🎶Back in the Archives Again🎵

Apologies to Gene Autry, whose signature song (Back in the Saddle Again) I defaced.

I have nearly every digital photo I ever made since 2007, and even a few before, digitized from slides or prints. I thoroughly enjoy honing and refining my editing and enhancing skills, trying to make silk purses from putrid but (hopefully) promising sow’s ears.

(If you think you have seen some of these examples before, I plead advancing-age brain fog syndrome.)

January 7, 2008, Madison, WI, JPEG made with a tiny Coolpix L12. — Photo ©Charles Haacker, Author.

I’ve been shooting vanishingly little new stuff for weeks. This is a tough time of year for me, and frankly, it gets worse every year. Then, living on the U.S. High Plains, we get those huge sags, “plunges” of the Polar Vortex. How do Canadians survive? It caused the lingering Bomb Cyclone that hammered most of the lower 48, killing people by many means but often bitter cold alone. Such “discourages” (/s) one to grab a camera and shoot sparse snow and dead leaves. I hunker and hope for spring.

But I am warm and dry in my Lightroom, sifting through old stuff to find files that seem to have potential, and I am one of those odd ducks who not only don’t mind spending too many hours staring at a 4K monitor, I thrive on it. I often return to old files I have reworked several times. I’ve been careful to preserve an untouched SOOC JPEG to avoid introducing artifacting or other flaws that creep in when you keep reprocessing the same JPEG file. You can get away with it maybe twice, after which it will show.

All the pictures herein have been reworked in 2022 using Adobe and Topaz products. Wherever possible, I have included the untouched original SOOC JPEG for comparison. Clicking on any image enlarges it for detail.

Summer 2006, made with a 35mm Canon T90 on Fujichrome 400, digitized by the lab. — Photo ©Charles Haacker, Author.

The “Pam-Pam”

In 2006 we took a road trip westward to scout the U. of Montana at Missoula. Daphne took her degrees from Colorado Women’s College, long since absorbed by the University of Denver, but the campus is still exactly the same. Daphne was a theater major (pro tip: major in something else) and experienced the only profe$sional summer of her career doing summer stock in this building.

I had strangely opted to shoot slides, which I know are intolerant of exposure error, and I did pretty well except this. I overexposed by at least a full stop. This has the same effect as overexposing a JPEG; the highlights are blown. We ordered a digitized disc, and most of the stuff was okay, except this.

The place meant so much to Daphne that I tried several times to rescue this thing over the years. This latest iteration uses combinations of Lightroom, Photoshop, and Topaz AI filters. Colorization is a new tool from Photoshop, as is the sky, since there was zero detail in the original. I think it’s pretty good. You might not notice anything without comparing it to the original.

Summer 2006, made with a 35mm Canon T90 on Fujichrome 400, digitized by the lab. — Photo ©Charles Haacker, Author.

The Marmot

We camped under canvas (well, Nylon), and along came this curious marmot. I had two overlapping zooms, but there’s no record of which one I used here. I think the marmot froze for a few seconds, so maybe the klunk of the big SLR spooked him. This was the one shot I got.

Exposure seems decent, but all the digitized slides had a magenta cast that I mitigated in Lightroom, plus doing my open-the-shadows-suppress-the-highlights routine. I cropped it and took it into Topaz PHOTO AI, their newest gee-whiz tool that allowed me to denoise it and enlarge it without losing detail. I recommend Topaz, but they are $pendy.

In Photoshop, I added more background and foreground blur following a formula from Anthony Morganti. I enhanced the catchlight in his beady little eye.

August 20, 2010, JPEG, Nikon Coolpix P5000-ƒ/5.8- 21.5mm- 1/263-ISO 64 — All photos ©Charles G. Haacker, Author.

Pioneer Woman with Plow

The Fremont County Pioneer Museum in Lander, Wyoming, may be the oldest museum in the West. Outside is this heroic sculpture of a pioneer woman with a plow. I should have asked (!!) who the sculptor is, the name of the piece, and so on, but I did not, and now I can’t find out! I love the piece. Just look at her beautiful features and the sinuous curve of her body as she works the Plow that Broke the Plains. — quoting myself from my Flickr pages.

I was dismayed at the placement of this piece. There was no good background in any direction. Getting the crossing light I wanted forced me to shoot toward the street. The original clouds were okay, but exposing for the bronze overexposed the clouds to irrecoverability.

Aside from the street, there was the ugly tangle of poles, wires, fences, and so on.

I began as usual in Lightroom, making my routine adjustments, opening shadows, taming highlights, and warming her a little.

Then I invited her into Photoshop. I knew that getting a clean cutout was going to be challenging, but Adobe has recently upgraded many tools to make selections easier and tidier.

This is at least her fourth iteration, and I still see flaws and giveaways, but at least I got rid of that warren of clutter behind her, then took advantage of Photoshop’s relatively new sky replacement feature. The clouds are mine — I have a folder full of “cloud negatives” (as we said in analog days) — and these seemed to provide the best backdrop.

At the four corners of the obelisk are statuary tableaux to the Navy, Infantry, Cavalry, and this one, to the Artillery. These pictures were all made in JPEG in 2011 with a brand-new Nikon Coolpix P7000 — All photos ©Charles G. Haacker, Author.

Lincoln’s cenotaph in the burial room. Abraham and Mary are buried some ten feet below and behind the monument, which is not a sarcophagus.

The bronze prototype casting by Daniel Chester French of his 1920 sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial in the rotunda of Lincoln’s Tomb — Wikipedia — All photos ©Charles G. Haacker, Author.

Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, Springfield, Illinois

Some of you may recall that I pride myself in pushing cameras to do my bidding despite horrified shrieks of, “You can’t do that with that camera!!”

They’re not wrong. My workaround has been and continues to be alchemy, almost entirely in post-processing. It’s a one-two combination of careful exposure plus knowing what can and cannot be done in post. I think the get-it-right-in-the-camera ethos is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. In my experience, every digital capture, JPEG or raw, almost without exception, needs some tweaking.

Visiting Lincoln’s tomb put my then-new Nikon P7000 through its paces. I now fervently wish I’d had the sense to put it in raw (it and its successors were all raw capable, even with minuscule sensors). I grumbled I couldn’t process raw (nonsense!) At least by this time, I was comfortable using my expose-for-the-highlight-develop-for-the-shadow method.

That’s what I did, underexposing into the bright overcast behind the artillery tableaux. I hoped to get some detail in the sky, but nothing worked: I had to replace the sky with storm clouds from my library of cloud “negatives.”

My shot of the cenotaph is faithful to the ambient; appropriately melancholic. The before shot was exposed to retain detail in the frieze; the shadows were then opened in post. The rest of the room looks monochrome for lack of light, just as your eyes see little to no color in low light.

A down-scaled bronze prototype by Daniel Chester French of his 1920 statue in the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., dominates the entrance foyer. The walls of the rotunda are decorated with 16 marble pilasters, which are separated by marble panels. The pilasters symbolize Lincoln and the 15 Presidents who preceded him. The room also contains 36 bronze panels, one for each state at the time of Lincoln’s death. The ceiling is of palladium leaf. — Wikipedia

I didn’t notice then that the P7000 had missed focus on Mr. Lincoln, a common autofocus fault in very dim light. I can’t recall if the P7000 had manual focus, but I doubt it. Topaz Labs’ new Photo AI rescued the picture; Photo AI combines all three of their earlier AI apps; DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI, and Gigapixel AI. I own all four, but it seems clear that Topaz intends to phase out the others in favor of Photo AI as a standalone.

I think I will do another chapter; I have more rescues.

📸As always, thanks for looking in. I sincerely appreciate it! 😊👍