In my MSU days when I was shooting on 35mm film my favorite setup was TMAX black+white film with a red filter on the camera. I thought this gave landscapes a kind of … “ansel adamsy” type effect.

When I transitioned into digital, one downside was my loss of this effect. I tried numerous ways, including photoshop layers, digital effects, and even using a red filter and converting the image to black and white. No matter what I tried, the results looked plain terrible. It seemed that JPG files deteriorate when exposure and contrast (especially in the blue channel) is pushed to the extreme.

Saturday I decided to try some new things, in hopes I would be able to better reproduce the “ansel adamsy” look. I had come to the conclusion that using an actual red filter on a digital camera was not the way to go. So I shot normal color photos, and used a polarizer filter to keep the nice blue sky from getting washed out. If you have a graduated neutral density filter (who doesn’t!?) that might work as well. Then I set my camera to “RAW” mode, which saves images straight to disk with no processing or JPG compression. Shooting RAW files vs. JPG allows significantly greater flexibility in adjusting color temperature (white balance), exposure, and all the other settings I would need to digitally reproduce the effect film use to achieve so effortlessly…but at the expense of files that can only be opened by special programs and can exceed 35mb each! Yikes!

So here is a color example from Saturday’s shoot:

And here is the same photos with the black/white + red filter effect:

Here are a couple others of two Bur Oaks:

I think it’s a fairly cool look, although I feel as though I am somewhat violating my unspoken rule of minimalist “photoshopping” to my photography. Then again, this same effect can be achieved via traditional photography techniques. After all, one of my favorite photographers, Ansel Adams did it back in the ’30s and ’40s.

When I was on the way home from Cider Days I stopped along the highway and took a cool pic of the valley near my parents house. This year on the way home from Artsfest I was about a half mile from home when another cool photo presented itself.

I remember liking this stretch of highway even when I was a kid, long before I knew I would reside here. As luck would have it, I now travel this route constantly to get into town (Carthage) and also because Steph’s parents live about 3 miles up this way.

I like living on historic route 66. Most of the road itself isn’t anything special, but it represents an idea of nostalgia. Once a major thoroughfare, now it’s just an out of the way back road. But it’s famous and I think it’s cool having an address that is “Old Route 66″.

This has been among the coldest of winters I can ever recall so I guess it’s fitting that the first day of spring brought about 9″ of snow to the Joplin area. After several years with little to no snow this winter has been off the heez, as far as snow goes. Joplin averages 16″ per winter, and so far this year we’ve amassed 31.5″ (according to Doug Heady).

Although I am more than ready for warmer temps and seeing the deciduous trees come back to life, I always enjoy a good snow storm. Taking this was actually a bit tricky, thanks to the horizontally blowing snow. I felt like I was trekking up to the north pole or something just walking around in the front yard.

What’s really on my mind though is the bike ride this saturday. I recall when they postponed it to March thinking “it can be really cold in March… heck it could even SNOW!” So we’ll see how the next few days shape up for bike riding…

Sunday after church Grant and I decided to take a quick afternoon kayak trip. As we often do, we chose Center Creek, except this time we did a section of the river neither of us had ever floated before.

The furthest I had ever been down Center Creek was the park in Carl Junction. So this time we started there and floated down to the bridge near Smithfield, which is the last takeout point before the river flows into Kansas and merges with Spring River. I found this section of the river to be particularly enjoyable because it seemed to have an abundance of rapids compared to other sections, and there were a lot of large rock bottom areas. I also enjoyed the numerous small wet weather waterfalls along the bank… though there are several of these just upstream from my house as well.

It is also worth nothing that Grant and I have become fairly proficient at the logistics of a self-guided float trip, considering we both drive compact cars. Who would have thought a kayak can almost entirely fit in the trunk of a jetta with another one tied to the top without even taking off my bike rack!? Sweet lovin!

This weekend we organized an expedition of sorts to get our kayaks out on a new river (new to me at least). We picked Big Sugar Creek near Pineville because it’s A)close B)scenic and C)void of most of the party scene found further downstream on the Elk River. The first day we floated about 6 miles from near Powell, MO to Cyclone, MO and camped. Then the next day we floated down from camp to a low water bridge near Deep Ford, about 7ish miles. I made a nifty map for those who are interested.

One item of particular excitement for me was seeing a beaver swimming in the river right beneath us. I tried to take a pic but wasn’t quick enough. All in all it was a really great float and a very pretty river. The only issue was that the water was extremely low in some areas, but that was somewhat expected considering it’s the middle of summer, and a dry summer at that.

PS you can click on any of the images for larger versions.

Here is the rustic store at Camp Tilden where we setup tent.

Crossing over a small bridge on the way to the drop off point. I think this spot may have been where we started on the second day.

We put in below a really pretty bluff area. McDonald county is generally very scenic and rural with a lot of winding dirt roads.

Here is the first day’s group getting ready to set out!

Me playing around with a new waterproof digital camera… and almost running into a tree branch.

Poco and Jimmy borrowed mom and dad’s canoe. I really dig Missouri’s über-clear rivers.

A cool bird that flew alongside us for a bit. Made it easy to get a good pic.

Here is poco trying to reach for a rope swing. Not sure what she was going to do if she reached it. Probably get her paddle stuck and then end up tipping the canoe.

Here is the group… just rollin down the river.

Grant fishing and Matt swimming.

Notice all the small fish swimming around Grant’s lure.

Here is a cool view under the water, showing all the little fish swimming around. Kind of looked like an aquarium. I never could get any pics of video of bigger fish!

Grant caught a fish and tossed it in Poco and Jimmy’s canoe. Then Jimmy pretended to eat the fish. Then he tossed it back in the river.

Here I am with my cool straw hat and green kayak. This river had very few rapids, though it might have more if the water level was higher?

Jimmy posing on a rock as a mer-man. Hawt!

The second day Mom and Dad came and joined us. I like dragging my parents along on things like this. Their canoeing skillz were a bit rusty and they tipped numerous times but still had fun. I’m really glad they came!

A really awesome jumping rock. The second day was sunnier and much hotter.

Here is a crawdad grant caught. Looks like a small lobster to me.

Enjoying a nice lunch under a grove of willow trees.

What a great way to spend a weekend!

I really liked the tv show Firefly. What I also really like is real fireflies. I will admit that most bugs tend to give me the creeps, but luminescent beetles really fascinate me. I think they are awesome and I could sit out back for hours and watch them.

This scene plays out about this time every year. I forget about it until one night I walk out to the garage and notice the entire river valley is flooded with bright green pulses, indicating the bugs are ready for some mc-lovin’. It is easily one of the most magical things that happens around the farm. I attempted, with mild success to photograph this annual spectacle last year but this year I made some forward steps with my firefly photo skillz and attempted to add in the element of actual lightning from a distant thunderstorm as a backdrop to the lightning bugs.

Photographing lightning bugs is somewhat difficult because they aren’t exceptionally bright, so you have to use high ISO and as wide an aperture as possible…because a long exposure alone won’t work since they move and blink. Photographing lightning is difficult because it’s unpredictable…I have found the best settings to be a low ISO and long exposure. Combining the high ISO for the bugs with a long exposure for the lightning isn’t exactly a recipe for a quality photograph and light in the sky begins to show up… in this case I was fighting with the glow of what I assume was Pittsburg, KS but eventually found a good angle where the glow wasn’t in the shot.

After about an hour with nothing to show, I suddenly remembered that I have a macro lens with a max aperture of f/2.8, much wider than the f/5.6 my everyday lens was giving me and it might actually work for this application. This let me knock the ISO setting down a good 6 steps and turn off the noise reduction setting – allowing me to take shots much more rapidly. The only limiting factor was that this lens has a fixed 100mm focal length, so wide shots are out of the question. Another thing I tried was shooting in RAW format. Supposedly RAW captures more detail and range, but the only thing I could tell for sure was that the files were huge, about 12mb each.

The lightning was far away, somewhere in the vicinity of Emporia, KS. So it wasn’t big, bright, and spectacular but it was all I had to work with. Given the various factors I was ultimately pleased with what I came up with. After about 2 hours of walking around in wet knee-high grass and about 100 mosquito bites I finally captured two shots that I like.