Zigzag Traveler

The Making of Crown Point Sunset

April 21, 2018 John Trax

Much as I would like to say so I did not start out my day with a plan to create Crown Point Sunset. One Saturday in November back in 2014 my wife, Carrie and I decided to drive over to the Columbia Gorge. We wanted to shoot some waterfall pictures with fall color. I had some nice shots of Multnomah Falls in summer but I was looking for something with fall color. I vaguely had the idea of doing a triptych of summer, fall, winter pictures.

Multnomah Falls in November — Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area is one of the most visited attractions in Oregon

The weather was nice at our house on Mt. Hood and per the forecast seemed OK in the gorge as well. Unfortunately the weather folks were as right as always. The weather over in the gorge was actually dreary, rainy, windy and anything but nice for the sort of pictures I had in mind. We persevered all morning and the best I got was this bland shot of the falls with some fall color. Not what I was hoping for at all.

By early afternoon we decided to pack it in and head home. On the way back toward Portland, still hoping for something to save the day, I decided to pull into the Portland Women’s Forum State Scenic Viewpoint. This state park offers a wonderful view of Vista House and the gorge looking east. I set up the tripod and camera and took a couple of images.

Vista House in the Fog — Vista House in the Columbia Gorge sits on Crown Point

This is what the scene looked like. Not exactly awe inspiring. While talking with another visitor I noticed that the sky was lightening a bit so I decided to hang on for a few more minutes. The fog was swirling and changing shape and position all the time and the light alternating between dim and maybe getting better. Minutes later the clouds opened and a beam of light came through. It illuminated the fog and cast a hint of pink pastel color on the sky above the gorge. I had time for two frames before the clouds closed up again and I was left with a dreary November day.

The first frame was a little washed out and I did not get as much of the sky color as I had hoped but the second frame looked to have potential. But potential and reality do not always match. Back at home I sat down at the computer and started my post processing.

Post Processing Crown Point Sunset

Everyone seems to have an opinion on post processing. And when I am showing at an art show one of the common questions is “Do you enhance your photographs?” I have explained my position on this in another blog post, so I’ll just say here that the RAW file did not match my vision. Which just means there is more work to do. I knew I had a good image, maybe even a great one. But conditions were, to say the least, less than ideal and I was not sure at the start what I was going to end up with. All the elements were there, combined with my clear vision of what the scene had looked like. But in this case it did take some work to tease out all the details.

The pastel pink in the sky was perhaps the hardest, too much and it would look fake. Not enough and it would not match what I saw. The beam of sunlight did a nice job of illuminating the fog and bringing out the fall color in the Aspen trees on the point. The rain in the distance made it difficult to get a clear sense of how the river itself should look. The deep shadows in the trees at the base of the point were a challenge to balance with the bright sunlit fog.

But the bones of an amazing image were there and over several hours I was able to tease out the details to produce Columbia Gorge Sunset. If I was a photojournalist the final image would not (and should not) look like it does. But I am artist working with nature, light and camera and this is the result of I saw that day. And that is the essence of art.

Prints of Crown Point Sunset are available on Amazon or on my website.

Digital Photography and Post Processing

April 21, 2018 John Trax

Red Barn in the Orchard — White pear blossoms surround a red barn at the foot of Mt Hood.

If you shoot jpegs with your camera or smartphone the little computer in the device post processes the image into something it thinks is nice. That version of the image is no more real or honest than any other version created from the RAW image data. It is all interpretation. When you work directly from the RAW file itself on the computer the resulting image is the artists interpretation, not the computer in the camera’s. The same set of digital data can be turned into a color image, a monochrome or sepia image or ‘filtered’ and manipulated into something that has little resemblance to the original scene.

My goal as an artist is to show as closely as possible what I saw, what I felt, what I experienced when I made the image. Sometimes that requires no more effort than posting the image to my website. Sometimes it requires hours or even days of post processing work in Lightroom and Photoshop. I reject the idea that taking a picture and then working on it on the computer is in any way altering what I saw, what I felt. Though I have photographer friends that still insist that “straight out of camera” is somehow more pure or honest. I think that working a RAW image back to what I saw rather than what the camera saw is the more accurate image. I believe in producing an image that reflects my vision at the time it was made. That I think is the essence of art.

We have to consider the limitations of the cameras we use and the conditions under which they are used. Take a snapshot with your phone in great daylight and the image will be a close representation of what you see. But come back pre-dawn and try to take an image of Mt Hood lit by sunrise and still include enough foreground detail for a good image. The phone, and indeed even most expensive DSLR cameras, are not going to produce an image that looks anything like what you saw. The human eye is still capable of things that the camera is not. When you look up at the mountain your pupils narrow as there is a lot of light in the sky. Look down at the dark foreground and your pupils open up to let in more light. This happens so fast you never notice. But the camera cannot do that. Everything in the scene is exposed at the same level. And that means to recreate what your eye saw we need to go beyond what the camera saw in that single frame exposure.

According to many sources the human eye can discern 20 to 24 stops of dynamic range. That is the difference between pure black and pure white in a scene. But only because the pupils are constantly opening and closing to adjust the amount of light we actually see. A good DSLR camera can discern between 10 and 12 stops of dynamic range. So what do we do when a scene has say 16 stops of dynamic range between darkest and lightest parts? The camera cannot record that properly so we have to fall back on combining images on the computer to produce a result that looks the same as what our eyes saw in the first place.

If I was a photojournalist I would feel obligated to modify the image as little as possible from what the camera recorded. Indeed there are rules and standards for this in the photojournalism world. But I’m an artist. I use a camera and the way light plays off the natural world to show my vision of what I am seeing. Sometimes that is just the way the little computer in the camera sees it as well. But most times my eye and the camera’s computer do not see the same thing.

Motorhome Types, How to Tell the Difference Between the Them

January 2, 2018 Administrator

How to tell the difference between the various motorhome types. Anyone who has looked into buying an RV has noticed that like any industry the RV industry comes with a certain amount of buzz words or slang that can be hard for new folks to understand. Motorhome types lead that list of impenetrable jargon. First you have the trailer versus motorhome split and each has a number of categories that can be confusing. Today I am going to talk about the various motorhome types in general use. In a future post I will take a look at the various trailer styles.

Motorhome Types:

Class A = big, usually on a bus or large truck chassis
Class B = really small, built inside a regular van with no modifications to the exterior
Class C = middle size usually on a light truck chassis with that big overhang in the front
Class B+ = sort of a class C without the overhang; or a class B on steroids
Class C+ = a class C body on a heavy truck chassis; sort of a class C on steroids

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Zigzag Traveler

April 20, 2017 John Trax

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The name Zigzag Traveler wasn’t made up just for this blog. There is a real Zigzag Traveler, or Ziggy to her friends. She is a 2017 Phoenix Cruiser model 2552. We have always named our vehicles, weird maybe, so what? We’ve had Martha, Mable and Myrtle recently. But naming our motor home turned out to be harder than we would have thought. After almost a month and still no name, we felt it was time and past time. Inspiration finally arrived and we came up with Zigzag Traveler. Sometime later we decided that might be a good name for this blog as well. All kinda ties together, sort of. …