I typically print my photos on Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300 paper which has a slightly textured matte surface. The 300gsm is nice and heavy in your hand, the texture feels rich and “fabric-ey”, and it lays flat before and after printing – no curling or waving. However, the Entrada is not really designed for rough handling. The soft open surface can pick up oil from fingers and is relatively easy to scratch and dent. It is best to put the prints under glass soon after printing.

This week I needed something a little different. The Wayne County Council for the Arts is having a show of photos taken within our county. All entries need to be submitted mounted and unframed. I decided to submit some photos, but I didn’t know how the prints would be handled or stored or presented once I turned them in, so I thought I had better use a glossy paper that would better resist smudges and scratching. The glossy would also look better since matte prints not under glass can sometimes look a little flat.  Plus I was planning to go black and white which I like best on a gloss type surface in order to have the look and feel of traditional wet process prints.

Usually I would order something like this through the Internet, but I didn’t feel like waiting for shipping so I needed to find a local supplier. I stopped by my local art supply shop to pick up some photo mounting adhesive and some board (permanent mounting is also something I don’t usually do). This gave me another idea. What if I printed on matte paper and then applied a gloss finish over the top?

I had heard of people doing this, but I never saw the point since I always frame my prints. So I picked up a can of glossy Krylon “Preserve It!” digital photo protectant and headed home to try it out. Of course the can warned me about flammable harmful vapors, but I figured how bad could it be?

The stuff worked great at putting a glossy surface over my prints. It was an interesting effect – a matte textured surface with a glossy sheen. Unfortunately the smell was over powering. I sprayed two roughly 8×10 prints out in my garage – not the cleanest environment, but well ventilated. After letting the prints dry for 15 minutes or so, I brought them inside. Holy Cow! In no time I could not stand to be in my office. I opened the window and closed the door in a vain attempt to keep the fumes out of the rest of the house. After a couple of hours I could not take it anymore. The prints had to go back out to the garage. It took all afternoon to air out my office to the point it was habitable again and I could still smell it the next day because just laying the prints on my desk caused the odor to impregnate the wood! After several days in the garage the prints still reeked so I threw them away.

Back to the drawing board – looks like real honest to goodness glossy paper is the way to go. I decided to head over to Booksmart Studio to see what paper they had on hand. Booksmart specializes in high end art book type printing, but they also sell stuff for photo printing and even carry a line of inkjet printable metal for those adventurous types.

They several brands of paper; Canson, Innova, Lumijet, etc., and a large selection of Hahnemühle. I always wanted to try Hahnemühle, but it is expensive and I got used to the Moab so I just never bothered. One nice thing at Booksmart is that they have sample prints on dozens of different papers so you can spread them all out on the counter and compare them. I messed around trying to decide on the right combination of print quality, texture, and gloss for about twenty minutes. I finally decided on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl 320gsm.

This is a cotton based paper with no optical brighteners and a gloss coating with a little bit of a dimpling texture that gives it a sparkle when held at the right angle to the light. Although there are no brighteners, the white is still a little brighter than the Entrada Natural. I like how deep and dark the blacks become and the warm grey lighter tones in black and white photos. I have not printed much color on it yet, but so far it seems to need the saturation boosted a little in order to match the colors of the Entrada. There is a slight curve toward the coated side, but nothing serious. It feels good, it looks good, and it seems to take handling very well.

So I fiddled around a bit until I got it to look the way I wanted it and then I printed my photos. I sprayed the back of the prints with 3M Photo Mount Adhesive. I did the spraying in the garage again, but the odor was nothing like the preservative. Once the prints dried a couple of minutes, I took them inside and mounted them on foam board using a hard rubber roller to press them down. Presto! – mounted unframed prints.

I could enter 3 photos and had planned to use one of a canal lock at night, one of a barn with vines growing over it, and one of some bolts in a local railroad tower. After I got them all printed and mounted, I noticed that the entries had to be all taken within the last 5 months. The barn and the canal lock were taken back in January so they were out. I ended up just using three bolt photos; two of which I have included in this post.

Oh well.

MDW

I’m not a big “gear head” when it comes to camera equipment. Oh, I know what’s what and I keep up on new developments, but when I meet another photographer I mostly like to talk about shooting styles and subject matter and philosophy rather than the latest sensor technology. On the other hand I did just get a slew of new equipment so I figure I better burn at least one post on it.

Those brave souls that have been following my last few posts know that I lost all my camera equipment while on a trip to Costa Rica. Thank goodness for home owners insurance which covered the loss – monetarily at least. I still really miss a lot of my old equipment that I collected over the years; much of which is no longer manufactured.

So let’s see, I needed a new camera and some new lenses and a new backpack and new filters and new memory cards – just about everything. I even lost a pin hole lens that I made myself out of an old camera body lens cap and some tin foil. Since I lost the camera AND the lenses I had the opportunity to move away from Nikon to another brand. I narrowed it down to Canon, Nikon, and Sony. In the end I went with Nikon again. Nothing against the other brands – it was a close call and really I think I could have gone with any of them based on the specs.

Staying with Nikon was again more of a stylistic choice for me than a technical choice. I’ve used Canon before, but Sony was a bit of a flyer. I wish I would have had the opportunity to try them all out for a while and then decide, but no chance of that so I had to go with Internet reviews and gut feelings. From all that I read and from viewing images taken with each brand in various models, I just felt that Nikon was the best fit for my method of shooting and the look of the images most closely matched the look I’m going for these days. I can’t really explain it – sorry.

So I have upgraded from a Nikon D200 to a D300. I know the D300S is out, but the major difference looked to me to be just the addition of video which I think is a stupid feature to have on a still camera and I’m happier without it gunking up the works. The D300 looks and handles a lot like the D200. It is only different enough to be really annoying.

The biggest hassle is that the buttons on the back have moved. The top button next to the video screen used to be for reviewing photos and the second down was the menu. The 300 has more features and a bigger screen so the review button has moved up and to the left away from the screen and now the top button is the menu. I have taken a couple hundred photos with the new camera and I am constantly bringing up the menu when I want to review my images. Maybe in a couple hundred more I’ll be retrained.

The D300 gives me two more megapixels which is always nice. The image noise seems to be less too which is also nice. The body is solid and weather proof just like the 200 (a must have when working in the outdoors). The bigger review screen is good, bigger is always better, but it seems a little too bright. I have it adjusted down as far as it will go and I still think it is too bright. It would be fantastic if someone would invent a screen that would adjust itself based on ambient lighting – brighter in the sunshine and dimmer in the shade.

I have yet to really get the hang of the thing so that my images finish in the same zone that I’m used to. The histogram is a little different, the exposure latitude seems a little wider, the preview screen tends to blow out my highlights, etc. I know I should not be using the preview screen to make decisions about contrast and exposure, but it is so hard not to be swayed by it when it is right in front of my face. Eventually I’ll get used to what the histogram and what the screen should look like when the image is the way I like it – it’s just going to take some time. The two photos on this post are from the new system.

Besides a new camera I had to get new lenses. My old ones were ones that I saved from my film camera days. They were completely manual. No CPUs and no auto focus motors. They were simple tubes with glass in them – lightweight and compact. The new lenses are specifically made for digital cameras and with the inclusion of focus motors (that I never use) and digital electronics, they are huge and heavy. My main lens now is a Tamron AF 28-75 F/2.8 zoom. This thing weighs 18oz! When I took it out on a hike the first time I could not shoot portrait from my tripod because the weight of the lens would pull the camera down no matter how much I tightened the mounting screw.

Back at home I took a piece of copper plate that I had left over from another project and cut a hunk off. I hammered it into a Z shape and drilled a hole in the middle. One leg of the Z hooks over the edge of the tripod head,  it passes under the camera, and then the other leg hooks over the back edge of the camera. Now I can turn the camera sideways without it pivoting around the mounting screw.

Another change in the lens department is the lack of an aperture ring. My old lenses had a physical ring that turned to set the F-stop. The new lenses rely on the camera. The D300 has a wheel on the front under the shutter release. Turning the wheel sets the aperture on the lens. This was a bit annoying at first, but I’m getting used to it. I was very worried that the electronics were going to force me into either aperture priority or shutter priority – happily I can still work everything manually.

Another change that is making it difficult to get the hang of the new system is that Nikon changed the raw (NEF) file format between the 200 and the 300. So my Paint Shop Pro XI photo editing software will no longer read them. I decided to upgrade to version X2 (shouldn’t that be XII?) which will open the new NEF files. I should not have bothered with the upgrade – the software itself has almost no upgraded abilities in the areas I use and although it opens the D300 raw files, they are unusable once loaded. Here’s why.

Nikon has come out with something called the Picture Control System. I find this a really crappy and wholly unnecessary bit if fluff added just to keep the programmers busy and to sell new software. The D200 had a menu where you could set modes like standard or vivid which would shade the images a little toward more contrast or more saturation or whatever. That was it. You set the setting and forgot about it. The resulting raw file was just a file.

Now we have a thing called a picture control where one can set the same basic stuff (standard, neutral, vivid, monochrome) only the settings are somehow separate from the actual image file so that according to the manual one can “share image processing settings among compatible devices and software”. Great. On top of all the color profile crap flying around let’s add another layer of redundant and proprietary complexity so that we can really screw things up!

It would appear that Paint Shop is not a “compatible” piece of software and misses out on the picture control settings. All the raw files opened with it are blown out beyond recovery. The histograms are shoved way way way to the right. I tried creating my own picture controls with all the settings at some sort of neutral position hoping that I could tone done the raw files, but it never helped.

In the end I had to install Nikon’s ViewNX software that came with the camera. I now import the raw files from the camera and then open then in ViewNX. I select all the images and export them to TIFF files. The TIFFs are now in a form that Paint Shop can open and ViewNX has applied the picture control so they look correct. Just what I needed was another step in my workflow. Besides, I could have opened TIFFs in Paint Shop XI and saved fifty bucks on the upgrade. Sheesh.

Finally we come to the new backpack. It is a Lowepro Flipside 400 AW. The flipside deal just means that the main zipper to open the bag is on the side against the wearer’s back rather than on the “face” of the bag. Supposedly this allows one to slip their arms out of the shoulder straps and spin the bag around on the waist strap to the front and get gear out without putting the bag on the ground. Many reviewers swear by this feature. It gives me the willies just thinking about such a maneuver. I ain’t doing it.

My old Lowepro bag used to open from the top. It stood up when on the ground and the top access was quick and easy. I often set up my shots while standing in mud or water or snow or maybe all three and an upright bag only let the bottom get all mucky. The new bag needs to lay down so the entire pack gets wet and muddy. The good thing about the zipper being on the side toward your back is that the wetness doesn’t get on you when you put the pack back on. Unfortunately the face of the pack is a mess. Good thing it is weather proof.

This pack has a tripod holder which my old one didn’t. I like this feature. I used to have to bungee the tripod onto my motorcycle and sometimes it scratched the rear fender or gouged up my seat. Now I can hook the tripod to the pack on my back and avoid all that. When I’m in the woods, I still carry the tripod in my hand – it would be too much trouble to strap it on and off all the time.

That’s about it for first impressions. I’m very fortunate to be able to replace all my lost gear and most of the gripes I have will go away once I get used to how the new stuff works. Time will tell.

MDW

We left off on the last post having arrived at Allegro Papagayo our beach side home for the last three days of our trip. We spent the remains of that afternoon playing with Calvin in the pool and catching some rays. The sun was a welcome change from the clouds and rain of Arenal.

The next morning I was on the beach before sunrise to see what I could see. I walked a mile or more down the beach. The only other people around were a couple of local guys casting nets for fish while their dog chased the small crabs that ran everywhere above the tide.

I photographed some interesting shells. The black sand beach made a perfect background to set off the strange shapes and colors. At one point the beach changed from flat smooth black sand to tumbled sharp black volcanic rocks. For some reason it was at this point that I started to see sea urchins washing in and out with the shifting water. I’m not sure why they were just here and no where else. They rolled and tumbled and slowly waved their spines. I’m no marine biologist so I can’t say anything too specific about them. These were mostly a maroon color with long spines that looked like porcupine quills. The underside had rows of bright blue spots. I could not find a decent photo of one in the internet. Too bad I don’t have my shots to show you.

I headed back toward the hotel and was shooting some flowering trees nearby when I heard someone running up behind me. It turned out to be my son. When I told him about the sea urchins, he of course wanted to see them. The tide was coming in so I was worried that they would be gone by the time we hiked all the way down there again, but we found a few that had not yet been sucked back out to the ocean.

After breakfast, we hit the pool again (my son would have stayed in the pool 24 hours a day if he could have). We found out that the resort offers a day trip where they take you by boat to a local town for some touristy type shopping and what not. Unfortunately it only ran one day a week and this was not that day. I was hankering to see something of the local area – all we had really seen so far were resorts and tourist attractions. So I got the bright idea to rent a car for the day (the rental place is at the hotel). So after lunch we took off for Playas del Coco.

We knew the area pretty well after yesterday’s experience so we had no trouble finding our way around. We rolled into town and parked at the beach. It was a weekend so the place was busy with locals and tourists. There was a soccer game across the street (just to liven things up a bit, a fight broke out among the players toward the end of the game). We played in the water a while (although the beach was not that great). We bought a couple of Copos from a guy with a push cart. Then we decided to walk up the street to hit some shops.

This is where things go bad for my photos. Normally on a family vacation I only take a point and shoot camera to take travel snaps, but this time I brought my SLR and lenses and filters and all that jazz – figuring I needed it in the rain forest and what not. Although I had told myself that I was never to let my camera bag out of my sight, without thinking I threw the bag into the car with our towels and beach bags and stuff, locked the car, and away we went.

When we came back, the car was still locked, but my camera bag with all my equipment in it and my tripod were gone. This was in broad daylight along a public beach in plain view of hundreds of people and within a hundred yards of a police station. I’m figuring someone had been watching us all along and had keys to the car so as not to look like they were breaking in and hit us as soon as we turned the corner of the street. So goodbye all my equipment (both the SLR and the point and shoot were in the bag) and it was the second to last day of our trip so goodbye to just about all the photos of our trip.

Demara stayed with Calvin at the car while Heather and I went over to the police station to make a report. This turned out to be like a scene from an old Bogart movie. It’s hot humid and toward the end of the afternoon. The police station is basically an empty room except for a desk along the back wall. The doors stand open to let in some air and a huge fan sets up a steady breeze across the room. The policeman is dressed in blue shirt and pants with his shirt unbuttoned to expose his white T-shirt. He speaks no English. We try to explain the situation to him. He is not impressed.

He gets up and we follow him out to the street where he spots someone he knows. They talk a while and then the new guy heads off around the corner. We stand around silent for a while. Then the policeman asks about our passports which of course we have left back at the hotel. He’s not happy about that. Soon a new guy shows up who can speak English and is going to act as our interpreter. The policeman starts asking questions (he likes to come back to that passport thing pretty often). His investigation consists of looking up and down the street and then telling us that there really isn’t anything he can do. We refuse to go away so with a sigh he brings us inside to fill out a report. I figure I’m going to need something if I have any hope of getting insurance to cover this loss.

Reluctantly the policeman takes my driver’s license in lieu of a passport and starts to get some papers out of his desk. He has to use carbon paper (actual carbon paper!) to get two copies. The fan threatens to blow the papers off his desk so he staples the sheets together. He methodically fills out the papers with the answers we give to occasional questions. In the meantime our interpreter keeps up a running conversation that eventually leads to a pitch for a time share resort. No wonder he speaks English.

Satisfied that everything is in order, the policeman bangs a couple of official looking stamps onto the forms, hands us one, and waves us out of his office. We hit the street just as dusk is falling. We stand around for a few minutes saying goodbye to our interpreter. He hands us a brochure for his resort before he leaves. So it is back to the hotel.

We pull into the hotel parking lot and realize that we have forgotten to refill the rental’s tank with gas. The nearest gas station is a half hour away back toward town. My wife and son go down to the pool while Heather and I head back out in the dark to get gas. I had heard horror stories about how bad the driving is in Costa Rica, but I didn’t seem to have any trouble. To be sure strict adherence to traffic laws like stopping at stop signs and passing only when safe is not practiced much, but everybody seem to take it in stride without any of the road rage type stuff you see around here. People are easy going down here.

One thing to look out for at night is people walking or riding bicycles along the road. This is how a lot of the population gets around. You must be constantly on the look out for people suddenly appearing in your headlights. Heather became the lookout for this sort of thing while I navigated the roadways - Bike! Swerve. People! Swerve. Dog! Swerve.

The gas station was pretty busy with lines on both sides of the pumps (full service of course). While we waited, I noticed a guy by the door of the station holding a large machine gun. I probably shouldn’t have, but I said something to Heather like “Hey look, a guy with a machine gun!” She made me roll up my window and lock my door.

Now during this whole excursion I had been trying to calculate in my head how much gas was going to cost us. It is sold in litres of course and valued in Colones. I was trying to convert this to how many gallons of gas I thought we would need compared to the few thousand I had left in my wallet. I was afraid we would not have enough to pay for the gas. I really did not want to have them fill up the tank and then not have the money to pay for it thus possibly upsetting machine gun man. So it was time to hunker down with the pump guy. To Heather’s chagrin I happily jumped out of the car and started babbling to the pump guy. I took out my wallet and showed him all my money and bringing to bear my vast knowledge of Spanish, amazingly we came to an understanding – fill it up but don’t go over what I’ve got in my hand. Fortunately the car was very fuel efficient and we got out of there with a few bucks to spare and the guys at the station had a good laugh over the crazy American tourist.

On our last free day, we took a boat ride over to a beach owned by the resort. It might seem odd to go to another beach when one was right outside our room, but this beach had white sand (real or trucked in?) and a snack bar for drinks and lunch. Being a Monday, there were only about eight guests versus three staff so we were waited on hand and foot. The staff brought drinks and fresh fruit to us while we lounged on the beach. We paddled kayaks around and floated in the surf on noodles. We built sand castles and watched monkeys in the trees. We spent most of the day just taking it easy and having fun. That night we shot pool in the club til they turned the lights off on us. Not bad.

Early the next morning we met a new driver to take us to the airport in the town of Liberia to go home. It was a short half hour ride, but another cab ride; another search for an ATM. We were out of cash and since the car rental agreement with our credit card information on it was in the stolen camera bag, we had canceled our one and only credit card. Among other things we needed to be able to pay a $26 per person “leaving the country” fee at the airport.

The airport at Liberia consists of a huge runway that can handle large planes and an assortment of metal buildings that pass for a terminal. There was the fee to be paid, customs forms to fill out, bags to check, etc. Get there way early. Again asking around is the only way to figure out where to go for all these things and even where to get on the plane. There are no ramps to the planes – passengers walk out onto the runway to board. You need to go through the security check point to reach the “gates” (there are only two) in a big open room filled with chairs that opens onto the tarmac. At least there is food and drink available here while you wait.

Our trip home was relatively uneventful except that my car keys were also in the stolen camera bag which meant that when we got back to the Rochester airport, we would not be able to drive home. Sooooo, while in Atlanta we called my cousin who oddly enough was visiting NY from her home in North Carolina and staying at our house. She and her son got our spare keys and met us at the airport at midnight. Hokey smokes.

Anyway, we had a wonderful time and would go back again in a minute if we could afford it (as long as I hang on to my camera bag). Six days were not enough to see even a fraction of all the cool stuff there. Do go if you ever get a chance. Just remember to be flexible.

MDW

Before we went on this trip to Costa Rica, I looked into the money situation – what the local currency is like, the USD exchange rate, where can I get money while in country, etc. Costa Rica uses the Colon. When we left home the exchange was around 518 Colones to the dollar. While we were there the rate went up to something around 580.

Everything I read said that there was no need to change your money; everyone would be happy to take American dollars. This turned out to be mostly true, but personally I always like to use local currency whenever I can when traveling. It eliminates the hassles of doing math in my head to make conversions when items aren’t priced in dollars like when I’m buying a Copo (a concoction of shaved ice, fruit flavoring, and condensed and powdered milk) from a guy with push cart on the street. It also makes me feel a little more “immersed” in the country rather than just staying in my own little American bubble looking out the window as things pass by. I think too that it is appreciated by the locals - I made an effort to meet them on their own terms something along the lines of making an effort to speak the language.

I tried to get Colones before we left – no dice. We contacted several banks in the area and only one could even lay their hands on Colones, but we needed an account there or else forget about it. So we went with a small amount of USD and an ATM card. The idea being that once in country, ATMs are everywhere and you can get both USD and Colones out of them; don’t carry a lot of cash, just get it as you need it.

This was good advice in general. The ATMs worked well and by waiting to exchange money we were able to take advantage of the changes in the exchange rate albeit by accident. The only problem was that ATMs are not always easy to find. Things may be different in more urban areas, but I never saw an ATM that wasn’t inside a bank building – none in businesses and none in the lobbies of the two resorts where we stayed. This meant we needed to get to a bank to get money and without a rental car (if you ever go to Arenal be sure to get a car) that meant we needed a taxi to take us there.

So we got into the country late at night after a long day of travelling and after buying food at airports and tipping drivers and stuff we are down to about $50. The first thing we wanted to do was go to the rain forest so we talked to the guy at the lobby about getting a taxi to the Arenal Volcano National Park. He said it would cost $40 USD for a guy to take us there and then return later in the day to pick us up. No problem, we had $50 so we get the guy to take a detour into town on the way back where we will get more money. Problem, we got to the park entrance and found out that it will cost us $30 to get in. We ended up borrowing the entrance fee off of Roberto, our taxi driver! Sheesh.

The rain forest was fantastic. If you have ever been to one of those butterfly house things where they have a big glass room filled with butterflies and tropical plants (there is a nice one in Ontario near Niagara Falls) then you know sort of what it was like only this was better. Butterflies were everywhere – big ones, small ones, blue ones, green ones, even clear ones. There were lizards and snakes and bright colored grasshoppers. We spotted one brilliant yellow snake curled up on a big leaf and took some close up pictures. When we looked it up it turned out to be an eyelash pit viper – very venomous – fortunately not very aggressive.

The vegetation was very dense. As is my wont, I tried to get off the trail and wander around a bit, but without a machete it was almost impossible so we stuck to the trail. We walked to an old lava flow. I had hoped to see some still flowing lava, but nothing was happening at the moment and they have closed off trails that lead to more active areas higher up since some tourists got killed a few years back.

It is a rain forest so it rained. We got soaked. You just need to understand that is the way it is and not worry about it. It was warm and the sun came out once in a while so it wasn’t all that bad. It is all part of the experience.

We took a side trail that turned out to be longer than we expected so we got back to the parking lot about 40 minutes later than we agreed, but Roberto was there waiting for us. Hey, we owed him money. He drove us into the town of Fortuna to find an ATM. I took out 100,000 Colones – it was difficult to make myself enter such a large number on the key pad. It came out in 5000 Colon bills which at the time was equivalent to a bit over $8 US.

We went back to the resort and hit the pool for what remained of the afternoon. The women caught some sun in between clouds and my son and I played in the pool while hummingbirds whizzed around us. I spotted some monkeys in the trees nearby and we went over to watch them for a while. By six-ish the sun was setting so we headed back to the room to clean up for dinner. We hung all our wet hiking clothes and bathing suits out on the porch to dry – they were still just as wet in the morning because of the incredible humidity. We eventually had to pay for laundry service to get them dry.

If we had known the lay of the land ahead of time – everything is miles away from everything else – we would have rented a car and driven out to a local restaurant, but the resort food wasn’t bad and spending an evening sitting in the open air overlooking the forest wasn’t exactly torture.

After another night of torrential rain we woke up to a grey misty day. We decided it would be a good day to go to a hot springs. We took a taxi over to Baldi Hot Springs. There is another one nearby called Tabacon that is a bit more upscale, but maybe not as “fun”. We bought our day pass at our resort and got a discount. Baldi is a whole hotel/spa/hot springs complex with bunches of pools at various temperatures (anywhere from 96 to 152 F) scattered over the landscaped grounds, swim up bars, and even some very fast water slides. We spent an entire afternoon just sort of lounging about.

On our third day it was time to pack up and head out for a few days on the beach along Golfo de Papagayo on the pacific side. It is a about a six hour drive from Arenal to the Allegro Papagayo resort. Another car ride and another weird travel experience. Our driver this time was Estaban who, like Roberto, spoke very little English, but was happy to shoot the breeze with me anyway using lots of hand waving and what little Spanish I could muster. About 40 minutes into the ride we realized that Calvin had left his backpack containing all his toys and games back at the hotel. So it was “regreso” for us – Estaban didn’t seem to mind.

Bag in hand we headed back out onto the road. We made it all the way through the town of Liberia and were getting close to our destination when Estaban realized that he did not know how to get to our hotel. We stopped at a couple resorts and they directed us to some other resorts; none the right one, I broke out the maps that I had brought with me and started adding my two cents, and Estaban took to stopping anytime we saw anyone near the road and asked for directions. Eventually we found our way to the right place after a nice scenic tour of the area.

We stayed at the Allegro Papagayo, an all inclusive resort on the coast - more pools, swim up bars, and open air dining along with a black sand beach right outside our room and plenty of hot sunshine. The rain forest was great, but it was nice to dry out a bit.

More about that when I wrap things up in the next post and I will tell the sad tale of what happened to all my nice photos.

MDW

When we last left our intrepid travelers they were finally on their way to Costa Rica after a loooooong delay.

We flew from Rochester to NY (JFK) and from there to Atlanta to catch a flight to Costa Rica. Just to add a final dig to the whole deal we were on the runway in line for take-off when the pilot informed us that we were getting out of line and going back to the gate. It seems that a passenger had noticed something dangling from one of the wings and it needed to be checked out by ground crews. Happily it turned out to be just a bit of excess rubber seal that had not been trimmed off. They fixed it up and gave us the A-OK. So it was back in line and we finally hit the air another hour late.

We arrived in San Jose just before mid-night Costa Rica time. (Costa Rica is in the central time zone and they don’t do daylight savings so they are in effect two hours earlier than we are in Rochester.) I can not tell you anything about the San Jose airport. It was just a blur. We filled out all our customs paperwork on the plane, we touched down, the terminal seemed dark and empty except around the knot of people from our flight, some more bag scanning, a customs guy checked our paperwork and quickly banged some stamps on our passports and we were flung out into the parking lot where we were swarmed by tour guides and cabbies. Fortunately we spotted Heather in the crowd (she seemed pretty happy to see us!) and we met up with the guys we had hired ahead of time to take us on a two and a half hour drive into the mountains to reach our hotel at the foot of the Arenal volcano.

Arenal is north of San Jose. Here is a link to a simple map of Costa Rica and here is a link to some information about the volcano on the website of our hotel the Arenal Springs Resort.

We didn’t get to see much of the countryside along the way – only what our bleary eyes could make out in the beam of our headlights as the road twisted and turned up into the mountains. By the time we reached the resort and started to check in, we had been traveling for better than twenty-four hours – lugging bags, killing time in airports, dozing on airplanes – but we had made it. We were finally in Costa Rica at the foot of a volcano surrounded by rain forest!

The rooms at Arenal are not in one building. There are bungalows scattered over the grounds. Guests can walk between the rooms and the main lobby and restaurant or they can take golf cart rides provided by the friendly staff. We walked unless it was raining.

Despite going to bed at like 3AM, I got up a little before 6, threw on some clothes, grabbed by camera bag, and headed out the door.

Tip: Costa Rica is near the equator. If you live closer to the poles like I do, you get used to the seasonal changes in the length of the day. During the winter in Rochester it may be dark by 5 or 5:30 but in the summer, especially with daylight savings time added in, it may stay light until 9 or better. In Costa Rica it is dark by 6:30 ish year round and the sun comes up 12 hours after it goes down.

It had rained off and on through the “night” and it was still overcast with a bit of a mist. The first thing I looked for was the volcano. Well, I could see the lower slopes at least. The peak was shrouded in thick clouds and would actually stay that way all three days we visited. It is the rainy season after all. The next thing I noticed – hummingbirds. There were hummingbirds everywhere you looked – buzzing around the flowers outside the room, stopping to eye anyone wearing colorful clothing, sitting in the tree branches – everywhere. Amazing.

I wandered around the grounds for a while snapping pics of the flowers and sometimes the volcano whenever there was a tear in the clouds. A stream ran under the road leading into the resort. I was very tempted to jump down into it, but it was covered in vegatation so thick that I could not see the water except where it passed under the road. Everything was wet from the rain and mist. I didn’t come dressed for a major expedition so I passed on it for now. I went back to the room and sat on the porch in a big rocking chair watching the hummingbirds and working on a crossword puzzle until the rest of the group was up and about.

Tip: Suppose you stay at a resort in the U.S. In your room you will find tons of printed materials describing the services and amenities of the hotel, schedules of activities, maps, and advertisements for local restaurants and businesses. Everything is spelled out for you so that you can operate pretty much independently. That is not the way it worked in Costa Rica. There were never printed materials anywhere. Things work on a word of mouth system here. If you want to know something, you need to ask. It is a very social kind of atmosphere. You quickly get used to striking up a conversation (depending on how good your Spanish is) with everyone you meet everywhere – hotel staff, taxi drivers, people on the street, shop owners. This is how things get done. We missed out on some things the first couple of days until we caught on.

Once we were all ready we headed up to the hotel restaurant for a free breakfast. This was a real breakfast – not just muffins and coffee. There was always a guy at a grill ready to cook eggs to order (we became buddies pretty quick), pancakes (these were just for tourists, I don’t think Ticos (Costa Ricans) quite understand pancakes), plenty of fresh fruit and juices, and several local type breakfast foods that tend to feature beans and rice.

The restaurant (like every one we ate at everywhere) has no walls so we could enjoy unobstructed views and breathe in the tropical breezes.

Tip: Everything I read before going on this trip warned about the bugs. They said to be sure to take gallons of the most powerful repellents allowable by law. Well, maybe it was the time of year or the places we happen to visit, but we never had a problem with bugs and never once did we apply any repellent. Buildings always are open to the air – no bugs. We hiked in the rain forest – no bugs. I can get bit by more mosquitoes and gnats in ten minutes on my deck then we did in a week in Costa Rica!

Well, this post is getting long so I think I’ll quit for now. Next up – a trip to a lava field, an exciting walk in the rain forest, and some more travel problems.

MDW

Wednesday 3:30AM EST- The dog and the cat are wondering what in the world is going on. All the lights are on in the middle of the night. My wife and I are running around the house making last minute preparations. We roust the boy out of his bed tell him it is time to get ready to go. He is excited about this trip, but also a little nervous. We check on him every few minutes to make sure he is getting ready and not just playing around.

Soon the car is loaded with our bags. A last check to make sure we have everything – toys to play with, books to read, plane tickets, passports, etc. and we are off. The house goes quiet and dark again as we take our little whirlwind with us. The animals can go back to sleep until my sister comes to take care of them while we are away.

My wife and her sister, Heather, take a trip together each summer. Sometimes it is just the two of them; sometimes other sisters or neices go along. It’s a girl thing – no guys allowed. Usually they take a cruise. Always they go somewhere tropical. This year they secretly planned to take me and our seven year old son, Calvin, along on a trip to Costa Rica. I only found out about it a few weeks ago. Another change this year is that my sister-in-law was not going. She was promised time off from work but it got revoked and some unexpected expenses at home had forced her to drop out – bummer – I like Heather.

When I learned that I was going on this trip, being a nerd, I started doing research on Costa Rica. I checked out what to do and where to go, the currency exchange rates, what to pack, what the people are like, and what foods to expect. I took German in school not Spanish so I started learning useful phrases and even found a listing of some common Costa Rican slang terms. I felt that I was pretty well prepared.

Of course having done some traveling in the past I know that one thing to keep in mind on any trip, expecially one to a foreign country, is to always expect the unexpected. Something always seems go wrong or at least is different than what you expect. You can let those things ruin your trip or you can roll with the punches and have a great time anyway. I vowed to roll and it is a good thing I did because this trip was about to go nuts even before our plane left the ground.

Wednesday 4:50AM EST - We arrive at the terminal to find a mad house. It seems that our airline, Delta, has three flights leaving within half an hour of each other and they do not have the facilities or staff to handle the rush of passengers checking in. Add to that all the other airlines also with flights leaving within minutes of each other and the security checkpoint was overwhelmed - the line literally stretched out the door of the terminal. The place is a total mess. We manage to fight our way to a kiosk and get ourselves checked in before they cut off at 5:30, but we still have to wait to get our bags checked in, then we personally have to schlep them to the baggage security area, and then we have to get ourselves through security which still has a line like you would not believe. This is a small airport - 95% of the time it is like a ghost town. Why the airport and airlines can’t work together to even out the traffic I don’t know. Did I mention I hate flying?

So we finally manage to get through security with our carry ons and our son still with us – all good. We start fast walking for the gate. We have 7 year old with us and my wife has a heart condition complete with an implanted defibrillator so we aren’t going to be running through the airport leaping over chairs and baggage like on those old O.J. Simpson commercials. We get to the gate with like 10 minutes to spare.

However, Delta, even though we are checked in and they know we are coming and they know that the security process is a total mess has already given away our seats to stand-by passengers. Although the plane is right there and has not yet started its departure, we cannot board because it is full. The staff tell us that we are out of luck, close the ramp door, and disappear for fifteen minutes or so. When they come back they cheerfully tell us (and the other three people that were similarly left behind) that there is no other flight with them or any of the other airlines that will get us to Atlanta in time to make our connecting flight to Costa Rica. They will be happy to send us to JFK in a couple hours and from there to Atlanta where we can catch the only other flight to Costa Rica that day - nine hours or better later than our original flight! For this they will have to charge us a mere $150.

Now comes the kicker. Remember I said that my sister-in-law was not going on the trip? Well, it seems that this was a lie and she was secretly going to meet us at the airport in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, as a surprise. She lives in Indiana and was flying separately on Northwest airlines. She doesn’t know that we missed our flight and won’t be there to meet her. The good folks at Northwest let my wife use their phone system to call down to the gate at Houston, page Heather who is waiting for her connection to Costa Rica, and let her know that she will be on her own in a strange country until like midnight. Kudos to Northwest!

Well, we are finally on our way. But wait, there’s more! It’s just one adventure after another on this trip. You’ll notice that there are no photos of Costa Rica on this blog. There’s a reason for that.

MDW

Sweet perfume circles and twirls around me as I walk; sometimes weaving through the tangled arms of the bushes near the trail sometimes wandering over the morning meadow or playing hide and seek in the still dark places under the trees. One moment the rioting wild roses hold me close with clinging thorns begging me to stand still and breathe in the heady fragrance and the next they call me to follow as they run away on the breeze. Which is better?

As I move along I notice that I can tell how near the rose bushes are not only by the strength of the fragrance but also by the quality. Near at hand the pure essence is overwhelming. Bees, unable to resist, pay no attention to me as they gorge themselves on nectar. Further away there is time for the sweetness to mingle with the earth, the morning, the other flowers. A spiciness is added - almost like sugar glazed cinnamon rolls baking in an oven, but lighter and more elusive.

Ethereal and lighter than air the rose soars and floats where ever the wind blows silently invisibly gently reaching deep into my mind coaxing out memories and emotions that have lain dormant.

The running stream has a different allure. The rose’s power is veiled behind a lithe spirit. The water’s power is bold and obvious. It exhilarates with flashes of light, hissing and rumbling, and cold drenching. It grabs me with both hands and yanks me into a crashing rushing world that blocks out all else.

The rose is of the sky; the water is of the earth. Water plows along the ground cutting through stone and dragging down trees. Always chattering and writhing in its channel, it frets within the confines of a self imposed prison. Gravity drags it ever onward and although it seems to delight in its power as it leaps and bounds, still it never has the chance to break its chains and run free into the forest.

The rose runs afield and socializes with the other flowers. It lets the currents of the air take it where they will. But the morning breeze is gentle and playful – it teases and never runs too far or too fast.

When I finally emerge from the gully wet and worn out, the rose is there to greet me – but only just. The afternoon wind has blown in cruel and harsh. The crashing water ignores the wind, but the light fragrant rose is blown roughly away and dispersed. No more dancing among the fluttering leaves. Now it is all pushing and shoving.

Borne on the wind comes the rain to rinse the air fresh. The steps of the dance drip down and wash away. They mingle with the water and eventually add to the power of the stream. Time to go inside and curl up in a quiet place and wait for another morning.

MDW

This past week I spent some time on a long overdue update to my website – www.forestrat.com. It’s nothing fancy. I’m no graphic artist so I keep things simple.

In the meantime I have also been experimenting with turning my digital SLR into a pinhole camera – Wikipedia.

In earlier posts I mentioned that it has been known for centuries that passing light through a small hole in one wall of a box will project an image on the opposite wall. This is known as the “camera obscura”. Photography was born from the desire to “fix” this image permanently without the need for someone to trace the image by hand.

A pinhole camera is basically just a box with a hole in one end and a light sensitive surface on the other side. It can be built out of all sorts of materials – shoe boxes, oatmeal boxes, tin cans, etc. as long as it can be made light tight. A gigantic one has even been made out of an entire abandoned air plane hangar – The OCRegister.

The tricky part is making a good pin hole. The hole needs to be very small when working at digitial camera body scale and it needs to be perfectly round without burrs. I searched the web for some guidance and ended up basically following the method described here – DIY Pinhole for dSLR.

I drilled a quarter inch hole in the center of an old camera body cap and used electrical tape to attach a piece of metal cut from a soda can with my pin hole in it. I made the hole using a pin saved from the packaging of a dress shirt.

I made several pin hole “lenses” trying to get the hole just right. I also tried using aluminum foil instead of the can metal. The foil was much easier to puncture and was much thinner, but it was also more delicate and took a steady hand to make the hole without tearing. I ended up preferring the foil once I got the hang of it. You can purchase laser cut pinholes from photo supply stores, but that takes away the DIY aspect of the whole deal.

Theoretically a pin hole lens will have a huge depth of field. Depth of field tells you where objects in a scene will be in focus. Setting your camera lens to f/2.8 will give a shallow depth of field which means that only those objects close to the same distance from the camera will be in focus. Nearer and farther objects will blur. As you reduce the aperture, depth of field increases. At f/22 (the limit for my regular lens) more objects front to back will be sharp. My pin hole should give me around f/168.

Although a pin hole lens will give you great depth of field, don’t expect razor sharp images. Producing a perfectly round smooth hole isn’t easy and deviations will cause interference. Also light does funny things when traveling through a very small hole causing diffraction patterns. The size of the hole depends on the distance between the lens and the film (the focal length). The short distance between lens and sensor on my camera requires a really small hole; something along the lines of .298mm or .012 inches. Images therefore tend to be soft. If I had a box with a much longer focal length, the hole could be larger and things would be sharper.

Exposure times in bright sunlight were on the order of five to ten seconds and required guessing since the exposure meter in the camera would not work under these conditions. The view finder was tough to use too since the scene was really dark - in bright light I could make out major landmarks, but in lower light conditions forget about it. Trial and error is the order of the day and digital makes this much easier. I would have ruined a lot of film otherwise.

The two waterfall images  show the difference between a conventional lens and a pin hole. The first image was made with my aluminum foil pin hole lens. The exposure time was ten seconds which produced the silky smooth water effect.

The second image is the same scene made with a conventional lens. Stopping my lens all the way down to f/22 still required a shutter speed of 1/1250 of a second thus freezing the water as it fell.

I like this pin hole image. On the other hand, I tried it on other things and was not as happy. Closer more detailed scenes were too blurry for my taste. Below is a test image I took of a deck post.

It is amazing that a shot this good can come from such a crude device, but the fuzzy feel just doesn’t work for me. I don’t mind misty images of lots of flowing water, but I tend to like the solid objects in my images to be nice and sharp. Picking the right scene is an important step in pin hole photography.

While messing around with pin holes, I ran across this little piece of equipment – the Loreo Lens in a Cap. It contains a fixed focus lens that fits on your camera sort of like a lens cap and offers f/5.6 all the way to f/64. It isn’t really a pin hole, but setting it to f/64 should be interesting.

It only cost fifteen bucks so I bought one. I’ve taken a few test shots, but nothing useful yet. I’ll give a full report once I have time to play with it under the right conditions.

MDW

When we left off last time we had made short work of over a hundred years of photographic history in a matter of minutes.

We started out with the knowledge that passing light through a small hole will project an image. At first people just used a pencil or whatever to trace the projection in order to obtain a permanent image. From then until now we have been fooling around with different ways to fix the image.

We know that many different chemical reactions can be triggered by the energy in light. It is a short jump from there (except for the details) to capitalizing on the different reactive properties of exposed chemicals versus unexposed chemicals to create an image.

Now we come to digital photography. Speaking of it as “digital photography” makes it sound wildly different from traditional photographic methods, but it isn’t really all that different. We take the same energy that has been in light all along and instead of holding on to a chemical record of its presence (e.g. altered silver salts on a cellulose film) we just detect it and make a note of it on a chip with flipped magnetic bits.

Here is a link to an article that explains a bit about how digital sensors work. As with most articles on the subject, an explanation of how the photons are actually detected is avoided. I have yet to find a good article on it.

Drawing on my vague memories of quantum mechanics classes and what not while in college, a wildly simplified explanation of the deal is that when light falls on certain molecules, the energy in the light is transferred to the atoms and it gets their electrons all  jazzed up and they jump into higher energy states. When the electrons drop back down to their normal states, they release the energy as electricity which is used to record the light’s presence by flipping digital bits.

Again the devil is in the details, but we still have the same basic system – light falls on a sensitive surface and the energy causes a change which can be used to create an image based on the difference between exposed areas and unexposed areas.

So now we have a bunch of bits representing an image. What do we do now? Send ‘em to the printer of course so we can create a photograph. There are a lot of different printers out there that can be used. The most commonly used for photographs is the ink jet printer. Here tiny droplets of ink are sprayed onto paper. It works surprisingly well and a good printer matched with good paper can produce an excellent photograph.

But wait there’s more! Perhaps we would like to use a digital camera, but produce traditional chemical prints. Well we could buy a digital enlarger made by a company called De Vere. This is like a regular enlarger only instead of passing light through a negative, it takes a digital file and projects it onto photo-sensitive paper. I’d love to get my hands on one of these, but the price is in the tens of thousands range.

Another possibility is called a LightJet print. The digital image is fed into the machine like the digital enlarger, but instead of projecting the whole image onto stationary paper, lasers shoot little dots of light at a rotating piece of photo-sensitive paper until it has “painted” the entire image. Again the LightJet process is expensive. It isn’t something you can do in your basement.

How about something you can do yourself?

Well, you know, if we could turn the digital file into a physical negative, then we could use our regular old darkroom to make the prints. That is just what a guy named Dan Burkholder likes to do. He creates “digital negatives”.

An inkjet printer can print not only on paper, but on transparencies too. Soooo, we reverse our image using our photo editing software and print a negative on a transparent sheet – piece ‘o cake. Turns out that there are a few details to take care of, but luckily Dan has worked it all out for us and has written a book about it. Neat.

Once we have a digital negative, we can create any kind of print – carbon, palladium, bichromate, etc. We could use an enlarger, but since the inkjet printer can make us a really big negative, we can often just contact print. Hey, we can contact print and make the exposure using sunlight so that we don’t need the enlarger at all. We can even use our negative to print directly on plant leaves like Rosemary Horn does – no chemicals and no darkroom!

Some may ask why bother with all of this when you can just use a digital camera and print to printer. Wham bam. No muss. No fuss. It’s now, it’s hip, it’s what everybody is doing.

Well, because it is art. Art should be different, art should experiment, art should present things in different ways than the status quo. Just because something is quicker or easier or sharper or more colorful or whatever does not mean it is “better”.

Photography did not, as many people predicted, render painting obsolete. Painting is painting and photography is photography; they are not replacements of each other.

Neither are the various methods of “painting” replacements for each other. We should not stop using oils because there are watercolors. We should not stop using watercolors because there are pencils.

Just so each method of creating a photograph is not a replacement for another. An inkjet is not a replacement for a dye transfer nor for an albumen. They each have a certain look and feel and aura that a skilled artist can use to enhance an image.

We should not stop creating photographs, real live touch them with your hands hang them on the wall photographs, just because we use a digital sensor instead of a chemical one to record the image.

MDW

When we last left our intrepid hero, he was off on a wild tangent about the demise of the hard copy photograph at the hands of digital philistines. Well, while I’m hanging around here, let’s talk about the many ways of the photograph. First a little history.

It has been known since ancient times that passing light through a tiny hole will form an image. This fact lead to the development of the “camera obscura” which has been described as early as the 10th century. It started out as a darkened room with a hole in one wall. Eventually lenses were added and the size was reduced to a large wooden box.

Still the image was fleeting and required an artist to trace the image with a pencil in order to make it permanent. This was a situation just begging for someone to invent a way to capture the image on some sort of light sensitive material.

The first generally acknowledged true “photograph” was made in 1826 by Niepce using a substance called bitumen of Judea; a kind of asphalt which hardens when exposed to light. The unexposed parts can be dissolved away to reveal the image. The exposure took eight hours. Niepce called his creation a heliograph (sun drawing). You can see it here.

Next came the Daguerreotype, named for the inventor, Louis Daguerre. A Daguerrotype is made coating a copper plate with silver. The silver is exposed to iodine vapor to sensitise it, it is exposed, and the image revealed by exposing the plate to mercury vapors. Despite the nasty poisonous chemicals involved, Daguerrotypes became quite popular due to their sharp detail.

At nearly the same time William Talbot announced his process, called a Calotype. The nice feature here is that a calotype was created on paper instead of metal and was a sort of “negative” that could be reproduced where as a Daguerrotype was a one off process. The calotype’s disadvantage was that the image was less sharp due to the course paper fibers and the look was more like a charcoal drawing. This is considered an artistic advantage by modern calotypists, but at the time was not so hot.

Next up, the wet collodion process. This is what we see in movies set in the old west. A huge camera, the photographer under a black cloth, and maybe a minion standing by with a big stick with flash powder on it. The images were recorded on glass plates coated with collodion (nitrocellulose dissolved in ether or alcohol). The results were sharp AND reproducible AND exposures could be as short as five seconds. Woo Hoo! Too bad the plates had to be used while still wet so the photographer had to drag an entire chemistry lab around at all times. Not good.

In the 1880’s the big step toward modern photography was made. George Eastman perfected the process of coating a roll of paper with a gelatin emulsion of silver salts. The gelatin was peeled off the paper after exposure to create negatives. The roll “film” allowed for small lightweight easy to use cameras. Everyone started taking pictures. Eventually the paper roll evolved into the cellulose film that we know today.

Many people are familiar with the basic wet process photograph. You take a shot with your camera on a roll of film, the film is run through some chemicals to produce a negative, the negative is put into an enlarger that projects the image onto photo sensitive paper, and the paper is run through some more chemicals – viola! a photograph.

This is the basic process, but there are more ways than you can shake a stick at to create a photograph. Besides daguerrotypes and collodions and calotypes and silver gelatins there are carbon prints, albumen prints, gum bichromate prints, platinums and palladiums, cibachromes, polaroids, and dye transfers just to name a few. I even found a person that prints images directly on plant leaves – grow your own photo paper!

Check out this link for some cool alternative and classic photography techniques - Alternative Photography

Well, this post is getting kind of long so I think I’ll quit for today. Next time I want to check into some ways to take traditional processes and meld them with digital ones to produce photographs. There is more to digital than just inkjet printing.

MDW