You ascribe the honor.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
To See What They Look Like
I believe it was Gary Winogrand who said “I photograph things to see what they look like photographed.”
Even today, with the near-instant gratification provided by digital cameras, it is often a surprise to discover that the exposure you made winds up capturing something quite different from what your eyes and brain registered on the scene.
We don’t look at one thing. Our eyes jump around in a series of saccades, changing focus and aperture on the fly, with our brains helpfully filling in the blanks with interpolated detail so that we won’t see a bunch of mush. Cameras and lenses are much less creative, despite tremendous advances in technology.
I thus consider it something of a triumph when a photograph I take “comes out” as I envisioned it would. But I am always open to surprise: every now and then what appears is not what I expected, but something much more interesting.
Shattered
Life leaves scars.
Some Photographic Challenges
It wasn’t all blue skies in New Mexico, alas. Heavy overcast and ultra-flat lighting made it hard to do justice to the magnificent landscape at Tent Rock. These two pictures barely hint at the sheer presence of this landscape.
Standing in the Gap
Tent Rock ‘Village’
What Winter Should Look Like
If we must have winter, it should look like this: sunny blue skies, bright white snow, large vistas. If I lived in Albuquerque, I would take up skiing again (or snowboarding, maybe). I haven’t thrown myself down a mountain since I was teenager, but the chance to do it in weather like this would tempt me mightily. I don’t mind a little nip in the air if the sun is shining. Of course, the bonus here at Sandia is that the temperature improves by 15 degrees at the bottom of the hill, and there are no snowdrifts to dig your car out of.
This image is a single exposure tone-mapped HDR. You might find it interesting to compare it to the version in the previous post.
Quick (Not!) and Dirty Comparison
I thought I’d throw together a little compare & contrast exercise for y’all between Lightroom 3 Beta and Aperture 3. The problem, of course, is that I’m working on my severely underpowered MacBook Air. It will run both programs, but everything is much slower than one would hope… and in the case of Aperture, it quickly becomes damn near unusable. LR3 does a MUCH better job of supporting my feeble little laptop. With this hardware, the fine points of image quality are really irrelevant; I simply can’t get work done in a timely fashion using Aperture on this machine.
Nevertheless, I’ve prepared some comparison images for your amusement.
First up, an unremarkable image opened from RAW with no adjustments:
Aperture
Lightroom
Now with typical adjustments:
Aperture
Lightroom
A few other examples:
Aperture
Lightroom
Aperture
Lightroom
And, lastly, a comparison with a previously-posted image:
Aperture
Lightroom
If you’re not seeing big differences between these images (or if you’re not seeing them at all on Facebook, please click through to the post on my blog), well, that’s because there aren’t a lot of big differences. I would say, on average, images coming out of Aperture tend to wind up a little more contrasty and a little more vibrant/saturated. Some of that is probably because, on my gimpy machine, I can’t really do adjustments in real time, which probably means I’m over-correcting.
Still, the upshot of this comparison is that while I LOVE the many other features Aperture offers (ease of keywording, Places, and Faces), it is currently way more frustrating than I’m prepared to tolerate for actually making image adjustments. And I think Lightroom 3 Beta currently has the edge in terms of brushed-in adjustments.
My Aperture trial will expire in 9 days. Lightroom 3 Beta will expire in mid-April. I will revisit the comparison when I have hardware that can handle the burden that Aperture places on it, and make a purchasing decision shortly thereafter. It’s possible I’ll wind up using LR3 for RAW editing and iPhoto (the latest version of which will be free on my theoretically-forthcoming new hardware) for cataloging and other higher-level tasks.
Ancestor, Waiting
Suddenly, in the negative space of this image, I saw a standing figure wrapped in desert-striped weavings, patient and watchful. And, once seen, it became impossible to not see.
Heart of Stone
It is hard to make a photograph that really captures what it was I saw in this constellation of rocks. The bigger version (click on photo) does a better job of it than the small one.
Tent Rock Wall
Despite overcast skies, we spent a wonderful hour and a half exploring Tent Rock park, located either inside or just adjacent to Cochiti Pueblo, not far from Los Alamos. If you’re in the neighborhood, I highly recommend a visit. I hope to go back one day, when conditions are more favorable. It offers one fabulous photographic opportunity after another.
White Sun
My return from Albuquerque presents me with several hundred photographs to pick through, a slew of email to answer, and *oh frabjous day!* an update from Apple that brings RAW support to my Lumix DMC-GF!. Of course what that really means is that I’m processing the same files twice now, once in Lightroom 3 Beta and now in Aperture 3 too. You lucky readers: can a compare & contrast post be far behind? (To be fair, I’m currently much more familiar with LR than Aperture; I really should learn how to use the latter a bit better before doing a comparison.)
If only I had a computer with enough oomph to handle these tasks without slowing to a mind-bendingly annoying crawl.