The Warm & The Cold Of It.

My favorite part of photography is the color of light.  Photography is about light.  It is the essence of photography long before we introduce any subjects.  Capturing the mood and the tone of that color of light, and how it affects varying subjects, may well be the single biggest part of being a photographer.

Blue Desert

This is a 1990s film image of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.  It is a straight digital copy and no filters were used while making the original.  Many would say that a warming filter should have been used to counteract the blues reflecting from the sky.  At this point in my career a warming filter would have been normal but it was on this trip that I began experimenting with letting the color bias fall where it may.  Blue skies usually mean white sand here, but when it bounces off the clouds in the afternoon, it can paint the sand blue. A moody picture for sure, and in reality a true view of the light that was bathing the sand at that time.

More than likely if I had made this during the digital era my white balance would have been set at auto and my initial images would have been color corrected.  That being done I would have tricked my white balance in an effort to capture this bluer and truer vision of what was happening with the light.

The color of light and what it does to the sand, is just one more reason why White Sands is the greatest location for “artistic learning” that I have ever visited.

Warming It Up

If a cool blue desert is normal, well so is a warm Gadwall.  I got this shot of an immature Gadwall duck during the last moments of light.  Many birders hate this “unnatural” light, but the reality is that it is perfectly natural.  Instead of this image just being a shot of an immature Gadwall, it is a picture of an immature Gadwall at sunset.  Both are important aspects of the natural world.

True Colors Showing Through

Black birds are rarely black.  We’ve all learned that with grackles, but the Common Crow will show other colors depending on the angle of light. With the light skimming the bird, you will see those browns.  Expecting my meter to over expose the dark bird about 3/4ths of a stop of light, I made no adjustments to my exposure.  I knew that my exposure would render the bird grayish in tone, but not necessarily in color.  This left the light blue sky burnt out and colorless.  I reduced the exposure of the sky via software.  This resurrected the light blue tones that existed when I made the photo.  This is one of the greatest tools that digital photography has brought us.

What’s It Worth?

I think we all love spectacular landscapes of spectacular places.  I spent most of my time in Washington State’s Northern Cascades driving, with occasional roadside stops.  I will admit as beautiful as this place is I made very few pictures and no grand landscapes. That was partly because of weather, but partly because every time I stopped, those grand scapes just didn’t fall into place. Even this little roadside waterfall just wasn’t grand.  It was however intimate. As soon as I divorced myself from my preconceived ideas of what a Cascades landscape should be, and began just looking around, the pictures started flowing.

The Cascades portion of that trip did not turn out to be what I had hoped for. My camera missed the grandeur of those mountains but in reply I found their intimacy.  Every place has a complex personality and if we can’t find the obvious,  sometimes we just might see what others miss.

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I appreciate your stopping by at Earth Images.  I literally approach this blog one day at a time. It serves no greater purpose for me personally other than to keep me talking about photography and other subjects that I am interested in.  That was also true in the beginning but back then it had a larger less self-serving reason for its existence.  That once greater purpose seems to grow weaker with every post……I’ll continue the one day at a time approach.

Today we honor Independence Day, commonly known as The Fourth of July. The flag image below is not mine.

God Bless America