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diff --git a/range.txt b/range.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 3746841..0000000 --- a/range.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,81 +0,0 @@ -# Scratch - -## 013 Bird, Sky - -My friend Mike and I took a quad ride through the country one weekend in San Miguel. It was a good trip, I wrote about it [here](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/11/lets-go-ride), but at one point we stopped for water and a huge flock of either ravens or crows came circling overhead. I like to think they were crows, since that would make them a murder of crows, but I couldn’t say for sure, I had no binoculars on me. I thought I'd maybe take a picture and see if I could zoom in later and figure out what they were. That idea failed, but I ended up with this picture which I really like. - -On a whim I decided to see if I could figure out how to get dramatically black skies in Darktable using the newer workflow tools, and I thought of this image. I think it works better as black and white anyway. - -## 011 Pawnee Grasslands - -Colorado conjures images of mountains and pine forests, but that's actually only the Rocky Mountains. Most of the state is grassland and plains, wide open country with huge skies, dramatic storms, and nowhere to hide from them. It can be exciting. - -Most of it is farmland, but there are a few National Grasslands that have been set aside to preserve things as they were about 100 years ago. We camped here in the Pawnee Grasslands for about a week. I wrote about it in a post called, appropriately, [Grassland](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/grassland), which also has some more images if you want to see some of the storms. But I like the simplicity of this one, it captures how very small even a 26ft RV feels out here. - -In developing this all I really wanted to do was up the contrast a bit and correct the color balance, which was tending toward the green side with all that grass. That and a little sharpening is all I did. - -You can download the Darktable Color Balance RGB preset I used in this video [here](https://luxagraf.net/darktable/colorbalancergb_colorcontrastboost.dtpreset). - -# Published - -## 007 Dragoon Mountains - -Southeastern Arizona is one of my favorite places in the desert southwest. The nearest big city is Tucson, but even that's a couple hours away. It's a lonely area, I love it. The Dragoons Mountains are among my favorite spots in the area. I've spent a few weeks in and around them over the years, entering from both the east and west sides, as well as from the south on foot. The west entrance is my favorite, but that road is too rough for [the big blue bus](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) so on this trip we came in from the east. - -The east is home to Cochise Stronghold, the place where Chihuicahui leader Cochise lived, later hid, and eventually died and was buried. As I've written elsewhere, [Cochise's presence is still easy to feel](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise) in the Dragoons. - -On this trip we spent most of our time hiking and hanging around the campground. During the week we had the place to ourselves. There was a dry creek bed a few yards beyond our campsite and for the kids it was like having a giant sandbox to play in. - -It was down in the creek bed, where I sat watching the kids, the birds, the world, when I noticed the way the sunbeams were coming through this yucca tree. I knew when I was taking it that the lens was going to flare, that's just what older lenses do, so I was thinking black and white from the moment I took it. - -In redeveloping it using 2021 darktable, I ended up with almost exactly the same look at the original, which you can see [here](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise). The difference is that this version, which uses the Color Calibration module, took about half the time as the original. It's slightly ironic perhaps but my favorite feature of the Color Calibration module is how easy it is to get the black and white look I want. - -For this one I wanted to replicate the look of my favorite black and white film, Tmax 3200. Alas, the magic of Tmax 3200 is about more than grain and when I made this image grainy the result looked terrible to me. So if you're reading this on luxagraf.net and you notice the large image above doesn't have the grain that's in the video it's because I decided it didn't work. Tmax 3200 has something about it (softness perhaps?) that I just can't get out of Sony's sensors. That's okay though, I'm happy enough with this image. As with the rest, it's not a work of art, but it reminds me of the experience of making it, and it illustrated a part of the story I wanted to tell about the Dragoons. - - -## 008 Rutherford Beach - -Coastal Louisiana doesn't have many beaches. It's mostly marsh, cat tails and reeds populated primarily by herons, spoonbills, coots, and other water birds. It's a flat, almost featureless, world when you drive through it sitting high up in an RV. - -There are no houses on the ground. There's very little ground and almost all of it will be inundated with water several times a year at a minimum. Maybe that's why everything out here is called a "camp", it's a way of acknowledging the temporary, precarious nature of the structures. - -Nearly every house has a sign out front with a name. Camp Canal, Camp Dr. Herbert, Camp David, Camp Southern Leisure, Camp 12 Oaks, and my personal favorite, Camp Plan B. I even saw a single wide mobile home on 12 foot high stilts with a sign on it that read: Cajun High-Rise. - -We spent five days camping on the only beach around, Rutherford Beach. It's free and you can pull right up on the sand. It stormed a good bit and fog would roll in pretty much every night, hiding the lights both onshore and off, making it feel like we were all alone in the world. - -That's what I like about this photo and why I went black and white with it, it feels more stark, more isolating, more raw, which is exactly how the Louisiana coast felt to me. And unlike the last image, I felt like the grain worked in this one. I shot it while driving, so it had a bit more softness to it that lent itself to adding grain. It looks more like film with that little bit of softness. - -## 009 Black and White Badlands -Late in the summer of 2018 we spent [two weeks camping in Buffalo National Grassland](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/range-life), on the edge of Badlands National Park. We only went into the park itself a couple of times, but this day rain was in the forecast and I already knew that without some clouds, the Badlands made for boring images (standing there looking at it was breathtaking, but sometimes that feeling doesn't translate into the image, and for me, in this case, it did not). I figured the storm would add some drama to the sky and make for better pictures. - -Most of the black and white images I've done so far for *Range* were composed knowing I would develop them to be black and white. This one is different. I had in mind color. But then the other day I was searching through my Darktable library for an image that would lend itself to making the sky black (in black and white). I know how to get a black sky using Darktable's old channel mixer, but I haven't done it in the new color calibration module (which replaces the channel mixer). Anyway, this image isn't great for that, but when I saw it something said, *you should make that black and white*. So I did, and I like it much better than the color version. - -<div class="self-embed-container"> - <video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-poster.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="15" class="vidautovid"> - <source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-compressed.webm" type="video/webm"> - <source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4"> - Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5. - </video> - <a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AviWkfPT8Yg">Watch on YouTube</a> -</div> - -I think this image is a good example of how a mundane image can be made much more striking in black and white. It's important to note this is not a great image even in black and white, but it serves my purpose here. Which is to illustrate that sometimes thinking in texture rather than color yields a more interesting image. -## 010 Alborada Festival - -San Miguel de Allende's [Alborada Festival](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/10/alborada) starts at 4 AM. Actually it was closer to 2 AM. The main Jardin gets packed way before that, but 4 is when it kicks off. Mexicans are serious about their parties. I’ve been in quite a few large scale parties — Songkran, Chinese New Year, New Year’s Eve in New York. San Miguel’s Alborada deserves a spot among those, it’s a hell of a party and it lasts for four or five days. - -I won't pretend to understand all of it, but the highlight for me was a particular group of dancers, La Sagrada Familia. I ended up photographing them many times over the months. I am actually not 100 percent sure that this gentleman was part of that group, but his dress and face paint fits. This was a random shot grabbed in the blink of an eye and then he was gone. - -<div class="self-embed-container"> - <video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-10-screen.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="16" class="vidautovid"> - <source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-010-compressed.webm" type="video/webm"> - <source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-010-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4"> - Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5. - </video> - <a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxXHn_sQeNE">Watch on YouTube</a> -</div> - -I would like to have made a head-on shot, but I never did see him again during the festival or in the next nine months we called San Miguel home. Sometimes all you get is an instant. - -You can download the Darktable preset I used in this video [here](https://luxagraf.net/darktable/colorbalancergb_colorcontrastboost.dtpreset). - |