Photoblog 2.0

© Harold Davis - Thousand Islands Lake, Ansel Adams Wilderness, July 2, 2005

About a week ago I organized a solo hiking trip to the Ansel Adams Wilderness. The Ansel Adams Wilderness is administratively part of Inyo National Forest, and lies just south of Yosemite National Park in the high Sierra. It’s accessible to hikers from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains off Route 395, which runs past Mono Lake and through Owens Valley. Here’s the general area in question shown as a Google Satellite image. My goal was to go camp beside Thousand Islands Lake, where I’d spent some time thirty years or so ago in my backpacking glory years. The lake is nestled under Banner Peak and Mount Ritter. I thought it would make good photographic material for the digital equipment I’ve been playing with lately. It’s spectacular country, and there are many islands in Thousand Islands Lake, although probably not one thousand of them. (You’d hardly know there were any from the picture above with the lake mostly under snow.)

I had about a day to make my preparations. I finished up Chapter 9 of the book about Google I am working on, and swung into gear. It had been a while since I had been backpacking, so I needed to remember what stuff to bring, to shop for food, load a backpack and make sure I could carry it, and get a wilderness permit.

The wilderness permit part of it was easy. I called the reservation number at Inyo National Forest, and for $5.00 on my Visa card got a wilderness permit which would be left for me in the night drop box at the Mono Lake Visitors Center in Lee Vining. Lee Vining is on the eastern side of Tioga Pass. The pass had opened a few days before following one of the heaviest snow years in recorded history in the Sierras.

As I chatted with the reservations ranger, he told me that there was lots of snow (I knew that already), and that I probably wouldn’t see too many people or mosquitos on my trip. I said both of these were good things. He also told me I needed to carry my food in an approved bear-resistant container. These bear canisters are made of molded plastic and use screws that you turn with a coin (or back of a spoon) to make it difficult for a bear to get inside. Personally, I kind of think that if a bear can get into a car trunk, a bear can probably get into one of these things. But regulations are regulations, so I added a bear food storage thing to my list of supplies to buy at REI (Recreational Equipment).

I also wanted to figure out a way to store my digital images in the field without having to use a whole mess of memory cards, so I bought a 40 Gigabyte battery operated photo storage gadget. I’ll be writing more about digital photo field storage options in a subsequent blog entry.

After my day shopping, organizing, and preparing I loaded my food in the bear canister, and the canister, sleeping bag, tent, cameras, and so on, into my backpack, and shouldered the backpack. With my backpack, probably about forty-five pounds, and in my hiking boots, I walked to the top of Marin Ave, a pretty straight up road that goes up about 1200 feet here to the top of the Berkeley hills. I was sweating, but I could do it! I felt good. I though to myself, “I may be fifty-something, but I’m fit - and you’d never know it!”

Wednesday morning early I left the three boys and Phyllis, drove out through the Bay area sprawl, across the central valley via Oakdale and Manteca, and onto the North Yosemite highway at China Camp. From there, after passing the park entrance station at Crane Flat, I turned onto the spectacular road that goes up to Tulomne Meadows and Tioga Pass.

On the other side of the mountains, in Lee Vining I picked up my wilderness permit - once I signed it my permission to hike was official! - had some dinner in a restaurant, and headed for a campground near my trailhead.

The trailhead I was going to use, Rush Creek, starts from Silver Lake at an altitude of about 7,200 feet on the June Lake loop. Grant, Silver, and June Lakes are a kind of messy resort (with a ski lift and many trailer parks) the first stop south of Lee Vining and the Tioga pass road. So I drove south for about ten miles, and then turned right towards the mountains. As I passed Grant Lake, the high rolling sage brush turned to mountain forest, rock and snowy vista.

The next morning I grabbed a massive breakfast at the Silver Lake Resort. For the record, I ate “Miner’s hash - everything but the kitchen sink.” I can’t vouch for the kitchen sink, but it certainly had eggs, ham, bacon, and potatoes. They are big on gold and silver mining and hearty eating in the tourist enclaves of the eastern Sierra.

Next, I stuffed my tent back into its sack, parked by the trailhead, and started up. Here’s a map of the area (you can click it for a larger size):

It’s amazing how easy it is to leave our everyday world and enter a completely different universe. This other universe is one where issues are simple: survival, not falling down a cliff or into a hole in the snow, being warm and dry, having enough to eat, and (if you are fifty-ish with kids) not having a stroke or heart attack alone in the wild. The wilderness is grand and majestic and magnificent - but it is utterly alien to us, and does not care in the least about us and our concerns, our well-being, or whether we live or die. Depending upon how you look at things, this is either comforting or terrifying (or both). Hikers do vanish each year in the Sierran wilderness; for example, probably no one will ever know what happened to Fred Claasen or Michael Ficery other than that they died.

Perhaps it is a good time to start making clear the mistakes I made on my journey through one of these cracks into the alternate universe that is the wilderness. First, I wasn’t really paying attention when people (such as the reservation ranger) told me about all the snow, and how empty the Sierra wilderness was this year. I also wasn’t taking the time to get adjusted to the change in altitude. I drove from sea level to above 7,000 feet in one day, and then started hiking up. No wonder I didn’t feel so good. My head was pounding, and my breathing labored. Stay tuned for one big whopper of a mistake to come (though obviously I am here to write about it).

The Rush Creek Trail goes up on a long diagonal above Silver Lake. You can look down at the normal world of people fishing on the lake:

Around the bend, Rush Creek pours out of Agnew Lake - this year, a great deal of water (which might have made me stop to think):

The trail on its way up to Agnew Lake somewhat bizarrely crosses a cog railway twice. This railway is used by Southern California Edison, who uses the area for power generation in a modest way. Also on this first bench up, I crossed a snow field (not very hard, but a slip could have been bad news - in fact I later heard someone had been badly injured crossing this patch), and a creek crossing where the bridge had been washed out, both within two miles of the start of my hike. Obviously, I wasn’t paying very good attention. My attitude was simply “Gosh darn I can do this!” Here’s the railway:

Right about at the second crossing of the tracks I met a hiker, my first on this trip. He was an old codger dodger - well, no older than me, but you know what I mean - carrying a day pack and his name was Billy. Billy’s hobbies were leading boy scouts from his home near Ventura into this area and helping with search and rescue operations. He knew this part of the mountains pretty well.

I told him what I was planning: to head up the cliff on the little-used trail on the south side of Agnew Lake, continue past Spooky Meadow, Clark Lake, and Summit Lake, and find the Pacific Crest and John Muir trails near Thousand Island Lakes, camp there a few days, and then head out the same way.

Billy suggested gently that I might want to reconsider. He said that in thie year of extraordinary snow the trail I was planning to take would almost certainly be under snow and probably impassable and dangerous. I should at least scout it, he said, from the other side of the lake before heading up it. Billy also suggested several longer (but less steep and dangerous) ways to get into the high country.

I can say with absolute certainty that I paid no attention to anything Billy the search and rescue codger-dodger said to me. When I got to the junction with the side trail I’d been planning to take - my trail led off to the left on the far side of the lake - I took it without looking ahead. I did notice that there was no sign marking my trail. I later learned that they didn’t post “my” trail because they wanted to discourage people from using it.

For the first part of the trip up the steep side of the lake, things seemed OK, and well steep. Here’s a picture with the trail outlined in red so you can see it:

I took the photo from the other side of the lake on my way out a few days later because I wanted to get a good look at where I had started my walk on the wild side. The first part up along the side of a steep scree field was no particular problem, although I did have to pause to take a breath frequently. When I got to the trees shown in the photo I had to start pulling myself up hand over hand, backpack and all. As I continued up the snow crossings started to get more and more difficult and scary. Some were undercut with fast running water, and I knew a collapse was possible at almost any time in these conditions of brutally hot sun and massive snow. As I’ve said, I drew the trail into the photo above. The part I drew in towards the top was the last I saw of the trail for many miles - it vanished under a snow field, and didn’t reappear. I began to wonder why I hadn’t brought proper gear for traversing snow - an ice ax, or at least crampons. Gators would have been nice, too, although more a matter of comfort than safety.

At some point when I was fairly shortly above the area shown in the photo I realized that I had lost the trail in a terrain of infinite snow and steep cliffs, and that it was probably too dangerous to go back down the way I had come.

This story is continued in Does the Wilderness Care about Me?
It concludes in There and Back Again

Dream Reflections © Harold Davis

This photo is of reflections in this year’s high water at the western end of Lake Tenaya in Yosemite Park. One of the famous Ansel Adams images is a majestic black and white view of Lake Tenaya, the surrounding domes, and swirling clouds. Ansel’s image, of course, couldn’t be more different than this one of mine.

This brings up the habit of today’s photographers of following in Ansel’s “gold-plated” footsteps. Hordes of digital photographers wait for their own Ansel moments at famous spots in Yosemite Valley — Half Dome, El Capitan, Yosemite Falls, and the roadside pullout below Inspiration Point at the Wawona Tunnel. These gold-plated Ansel foot print spots extend well beyond Yosemite, including for example the view of Denali from Wonder Lake.

There’s nothing wrong with studying the work of a master, or even paying homage by imitation. But, of course, the danger is that today’s digital photographer’s end up with less than nothing — pale color renderings of monochromatic iconography that are very far from original and do not take advantage of digital’s power.

I’ve been thinking about a related issue: if Ansel Adams were here now, how would he feel about digital photography?

I was fortunate enough as a young photographer to meet Ansel on a number of occasions, including one particulalarly memorable long afternoon at his house by the Pacific Ocean in Carmel Highlands. Based on my impressions of the man, and from reading his books, I think he would have been deeply conflicted.

Ansel was no Luddite, and in fact a great innovator in the grand tradition of American tinkering. He was very proud of the stroboscopic light source that he had rigged for his enlarger to send enough light through his negatives to get the deep, dark tones for which his prints are justly famous. (He also enjoyed driving a current year Cadillac with the vanity plate Zone V back when the Cadillac brand still meant something.) Ansel would have appreciated the technology behind digital photography.

On the other hand, Ansel’s appreciation of photography was deeply intuitive and sensous. He was a man who narrowly missed a career as a concert pianist. As he said to me, it was a good thing, too considering how afflicted with arthritis his hands became. He reviewed my photographic prints by running those deformed but powerful arthritic hands across them, touching the surface of my photos to somehow “see” them better. The sensual Adams would have been deeply disturbed by the virtual nature of digital photography — the final expression of many digital photos is of course to appear online. He would have missed the disappearance of the craft of silver halide photographic printing.

Ansel was also deeply uneasy about color photography. Oh, of course he took some color photographs on commercial assignments (particularly for Polaroid Corporation), and said some nice things about color photos by masters such as Joel Meyerowitz. (He also said some nice things about my color prints!) But he was never comfortable with the ability of color film and color printing techniques to adequately reproduce the tonal range inherent in what our eyes can see. I think the combination of high-quality digital capture and digital darkroom software (meaning Photoshop) would have at least partially helped resolve this issue for him. (Processing a digital photo in Photoshop mimics the steps used to make a good conventional print: read more about this here.)

There’s no real way to know how Ansel Adams would have felt about digital photography, and I can only speculate. He was a pragmatist and a great experimenter, as well as one of the greatest photographers the world has known. It’s too bad he isn’t around so we can see what he would have done with digital.

By the way, here’s another (very un-Ansel) image I took recently of Lake Tenaya:

Rock and Reflections, Lake Tenaya © Harold Davis

Lembert Dome, Tuolumne Meadows by Harold Davis

I always have a little chuckle when I hear a photographer boast that their digital photo didn’t need to be “fixed” in a digital darkroom program such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. This statement probably means that the photographer doesn’t understand what their digital camera is capable of doing, and that they shot the original photo as a JPEG rather than in camera RAW format. There’s nothing wrong in shooting JPEGs, but you lose a lot of the power of digital photography. You can certainly fix things in Photoshop if you start out with a JPEG, but you don’t process an image as a matter of course with a JPEG the way you do with a camera RAW image. (By the way, you can set many cameras to save images in both JPEG and camera RAW formats, so you have the best of both worlds.)

The steps I take to process a camera RAW digital photo in Photoshop are very comparable in their results and purpose to the steps I would have taken to make a good silver halide or chromagenic print from a film original. Here are my steps for routinely processing a digital RAW photo:

1. Open the camera RAW image in Photoshop. Note that there is no universal camera RAW format, each camera manufacturer has a proprietary version. For example, Nikon’s camera RAW format is saved with a NEF file suffix.
2. The Raw Adjustments dialog will open as part of Photoshop’s process of opening the camera RAW image. Here’s where part of the power of the RAW format comes in. This dialog, shown here, let’s you adjust the exposure up or down a few stops - so shooting in camera RAW is effectively the same thing as automatically bracketing each exposure.

   

   The other thing this adjustment dialog does is let you set the kind of light source used in the image. This is the same things as resetting the white balance - after the fact. The possible settings are shown in the drop-down list, and you can preview the results before making a choice (you can also preview the results of changing the exposure up or down). Here’s my post about the Photoshop CS2 Camera RAW Settings dialog, which is what you use to import a RAW photo into CS2

3. As soon as the image opens in Photoshop, save it as a PSD file. PSD files are Photoshop’s native format. You can archive the camera RAW orginal (NEF file if it was shot with a Nikon) and keep it safe. Do your Photoshop work in the PSD file, which has the advantage that it keeps track of the history of everything you do within Photoshop. It’s smart to name the PSD file the same way the camera RAW file was named, except the file suffix - that way you know what corrrecting image goes with what camera RAW original.

4. Working on the PSD file, sharpen it by choosing Sharpen > Unsharpen Mask from the Filters menu. A 100% sharpening should be about right, but experiment with the slider to try less or more sharpening, and use the preview checkbox to make sure the effect works before applying it. (Too much sharpening can make an image appear to be coarse and unreak.)

5. On the Images menu, choose Adjustments > Auto Levels. If you don’t like the results, use the History palette to undo the adjustment (Control + Z on the keyboard also undoes your last step).
6. On the Images menu, choose Adjustments > Auto Contrast. If you don’t like the results, use the History palette to undo the adjustment (Control + Z on the keyboard also undoes your last step).
7. On the Images menu, choose Adjustments > Auto Colors. If you don’t like the results, use the History palette to undo the adjustment (Control + Z on the keyboard also undoes your last step).
8. Now come some steps that depend on the image and your taste: use the Clone Stamp Tool and Healing Brush to fix and flaws in the image; dodge and burn specific parts of the image to taste to bring out details hidden in shadow (dodging) and put detail back into parts of the image that are washed out (burning). (Dodging works better with digital images, so you are better off exposing properly for the brighter parts of an image and adjusting the shadow areas in Photoshop as a generalization.) You can also adjust hues, saturations, and specific colors.
9. When you are satisfied with the image, make sure it is saved in the PSD format.
10. Using the PSD file, use Save As to create different format files for different uses - typically a JPEG file for viewing on the Web, and a TIF (tagged image file) format file for print reproduction.

It’s important to regularly follow a process such as this for processing and archiving your digital photos. As I said at the beginning of this protocol, these steps are very analagous to what photographers have always done to create good finished prints - so I don’t see why there should be any obliquy attached. The only excuse is ignorance - and if you are reading this, you are no longer ignorant.

You may also want to try photo retouching or photo composition (neither of which are described here - well, maybe a little retouching depending how far you go with the Clone Stamp Tool). These are great things to do with digital photos and Photoshop. But photo composition is worrisome - because a skilled Photoshop operator can change anything digital - photos and documents - and there’s no way to tell that changes have been made! Beware - you should not necessarily believe your eyes when presented with photos or digital documents. It is easy to fake them nowadays.

Of course photo composition can also be used for artistic purposes. For example, here’s information about photo compositing a moon into your landscape picture.

Make sure you have the best electronics when it comes time to process your photography! You want to make sure you have one of the top end digital cameras, and sometimes the technical mumbo jumbo can be overwhelming. So do you technology research online before you make a purchase, and don’t forget there are great LCD TVs available to display your photos on!

My Hiking Boots, photo and poem by Harold Davis.

Say thanks to my hiking boots at the end of the day!
All covered with mud and perhaps with clay.
My boots get me into the wilderness and out again:
They ignore cold, heat, snow, and pain.
Leather and Goretex upper and Vibram soul:
I know each part of this shoe very well!
Say thanks to my hiking boots on trail and at home,
I know they’ll support me where ever I roam.
No trail is too dusty, no ice field too steep,
For these hiking books their promises they always keep!

Flowering Dogwood, Yosemite, photo by Harold Davis.

I took this photo last month outside Camp Curry in Yosemite Valley. Click here for the Yosemite category on Photoblog 2.0, and here for Harold’s Yosemite set on Flickr.

When I say outside Camp Curry, I mean right hard by the front gate of the place. It’s amazing that you can stand there and look up at an incredible view like this while down below everyone scurries around in grubby Camp Curry.

Camp Curry may be grubby. Actually, it is grubby! But it was founded with noble ideals - making the grandeur of Yosemite affordable to the masses. And my son Julian loves the place. It is his idea of paradise, with warrens of rocks and paths to wander through, campfire talks at night - the perfect summer camp with Daddy.

Two schools of thought, really, about how to photograph in such a place: do you show Camp Curry in all its unclean washrooms, scurry around the pizza concession, human ant heap *or* do you edit the picture by framing to show the wonders of nature? Obviously, in this photo I took the second road (as I usually seem to do in nature or the wilderness).

I also post-processed this a bit in Photoshop, adjusting one set of color and contrast for highlight areas (the dogwood) and another for the shadows (the cliffs). I also dodged the cliffs to bring out the details.

Judy Garland, photo by Harold Davis.

I was furiously finishing up a chapter yesterday when I heard that Judy Garland - that is, Judy Garland the rose - was blooming in my garden. I had to take a break and photograph this new bud.

For this kind of photography the essential accessory is a tripod. The camera may not matter so much: unless you have a macro lens, a digital SLR won’t do as good a job as a less expensive LCD camera. But you do need a tripod so you can set the camera in aperture-preferred mode, stop it down as far as it will go, and let the exposure be as long as it needs. The tripod means you won’t get shake from the long exposure.

It’s worth investing in a good tripod. The tripod needs to be strong, and it needs to have the ability to spread its legs in all kinds of variable ways. It’s particularly important that the tripod be able to get very close to the ground (without that ability I would not have been able to take this picture). More information about tripods.

Here are some more photos from my garden:

Yosemite Without People, photo by Harold Davis.

This photograph is a view looking down on the top of Vernal Falls. I took the photo last month during the high water. Recently, I edited it in Photoshop to remove the people and fence from platform beside the top of Vernal Falls. So this is probably pretty much how it looked before there were people (at least European people).

With the people and fence in the picture, things look a little bit junkier - but it doesn’t really spoil the grandeur of the falls. But taking the people out has set me to musing about what Yosemite would be like without people - and also what appropriate stewardship of a unique place like Yosemite should be.

I think that actually the National Park Service does a pretty good job all things considered. From above, human footprint in the valley isn’t all that extensive, and there are some places you really can’t see it at all. The shuttle bus system is really a good way to get people to drive less in the valley, and still get them about conveniently. But I hate the feeling of constant construction and tourism in the summer months in the valley, and despair at what at times feel likes sacrilege towards one of the greatest temples of nature.

John Muir would probably have missed the serenity of the valley, although in his time there were other eco-scourges: for example, the sheep herds he called “hooved locusts.” (Muir originally came to the Yosemite on a summer job tending these very sheep.)

I’d like to think that there might be a better way to manage the valley without excluding anyone who really wants to see it, but I do realize this a big political problem.

But suppose there were another “almost-Yosemite” to start over with? I’m speaking of Hetchy-Hetchy, which is now filled with water as a reservoir for the Bay Area. Muir himself described Hetchy-Hetchy as another Yosemite. The defeat of the efforts to conserve Hetchy-Hetchy and the victory of pro-development water interests were a great early defeat for this country’s environmental movement.

The defeat at Hetchy-Hetchy helped fuel the rise of the Sierra Club, the National Park movement, and - following other defeats, notably Glen Canyon - a de facto moratorium on development in areas of scenic wonder.

There’s now talk of draining Hetchy-Hetchy and restoring it (for example, see the Yosemite Blog coverage). This may all be a dream, but it could happen. If it does, and if we can restore Hetchy-Hetchy, let’s make it a temple to the grandeur of nature, not (like Yosemite sometimes feels) a temple to tourism, autos, buses, and park concessionaires.

This photo shows photographer Jay Maisel buried in Kodachrome slides around 1980. But Kodachrome is doomed. Kodachrome, the most permanent and colorful of color films is also very expensive to process.

An recent New York Times article covers the story of the end of Kodachrome in Super 8 format. (Processing will cease at the end of 2007.) Kodak still makes and processes Kodachrome in 16mm and 35mm formats, but the picture is clearly flickring on the wall. Kodachrome will join all the other antique processes - tintypes, daguerotypes, cyanotypes, and so on - in the dustbin of technology history.

In the Times article, Kodak spokesperson Judy Doherty is quoted as saying that Super 8 Kodachrome fans can simply transfer their film onto digital “and achieve any kind of effect they want.”

Much as I love digital photography, this (of course) is simply not true. There are plenty of extremely cool things you can do with digital that you can’t do with film. But making your digitals imagery look like Kodachrome is not easily one of them.

Generally, it’s no good being nostalgic for the era of film anymore than it makes sense for motorists to waste over the glory days of horse transport. Digital is here to stay, and film is going away.

Meanwhile, a major battle is shaping up for the hearts and minds of digital snapshooters. Where do they print these pictures? Do they use an online service (Snapfly, Shutterfish, or Kodak), go to Costco, or buy a home printer. I think the home photo printer comes out ahead slightly just on convenience. But the real winner is digital to digital: mostly I want to put my digital photos up on Flickr and share them digitally. To heck with having these bits and pieces of papers and prints around! So yesterday! So horse and buggy. When someone finally comes up with a decent wireless photo album that synchs with services like Flickr then the companies offering photo processing and photo printers can finally die (as they ought to).