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I realize that the concept of Alternative History might be a bit difficult to grasp if you're not familiar with the works of Susanne Clark, Ian Banks, Terry Pratchett, and others.
The concept is this - consider what might have happened had something like oil not come into wide use. Then consider what the world might look like, instead, if Victorian era steam continued to provide power we used.
Adding the ideas of Victorian age with steam, I had in my minds eye a clear idea of what the modern age might look like. I also added the idea of what the world might be like if we lived in a multi-verse, instead of a universe.
The final result is one that combines modern images with Victorian age graphics to create a sense of what might happen if information were to transfer between worlds in a living multiverse.
OK. Its a little weird. But I'm an engineering manager and love to build ideas upon other ideas...
Its been very interesting to work through the sequence of images for the Bogvillians. They have the "look" that I have been dying to photograph and work with artistically. Alas, it takes more than just good subject matter to express the kinds of things I am after. Watching from a third person position, I see that I need to take the technology, learn it, understand it, and apply it. However, its so easy to get stuck there thinking that technology will "save" an image. It doesn't work that way for me. I find that I also need to let the mind's worrying and fretting over technology find another place to "be" while I'm actually working an image. I see that I must also work to allow my whole being to participate. I can't really explain it, except that I feel more "open" and connected on more levels when I work to stay in the body and to share "space" with my mind. Oh, and I find I get the best results when I let the mind "do its thing", but not to let it take over the process.
[Strobist Info: AB800 with shoot-thru umbrella close high camera left, AB1600 with reflected large umbrella level with camera far right, white cloth backdrop, wee-bit-o-processing to taste.]
This series of images has several inspirations. I like the wood cut or engraved feel of these. We see these kinds of images around so many of the Paris flea markets. Alas, I can't afford them and all too often they're not of a subject I'm interested in.
My many thanks to the G'Mic developer, David Tschumperle and to David Patrick for providing a kewl new tool and for sharing what's possible.
I feel funny saying this, but it seems as if I'm on the edge of finally having something to show for my 40+ years of effort. These more closely express what and how I feel about old heavy machinery than any photographic approach I've ever taken up to this point.
After thinking about this for awhile, the analog traditional photographic approach to creating the images in this series would be some thing like... light controlled solarization... micro contrast masks... unsharp masks... cold tone paper... sepia toning... followed by a dash of selenium toning. All this would have taken me a month working on a single image.
Now? Well... you see the results here...
I needed to clean up my light/darkroom. Boxes and storage junk was piling high. To motivate myself to the task of cleanup I decided to work a bit more on on skulls and still life.
Strobist Info -
Light Setup - Alien Bees B800 with 3x4foot softbox, a large sheet of glass, and 6 sheets of variously sized white rag board (for light control). Resting one edge of the softbox on the floor and using a very short AB light stand to point the light toward a 4x5foot 1/2 white foam core reflector. I used this to knock the light intensity down, even after setting the AB800 at it's lowest power setting.
Over the foam core reflector I built a three sided white reflector box (rag board laying against two tables). Then I suspended a glass sheet between the tables so the light would come up from below.
Lastly, I rested three sheets of variously sized rag board against each other to form a three sided reflector cavity above the glass to spill just a bit of light around the edges of the subject.
Camera setup - Canon 40D set to manual. Chimped the light curves in camera to find that 1/200th sec at f/11 was just about right. Used a very sweet Canon 28mm f/2.8 optic to minimize the number of glass elements bouncing the softboxes intense light.
I should tell a bit about this gent. The context is that I was kilted the day Daniel and I visited the reenactment. I was attempting to give modern era support (in Utilikilt) for the 79th NY Scots who were there. Alas, the 79th never went into battle themselves kilted.
As we were talking with folks and enjoying the event I was directed to this elderly gentleman. I was told he is Scot. He took one look at me and asked if I too am Scot. I fudged and said "yes". I married into it, actually. But this fine man didn't hold my white lie against me and proceeded to share with Daniel and I several stories from the home country.
It was a delightful experience.
I have been giving a bit of thought around justifying this kind of treatment of "period" reenactment images. In reviewing the genuine works from the time I realize that they are beautiful. Truly. I also realize that I want to express something unique so as to not confuse the real items with the way I see things.
For me, I wonder if one of the dimensions of this kind of image expression is a kind of "autochrome" hand painted deteriorated alternative history. Hmmm... I may have to write more about these thoughts on my photo-blog...
Pano of 3 images done with hugin.
I said to myself "Why not go back and find the images taken with your worst lens, the one with the bad fringing and soft edges, taken when you were not very good and knowledgeable with your camera and see how fun it is to create a pano out of those wrecks." and thats what I did.
Threeish hours later this is what I got.
Spring is out. Summer is in. Saks Fifth has changed their window displays. I couldn't resist taking a few moments on my way into work early in the morning to capture a few images of the Stepford Wives.
As with my other tone-mapped work, several applications are used to create the final image. I've left the Qtpfsgui parameter information in this description to show where I started from. It's certainly not where I ended up. So keep this in mind.
Qtpfsgui 1.8.12 tonemapping parameters:
Operator: Fattal
Parameters:
Alpha: 1
Beta: 0.8
Color Saturation: 1
Noise Reduction: 0.1
------
PreGamma: 0.5
Sure wish i had my 24mm prime for this one. The zoom lens I just doesnt cut it for sharpness around the edges.
Wukoki ruins facing east in the morning.
That would make this the western face of the ruins.
When I wandered into the basement to try my hand at a few more still life images, I had in mind old hand coated glass plate, slightly deteriorated, Gothic, Victorian, mid-1880's style work.
These continue to express nearly completely what I was looking for. I really enjoyed making the sequence of images. Photography is just too much fun!
Strobist info -
Alien Bees B800 with 3x4foot soft box set to it's lowest power setting, 5 or more feet from the subject at a rather oblique angle, and a single large white reflector opposite the flash to fill the shadows.
Camera info -
Lens set to wide open for selective focus. I wanted to emulate early optical needs for gathering as much light as possible at the widest aperture available at the time. With these wee-DSLR's, depth of field tends to be too great. So this was something of an experiment to see what might be possible. The 50 f/1.8 II comes very close to meeting the need. If I had more room to move, I think the 100 f/2 would be outstanding wide open. I'm also exploring the use of Sigma's 20 and 28mm f/1.8 lenses wide open. Their design MTF data leads me to believe the center contrast should be quite good at f/1.8.
Processing info -
Heavy use of vignetting and texture layers in most cases. Also heavy use of different BW tints. Some from gum over palladium, others from platinum, and yet other tints taken from old early 1900's portraiture photos. All these were balanced and blended to taste.
Trying my hand at images a little less distorted. I believe this role lends itself to a more formal approach.
Please see the Bogville Creature Show.
[Strobist Info: AB800 with shoot-thru umbrella close high camera left, AB1600 with reflected large umbrella level with camera far right, white cloth backdrop, wee-bit-o-processing to taste.]
The last visit to the Roundhouse found me working a little in the cab of SPS700. Even without fire in the boiler this was an impressive experience. This steam locomotive is the third largest operating steam engine in the US.
Look for a portfolio titled "In the Railyard" to be published in LensWork Extended #78 Sept-Oct. More of my images in this style will be presented.
Archival print available for $25
I feel funny saying this, but it seems as if I'm on the edge of finally having something to show for my 40+ years of effort. These more closely express what and how I feel about old heavy machinery than any photographic approach I've ever taken up to this point.
After thinking about this for awhile, the analog traditional photographic approach to creating the images in this series would be some thing like... light controlled solarization... micro contrast masks... unsharp masks... cold tone paper... sepia toning... followed by a dash of selenium toning. All this would have taken me a month working on a single image.
Now? Well... you see the results here...
plenary session: Open Space - Drawing it all together: Cristina Mendes-Da-Costa took a look at theme 1: Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
This is one in a series of 6 leaf images. It's getting pretty late in the Fall season, yet there are all these wonderful leaves still laying around. Even after all the leaf blowers and gardeners have plied their craft all these wonderful little worlds of beauty are still to be found.
I have studied hand coating collodion, the making of tin-types, albumin, ferrotype and platinum prints. As they age they tend to deteriorate much more gracefully than the images I have re-created here. My work and "take" on the subject is unlike any of the originals you will ever see from the time period. Rather, I am attempting to touch at something a little different.
I'm working through the images we made in the big old Portland home everyone first met at.
Please see the Bogville Creature Show.
[Strobist Info: AB800 with shoot-thru umbrella close high camera left, AB1600 with reflected large umbrella level with camera far right, white cloth backdrop, wee-bit-o-processing to taste.]
This is one in a series of 6 leaf images. It's getting pretty late in the Fall season, yet there are all these wonderful leaves still laying around. Even after all the leaf blowers and gardeners have plied their craft all these wonderful little worlds of beauty are still to be found.
OK. Last image of this series. I don't know what I'll try my hand at next. Maybe I'll work on nicely saturated color images? Maybe I'll work on more tone-mapping? Maybe I'll work on some portraiture? Hmmmm....
I have been thinking about why I like these kinds of images more than the "straight" photographic versions of these. Perhaps it goes to something that the academics have pointed out, and that is that humans love a representation of a thing more than the actual thing itself.
If this is the case, I would have to agree. When I look at the "straight" images, they look exactly how the eye remembered the scene. When I look at the tone-mapped/selective colorized/heavily manipulated versions of the images, I see what I felt.
A colleague of mine put it this way: Would you rather have an apple, or an apple pie? A raw apply, while potentially tasty, might lack the depth and feeling one gets from eating an apple pie.
It's an interesting notion and one that feels like it's close to hitting the mark for me.
I'm coming down to the last of my reprocessed Brooklyn Yard images. I love the rich details and the modulated contrast ranges. I also love the level of control I now have over the micro-contrast - which was something I spent 40 years in traditional film photography to try and achieve.
This is great fun!
I enjoyed working in the freezing cold. The snow was fun to watch as it fell. The temperatures helped make the steam from SP4449 really stand out against the sky.
For this series I wanted to continue with the hyper-reality enhanced micro-contrast work. These represent 3 images of a +/-2EV spread, tone mapped, sample colorized, and then selective colorized on top of all that.
For me, this is what photography and image making should be: Absolute unabashed fun!
pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian
A turn-of-the-century lady librarian standing athwart a wall of books, shouting into a megaphone. Behind the books rises a guillotine against an eerie blue sky with two palms. Tux the Penguin's head sticks up out from behind the books. Before the wall of books grazes a stately gnu.
Image:
Muhammad Mahdi Karim
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Wildebeest,_Ngorongo...
GNU FDL
www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html
--
EC
www.flickr.com/photos/baumderjustiz/4797771263/
CC BY-SA 2.0
The last image reached 100 views so its time to put another up, its a new restriction I am putting on myself to keep my flickr from bloating.
Shiprock can be seen from Mesa Verde in Colorado as seen here and from Hovenweep in Utah. It can be seen in Arizona from the Chuska and Carrizo mountains.
Wikipedia has a lot of info about it here and links to info on the town of Shiprock, New Mexico are on that page as well.
Tuzigoot National Monument as seen at sunrise.
My battery went dead shortly after this shot and by the time I figured out my spare was not in the regular spot in my backpack this light had vanished into the typical light that kind of washes the detail out of the structure.
I missed the gold light painting the tree tops as the sun rose higher.
I missed close ups with this light.
Was kind of a cursed day from then out but it wasn't all bad.
Visiting Eureka, California, my wife and I wandered around the old downtown area. It appears to be under serious rennovation.
This building is a private club. Men only, I hear. It looks wicked. And the HDR tone-map treatment adds something from my perspective.
This was made of three images, stacked. Then passed through Qtpfsgui in two different filters (Fattal and Drago), then layered into the Gimp. The levels were fiddled with until I got what I was looking for. The final images were blended and then a bit of vignette was thrown in for good measure.
As I round the final bend and enter the home stretch I found an interested technique. What I like about this approach is the layered black and white tones with textures that remind me of aging etchings.
The work was done in support of Bogville's Sub Lunar Servitude show that's coming up soon.
This is one in a series of 6 leaf images. It's getting pretty late in the Fall season, yet there are all these wonderful leaves still laying around. Even after all the leaf blowers and gardeners have plied their craft all these wonderful little worlds of beauty are still to be found.
This has been a very fun series of images for me. They were made under somewhat trying emotional circumstances. A close friend of my wife died just as we left town. Rather than return, we decided to stay in Vancouver to visit with Dave. My friend Dave was going through some challenging times of his own. Yet, we made a rather merrier trio of visitors. Life and living. It must go one. With or without us.
I would like to thank all the Bogvillians who were able to make the photoshoot. I want to thank them for their time and fun preparation. Their efforts helped make the photoshoot a success (well, at least from this perspective).
All the recent work posted here was done in support of Bogville's Sub Lunar Servitude show that's coming up soon.
After working through the Bogville series, I wanted to return, briefly, to an earlier set of images and re-process them using my newly developed techniques.
When I return, these will be bundled and shipped off for publication. It may take a few months to hear something, but I'm hopeful that I get to share these with a wider audience.
[Strobist Info: AB1600 with cone over left camera shoulder, AB800 with cone on white backdrop camera right, liberal processing to taste.]
When I discovered a technique that expressed what I felt about steam locomotives, I was excited. The original work is published in what I feel is the finest photographic arts publication in the world, LensWork Magazine.
Over time I have worked to refine the technique and process further. Each step takes me deeper and deeper into the kinds of art I have been hoping to create for over 40 years. This is so THRILLING to me! This kind of subject matter just shouts at my and tickles my silly-bone to absolutely no end!!
I visited the Roundhouse yesterday. I took the Canon 40D, three lenses, and a huge tripod. I wanted to begin working with high dynamic range images of the kind found in some of the HDR pools here on Flickr.
This image is a three layer +/-1 auto exposure bracketed image. This deploys Qtpfsgui to the indicated parameters above.
Based on the feedback and number of views of the earlier work, it seems that people respond better to image with color in them. So I think I'll continue to head down the tone-mapped color route to see what I can come up with.
There is one exception. I have a 300+ degree panorama what I will work on sometime. For that, I think a straight brightness map would work out well. There will be enough other stuff going on in the image that altered tones might get too congested, visually.
Between the arid desert and a water hole thats covered with bees these doves are on the fence.
Dashing in to take a hurried drink until they can no longer stand the bees then they head back to the fence.
After visiting my brother, we headed over to see my wife's daughter in Petaluma. The rail station there has been completely renovated. However, the old rail lines sit out back in an open field largely ignored. On this latest trip I noticed how a large construction company has put up a fence along the south side of the property. This made photography rather difficult of the old engine.
I have worked these with Qtpfsgui and the GIMP. Still, I wanted to include the Qtpfsgui parameters. They are only a vague starting point for where this image ended up.
Qtpfsgui 1.8.12 tonemapping parameters:
Operator: Mantiuk
Parameters:
Contrast Mapping factor: 0.001
Saturation Factor: 0.8
------
PreGamma: 1
This is one in a series of 6 leaf images. It's getting pretty late in the Fall season, yet there are all these wonderful leaves still laying around. Even after all the leaf blowers and gardeners have plied their craft all these wonderful little worlds of beauty are still to be found.
To me this looks like the headstones are emerging from the earth.
I'm really enjoying the tone mapping technique. Add a dash of sepia tone. Et Voila! Images that come closer what what I've _wanted_ to create than I've ever come in 40 years of clicking a shutter.
Whenever I travel I find many things that attract my "eye". On this trip I realized that there must be just as many interesting things in my home town. If only I looked with a different "eye". I noticed how much my "story" of where and how I live narrows my participation of a place. Seems to me that maybe I need to be more curious and open to the world around me so that I can experience things like I do when I travel.
I wanted to try out a new lens. So, I stopped the bike on the bridge and tried my hand at something new. The Sigma 12-24 EX HSM rocks hard! I love this lens. Of course, when have I not liked a lens? LOL!!!
This series of images has several inspirations. I like the wood cut or engraved feel of these. We see these kinds of images around so many of the Paris flea markets. Alas, I can't afford them and all too often they're not of a subject I'm interested in.
My many thanks to the G'Mic developer, David Tschumperle and to David Patrick for providing a kewl new tool and for sharing what's possible.
I needed to clean up my light/darkroom. Boxes and storage junk was piling high. To motivate myself to the task of cleanup I decided to work a bit more on on skulls and still life.
Strobist Info -
Light Setup - Alien Bees B800 with 3x4foot softbox, a large sheet of glass, and 6 sheets of variously sized white rag board (for light control). Resting one edge of the softbox on the floor and using a very short AB light stand to point the light toward a 4x5foot 1/2 white foam core reflector. I used this to knock the light intensity down, even after setting the AB800 at it's lowest power setting.
Over the foam core reflector I built a three sided white reflector box (rag board laying against two tables). Then I suspended a glass sheet between the tables so the light would come up from below.
Lastly, I rested three sheets of variously sized rag board against each other to form a three sided reflector cavity above the glass to spill just a bit of light around the edges of the subject.
Camera setup - Canon 40D set to manual. Chimped the light curves in camera to find that 1/200th sec at f/11 was just about right. Used a very sweet Canon 28mm f/2.8 optic to minimize the number of glass elements bouncing the softboxes intense light.
First snows of the entire winter came during March, before that nothing.
Phoenix Arizona hadnt seen rain in 144 days straight and down there they were not only getting rain finally but snow fell as far down as the northern city limits. Snow actually accumulated in the areas where sonoran deserts start, blanketing saguaros and other cacti in snow.
This image taken in Utah you can see snow has fallen on the Sleeping Ute Mountains, and on the other side of those mountains Mesa Verde had so much snow falling the plows were going up and down non stop as we made our way slowly to the Spruce Tree House ruins, one of the few sites they kept open during that snow storm.
Just a few days before we were down in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico wearing tshirts and breaking the occasional sweat hiking to the Palo Alto ruins.
On our way back to Phoenix we were snowed in at Payson Arizona, forced to stay the night in a hotel and then the next morning dig our car out with a jumbo dust pan I hiked to WalMart to buy, they didnt have snow shovels at the time.
Weather makes things interesting now and then.
As I round the final bend and enter the home stretch I found an interested technique. What I like about this approach is the layered black and white tones with textures that remind me of aging etchings.
The work was done in support of Bogville's Sub Lunar Servitude show that's coming up soon.