Mini Volcano

There’s a special place in California that not many people know about. The place really doesn’t even have a name.

It’s a geophysical site of above-ground mud eruptions in an area near the Sultan Sea (near Niland, CA).

The image you see here is one of the many mud eruptions that dot the an area of about one square block.

To get to this place, you need to travel south on Highway 111 from Indio, California. You take a right turn on Schrimpf (a dirt road) and travel to Davis. The mud eruptions are on the right side of the road.

Palm Springs Daily Photo

My other blog is back up and running after a long hiatus. It’s Palm Springs Daily Photo.

Palm Springs Daily Photo is one of the City Daily Photo blog sites.

One good thing about running this blog is it keeps me out in my city finding photo ops that will interest all.

If you got a City Daily Photo blog, I’ll write you up on this blog. Just let me know.

Looking Down on Philly

Philadelphia is a great city.

Taken from above, this shot of Philly shows a wide boulevard with buildings on either side.

Since the light was severely muted I upped my ISO to 800 and opened my aperture wide to f/2.8. The shutter speed ended up being 1/800 seconds, calculated by the camera because I set the aperture in Av mode (aperture priority mode).

Still Life Photography

The breathtaking beauty of found art is most rewarding to capture into a frame.

I’m constantly on the lookout for vignettes from which to make a still life photograph.

In this shot I’ve found a beer bottle perfectly placed into a wall where bricks are missing. (I didn’t put the beer bottle there).

This shot makes you wonder if the person who put the beer bottle there was thought about making art out of this scene.

Just in case if you wondered, the photo was taken in Madrid, Spain.

Eggleston’s Muted Tones Give Retro Look to Photos

William Eggleston tended to look for things whose colors muted from being sun-drenched for a long period of time. From old barricades to rooftop signage and vintage cars, Eggleston made good use of faded color. His landscapes, which usually contained human-made subjects—a house, road or sign,– were not only taken in the Southern United States. He photographed one Western town hit by perpetual desert sun—Amboy, California— a faded landscape (see photo to left, an emulated version of Eggleston’s, which I photographed), an old gas station and diner sit in the middle of nowhere under a chalky blue sky. The place’s distinguishing characteristic is the big Roy’s sign.  Eggleston’s photograph of the place is a stunning study of muted colors with continuous tonal ranges from the highlights to shadows.

Eggleston used color in what appeared to be inadvertent use. Up until the 1970s color was seen everywhere, in magazines on television and in snapshots, but the shots always had a purpose—to sell something to shoot an object for its beauty or subject because it has a relationship to the shooter. Shooting indiscriminately to highlight color had not yet been experimented with. Eggleston brought color to the forefront of everything one sees every day.  He used Kodachrome film and made prints with a dye transfer process (a now defunct process of transferring dyes from three images onto a one piece of paper that produced the richest tonal ranges of all photographic processes).

Digital photographs tend to have vivid colors, many times just too vivid. Dealing with the color is best done after taking the picture with an image processing program. The way you tweak colors in, say, Photoshop or Elements is dependent upon what kind of color you start out with. To get similar color as Eggleston has in his photos, there are a number of options you can use in Photoshop (grant it nothing is as good as the dye transfer process, but you can get near if you tweak long enough). You’ll have to use a number of tools.  The options are contained both in the Raw window of Photoshop and in the main program. In the Raw window consider adjusting the temperature, tint, exposure (to lighten/darken color), recovery (to darken the center of the frame outward), vibrance and saturation in the Basic settings window. In the HSL/Grayscale you can also work with color. When you click the saturation tab you’ll get window where you can tweak many colors. I find that the blues need less saturation than the other colors and the reds need more to emulate an Eggleston photo. Last are the colors in the luminance tab. Tweak those by eyeing them in an effort to mute the color in your shot.

Homelessness Hurts

There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. This picture hurts.

An elderly man who dresses in as dignified an outfit as he can still appears torn and tattered. You can only guess that, yes, indeed, he is homeless.

But how can you tell? Is the umbrella whose curved cane-like top sits on his thigh the obvious giveaway? Or is it the tears in his clothing? Perhaps it’s the hat or the socks that are too short?

Could it be that blurred person in the background sleeping with his legs crossed and head covered with a hood that  gives this image a look of homelessness?

It might be that the location of the shot, the beach at Santa Monica, California, a magnet for homeless people, is the key identification marker of the dreaded personal circumstance.

Whatever the reason, this man sits where he does, the shot inspires because of the contrast that the frame provides. The black-gray suit stands out from the dark green chairs. The wide aperture of the lens causing the soft background completes a shot that where the subject is balanced within its elements in a situation that appears, to many, as far off as a distant planet in another solar system.

Meditation

Independence National Historic Park is as good as any place to meditate. Here a group sits Indian-style (or is that the lotus position) finding their inner peace among the green grass next to the building where the liberty bell welcomes hoards of tourists.

No trick shot here, just aimed the camera at the configuration the people made on the lawn and shot away.

Imogen Cunningham Went for the Details

Imogen Cunningham had an interest in patterns and form, which began with her close-up images of Cypress tree trunks along the Central California coast. After a zoo visit in the early 1920s, she undertook a study of the animal. She discovered the abstract black and white pattern of the zebra. In one of her photos of a zebra, she shows a zebra’s body from its backside to just before it’s front leg. Strikingly evident in that photograph is the pattern of stripes that show up as thick diagonal lines, which curve down into the bottom of the frame. The lines are memorizing, and appear to be an optical illusion.

A similar pattern is shown in a photo (above) that was cropped in the same way Cunningham had framed (or cropped) her photo. You can emulate her zebra photo at a zoo. You have to catch the zebra so that you can frame a view of it from its side to get the same stripe configuration in both the emulated photo and Cunningham’s photo. To get a sharp shot you’ll probably need a tripod because it’s most likely that you’ll have to zoom in to get a close-up. You don’t necessarily have to frame the photo so that it only includes part of the zebra’s body, you can frame it so you show the whole animal and crop it later.

This is from my book, 101 Quick and Easy Ideas Taken from the Master Photographers of the Twentieth Century.

Imagination

You ever had one of those days where you feel that you could be behind the curtain of this booth?

I’m having one of those days. If you were to be behind that curtain what would you do when it opened?

Photography is about imagination and this photo certainly can have you imagining things.

Oh, by the way, this Freakshow is in Venice Beach, California.

The Helicopter

Here’s a little piece of modern architecture in Palm Springs, CA, home of some of the best modern architecture in the world.

This shot came about when I aimed my camera at the helicopter you see in the frame.

I didn’t have a telephoto lens on my camera when I took the shot, so you’re seeing the shot through a wide angle lens, 19mm to be exact.

Everything is sharp in the frame because I shot at f/13 (a narrow aperture). Since I was shooting into the light, the shutter speed (1/100 sec) was relatively fast for such a narrow lens opening.

When you look at the shot up close you can see the details of the helicopter–four blades with motion blur on top and a tail in the shape of a cross in back.