Photography, writing and observations of our world

Last weekend several friends and I drove to west Texas for what was to be a week long visit to Big Bend National Park.  Unfortunately we did not have reservations and our visit coincided with "spring break" crowds from around the USA.  After one night at the Cottonwood Campground, near Santa Elena Canyon (pictured on the left, Mexico on the left, USA on the right) we were out of luck and had to exit the park.... all the way to Fort Stockton, Texas.  Next time, I will plan better and make sure to have a place booked.  I'll have a few more images in the days ahead.

As you race to the edge of a precipice one MUST believe that you can find your way, there is no other option.  Be it a hang glider, skiing, diving, sailing, love or life.  If you are not racing to the edge, you are not believing in the life you have now.  Wake up, it's happening now.

Today, my photo of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany was published in the Austin American Statesman having won their travel contest.  I am very happy with winning the contest and especially for this photo.  I have looked at it on and off for years, and at one time had it printed four feet wide and had it gracing my wall.  I think it is time to do that again!

The last half of 2009 has come an gone.  The last half of the year I traveled thousands of miles in the Pacific northwest, from Oregon to the upper reaches of British Columbia.  My third year in a row to do so.  It is a green Eden.  Days later I was cruising the coast of Maine, a place that has its own way of life, my first visit, and it won't be my last. 

For 2010: I begin anew to dive into the things I am passionate about and not to just chase the rewards of my labor.  From the wellspring of passion we find the energy to grow the projects that will bear fruit later.  Do what you love, love what you do, share it with others and it shall reward them and you too.  Don't just "have a great year" but MAKE IT a great year.  It is one of the last years of your life, truly, live it like it is....

Moments of discovery.  On the beach of Baie St. Jean, St. Barthélemy, FWI.  July 16, 2009.

The freedom to be free (with your personal watermelon) says it all. I hope everyone enjoyed the day.

An adaptation of my photograph from 1969 in Pelican Bay, Santa Cruz Island, California.  Santa Barbara 20 miles away on the horizon.  Every weekend we would come, my teenage friends and I, in my father's 29 ft. sailboat, SEA COLT.  We brought half the food we needed and spent the rest of the day in the water catching the rest.  This is now part of the Channel Islands National Park, but in the '60's this was a glorius rare day warmed by the Santa Anna winds from the mainland, crystal clear skies.... and the sea was all ours. So I remember my father on this day for his generous granting of my freedom to have this day, he reveled in such places.

June 10, 2009

    I am only 21,547 days old. I can remember many of them, starting with swatting mosquitoes on the screen that covered the top of my baby crib.  I can recall slithering out from under it and grasping the white crib's round rails as I slid to the floor landing atop the shag rug on which I loved to play.  It was my first solo adventure and I didn't even know how to talk.  
    Of those thousands of days, the ones that are etched in my memory most, are days that I was traveling, changing my environment, making forays into areas beyond my comfort zone.  By the time I was 30 years old I realized that a true adventure was one from which I might not return, but just that remote possibility excited neurons to forever sparkle in my memory.  As a younger man my youthful eye was blind to many dangers in trips to places that now I give more thought before proceeding.  Sometimes I escaped tragedy just by sheer luck, wandering into places and environments that I was not prepared to see and experience; I was fair game for the seemingly predatory nature of a sometimes harsh planet and her lurking inhabitants.  But go I did, and I still want more.
    With time however, the "comfort zone" changed too.  I am tall, so I no longer am keenly excited to get in a sardine can of an airline for hours on end to get some place.  A few years ago one such flight caused a DVT in my leg that brought all travel to a stop for four months.  It is the terrible trick of nature that I still think more/less like I did when I had just 25 years behind me, but the body fails to keep up occasionally.  So a little more caution was added to my travel potion but it generally the results in experiences continue to be just as exciting.  I no longer SCUBA dive in 44 degree F. water as I did as a teenager, in fact many years later I came up with the lame formula of one's age plus 25 or 30 should be the minimum water temperature one should plunge.  It does seem to work.  I still go, but not on moonless nights in waters that Great White sharks are known to inhabit (it's too cold for me now! ;-)
    My first parentally-sponsored solo travels came as a preteen, learning to sail in South San Francisco Bay.  I had an eight foot El Toro with 45 sq. ft. of magnificent sail.  It was my ticket to freedom within my small world.  At 12 years of age, I commandeered this vessel across the full width of San Francisco Bay, probably about 6 miles further than I was allowed to go by my parents.  So I found out that if I didn't tell them, and I made it back, then it was probably OK.  So I didn't tell them for at least a dozen years.  But in defense of my voyage of discovery, I was in my mind, fully prepared.  Every bit as prepared as I have been on every trip since, it's just that my level of awareness of what preparations DO need to be done has changed.  In retrospect as an adult I know I was woefully unprepared for that trip across the bay... I had not done a weather check, only told one friend, he was 11 years old, and really was just as clueless as me, I had no back up plan should something have gone awry (like the boat flipping and not being able to right it), many things left out.  Fast forward many decades and a million miles.
    My latest long solo journey was to Antarctica.  I decided to go on the trip after I heard of a cancellation that freed a berth on a tired Russian ship that would be full of other like-minded photographers.  I had nine days to prepare.  Most on this trip had been preparing for well over a year!  I had to move very quickly.  I had gear arriving hours before my departure, and I would be gone over a month.  Baggage checked, boarding pass in hand, I cleared security, only to see CANCELLED above my flight's gate.  An ice storm in a connecting airport had brought down the whole house of cards.  A day later I was back at the same gate, but this time I made it.  I had prepared a cushion of several days in Buenos Aires for just such an emergency, and it paid off.  I was booked in a cabin for two, but I had replaced a couple, so there was an extra bunk.  I tried to get several friends to join me, but no luck.  However one friend it turned out had a ranch in South America which I ended up visiting at the end of my voyage, a sublime experience that I will not elaborate on here as it is well documented already (search my web site for Estancia Alicura).
    My point is, be persistent in your quest for new places and experiences.  At first you might be alone, but soon enough you'll be with new friends enjoying a whole other world from their viewpoint.  These events will alter the course of your life.  My lost night before the start of my journey south cemented my relationship with my girl friend.  We'll be married in two weeks.  Hello world, here I come.

I have been using the amazing COOLIRIS add-on to Firefox and Safari for quite some time, and it keeps getting better.  Being able to browse my own images on my computer's hard disk is a nice touch.  Perhaps one day it will support DNG & other RAW files.  Meanwhile, get it, you'll love the 3-D wall.

I wish I had taken the photos presented here, alas I did not.  I was just a recipient of the marvelous eye of Dwaine Gaeke via a forwarded email from a mutual friend.  Dwaine gave me permission to publish these as an example.  I just wanted to demonstrate that anyone can capture these images if you have an eye for composition and vary the exposure.  As soon as I saw them I realized that they were virtually identical in framing, just different exposures with a Panasonic Lumix point-n-shoot camera.
I aligned them in Photoshop CS4, then used Photomatix to create an HDR image, which I subsequently reimported into PS CS4 to paint the HDR image over part of the darker original to remove some parts that were too light.  I ran the Noiseware Pro filter on the result to reduce digital noise, then saved and imported into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 for final tweaking.  Here is the result.... almost mystical.  Great job Dwaine.

2009 is a great time to be in photography.  The quality of the equipment and the software to process images has improved dramatically in the past 15 years.  I find that my mind coached with training of what these tools can do, has even altered my perceptions of the way I see the world.  I now look for things that often I cannot see, but that I know are there.  Very exciting stuff in that the end resulting image is often analogous to what Forrest Gump said, "it's like a box of chocolates, you don't know what you are going to get."  But usually one knows that you'll get something that you will like.  The other day I was showing some rowing images to a very experienced friend in the sport.  She saw things in the image that I could not see: wrist position, back inclination and elbow angle of the various rowers that told her information about what was going on in the boat.  Oar positions and alignments that meant nothing to me, but to her trained eye, it was a wholly different plane of observation.  It is like this for me when I photograph a subject.  Many times I have been asked "what are you photographing?" and I have difficultly explaining that I am not quite sure, well, completely anyway.  I am sure it sounds like a stupid answer to the questioner.  However the same thing has happened to me a lot with other photographers.  We'll be in the same place at the same time, and looking at our pictures later I'll think, "were we on the same trip together?"  My point is people can and do see things differently and can be trained to see them in a certain way.  Not so different from doctors studying x-rays.

One of the tools that Adobe Systems has added to the quiver of Photoshop CS4 Extended Edition in recent years has been the "stack mode" and its special filters.  If images are captured with precise alignment, Photoshop can take this "stack" of images and process the individual pixels.  A maximum filter will  yield the brightest value of that pixel position from all the images in the stack.  The minimum filter will do the opposite, while the median filter falls in between.  The latter is of great use when you want to photograph a subject that has people or objects moving within the frame.  With enough exposures, you can make them all disappear from the final output image.

These three images here are of some rocks off Point Lobos, California (near Carmel).  A series of nine images stacked together.  Everything about the images is identical, save for the TIME that they were taken.  The first is with the maximum filter applied, and all of the surf (bright white) and the white birds show up in abundance.  Remember the birds have been multiplied as they were flying, so it is likely nine times as many birds as in a single photograph.  The median filter leaves the image in a slightly more natural state but removes much of the chaos of the image.  

The minimum (bottom left) shows the darkest part of the rocks without the white surf, and a few dark birds as well.  Of the three I find this one the most interesting as brighter objects tend to be retained on our retina and memory longer than do the darker ones.  That is to say we can imagine the maximum and median images easier than the minimum, dark image.  I think it has become my "art" at this point, it is mine.

Last week I did a short "BBQ Tour" with my friend Mark to sample the spiced cuisine in the Austin region of Texas. Unfortunately we did not have the discipline required for what I am sure will become many forays in multiple compass directions. We were overcome with the aromas offered at our first stop, Smitty's Market, in Lockhart, Texas, and ordered too much.


It was only 10:30am and we had the full day before us. I was doing well up until the moment I snapped the photo of the BBQ on the butcher paper in front of me. Carnivore instincts set in and we seemed out of control for a short time. Smitty's got four greasy thumbs up in the end. The sweet ribs were our favorite. We pressed onward to Luling after walking around the heart of Lockhart.



The smoke stained sign in the interior of the Luling City Market was ominous. But our quest for food that only a cardiologist could appreciate was not over yet. We did the "usual" at this point, one link of sauage, four ribs, and a few slices of brisket. Since this was "lunch" we even threw in a Shiner beer too. The line was out the door by the time our eyes glazed over with a coating of cholesterol and we muttered the words "I'm done" and "me too." Wrapped up what was left just in case, and took it with us. Mark and I agreed it wasn't exactly fair to judge the Luling Market in our sated state, but we gave the edge to Smitty's.


"On the road again" as Willie Nelson says in his song. We stopped briefly in Gonzales to take in the local antiques, both in and outside shops. A nice place to stop and visit the Gonzales Memorial Museum, full of Texas history. It was near here that on October 2nd, 1835 the first shot was fired in the Texas war of independence from Mexico.



Our own day was running late and we had one final destination to see the K. Spoetzl Brewery, the creator of Shiner beer. We arrived about 90 seconds before the visitor center closed, but not to late for a quick sample to end our day.

More to come....

From the Heart of Texas crew races Sunday on Lady Bird Lake, Austin, Texas.

I have had a lot of discussion about this image in my Caribbean gallery so I am going to elaborate more on it.  I did an exploratory trip of the Caribbean in 1978 on an old 1930's schooner for six weeks.  I traveled from the Grenadines to Antigua.  May 15, 1978 was the first time I saw English Harbor (I kept an extensive written log so I know the dates).  There were not any boats in the outer harbor then (lower part of the image with a lot of anchored sailboats) and I took a small dinghy and rowed over to the far end of the bay.  For the next few hours I snorkeled the entire length of the shallow bay, repeatedly diving to the bottom.  The whole expanse of water was full of shimmering schools of juvenile fish, and with each plunge toward the bottom the fish would open a "hole" to let me through and then close behind me, covering my view of the surface.  It was magical.  I was 28 years old and had been free diving and SCUBA diving since my mid-teens in California, but I had never experienced anything like this.  It was an enthralling, interactive contact with nature.   I did not visit this harbor again until 1990 when it became my first landfall after sailing across the Atlantic.  Another visually intoxicating experience with the elements. This trip was only my third visit over this 31 year history.  I knew that there were steel drum bands playing on Shirley Heights on Sunday evenings, having been there before, so we set off just before sunset in Pele's Taxi, the driver a local personality.  I knew the view, I was armed with a basket full of memories and I knew exactly want I wanted to convey in an image.   Which I might add as was quite different from the throng of commotion behind me... a hundred steel drums, children & adults dancing, beer and wine flowing to the staccato of the drums... even some palm fronds being woven into baskets. 

This image was published in the March 22, 2009 issue of the Austin American Statesman as it won their "Win in a Flash" contest.

I played a bit more with my wild valentine sky and then decided it looked somewhat like ocean waves (left).  Much like the glacier ice (right) did to me in Iceland (June 2007).  Life is full of ups and downs no matter where one looks.  It just takes practice in observing.

Texas has been really dry for the past year and a half.  Austin and environs are about 24" of rainfall behind.  Here are a couple of HDR images from Dripping Springs & Johnson City, Texas.  Lastly is an image from inside the wine cellars of Pedernales Cellars (plural seems a bit of a stretch).  It's the dribble that counts.  Cheers.

Some journeys are defined by place, or perhaps the act of getting there, while others are judged by the company one keeps along the way.  It is rare when all of these factors are exhilarating at the same time.  I was very lucky, fortunate, and grateful at New Years.  My thanks to my friend Bob who made it possible. The rest of the images are here (plus video in the upper right). - rj.

I think it is the random nature of the place and it's effect on the not-so-random things we build to sail upon it.  It is magical.

For my friends celebrating the festival of Hanukkah today and for others with Christmas just ahead, I wish you all a new year of health and happiness.  See you next week or in 2009.
- Cheers!