The Smell of Snow

Today started off sunny but in the afternoon the storm that clobbered the mid-west started moving in. Around 4 PM it was coming down hard and I shot some 'cheater' images from the cover of the porch and out various windows. This one was made through the window in the laundry room, a clump of white birches that is attractive in almost any season but it looked especially nice in the falling snow which greyed out the forest across the field behind it.

This snow is wet and heavy. The first bit that fell immediately turned to slush. When I got up this morning the snow that fell last night was like tiny snow balls, round clusters not much more than 1/16th inch in diameter. The Eskimos have different words for different kinds of snow and anyone who lives in an area like this that gets frequent snow can tell you that there are different smells to different snowfalls too. This one smelled like spring, the kind of snowfall we get when the maple sap begins to run. The kind of snowfall that both reminds me that it is still winter but also promises spring.

Canon SX50.

Pondering Impermanence With The Way Back Machine*

In October of 1993, the same year I finished climbing the 46 High Peaks, a group of Tibetan Monks were visiting St. Lawrence University. During their stay they created a sand mandala (photo above) in the art gallery. We went to the final ceremony. Before the ceremony there was a step ladder from which I (and others) were allowed to photograph the mandala.

During the ceremony the monks swept the  sand to the center and stirred it before scooping it into a glass pitcher. Those who wanted were given a small amount of the sand as a souvenir. Above my monitor as I type this there is a small silver box containing about a teaspoon of that sand. Following the destruction of the mandala and placing the sand into the pitcher it was taken to the river where it was poured into the water to wash away.

One of the purposes of the creation and destruction of the sand mandala is to demonstrate the impermanence of all things. Tonight as I was scanning these old negatives I was struck by the irony that the mandala lives on in these photos and not only mine. In the second photo where the sand is being poured into the river I count no less than 5 still cameras and one movie camera, not counting the one I took the photo with. In addition to that there were dozens, if not hundreds of photos taken during the several days that the monks worked on creating the mandala in the gallery. Those of us who photographed the mandala and ceremony took a demonstration of impermanence and made it permanent, at least relatively permanent. Certainly more permanent than the monks intent.

I recently read about a group of photographs that were shot into space on a geostationary satellite with the expectation that they will still be around millions of years from now. It seems in spite of the message that the monks brought to Canton, NY nearly twenty years ago we humans are doing our level best to create permanence in an impermanent universe and photography seems to be our chosen tool.

* With apologies to Sherman & Mr. Peabody I've taken to calling my camera "The Way Back Machine".

Can You See the Forest Among the Trees?

The tree and rock just left of center have appeared here before. The tree is at the Northwest corner of a section of our small woodlot that extends into the corner of our back field. In case you haven't noticed, I fond of woods and trees. They appear frequently as subjects of my photography. I enjoy seeing other photographer's photographs of trees and forests, at least I usually do.

Yesterday I was in book store and they had a copy of Skogen by Robert Adams. I've read some of his books on photography and he has a very different view of the medium than I do. That said I wondered how he would do with woodlands as subject matter. The single review on Amazon was a rave and I had seen a couple of other favorable reviews but I wasn't about to order a copy sight unseen.

The reviews I've seen are uniform in their praise of the book, its layout, fine paper and printing, the quality of the binding and I have to agree that those things are very nice indeed. After thumbing through the book however it remains on the bookstore shelf nor will I be ordering a copy from Amazon at their 30% discount price. Suffice to say that had I made those photos they would all be in the reject bin.  A beautiful package that was a let down when opened.

I debated whether I should write my own Amazon review but since I didn't buy the book at all, much less from Amazon, it seemed churlish to write a "Customer Review" on their site. Instead I vent my disappointment here.

Woodlot, Northwest Corner was shot with my Canon SX50 and converted to B&W using NIK Silver Efex 2.0.

Another New/Old Photo

Scanning old film files is an interesting exercise. I'm finding photos that I never printed and simply forgot about. Unless you make at least contact prints, film images are easy to forget about and never see again. They are shut away in file pages inside boxes. Looking at them requires pawing through and holding each page up to the light while mentally converting the negative image to a positive one. To complicate things even further, unless they are badly out of focus they all look sharp in small negatives. It isn't until you use a magnifying glass or put the negative into an enlarger that you can see for sure how sharp it is and whether the DOF is all you intended.

Aside from that though there is a subtle quality to to a film image that digital doesn't quite match in my opinion. When digital cameras first came out I was skeptical because film images are made up of random grains of silver whereas digital images are made up of square pixels. The reason that makes a difference is that we instinctively recognize things by shape and pattern. The random grains of silver have no inherent pattern so we immediately recognize the image they form. With early digital and its low resolution we had a grid of squares which competed with the image for recognition, a lot like a tiny mosaic. Once resolution passed the 11-12 megapixel range though the pixels were so small that (theoretically at least) we can't see individual pixels so it shouldn't make any difference whether it is made up of random grains or a grid of squares. Yet somehow there is a difference.

Back when CDs were a new technology an audio technician in a recording studio told me that they did all their recording and mastering on analog tape. I asked why they didn't record digitally and he explained that digital recording lost subtle resonances. In any musical performance there are sounds above and below our threshold of hearing which add to the overall quality of the sound. In order to create a digital file however, they needed a constraint on the size of the file, much the same as the way that pixels are all described by the same number of bits, 8 bits/channel in an 8 bit image, 16 per channel in a 16 bit image. To do that in a reasonable sized file the audio engineers designing the recording system had to chop off the frequencies above and below human hearing and in the process lost the subtle resonances. Thus (according to him at least) the best recordings were AAD, analog recorded, analog mastered and digitally reproduced.

The corollary in photography is that the tonal range is 256 shades of brightness from pure black to pure white. The number of tones was determined by what a monitor could display. Besides that, the steps between tones had to be even because they are mathematically derived. To make it work you can't have pixels in one area described by 1 or 2 bits and others described by 80-100 or more. They are all described by the same number of bits with even jumps from one to the next. Consequently continuous tone with digital is an illusion created by making the steps so small that the eye can't see the jump from one to the next. But light doesn't work like that. It really is continuously variable without steps.

Arguably film isn't continuous either. The silver particles may be random but they are opaque and cast a shadow on the printing paper resulting in white areas on the print. The resulting tones are determined by the density of the grains in the same way that a newspaper half-tone screen does, albeit much smaller. There is a difference though because the halftone screen, like a digital image, is a grid, not a random pattern like silver grains on film. Also the printing ink is always black while a silver emulsion print can create shades of grey.

Scanning negatives has gotten me thinking about all this because I have recently read a couple of articles questioning whether one could tell from a print whether a photo was originally made with film or a digital camera and that question was apparently lurking in the back of my mind. Of course I know with my own photos which is which and my gut tells me that there is an undefinable difference something like those tones in music that are above and below the range of hearing but never the less add to the overall performance. Can I tell when looking at someone else's prints? I'm not ready to place any bets.

Today's new/old photo shot on 120 B&W negative film with a 645 camera. I made it on a daily exercise walk past a beaver pond that was about a mile and a half from our home. Like the Snowy Trees image from a few days  ago this is the first time anyone other than me has seen it and before I scanned it, I had only seen the negative version. The roll it was on was not contact printed. In the audio technician's terms this would be an FDD image, Film recorded, Digital scan mastered and Digitally presented.

Software Trial by Photo Editing

In the past I have purchased several software packages from Serif.com and have been generally satisfied with the products. They have repeatedly tried to sell me their PhotoPlus software which I have never before bothered to look at because I have been using Photoshop since version 7 and since the introduction of Lightroom I use and recommend both Lightroom and Photoshop. All my initial processing is done in Lightroom and I use Photoshop for images that require the use of layers, advanced selections or photo-merging.

This morning however I got an email from Serif offering limited time free trial versions of their software so I thought it would be interesting to see how PhotoPlus X5 compared with other image editing software I have used. I undertook this as a matter of personal curiosity and a recognition that not everyone wants to or can pay the cost of Photoshop. I have no affiliation with Serif beyond having bought a couple of pieces their other software several years ago.

COMPATIBILITY

The first thing I discovered after installing Photo Plus was that it does not play well with Adobe DNG files. It will open them but with a wide black band on one side. You can't simply crop off the black band because it falls within the frame of the image, not covering but compressing and distorting the image into the remaining space.

Since my current standard practice is to convert all RAW images to DNG upon import, this problem alone is sufficient to remove it from consideration by me. Looking at older files however I note that PhotoPlus will properly open CRW and CR2 files. I'm guessing that the difference lies in the fact that most RAW files write the EXIF data to a sidecar XMP file whereas Adobe DNG incorporates the EXIF and IPTC data into the DNG file itself and PhotoPlus can't separate it from data describing pixels so it represents the EXIF & IPTC sector as a band on one of the long sides. Don't quote me on that though. I could be wrong.

PhotoPlus does open JPG, PSD& TIFF which are the only other file types I use or have used and have to test with. I cannot vouch for its ability to work with any other proprietary camera RAW files or other image file types.

CONTROLS

The layout of controls closely follows Photoshop's interface including a lot of (if not all) of the same keyboard shortcuts, i.e. left & right bracket keys to change brush size and Control Z to undo the last command. The Tools (brush, cropping, clone, etc.) are on the left and the Studio Tabs (their equivalent of Photoshop's palettes) are on the right side. There are a good range of tools and controls including layers. I did not find any photo-merging capacity except for bracketed exposures to create HDR images and that is disabled in the trial version so I could not test it.

The Adjustments palette on the right includes Levels, Curves, Color Balance, Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation/Lightness, Colorize, Vibrance, Selective Color, Channel Mixer, Gradient map, Lens Filter, Black & White Film, Threshold filter, Posterize and Negative image. They appear to closely mirror Photoshop's set of Adjustment layer tools. The Warp, Line, Shape and Node tools on the left were shaded pink indicating that you'd have to buy the full version to get them. The same was true for the Organizer, Tablet controls, Photo Fix, Filter Gallery and Cutout Studio on the top menu.

Overall the interface is very similar to Photoshop. There are a few differences in layout but if someone wanted a less expensive software to begin photo editing they could go to Photoshop later if the need arose without suffering “interface shock”. In the past I have used Paint Shop Pro which I can't say the same for. I actually began image editing on PSP3 long before Corel bought it and continued to use it for a couple of iterations past when Corel changed the interface. PSP is a powerful program, Photoshop on a budget, but with a significantly different interface that I stopped using because I found it to be nearly the opposite of “intuitive”. That could be just me however.

I discovered while trying to save an image that I edited in PhotoPlus that you can only save layered images in PhotoPlus' proprietary .Spp format. Aside from .Spp the only other format offered to save in is JPG. I suppose you could save all your work files in .Spp and your output files in JPG but I frequently use TIFF for images that need to be saved in a non-lossy format. Whether any other editing software will recognize the .Spp files should you want to do further editing in other software or switch to another editor in the future is an open question.

My conclusion on Serif's PhotoPlus? As I said at the outset, it is not for me. The incompatibility with my preferred RAW format, inability to save to layered TIFF and the fact that I am already invested in Photoshop and Lightroom make this a non-starter for me. I am impressed by the clean interface and range of tools however and for those who shoot JPG or a RAW format that PhotoPlus is compatible with, at $89.99 this could be a real budget friendly alternative to Adobe's much more expensive software as long as you don't plan on stitching panoramas, merging photos for DOF or a handful of other advanced features from Photoshop.  

The top photo was shot with my Canon SX50 in JPG. I was able to do levels and vibrance adjustments to it in PhotoPlus but had to merge the layers to re-save it. I could not test the sharpening tools. They were one of the "pinked out" features in the trial software. The second picture is a screen capture of how a DNG file looks when opened in PhotoPlus. I tried several, all with the same result. The black band is always on a long side, on the left with a vertical image and on the bottom with a landscape format image. The image itself is always 'squished' on the right/top.

May 2, 2014 Upon receipt of the comment  thanking me for the review I revisited the Serif website thinking I should review the most recent version (#7) however it appears they no longer offer limited trial copies of their software. There is a free "basic" version but there is no indication of how it relates or compares to the current paid version in terms of features and capabilities. The only comparisons on the site are to Corel's Paint Shop Pro and Adobe's Photoshop.

Ten Years & Four Days Ago

When the Paul Smiths Visitor Interpretive Center was still run by the state they had a series of "Challenges". The challenges consisted of completing a series of hikes in areas other than the High Peaks. The purpose was to draw some hiking traffic away from the High Peaks which were suffering from overuse and to encourage hikers to discover the other delights offered by the Adirondacks. I participated in the first challenge and today's photo was made on a snowshoe hike up Goodnow Mt. on Jan. 14th, 1993. I scanned the negative in one of the recent batches of scanning and this is the first time this photo has been seen by any one but me. It was a beautiful day with the lingering aftermath of a fresh snowfall. I broke a snowshoe harness and completed the hike sans snowshoes. You wouldn't guess from the photo but there was only about 4" of snow so the lack of snowshoes wasn't really a problem.

Photo made on B&W 120 film using a Fuji GS 645 camera, a folding model that I could carry in my coat pocket and did on several hikes back then.

Mid-winter Longings

I'm still scanning old negatives. This one is from a climb up Redfield in the Adirondacks. The trail follows Uphill Brook and I photographed  this scene of rocks with moss and wildflowers along the way. Scanning these scenes from old hikes, this one in August of 1991, makes me long for summer and mountaintops.

Archiving Film

I've been scanning my old B&W negatives for a while now and in the process found a few that I liked but for some reason had never done anything with. This is one. It was a 35mm negative that I made on a winter trip up Azure Mt. on the Blue Mountain Rd. near Santa Clara & St. Regis Falls. The wave was created by wind blowing around the snow that was on a fallen tree trunk.

I was prompted to scan this particular roll of film because I had entered another photo from the roll in a show at the Paul Smiths V.I.C. and they wanted a digital copy to put on their website. Except for two, all of the photos in that show were made on film. If you are in the area of Paul Smiths stop in, check out the show and take your skis or snowshoes. They have an excellent set of trails to explore.

Below is another photo from that roll of film. I did make a silver print of this one once in my darkroom.

New Camera - Canon SX50 HS

I haven't been watching new equipment announcements so I didn't know about the Canon SX50 HS until a friend told me. I was dismissive at first because it was so inexpensive I had a hard time seeing how it could generate high quality images at a 1200mm equivalent angle of view but it nagged at me because of the times I've had to pass on photos simply because my lens wouldn't pull in the subject. I had a chance to get one on sale and on an impulse I bought it. This is a mini-review which is to say I'm not going into the kind of detail that review sites like DP Review do. Just my impressions in my (so far) limited use of it.

The photos here come from an outing yesterday to a local trail along the Racquette River. I took the SX50 HS but not a tripod. I was on snowshoes and did have one hiking pole with a small ballhead on the camera screw under the knob. I shot 65 photos. I lost one series of 4 or 5 photos because some water drops got on the lens and I missed seeing that until I got home. My fault, not the camera's.

The photos below were shot with the lens at or nearly at full extension. I used the hiking pole and a convenient tree for stabilizing the camera. Both have been subjected to my 3 stage sharpening (Detail controls in Lightroom, export to Photoshop, apply USM 15/60/0 and Smart Sharpening 75% at 0.3 radius). The Smart Sharpening settings I use vary according to final image size and the type of output. These are settings I frequently use for an 800 pixel wide web image.

 For reference below is a broad view, although not the full width of the widest angle the camera can do, taken from exactly the same position as the two icicle shots. All were shot as RAW images. The icicle shots both come from the area outlined in red, they are left and right at the base of the rock. The water's edge on my side of the river was about 8-10 feet in front of me.

 I'm still getting used to the controls which are significantly different from my other Canon cameras. The buttons on the back are too easily pressed, causing unintended changes in settings and the power button not easily enough. You have to press it with some deliberateness to turn the camera on or off. I lost 2 or 3 shots at the longest focal length due to camera movement, not surprising for such a long lens. A tripod would have been better than the pole and a cable release would help too. For the money though, and with care, the camera is quite a good performer.

 The closeups were 1/13th sec. @ f/6.3. The lens only stops down to f/8 and wide open is f/3.4. Neither closeup image was cropped, they are the full 3000x4000 pixels so at 240ppi I could print them 12'X16". At 300ppi they would be 10"x13".

This camera won't replace the 7D but  will be more like a supplement for when I need the kind of reach that I don't have and can't afford for the DSLR, not to mention that a DSLR lens of similar length could be a weight concern. The longest SLR lens Canon makes is 800mm. It weighs 9.9# and costs $14K. To get to approximately 1200mm you'd need a 1.4 Tel-extender which weighs only ½# but adds another $500. The SX50 HS cost me $400 on sale. Would the performance of the 7D with a tel-extender and 800mm lens be $14,100 better? I don't think so, at least not for me. I don't do that much telephoto shooting. The SX50 may replace the G11 for hiking when photography is not the object of the hike but I want a camera along.

Our Woods

As recently as the Thursday before Christmas we had no snow, then it started. We had a first storm with a lot of wet heavy snow, that was followed by one with even more soft fluffy snow, followed by yet more soft snow. I've shoveled more snow in the last 10 days than all of last winter which admittedly wasn't much of a winter. It was still snowing lightly this morning and we cleaned up the latest 3". Finally this afternoon the sun broke through and I decided to break out my snowshoes. Snowshoeing is hard work too, especially breaking trail, but it is way more fun than shoveling.

I checked the depth in the back field using my hiking pole. I always take one pole when snowshoeing. If you trip and fall it makes getting back up easier. The snow in the field behind the house is now 26" deep. I continued on into our woods. We don't own much woods, 1½ to 2 acres worth, but it's nice having your own woods to hang out in. Walking through I spotted this young beech with the sun shining from behind. Arrayed in golden leaves and a mantle of snow it was ready to have its portrait taken. Shot with a Canon G11.

Merry Christmas

I really should have saved yesterday's photo for today but this one will do. I made this photo yesterday too. It is the same sugar shack I ran a photo of a short time ago.

Between the horror of the school shooting in Connecticut and then yesterday's shooting of firemen responding to a fire in Webster, NY along with all the other turmoil in the world this is a Christmas of very mixed feelings. On one local blog that I follow some comments expressed the view that evil is in firmly charge and that good has lost. I confess to feeling some dismay at the state of the world myself.

I do not believe in a God who magically impregnates women any more than I believe there is a real Santa Claus living at the North Pole. We know for a fact that the designation of Dec. 25th as the birth of Jesus (not even his real name) was an arbitrary decision made several hundred years after the fact and that has only a one in 365 chance of being the right date, but it is what the various traditions symbolize that is important, (re)birth and renewal.

 There are not a lot of things I 'believe', things that I accept without proof, but one thing I do believe it is that the triumph of good is inevitable, it is programmed into creation by whatever power brought forth the universe and sustains it moment to moment. I believe that system and human nature are 'rigged' for good in the end. At this point in the year when the ancients saw the day shrinking and figuratively dying, it begins to lengthen again, to rise anew. They created holidays to mark the rebirth of the sun, the beginning of a new cycle of nature. That is what we celebrate, that no matter what we humans do, good or evil, the cycle goes on, life begins anew.

When I was out photographing yesterday in the silence that is winter I could feel the new beginning that the Christmas story stands for. Some of those in despair are sure that there is a 'war on Christmas' but, as I see it, they are too caught up in the details of the story to sense the message behind it. There probably wasn't really a stable or a star, those are symbols in a parable to remind us that hope comes from humility and often seems to shine in the far off distance. The Wise Men symbolize those who seek in spite of difficulties and those who would deceive them. I find my truth in nature. I hope that my photos bring your some sense of what I find there. Happy Holidays whatever belief you choose to follow. May you have a wonderful new year.

A Snowy Christmas Eve Morning

I had an early appointment this morning and drove into town through a snowy landscape that brought "Over the river and through the woods" to mind. Where I grew up we attended a one room country school and walked 1½ miles each way. This morning's drive took me back to winter mornings walking to school wrapped in the exquisite silence of winter with snow flakes fluttering down.

We seem to spend all our time surrounded with man made sound these days; TV, radio, even wearing MP3 players to constantly blast us with music while we do other things. I could not help but remember the joy of no sound at all on those winter mornings, snowflakes landing so softly that nothing disturbed the silence. I hope that you all make time for some silence this season, an opportunity to commune with nature and experience peace.

Season's Greetings

I wondered if we would have a white Christmas. The local weather forecast as late as Wednesday said it was doubtful but it started snowing Thursday evening and hasn't quit. It will be very white. At the rate it's snowing we'll certainly have more than a foot (may be there already) and the NOAA site says it will continue for another 12 hours. We're warm and have lots of food in the fridge. I hope everyone else has the same good fortune.

Along with getting ready for company over the holidays I'm still working at scanning old negatives. Many memories come flooding back in the process along with an acute sense of how the world has changed over the last 3-4 decades, an awareness made even more poignant by the massacre of school children and teachers in a Connecticut elementary school. When I stood on the Thousand Island Bridge about 40 years ago to make this photo I never imagined I would see such events unfold on the evening news.

After such things (and there have been far too many in recent years) I have often wished that I had some sort of time machine so that I could go back to the day before such events and warn the authorities to take preventative action. Alas they would not be likely to believe me. I would be dismissed as some kind of nut case.

I find some solace in looking back at images I made in better times. The irony (it seems there is always irony) is that I didn't think those were better times when I made the image. If I tried to walk up the bridge with camera in hand these days I'd be arrested as a terrorist plotter. The line of the fence, the broken windmill and the abandoned farm buildings still speak to me across the decades reminding me that all things change and the more they change, the more they stay the same. Life does go on.