July 2013

July 27, 2013

Altenburg Full Moon

I spent the day roaming around in small coal mining towns I last saw in the early 1970s. It’s funny how I would catch a glimpse of the side of a building and recognize it immediately, then pass through a whole town without a flicker

Athens Historical Society Museum curator Jessica Cyders and I met with some members of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds to see what mutual interests we might have. I photographed the architecture in town of Shawnee in 1969 for an independent study course. It felt good to see so many buildings still standing. Some are a bit wobbly, but I don’t stand so straight these days, either.

Lutheran Heritage Center

The photo above isn’t from Shawnee. It is the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg taken under the full moon. I described all kinds of technical machinations for shooting Tower Rock the other night. This is decidedly low-tech. I shot it out my car window. The shutter speed was slow enough that I had to turn off the motor to get it anywhere near sharp.

The moon provided some nice backlighting, but the right side of the building was a trifle dark. I moved car slightly so the headlights hit it. It would have been a little more evenly lit if I had aimed the car a little more to the left. I used that technique when I was doing a story on an old homeless guy who sold pencils on the street. I spotted him asleep on a dark park bench. Once I got the angle I wanted, I radioed another photographer to drive over and light him up.

Trinity Lutheran Church

I was was headed to drop Gerard Fiehler off at his house when we decided to see how the moon looked on the Trinity Lutheran Church. I thought a street light made the building look ugly and was turning around when I shot the photo of the center. While I was doing that, Gerard got out of the car to see if he could find an angle where we could get the moon without seeing the street light.

His diligence paid off. It’s not a great shot, but it’s pretty good for a situation I was going to blow off.

July 25, 2013

Somewhere in Kentucky

I haven’t driven the roads between Cape Girardeau and Athens, Ohio, enough to know every turn like I do the regular routes back and forth to Florida. When I stayed at LaGrange last night, I wasn’t even sure what state I was in, other than exhaustion and confusion.

When I was pumping gas and scraping suicidal bugs off the windshield, I wondered who swiped summer. It was chilly enough that I’d have reached for a jacket had one been handy. It felt more like early November than late July.

Thursday was spectacular: the sky was blue with puffy white clouds all around. It was a good day to be on the road. This was taken somewhere in Kentucky.

July 25, 2013September 14, 2023

Tower Rock, Full Moon and HDR

Warning: photo geek stuff to follow. If you’d rather just look at pictures of Tower Rock and the Mississippi River under the full moon, click them to make them larger.

I grew up doing Plain Jane photography. All I had to think about was film type (color or black and white), film speed, shutter speed, aperture and focal length of the lens. Color / black and white was easy: until I got to The Palm Beach Post, all my work photography was black and white.

I almost always used Kodak Tri-X film for everything except available dark photography, where I experimented with all kinds of exotic film and developer combinations to be able to shoot where you could barely see.

Film speed and f/stops determined how much light hit the film. If you wanted to stop action, you’d use a fast shutter speed and a wide lens opening. If you wanted lots of stuff sharp, you’d stop down the lens and be forced to use a slower shutter. It’s all about math.

Lens choices were equally easy: want to get lots of stuff in, use a wide angle; want to shoot something a long way off, grab a telephoto.

Menus have menu menus

My new Nikon D7000 has more menus than a classy restaurant. The submenus have submenus, most of which I have never explored. The other night, though, I ventured into the unknown. If I have time, I usually bracket my exposures: in other words, I shoot one at what the camera or I think is right, then I go an interval above and below that exposure in case the camera or I have made a bad first choice. I print or publish the one with the best action, composition, sharpness and/or exposure.

The problem is that film, paper and sensors don’t have the range of the human eye. We can usually see detail in dark areas and bright areas at the same time. Cameras can’t – or couldn’t.

Enter HDR

There’s magic in those menus. I opted to enter the land of High-Dynamic-Range imaging, better known as HDR. It shoots those same bracketed images, then allows them to be reassembled into one picture. To be honest, I’ve avoided fooling with it because too many people use it to create what we called in school “technically dominated art shots.” Pictures, in other words, where how you did it becomes more important than the content of the photo.

Just because it’s magic doesn’t mean that it’s always GOOD magic. The photo immediately above looks like it could have been shot during the day. It saved too much ambient light. It was taken at 9:40 p.m. when I had to boost the ISO from 200 to 1000. The three exposures for this shot were 13 seconds, 6 seconds and 25 seconds. All were at f/5. I told the camera to overexpose the image by about 4 times because the meter was sensing all the lights from the shore and the reflections of the water and stopping down.

The photo at the top of the page was taken at 9:04 p.m. when I had the ISO set to 200. The exposures were 13 seconds, six seconds and 25 seconds @ f/3.5. I told the camera to overexpose by a factor of 1.33. The colored blur is a barge making its way upstream.

Old ways sometimes better

Because HDR merges photos taken slight intervals apart, sometimes you lose nice detail that is moving. This single frame shows the whirlpool south of Tower Rock starting to form. You can just barely make out the swirl. I zoomed to 55mm and set the ISO to 200. The exposure was 15 seconds @f/4. I overexposed by two stops.

Boat with HDR

I’m not overly excited by this HDR shot of a towboat that conveniently paused across from us for some time.

Boat without HDR

This is a single frame from the sequence that made up the vertical photo above. I cropped it tighter (just a little bit too tight at the top) and turned it into a horizontal. I find the moon less interesting than the idea of a pilot feeling his way up the Mississippi like pilots have been doing since the days when travelers were first devoured by the demons inhabiting Tower Rock.

Now that I’ve been exposed to HDR, I’ll use it like a torque wrench: something nice to have, but not a tool I grab every day.

July 24, 2013January 19, 2021

Friends on Robinson Road Exhibit

I’ll be doing a presentation at the Athens County Historical Society and Museum on July 28. The topic is Friends on Robinson Road, an Athens Messenger picture story I shot in 1969. I mentioned them in a post for Valentine’s Day 2012.

UPDATE

Here’s an update: when I went back to the area to see if I could find the old house, I discovered that the two men lived on Robinson Ridge Road, not Robinson Road.

My search led me to another interesting story about the Allen family who had been living on the same land since 1850. Capt. Josiah Benton Allen, who lost an arm at Vicksburg, was one of the men responsible for the erection of the iconic Civil War memorial on the Main Green at Ohio University.

I was just looking through my notes, and remembered that Curator Jessica and I tracked down Jesse’s daughter Opal and her son Russell. When I asked him how well he knew his grandfather, he said, “I knew him as well as any of the grandkids; I knew where he hid his whiskey.”

Bill and Jesse were gravediggers for Clark Chapel’s Cemetery, where they, ironically, are buried in unmarked graves, so far as we could find out.