Waiting

I stood there for a minute or two taking pictures. The dog never came down off the porch to check me out, never barked. He or she did look my way with momentary interest when I exclaimed "What a good puppy!"

Because it SNOWED today...

...we're going to have a little reader poll here at Something Beautiful.

I photographed these tree roots at Dumbarton Oaks the other day. One of these images was rendered in grayscale directly from the RAW file in Lightroom and then adjusted. The other was tweaked in Silver EFX.

Can you guess which is which?
And, in any case, which do you prefer?
(As always, please look at large versions rather than thumbnails to decide.)

A:


or

B:


I find that preferences in black & white vary tremendously, and that people are quite passionate about how they like their monochrome images structured. I await your responses with great interest!

Vine Growth Chart

This vine is ready for spring and another growth spurt.

Suddenly, A Crowd Had Formed...

...at Everard's in Georgetown.

Loss

Photo taken 7/30/2006, at my father's 85th birthday party in Boston, MA.

I am heartsick with sadness. I just learned that Howard Zinn died yesterday.

Most people know him as the author of A People's History of the United States, or they remember his name because of the movie Good Will Hunting. I knew him as a family friend, wife to warm and wonderful artist Roz (who died two years ago). He was kind, fierce, brilliant, eloquent, tirelessly energetic, generous, charismatic, and also soft-spoken and modest in personal conversation. I looked forward to his visits to DC, when he would often invite me to join him at his speaking engagement and sometimes include me in dinners with the lefty literati.

Not many people are able to reach and change minds, and to speak with fearless passion about the issues that matter. I didn't always agree with Howard, but I deeply admired his commitment to justice and peace. I was lucky to know him and I will miss him.

Read an obituary here.

A Winter Garden

Dumbarton Oaks garden is one of my favorite places in Washington. To be more accurate, it's one of my favorite places anywhere. For awhile, when I first moved to DC, I went there every fair-weather Sunday to sit on a bench and read the paper in beautiful surroundings.

I thought I remembered that the garden was off-limits to visitors from November to April. I either misrecalled or the policy has changed. I went waltzing in this afternoon; not only was it open, but nobody was taking admission fees either.

I intend to renew a more intimate acquaintance with this glorious spot.

An Old Love

Back in the day, all I ever shot was black and white. I developed it myself. I printed it myself. In a darkroom. With all the stinky chemicals. Yes, I dodged and burned. I toned. My darkroom had no ventilation and no running water and was at the opposite end of my apartment from the bathroom (and the tub in which I washed the prints). Big, beautiful, 16" x 20" prints they were.

I was, if I may so, a very good printer. I had mad skillz. But after a few hours in the darkroom, my pee smelled like fixer for days. It's a wonder I still have my original liver.

So I don't really miss the darkroom, except for a vague, wistful nostalgia. And now, with the advent of shooting RAW and "developing" through post-processing in Lightroom, I feel that I'm returning to my roots albeit in a modern, digital way. But I'm nowhere near having mad skillz.

Yet.

In Knots

This is not technically a great photograph. And surely no one would imagine I'm in favor of plastic pollution in trees. But still: this was beautiful, blowing in the breeze.

Because it's raining again…

…I am driven to find the silver lining in the clouds. Or, as the case may be, the green metallic flake lining.

Great Falls

Sure, I took pictures of the rapids. I'll probably post at least a couple of them here at some point. But I wanted to show you this one as an example of how sometimes even though you do everything technically "wrong," it works out anyway. (As usual, bigger is much better.)

Blue Grass

It was l'heure bleu. I had run out, camera in hand, as the sun broke through the clouds late in the afternoon. Five minutes later it dipped below a heavy bank on the horizon and the light fell quickly. I took many blurry pictures trying to find a compromise between ISO, aperture, and shutter speed.

I don't know what imparted a lavender-blue tinge to these weedy grasses, but they practically glowed in the twilight.

Mosscape

There's a whole world of beauty at our feet. I challenge you to go for a walk this afternoon. Take a watch with you and stop every five minutes and just look at what's on the ground nearby. Even if you expect to see ugliness, look carefully. You may be surprised. (As always, kindly embiggen the image.)

Rustscape

I can't paint, but if I could, my landscapes would look like this: an arcane map of the world. (Enlarge for full enjoyment.)

Lampposts on the Bridge

I have always been partial to greening bronze, and ~ as shown here ~ it looks especially great in late afternoon light. Again, please view the big version.

Rock Creek Sunset

I continue to experiment with HDR tools. This image combines four handheld exposures. The thumbnail version does not do this image justice... please enlarge!

Light Waves

The late afternoon light made its mazy way through some curtains in a dazzling display of moiré. Please have a look at the large version to best appreciate the color and pattern.

Hinge

It wasn't until I looked at this image on my computer that I saw the "N" in the center.

Edges

Sometimes the frame is more interesting than the painting. That's true for windows too.

Written on a Scroll of Brick

The calligraphy of a vine and the withered wisps of leaves seem like the last traces of an elegant writing system since abandoned. Or maybe it's a music score, in an unfamiliar notation, that has yet to be performed.

Bright, Bright Sunshiny Day

This image just feels too easy. It's almost embarrassing: simple, graphic, bright. But it makes little pleasure neurons in my head go *ping* so I don't care if it's a cliché.

Brave New Mall

This is an image you simply could not create with a single conventional exposure.

It's a handheld HDR, this time using only two exposures: Photomatix HDR and tone-mapping based on two camera JPEGS, exported as TIFF, adjusted in Lightroom, exported as JPEG for the web. I tried to keep it looking 'real' this time, but if you snoop around in the image you'll see a few anomalies. I didn't take the trouble to bring it into Photoshop and fix everything properly.

Amazingly decent result considering the completely ad hoc nature of the entire enterprise.

Thank You DMV

Three words you don't hear together very often!

I had to go down to Georgetown to deal with some car bureaucracy: two hours of my life I'll never get back. The entire experience was redeemed by the dozen or so photos I managed to take between the DMV office and my car. The light, the environment, and my eye all happened to be on the same page for half an hour. It's a great feeling when that happens.

Wild Colored Grasses

I took some significant liberties with the tone-mapping in Photomatix, I'll admit it.

By the way, I re-sized and uploaded these files directly rather than use Blogger's uploading because the recompression was totally mucking up the color depth and contrast range in this image. I have noted this previously, but it was especially obvious with this one. It makes me wonder if I should go back and revisit some of my earlier posts. (Grrrr! More work for me will, however, mean better pictures for you.)

Reader Quiz

Okay, so you've been following along as I explore the wonders of RAW format, right? Think you can tell a camera-produced JPEG from the RAW-processed JPEG?

OK, let's find out! Look for:

1) noise in shadows
2) color balance
3) sharpness with minimal graininess
4) appropriate contrast
5) highlight detail

So, which is the RAW-processed file? Is it...

A?



Or is it B?

Winter Flowers

Yellow is the color that lasts through the frost and the snow, somehow persisting deep into winter. These buds are preserved in place, but winter is not mocked. The ice and the cold have the last word.

[Update: Re-uploaded images directly to avoid recompression color and contrast shift.]

Textile Design Insanity

I've just been playing around like a crazy girl! Is there no end to my madness???

No, drugs were not involved. I'm just seeing how outrageous I'm willing to be. (I betcha you haven't seen anything quite like it before, though, have you?) You're going to want to check out the large version to appreciate the full lunacy of this image.

Note to self: Get a computer that can handle these large computational tasks with some grace, would you please? Because doing even a half-assed job on these with a feeble machine is downright aggravating.)

Wires & Shadows

Believe me when I tell you that no camera JPEG is going to give you a result like this. RAW is beautiful (these uploaded files suffer from some meaningful loss of quality).

And here's a black & white version:

There is still some color in the world…

It may be winter. It may be cold. But I found these red leaves and they made me glad.

Totally Inaccurate

Sometimes what you want is fantasy, and then the RAW file is the stuff that dreams are made on.

The Raw Deal

My GF-1 makes pretty nice JPEGs. I haven't had any complaints, really. But yesterday's experiment in RAW+JEPG has opened my eyes. Even with my clumsy bumbling in Lightroom, I can see why professional photographers shoot in RAW. Although I'm post-processing these images on a non-color-controlled MacBook Air, I can clearly see why the exquisite tonal and color control afforded by post-processing RAW data is desirable. Here are a few examples (of course all images you see online are now JPEGs, and have gone through an extra level of compression courtesy of Blogger, so some of the differences get lost in the process).

Blue Ice Puddle


Image 1: Camera JPEG, tweaked in iPhoto. Not bad!


Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

Three Guy Wires


Image 1: Camera JEPG, tweaked in iPhoto. Pretty good!


Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

Pink Pipe


Image 1: Camera JPEG, tweaked in iPhoto. Difficult color palette, handled quite well.


Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. Guess what? More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

It's a lot more work, and there's clearly a whole world of technical expertise I've yet to acquire. Fortunately, I have a pretty good technical background in image processing, both from my background as an analog printer (remember the silver print darkroom in days of yore?) and from years of working with digital images in circumstances where image quality was paramount. I can learn what I need to, and my eye is decent. The biggest challenge working from the RAW file is that there are so many instances, so many "interpretations" if you will, of the data that are viable. There is no one correct version. The hard part is to pick a vision for the image and then know when to quit tweaking. Ansel Adams would have loved this technology.

Back Again

After about 12 hours of being on strike, Blogger is once again deigning to publish to my server. Thanks, Google!

Wall and Pipe

Post-processing madness! I shot this image in both RAW and JPEG. I tinkered with the RAW using my trial version of Lightroom, which of course I really have no informed idea how to use. The difference in color balance between the two versions couldn't have been more striking. And, of course, since I have no good memory of my perception of the color at the time of the exposure, ultimately I just have to go with the more pleasing/plausible version.

Late Sun Through Stained Glass

It was all I could do to cross the street in the cold & wind to bring you this image from the National Cathedral. You're welcome.

[UPDATE]

I purchased Photomatix Pro and have started fooling around with using HDR processing for exposure-bracketed shots. All these images were foolhardily hand-held (no tripod for me, I'm a rebel,man!).

For comparison purposes, here's an "exposure fusion" version of the Stained Glass image.



And now here's a "tone-mapped" version.



And a special bonus for you lovely people: a tone-mapped version of the National Cathedral nave, given a rather more "painterly" treatment.



I'd be interested in your thoughts… any preferences among these images? Please comment!

Another Light

What time of day is it? Where is that other light coming from? Are those Christmas pin-lights on the trees or buds? I love the subtle ambiguity of this image.

Writing on the wall

It's gusting 30 miles an hour and cold as hell this evening. The heat in my apartment building has been unreliable the last couple of days (usually it's positively tropical in here, which I adore despite the patent ungreenness of it), and the chill has seeped into every corner. I dislike windy weather; it makes me restless and irritable, and I always sleep fitfully. The violent rattle of ill-fitting windowscreens, the slamming trashbin lids, and the clanking chain in the neighbor's yard don't help either. It's going to be a miserable night.

...And In With The New!

Think of 2010 as an attractive, colorful, surprising, and still unopened present. What do you want it to be?

Happy New Year, friends!