Waterfall, Leaf, and Post

I couldn’t think of a lot to write about this time; no computer stuff, no photography as art ponderings, no reports of any big hikes. I did take a quick half day walk to a local woods and took some pics so I thought I’d just post a couple three of them with a little explanation.

I often feel like my photos require explanation. Sort of to answer the question of “what in the world was he thinking when he took that piece of crap”.

I have an idea for a full discussion of the problem of me experiencing the scene first hand while everyone else just sees the photo and the difference that makes in how the photo is viewed. I have to think some more on that first though.

Maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe people don’t think that hard about the meaning of photos. They are just looking for the first impression is it a pretty picture or not reaction. Remember – just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

If you have followed this blog much or look at my web site, you know that this first waterfall photo is pretty standard fare for me. I love to shoot water and I have a difficult time avoiding streams and gullies when I’m walking in the woods. I can hear running water a mile away.

However, I rarely take photos of large waterfalls with a wide lens. I seem to like smaller more intimate falls that may only be a few feet high. I like to be close and study how each small rivulet makes its way over the stones. I like the complexity of the separate streams running here and there around the frame rather than one big gush. I like to play the dark black hollows of the stones off against the bright white of the flowing water.

I took this yellow leaf at the same waterfall. While I was waiting for a long exposure of the fall, I saw this colorful leaf fall from an overhanging tree, land at the top of the fall, and get pushed over the edge by the water. It got stuck part way down with the water flowing over it. I thought it might be a little different angle on the typical “here’s a pretty autumn leaf” type of shot.

I normally like my photos to be sharp and in focus front to back. I rarely ever use any setting other than F22. I’d buy F64 lenses for my camera if I could get them. This leaf is obviously blurry. The water flowing over it made a mist effect at the long exposure time and it made some parts of the leaf move (like the upper right point”). I like it anyway. I don’t know why for sure. It is kind of different at least.

This last one is the top of a post along the access road to the woods. I saw it on my way back to my car. It was early afternoon the sun had come out and it was shining at a nice angle. I found it interesting because of the moss growing on the top and the green stuff blending with the purple-ish color of the weathered wood down the sides. There were some gouges in the side made by who knows what that gave it some more character.

I just liked the colors and the textures. I tried a bunch of different angles to try and convey what I liked about it. I settled on this one. Maybe it’s not the one you would have picked, but that’s what makes photography more than just a literal recording system. People see things differently – I hope.

MDW 

Autumn in the Woods (sort of)

Well here it is October and the fall colors here in the western Finger Lakes region are spotty at best. Another dry summer combined with an Autumn that has seen too much warm weather (predicted to be near 80F tomorrow!) and too many overcast days has taken its toll. There are pockets of color – a group of maples standing together in a clearing decked out it orange, red, yellow and green – but overall the leaves are either still green or they have turned brown and fallen. I think this is like the third year in a row that this has happened.

Still the woods is the woods and it is great to be outdoors. I went for a bit of a walk in a local state reforestation area the other day. It was windy in the morning and I couldn’t help breaking off the main access road to wander deep in among the trees. The sound of the wind and the leaves fluttering down around me was very relaxing.

I cut across the hillside following the terrain over wooded knolls and then down into dense valleys and then up again. I got a good workout that way. Eventually I plunked myself down on a big rock in the bottom of a ravine and took a break for lunch and to spend some time listening and watching.

The trees all around were the main attraction. Goaded by the wind they woke from their usual quiet reverie and danced, swayed, and sang. Their drying autumn hands hiss and crinkle as they scrape ceaselessly together.

Against this backdrop there is a rhythmic creaking and groaning. Sometimes limbs grow too close together or maybe one tree looses its footing and leans on another for support. Where wood meets wood a kind of bow and string deal develops. The wind makes the trees sway and the wood slides back and forth. The tones might be high for small pairs of branches or it might be a deep groaning like the timbers of an old sailing ship where two massive trunks collide.

Acorns fall from tall oaks. Dislodged from their precarious roosts they rap from limb to limb on their long free fall until they finish with a quiet plop into a nearby pool of water.

Dry leaves follow the acorns at a more leisurely rate. They waft up and down back and forth in the breeze and land atop their fallen brethren with a soft pffft.

Crickets sing. Small animals scurry through the fallen leaves searching for food that the trees toss down for them. Among the branches small birds pipe in a high treble while away up the hillside grouse drum out a bass line.

A grey squirrel came out to hang from a branch and eye me warily. As I remained still and didn’t seem to be a threat he went back to collecting acorns. Amid all the noise and activity a dark butterfly passed silently down the ravine following a crazy zig zag path that only it could see.

It’s nice to just sit quietly sometimes. You become a part of the woods instead of just a noisy lumbering intruder.

MDW

Color Management – IV

OK, let’s try to wrap up this up and get back to some hiking and what not.

I was just about to make a print when I stopped last time. As I said, I generally use Paint Shop Pro XI for editing and printing (I can’t even begin to justify the cost of Photoshop for what little editing I do to my images). The color management settings in PSP let you set things up so that what I see on the screen is close to what I will get when I print it out.

The settings in PSP do not actually affect the printing process. This fact is not well documented and took me a while to realize. The printer driver is going to handle everything related to printing. PSP just passes the file off. That means that you need to be careful to choose the same printer color profile in PSP and in the printer driver.

If you choose the standard printer profile that comes with the Epson printer in the PSP color management dialog, then you should use the standard printer settings in the printer driver. On the main tab of the printing preferences for my R1800 I check “Color Controls” and choose “Epson Standard” in the color mode drop down. I usually do not make any other changes except to select the correct paper type. The output is pretty darn good.

If we want to get tricky we can download a profile for the specific paper that we’ll be using from its manufacturer. Since I’m using Moab paper I pulled down the paper profiles for the R1800 printer. I select that profile in my PSP color management. In the printer driver, I check “ICM” under color management and set the ICM Mode to “Driver ICM (advanced)”. On the advanced page I choose either Adobe RGB or sRGB (the same as my color working space in PSP) as the input profile. I choose Perceptual as the intent. I choose the paper profile as the printer profile. I think the output is better than using the standard settings, but you gotta look real close so the hassle may not always be worth it.

So I’ve got my workflow for printing down pretty well. My prints look like my screen - pretty much. Remember that a screen is shining light into your eyes while a print is using reflected light – two completely different media. Ain’t no way they are ever going to look EXACTLY the same.

Now what about posting the image to the web for viewing? This is a whole other animal. Sometimes images posted on the web look way different depending on what machine you view them on. I personally find this very annoying.

I can never completely control how every viewer sees my images. You may use a CRT or you may use an LCD – I think LCDs show more contrast. You may like your monitor very bright or very dim – too bright and the whites might blow out, too dark and shadow detail is lost. You might not have the colors tuned too well and white becomes blue and blue purple.

On the other hand there are a few things that I can do to give my image the best chance. I’ve ignored this stuff up until recently and I’ve paid for it with some really uneven image quality.

One source of confusion for Windows users like me is that you can go to the properties of the desktop and assign color profiles to the monitor. I naively assumed that this meant something and that anything that I brought up on my monitor (including web pages with pictures on them) would be color managed for optimal viewing. Forget about it!

As far as I can tell the only reason to add color profiles to devices in Windows is so they will show up as choices in drop down boxes in applications. It doesn’t do squat for viewing images.

So when I would save images for display on my web site or my blog, I would dutifully embed the color profile that I had been using for editing into the files. I would put them on the web assuming that everybody’s computer would see the profile and adjust the colors accordingly. In reality the vast majority of visitor’s computers were ignoring the embedded profile and falling back to sRGB as a least common denominator thing.

This was OK as long as I was using sRGB as my color space. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, I decided to get crazy and start using AdobeRGB during editing. When visitor’s view my images now and the browser ignores the embedded AdobeRGB, weird color shifts often appear as things are seen through the sRGB lens.

Here is a link to a site that demonstrates the situation. The guy that published it kind of goes ballistic over the issue, but it’s a very good demonstration anyway:

http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html

I have downloaded the Apple Safari web browser for Windows that is mentioned in the article. It is color managed and it indeed handles images as they should be handled. Apple stuff has always been better than Windows for graphics type applications.

Of course because of the incredible market dominance of Internet Explorer, it would be wise, as this guy Ballard suggests, to always convert images to sRGB before posting to the web. Embedding a profile is optional. It does waste space if everyone is going to default to sRGB anyway, but I personally include the profile just in case there are some nuts out there using color managed browsers and they default to some other profile. So far I have not been that tight on space.

So there you have it. Certainly there is a lot more to color management than what I have presented. That’s what makes it such a pain in the butt to deal with. You have to watch it all the time and any time you change a device in the chain, you have to be sure it plays well with the other kids.

MDW