Apropos nothing in the text, just a pretty spot in Wyoming*

R forwarded me this story from MSNBC about the degradation of air quality in rural Wyoming as a result of the rapidly spawning gas industry during the last few years. Nothing we couldn't have predicted.

Since 2003, I've watched how the BLM's "oversight" and the gas industry exploitation have impacted Sublette County, everything from dangerous meth-high equipment drivers on the highway to ripping up miles of virgin landscape to lay pipelines. The industry spokespeople are asking for trust and cooperation to solve these air quality problems. Have they earned that trust? Sublette County should have seen this coming. In fact, the county commissioner called the ex-governor a "whore for the industry" back in 2003. Them's fighting words. I hope the good folks of Sublette County has it in them to fight hard, because the Wind Rivers are some of the last great country left.

Meanwhile, the BLM is reviewing a proposal to allow 4,000 more rigs in the field. The formerly gorgeous winter landscape of the Wind River basin could end up like the Wasatch Front on a bad inversion day, and we'll have only ourselves to blame.

*Granite Creek Falls in the Bridger-Teton National Forest

Balanced Rock sunset

The real problem with the Moab Photo Symposium was that there simply was not enough time to do everything. I told the organizer, Bruce Hucko, that I wanted an "E" ticket to the party since I'd not been before, and even then, I missed out on way too much. I could have happily gone to every workshop, photographed at every sunrise and sunset.

The theme was "Bodies of Work, Bodies at Work" and we saw some fascinating projects- I especially enjoyed learning about Chris Conrad's night photography and ViviAnn Rose's hand-colored nudes. David Hiser, Jeff Foott and Tom Till gave three very different presentations on the life of a world-traveling photographer; Foott's talk illustrated the kinds of photos needed to illustrate an editorial piece, which was deeply interesting as I envision telling the Highway 89 story. It was interesting to hear three old-school film guys talk about their digital experiences, especially Till, who has been enjoying shooting with a DSLR after years of lugging around a 4x5 camera. Rory Tyler showed us petroglyphs he discovered-rarely do I meet someone with such a depth of passion for any topic as Rory has for rock art, not just of the southwest, but world-wide. Steve Traut made us all laugh, and I hope to see his work in Grand Junction sometime. I didn't get a chance to talk to Adriel Heisey until Sunday, which was a mistake because we have a lot of territory to discuss. His aerial work is tops. And I'm still pondering Brian Parkin's thoughts on working with galleries and how it applies to my work.

So I didn't get to go on up for any dawn shoots. The first day I was still practicing the first ten minutes of my talk; then I was scouting for my workshop. Not enough time! That's why I've already agreed to go back next year. Hope to see you there.

Dancers from Montezuma Creek Elementary School

The Festival of Cultures was going on in Moab last weekend at the same time as the Photo Symposium, but I did get out at the lunch break to see the Navajo dancers from Montezuma Creek Elementary School. So very cute. This is one of my favorite photos from their performance. I like how the feet, halfway off the edge of the stage, gives the sense of how excited they were to be performing.

Fleeting spring colors

Monthly progress report on those New Year's resolutions.

1. Get in shape Yet more excuses.
2. Baseline mammogram done, with a follow-up repeat and an ultrasound. They now have lots of pictures on file for next year's comparison. Apparently, being called back for a second look is very common, enough so that there is scientific literature on the medical consequences of so many healthy women being exposed to the stress of a call-back.
3. Find a publisher More queries are out right now. Waiting is hard.
4. Learn to ride a horse I met Barney. Fran put me in the saddle, and led him around the corral so I could see the world from the saddle. I'm signed up for a workshop on gentling wild horses next week. I need to find a place for lessons on pre-gentled horses.
5. Take more salsa lessons Done, but more of more would be (still) fun.
6. Install CS3 done.
7. Establish a systematic keywording workflow I updated this project last week. Ready to move this task to a higher priority, now that I'm back from Moab.
8. Launch snappola.com I'm exploring an Internet shopping cart right now.
9. Shoot the wedding dress remix still waiting for the snow to melt. Have a volunteer model for the project.
10. Make a Turducken Oh Millie?

Three completed, substantial progress on four more. And I went for a walk today. Progress, not perfection, is our motto. The year is only one third over.

Three separate shots with filtration as labeled, camera mounted firmly on tripod (click image to enlarge)

Two early morning trips to Temple Square, including our first "impromptu" Photowalk (yay Harley and Aaron for braving the alarm clock) have yielded some interesting data, if not pictures. Actually, some fine photos were made, but today's images belong more in the data category.

I've used the Cokin 840 Diffuser filter in the past as a remixing layer with some success (It's one layer in this Temple Square image, for example). In putting together this weekend's workshop for the Moab Photo Symposium, I acquired several new tricks for my bag, including one of Cokin's Pastel 087 filters. My group will be doing a Photowalk-esque walkabout during the workshop, and won't lack for photographic esoterica to experiment with.

The pictures on Cokin's site and printed materials don't real serve to show how different these two filters really are. The plain version was shot at f8.0 1/320th sec at ISO200, both of the filtered images at 1/200th sec. I'm not sure pastel is the right word for the 087 filter. It's more like "smear the light around and kill the contrast," which probably wouldn't translate to French very well. I made some images in the shade. Here the differences aren't nearly as striking.

Two separate shots with filtration as labeled, camera mounted firmly on tripod (click image to enlarge)

I haven't had a chance yet to see how the 087 works in night scenes. I'm usually not a fan of heavily diffused portraiture, but I think I'll do the experiment. I am always much happier working with data than lore.

A fun part of these effects is that the gear is (relatively) inexpensive and lightweight. You can get the basics at any decent camera shop. The retail shops aren't likely to have everything in the Cokin catalog; I bought some of the more obscure ones from the Filter Connection. I've even outfitted my Canon G9 with a LensMate filter mount, which can mount a Cokin filter holder. Now I don't have to hold the filters up to the lens, which is not exactly admirable technique, though it did work in a pinch.

The Pastel 2 087 has earned a spot in my camera bag, although it must keep company with two more new acquisitions I'll post about soon. What's your most unusual filter/gear in yours?

Ducky, Blue & yellow #2

I predicted that the Lightroom project would devolve into a horrendous sequence of upgrade mission-creep, and I was right. It's not Adobe's fault, by any means, but the getting ready to start has been incredibly time-consuming:

• Order the new LaCie Double Triple 1TB storage.
• Consolidate my camera downloads onto the 1TB from the various places I had stowed them while deciding what to buy.
• Discover the 1TB unit will not communicate through its 800 FW port. Ask LaCie to ship replacement first, they ignore/decline, but send SRO promptly.
• Tediously back up the 1TB to some LaCie bricks - 400 FW to USB is very slow.
• Make some DVDs for extra insurance.
• Send 1TB to LaCie.
• Take G5 in for runaway fan, instability, random instances of powering down during processor-heavy activity (read: open ACR file in DNGConverter and Photoshop). Diagnosis is not the fan; the G5 needs a new motherboard and/or logic board. Verify and accelerate daily back-ups while limping along temporarily.
• Copy all the files back to the replacement 1TB from the bricks. More tedium.
• Install LR 1.4.1 upgrade, which has been issued, retracted, reissued during this timeframe. Upgrade went smoothly.
• Create new catalog. Trivial.
• Import my starting list of keywords from Excel-generated tab-delimited list. I listed about 400 keywords before I decided that I had a workable structure. At this point, I think it will be easier to add new ones in Lightroom. Uploading keywords was straightforward.*
• Relabel the top-level keyword hierarchy words to begin with special characters for forced sorting.

So there it sits. Between now and Thursday, I probably won't actually do much importing of folders and keywording. Anyway, it might be a good idea to let some early adopters work through any potential kinks in 1.4.1.

In the meantime, as I was doing all the copying between drives and hunting stuff down for the Moab Photo Symposium, I found today's picture.

*For what it might be worth, here is my starting list of keywords in an Excel file. The logic is strictly matched to my own typical mental search pattern. Feedback always welcome, especially in the next few days, before I get fully committed to this list.

Links to previous posts on cataloing my archive with Lightroom: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Tulips at Thanksgiving Point, Lehi, Utah

I shot almost everything at the last Photowalk with either Cokin's Dreams or Pastel filter, sometimes both. For this one I used the Pastel 2 filter, and a very shallow depth of field (3.5). Because of the 20 mph wind, I cranked up the ISO to 400, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/2000 sec. That's stop action even for waving tulips.

A newbie to our Photowalking tribe posted a message advising that we reschedule - I'm glad we didn't. Our group is not about getting the perfect shot, just having fun, and why would I put that off for a week? So the newbie didn't come, but we adopted some other folks that we met, and now we have new friends. And that's why Photowalking Utah is the best dang group of photogs around.

Monica

The Moran Eye Center had a reception last week to honor my guy and one of his colleagues with new endowed professorship ranks. The best part was that R's daughter Monica flew in from El Paso for the party.

Before we went up to the Moran, we did some traditional father/daughter shots, then popped this one off to show Monica's new fantastic new tats. That's more than an SB800 worth of ink there, folks. And she had the big one done in one go. Tough gal with a golden heart.

I was forbidden to bring the gear to the reception, so I have no pics of the two of them leaning against the wall while the chairman described all of R's accomplishments (it was a long part of the talk). Each of them delighting in the other's company, trying not to laugh during the serious parts. He is so proud of the woman she has become, but she's still his baby.

Barney meets the D2X

Fran introduced me to Barney last week. I introduced Barney to the sound of my camera. He is a beautiful beast, though he doesn't show to advantage from this angle. I can see many more images to make with him as he gets to know me.

Impressionist-style spring flowers

The next Utah Photowalk is Saturday at 5 pm. We're meeting at Thanksgiving Point to photograph the tulip festival, should the weather and blossoms cooperate.

I like to assign myself a little project for each Photowalk, and this time, it's to get familiar with some new filters I bought for my workshop at the Moab Photo Symposium, and to collect some more base images for my examples.

Today's image used no filters, just 9 exposures I made while jumping about in one spot. I stacked the images into layers in Photoshop above a black background. Then I used the screen blending mode for each layer to screen, dropping the opacity to 20%. Why a black background? One way to think of the screen mode is as if two slide projectors were pointed at the same black screen; what you see is the blended image; the black background serves as a blank canvas for my watercolor effect.

Hope to see you out at Thanksgiving Point. More details are at our Flickr site.

North Star: Spring Remix

Here's a fun spring makeover - I like the cheerful colors, not at all like the cold autumn day I made the original. How I did it follows:

Bronc rider at North American Indian Days 2007, Browning, Montana

I once read an article (source forgotten, probably Birding) about a teacher preparing her preschoolers for an outing to the local aviary. Long before the field trip, each kid was equipped with a pair of binoculars (two toilet paper tubes taped together and a yarn neckstrap). As the students lay on the floor, she had them practice tracking birds with the binoculars by zipping a tissue-paper bird along a string suspended above the classroom. When the kids got to the aviary, they paid attention to the birds the teacher pointed out to them. Impressive results for zero optical elements in the binoculars and the native focusing ability of four year olds.

If looking through a cardboard tube changes the participatory experience for preschoolers, how does observing events through the viewfinder of my camera impact my own experience of the event itself? This question has been on my mind a lot as I have been collating images for my talk at the Moab Photo Symposium. I didn't need my archives to remind me of the extraordinary experiences my Highway 89 project has afforded me. But at the same time, I wonder what part of the experience of being there I may have missed through the crystal veil of the lens.

Photographing can give me a shot of courage (I forget to be afraid of flying when I'm shooting out the window, even if the pictures are useless) or serve as a convenient prop in an awkward moment (as official family reunion photographer you can escape boring conversations with distant relations). Mostly, the act of photographing has given me the license and spunk to push to the front of the action with brashness that surprises even me.

But the act of photographing has never been neutral to my experience at hand. Framing, composing, creating engages a different set of neurons than just observing. I've written before that I become strangely unverbal while shooting. Even more peculiar, I can stand in the cold for hours and not really feel it until after the gear is put up and I start to get warm, long after R has taken refuge in the truck, which is completely the opposite of our regular patterns, say when birding. If the act of creating impacts this basic brain processing, I can only assume that other parts of the perceptual experiences change. I wouldn't agree that my perception degrades, but it is different than when I set down the camera.

The thing is, I want it all: the photos and the raw, unfiltered experience. Sadly, I haven't perfected my avatar such that I might do two things at once, so I make choices, compromises. Simply training myself to photograph with both eyes open has helped me to stay tune with essence of the total experience. And when I am lucky enough to photograph a singular event (like the Indian Rodeo at North American Indian Days in Browning, Montana), I remind myself take a moment to lower the camera from my eye, to drop the crystal veil. Inhale the experience: smells, sounds, fill all the senses. Engage with my fellow participants, smile, laugh together. Just be present. Breathe. And then back to dance with the Nikon that brung me.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mill Avenue Bridge, Tempe, Arizona

Here we are, the first quarter of 2008 gone. I made a photo or two, like this one at the Mill Avenue Bridges, the original route over the Salt River to reach Phoenix from Tucson (although that is the new bridge. The old bridge carries the east/soutbound traffic). I'm still plodding through my January resolutions, and I need some help with #8 (Snappola). I am looking for a web shopping cart, of which there are about a million options to sort through. Here are my requirements:

1. Installable by a mere mortal (uh, me). I did my own MT installation and upgrades, so I have some skill, but software is not my profession.
2. Decent documentation (see #1)
3. Active user community or reasonable support if I buy a license
4. Does not require customers to create an account. This knocks out about 90% of the ones I've looked at (Zen Cart in particular). I hate having to create an account if I buy something on-line. Why would I inflict that nonsense on my customers?
5. Easy to integrate with MovableType (preferred) or WordPress.
6. Runs on XMission's servers (unix-based)
7. Integrates with PayPal
8. Bonus points integrates with a third-party bulk email service.

As for the rest of my resolutions, I have nothing to cross off the list, but some progress to report along with the usual whinging.

Arena Station glass

Riding UTA's TRAX line for a Photowalking event has to be one of my better ideas - just about the time I got cold (40°F), another train came along and carried the twenty-five or so of us to the next station. We did walk four blocks on this 'walk, from the Temple Square station to the Gallivan Center.

I decided to travel extremely light: one lens, one body; and to get out of my comfort zone, by choosing my 12-24 mm lens. I bought that lens in 2005, because I previsualized this image of the Wells Fargo Building, and needed the wide angle coverage to get the shot. Its classic use is to exaggerate the foreground/background transition, especially for hyperfocal landscapes, and for photojournalistic portraits. Using it effectively in nearly all situations means getting close to the subject. I don't use it as often as I might, so I wanted to spend some play time with it. And to make sure I wouldn't cheat on this self-imposed exercise, I left everything else at home.

Among the many things I like about Photowalking is setting aside a time to do experiments. When we went to the west side, I brought only my new G9; when we did the Christmas lights at Temple Square I stuck with my lensbaby for everything but the group shots.

The wide angle exercise worked well for me, except once when I snatched Bryan's camera out of his hand to get a shot I saw. That wasn't the most stylish approach, although he handed the machine over with aplomb. And that's another great thing about our Photowalking group - everyone is there to have fun, lend a hand, make some new pictures. No stress, no prizes, no drama. Just a lot of laughs and new friends. Next time we might even have snacks.

Thanks to UTA for letting us have our group event on the rails.