Technology leads to people doing stupid things?

I came across an interesting article in the NYT. Apparently more and more people are purely relying on technology when they go into the wilderness. Not even taking essentials such as water, but taking their cellphones, GPSs and sattelite location devices. The article is a fun, but sad, read. Lost hikers asking rescue services whether they could bring them some hot chocolate. Hikers in the Grand Canyon pressing the "rescue me" button on their satellite devices because the water tasted salty. Technology is a good thing I think overall, but you should not neglect the basics and be as self reliant as you can. I go out a lot into the wilderness, but I am always prepared. It is not that hard. Just plan.

Super Sad True Love Story

Just heard about this on NPR. It's hilarious.

Lightroom bad highlight rendering

Lightroom 3 (I am using 3.2 RC) has some superb rendering nowadays. Lots of detail, pleasing grain behavior, great noise reduction and more. I am generally very happy with it. There is one area where it can use more work and I am not the only one to think that. I ran into this again recently in the below shot of a glassblower at a county fair. If you mouse over this image, you will see the rendering of the same raw file that is obtained from Nikon's capture NX. Pay attention to the flame.





Mouse over this link to see the image using the Adobe Standard profile

Clearly, Nikon's capture does a far better job creating a smooth transition in the highlight area of this image. The Lightroom version has two ugly posterized step transitions in it. Clearly it is not dealing well with areas that are blown out in one or more channels of the raw file. If you try different camera profiles in LR, you will get different highlight posterization but none as good as the Nikon Capture example. This is also often observed in images of setting suns and such where you will often see a weird halo around the sun. This is the same thing as was observed in the article I linked to above.
Of course, I would not want to do lots of work in Capture NX as that program has a horrid interface and I do not always like the color rendering, but clearly this is an area where Lightroom/ACR could improve.

EDIT: I added a mouse over link to show the image when using Adobe's Standard profile. It is better than the other profiles Adobe offers or one created using the profile editor or the Passport software, but it still does not do as smooth a highlight as Nikon's software.

EDIT 2/5/11. This issue has now been fixed by Adobe.

50 year anniversary

This month it was 50 years ago that Longs peak's famous east face diamond was first scaled by Dave Rearick and his partner Bob Kamps. The radio had a story on it this morning with interviews with the climbers and here is a nice account on the successful attempt. At the time, the climb was considered so dangerous that the parks service simply did not allow anyone to try. Kamps and Rearick obtained special permission. In honor of the anniversary here are some pictures I took of Longs Peak¹ a while ago.

This is standing below the east face. I can't imagine climbing this thing.


A more traditional view standing on the other side of the lake:


Here are more images. I wrote about the photo excursion that yielded these images some time ago.


¹It always bothered me that the official spelling omits the apostrophe as the USGS mandates for most place names named after somebody.

Mayflower Gulch revisited

I revisited Mayflower Gulch last weekend. I went there two years ago or so with my friends Ben and Dave. Ben has this extraordinary picture in his gallery from this place (middle image on this page). I did not come accross a similar image this time, but I am still happy with the images I did capture. I posted two images before from this trip. The nice thing about this place is that the 4x4 road goes quite close to the bowl but very few people are there even in the weekend except maybe a few photographers. I did this easily in my Subaru Legacy from the trailhead to the spot of the old mining camp. A compact car would have more trouble getting up there. I highly recommend this place for a sunset outing.

This is the view from the point in the road where one parks and starts hiking to find good spots.


As you can see the clouds were quite threatening and the weather could have gone either way. In the end, I got a few minutes of good sunset light. Clicking on the images will get you larger versions of the images on my smugmug site. Use the back button to get back to this post.

This is the view through the window in one of the cabins you saw in the previous image


Another window view looking at the second cabin


The wind was blowing quite hard this day, so I had to shoot at quite high ISO to keep the flowers from blurring completely while still keeping enough depth of field. Most of the following images were done at ISO 800 and f/22.

Yellow flowers and sunset light on the mountain range


Pink paintbrushes


Elephant trunk flowers


Mossy Waterfall

(There is a version without light on the mountains here)

Looking back at the sunset


At this point, the sun had set and the wind completely died down, which allowed me to use low ISOs again. However, the light was not as nice anymore
Mossy fall 2


Asteraceae