A lot of my photography takes place locally, around a heavily populated southeastern Michigan. Despite the sprawl of suburbia, and mini-castles, condos, or strip malls that seem to occupy every corner, there remain a few places where one can stroll through the woods. Ironically, many of the larger areas of undeveloped land in southeastern Michigan were once toxic dumps, now deemed unfit to build upon. Sometimes there is just a simple city park tucked away in the middle of a large subdivision, where the last stand of trees were spared. The key is finding them.
Well, lately I often find myself exploring my own neighborhood via satellite. (Boy, does that sound cool to say or what?! Kinda makes you feel like you work at CTU.) Google Earth, or Nasa World Wind are great tools for doing this. Lately I find myself doing this late at night, or on poor weather days, just exploring around to see what is practically in my own backyard, without burning the gasoline and time to find it. This particular overview is a local swamp near me that I have never been to, so I simply placed my virtual thumbtack on it as a reminder, ‘hey – check this place out sometime.’
I have no idea if any photographic opportunities exist here, perhaps a rare flower, or even wishful thinking of an approachable fox den – it is simply a place I have never been to, or even knew existed perhaps 5 minutes from my front door. It’s amazing how much time you can spend just exploring your own neighborhood, which ultimately results in time and energy saved from doing it the old fashioned way. Of course, the old fashioned way is necessary to find out if that spot you just marked was leveled in the past year to make room for a new subdivision. These satellite images tend to be pretty old.
I imagine someday the detail in these satellite images will become real time, and perhaps with enough resolution where you put on a set of futuristic space goggles (Google goggles has a nice ring to it eh? – just remember you read it here first!) and actually walk around. Of course, what fun is that if you can’t get your boot stuck in a bunch of mud, listen to the wind whistling through the trees, or have a chickadee land in your hand?
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Occasionally I run across photoshop tips that are extremely useful, and for which I have immediate need. Since Photoshop has about 1 million tips out there, it is hard to keep track of the particular ones you have use for. I have decided I will be storing them in my blog for future reference. Perhaps someone reading this will also find this helpful. This particular problem I encounter occasionally when scanning slides, which could be the sign of my aging Poloarid SS4000 film-scanner. Particularly in scanning my recent underwater slides, a couple images had bad cases of chromatic abberations (color fringing, typically in high contrast area where colors are focused differently). The tip below was paricularly effective in eliminating this optical defect. As with all things Photoshop, there are many ways to get at the same result, I just found this one worked well for this case.
Convert to 16-bit mode if you aren’t already.
Convert the image to LAB mode.
Select the A and B channels, by clicking on A in the Channels palette, then shift-clicking B. You should see a rather weird rendering of your image with everything at 50% luminance, but the color fringes should be clearly visible.
Run the Dust & Scratches filter at whatever settings are necessary to get rid of the color fringes.
Go back to the Channels palette and select LAB channel.
Go to the History palette and select the bottom (last) history state as the source for the History brush. (Look for the little box on the left of the history state, and click it to make a little brush icon appear.) Select the next-to-last history state, which will undo the effect of the Dust & Scratches filter.
Using the History brush, paint out all of the objectionable color fringes in the image.
Sample image correction:
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This is a very cool program, very similar to Google Earth, but with a lot of unique features that give you other ways to look at our little rock in the universe. Ocean temps, topo maps, a lot of interesting stuff to play with. They even let you jump over to the moon and expore it in a similar fashion. The closeup views don’t seem to be as detailed as Google Earth, but it seems worthwhile to have both programs. They are both free.
Here is the link: Nasa World Wind
Here is a little screen capture shot of where Dominica is in the Caribbean;
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Today my slides were finally returned from the Fuji Trucolor lab in Arizona – all 7 rolls of what I shot underwater in Dominica. The return to film felt a bit strange – from loading it in the camera, to pacing myself underwater with my limited amount of exposures, waiting for the developing, and of course, going through slide by slide with a loupe and light table. Afterall, it has been a bit more than 2 years since I have exposed my last piece of film. In my own silliness, I actually had a bit of pretrip anxiety about this. Especially because I felt my underwater photography skills would be more than rusty, I was thinking I would be a bit lost without that digital safety net of instant feedback.
While there are many aspects of shooting with film that I don’t miss, this short return brought back the whole tactile experience of it. With my loupe and a tiny little lightbox, I was like a kid in a candy store when I found shots I was pleased with. Those that didn’t make the cut were thrown in the trashcan (a physical object!) just like the good ol’ days. With vibrant color from shooting with the new Fuji Velvia Pro 100 film, instant sharpness and clarity without needing to post process anything through a computer, that slide jumped out and grabbed your attention. I held it in my hand, grinned, and said ‘wow.’ I was happy I didn’t totally blow it.
So it will take some time to now scan the best, clean the dust spots off, and file them away in their pages, but the return to film brought back some good memories of this particular process of photography, however short lived it may be.
The image in this post is of a bristleworm, sometimes called a ‘fireworm,’ due to the painful sting you will receive if you touch any of the fine bristles along its sides. There were many of them around Dominica, but finding them in a good photographic setting was difficult. This particular one happened to be crossing a rather colorful group of corals and sponges.
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