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.
A typical “clone” of an IBM 80386SX PC
Samsung Galaxy S8
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.
The Grand Canyon – June 2006 – shot with the Canon Power Shot S2
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.
Nikon D5300 DSLR
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 iconic shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, taken from the south (city) side (May 29th, 2016). As you can see from the before-and-after screenshot below, I had to apply a heavy dose of the Dehaze function in Lightroom since it was a typically hazy day for San Francisco.
The “before” image on the left is the RAW file straight out of the camera - the right “after” image is the result of some final tweaks done in 2020, that included increasing contrast and color saturation, and some detail work on the sky to enhance the clouds.
Here is a panorama of San Francisco, shot from Twin Peaks park on May 29th, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the far left background and the Oakland Bay Bridge on the far right. The wooded hills of the Presidio are on the left, the infamous Haight-Ashbury District in the middle foreground, and the skyscrapers of the Financial District dominating the right side.
The other iconic face of the Golden Gate Bridge, shot from the north (Marin County) side on May 30th on our way out of town. It was not only a hazy day, but the top of the bridge tower was also shrouded in clouds. I wanted to remove the haze, but keep the clouds, and you can see the progression of my efforts several years apart with the two screenshots below.
This first screenshot shows the original RAW image straight out of the camera on the left, and my first editing attempt in 2017, which left a bit to be desired.
Here is my updated editing attempt from 2020, when I reviewed the images for this blog post. The 2017 edit is on the left, and the latest edit is on the right. The newer changes included more contrast, color saturation, and some slight sharpening.
It was a very windy day, and when I saw these wildflowers bending and swaying in the breeze, I wanted to capture that motion with a long exposure photo. I handheld the camera (to impart just a bit of “camera shake”) with a 1/15 second shutter speed to show the swaying of the flowers. The initial 2017 edit is below.
You can see the typically bland and unsaturated RAW file on the left, and my first “interpretation” of the image from 2017 on the right.
As I looked at this image again in 2020, I realized two things: first, I wanted the colors to “pop” more, and second, I wanted the overall image to have a softer feel given the subject matter. Toward that end, I added more saturation and contrast across the board, but I also applied some of the techniques I’d learned to achieve that “painterly” look, which included turning the Texture and Clarity functions in Lightroom down as far as they would go (-100), plus adding some grain to the image to give a more coarse “film” look.
I put a bit more effort into this classic California sunset shot to show how much leeway there is to apply the photographer’s “vision” to an image - and also to get it closer to what the human eye can actually see.
The original RAW file on the left, and my initial editing attempt from 2017 on the right - not much of a change, as you can see.
One of the challenges of editing is to recover “blown” (over-exposed) highlights and (under-exposed) shadows in a photo. Looking at this more closely in 2020, the red overlays on the left show where the highlights in the sun have been “clipped” (in other words, over-exposed to the point where no detail is retained). By placing a radial filter over the sun, and isolating it from the rest of the image, I was able to recover the highlights almost completely by turning down the exposure in that area only (the only clipping points left are those two tiny dots on either side of the top “slice” of sun).
While I used a local filter over the sun to correct that area of the image, I also added saturation and lowered the exposure globally on the whole image. The problem with global changes to an image is that sometimes you introduce other problems, and you can see from the blue overlay in the lower left of the “after” image above, that I started clipping (under-exposing, in this case) a portion of the waves (the darkest part of the image).
To correct this, I did a few things: first, I added a Graduated Filter to the bottom of the image (that would affect the ocean only - as shown by the horizontal lines on the right); second, within the area affected by the filter, I increased the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks (along with the other settings shown); and finally, I chose a golden hue to bring out the reflections of the sun on the water. You can see how that has brightened up the water (the blue shadow-clipping overlay is now gone), and the golden sun reflections are now more prominent.
This photo is one of my earliest attempts at ICM - Intentional Camera Movement. It was shot on the same evening from the same beach as the previous photo, but after sunset, so it was considerably darker out. By swinging the camera horizontally with a relatively slow shutter speed (1/4 second), I was able to create the abstract swaths of light and color that I had envisioned. Although a relatively simple image, it still took a bit of effort to “bring to life”, as you can see from the screenshots below.
My first edit attempt in 2017 (the right side above) was little more than a slight bump in saturation. I still liked the photo, but it was a bit underwhelming.
Reviewing the shot in 2020, I decided to not only increase saturation, but change the hues slightly. To make the color scheme more complementary, I darkened the cool end of the spectrum (aqua, blue, purple, magenta), and added quite a bit of saturation across both the cool and warm end of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green). I also backed off on the Texture and Clarity settings, making the “edges” a bit softer and more blurry.
A pristine stretch of Oregon coastline taken from the cliffs by the famous Sea Lion Caves, near the town of Florence, OR.
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/
A random building front in downtown Portland, OR. I converted the photo to B&W and added a sepia tone to give it that “vintage” feel.
Not sure what it was about Portland, but I seemed to shoot several random walls as part of the return to my artsy-fartsy roots. When I saw this wall, I knew I would turn it into a black and white, since it reminded me of the kind of thing I would shoot as a kid and develop into a high-contrast, grainy print. This may look like a simple photo, but a fair amount of effort went into simulating that simplicity. Details are below.
To begin with, here is the original photo, after being converted from color to B&W, showing the overlay of the cropped area. Note that I couldn’t get squared up with the wall from my vantage point, so the perspective would also have to be corrected to make the windows line up straight with the frame of the image.
There were several challenges involved in turning the relatively bland original (left above) into the sharper, high contrast image I wanted (right above). The main problems were removing that annoying wire in the upper left corner of the frame, and cranking the contrast and sharpness of the whole piece while still retaining some shadow detail in the windows (to avoid ending up with empty black squares).
The final image I ended up with was really a compromise arrived at in the interest of time. The compromise entailed cropping out the wire in the upper left instead of removing it entirely. To be honest, this isn’t that great of a photo, and removing the wire properly would have taken more time and effort than I felt it was worth (mostly because my Photoshop skills aren’t up to the challenge yet, and the attempts I made in Lightroom just looked sloppy). At some point, when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of photos, you need to make tough decisions about how much time to allocate, and when “good enough is good enough”.
The problem with cropping out the wire instead of removing it was that the updated crop moved the window on the middle right very close to the edge of the frame - closer than I feel comfortable with to create a “balanced” look (take a look at the previous images to see how much more wall-space there was to the right of the window before the final crop).
Recovering some shadow detail in the windows was easy enough. I just added some radial filters and bumped the exposure and other settings within those filters to brighten up the windows only. The circle with the red overlay in the middle (above) shows one of the radial filters, and the area affected. The dots in all the other windows show the position of additional radial filters. Again, the effect of those filters was a compromise - when I tried to brighten them more than the settings shown, I started to get obvious “halos” around the windows, which looked clumsy and artificial. So, even though the windows are still dark, they’re better than they were.
Here’s an interesting bronze elephant sculpture in downtown Portland that I didn’t remember being there from my college days (did I mention I went to Reed College in Portland?). After going through various color iterations of this, I decided that a sharp, high-contrast B&W was the best suited to the subject matter and relatively harsh noonday lighting.
I never promised you a rose garden - so consider this a bonus gift. Taken at the famous Portland Rose Garden on an unusually bright and sunny day (for that city).
Heading up to Seattle, WA on June 4th for our final stop on this West Coast Road Trip. This is a classic view of the city taken from the Beacon Hill neighborhood. You can see I-5 through the trees on the right, and Elliott Bay peeking into the frame on the left. Yes, the bay was named after me - and they even spelled my name right! Thanks, Seattle!
Here’s a formerly-famous Seattle landmark that used to sit in a prominent spot in the Georgetown neighborhood when it was in use (it’s now been moved to a side lot in that neighborhood, and it took us a while to find it). These structures used to house a pair of stores that sold….wait for it….hats and boots! You can just make out the door on the far right in the heel of the boot, and the wire-frame structure holding up the the hat used to the walls of the main store.
Here is another classic shot of Seattle with Mount Rainier in the background in all its glory, taken from Queen Anne Hill. When I first moved to Seattle many years ago, I lived in the Jem Way Apartments just down the hill from this spot. In fact, that brownish building dominating the immediate foreground (between the trees), was directly in front of my apartment building (but I still had a nice view out of my front window to the docks out of frame on the right).
Here’s a closer view from the same vantage point on Queen Anne Hill, with the beautiful Space Needle (built for the 1962 World’s Fair) in the foreground. The red line and circle on the building on the far right points out where my office used to be when I worked for the now-defunct Go2Net.com. Just in case you don’t believe me (since I can hardly believe it myself), here are a couple of shots (below) from my office taken in April, 2000, about a year before I moved back east to the DC area:
A conference room at Go2Net, next to my office
The view from my office window, overlooking my namesake, Elliott Bay, the Seattle Waterfront docks below, and the Olympic Mountain range in the background
Another favorite destination, and Seattle icon, the Pike Place Market, where they made fish-throwing famous…
The main drag of the Pike Place Market - doesn’t that guy in the foreground look like Charlie Sheen?
Pike Place Market can get crazy-busy on a warm summer weekend….crowd photos can be so strange sometimes - that dude in the center foreground looks singularly unimpressed with everything going on around him, while the woman behind him (with the “Y” cap) looks like an undercover cop coordinating a drug bust on her walkie-talkie….ksshk…target in sight…Alpha Team move in….ksshk….
Taking selfies in front of the famous first Starbucks store in the Market
The bronze Pike Place piggy bank is looking a bit worse for the wear after all these years…
A lot bigger than it looks from the outside, there are so many nooks and crannies in the Market - and so many bizarre sights to see…
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”….
What the sign doesn’t say is that the truck rolled BACKWARDS across five intersections down the steep hill of E. Lynn St. - and that it was the truck my brother was driving at the time for Hale’s Ales. He had parked the truck on the corner of E. Lynn and Eastlake Ave while delivering kegs of micro-brew to the Zoo Tavern on Eastlake. The vehicle, a small U-Haul-style box truck, was parked nose uphill (in the circled area on the map above), and the parking brake failed just as my brother was headed back to the truck with a hand-cart full of empty kegs. He valiantly chased the truck and tried to jump up into the cab, but it picked up speed too quickly and got away from him. Miraculously, it made it all way down E. Lynn - parked cars lining both sides of the street - without touching a single car (or crashing into any cars on the cross streets) on the way down. Equally miraculous was that not a single human or animal was injured in the process (and that my brother wasn’t in the truck when the brake failed). It took out a park bench and several bushes before sailing backwards into Lake Union. Since there was only minor property damage - and the brake failure was confirmed to be something my brother could not have prevented (in fact, he had complained to Hale’s Ales previously about the condition of the truck), he didn’t get fired and faced no legal consequences as a result of the accident. Unfortunately, after hours of searching online, I’ve been unable to find any articles referencing the accident, even though it was all over the local news that night. The only remaining proof this whole thing ever happened is that one-liner on the Lynn Street Park sign. Naturally, my brother and I had to visit the site when we got to Seattle - the sign had been put up since both of us had moved, so we were surprised to see it there. What a crazy story - and I’m sure I’d have a hard time convincing some of you that it actually happened had it not been for that sign.
After that trip down crash-memory lane, we decided to head over the Hale’s Ales brew pub on Fremont Ave. for a pint and some grub. On the way, we had to swing by the popular Seattle landmark, the Troll under the Aurora Bridge in the Fremont neighborhood. Apologies for the blurry photo, I snapped it with my phone out of the car window as we were driving by. The statue is made of concrete around a steel rebar frame, and what you can’t see in this photo is that in its outstretched left hand, the Troll is holding an actual VW Beetle (as if it had just snatched it off the bridge above). The statue’s left eye is also a Beetle hubcap. Here’s a better photo of the Troll.
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….
After dinner, we decided to head over to West Seattle’s Alki Beach neighborhood on the other side of Elliott Bay. Here is yet another iconic view of the downtown skyline from that location. It took some patience to time this shot with the lone canoe in the foreground and none of the usual ferry traffic crisscrossing the Bay.
Alki Beach, West Seattle, with the Olympic Mountain foothills in the background, during a gorgeous summer sunset. We couldn’t have asked for better weather on the one night we had in the city.
The Space Needle at sunset from Alki Beach in West Seattle
Some more ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) noodling while watching the sun go down over Seattle from Alki Beach
A blue-hour, soft-focus “painterly portrait” of downtown Seattle, taken from Alki Beach just as the last rays of the sun are reflecting off glass and steel
I will leave you with one of my favorite images of the entire trip. This photo of the the top of the Space Needle, shot from West Seattle after the sun has set, appeals to me on so many levels, but it’s mostly the minimalist simplicity of the negative space that I find so soothing and interesting at the same time. Again, the simplicity of the image is belied by the effort that went into it, but this time I will maintain the mystique and just let you ruminate on this for a minute before you go on with the rest of your day (or evening).
Thanks for making it to the end of my story - and check out my next blog post about Shenandoah!
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