Salvation of the Tool

The salvation of my camera gear usually comes before the safety of my own physical self. My children and friends can recount, in vivid detail, the numerous times I have slipped in a boulder field, holding my camera up into the air and out of harms way, only to sacrifice some bony prominence, leg meat, or facial skin, in order to keep my gear safe.

Bones and flesh will heal – camera gear is forever.

This acrobatic method of stumbling and falling is in direct conflict to the neurological reflexes that have been a natural preservative to our human race for eons. Since the dawn of man, life in the wilds has given our bodies the ability to save ourselves from injury by creating the “somatic reflex arc”, an involuntary and nearly instantaneous movement in response to a stimulus. These electrical reactions happen so fast that the signal does not even go to the brain, but just to the spinal cord – and back to the limb, or limbs, that need the response. Your brain only becomes aware of the reflex after it has occurred (so it doesn’t feel left out). The reflex arc is responsible for slapping at the wasp that is stinging the back of your thigh, to jerk your hand off the scorching backpacking stove you thought was cool, or to violently twist your head as a mosquito enters your ear canal.

Human reflexes were meant to save your body, not your camera gear, and all include some form of vestibular and visual input - balance and location in space - which is processed by the brain as a top priority. Examples of this “extrapyramidal system” (a reflex involving additional sensory input) would be: throwing your hands up in front of your face just as you see a bent willow branch snap back toward you, the embarrassing little backward hop when you see a stick that looks like a rattlesnake, putting your hands out in front of you as you fall into a enormous expanse of jagged boulders, or to close your eyes when someone yells, “Heads!” To unconsciously ignore such a complex system of chemistry and genetics is quite amazing – and, in the big picture, probably not all that clever.

As outdoor photographers, we pride ourselves with ability to override this system of evolutionary deliverance, to save our precious tools at any cost, and to suffer, without complaint, any violent insult to our feeble hairless frames.  We have learned to shoulder roll away from our camera, letting our humerus take the full force of the impact; to land square on our ass after a rodeo slip on ice, holding the camera up high and letting our spines collapse with the vicious shock; and yes, in a forward fall, to throw our arms up over our head, holding the Nikon body and wide angle lens up like the grail, and letting our meatless elbows and chins pack into shallow gravel.

Tragedy is not the loss of tissue, but the loss of a prized piece of optical glass.

Only twice in my memory (there have been some head injuries, so this comment is only inclusive of known injuries) have I actually let the camera touch earth, and thankfully both times only resulted in a muddy Galen Rowell filter and a fractured lens hood. Some boiled water and careful cleaning (supplemented by a string of obscenities that warmed the hearts of all at camp) dutifully restored the filter to beneficial employment, and the lens hood was meticulously reincarnated to its original shape by the careful hands of a Sherpa guide - and a roll of duct tape. Other than one entire side of my orange Gore-Tex jacket being smeared by the abrasive combination of sugar snow and forest mud, and the brutal humbling of my delicate pride - I emerged unharmed.

With both the rising cost of camera equipment - and health care - I am unsure as to where the magic line resides; that ephemeral plane between sudden pain and possible death versus the salvation of our digitized, mechanized, wondrous instruments. Perhaps someday I will perceive a full arm cast and physical therapy as outweighing the cost to replace my camera – but I doubt it.


www.hartimages.com

The Road Trip

One of the splendid privileges of being focused only on landscape photography is the travel; incredible serpentine canyons glowing blue and pink, Hobbit-esque forests of ancient trees braided with moss, terrifying ice-carved mountains so big that they hold the earths weather hostage from an entire country. Even the most hardened portrait photographer has, at some point in their career, dreamt of capturing sun-warmed images of blonde models in the southern Utah desert or on a palm-lined sandy beach. Traveling, and becoming overwhelmingly immersed in uncharted territory, is part of the magic - the romanticism of classical photography, the quintessential combination of a camera, a free soul, and a willing body. And this formula of image capture and adventure is a powerfully seductive drug.

Travel photography can be broken into two separate factions: those with the means to travel – and those without. And those without - find a way. For the vast majority of us who do not have travel agents, or schedule planners, or awards cards for Four Seasons and Explora, our adventures are usually planned after a hard night of drinking.  Light beers and pale ales tend to create a soft open itinerary, often ending up in Yosemite, the southwest deserts, or the rolling planes of the Dakotas. Dark beers and bitters produce a desire for more difficult destinations such as the coastal rainforests, Canada, or the Tallulah Gorge where Deliverance was filmed. Anything swilled from a clear plastic jug will frequently find you entwined in some triple-distilled destination like Pakistan, Somalia, or the Tallulah Gorge where Deliverance was filmed. Stripped down to its most basic definition, you are simply a beatnik in a van with a camera, a nearly unemployed retail servant clinging to the hope of fame and fortune from one ‘killer’ shot.

Once you have committed time and money to a photo adventure trip, you must remember that even the most resolute plan is only toilet paper thin in its ability to bring your intrepid odyssey to its goal. The ability to deviate from any plan will be your most valued attribute, and to do so in the face of drooling adversity will only make you stronger - and grace you with images never dreamt possible. Be the willow, savor the tasty fruits of your flexibility, for it will be these twists of fate that will bring to you the greatest gifts of all – amazing images and spellbinding tales of exploration.

A road trip is nothing more than a theatre for some potential epic: flying into a hurricane in a three-seat Cessna to avoid the mandatory water closure, taking any taxi within the catacombs of Kathmandu to see the monkey temple at sunrise, fighting through a nighttime sandstorm in the Utah desert, lost, and trying to locate your car by using the remote key and watching for the flash of headlights, the old guy on the freeway threatening to kill you with a tire iron – these are all worthy ingredients for a good yarn. And, if you shoot enough images, capture every instance of amazing light and shadow, see every sunset, look for compositions that tell a story and routinely snap the random luck shot, you will be amazed at what you will end up with when you get home.

Even a shoestring budget can produce amazing images. Sure, ending up scribbling out pathetic postcards to your estranged family, relishing the dim warmth of a Chevron bathroom, and surviving on cold hot dogs and Meow Mix has its appeal, but the next level of travel hell is so much more comfortable. The Super 8 in Escalante has a great continental breakfast near the cigarette machine, any North Face tent can be a little slice of heaven – with the right partner, and to own your own Subaru means photographic independence within the North American continent. Add to this a smart phone with Google maps, a debit card with at least $217 available, a quality Gore-Tex jacket and a hankering to suffer, and you will see so many beautiful places. These places won’t be on cards and calendars, or posters at truck stops, they will be intimate slices of your life, off the beaten track and almost unknown to the world. These are the images that will mean so much to you as a photographer – and to others - mysterious places with grand arcs of story.

Get outside and shoot, and shoot often. Look at things from different perspectives. Learn the craft of exposure and light and Photoshop. Enjoy being patient standing in the cold or swarmed by mosquitos. Make mistakes every day. Travel to the next town or state or country, and when you do - be a good ambassador for this great nation.

We live in a time where almost anyone can travel, everyone has a camera, and everything is captured. Take the huge scary step out of your front door and don’t look back. Great pictures don’t necessarily come from the most elaborate and expensive cameras, but often from just the tiny lens of an iPhone. 

To Photoshop, or not to Photoshop

A lot of people ask me if I use Photoshop on my images, “Did you Photoshop that sky?” or, “Are those colors Photoshopped?” and my answer is always the same, “Yes – of course I use Photoshop.” And every time I answer that question I have this unfounded twinge of guilt that runs up my spine, like I was admitting to a hair transplant, or colored contact lenses, or that I don’t own a gun (Idahoans are typically armed to the teeth). It still seems that for portraits and landscape work, Photoshop remains a dirty word, a sneaky dark secret that should be left under the house in a shallow grave near where the main water line is. It’s crazy.

In the 1930’s, Ansel Adams stood for hours in his darkroom with his prints – burning down highlights, dodging shadows, lengthening exposures here and there, bathing the paper in selenium toner to deepen the blacks, and then plunging them into potassium ferrocyanide to brighten the whites. He used red glass filters on his camera lens to darken the blues of sky and water, used different types of paper for different images, touched up tiny specks of white with a #000 brush and photo ink, and exposed and developed film in such a way that it allowed him to expand the normal range of exposure latitude, far more than was thought possible at the time. Other daredevil photographers were making multiple exposures, sandwiching negatives, using long exposures to create ghosts, and actually painting hints of color onto the printed photographs themselves. Would they have used Photoshop – I say hell yes!

Photoshop is the darkroom. Every image I process travels through the Photoshop darkroom. My camera is set to just capture the “raw” image; no color correction, no sharpening, the color gamut and dynamic range are unprintable, and the data hasn’t even been assigned a format yet; it’s just the raw information from the sensor - a digital negative if you will. From there it is transferred from my camera to the computer and ‘processed’ (through a series of complex algorithms and calculations in a Raw converter software program) and then placed into Photoshop for refinement. Up to this point, I am simply ‘developing the film’.

Once inside Photoshop, yes – you can do anything to an image. You could end up with an abstract neon interpretation of your cat draped over the back of the sofa, or a stunning life-like landscape image of the Virgin River in Zion National Park. This is where Ansel would have plopped himself down in a mission chair and sipped his coffee; creating Photoshop layers for contrast and exposure, locating neutral gray and balancing the color, dodging and burning, bringing up the reds and reducing the blues in the shadows, spot healing tiny imperfections in a sky - all the while daydreaming of Georgia O’Keeffe naked. This process is the modern process.

I have a good example: I was hiking the Narrows of the Virgin River Canyon in Zion this summer. At a bend in the river the soaring canyon walls curved away, catching reflected light from a late afternoon sun and glowing orange. The river in the foreground was a stunning blue-green and clear – something you will not find here in the spring when it is opaque and brown. I set up my tripod, framed the image – and waited. I waited for the other hikers in the canyon to get out of my picture. It was like they didn’t even care; sauntering across the water-washed boulders in bikini tops and board shorts, taking their own pictures with iPhones, or splashing through the river in Frankenstein-like water boots. But, I am patient. I knew the risk involved in entering a canyon that is so famous for its ease of access, stunning beauty, and fleet of propane-powered tour buses that dump their loads at 15-minute intervals.

Suddenly I had the river bend and canyon all to myself and began clicking - changing exposures a little, checking focus, adding and subtracting a polarizer – until I noticed a guy with a blue jacket far in the background, kneeling and taking his own tripod mounted photos. Damn. But just as quickly as the curse word escaped my chapped lips, I uttered the four words familiar to so many photographers now, “I can Photoshop that.” It was that simple. I got the best shot I could, knowing that in the post-processing realm - the ‘darkroom’ - that I could very carefully remove or camouflage that small blue square in the background.  The image was one of my favorites of the year.

However, film photography is not dead yet. There are two factions of photographers – digital and traditional - and I would venture to guess that nearly all of the digital photographers that are even semi-professional use Photoshop to produce their images and prints. The dwindling band of traditional photographers (those who still use film and wet chemicals in a darkroom) are not only a hardy breed, but are the bad-asses of the photo world. Hauling a bulky view camera, changing bag, sheet film, tripods, etc. into the wilds is crazy enough, but then to print poster-sized images in a darkroom– that’s an incredible amount of money, time, and skill - a lost skill. If you would like to see what is still possible with old world skills, just visit Michael Fatali’s website – it will blow your mind and bring tears to your eyes.

As technology advances, so too will the way we produce photographic images. That is the way it has always been. If you think that Photoshop is a dirty word, an admittance to some degrading act or covert misinterpretation, then you should still be watching that black and white ‘tube’ television, untangling the curly cord to your Bakelite phone, replacing your Gore-Tex with oiled canvas, waiting at the mailbox for your mail, and making your Redenbacher popcorn in a pot on the stove.

So I guess that’s it. My name is Rob Hart, and I use Photoshop. 

www.hartimages.com

hartimages - new look

Thank you for looking through my images, and following the link to this page.

Snowy Trees, Canyonlands - Utah

My new website, hosted by SmugMug, is a full-featured gallery sharing site which gives you the ability to purchase images at various sizes - framed or unframed, cropped or uncropped, matt or glossy, on fine art paper, metal or canvas. Images are printed and shipped from Bay Photo in Santa Cruz, a professional photography service with 35 years of experience.

If you decide to purchase through the SmugMug site, you will notice that most of my images are not created in the traditional 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, etc. size, but are ‘full frame’ images direct from the camera. In other words, you get exactly what I saw through the camera, without cropping. I believe the resulting images are more pleasing to the eye, being a bit wider and having more of a true ‘landscape’ feel. SmugMug offers these modern paper dimensions so you can print full-frame images, and you will notice them when you click the BUY button; sizes such as 8x12, 12x18, and 16x24 will be available, and frames for these sizes are generally available from places such as Aaron Brothers, here in Boise.

The images you order from the SmugMug website will not be signed or numbered, but will have a small digital signature in the corner of the print. If you wish to purchase a signed and numbered image, then you will need to contact me by email. The images I print are 24x15 at the largest (on Moab Entrada, 100% acid-free archival paper), and up to 40x25 on archival canvas (which are simply stunning). I can ship the images rolled, or framed / stretched. These are limited editions, commonly in a run of 75.

I am excited about the new display properties of the SmugMug site, and in the next few months I hope to add more text content such as captions and locations of images.

Rob Hart

rhartimages@gmail.com

A New Site

The time for a new look has begun. My old web site has become smaller and smaller as most computer monitors have become larger and larger. Tablets and iPad’s and smart phones need their own platform and size requirements. The upload speed, the color, and the purchase/shopping cart/PayPal features – almost everything needs to be retooled.

This blog site is just a start; and over the next few months I will work toward the future of my new site – in my ample spare time. Without any expeditions on the near horizon, and with ski season still a few months off, it seems the perfect time to get rolling. There will be, however, a substantial increase in our weekly java bean purchases.