đ¶Back in the Archives Again, Part 2đ”
Again, apologies to Gene Autry, whose signature song (Back in the Saddle Again) I vandalized.
âYou donât take a photograph, you make it.â â Ansel Adams
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 sowâs ears. â From Part One
M/V Presque Isle, Great Lakes Thousand-Footer Ore freighter.
This picture was made from Two Harbors, MN, in August 2015, at long range with a Nikon Coolpix P7800 in raw capture (at long last). Its longest equivalent focal length was 200mm. If you can enlarge the picture, you can see the heat shimmer. She was emerging from fog, âdownboundâ (southwest) for Two Harbors to unload her cargo of taconite pellets.
My late wife and I loved (!) the Great Lakes of the east-central U.S. Our son took his baccalaureate from UM Duluth. We visited many times, driving up from Madison, WI. Lake Michigan is the eastern border of Wisconsin. Lake Superior (Minnesota) is to the north. We became enamored of both lakes and lake boats (freshwater ships are supposed to be called boats, but hardly anyone does).
Since 2015 Iâve reworked this picture maybe a dozen times. The P7800 had a 1/1.7-inch backlit CMOS sensor measuring 7.6mm by 5.7mm, about 04.33 millimeters squared (0.0726 inches squared). I.e. â tiny. About the size of a modern smartphoneâs sensor. Yet, my very long experience with tiny-sensor P&S taught me that their resolution is much better than the critics say.
The handheld exposure was 1/250 @ f/4.0 native ISO 80. This would be an example of doing what you can with the camera you have. I didnât expect much, if anything, but this quote resonates:
âWhat I like about photographs is that they capture a moment thatâs gone forever, impossible to reproduce.â â Karl Lagerfeld
In other words, Take the Picture.
So I did.
I was glad I shot it in raw. The exposure was on the money. The thin sun highlighted the bridge detail at the stern. Had I a longer telephoto, like my Sony FE 70â300mm f/4.5â5.6 G OSS Lens (105â450 equivalent on my compact half-frames), Iâd have a better result, but the little Nikon P-for-Performance series did well for me for years.
I wonât post all the earlier iterations, but I felt a tug whenever I ran across the picture. I kinda sorta liked it okaaaay-ish, butâŠ
Fast-forward from 2015 to late 2022: The post-processing landscape has profoundly changed, engineers leapfrogging themselves to stratospheric peaks of digital derring-do.
The most fantastic thing was Topaz Labs introducing their AI series of apps that eliminated noise, increased sharpness, and allowed for enlargement without loss of detail. This year they added Topaz Photo AI, which combines all three into one awesome app. Along with all my routine processing, that was what I used on Presque Isle. Photoshop contributed a more interesting sky than the dun fog. The clouds are mine from my files.
This bonus shot of another Thousand Footer, M/V American Spirit (American Steamship Company), includes M/V Presque Isle entering the harbor at left while a couple of fishermen hustle along in the foreground.
Full disclosure? The fishermen werenât in that shot. They were in this one:
By the time Presque Isle was where I wanted her, the fisherfolk were gone. Grr.
See, hereâs the thing: I felt lucky to have both boats in the same frame. I loved that the fisherfolk appeared. If this was the only shot I got, itâs kinda sorta okaaaay-ish, buuutâŠ
Requoting the immortal Saint Ansel, âYou donât take a photograph, you make it.â If you know something about his work, you know that tripping the shutter was only the beginning. After processing his negative, the hard work of printing it the way he had previsualized it might take weeks. Then, as he liked to say, âThe negative is the score, and the print is the performance.â And âDodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.â Heâd come back and reprint it to suit his tastes at the time.
If I need to justify what I do, I like to think St. Ansel is in my corner. I look at a photo that I once thought was fine and think, âThis can be better.â
The original picture had the two big lakers nicely positioned, with Presque Isle well separated from American Spirit. Still, I felt the speedboat was needed to complete and balance the composition. I copied the bass boat and its wake and pasted it on its own layer. I used Topaz Photo AI to enable enlargement and repositioned the layer where I wanted. I adjusted color and contrast to match its new surroundings, added a mask, and brushed away everything that wasnât boat and wake. I added some of my storm-cloud skies but throttled it back so it wouldnât dominate. I like to believe that if I didnât tell you, you wouldnât know, but I strive to be ethical and flag every picture I show thatâs not wholly halal.
Someone is bound to comment, âBut is it photography?â I call them photoillustrations. They are photographs, enhanced, and composited. I use only my own pictures, which are photographs. So yes, I think itâs photography.
The Boss, a life-size bronze sculpture in Sheridan, Wyoming, public art.
As I walked out in the streets of Sheridan, As I walked out in Sheridan one day, I spied a rhinocerosâŠ
Wait. WHAT?
Sheridan, Wyoming, has fantastic sculptures on streets all over town. Iâve photographed many, but this big fella (âThe Bossâ) is a standout for being a rhino in a cow town. The picture was made in late June with a Nikon Coolpix P7000 with its itsy-bitsy CCD sensor.
The first two images are straightforward, the flat, muddy SOOC JPEG, then transformed by Lightroom, except everything is sharp, including and intrusively â the background.
Itâs a challenge with tiny-sensor cameras. The smaller the sensor the shorter the lens; the shorter the lens the deeper the depth of field. Smartphones overcome it with computational photography, but anything like background blur (bokeh) is tough to achieve with any tiny point-and-shoot.
But (here he goes again) modern post-processing has the solution: Blur your too-sharp background in post! There are several ways to do this in Adobe, and Iâm confident other apps with layers can do it. Anthony Morganti just published this (new?) technique in his series Photoshop for the Lightroom User. I used it to blur the background behind The Boss.
Buffalo Bill Dam (1910)
Buffalo Bill Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam on the Shoshone River in the U.S. state of Wyoming. It is named after the famous Wild West figure William âBuffalo Billâ Cody. â Wikipedia
I hope against hope that I could somehow get back to Cody, Wyoming, one last time. There is so much to see and do in Cody, yet somehow my bride and I never made it to the overlook of this dam on the Shoshone River. Originally called the Shoshone Dam, it was renamed in 1946 to honor Cody.
We always seemed to hurry along the North Fork Highway to get to one or another destination, but every time we passed the slot where we knew the dam was (itâs not visible from the road), I wanted to stop and take a picture.
It turned out to be a hike to get to this view, as close as I could get. The light was awful; the grey dam blended perfectly into the Pre-Cambrian granite, the brightest part of the scene was the rocks in the background, yet there I wuz. I couldnât not take the picture.
But it was so dark, with no separation between dam and abutments, it became a file-and-forget.
This year I thought I could rescue it. I lightened the dam (maybe not enough), darkened the abutments, and blurred the background, hoping to make the dam stand out more.
đžAs always, thanks for looking in. I sincerely appreciate it! đđ
