LytleDrive

This blog is moving to LytleDrive.com

2011-10-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

I've built (or am building) a new website at LytleDrive. I'm using WordPress for my new website and it is a blogging tool with plug-ins for other things like photo galleries. I might as well use that from now on as I hope to build a photo business (and perhaps software too). So, see you there....

-Dyer

A Perspective on Perspectives

2011-01-19T20:31:00.000-08:00

I've always enjoyed the examples shown in books about photography that demonstrate the differences in the images produced by lenses of differing focal lengths. Recently I found myself standing under the Peabody Coal Company's conveyer where it crosses Arizona state route 160 west of Kayenta. The conveyer belt moves coal from the mine south of the highway to a storage and railroad pickup facility north of the highway. From where I was standing, I could see the conveyer structure stretching away from me to the storage tower. I made a photograph using my wide angle (17mm on full frame) lens.

Conveyer to coal storage, 17mm lens

Next, I put on a telephoto (135mm) lens, stood in the same place, and made approximately the same photograph. The difference in perspective is obvious, the steel poles supporting the conveyer seem compressed together in comparison to the wide angle shot. The difference in coverage of the environment is also large, the wide angle lens shows much more of the high desert surrounding the facility than the telephoto image.

Conveyer to coal storage, 135mm lens

Having a wide range of focal lengths available gives me a lot of flexibility in my perspective. As always, click on a photo to see a larger size.

Sandhills cranes, Photographers, and Wildlife Refuges

2010-11-25T18:56:00.000-08:00

I was in Socorro for a couple of days this week, on my way to visit family in Grants, NM. This time of year is good for seeing some of the migratory birds that winter at two wildlife refuges in the area. The larger of the two wildlife areas, Bosque del Apache, is an excellent place to see these birds and is much larger than the Sevilleta NWR at least as far as tour roads go, and Bosque has more water which is nice for reflections and morning flyouts. However, Bosque has become very popular with photographers and this time of year any place in the refuge where birds are accessibly close to the road is very busy with parked cars and lines of photographers. Some pro photographers even teach workshops at Bosque. On the other hand the small area available at Sevelleta isn't nearly as popular.

"A Siege of Cranes" Sevilleta NWR, NM

The photograph above was taken Tuesday afternoon/evening at Sevelleta. I went into the refuge area and found myself the only one there, I drove down the road and found a large group of sandhill cranes in a field, across the road, and into the next field. I estimated there were two or three hundred cranes in the group and they seemed to be relaxed because nobody was around. I parked the car a distance away and approached he group slowly with my camera and telephoto lens handheld. As I got close they began to get more nervous and began moving to a more distant field in small groups. At one point, a fairly large group took to the air and I shot this image as the cranes flew in the late evening light.

A group of sandhill cranes flies with a sunset backdrop

I went thrice to Bosque and once to Sevilleta and my best results came from the visit to Sevilleta because the access to the birds and the lack of crowds allowed for a more relaxed environment for both myself and the animals. Fortunately, there was a very nice sunset the evening I was at Sevilleta, so that helped!

I have, generally, seen some different animals at the two refuges. At Sevilleta, I've taken some very nice photos of American kestrel and at Bosque I've seen more hawks of various breeds so this might be an important consideration for the photographer interested in certain subjects. I've also seen more deer at Bosque and took the photo below on the second morning I was there.

Mule deer, early morning, Bosque del Apache NWR

As ever, click on a photo to see a larger version.

Frost and Intermediate Landscapes

2010-11-18T21:34:00.000-08:00

I just finished going through some photographs I took last weekend. I drove up to northern Arizona to the Navajo reservation and then to a high part of the White Mountains. I found snow in the Lukachukai Mountains and enjoyed this little taste of winter. I've posted 26 of the photographs here.

Driving along a road near Chinle, Arizona, early in the morning, I noticed the sun sparkling off the frost on the dead flowers along the road and stopped to explore and photograph. Some of the very small, frosty flowers were really pretty close up so I spent some time with my 300mm lens exploring.

This experience sensitized me to the possibility of photographing frost. The following morning found me following a trail that leads east from Hannigan Meadow, AZ where I found a lot of heavy frost on some of the grasses in the meadows. I was struck by the size and patters of the frost and spent some time photographing there.

Canon 5D mk II, Canon 300mm f/4, Canon 1.4x converter

Click on the images to see larger versions.

Logo work, social networking thoughts.

2010-11-14T19:27:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a book called "The Whuffie Factor" by Tara Hunt which is all about marketing your business using social media. She also talks a lot about business identity, logos, web sites, etc. I've been thinking about these things lately too. More than a year ago, I designed a logo for myself and posted to this blog about it. More recently I've decided that that old logo is a bit complicated and I needed a simpler logo. One idea I've had for a replacement appears in the current header of this blog, the LYTLEDRIVE text in green and orange with "photography from the heart" below it. I've shown this to a few friends and most didn't like it much so I'm still searching for a logo. I want to use the "Lytle Drive" idea because I've always liked it and plan to use it for my company name. Here is the logo without a byline:

The byline is something else, and I've been thinking about what it is that I'm offering folks, that is, what product do I make. Photography, yes, but there are many forms of photography and I only do a few, landscapes, macro, people (mostly children). I don't so much of the gritty street photography, or document disadvantaged people, etc. Usually, I'm trying to make beautiful, aesthetically pleasing images to share, photos that I enjoy looking at myself. So, I've changed my byline to "Finding the Beauty" which can mean finding the beauty in nature or finding the beauty in people, etc. Here is the logo with the byline:

Generally I'm using ideas from a number of other logos I've looked at. I suppose I should pay a professional logo designer to design me a logo, but I rather enjoy playing with ideas myself. The graphic I'm using is available for free download at this link. I've modified it a bit to work with my design.

Of course the colors of the text and graphic will have to vary in some instances, depending on how it is used, but I think this is a pleasant and simple logo and I'll use it for now. I plan to get some business cards printed using a few of my images on one side of the card and my logo and other info on the back. I'll order the cards from Moo, they have some creative products available, including their MiniCards. I can carry around a mini-portfolio on a small set of high quality business cards!

Tucson All Souls Procession and ISO 6400

2010-11-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

I went to the All Souls Procession in downtown Tucson on Sunday to experience the fun and make some photographs. This event seems to be bigger every year (now in its 21st year) and downtown was humming with activity. The event started at 6 PM and, earlier in the day, I thought I'd find a flash to mount on my camera so I could get better images in the low light (and with better color balance under the sodium lights). Calls to a couple camera stores didn't yield any luck finding a Canon 580EX II which I had decided to buy, so I ordered the flash on Amazon and went flashless to the procession. I was using my 135mm f/2 lens on the 5D mk II so, as I had done at the fire dance the night before, I used shutter priority with the shutter speed set to 1/200 sec. I looked for a place that wasn't directly under the sodium lights and found a place near some fluorescent street lamps, not the best, and darker than last year, but at least I wouldn't drown in low pressure sodium light which I find hard to correct for even shooting raw files.

Blue eyes and the veil and hat make a great look!

With that shutter speed and wide open at f/2, I found I needed to set the ISO to 6400 to get reasonable exposures. Wow, I haven't really used this setting much so I was concerned about the amount of noise that I'd see in the resulting images. I did get a fair amount of both luminosity noise and color noise but the corrections for these in Adobe Lightroom are quite good and I was able to clean up the noise to a level that is satisfactory. Next year I'll have a flash and will try that option, but I'm fairly happy with the results from this year.

There was a lot of face paint but I really liked some of the paper machete.

I didn't stay for the final show at the end of the event. This means I missed a lot of fire, but, well, I don't like crowds much and I wanted to watch Masterpiece on PBS (Sherlock Holmes). I guess I'm just not a enough of a party person :-)

Fire Dance! Tucson Celtic Festival

2010-11-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

Photographing without a flash outside at night is always interesting. I wrnt the the Celtic festival here in Tucson to see what it was about, I hadn't been before. I got there late, about 6 PM, so I knew I'd be shooting in low light situations, I brought a fast lens. At first I though I'd bring my 70-200 f/4L lens because it has very good image stabilization but then I thought I'd probably be shooting people performing so the image stabilization wouldn't help with moving subjects. Then I thought I'd take the 85mm f/1.8 which is a nice fast and sharp lens, one of my favorites. But, shooting performances means that I want to be able to reach into the scene and capture details of people's faces so I needed a longer lens. Also, I wanted to use the 5D mk II because I know I can shoot it at ISO 1600 with good results. I have a 40D too but it gets noisy at ISO 1600.

Given these considerations, I took my Canon 5D mk II with my 135mm f/2L lens. A problem with the 135mm lens is that it has no image stabilization and is long enough to require a fast shutter speed. However, it seemed like the best choice in this case so I needed a strategy to keep the shutter speed fast enough to get sharp photos in low light conditions. I decided to put the camera into shutter priority mode with the shutter speed set to 1/200 second and hope for the best. I could have tried a slightly slower shutter but experience tells me that, for me, I need a 200th.

When I got to the event the place was flooded with light from a huge lighting system used for the horse races at Rillito park, I took a couple of photos, at f/2 and they looked fine. When I discovered they were having a "Fire Dance" at 7 PM I looked forward to it. I figured that I could probably get some photos if the fire was bright enough. What I didn't know was that they would turn off the bright lights for the fire dance. I'm certainly glad these lights were turned off because it make the fire dance much more fantastic than it would have been with them on. However, I didn't know how well my camera setup would handle the situation. Well, it worked out fairly well. Here is a photograph of one of the dancers blowing fire. This was so bright that the camera stopped the aperture down to f/7.1 giving me more depth of field than most of the other images.

A dancer blowing fire, 1/200, f/7.1, ISO 1600

I tried to get photographs where the fire the dancer was handling was shining light on their face. This worked out fairly well in most cases. There were examples, however, where the dancer was facing away from me and I got a silhouette. I shot about 250 frames, of which, I quite like about 18 of them. This small percentage can be ascribed to a number of factors. The camera focus sometimes got confused (I was using the center focus point and had the autofocus set to track focus). Also, when photographing dancers, it is hard to predict their movements and I get it wrong frequently and get photos of their backs, etc. I'll post a couple more examples from the shoot below.

A dancer swing chains of fire, I liked the silhouette. 1/200, f/2, ISO 1600

Dancing with fiery hoops. 1/200, f/2, ISO 1600

Style of Presentation on Website

2010-11-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about the design of my website, as I mentioned in my last blog post. The way a photograph is presented to the viewer is important and I want to do that in a way that is both pleasing and simple. I put a few photographs into a simple flash based web page a couple of days ago and I liked the presentation well enough to consider using some of the style from that lightroom template for my presentation on my web site. I've also used the "print" module in lightroom and I like the "fine art mat" style of printing photographs which has a lot of similarities to the web page linked above. I did a mockup in photoshop of the way I might like to have one of my photographs presented on a web page.

Example photograph presentation

So, I've embedded the photograph into a white rectangle which represents the paper it would be printed on, then I added a caption and signature, and finally floated the result above a grey rectangle using a drop shadow and a two pixel stroke around the white rectangle to give it substance. I'd like to have the background of the web page be the gray and have the white frame and text added automatically by the web site for each photograph. If there are thumbnails on the page, I wouldn't have them framed, just the expanded photo being viewed. I'll have to see if there is a way to do this with a template or write html5 and css to do this. Of course, my blogging software adds yet another frame in this case, try to ignore that :-).

Time to update my website: Beginnings

2010-11-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

About two years ago I bought the dyerlytle.com domain at godaddy.com, bought web hosting, and put up my first website that wasn't tied to my job (I write software at the University or Arizona). I take a lot of photographs and I like to share them on the web for others to see. Since then, I've been using JAlbum (jalbum.net) to construct galleries of photographs. This has worked ok but I've never been happy with the look of the website and have been itching to update it (I updated the look of this blog recently, do you like it?).

The front page of my current web site.

So, I've begun looking at the possibilities for a better looking and better functioning web site. The first thing I've done is look at a lot of other photography websites. I find that a large fraction of these sites use Adobe Flash to do animations, zoom in/out, and move things around on the screen. I also find that many of them don't work on my iPad or iPhone because those mobile devices don't support Flash.

Not a nice result when you go to a web site.

So, although Flash is flashy, it won't work on some important mobile devices. Also, I find that some of the flash sites are slow for whatever reason, and it takes a while to see the first photograph. So, I don't think I want to use flash. Another thing I've noticed is that a lot of photographic web sites are similar with sections for "about me", "galleries", "contact", "blog", etc. and the "galleries" link often takes me to a page with more links like: "people", "places", "mood", "landscapes", "black & white", etc. So I started looking around and found that there are quite a few website "templates" available, some free, some you have to pay for. I suspect quite a few people use these templates and that the templates are often copies of other templates, etc. So, I'm going to try to avoid using templates if possible. From this analysis, it seems that I should use html (perhaps version 5, although older browsers won't support it) and I'll need to try to write the website myself. Dang, I've written some web sites with html-4 and css but not many, this will be a lot of work.

There are some html5 plugins for Adobe Lightroom that look interesting. For example: HTML5/CSS Photo Portfolio and I may use something like that as a fallback if I can't write my own or it is taking too long. Another possibility is "The Turning Gate" which makes a product called "TTG Stage CE" which will translate flash content, for example galleries made with Adobe Lightroom's web module, into something viewable on mobile devices.

Choices, choices, and a lot to do, and a lot to learn. Fortunately, I enjoy this stuff. :-)

The eyes have it

2010-11-02T22:19:00.000-07:00

Photographing people can be a real joy and at the same time one of the most difficult things to do. I enjoy the people pictures I take that capture something about the individual being photographed. Personalities can be captured at times with a depth that surprises me. Perhaps it is a moment frozen in time when a particular bit of expression shines through a normally impassive facade. Other times I'm photographing people, particularly children, who are amazingly expressive and their emotions are changing from moment to moment. This really shows on their face an in their eyes, and my job is to capture that expression.

Last weekend I went out looking for pictures about halloween in small towns. I wasn't sure what I was looking for but I followed a route east from Tucson towards New Mexico and I ended up spending the night in Silver City, NM with a stop in Wilcox, AZ along the way.

When I got to Wilcox, I looked for houses with unusual decorations, in fact, it was a windy day and I looked for the effect of the wind on hanging skeletons and giant plastic pumpkins. Not finding much I went down to the old part of town, along the railroad tracks where there are a few stores and restaurants. I was surprised to see the main street closed off and a number of people dressed in 1880s old west style clothing so I asked one of them when the shootout was going to happen. To my surprise, the guy said 2 o'clock. I got to talking to some of the actors, they were interested in me because I had my camera, and ended up shooting some informal portraits of some of the group before the actual shootout began. The person leading the event asked me if I would take some photographs of the action during the play and I agreed, for me, this is fun.

Marshall Marshal Bo (and shotgun)

After getting various phone numbers and e-mail addresses from the folks who were interested in photos I packed up and headed for Silver City, NM. I had read in the online New Mexico calendar of events that there was an event planned in Silver to benefit the restoration of the old Silco theater downtown. I lived in Silver City from 1962 to 1966 and I didn't remember the Silco, when I was there the Gila theater was open downtown and that was it. When I arrived, Bullard street downtown was closed off for a block surrounding the Silco and they were having a vintage car show in the street. I started asking folks to pose with their cars because I like these sort of portraits of people with something they are proud of. I had to hunt around to match owners to cars, everyone was milling around and owners were not standing by their cars. The guy in the photo below was very nice to me, he let me photograph him and then he went around an hunted up other owners so I could photograph them too.

A very nice guy with his old truck, I don't remember his name.

I got to talking with the guy in charge of the restoration effort on the Silco theater and he gave me a tour of the place, even taking me into the basement to show me how a flat floor had been installed in the 1960s when the building was used as a furniture store. Under this flat floor, still remains the sloped theater floor and even a bunch of the old theater folding chairs are still down there waiting to be revived when the flat floor is removed. He ended up asking me to send him photos from the event and I was happy to oblige since I think the Silco restoration is a great project for downtown Silver City.

And, just because I'm talking about photographing people, and because I have a friend with a two year old daughter with personality plus, I'll include a photo, taken recently, of Cecilia Emily. I've been photographing her since a few days after she was born. Truly, the eyes have it.

Cecilia Emily Pasek

Focus, Group f/1.4 vs Group f/64

2010-10-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

When I started trying my hand at travel photography, I was inspired by Ansel Adams and believed in the "Group f/64" philosophy of "everything in sharp focus". For some subjects, I still think this is the best choice but since I started doing some portraits (of people), I've fallen in love with the shallow depth of field of large aperture prime lenses. When the subject of a photograph is a person's face, background clutter can be a distraction and a shallow depth of field allows the eye to be drawn to the face, particularly the eyes of the subject which I usually want to be in sharp focus.

Esther (shot at f/2.0)

Lately, I've been trying this shallow depth of field more and more in other situations, for portraits of things and even landscapes. Sometimes I wonder, how much of an image needs to be in focus for the photograph to convey the story I have in mind? For example, the following photograph, looking through the spokes of an old wagon on a ranch in southern Arizona, has very little in focus. There is just one wagon wheel spoke in focus, and only part of that. Still, I like the feeling of the image, the out of focus ranch house still tells the story without really needing details. I'll plan to explore this style more in the next weeks.

Looking through a wagon wheel at the ranch house, Empire Ranch, AZ. (shot at f1.6)

iPhone 4 Camera, surprisingly good, needs raw.

2010-10-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

I'm guessing there is no application that can be written for the iPhone that will allow me to capture the raw file from the little 5 megapixel camera. Too bad! I find the tiny camera to be a gem, with a sharp lens that focuses quite close to the camera. (See photo below)

A "Horselubber" grasshopper eating one of its own kind on an asphalt road. I just set my iPhone on the road next to it and used an application with a 3 second timer to fire the shutter.

As many have said, sometimes the best camera is the one you have with you. When I bought my iPhone 4, I was looking at the latest model iPod touch but the specifications for the camera on the touch were so much worse than the iPhone, I decided to ditch my old cell phone and switch to the iPhone just to get the better camera. I find the back illuminated CMOS sensor on this camera performs well, giving reasonable shutter speeds in dim light (in spite of the auto ISO adjustment) and sharp JPEG files with good pixel to pixel resolution. Of course I'd like more control over the shutter speed and ISO settings but these can be worked around, sort of, by carefully picking the part of the image the meter sees.

A sculpture found at La Entrada and River Road in Tucson. I picked a bright point in the center of the image for both focus and metering, keeping the sky dark and not blowing out the highlights. I made the sky darker when I converted to black and white.

I have found there are various useful applications for the iPhone camera. One that I like is "Camera Plus" which has a timer setting that delays the shutter for a few seconds after I touch the screen to take a photo. This allows me to better use the "Blur" tripod and mount I bought for the phone from Mobile Mechatronics Inc. (http://www.mobilemechatronics.com/blur.html). The "Camera" app that comes with the phone provides a setting for in-camera High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography which sets the camera to take 3 photos at varying exposures and merges the three into a final image that covers a wider range of exposures than a single photo could. Of course, the camera and subject must stay fairly still for this to work.

On the left is the "normal" image taken with the iPhone camera, on the right is the HDR version of the same image taken at the same time. Notice the blown highlights and darker shadows in the first image.

The fixed aperture of f/2.8 on this camera means the depth of field is always the same. I find this compromise to be acceptable for the small size of the camera. Given the tiny sensor size and the 3.85mm focal length of the lens the depth of field is quite deep even for macro shots.

Vines on a slope. Even a couple of feet away from the camera the depth of field is a couple of feet. For closest focusing distance, it is only an inch or two (see first image in this post).

Serendipity is Relative

2010-10-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, I had intended to get out in the field for some photography, but ended up cleaning the house most of the day (including shampooing carpet, rearranging furniture, etc. etc.). So, Sunday morning I had some psychological withdrawal symptoms, got up early and headed down state route 83 toward Sonoita. I had intended to do some more shooting of flowers (gone to seed) along the road, and I did some of that, but then I decided to drive in to the Empire Ranch because I hadn't been there for a few years.

The Empire Ranch is an old ranch preserve in the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area. I've visited the area for 20 years, off an on, to photograph the old buildings and equipment as well as the trees and flora along the nearby creek. When I arrived, I saw a number of old stagecoaches and other horse-drawn vehicles scattered around the property as well as some tents, stacks of folding chairs and other event paraphernalia. There were a couple of guys loading 19th century buggies onto a trailer pulled by a pickup truck and I spoke to them, commenting on the coaches and buggies. They told me that there had been an "open house" at the ranch the previous day and they were busy packing up the various equipment that had been brought in for the event.

A "Mud Wagon" was used for muddy or rough conditions, canvas was used on the top and sides to reduce weight. I converted this image to black an white for the "old timey" effect and because the wheels were too, too yellow.

So, I photographed coaches and buggies. These vehicles are used in the Tucson Rodeo Parade every year and, serendipitously, I had a chance to photograph them in their "natural environment". Generally, when I see things like this, they are in a museum or in a parade or somewhere surrounded by modern "stuff". Of course, another person, not interested in photographing old wagons, wouldn't necessarily be as pleased as I was to happen upon this circumstance, hence the word "relative" in the title of this post.

The other thing that was nice, after the guys left in their truck, there was absolutely nobody else around, I didn't hear or see a soul except for a couple of cars driving down a dirt road that passes by the property. I also consider this part of the serendipity, with a lot of people around, I often find it hard to get a shot without onlookers, which are the shots I enjoy most. So, getting up early and exploring old haunts payed off on this day for me.

An old wagon shows the size the apparent fragility of the wheels used, I liked the circle within circle effect apparent from this perspective and I used a shallow depth of field to emphasize the foreground wheel.

Bisbee Philosophy

2010-01-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

Photographing in Bisbee, AZ yesterday, I came upon this, sort of, shrine next to the dog play area up Brewery Gulch.

Sort of a collection of philosophy, artwork, and ruin. (click on image to see full size).

Winter Raptors

2009-12-27T21:38:00.000-08:00

Winter is a good time to find raptors on the hunt in New Mexico. After a visit with family near Albuquerque, exploring a few new counties in the north east quadrant of the "Land of Enchantment" promised the possibility of new landscapes and maybe some bird photography. Tucumcari is in Quay county and north of Quay is Harding county where we find the metropolis of Roy which is surrounded by the Kiowa National Grassland. There are a few lakes in the area, Ute Lake and Conchas Lake being the largest. Lakes often harbor migratory birds and the grasslands nourish large numbers of rodents that forage all winter and they, in turn, attract raptors.

A visit to Ute Lake at sunrise found the lake covered with fog that slowly burned off as the day progressed. Wind frost coated the bushes at the edge of the lake and the honking of Canada geese echoed over the water.

Waiting on the shore for a while was rewarded with a good view of many groups of Canada geese flying out of the lake on their way to forage for breakfast.

Driving to Roy revealed that none of the towns along that route north of Logan have much to offer in the way of lodging, gas stations, or eating establishments although there are the bare minimum (one gas station and one restaurant open in Roy). A trip along NM state route 120 west from Roy led to the Canadian River Valley (about 600 feet deep) where the Canadian river was found to have ice on it but wasn't particularly photogenic, at least not in this photographers opinion. The surrounding grasslands seem to be mostly grazing lands and would perhaps be more attractive in summer. However the raptors were everywhere, particularly the hawks and kestrels. About every quarter mile along the road there would be a hawk on a utility pole or a kestrel on a wire. More rare were great horned owls and I didn't see any eagles.

The raptors were successful, I watched an American kestrel catch and eat some kind of rodent. A closer shot would have improved the image but this guy didn't trust the photographer enough to let him get too close. As ever, click on an image to see a larger version.

Grab Portraiture Learning Curve

2009-12-15T14:06:00.000-08:00

As Bogart famously remarked, "Here's looking at you, kid". Photographs containing people and animals hold a particular interest for us. This is specially true when the the subject is looking at the camera.

Finding that I like to shoot candid portraits has meant learning more about color correction. For example, in the image below the photo was taken very quickly (a few seconds at the office Christmas party) in an environment where the lighting was a combination of tungsten lights, two kinds of fluorescent lights, and a large north facing window on a blue sky day. Here is what the jpeg looks like right out of the camera (set on auto color balance):

Anna's face is too blue on one side and too yellow on the other and the exposure (set to aperture priority auto exposure) is a bit dark. Correcting the overall image (raw file) color balance didn't give me a satisfying result so masks were necessary to correct some areas of the image differently from other areas (mostly on the face). The color of a human face, and a very young human face in this example, is a challenge because of the subtle shading and the curves that give shadows and highlights which are often illuminated by different light sources. I can see why portraits are usually made in a studio where the light is carefully controlled. After correcting the color as best I could and working on her eyes a little (brightness, contrast, saturaton) and the overall brightness and contrast of the image, the result is more pleasing, at least to this photographer (oh yes, I fixed the mark on her face too):

Other situations are a little easier, color wise, but the time element can be another obstacle to getting the shot. This example was taken outside on an overcast day (single light source). The young lady below had just gotten her face painted at the 4th avenue street fair this last Sunday. I asked her if I could take her photograph, she said "yes", looked at me for about two seconds, and then went back to talking with her friends. I got two frames but in the second one she was already turning away. Again, spending an hour in a studio makes a lot of sense to get the composition right.

This is one of the things that draws me to photography, learning how to do things better and better. For years, black and white was the medium I learned about, exposure, contrast, focus, and depth of field were important but color balance wasn't a consideration.

Both photographs taken with Canon 5D mk II and Canon 135mm f/2 lens. Both images taken at f/2.8. As ever, click on the images to see larger versions.

San Pedro Owl

2009-12-12T20:43:00.000-08:00

I wanted to get out of town this weekend but various issues at work conspired to keep me from getting out early as planned. However, this time of year I don't have to go far to find something interesting and weather that I enjoy. In the summer, longer treks are needed to find nice weather (I like coooool!) and the sun is high in the sky making the light harsh most of the day. In the winter, we have excellent weather in the Tucson area and the sun is lower in the sky.

Various birds winter in the area along the San Pedro river, not far from here, and the rain we had earlier in the week promised the possibility of more water. Hunting for birds with my camera is great fun so I headed down to the Fairbank crossing, east of Ft. Huachuca, south-east of Tucson. The parking area at Fairbank is a nice place to park while exploring along the San Pedro but the authorities now have a gate they lock at dusk which isn't good for photographers because we often get back to the car after dark when out photographing at sunset. Fortunately, on the west side of the bridge, there are a couple of wide areas were one can pull off the road without the threat of being stranded. I parked in one of these and wandered down to the river.

Hiking north, down river, I hadn't gone very far when a suspicious lump in one of the trees got my attention. A 300mm lens and 1.4x teleconverter on a 1.6 crop camera body gave me quite good magnification and I found that the lump was a great horned owl relaxing in a shady area of the tree. After taking a few shots from where I was, (the bird was small in the viewfinder and backlit by the setting sun), I approached in a zig-zag fashion, never moving straight toward the bird and took a few frames each time I stopped. Still the bird was backlit and the images were poor. Finally, when I was quite close, he spread his wings and nonchalantly flew to another tree.

He was still backlit in his new location. Again I approached cautiously, and got a few more images before he took off again and flew to the other side of the river. Fortunately, the river isn't very deep and I had my waterproof hiking boots on so I waded across and approached again. This time he was situated with better light on his front side and I got some better images. Click on the images to see the larger versions.

Depth of Field, San Xavier

2009-12-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

I bought a new camera lens recently, a 135mm f/2 Canon lens. This will be my new portrait lens on my full frame camera body. Saturday, I wanted to try out the lens but I got a late start so I couldn't go far and decided to go to one of my favorite local places for photographs, the mission San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson.

Built between 1783 and 1797, the church is one of the older structures in the area and, being a plastered adobe and rock structure, is under constant maintenance and restoration. Currently, there is no scaffolding on the outside of the church. The interior, having undergone recent restoration, is now in excellent condition.

I've always been drawn to the mortuary chapel at San Xavier where visitors light votive candles, say prayers to Our Lady of Sorrows (Virgin Mary), and make devotional offerings. I took a few photographs in the chapel experimenting with the shallow depth of field I get with my lens set wide open at f/2. The short telephoto focal length also compresses depth a bit giving me the ability to pick out one statue from a group of small statues (ISO 200, 1/10 sec.). Click on images for larger versions.

Outside the church, it was a fairly cloudy day and I shot various images of the church and grounds, as well as some images from "Grotto Hill" east of the mission. One of my favorite areas from which to shoot the crosses on top of the church is the back, or north side. Here there is a multi-arched entry through which I get a good view of the main dome of the church with the front bell towers behind. On this evening I noticed some mourning doves sitting on a metal arch in the garden area. I photographed them with the church behind but set my aperture to f/2.8 to throw the background out of focus and emphasize the birds (ISO 200, 1/160 sec.).

Later that evening, as the sun set, the clouds really lit up with orange and red light. I went up on Grotto Hill and shot the church against the sunset, although now I stopped down the aperture to f/11 to keep focus throughout the scene (ISO 200, 1/5 sec.).

Variations on a Cat

2009-12-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a meeting of the Transit on the Move liaison committee, which is working on the streetcar system we are building in Tucson. The meeting was held downtown at 5:30 PM so, because I'm adverse to driving in Tucson traffic between 5 PM and 5:30 PM, I went down a bit early and had some time on my hands. I almost always have my camera with me these days, you never know when something interesting will pop up. Since I was in the area of the Tucson "Arts District", where I know there are a number of interesting old buildings and the time of day was near sunset, I went for a short walk around the area to see if I could see anything of which to make an image.

I photographed a couple of interesting doorways and a couple of old buildings. As I walked I saw a number of house cats walking around. When I see them I always make a little "pshh, pshhhh" sound with my mouth which makes them look at me. These were all very relaxed cats, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. Finally, I was taking a picture of a large group of starlings sitting on utility wires when I saw a large cat comfortably sitting on the corner of a 5 foot fence. This cat meowed at me and was at eye level, so I went over and scratched it behind the ears and it was purring a bit. A very content cat. I had my 5d mk II with an 85mm f/1.8 lens which is almost perfect for portraits so I made a few images of the, very cooperative, cat.

This lens' close focusing ability is somewhat limited on a full frame camera for portraits of small things. I can't fill the frame with the head of a baby or head of a cat, it just won't focus close enough. On an APS-C sensor camera it is a different story and I find it great for head shots. I have a 135mm f/2 on order! Anyway, I did my best with the cat. I was shooting wide open at f/1.8 so my depth of field at closest focus was probably about a third of an inch, I had to focus as best I could on the cat's eyes and let the rest of the image go soft (except for a few whiskers that crossed the focal plane). As ever, click on the image to see a larger version.

I was playing around with the images and, as part of my post processing, I always sharpen the image a little. When I sharpen, I put the image into "Lab" colorspace, select the "brightness" channel, sharpen that, and then return the image to "RGB" colorspace. One of the side effects of this workflow is that I get to preview the image in black and white. When I started this cat processing, I didn't think black and white would be a good treatment for the cat because I liked the yellow color of the cat's eyes and the sprinkling of reddish fur in the cat's fur coat. However, when I had one of the images in Lab colorspace for sharpening, I liked the emphasis on textures and shapes I saw in the B&W version. I picked an image that had good sharpness on the cat's eyes and whiskers, and made this black and white portrait of the kitty.

Too bad I'm slightly allergic to cats, they make good photographic subjects!

See the Flames

2009-11-23T14:18:00.000-08:00

Friday night there was a "hot air balloon glow" event on the mall at the University of Arizona to benefit the Tucson Community Food Bank. I brought in my tripod and an extra lens to photograph the event although I ended up not using the tripod and I only used my 50mm lens. The things I found the most interesting at the event were the people I met there and the fire!

I've always enjoyed fire, bonfires, campfires, etc. as long as people and property aren't threatened. When we were young, my brother and I made gunpowder from scratch and used it to make fireworks. They weren't very good but we had great fun making a mess and a lot of smoke.

Fire, because it's in constant motion and is often much brighter than its environment, poses an interesting photographic challenge. Fast shutter speeds allow you to capture details of the fire you wouldn't see with the naked eye. The photograph below, of the flame used to start filling a hot air balloon, was taken at 1/4000th of a second. The speed of the shutter "freezes" the flame, showing all the intricate shapes as well as the blue and orange parts.

Click on the image to see a larger version. In the original, 21 megapixel, version there is an amazing amount of flame detail. I'll post a tightly cropped version of this flame soon on my web site. The image was shot with a Canon 5D mk II and a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 lens at f/2.8 and ISO 3200.

A slower shutter speed, on the other hand, allows the fire to blur a bit and look more liquid. The next shot was made later in the evening when most of the daylight was gone so my exposure times were longer because I was still depending on my automatic exposure which was set to center-weighted. The darker surroundings meant the exposure control slowed the shutter, thus over-exposing the fire, smearing it out, but giving some detail to the background.

Same camera and lens, still at f/2.8 and ISO 3200 but now the shutter speed was 1/60th of a second.

This fire, of course, was what made the balloons glow. Some of the balloons (there were seven balloons in all) were made of dark fabrics and didn't glow very brightly even when it was dark. But a few were made of lighter, more translucent fabric and glowed like lanterns when the the flame was on. Unfortunately, the best glowing balloon, a yellow one with a saguaro on the side, had to shut down early because the wind was sufficient to make it unstable and they didn't have enough people/weight to control it. They had to put it away before it was really dark. The second best balloon for glowing and seeing the fire is shown below. This was late enough that the sky was almost black and my center weighted metering on the camera saw the frame filled with bright balloon and gave me a shutter speed of 1/800th of a second, freezing the fire inside the balloon pretty well.

Same camera, lens aperture, ISO, etc. as before.

Thanks to Guy McArthur for alerting me to this photographic opportunity. I'll have to go to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta next year and photograph some more fire!

Feel the Cold

2009-11-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

I live in Tucson Arizona and I'm a heat wimp! I suffer in the hot, moist weather we get during our "monsoon" in July and August, and I think it is too hot from about May to late October. Winters are "nice" here but I miss snow even though I've not spent many years living with snow.

I was up in the White mountains of Arizona last weekend, on my way back from photographing in Petrified Forest National Park. I got up early and headed up hill from Springerville AZ, on route 260 to where the road runs along level at about 9100 feet and it was cold. There was a bit of snow the day before and there were dull gray clouds hanging low enough to enshroud the tops of the small hills in the area. The temperature was about 10F and the wind was blowing with gusts up to 25 mph.

I had planned to photograph the light sprinkling of snow in the morning light, with the little sparklies you see when the sun is at the right angle. I've always enjoyed shots like that. But no, that wasn't the world mother nature spread before me, she was showing me what cold is like. And I was enjoying it.

I've photographed this line of aspens at the edge of an open field of grass in the summer when the leaves are green and they blend in with the background pines. I've photographed them when they are brilliant with the golden leaves of fall. I've even photographed them when there was much more snow on the ground, but the sun was shining. This image is all about the cold.

I often see photographs of cactus taken around Tucson, particularly the saguaros and I like a lot of those images but I often can't really tell if the weather was cold or hot when the photo was taken unless, of course, there is snow on the cactus. And even then, it might well be above freezing when the image was made. Communicating a sense of the environment is an interesting puzzle to solve when photographing. Some subjects really tell you about the environment, particularly images with ice and snow in them. Blue is often the color of cold, but red can be autumn leaves and other non-hot things.

When I was looking at the color balance in these two photographs, I decreased the amount of blue in the images and I noticed that, when I made the snow nice and white, they didn't look as cold. I put a little blue back in but not as much as I saw in the raw files as they came up in lightroom. As ever, click on the images to see a larger version.

Ahhh, photos to look at when it's 110F in Tucson in July!

Camera data:
photo 1: Canon 5D mk II, Canon 85mm F/1.8, 1/5 second at f/11, ISO 400
photo 2: Canon 5D mk II, Canon 85mm F/1.8, 1/25 second at f/16, ISO 400

Petrified Logs, Jasper Forest, Petrified Forest National Park

2009-11-14T20:39:00.000-08:00

I've only been to Petrified Forest NP once before to take photographs. I'd been there a couple of times when I was much younger and found it to be a boring place, no huge mountains or deep canyons or underground caves! Now I wonder around and am amazed by both the landscape and the beautiful petrified logs that can be found weathering out of the soil, this is a strange place!

Today was windy and cold and mostly cloudy. When I thought about photographing rocks it made me think of photographing flowers because they can be similar photographically. I want to capture the colors and avoid harsh shadows so cloudy days and sometimes shade are good for flowers and I think the same can be said for colorful rocks.

I hadn't stopped at the "Jasper Forest" last time I was photographing here. Now I think it is the best place because of the landscape and the beauty of some of the logs. These logs are short, not nearly as long as the ones at places like "Long Logs Trail" near the south entrance. However, I find the colorful cross-sections more interesting than the shear mass of the really big logs.

I still have a lot of post processing to do but here is one image. Taken with a Canon 5D mkII and a 17-40 f/4.0 lens. (I would have put a 17mm tilt-shift lens to good use today if I had one.)

Day of the Dead Procession

2009-11-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

I went to the "Dia de los Muertos" procession Sunday night in downtown Tucson. This is a time for family and friends to pray for family members who have died. The procession in Tucson is anything but solemn, most of the people seemed to be having fun. I was amazed by the size of the procession, the number of spectators lining the streets, and the free outdoor performance that happened at the end of the procession. Photographing without a flash was a challenge, I was shooting with a Canon 5D mk II and a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. I had a monopod attached to the camera but because of the crowds, I often had to lift this off the ground to get above the heads of some of the other onlookers. Of course, the subjects of my photographs were in constant motion as well so I felt I needed a shutter speed of at least 1/100 second. To reach this goal, I shot in an area where there were some street lights (low pressure sodium, a color balance problem), shot at ISO 3200, and kept the aperture open to f/2.2. The contrast between the various masks and other constructions against the night sky was another difficulty.

I ended up with about 50 useful photos, out of a few hundred, and a couple of pretty good HD videos. Many of the images I got were blurred for one reason or another, mostly camera or subject motion. I probably should have shot at ISO 6400 or higher but then the quality of the images begins to be compromised.

A lot of the people in the procession had simply painted their faces and added black shadows around their eyes, nose, and mouth to give a skull-like impression but there were quite a few that had obviously spent quite a lot of time putting together costumes and display pieces for the event. I'll post more photographs later but I'll add a couple to this blog post. The first image is of a skull mask that was raised above the procession on a pole. I like the design of the mask and the painting on it. The small skulls radiating from the mask had lights inside them and the "candles" in the eyes of the mask where illuminated.

For the second image, I wanted to show something unusual. A lot of what I saw consisted of skulls of various kinds, black and white, some using face paint and others made from paper mache. The sun face/skull pictured here struck me as out of the ordinary in an already unusual and creative landscape. Perhaps, just because of the color, I'm not sure, but I liked it. As ever, click on images to see larger versions.

Photographing at work

2009-11-07T21:08:00.000-08:00

This last week, I was asked to photograph an event at my place of employment and to take a group photo of some of my co-workers. I've been showing my photography around at work for a couple of years and have had friends ask me to photograph their grandkids, which I've done gladly because I love to photograph children, but I hadn't been asked to take photos that will be used in annual reports and web pages for the laboratory. Today, another friend of mine told me I really should go photograph at the "Dia de los Muertos" procession tomorrow night. People, at least locally, are beginning to think of me as a photographer, I like the feeling.

The event I photographed was a public outreach event from the Lunar and Planetary Lab to a fifth grade class from an elementary school. The children (about 12) got a chance to examine a collection of meteorites, make their own comets using dry ice, water, soil, and a collection of other ingredients similar to those found in real comets, and make small impact craters in tubs of flour layered with other colored powders. These were smart kids who were very engaged in the process, listened well to instruction, expressed themselves clearly, and had a lot of fun in the process (what kid doesn't have fun with dry ice?). The photo below shows two girls with a ziplock bag full of comet ingredients, the white cloud above the bag is condensing CO2 and water vapor escaping from the bag.

Adam Showman, one of the professors here at the lab, wanted a photograph of him and his graduate student group. This was also fun to do, we tried a variety of locations and shot about 15 photographs indoors, outdoors in the shade, and outdoors in the sun. The photograph below was, I think, the most successful of the group because it captures a little of the personalities of the people in the photograph, and the background indicates that the subjects are involved with planets (although a background with Jupiter in it would have been more appropriate to the work they do, the 3D poster of Mercury works well I think.

Most of these shots were indoor shots without flash. For those of you interested in camera details, both shots here were made with a Canon 5D mk II and a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. The first shot was made at f/2.8 at 1/125 second and ISO 800, the second was made at f/2.8 at 1/160 second and ISO 1600. Click to images to see larger versions.

Vision Incarnate

2009-10-28T22:39:00.000-07:00

I read a sample chapter in duChemin's book, VisionMongers, and it got me thinking about photographic vision, craft, and equipment.

Twenty years ago, in discussions on the internet news group, "rec.photo", I was involved in a conversation about "art" and "expression" in photography. At the time I was using a collection of used film cameras in various formats and was developing my own film and printing my own images in my darkroom. I was dismayed at the number of photographers for whom the photographic equipment seemed to be the focus of their interest, rather than the vision and communication involved with the pictures produced. I said something like: "Equipment shouldn't be so important, an artist's vision will transcend the medium used to express that vision."

Lately, I've been shooting photographs with modern 35mm digital SLR cameras and have been spending quite a bit of time thinking about equipment, more than I used to. I have a camera body that gives me a digital image containing 21 million pixels and some of the very finest lenses, I have autofocus, autoexposure, auto color balance, all kinds of tools to help make my life easier. I worry that I've become too distracted by the technology I use to express myself. I do feel that I'm making some good photographs, and the technology helps make them easier to capture, but part of me still harkens back to the artist who can make art with whatever materials are at hand. Sigh.

So, I recently got a new cell phone and it has a camera in it. The camera is fixed focus, fixed focal length (3mm), allows the user to have some control over exposure and white balance, probably has a fixed aperture (f/2.8), and an unknown shutter speed. The images contain about 1,300,000 pixels. This got me thinking about trying, as others have done, to limit myself to this little camera (not all the time, though, I'm not that much of an artist!) to see what happens.

In my last set of images posted to my web site, I have a photograph of an old school bus rusting away in a field in New Mexico that got me thinking about why I took the image. I decided that I liked thinking of the idea of all the years that school bus delivered children to school, probably in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Who where those people? What experiences did they have on the bus? Where are they now? It's like a little piece of history, one that nobody writes about in history books.

Today, I walked over to a nearby neighborhood park that I know is very well used and looked at the playground equipment and thought again about the history, how many children had slid down the big slide and where are they now. There is evidence of many coats of paint on that old slide that have been warn off by all the little hands gripping the rails, the bed of the slide is smooth and shiny from regular use but when I was there, nobody was around.

Here is an image, taken with my cell phone looking down that slide, post processed in photoshop to make it black and white. As ever, click on the picture to see the larger version.

"The Chains" and "Rattlesnake"

2009-10-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I spent the morning in the Page, Arizona area. I was taking a "photographic" tour in the Antelope Canyon area at 10 AM so I wandered down to Lake Powell at sunrise. There is a day use area just south of the bridge across the canyon called "The Chains" where you can park and wonder around on the slick rock and go down to the lake's edge. I photographed in this area for an hour or so and it was quiet and peaceful for a while until the airplanes started flying and the power boats started their journeys on the lake. Apparently, there are quite a few tours you can take by small aircraft and one of the popular times to fly is just after sunrise. I photographed smooth rocks that have weathered out of the sandstone, animal tracks in the sand, sandstone shapes and the lake itself. The photo below gives a wide angle view of what one sees standing on the shore of Lake Powell at this time of day before the boats take to the water and make a lot of waves.

Later on, I went over to Antelope Canyon for my tour. This area has become a very popular place since I was last there. When I last visited, probably 14 years ago, I had to go to a particular gas station, hire a Navajo guide, and be driven out to upper and lower Antelope Canyon. Now there is an entrance station where you pay $6 to get in to park at upper Antelope and there are rows of trucks, each able to carry about 14 people, waiting to take you on a tour. The first hour of my tour was going along with the less expensive, non-photographic, tour. When I was at upper antelope, there were about 5 tour trucks there from various tour companies around Page. In the canyon itself, not a very big place, there were at least 60 people, and it was very difficult to take any photographs without people in them. One strategy I saw a lot of people using was to point their cameras up at the "ceiling" of the canyon. However, this approach gives very high contrast images because the upper areas of the canyon are illuminated by the sun while the lower areas are in deep shadow. For the second half of my 2 hour tour, I was dropped off, by myself, at a smaller canyon, called "Rattlesnake", for about an hour. This small canyon is much harder to negotiate than the larger Antelope Canyon, but I had it all to myself! Rattlesnake is harder to negotiate as it has some small drop offs and very narrow areas to squeeze through. I took the following photograph in Rattlesnake of a nose of sandstone that jutted out into one of the "rooms".

The "regular" tour of Antelope costs $25 and the "photographers" tour is $40. My recommendation for visiting Antelope is to go on a week day, perhaps there will be fewer people then. Also, if you go when the sun is more overhead, you will see more of the shafts of sunlight that come down through the crack in the "roof". This time of year, the sun is too low on the horizon to get these shafts. As ever, click on the images to see larger versions on my web site.

Glen Canyon Dam at Night

2009-10-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

I'm in Page, Arizona tonight. I have a photographer's tour of a couple slot canyons tomorrow with a Navajo guide. I wondered over to Glen Canyon dam to see what sort of night photos I could get. There was nobody around the visitor's center and it was closed. There were a couple of guards walking around on the dam and they would shine their flashlights around once in a while. I took a few exposures, mostly at about 35-45 seconds at f/11, ISO 400. The photo below shows almost the entire dam as well as some of the machinery at the base of the dam and the water flowing out the bottom. The distortions are courtesy of a 17mm lens on a full frame camera.

To show the scale, the image below is a full resolution crop of the right center of the image showing the pickup trucks parked down by the generating structures. (click on photos for larger view)

Acoma and photography

2009-10-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

I went to visit the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico again after many years. It is one of the longest continuously occupied human communities in the United States. The last time I visited was about 15 years ago and things have changed in the intervening years vis-a-vis photographers. Most importantly, to me, tripods are no longer allowed, period. You can take a camera but you must have a tag attached to it and if you don't take one of the tours you have to pay a $10 "camera" fee. If you do take one of the tours, which is the only way to get up on the mesa, the camera fee is included ($20). Photography is not allowed inside the mission church or the graveyard outside the church. (click on photos to see a larger image)

The problem I have with tours when doing photography is that I can't take my time to setup photographs, wait for changes in light, think about composition, etc. However, when a tour is the only way to go, I'll give it a try. The controls I have are, when to go. On this day, we went on the last tour of the day which started at 5 PM and ended around 6 PM, with sunset at around 6:40 PM so the light was farily good and there were only some puffy white clouds in the sky.

On the mesa, water is collected in catchment basins because there is no municipal water service. This means there are pools of water in various places around the community which gives an additional interesting atmosphere to the place. I photographed some of the houses along one of the streets with one of the water pools in the forground.

In one area of the village, I was watching a bunch of ravens flying in the updrafts caused by the wind hitting the edge of the cliffs along the edge of the mesa.

Sometimes fall color isn't what you expect

2009-10-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

Visiting various places in New Mexico, I was looking for fall color today. The skies were in large part overcast and Sierra Blanca (11,981 feet) had its head in the clouds most of the day. Although most of the taller trees had lost their leaves in the wind over the past few days, some of the smaller and closer to the ground shrubs and plants were showing fall color. These were most prevalent in areas that have had forest fires in recent years. In the case of fire, low shrubs and scrubby trees are the first things to replace the pine and fir forests. Many of these seem to be able to hold onto their leaves through the wind storms. This photograph was taken south of Ruidoso, New Mexico along the road from Cloudcroft.

In Capitan, NM, I saw an old school bus rusting away in a field north of town. The yellow of the bus reminded me of the opportunities to photograph the yellow aspen trees I had missed. It also reminded me of the simplicity of the days when children rode busses like this one to school.

Photographing fall colors when the wind blows

2009-10-05T19:04:00.000-07:00

The wind has been blowing for a couple days here in Cloudcroft, and a lot of the colored leaves have blown off the aspen trees, rocky mountain maples, and even a lot of the oaks. They also had rain night before last which didn't help. So, what to photograph to document fall here in the Sacramento mountains? Well, a lot of the leaves are still here, they are just on the ground and can give an interesting backdrop for foreground objects, for example, the trunks of the trees.

I went for a hike on the Osha trail this afternoon. This is just west of Cloudcroft on state route 82 across the road from the train trestle. It is an easy 2.5 mile loop hike and takes the hiker through aspen groves, maple groves, pine and fir groves. From it one can see down into the Tularosa basin to White Sands NM. I photographed various trees, views of the leaf covered trail, and some landscapes. My best result is the photograph below showing a Rocky Mountain Maple tree surrounded by its discarded leaves.

The Lodge at Cloudcroft, NM

2009-10-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

I'm staying at "The Lodge at Cloudcroft" in New Mexico. I came here to photograph at White Sands National Monument and to see what kind of fall color I could find in these Sacramento mountains. I haven't found any outstanding fall color yet because we've had some overcast skies and high winds which have blown some of the leaves off the trees. I've seen some very colorful oaks and maples but only isolated individuals. There are some yellow aspen groves but the ones I've seen that still have leaves aren't very accessible.

I've been coming to the lodge here in Cloudcroft since I was about 10 years old and it really hasn't changed in all those years. Most of my visits in the past have just involved eating in the dining room, a beautiful experience, but this time I thought I'd stay a couple of nights. October is part of their "off season" so the rates are reasonable and the rooms (1899) are beautiful and have been updated with modern conveniences (modern bathrooms and excellent fast wifi).

Here is a photo of the front of the lodge, taken a few minutes ago:

The lodge was built as part of the Alamogordo and Sacramento Mountain Railway which was a logging railroad.

The interior is kept very authentic with a comfortable lobby, excellent restrurant, gift shop, swimming pool, and pine trees and aspen trees all around. The town of Cloudcroft is small but has a small grocery, a couple of bars, and at least one gas station.

Things to see near here are the Sacramento Peak Observatory (a solar observatory), Apache Point Observeratory (3.5 meter, F/10), White Sands National Monument down near Alamogordo, and very nice mountain country.

Here is a photograph of the lobby of the lodge:

White Sands contains dunes of gypsum that are white and is extensive enough to spend quite a bit of time exploring. I find summer a bit hot at White Sands but I would certainly recommend a fall-winter-spring visit.

I'll post a photograph I took last night at the monument to this blog post.

Astigmatism and Color Fringing, Sigma 50mm f/1.4

2009-09-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

I went out to Chiricahua National Monument yesterday to try some sunset photography but got there too late and ended up taking some night images at Massai Point. The moon is at first quarter so I knew I wouldn't be able to get the sort of deep sky images that I enjoy taking but figured it would be a challenge to see what I could get with the moon up. I try to take exposures that are either short enough so the stars in the sky don't smear too much or long enough so they make long trails. Lately, I've enjoyed the short exposure (< 45 seconds) shots so I tried some of those. I wanted to get some of the Chiricahua rocks clearly exposed and found that in the light of the first quarter moon I needed to shoot at a fairly wide aperture to keep the exposure times short. Both of the images shown here have ~35 second exposures taken at an aperture of f/1.6.

I've been pleased with the results I've gotten with my Sigma 50mm f/1.4 lens on my Canon 5D mk II but I hadn't paid close attention to some of the lens distortions that show themselves when shooting star fields. This first image shows a couple of the rocks near Massai point illuminated by the moon and with stars in the background sky.

In this image, in addition to the rocks and bushes, you can see a lot of stars in the sky, a galaxy, and a couple of satellite trails. If you look closely, you will also notice some distortions in the stars in the upper left and lower right. (click on images to see larger versions.) This is meriodional astigmatism and it gets worse the closer to the corners of the field you get. I found this effect easier to see in the following image which shows a distant view of Cochise Head from Massai Point.

Look at the top of the image, the stars are distorted so they look like little line segments oriented tangential to a circle centered on the image.

I also noticed that some of the stars looked more red than they should be and closer inspection shows that there are red/cyan fringes around the very brightest stars. This happens all over the image, not just near the edges. I'll show a couple of full resolution crops from the second image below. The first full res crop shows the meriodional or tangential astigmatism and is taken from the top left of the Cochise Head image. The second crop shows the color fringing and is taken from the center of the same image.

Apparently, night sky imaging at wide apertures requires extremely fine lenses!

Ghost Beads for a Bellagonna

2009-09-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

I went up to the Navajo reservation over the weekend. This time of year I'm getting tired of the heat in Tucson and I want to go somewhere that I can find cool weather. I've always enjoyed staying at the Thunderbird Lodge in Chinle, AZ near Canyon de Chelly so I made my way there.

I've been to the Chinle area many times and have lots of photographs of the canyon at various times of year as well as photographs of nearby areas so I was looking to do something different. I enjoy photographing people but find it more difficult than landscapes or wildlife. My main problem is shyness I think, it is difficult to ask a stranger if I can take their portrait. Native Americans are even more difficult because some of them are very sensitive about photography. There are usually a number of venders selling jewelry along the rim of the canyon as well as at White House ruin on the canyon floor. I decided to try to photograph some of the venders in both places. I ended up photographing five Dineh (Navajo) people. I promised to send them the results either by e-mail or prints by ground so I got their names and addresses.

Pearl Joe's daughter had jewelry spread out on a blanket in front of her car at the Tunnel overlook. Pearl sat in the back seat of the car stringing juniper seeds and turquoise beads into necklaces and bracelets. Pearl told me juniper seeds are also called "Ghost Beads" and keep away bad dreams and evil spirits, hang them on your bed post at night and you'll never have a bad dream. I wonder if they work for a Bellagonna (non-Navajo person) like me? I bought a small string of seeds, we'll see. Pearl was a little shy about having her photograph made, she told me people try to make money from her photograph or make a painting from the photograph and sell that. I told her I wasn't doing that and that I was just trying to learn to take better people pictures. She let me make her portrait. (click on the photos for a better size image)

Don Charley is a flutist and not shy at all. At the age of 29, he is trying to make his career playing traditional Dineh flute music. Unlike Pearl Joe, who doesn't use a computer much, Don studied web design in college, has e-mail, a myspace page, and other modern social connections. He was trying to sell CD's of his music and not having too much luck in spite of his long and complex sales pitch. I didn't buy a CD but I did promise to send him a couple of photographs that he could use on his web site with my blessing and that was enough to peak his enthusiasm. In talking to Don and his girlfriend (didn't get her name) I learned that young Dineh have trouble staying in Chinle because there are no jobs around. In particular, the distance to the nearest Wal-Mart was mentioned. The Gallup Wal-Mart is pretty far away and if you can't get a job there, you might have to go all the way to the Wal-Mart in Flagstaff! I photographed Don playing his flute.

A while later I hiked down the trail to White House Ruin and talked to, and photographed, a few venders who were waiting for the tour jeeps to arrive. White House is one of the main stopping points and breaks for the passengers of the half day jeep tours that leave from the Thunderbird Lodge. Delores Sam lamented the fact that the tour goes up Canyon del Muerto first before it comes down Canyon de Chelly so the venders in the more northern canyon get the first crack at the tourists. I very much enjoyed sitting in the cool shade under the cottonwood trees having an interesting conversation in the beautiful canyon.

I'm very slowly learning a few Navajo words and know a handful. I discovered, on this trip, that even the few I've learned, some I've learned wrong! I learned to say "Hello" as "ya-tah-HAY" somewhere, but it is "ya-eh-Teeh" instead. I'm not good with languages.

Chasing storms and galaxies

2009-09-13T21:25:00.000-07:00

I looked at the weather map Saturday afternoon and decided there might be some thunderstorms in south-east Arizona that evening so I loaded my camera stuff and "sleeping in the car" stuff into the outback and headed east. It looked like the storms would be near Sierra Vista, but when I turned on the Sierra Vista turn-off just west of Benson, AZ, it didn't look promising. The storms looked better further east so I headed for Willcox. I had read on the web about a little visited BLM picnic area called "Indian Bread Rocks" south of Bowie, AZ on the east side of the Dos Cabezas Mountains and I figured I could sleep there.

When I got near Willcox, it was clear that there were storms north of the city so I followed N. Fort Grant Road as the sun set and it grew dark. When I got, probably, 15 miles north of Willcox, I found a dirt road I could turn off on, and it wasn't raining there, and I had a good view of some of the storms so I figured I'd photograph some lightning. Well, lightning photography is tricky, you have to make sure you get your focus set right, etc., autofocus won't work on a black sky! Here is one of the photos of lightning, I need more practice doing this, too bad the monsoon has fizzled this year.

After the storms started winding down, I headed for Willcox for a bite to eat and then out to "Indian Bread Rocks". To get there, you go south from downtown Bowie, under I-10, drive through a few miles of pistachio groves, turn right on a nice graded dirt road, and then drive a couple more miles to the picnic area.

As expected, there was nobody there and everything was quiet and very dark. I appreciated the outhouse and garbage container and, while walking around, noticed that the sky was very clear and that I could see the Milky Way quite clearly. The brightest part of the galaxy in the sky was to the south so I set up the tripod again and took a few time exposures. I had read that if your exposure is longer than 30 seconds, the stars will streak too much to make a nice image. Of course, you might WANT star trails. I tried a few different exposures and tried to get the camera focused properly. Thank goodness for "live view" on the 5D MK II and the zoom, you can set the focus quite accurately. The best image was a 20 second exposure taken at f/1.6 with my 50mm f/1.4 Sigma lens. In hindsight, I should have done some wide angle shots too with the 17-40mm lens. Here is the image:

I had a somewhat restless night in the car wondering if anyone would show up and chase me away, wondering if any large animals lived in the area, and what kinds of insects live there. But my fears were unfounded and the night was cool, quiet and peaceful. The next morning I tried to take some sunrise photos but there were clouds veiling the sun in the east.

Mixing work and play (photography)

2009-09-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

This last week I attended a meeting in the Denver area and gave a presentation about some new software we are developing for planning observations with the VIMS instrument (Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer) aboard the Cassini spacecraft. Since one of the people on the science team is a photographer friend of mine, I decided to take a few extra days so I could photograph on the way to Denver, while in Denver, and on the way home.

My path took me first to Moab, and the slick-rock country of south-east Utah. I visited Moab 15 years ago and went to see some of the sites while I was in the area but didn't bring back many pleasing photographs from that trip. This time I visited new places I hadn't been to before in Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park (Island in the Sky), and Dead Horse Point state park. Here is a sunrise photograph I took at Dead Horse Point looking toward the La Sal mountains. I used a wide angle lens (17mm on a full frame DSLR, f/11, 1/13 sec) to emphasize the broad expanse of the landscape. The color on the upper clouds only lasted about a minute.

Next, I drove to Denver and gave myself a couple of days to explore the mountains nearby. The most interesting place I went was to the top of Mount Evans (14,250 feet above sea level). Amazingly, there is a road to the top and my friend Roger picked me up at 5 AM and we got up there before sunrise. It is a beautiful place to be and there is a surprising amount of wildlife. We saw mountain goats, yellow-bellied marmots, pica, and ptarmigan. Here are two photographs, one showing the landscape (looking south-east from near the top just after sunrise, 28mm, f/16, 1/50 sec) and one showing a mom goat and her kid (300mm, f/11, 1/250 sec).

The next day I visited Brainard Lake recreation area west of Boulder and did a hike around Long Lake. On the way in I stopped at a small lake covered with water lilies named Red Rock Lake and photographed the sunrise over the lake (40mm, f/11, 1/320 sec).

After the meeting, on the way home I drove late into the night to get to Almogordo, NM so I could get up early and photograph at White Sands National Monument. They don't open the gate there until 7 AM which is a little late for the sunrise but fortunately there were quite a few clouds in the east which helped with the light a bit. I plan to revisit the area later this fall when it is a bit cooler and camp in the park so I can get some images earlier in the day. This photo features some of the insect tracks I saw in the sand. They had had some rain on previous days which changes the texture of the sand a bit.

When I get a chance to go though my photos and process more of them I'll post them on my website at dyerlytle.com.

Logo and Brand Identity

2009-08-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about trying to sell some photographs as a way of making a little money to help pay for my expensive hobby. Everything I read about selling photography points to the need to market one's self in order to be successful. So, I've worked up a logo for "Dyer Lytle Photography" that I'll use to identify myself and to use as a design template for my website and this blog. It's quite difficult to come up with something that doesn't look similar to every other photographer's logo! At least it is difficult for me, with no graphic art in my background. Fortunately, I know how to use some of the tools in photoshop and enjoy playing around with fonts and other graphic design elements. Here is what I have.

A few photographs from the last month.

2009-06-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

I've been on a couple of overnight trips in the last month to take photos. The first was over to Glennwood, NM and up to St. Johns, AZ to photograph landscapes. More recently, this last weekend I drove up to Mt. Graham.
The trip to Glenwood/St. Johns was motivated by a book I read called "Otero Mesa" by Gregory McNamee, Stephen Strom, Stephen Capra, and Bill Richardson. This book was written to try to save a broad area of New Mexico from intensive oil and gas production. As an environmentalist, I find books of this sort, heavily illustrated with photographs, right up my alley as far as my passion for the natural world and photography. I can only hope someday to make photographs that will help save that natural world from destruction. I've always been interested in the grasslands east of Mule Creek, AZ which is on the way to Glenwood so I drove that way to see if I could find a photo. The best photo I make in that area is this one or a lonely tree:

On that same trip I went the mud hills north of St. Johns. I've driven through that area at least once a year for the past 25 years on my way up to visit my brother in Grants, NM. I've always thought about stopping there but when traveling I'm usually there around noon and I prefer photographing either in the evening or early morning. This time I camped in the area and so I was there for sunrise. The mud hills have interesting patterns and pebbles weather out on the surface near the bases of the hills. This is one of the photos I took in that area:

This last weekend, I drove up to the top of Mt. Graham to see if there might be any interesting meadow shots in the old forest fire area. I didn't really get into the forest fire area on this trip but I did take a few photos. I really enjoyed the cool mountain air up there and the smell of pine and fir forests is wonderful. I did find quite a few people camping and making large fires and running generators, and etc. I go to the mountains to enjoy them, listen to the birds sing, drink in the peacefulness, I don't like noisy drunken campers, I try to avoid them.

I've always wanted to take a good photograph of the corn flowers/lilly that are found at these higher elevations (over nine thousand feet in this case) so I shot some in a campground after a rain storm and I like this one.

As ever, click on the photo to see a larger size image.

A Family Visit

2009-05-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

This past long weekend, which I made longer by taking Thursday and Friday off, I traveled to Grants, New Mexico to visit my brother and his family. Both of my nieces, who no longer live in Grants, were visiting with their families. I have one grand niece and two grand nephews. Naomi is my younger niece's daughter and turned 3 years old on May 24th. She is a sweet little girl and this was the first time we have met.

I took this photo of her at the playground at the "Riverwalk Park" in downtown Grants. Naomi and her family live in Dallas, Texas.

Next is my grand nephew Aiden Drake. I like to call him Drake instead of Aiden, I'm sure it drives his mother mad :-) He is seven years old and is a very active child.
We played a couple of games on a Nintendo Wii game console and had fun playing outside both in my brother's backyard and at the playground. Aiden Drake will be in second grade this fall in Las Cruces, NM.

Finally, there's Alex, who is four years old and wants to do everything his older brother does.
I'm sure he will eventually choose his own interests and will diverge from Aiden in this respect.

I was glad to see all these folks because this is the only branch of my family with which I have any communication. I'm sure I have other cousins and such but they are probably in New York state or in Canada. Growing up, our family moved away from our east coast roots and in the process lost contact with some of the family. I love the west and so I do not regret the cross country move.

New Mexico Ghost Towns

2009-04-27T11:30:00.000-07:00

This last weekend, I went to New Mexico to visit a couple of new places, a couple of places I've been before, and to take a few photographs.

Friday, April 24th, I drove to the ghost town of Lake Valley, which is north of Deming, NM on route 27. This town started when there was a large silver discovery and people came to mine the silver. The silver soon ran out and then they mined manganese. The town has a few old houses, an old gas station, and a schoolhouse that doubled as the town hall. The place is owned by the Bureau of Land Management and there is a caretaker on site. The school house has been restored and is open 10AM to 4 PM Thursday-Monday. I got there about 3 PM and went in to see and photograph the schoolhouse which is the only building you can go inside of, and then spent a couple of hours wandering around photographing buildings, mine workings, water tanks and old cars. Near sunset, I went over to the Lake Valley cemetery and took a few photographs. Here is a photo of the townsite as seen from the cemetery which is on a nearby hill:

I spent that night in the town of Elephant Butte which is a suburb of Truth or Consequences, NM. The next day I took the back roads from TorC down to Las Cruces. This route took me through agricultural areas and to a couple of state parks. It was a pleasant drive. From Las Cruces, I drove to Deming and then up past City of Rocks to the Mimbres valley. I drove up the valley to the Lake Roberts area and then to Silver City.

The next morning I drove down to Lordsburg, NM to take some photos, met and talked to three different folks about the history of Lordsburg and what it is like to live there. Then I drove south of town to the ghost town of Shakespeare where they were having their "living history" day which include re-enactments of shoot-outs and firing a cannon and a number of folks dressed up in period clothes. I photographed various things including a shoot-out that was billed in the newspapers of the time as "Four Dead in Five Minutes". Here is a photo of a guy firing a revolver during the gun fight:

A couple of local explorations

2009-04-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

This last Saturday, April 11 was a stormy day. After I finished doing my taxes (yes, I procrastinate!) I decided to wonder down to San Xavier to see how far they've gotten with the restoration and to take a couple of photos with nice clouds in the background and perhaps a rainbow. I saw a rainbow on the way down but did not catch one over the mission. The west tower of the church has been restored, the east tower needs restoration. The work done so far is beautifully done as can be seen in this photo:

I took a few photos and am happy with a few of them.

The next day, Easter, I decided to drive up to Globe to see what I could find to photograph. I figured there would still be some clouds around and Globe-Miami is on US 60 so perhaps there would be some vintage motel signs similar the the ones I found along the same road near Wickenburg last week. I had also read that they now have a steam train in Globe that takes riders out the the Apache Casino so I thought I'd check that out. It was an interesting outing, they weren't running the steam engine on the train because it was being fixed but I did see the train and the steam engine. I wondered around the area and took a few photos, I thought this image was a good juxtaposition of the image of Geronimo and the sign for the El Ray Motel:

Following the train tracks, Gila Bend to Prescott

2009-04-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

This last weekend, I had planned a trip to Flagstaff for a meeting at the USGS. However, when I talked to the folks up there last week they said they weren't ready for a meeting yet. Bummer! I always enjoy visiting Flagstaff and this was a chance to make the trip into a photo trip. I decided to do part of the trip anyway so on Saturday, I drove up to Wickenburg by way of Gila Bend to avoid Phoenix and then on Sunday drove from there up to Prescott and then around through Payson and home, avoiding Phoenix again! Much of the trip I was following the railroad, I picked it up in Salome, AZ and followed it to as far as Skull Valley, AZ. Generally, the landscape was non-spectacular, just desert and small hills and mountains. What I found interesting were the small towns along the way that probably grew because of the railroad but are now shrinking because the train no longer stops and the interstate highways have taken most of the automobile traffic. Each small town has a character of its own, very few chain stores to be found. I particularly enjoyed some of the old motel signs, many of which are in disrepair but are still charming. I found this motel in Aguila, AZ, I think some of the neon is still working:

Driving up old highway 80 from Gila Bend to Hassayampa, I found that Phoenix is starting to leak out west of highway 85. This is really the town of Buckeye, but I consider it to be the western edge of the human infestation called Phoenix. I found this development getting started which has a water skiing lake surrounded by lots for sale. I talked to an owner of one of the lots and it turns out he is from California and bought his lot so he can build a second home to get away from the crowds and go water skiing. Of course, he is just becoming part of the same problem in Arizona! Here is the sign for the place:

Along the way north of Cotton Center, where Komatke road joins the highway, I crossed the Gila river and was glad to see water in the river. There is a dam there and pumps that take water out of the river for the various wheat and cotton fields that need to be irrigated. This is also a favorite spot for quite a few water foul and a few fishermen. I also crossed the Hassayampa river a couple of times but never saw any water in it. Here are some herons at the Gila dam:

More about this trip in my next blog post.

The San Rafael Valley and using old photo equipment.

2009-03-31T21:39:00.001-07:00

I went and photographed last Friday down near Harshaw, a ghost town east of Patagonia, Arizona. There is an old cemetery, a couple of old buildings and a number of sycamore trees in the area. Nearby is the San Rafael Valley and I got up there near sunset and took a couple of images. This one shows the grassland from a wide angle perspective.

Last week I was reading about lens adapters for using old manual lenses on modern auto-focus digital camera bodies. I still have the Pentax equipment I inherited from my father so I ordered an adapter to allow me to mount M42 screw mount lenses on my Canon 40D and 450D. One of the things I have in that old kit is a set of three extension tubes that allow close-up photography. I don't have a set of Canon extension tubes and auto-focus really doesn't help much at high magnification anyway so I've been trying the combination of 450D, extension tubes, and my 28mm f3.5 Super Takumar lens. Here is an example image of a dime. Click on the image to see a bigger version. Its almost like using a microscope.

This coming weekend I'm heading up to Flagstaff (I have to be there Monday for work) so I'll see what I can find to photograph. I'm thinking of trying some stuff in small towns along the way, perhaps even photograph local people, we'll see.

In other news, I'm working on some of my vehicles. I traded my '59 VW panel van to a friend for some help with repairs on my '66 VW microbus. I've also taken the '54 J.C. Higgins bicycle down to the shop to have the rear wheel rebuilt and the bottom bracket replaced.

New bicycle, experiments with camera mount, and 4th Ave.

2009-03-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I traded in my 3-wheel recumbent for a new touring bicycle. I'm planning to ride across Iowa in July with a friend and decided this was a good upgrade for such a trip. I haven't ever had a real touring bike and do enjoy long bicycle trips when I get in shape and have a chance to participate in one. The ride across Iowa is an organized ride called the "Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa" or RAGBRAI.

I decided I'd try to document this event since I enjoy photography so much. Instead of having to stop my bicycle to get my camera out of the bag, I thought it would be best to mount the camera on the bicycle so it would always be at the ready. Another thing that can be done with a bicycle mounted camera is take short video clips while riding. I've come up with a handlebar mount that works fairly well although I'll be working on improvements as I go along. The mount looks like this:

I've posted a video I took yesterday while riding: movie (34 mbytes)

Also yesterday, I went down to 4th Avenue to take a few photographs. They are having the street fair and, since I don't like crowds, I went down at 7 AM to see what might be of interest. I found some of the advertising interesting as well as some of the shop windows with the sun shining into them. I've talked to some of the neighborhood folks in that area and they make quite a bit of money selling beer to visitors. Here is a photograph of one of the beer booths:

Many of the shop widows along the street have security screens or grates across their windows when they are closed. I photographed this dragon behind one of the grates, he looks angry at being imprisoned!

Visit to the Gila River

2009-03-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I visited various places along the Gila River in south eastern Arizona. I went to the Gila Box riparian area and I visited various small towns along the Gila south of Morenci, along highway US 75. There was good flow in the river and I saw a few folks with inflatable rafts and kayaks in the area although, generally, there weren't many people around:

Traveling along route 75 next to the river I found quite a bit of agriculture although I'm not sure what was being grown because it is still very early in the season. I ate breakfast in Duncan on Sunday and got into a conversation with a man who has lived in that small town (pop. 750) all his life (70 years). We talked about floods, big towns, small towns, the weather, life in Duncan, etc. In Shelton, Arizona I met a couple of dogs who were quite friendly but smelled of skunk! Here is a photo of them taken with a wide angle lens:

In a couple of weeks, I'll be heading up to Flagstaff to work with some folks at the USGS for a day or two. I'll plan to go up early and try some photography in some of the small towns in the area (perhaps).

Brief update

2009-03-10T13:52:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm not a very good blogger! I'll try to do a bit better than one post every 14 months!

I've been doing quite a bit of photography lately, I was in Alaska last September and Yosemite a couple of weeks ago. I have been playing around lately with some new ideas and some new equipment. For example, when I was in Yosemite, I photographed an Incense Cedar tree and thought it would look good in low contrast black and white. The result was this:

I think I'll try this sort of low contrast shot with lots of fine detail more often, perhaps with other kinds of trees around southern Arizona. I might try using a telephoto lens to compress space so I can get a lot of trees in one shot.

Another thing that has been fun is my ultra wide angle lens I bought for my camera (Sigma 10-20mm). The distortion and wide field effects look amazing sometimes. Here is a photo I took in downtown Tucson on Sunday of a handrail for a series of steps:

Click on the pictures to see full size versions. I'll try to do some experiments this weekend.....

Canada

2007-12-29T16:52:00.000-08:00

I spent this last week in Canada; Ontario in particular; visiting my friend Janice. I really enjoyed myself because I felt like I was home for the holidays. Not only is Janice a good enough friend that I feel she is part of my family, but I was visiting places where my mother grew up and eating food my mother used to make for the holidays when I was young. We made butter tarts and ate plum pudding at a nice little restaurant.

People in Tucson will find it hard to believe, but I very much enjoyed the snow and cold weather in Ontario. To me, a house with Christmas lights and a warm glow in the window looks more cozy in the snow than in the bright sunshine surrounded by desert.

I also enjoyed seeing the free public ice skating rinks in downtown Toronto, too bad every city can't have these! Toronto also has an underground city below the streets that is full of stores and allows people to get around and shop without facing the cold and ice.

I learned about life in the early nineteenth century when I visited Dundern Castle in Hamilton. Built in the early 1830s over the remains of some War of 1812 structures, it is restored and open to the public as a museum.

Blog Name

2007-12-18T11:25:00.000-08:00

When I was a freshman or sophomore in college, I dreamt of my future as a physicist and what sort of goals I should set for myself. I was interested in exploring the universe having spent many years reading science fiction books so one rather ambitious goal I set for myself was to invent a method for faster-than-light travel. During one of many conversations with some of my friends about this and other topics, one of my friends, probably Walter Kubilius or Marc Valdez, suggested the name "Lytle Drive" for my future space ship propulsion system. I always liked the sound of that! ;-)

On Photography, Part 1

2007-12-17T20:45:00.000-08:00

When I was about 12 years old my father helped me start developing and printing some of my own photographs. I had been watching and helping him with black & white printing since an early age but only started taking my own photographs in junior high and high school. I started photographing with my father's cameras, his old Leica rangefinders and later his Pentax single lens reflex camera. Sometime in high school my brother gave me a used Kodak Retina fixed lens camera and I began photographing without supervision. I always enjoyed seeing the image come up in the developer when printing.

In those early days, I photographed things I was interested in, like motocross racing and cave exploring. In college, as an undergraduate, I photographed lots of things, friends, the college campus, road trips, etc. Most of these photos I consider snapshots. In graduate school I finally had enough money to buy my first single lens reflex 35mm camera, a Nikon FM with a 50mm lens. I took a few photographs of lightning at night with that camera mounted on a tripod and was pleased with the results. I later sold the Nikon to a friend because of financial problems. During this time I mostly shot color slide film and color print film and very little black and white.

It wasn't until I had joined the workforce for a few years and had begun going on hiking expeditions and doing some rock climbing that I realized that the photos I was taking with my little camera weren't doing justice to the grand vistas I was seeing in places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Around 1987 or so, I saw the images of one of my co-workers hanging in the lobby of the building we worked in. These were large, framed, hand printed, black and white photographs that really captured the feeling of the mountains where they were taken. That was when I decided that I needed to learn to do this sort of photography so my travel pictures would really communicate the emotions I was experiencing when standing in some of the grand places I was visiting. Thus began my journey and education as a photographer and I still derive great pleasure from photographic trips as well as processing the results and making web pages and prints.

In part 2, I'll discuss what I've been doing photographically for the last 20 years.

Initial Thoughts

2007-12-17T10:56:00.001-08:00

This is my first blog. I'm sure lots of blogs start like this! I'm using this as an open journal to save my thoughts and share them with others. It is also an experiment in psychology, my personal psychology. How will keeping a blog effect the way I think about the world, how I set goals, and how I communicate?

This blog will be about science, photography, gadgets, myself, and a little politics, both local and global, thrown in for good measure. This first blog entry is being entered on my iPod touch, which I think of as both a micro-laptop and a lot of fun!