Beaver ponds sunset

Several weeks ago I spent a sunset at a set of beaver ponds (lots of mosquitoes) in McCullough Gulch near Breckenridge with my friend Dave. They look out on the aptly named Red Mountain. The beavers were very active so the reflection kept getting "messed up" but we had a fun evening shooting anyway.

Here is a vertical shot. It was stitched from two sets of 9 images at two different exposures combined using a simple gradient layer mask to simulate a big grad neutral density. Click for bigger.


The ponds were really low this time so we had lots of mud in the frame. I like the geometric effect of the fingers of water reaching out to the viewer.

Here is a horizontal rendering. Also stitched from multiple shots. If you go to the bigger version by clicking on it, you can see a beaver swimming in the water in the middle of the reflection of red mountain.

Apple harvest

I am woefully behind in posting (I haven't written almost anything about my Australia trip months ago!) but I couldn't pass this up. Our apple trees bore fruit this year and we gathered a lot of apples. Since we don't spray (as a chemist I cannot condone the use of 'chemicals' ;-) ) a lot of them are only good for applesauce but still this is a very fun event. Our property might have been part of an orchard a long time ago, so we have some good tasting apples. We also have planted new fruit trees since we lived here, so we are becoming quite the producer of good stuff.

IE 9 still not color managed?

I don't do windows, so I haven't checked it yet, but apparently the new IE 9 beta still doesn't correctly color manage. It will only take images with spaces different than sRGB and translate them to sRGB. It will NOT use the display profile. That is pathetic and you cannot call it color management. Microsoft claims their color management supports v4 profiles. However, this is meaningless if you don't support the monitor profile as barely any image you will find online will have a v4 profile. Many monitor profiles are v4 though so there it would be useful, if only it actually did anything with it. Contrast this with Firefox, that even though it does not support v4 profiles, will use the monitor profile (as long as it is a v2 profile). Here it makes sense to refer to Microsoft's own document from 14 years ago, which makes clear that a browser when encountering a tagged image should respect the image's profile AND convert to the monitor profile.

Virgin River Fall

Virgin River in Zion National Park at sunset. Reinterpretation of an image I created in fall 2009. Click on the image for a bigger version. The same image on flickr is here

Columnar mountain near Big Bend National Park

This is a redo of an image I made a while ago (I used it in the previous post) from a columnar mountain near the entry to Big Bend National Park. This is done using the new process in LR3 which gives far nicer results. The black and white was done using the channel mixer in Photoshop. Lightroom sometimes creates little halos around regions of one color where they quickly transition into another. The Photoshop channel mixer does not have this issue. This was a problem around the red mountain.

Paris, Texas

Although titled Paris, this post is actually about Terlingua, Texas.

Our cabin's number in Terlingua.

We watched the outstanding Wim Wenders movie, Paris, Texas a few days ago (on streaming Netflix!). This is a superb movie that is highly recommended to people interested in photography. Every shot is beautifully composed with respect to color and composition. Just great. The music (mostly haunting slide guitar melodies) in it was done by Ry Cooder and I have had it for years. One of the things I never realized is that the movie starts in Terlingua, Texas, a place we visited a few years ago. This point in the movie is also the first time you hear the Ry Cooder song. This is interesting as when we stayed the night in Terlingua, the cabin next to us was occupied by a band from Austin.

The guitar player of this band (sorry didn't take his picture and I don't remember their name) actually did a really good rendition of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas music. I never realized how appropriate that was until I rewatched the movie. I linked the South West Texas thing with the movie of course, but had not linked Terlingua with the movie. Funny.


Rusty nails in Terlingua.



Terlingua's really nice ghost town cemetery:


EDIT: Should have done this before, but you can find the opening scenes here on youtube. The scene that shows that we are in Terlingua here comes right after this scene. The landscape you see in the beginning looks like it was filmed in Big Bend National Park. A really amazing place. Terlingua is at the west entrance to the park.