16 bit medium format images, and Photoshop simply has a hard time handling such images, especially when combining them in layers, and doing things like rotating and translating. Photoshop doesn't scale well in cases like this. I spent a lot of time twiddling my thumbs while my computer was thrashing away. The problem of efficiently aligning large images that may be rotated, translated, and scaled differently is something I hope to address in my own software.
With a digital camera, this whole process is much easier, because you don't have to worry about image alignment errors due to the scanner. You still have to worry about having a sturdy tripod though. And you have to worry about your lens moving in and out a little bit between exposures.
A third cliche photograph in the Page area is of course a shot of Horseshoe Bend, from an overlook just south of town. Horseshoe Bend is an excellent example of a gooseneck in a river -- in this case, the famous Colorado River. I'm not even going to show a shot from this overlook, it's been done a million times, for sure. (Actually, I just don't happen to have a picture of it scanned in -- partly because of lack of inspiration to do so!)
One of my pet peeves is seeing pictures like that of Horseshoe Bend in our local camera club competition. Everybody always has the same shot, from the same overlook, and it gets old really quick. Yet the judges will invariably score such photographs quite highly, because they are of a great photographic subject. The problem is, a lot of time these photographs are technically crap, with bad light, bad color, blurry, etc. Yet, that doesn't matter to the judges, apparently.
After this trip to Page in early June, it got me thinking about the whole subject of "subjects", and how that relates to photography. I hope to be talking about this in my blog real soon now. (Ha!)
"Shortly" is about 4 months
He's baaaaacckkk. After a long haitus from this blog, I decided this "morning", 3:55 am, that it's about time I start posting something again.
My last entry said that "Hopefully, I will be posting something shortly". That was back in August, and before that, May was the last time I entered anything.
So it's time to get caught up.