When traveling east on the Historic Columbia River Highway in Oregon, Latourell Falls is the first of many stunning waterfalls at which one must stop. Latourell Falls is formed where Latourell Creek takes a 249-foot plunge over the edge of a basalt cliff into a pool below. My favorite part (of course) is the backdrop of columnar basalt. (Have I mentioned my fondness for columnar basalt)?

I’m heading out on a hike now… look for the photos tomorrow!

I know I said that I was going to get away from colors for my next weekend photography challenge, but I changed my mind. What with St. Patrick’s Day right around the corner, I couldn’t resist choosing the color GREEN as the next topic. So GREEN it is.

By the way, we’re going to called them “Weekend Photography Assignments” from now on. “Challenge” just sounds a bit too competitive and this is in no way, shape or form a competition.

The rules for the assignment are still quite simple: 1) Your photos have to be NEW, as in taken between NOW and Sunday evening, not something dredged out of the deep, dark recesses of your hard drive; and 2) the photos should feature the color GREEN in a predominant sort of way. That’s it. If you’re in, take a bunch of GREEN pics starting now and email a few of your favorites to me at 39DegN@gmail.com and put the word GREEN in the subject line. Be sure to include your name so I can give you credit and include a title if you wish. The results will be posted in Monday’s blog entry.

And remember that you don’t have to be a “photographer” and you don’t need a fancy schmancy camera to take part in this. Whether you have a fancy camera, a point-and-shoot or a camera phone, it’s just for fun (and to help train your eye to see specific things), so there’s no critique involved, no winners, no prizes. Just pictures of GREEN stuff. So c’mon! It’s fun!

Meanwhile, here are a few GREEN things that I did dig out of my archives so they TOTALLY don’t count:

Golden Gate Canyon State Park, Colorado

Golfer, Fitzsimons Golf Course, Aurora, Colorado

Bunny, Aurora, Colorado

Greenery sprouting from columnar basalt, southern Iceland

Anyone who knows me is aware of my strange affinity for ice, and that carries over into my photography. I have no problem sitting in one spot and taking 200 photos of one small ice formation on a rock in a stream. I took these photos during a hike last October along the Gore Creek in Eagles Nest Wilderness east of Vail, Colorado. I was there to take photos of the last remnants of the fall colors. The ice was a nice surprise.

One of the things I liked about my time in Baghdad was that we lived and worked in a hotel and had a bird’s-eye view of day-to-day life in Baghdad. We could see people driving to work and going to worship at the mosque across Firdos Square. We could see fishing boats on the Tigris River and people filling up at the petrol station and selling cigarettes from little carts on the sidewalks. We could watch kids playing soccer in a dirt field along the river and men playing tennis on the clay courts at the sports club. It was nice to have a glimpse into everyday life in Baghdad, something that you rarely saw on the news. Once I moved up north to Kirkuk, we lived at ground level and the only “real life” stuff I saw was from an armored vehicle zooming by at 80mph during my regular trips “outside the wire.”

The view from my office balcony - the 14th of Ramadan Mosque

Mosque dome and minaret detail

Surrounding neighborhood

Christian church

The Green Zone across the Tigris River

Bridges spanning the Tigris River

Pilgrims

Fishermen on the Tigris River

Protest march at Firdos Square

Smoke from a too-close-for-comfort car bomb

Poor air quality day

In honor of newly crowned Best Picture “The Hurt Locker,” about an EOD team in Iraq and primarily in Baghdad, today I shall post a few street-level photos of Baghdad that I took during my time working there between April and November of 2004.

All of these photos were taken from the back seat of an armored vehicle zooming as quickly as possible through the perilous streets of Baghdad. The only time we left the relative safety of our hotel compound was for meetings in the Green Zone or to make a made dash down the exceedingly dangerous BIAP Road on the way to the airport. These trips were always an adventure.

Correction: The third photo was taken while walking to the Royal Jordanian Airlines office around the corner from our hotel but still within the hotel complex. Trying to make reservations with them for the flight from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan and back was always an adventure too.

In his book  The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers, photography and Photoshop guru Scott Kelby says, “I sharpen every digital camera photo, either to help bring back some of the original crispness that gets lost during the correction process, or to help fix a photo that’s slightly out of focus. Either way, I haven’t met a digital camera (or scanned) photo that I didn’t think needed a little sharpening.”

All photo editing programs have some sort of sharpening tool. Picasa’s is under the Effects tab and has a slider that you can move to increase or decrease the sharpening effect.

Picasa's sharpening interface

The Photoshop sharpening options give you much more control over sharpening an image than just “more” or “less.” However, I know that most people reading this aren’t going to shell out $700 for Adobe Photoshop, so today I’m going to introduce a photo editing program that I’ve recently discovered called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). The cool thing about GIMP is that it offers a LOT of the functionality of Photoshop and a very similar look, but it’s open-source software. In other words, it’s FREE. Like Photoshop, it’s a rather complex program so it has a fairly steep learning curve, but performing some of the basic photo editing tasks isn’t too difficult.

To sharpen a  photo in GIMP, open your photo in the program, then go to Filters–> Enhance –> Unsharp Mask. (You could try just the Sharpen feature, but even the creators of GIMP advise their users to ignore that feature because it’s lame).

Go to Filters--> Enhance --> Unsharp Mask

There are three variables under Unsharp Mask: Radius, Amount and Threshhold. Scott Kelby recommends the following values for various situations:

• For people: Radius 1, Amount 150%, Threshhold 10
• For cityscapes, urban photography, travel: Radius 3, Amount 65%, Threshhold 2
• For general everyday use: Radius 1, Amount 85%, Threshhold 4

Unsharp Mask variables

Since Scott mysteriously failed to mention the recommended variables for photos of stunningly beautiful cats, I’ll try these: Radius 1, Amount 1.51 (151%), Threshhold 10

So I’m starting with this original photo:

Original photo of my stunningly beautiful cat, Halle

After applying the Unsharp Mask settings shown above, I end up with this:

Original photo with Unsharp Mask applied

Now I happen to think that that’s just a bit TOO sharp, so I can go in and “fade” the effect by any percentage I choose by going into Edit –> Fade Unsharp Mask:

Go to Edit--> Fade Unsharp Mask

After fading the previously-applied Unsharp Mask variables by 50%, I end up with this:

Final perfectly sharpened photo of my stunningly beautiful cat, Halle

The amount of sharpening that is “just right” is very subjective, so regardless of the photo editing program you use, play with the settings until you get the amount of sharpening that looks right to you.

Oh, one other thing: sharpening should be the very LAST thing you do when you’re working on a photo in post-processing. Do all of your other tweaking first, THEN do the sharpening.

For some REALLY detailed and technical info on the subject of sharpening, you might like to read the article Sharpening 101 by Thom Hogan.

If you’d like to give GIMP a whirl, go to http://www.gimp.org/ and click on the orange Download button near the top of the page.

This is by far my favorite of the not-very-many flora photos I took while in Iraq:

Because I have no idea what they’re really called, I always thought of them as “purple weed balls.” Here’s what they look like in their various stages of purpleness:

If anyone out there knows what they’re really called, please let me know.

I took this photo last May within walking distance of my house. Im not crazy about the foreground, so I’m excited about a new “go-to” place I found recently for sunset shots. Can’t wait for the sunsets to start getting fabulous again!

If you like to get in close to your subjects and capture details that people don’t usually see, then macro is the mode for you.

Your point and shoot camera very likely has a built-in macro mode. Check your user’s manual to learn how to activate the macro mode – somewhere on your camera (if your camera has the function) there will be a button or some other sort of setting that looks like this:

How close you can get to the subject will vary, so check your manual for that info as well. Following are a few tips to maximize your macro results:

• Use a tripod if possible. When you’re shooting close up, any amount of movement will affect your results. If you’re shooting something that’s moving, like a bug, a tripod isn’t necessarily possible. In that case use whatever you can to brace your arms/elbows to steady the camera.
• Use the self-timer setting on your camera to minimize camera shake.

• If you are able to manually set your aperture, choose a large aperture so your subject is in focus but the background is blurry. (Keep in mind that where aperture is concerned, the smaller the number, the bigger the aperture).
• Focus carefully on exactly the spot that you want to be sharp. There will be lots of blurry areas in your macro photos and that’s ok, but you do want the main part of the subject to be in focus.

• It’s best to take point-and-shoot macros in natural lighting since using your flash will generally cast unwanted shadows onto the scene. If you are shooting indoors and need extra light, try using a lamp or other light source and bounce the light off another surface.

Taking macro photos takes a lot of practice and patience, but the results can be simply amazing.

It’s “pretty pics from the archives” Wednesday!

These photos were taken last year at the tail end of a trip with some friends to Pagosa Springs, CO over Labor Day weekend. On the way home, we took at little side jaunt just west of Wolf Creek Pass to the Lobo Overlook. From the overlook, you get an amazing 360° view of the surrounding peaks along the Continental Divide. The view plus a friendly little gray jay made this brief stop an entirely delightful experience.