Hi, I'm Back From the Canyons
Hi Katie,
Yesterday I returned to civilization from our Escalante side-canyons trip. At our base camp, the wind blew like a banshee all day and every day. But on our hikes down into the canyons we were protected from the winds and it was warmer and more fun. We day-hiked in 2 canyons — Horse and Death Hollow — and backpacked through 2 others — Wolverine and Silver Falls. Wolverine had the most interesting rocks — petrified wood, agate, and blobby things that might have been coprolites. I’m sending a picture taken down in Wolverine Canyon where the walls narrowed down to a “slot”. Part of the slot was only about 6 feet wide and over a hundred feet deep. Death Hollow has better slots, but those were technically difficult to pass through, requiring roped climbing, mud wallowing, and swimming.
There weren’t as many flowers on this trip as last year’s, but that may have been because it rained the first day on that trip. This time, rain would have been welcome! In the 4 canyons we visited we found more flowering plants in Silver Falls canyon than in the others. One was a flowering Fishhook Cactus, with barbs that would never let go if you let them touch you. There were springs in Silver Falls Canyon, and a small creek that reflected the green leaves of the cottonwoods, the red sandstone cliffs, and the deep blue sky.
It was great out there in the desert, but flush toilets, running tap water, and refrigeration do have their attractions.
Love, Dad
Welcome back, and thanks!
I haven’t gone back and checked yet, but it seems to me that I recognize the exact spot in “reflections”, although the coloring seems quite different.
When you say 6 feet wide and 100 feet deep, you mean you’re 100 feet below most of the land surface? (Not that a dropped object — say a cell phone — would fall 100 feet into the slot?) About how deep (and wide) was it where you took the photo?
I just noticed (again) how parenthetical I am. Hmm.
Comment by jennifer — May 2, 2008 @ 7:19 pm
Even the trio of thumbnails make a lovely sight, rakk, the enlargements yet better — thanks! Your canyon perambulations are fabulous meanders on which to hitch a mental ride, windows of erstwhile fresh air for the east coast grindstone-bound …
Diito Jennifer’s sense that “reflections” looks mighty familiar.
Comment by el Kib — May 2, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
We were over 100 feet below the cliff tops, and if you were on top you could drop your iPhone to the canyon floor. (Probably damaging more than the middle keys.)
The reflection picture may look much like the other dozens of similar pictures I posted last year, or like the other dozens I didn’t post this time, but I can’t help it. My camera draws me to the canyon pools and makes me take a shot of every one.
Comment by rakkity — May 3, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
Your photos never get old, but I did chuckle when I read your comment. My camera drives me to flowers.
Comment by michael — May 3, 2008 @ 1:10 pm
A comment about “reflections”: I tried a new trick to get the dark lower half properly exposed at the same time as the bright upper half of this scene. (The full scene has a brightness range that exceeds my camera’s exposure capability.)
This is actually two photos, one of the upper half, and another of the lower half, each properly exposed. Post-facto, they were seamlessly stitched together by DoubleTake.
At the time of the shot I wondered if this trick would work, and apparently it did, because it has passed the acid test — no one on the blog has reported seeing a”seam”.
Comment by rakkity — May 5, 2008 @ 5:57 pm
But I did notice the coloring was … well I said different. This is quite unfair of me since I don’t attempt photographs these days; all I know now is that it’s harder than it looks — but I might have been responding to something I perceived as “off” about the color/relative darkness. Do you have a slightly darker-on-the-bottom version? Wait, let’s see both whole photos.
Comment by jennifer — May 5, 2008 @ 6:40 pm
Why did you post that funny looking photo with the seam?
(
Comment by michael — May 5, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
Can you tell me exactly where the seam is?
Comment by rakkity — May 6, 2008 @ 12:50 am
OK Jennifer, here’s the top, and here’s the bottom. If you view them side-by-side, you can see the differences in brightness/darkness of the common areas.
Comment by rakkity — May 6, 2008 @ 12:55 am
I don’t normally try and hunt for seams, but since you take Mikey’s joke seriously, I’ll say that the left side of the jagged border between light and dark seems a little too-much composed of straight-line segments, even where I would expect rocks to jut in and out. The right side doesn’t make me as uncomfortable. Happy now? (We occasionally find relief in “don’t ask, don’t tell” in my household these days.)
Comment by Peggy — May 6, 2008 @ 6:23 am
DoubleTake has done much more than stitch a foreground shadow to more sunlit else — thanks to the supplied “halves”, one can see that the variations occur throughout. And in the foreground wash terrain, DT actually darkened the shadowed area (relative to the better shadow exposure) and lightened the background contiguous surface, yielding some loss of detail to blowout — all in the name of retrieving information in the background cliff wall shadowed areas, it seems. But the shadowline is no “seam”, just the shape of whatever’s above and behind rakkity.
I’ve done this the clunky “manual” overlay-and-erase way, but as a one-stop high-dynamic-range tool, DT’s not bad!
Comment by el Kib — May 6, 2008 @ 8:50 am
For some reason I didn’t see the “top” and “bottom” until just now. And I agree with Peggy that the shadowline border is just a bit too straight, or rather seems to be composed of straight-line segments. In the “top” photo, look at the sharp shadow around and behind the biggish rock almost but not quite half-way across (left-to-right) the shadow line. It’s that type of detail that is missing from the stitched photo. But I never would have noticed …
El kib, I don’t understand a word of what you wrote. Is DT a program or a new alias for rakkity? What do you mean “the variations occur throughout”?
Comment by jennifer — May 6, 2008 @ 8:47 pm
DT = DoubleTake, the program I used to stitch the pictures together.
I think the ragged edges (jaggies?) you are seeing, Jennifer, are due to my re-sizing of the images for the convenience of those who don’t have 40-inch monitors. The originals were about 2200 x 3300 pixels, and reducing them to 768 x 1024 necessarily creates “jaggies”.
Comment by rakkity — May 6, 2008 @ 11:26 pm
You resized the finished photo, but not the “top” and “bottom” photos? Because I see detail in those (lacking in the finished photo), not jaggies. But maybe not seeing it is the blowout of which Adam speaks.
Is the stitch place along the edge of the shadow?
What was it Mike said? Jennifer hates not understanding everything? Sorry.
Comment by jennifer — May 7, 2008 @ 6:18 am
Those shadow straightnesses can be attributed to a relatively smooth patch of gravel and the outline of the butte that cast them. I don’t know that this merits belaboring, but the image is not a binary composite, but rather a very complex hybrid. DT did not use “digital scissors” along the shadow line the way a human might’ve — it consider ALL of the roughly 1.5 million pixels individually and adjusted according to a calculated range of brightnesses. If you look into the distant canyon, you’ll see that those shadowed walls were brightened, and portions of the foreground shadow were darkened. The interventions are throughout.
Comment by el Kib — May 7, 2008 @ 7:42 am
Photoshop’s version:
Comment by michael — May 7, 2008 @ 8:02 am
OK. Now I get it, and I see what you mean about the complex hybrid. Thanks for explaining that better. I don’t think you understand what I meant about the edge of the shadow, but I understand now that what I was trying to describe is largely due to the hybridization process.
Comment by jennifer — May 7, 2008 @ 8:50 pm