Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images

Photo: Fireworks burst over the city of San Francisco as seen from the Berkeley Hills, California

“Happy New Year!” – from all of me at Enlightened Images.

It’s been no secret that this has been one of my tougher years, and frankly, I’m glad to see it go. However, I’m not going to send it out on a low note, as I’ll be cooking up some Filet Mignon and Alaskan King Crab Legs for dinner. Tomorrow, anything left over will be put into an omelette and served with a traditional New Years Day Bloody Mary.

I want to wish everyone a very safe, happy, and healthy New Year.

I’ll re-surface next week after the Holiday. Until then, Cheers!!

Every so often I feel it’s important to pass along other great and important photo links, and numerous times of late, that has been thanks to the Boston Globe’s Big Picture. This time they’ve put together a collection of “The Decade in News Photos.” It’s 50 images; 49 compelling and remarkable images, and (scratching head) one picture of Paris Hilton. Serioulsy – one gaping flaw, as a commenter noted, is that they chose to include Paris Hilton, but Michael Phelps & Michael Jackson are surprisingly absent.

Otherwise, it’s still worth a visit. My favorite image – as it didn’t involve any depressing or tragic news, was the image of the Opening Ceremony at the 2008 Summer Olympics. And in a game of “Where’s Waldo?” – there is one person obviously out of proper formation from all the others, and it doesn’t involve how far back or forward they’re leaning. Can you find him?

Picture: Fresh snow on tree branches in Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, California

I just heard the weatherman on the radio say, “only three more days until Winter.” It’s so odd that last week we had the lowest, longest-lasting snowfall in the San Francisco Bay Area in many many years. Today the weather was approaching the mid-sixties and sunny; warmer than most summer days in downtown San Francisco.

I must be feeling old & confused. I remember growing up back east, we had all four seasons, just like they were taught to us in school when we were very young kids. I think I need a trip to the mountains, where winter is winter, and not just a long series of pre-spring, early spring, late spring, and early summer rain storms. I need to see more of those cool white snowflakes wafting downward from the heavens, and coating the world in a peaceful blanket of tranquility.

I do remember one thing about winters as a kid back east that kids here in most of California never get to experiece; the Snow Day. It was when you woke up, saw snow on the ground, and ran to the kitchen where your mom was listening to the radio, waiting to hear if the name of your school got called. “The following schools will be closed today because of snow…” If you heard your school’s name, it was yeah-baby, time to go play! Yeah… that’s it… that’s the ticket. I need a Snow Day.

To see the above image larger, click here.

If you’d like to see more of my Yosemite images, check out my Special Yosemite Print Collection.

Picture: Sunrise light on black, wrought-iron fence gate, Carneros region, Napa Valley, California

In following with a discussion that was taking place on twitter, I responded with a quote:

“A boring or ordinary subject in great light will always make a better photo than a great subject in boring or ordinary light.”

One day when I was in the Napa Valley photographing for my book Backroads of the California Wine Country, I was set up to catch the sunrise light on the Domaine Carneros Estate Winery & Château. Behind me was a black wrought iron decorative gate. When I first arrived at the scene, it was completely uninteresting to the point where I was standing in front of it to get the shot I wanted. By chance, I just happened to watch a car drive by, and as I followed it and spun around, I saw the beautiful golden light of sunrise striking the black painted iron. What was dull and uninteresting just a few moments before had suddenly, with the change of light become interesting and intriguing.

One of the things that I am always telling my photography workshop students and clients is that there is right light and wrong light. Hand-in-hand with that, I also tell them to look at the light, not the subject. After all, we as photographers are recorders of light and shadow. It doesn’t matter what we are taking a picture of, there will always be some combination of light, shadow, and subject area. For instance, being deep in a forest on a bright sunny day is certainly not ideal conditions for good forest photography. That’s the wrong light. That same forest bathed in soft white light from overcast clouds suddenly becomes ideally suited to the photographic medium. For most forest photography, that’s the right light.

This is not limited simply to scenic outdoor photos. Imagine if you will a simple scene set indoors; a person sitting at a small table by themselves, next to a window, a single candle on the table, and hands held around a plain white coffee mug. Picture in your mind’s eye this scene and how it would look if it was shot at midday with relatively even light. Now imagine the exact same scene, this time shot in the evening with the light of a full moon streaming through vertical blinds on the window, and the only other light in the room is the candle. All the elements are exactly the same, yet I’m sure you can see in your mind’s eye how the difference in light can make a radically different photo using the same subjects.

Now going back to the forest, take a look at these two photos. PIctures: Dogwood flower bloom in Spring, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, California

The first photo shows the scene as it appeared to my eyes when I first walked up to the trees, trying to catch the bloom of the spring dogwoods. Visually, the light makes the scene rather cluttered. Seeing the difference in the light on the flowers and the shadows on the trunk of the trees, I was able to isolate a single Dogwood flower against one of those shadowed areas. By using Spot metering and exposing for the highlights of the bright white flowers I was able to turn that shadowed area almost completely black. This contrast between the edge of light and dark transformed this muddled scene into the great light that I needed. By using my knowledge of light, I was able to manipulate the scene and find the right combination of light, shadow and subject, and turning boring ordinary light into great light. Hopefully the result was to make a different, and as I see it, successful photograph. (This coming from someone who is most certainly *not* a flower photographer.)

Picture: Canyon walls in evening light from Point Sublime, North Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

Another new image gallery has been posted on to my web site. Given the title of this post, and the photo immediately above, I guess it won’t come as any surprise when I announce that this new image gallery is filled with pictures of the Grand Canyon National Park. It’s as comprehensive as my coverage gets right now, but there are still a number of other areas of the park that I’m anxious to explore and photograph. No, one of them is NOT the newly built tribal skywalk. While I greatly respect Native American tribes taking some commercial advantage to regain a sense of pride, place, and status that had been stripped from them years ago, it turns out that they won’t allow any cameras there, not even cell phone cameras. From a photographers perspective, what’s the point?

I long for the quiet, can’t see another tourist for miles type of solitude that the canyon can provide. That’s exactly what I experienced at the place above, when a friend and I had all of Point Sublime all to ourselves.

Photo: Sunrise over Mt. Diablo and green East Bay hills near Orinda, Contra Costa County, California

File under: Long overdue; I’ve added a few new photo galleries to my web site. One of them is a collection from my home stomping grounds, namely the East Bay Hills. The area covers my old home town of Lafayette, my local hiking haven, Briones Regional Park, as well as the Berkeley Hills and Tilden Park overlooking San Francisco Bay. Also included in this gallery is Mount Diablo & Mount Diablo State Park. Finally, in what could soon be a collection of memory “that’s the way it used to look” photos, I include some pictures of the nearby Tassajara region. Nesteld in the rolling foothills between San Ramon, Dublin, Pleasanton, and Livermore, the area is being evermore encroached upon by suburban high density housing and estate homes.

Visit my new online photo gallery:
East Bay Hills / Diablo Valley Photos.

Picture: A glorious sunset over the Coconino Plateau from the rim of the Grand Canyon, Arizona

It’s not quite as big as sobriety, but it does harken to a chemical dependancy. Two years ago this week, the boat I bought showed up in my driveway. Two years ago this week I had my very last cigarette. It was a nasty habit I’d picked up, fought, and wrestled with off andf on since I was a Junior in High School. I am so happy that the promise I made to myself has succeeded, when all other attempts to quit smoking failed.

The odd thing – during every failure, I wanted to quit, and in those times, quitting was easy. Each time I tried, I did quit, but only for a few weeks or a few months. Yet I always fell back.

This last time, I didn’t want to quit. I just made myself a promise that if I bought the boat, I’d quit. This time was worse by far than any other attempt, again because I really didn’t want to quit. Despite my anti-smoking aids, the withdrawls went on for months. Yet I never fell back. The major difference was that this time I’d found something I wanted more than cigarettes. I made a promise and thankfully, this time it stuck.

It seems the sun has finally set on my days as a smoker. Now I only have one more year to go before I can qualify for non-smoker health insurance rate.

Picture(s): Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil skeleton in front foyer of the California Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California

Over the Thanksgiving Holiday week, I got my first chance, along with my family, to see the new home of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Golden Gate Park. I had been to the old Academy many times, including when I shot for my book, Our San Francisco. I always loved being ‘greeted’ by this massive dinosaur, which clearly reigned as one of the prize exhibits.

During the long rebuilding process, the CAS moved to a (very) small temporary home in downtown San Francisco. It was tough going to visit there and see so few exhibits when you knew the CAS housed so much. But this last year, with lots of fan fare, the new CAS re-opened at it’s home in Golden Gate Park. I was excited to see all of the new exhibits, and to see what remained of the old exhibits.

Once again, I got special permission to photograph at the CAS for my upcoming book project. Unfortunately, my very first moment in the new CAS was a photographic disappointment.

Yes, I was again ‘greeted’ by my old friend. However, the new design, with lots of glass and sunlight, meant that I could no longer photographically isolate Mr. Rex the way I had years ago. Back then, there was glass on both sides of my oversized fossil friend, but by standing in just the exact right spot, aiming my camera down the long entrance hall, I was able to get a relatively clean shot of this impressive creature.

Not to be outdone by modern architecture and design, the best I could do was to incorporate my new friend into his (forgive the gender bias) new environs. So in the end, it wasn’t so much as a disappointment, as a new opportunity, a challenge, a visual problem to be photographically solved. After all, that’s what being a photographer is all about.

The new CAS is truly a great place to visit, and should be very high on the list of must-do / should-do for out of town visitors and tourists coming to visit San Francisco.

PS: In case you may not have noticed, my “catch all – etc.” category for this weblog, since its beginning has been called the “Fossil Beds”. It’s only appropriate that I include this post in that category

Picture: The wrong bird for the day, but a much prettier bird…

I just want to take a brief moment to wish everyone here in the U.S. a happy and wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. I am thankful this year for having the love of my family, for being back at work, and for being pretty much fully recovered from my accident earlier this year. But in light of that accident, all else pales with simply being thankful to still be here, and to enjoy more time with the people I love. What more could anyone ask?

I hope everyone, everywhere, takes a moment to reflect and be thankful for what’s really important, the big things; life, health, family, & love. Everything else is just small stuff.

Picture(s): Lava Tube Cave Entrance, Lava Beds National Monument, Modoc County, California.

Those people that know me and have seen my image postings around the internet may have seen many of my postings contain the phrase, “No HDR”. The only reason I posted that, and have mentioned before, is that I’d get so many comments from people saying something like , “Wow, great use of HDR.” I finally just started posting the No HDR comment to head those other comments off at the pass, so to speak, especially since I didn’t ‘do’ HDR. In fact, it was only a couple months ago when I made my first HDR image.

It’s not that I’m against HDR, by which I mean the automated computer process of blending multiple exposures. I’ve seen some very good HDR, and some extremely horrid HDR. On the good ones, you can barely tell HDR was used, while the bad ones have more halos than a pack of angry angels. For myself, I never used HDR because having grown up in the film era, I was just really good at pointing my camera at places where I know I could control the contrast range within an image. If there were dark shadows, I was OK with them being dark.

However, on my last trip, I encountered several instances where there was just no possible way any single exposure could handle the range of contrast. For example, the above image was taken inside the entrance to a cave at a point were bright light met extreme shadow. In fact, twenty feet further down the tube you could open a roll of film without fear of exposing it – dark. I shot this image with HDR in mind, shooting 8 frames in 2/3rd stop increments.

After I processed it, I decided to test out an alternate process of extending dynamic range on the same image, namely by doing a manual blend. Rather than having the computer do everything automated, I chose three of the eight frames, and using layer masks worked my way out from lightest to darkest.

When all was said and done, I much preferred the look and feel of my manually blended shot over the HDR image. Both shots have Extended Dynamic Range (EDR), but for me the HDR just didn’t turn out as well as the manual blend; it felt to0 flat and ‘processed’. You may feel differently – and that’s OK. Just so you know, the Manual Blend is on the Left & the HDR on the Right.