Post 2 - West Coast Road Trip
6-minute read (not including photo captions at bottom)
Milquetoast.
I love that word. Not sure why, but it just cracks me up. Maybe it’s just the sound of it, or the spelling – or the image it invokes of a corner of toast dunked in milque that looks like the floppy ear of a bored dog.
It’s everything I aspire never to be, so let’s hope that your experience with this blog is a decidedly non-milquetoastian affair.
I could start at the beginning, and tell you about how I learned photography over time in a chronological order. Starting in the middle of a story seems to be more of an anti-milquetoasty thing to do, since your average milquetoast would probably (yawn!) start at the beginning, so you’ll have to wait for the prequel to get the full dose of my history.
So, where is the middle? The Digital Revolution, of course! When overnight everything went from hamsters in flywheels driving cranks and pulleys – to shiny, purring virtual worlds where a single tap on a screen can initiate more sophisticated computing power than even the Jetsons could have imagined in their wildest dreams.
But seriously, folks – the AI-willies not withstanding (privacy and personal freedom are overrated anyway, right?) – the advent of that inter-ether-web-net thing and the transition of all things to the digital realm has been such an epic game-changer on so many levels, including photography, that it just makes my tiny little brain do the vertigo flop. Moore’s Law has just about turned everything inside out and upside down over time.
I mean, the first computer I bought in 1987 (not the first one I used) was a 386SX IBM “clone” with a 40MB hard drive, a 2400 baud modem , and a whole MEGABYTE of RAM (not to mention both 5.25 and 3.5 inch disk drives). Even though it only came with a 12-inch green monochrome monitor, this thing was cutting edge at the time. A friend even commented back then that the 40MB HDD was overkill since I could never fill that up in a lifetime! HA! And double HA! (with a third HA! thrown in for good measure)! Today, a single RAW image at full 14-bit resolution shot with my Nikon D810 is twice that size.
A little over 30 years later, that brick is comically outclassed, not only by my current laptop, but also by the tiny, shiny piece of glass and metal that now fits in the palm of my hand and not only makes phone calls and takes photos, but can run computing circles around that old 386 without even breaking a sweat.
But I digress – as I often do, when it comes to computers.
I bought my first digital camera, a Canon Power Shot S2 , in mid-2006, before going on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon. Its 5 megapixel sensor and 12x digital zoom (and native JPG-only output) put it squarely in the “meh” camp. Canon had the temerity to market this as a “prosumer” camera, but trust me – it was 0% pro and 100% sumer.
Nevertheless, the S2 was an absolute revelation to me, and quite literally changed my life.
In the space of that week’s vacation, I took about 6,000 photos. Six t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d photographs. That may not seem like a lot now, but at the time, that was an utterly unspeakable miracle. I wouldn’t even have shot 600 photos in that week, had I been using film. In fact, I’m not even sure I shot 6,000 images total on film in my four years of high school and four years of college combined.
In 2016, for his 50th birthday, my brother and I took a road trip up the California, Oregon, and Washington coastline on Hwy 1 from San Francisco to Seattle. For that trip, I upgraded to a Nikon D5300.
The D5300 – by far the most complex camera I had ever owned (which isn’t saying much, given my camera history) – was closer to the “prosumer” camp than its lackadaisical predecessor, although it still qualified as “entry level” equipment. With a 24 megapixel APSC crop sensor, tilt-swivel screen, and 18 – 140mm kit lens, the learning curve was dramatic (for me). Not only did I spend hours before the trip playing with it and poring endlessly through all the menus, but for once in my life I did something unheard of: I actually read (parts of) the user manual!
Along with my purchase of the D5300 came another major technological leap forward. I was used to developing and printing my own film in the darkroom, but now I’d have to learn how to virtually develop my own “digital film”, since the D5300 had the option to output RAW files (which would require editing).
Shortly after buying the new camera, I also bought a monthly subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud package, which includes Lightroom and Photoshop. Although I had been using the stand-alone Photoshop since the mid-1990’s, I only understood it on a superficial level, and had no experience with Lightroom (since it didn’t exist back then).
No more red safelights, clunky enlargers, or skin-burning chemicals – now all my “dark” work could be done in the light. Working with it on nights and weekends, it took me a good year to feel comfortable with Lightroom, and of course, I continue to learn new things about the software on a continual basis, especially since Adobe adds new features and tweaks as a part of their regular updates.
Although it shares some of the basic editing features of the much more robust Photoshop, the real forte of Lightroom is its cataloging functions – which forced me to start organizing my photos and thinking in terms of workflows and naming conventions. Thanks to that mental - and software - shift, I can now make statements like this with a single glance: as of this writing (January, 2020), I have 511,507 photographs (and videos) listed in my Lightroom catalog (that includes scans of family photo albums, and every image saved from all my mobile phones over the years). That’s almost 8TB – Terabytes – of data. That’s an absolutely staggering amount of data – I didn’t even know the word “terabyte” (or even “gigabyte”, for that matter) existed when I bought my first computer.
Having gotten busy with work and sidetracked by life-in-general, it wasn’t until almost a year after the West Coast Road Trip that I got serious about making a second pass through the photos and applying the editing techniques I’d learned in the meantime.
The images in this collection are from that period, edited with the intention of giving my brother a “retrospective” collection of the trip photos for his 51st birthday. (It was also a sneaky way of giving him a present without spending any money - although it did take me several weeks of editing - and a few bucks for a thumb drive - to put the whole thing together). Since this trip was the first time in over a decade that I started trying to jog my memory about the artistic side of photography, I’ve included some artsy-fartsy shots below, along with a few “touristic” snaps.
To demonstrate the power of post-processing, and how my Lightroom editing skills have evolved over time, I re-edited some of the images for this post, and will “deconstruct” that editing for several photos below, showing the before and after screenshots from Lightroom.
If you prefer, you can skip these notes and go directly to the West Coast Road Trip photo gallery to view the images as a slideshow without commentary.
If you make it to the bottom of the page, your patience will be rewarded with a crazy story of a truck crash that will beggar belief and blow your mind.
The Sea Lion Caves are an amazing place - to get to this spot, you have to take an elevator down a shaft bored into the mountain. If you’re near Florence, OR at some point, I’d highly recommend stopping here - it’s worth the effort. Here is the link to their website: http://www.sealioncaves.com/
Ok, here’s that crazy truck crash story I hinted at above. Look at the last line of the first paragraph on the sign above for the Lynn Street Park. It reads “In 1995, a driverless delivery truck rolled three blocks down Lynn Street, tore through the park and plunged into Lake Union”….
If you’re in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, you should check out the Hale’s Ales brew pub - they’ve got good food and great beer. Just don’t go for a ride in any of their trucks….
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