Tag: GA

Fair Daze

It’s been a good while since I’ve posted. That doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. My JOB is always something that takes a lot of time and energy from me, and JOB is in full swing now. It has consumed a lot of my energy. Sadly the older I get the less energy there is to be consumed.

I have been doing photog type things though. As I type this I am importing about 500 photos from several different sessions. The bulk of those numbers come from two live events I recently attended, a high school band competition for the Perry High School Band, the Panther Brigade, and a day of walking around the GA National Fair with my friend Shirley. A great many of those frames will inevitably find there way to the trash due to repetition or simple sucking. But I expect a good number of quality frames to satisfy my photo-lust.

At the band competition I did shot a lot of frames as sequences to string together later as video and GIF type stuff. I was feeling experimental. This type of thing has always interested me with the stuttered psudo-time-lapse effect in motion presentation. Time will tell if any of it is worth while. I don’t have any any specific goals other than to see what happens, and exercise my skills. I only had my 50mm lens along being it was a work field trip and space was very limited on the school bus with a full load of band kids and chaperones . Consequently there aren’t any closeups of the actual field competition unfortunately. I did get some nice color shots of the audience and general gestalt. I also got several nice sequences, while walking back to my bus, of other bands moving from the staging area to the field. And I had to presence of mind to finally get some nice shots of school buses. When doing some editing I noticed I didn’t have many bus shots at all to choose from, and was a little dismayed.

The bulk of the fair frames I captured are from a side-show of dogs catching Frisbees. It was fun. I mashed the button a lot. There is undoubtedly a lot of junk in there, but I hope there is a lot of cool shots too. It will be a while after I post this before I really look at them. But I did did see some cool stuff as I started the import session.

The thing that has been of the most interest to me recently, and is the focus of the photo portion of this post, I entered six of my photographs into the fair this year. This is the first time I’ve I’ve ever entered a competition or anything officially. I was excited and nervous leading up to doing this. There was a good deal of preparation required. I had to have prints made following the specifications set forth by the fair organizers. That cost me a pretty penny I had to scrape together, but I’m glad I did it, even if I had to do without a little bit.

Before the fair I dreamed I would win a ribbon, and emerge a winner. Sadly I wasn’t a winner. I didn’t even get an honorable mention. I was disappointed yes. Regardless, it was great to see my photographs along side many other amazing works from amazing photographers. The excitement and hope of the entire experience was a pleasant interlude that left me feeling satisfied I had done something concrete with my hobby. I learned a few things I think as I continue to present my work in the future.

Below are the six entries in no particular order.

Independence

Yum

Boom

Heron Earth

Hello Sunshine

Hi There

October 10, 2025
Soft

There is a very narrow focus on this shot. Only a small part of the frame is in focus, and I like it like that. It has a dreamy feel to me.

It’s been a busy week. I’ve gone back to work. The new school year just started and a bus drivers job is never done, which is good for job security. =)

As always the first couple days are chaotic and crazy. Combined with the shock of coming back to work after a summer hiatus, and the uncertainty felt by thousands of new students in new situations, there is bound to be problems. However the organization I work for is well skilled with the pressures of first day back. There is a lot of pressure for all. For some a lot more than other, for certain. With lives literally on the line it’s not something to take lightly.

I myself had made a mistake that caused great distress in one family. I’m happy to say that everything ended up positively. But it could have been less than a good ending in many ways. I felt bad and stressed and probably will for some time to come. It’s difficult to anticipate every scenario, and even then in the heat of the moment to always be perfect. I know I used to think school bus drivers were kinda lame, but I tell you what, we have to deal with a heck of a lot going on all at the same time and do it knowing lives are at stake. It’s no small job.

August 2, 2025
Butterfly with a broken wing

Even though I still have some good waterfall photos to look at and play with I wanted to look at something new. I have scanned through this batch I got recently at the butterfly place. It’s really quite nice, but oh so hot. Apparently butterflies really like hot weather. I most certainly am not comfortable in it, so I didn’t spend as much time there as I should have. Although, I did get some pretty nice shots while I was there. I need to work on my outdoor conditioning and really my general conditioning too. When I was a kid I remember loving the summer heat and thinking I wanted to be outside all the time my whole life. That was a long time ago though. It was also in a place that had far less humidity. I wonder if I spent my youth here in middle Georgia with the semi-tropical climate I would have been so happy to be outdoors?

I realized when well after the fact that this little buddy has a broken wing, or torn, or whatever the correct terminology would be for such a disfigurement. I can tell you it didn’t seem to hinder it’s progress jumping from one flower to another in the search of pollen. As I mentioned I didn’t even realize it had this handicap. I expect butterflies are really quite resilient. I’d imagine they encounter quite a lot of obstacles in their lives and they manage to carry on. I wonder if it even realizes it has this disadvantage? Whatever the case, it is a beautiful animal in a beautiful environment, and I like beautiful things. I hope you like it too.

July 25, 2025
Generic Title

I’m not feeling particularly inspired to write right now. It’s funny, I was thinking last night. My mind was wandering all over the place. I probably had a half a dozen ideas of things I thought would be good to write about. For some reason as I’m trying to sleep my thoughts frequently kick into overdrive and prevent me from attaining the rest I so desire at the time. I actually thought about this a little bit last night. I’m happy I just remembered that thread of thought to give me something to write about now.

I don’t know what it is about night-time or bed-time or even more lucid times, but my mind has a way of running in a lot of different directions all competing for processing power at the more or less the same time. I can go from thinking about some conversation I may have had earlier that day that made me upset for some reason into thinking about some cryptic religious topic and then as soon as that starts to go somewhere I’m off wondering why I can’t keep my attention on any one topic for very long. I do know that Ive been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD). It seems a fairly common pathology, and I’m not worried about anyone knowing as much. Heh, I can’t imagine anyone will ever take the time to read this screed anyway.

When I was a kid things like ADD either weren’t known or so little known it hadn’t filtered down to the the salt of the earth type people yet. You know, the non-rich. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rich have had access to this knowledge a long time before us common folk. I imagine that, at least, the surface knowledge of things like ADD, for example, is now pretty much common knowledge to the average person in the civilization and society of well developed cultures. Where in less developed cultures where things we take for granted are a struggle, I’d be surprised if even many of the cultural leaders are aware of such things. Don’t get me wrong please. I’m sure that even in the most impoverished societies on this planet have many well educated and even brilliant people. I just doubt that the benefits and knowledge possessed by those fortunate few are even available to the majority of their society either by design or simple poverty of resources and ability to educate. Then there is the simple willingness to want to learn about new things like mental health that I’m sure is lacking in large part of the human race anyway. If they can’t eat it, F**k it or piss on it I’m afraid the average person simply doesn’t care.

So these are the kinds of things that swirl through my thoughts most nights. Most of the time it is just idle curiosity that has my attention. Occasionally I have some kind of deeper more profound thoughts, at least they seem that way to me at the time. But as I’m in bed trying to get some sleep so I don’t fall asleep at work, I usually just file whatever it was away in my mind and tell myself to do something with it tomorrow. But it never seems to work that way. Most of the time I forgot that I even had something I thought was important. Occasionally I remember and put it to use in some way or another, like adjusting my schedule or writing something down. But a lot of the time it is simply gone, vanished in the ethereal fog of my mind. And that’s okay, because it has to be, or what’s the consequences. After all what are the odds that anything someone like me could imagine would end up being worthwhile. Even If I imagined a solution to resolve conflict in the middle east no one would listen to me anyway.

I really like this picture of Anna Ruby falls. I don’t have a lot to say about it right now. I spent my energy rambling about random thoughts that no one will ever care about. It’s so strange that when I want to say or write something about something in particular, like this or any of my other photos, I simply can’t think of much to say about it. I guess whatever I wanted to say is in the image itself, and doesn’t need much explanation. At least that is the hope.

July 21, 2025
Anna Ruby Falls

I continue to move through the cache of photo files I created at Anna Ruby Falls. I tend to work on these things with a chronological continuity. Process what I have and move on to the next thing. I occasionally go back and look at things I really like, and possibly revitalize them in some way. I can see this folder getting revisited. I really like this collection. I’m having a good time playing with them.

I started messing around with this picture this morning. I didn’t have any specific plans or ideas. You’ll probably think that’s obvious. But I’m enjoying learning as I play, and once again I really like this experimental piece. This has gone well past traditional photography into the realm of art, I say. You may say it’s some whole other thing. I like this at this time.

I’m getting very close to the actual waterfalls, which you can see are in the background here. I’ll be getting around to them very soon. I think this may be my favorite exposure of the batch so far. I do still have many more exposures to look at much closer. And I fully expect to come back to this one at some future point and see what else I can do with it.

I’m happy to say that my schedule has allowed me to take two day trips to acquire new images. I have a lot of new and different stuff to keep me busy once I go back to work when school starts. I’ll be able to play with butterflies and a bunch of dam pictures I got when I took my drone to a dam/lake not too far from me, and got some cool stuff. I’ve barley looked at either batch yet, but What I have seen looks nice.

One of the many dam pictures I took recently.

July 18, 2025
Green

I like this one. I pretty much like all of them, but this is the one I like today. There is no water in this one, but it comes from the same batch I got at Anna Ruby falls. It is obviously a trail. It is the trail from the bottom of the of the mountain/hill to the top where the happy little waterfall lives. I stopped many times on the hike up hill, both for photo opportunities and for breaks. It was a steep hill and I needed every break I took. Next time I need to bring a bottle of water.

I barely did anything to this exposure. I was moving along systematically in Lightroom, as I do, and this was the next thing. There are a few more from this location/scene that are different in their ways. I chose this one to like today.

No crops. No fancy grading. No masks. No fancy edits. All I did to this one was change the profile to Adobe Landscape. Then enabled HDR editing in LR (Lightroom). Did a quick auto levels for the illuminati, (I recently heard another photog refer to luminescence in this manner and found it cheeky) and saturation. Finally I made a slight adjustment the monotone-luminescence-level using the tone curve.

I was quite happy with the results when looking at them in LR. But there is a lot of processing every time an exposure changes format. I say that because when I exported to a small JPEG, for use in this blog post, and later upload to Facebook, that image didn’t quite set right with me. At least I wasn’t as happy with the outcome as when I was exclusively in LR. Specifically, the dark hollow is to me seeming a bit too dark. I hesitate to post it, but am going to anyway as a learning experience.

I probably should just not post any of this, but I will because I took the time to write it. I doubt I’ll come back to play with this image and refine it anytime soon. There isn’t any specific reason.

July 11, 2025
Resplendent

Resplendent. That’s the word I thought of when I looked at this one. I’m really happy with it. I don’t have a lot to say. I just wanted to put my output of th3 day out there for enjoyment by… Well.

July 6, 2025
Run for the roses

That’s a Jerry Garcia song, “Run for the Roses.” A great song in my humble opinion. What does that have to do with this nature landscape photograph? Directly there is no connection between the two. This is simply a song that popped in my head just as I was trying to think of a title for today’s post. Of course I opened up my iTunes and played it a couple times. It’s been a long while since I listened to this really good stuff, from a really good place at a time I needed to hear it. I draw much of my inspiration in my life from Jerry and the rest of the boys, and their shenanigans. But what does that have to do with the picture of the stream?

I’ve decided to only post this one picture today. The last several posts have been exposures from this same batch, and I’ve shown several variations of each, and tried to explain them a little at least. I don’t much expect, if I’m being honest with myself, that I’ll be going back to compare notes of them ever again.

I have decided with this exposure to only post the edit I like most, at least at this point in time, instead of some sort of pick-a-pic format. Single pictures are the thing. No body puts up multiple choices for the same thing for you to pick unless there is a profit in it, and then the choices have to be created from totally different perspectives. Think of the broadcast and NEWS industry. You can have anywhere from one to thousands of different views of the same event. But the point I’m really trying to make is that when you go to any web page there is only one image like itself displayed unless there are extenuating circumstances. One logo, one photo of the CEO, one photo of the hamburger, one photo of the award winning photo. I know and, if you’ve been paying attention, you also know, the “artist” of each probably struggled which version of which exposure to choose. In the end they had to choose. It’s difficult to choose what you want sometimes.

Well that is how the song “Run for the Roses” came to me. I have to choose the one that you see. My doubts and insecurity will always have me thinking “it could be better” because it could. But what is better anyway? Once you get past the basic technical know-how, photography comes down to the situation as it is in the moment, the 1/250th of a second and the choices that lead you there. Sometimes it’s perfect. Sometimes life blinks at the very instant the shutter shuts.

So I have to just throw it on the wall and see if it sticks, so to speak. Run for the roses…

July 4, 2025
A little before and after

Today I am posting a before and after look at a photo of a big rock covered in moss living in the stream at Unicoi State park. This is the stream directly after the Anna Ruby falls. There’s probably a better way to say that, but I think this gives the accurate topological positing.

In the spirit of the last couple posts, I wanted to compare a straight out of the camera flat processed image along with an edit I was happy with. There are a million ways to look at the same picture when taking into account crops, angles, colors, light and other variables. Some of the ways are going to be good and others bad, but that is pretty subjective to the audience when you get right down to it. At some point you have to say I like that then put it out there. There will always be criticism, both constructive and destructive. Everybody has their own opinion, and some people delight in tearing down everything. That’s is a sociological/physiological perspective better suited for some other blog. My ADD and deep fascination with the human condition rears it’s head again.

A few thought’s about this edit. That’s ultimately why this post is here. I decided to crop this image down to what seems to me to be the focal point, the rock and stream. There is something to be said about the wider view and the totality of the whole, but in this case I wanted to zoom in on those central points of interest. I didn’t have to crop in very far and the detail was still very much observable. Sometimes when you crop you loose detail, but I’m blessed with a very good camera, in today’s terms, capable of some pretty detailed exposures. This was shot on a 17-35mm zoom lens. This exposure was at 35mm. I took some exposures of the same scene at wider settings and like them too. I will post something with a wider perspective showing more of the totality of the scene soon I hope.

One thing I’m a little unsure about is the color. The green is really green, at least on my monitor. When I was editing I liked it. When I look at it compared to the original it seems hyper-green. Part of me kinda likes that super-popin green while another part of me says it’s unnatural. These are the kinds of decisions one must make when processing photographs. When I decided I was finished with this exposure for today, I knew the green was a-popin, and I liked it. After the fact, I question my judgement. I wonder what other people would think. I wonder how much of what other people think would effect my editorial judgment.

June 30, 2025
More different looks
Continuing my look at the photos of the Anna Ruby Falls shoot in Georgia this time only changing the Lightroom profiles. All of the profiles used are built into Lightroom. I believe you can purchase different profiles, but haven’t really looked into that option. I’m in no position to be throwing money at curiosities at this time, so it will remain unexplored for the time being. I’m not sure if profiles are the same thing as LUTs, which is something I explored a good while back. My curiosity is peaked.

So according to Google AI overview a LUT is…
“A LUT, or Look-Up Table, is a file that alters the colors and tones of an image or video. It’s essentially a color grading preset that can be used in both production and post-production to achieve specific looks. LUTs can be used for technical tasks like converting between color spaces or for creative purposes like applying cinematic styles.

Here’s a more detailed explanation:

What it is:

A LUT is a table of numerical values that maps input color values to output color values.

It’s like a spreadsheet that tells your editing software how to change each color in your footage. LUTs can be 1D (simple adjustments like brightness or contrast) or 3D (more complex color transformations).

How it’s used:

In production: LUTs can be applied to monitors on set to preview how footage will look after color grading, especially when shooting in formats like RAW or Log.

In post-production:

LUTs are used to apply specific looks to video footage during color grading. They can be used to convert between color spaces (like Log to Rec.709), create a stylized look, or match the colors of different cameras.

Types of LUTs:

Conversion LUTs: Used to convert footage from one color space to another, such as Log to Rec.709.

Creative LUTs: Used to apply specific artistic looks and styles to footage. Camera-specific LUTs: Designed for specific camera models to ensure accurate color reproduction and consistency. Monitor LUTs: Used to calibrate monitors and ensure accurate color representation.

Why use LUTs?

Efficiency: LUTs can speed up the color grading process by providing a starting point for adjustments.

Consistency: They help maintain a consistent look across multiple shots or projects. Creative control: LUTs allow for experimentation with different looks and styles. “
And then there are Lightroom profile, which appear to be similar but technically different. Again according to Google AI…
“In Lightroom, profiles are essentially a set of instructions that determine how your RAW or other image file is interpreted by the software, affecting color, tone, and contrast. They act as a starting point for your edits, providing a base look that can be further customized. Lightroom offers various built-in profiles, and you can also import and create your own.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

What are Lightroom Profiles?

RAW vs. Creative Profiles: RAW profiles are designed to optimize how RAW files are displayed, while creative profiles apply stylistic effects to any image format.

Purpose:

Profiles don’t alter the adjustment sliders in Lightroom; instead, they apply adjustments directly to the image data.

Starting Point:

Profiles offer a foundational look for your image, allowing you to build upon it with further adjustments.

Non-Destructive:

Profiles, like presets, are non-destructive, meaning they don’t permanently alter the original image file.

Using Profiles in Lightroom:

Finding Profiles: In Lightroom Classic, profiles are located in the Basic panel within the Develop module, accessible through the “Profile” menu or the “Profile browser” icon.

Applying Profiles:

Clicking on a profile in the browser applies its corresponding adjustments to the selected image.

Creative Profile Amount Slider:

For creative profiles, you can adjust the intensity of the effect using the “Amount” slider.

Camera Matching:

The “Camera Matching” profiles are designed to emulate the look of your camera’s JPEG rendering.

Installing and Managing Profiles:

Importing: You can import new profiles by navigating to “File > Import Profiles & Presets” in Lightroom Classic.

Missing Profiles:

If profiles are not showing up, you can manage them through the “Profile browser” and ensure they are enabled.

Mobile:

Lightroom mobile also supports profiles, which can be imported and used within the “Profile” tab.

Key Differences between Presets and Profiles:

Presets: Presets are a collection of pre-defined adjustments that can be applied to an image, affecting the sliders in Lightroom.

Profiles:

Profiles are a foundational interpretation of the image data, providing a starting point for editing.

This video explains the differences between Lightroom presets and profiles:”
In my personal analysis based on the available information LUTs are mostly for film and video production, which Is probably why it’s been so long since I looked into it. Then Lightroom profiles are more for photographs which is appropriate in this case. I’m sure there are many different things that can be said on the subject, but this is where I present the pix portion of the blog post. The top of the post featured image is the flat profile I used to create all of the other variations presented. The only adjustments made were profile adjustments from the parent/featured image.
June 29, 2025