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.
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.
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.
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. 
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. 
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.
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. 
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.
Recently I have been going back and looking at some older images that I took with film. Some of these I can photograph on a lightbox with my Canon 1Ds Mark III using a 100mm macro lens with a 12mm extension tube to get more than 1:1 and shoot within the boundaries of the slide or negative to get a "new crop". The side benefit of this technique is I can get a RAW image of the old slide and more easily fix any color casts. On larger transparencies I have to resort to the flat bed scanner, which isn't so bad really is the format is large enough. The one presented here is a 50 x 120mm positive transparency from a Noblex 150. When I took the image ten years ago I did not think much of it at the time. However with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.1 and Photoshop CS4, I can breath new life into images such as these. It's almost as good as going back.
I am still working on my images from the recent trip, but I was contacted today by Monsieur Gilbert Lanza, a most kind gentlemen and maître 'd of the restaurant aboard the PRINCE ALBERT II. I had taken a few photos of him aboard ship in the harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts. A lovely day in the harbor. I wish him well on his future journeys.
Commentary on blogging: It is best done when traveling alone. That said, I'll do a paragraph to get from St. John's Newfoundland to Halifax, Nova Scotia where we will arrive in about 10 hours. Ramea Islands were rainy, foggy and interesting, but not very special insofar as photography of my interests. Gros Morne was wonderful, but we had had barely enough time to do a short walk, let alone a boat ride up the fjord and a hike at the end.... so only the former was accomplished. I'll be back without slow moving guides. Today we were in Louisbourg, Nova Scotia... one of the last defenses of the French. Begun in 1713 and elegantly preserved in that period. It was a superb historical tour of the early province.
Aboard the Prince Albert II, leaving the Ramea Islands off the southern coast of Newfoundland.
