Take a slow moving carousel full of children, add a one and a half second camera exposure.

Now, that’s a thrill ride!

“We’re on a road to nowhere, Come on inside. Takin’ that ride to nowhere, We’ll take that ride.”

He was somebody’s son. Odds are he was someone’s brother. He might even have been a husband and a father. We don’t know if he perished at an old age or as a young child. We don’t know if he died 50 years ago or 100 years ago. All we know is that he is gone.

As I photographed his headstone yesterday morning, the subject caused me to pause and think about him, the “Unknown Male”. Who was he? What happened to him? Why is he in this cold, anonymous grave?

We will never know.

We awoke yesterday to find about 10 inches of The Greatest Snow on Earth.

I use Adobe PhotoShop to edit all of my photos that are presented on the web. I get asked about this quite a bit. There is a school of thought that some people hold that if you PhotoShop your photos that you are manipulating them and that this is ‘cheating’. I even heard a person once refer to digital photography as digital fakery. Here are some reasons why I don’t share this view.

1. I shoot my images in RAW. These images have no processing (sharpening, contrast, saturation, etc.) done to them in the camera. When viewed on the computer they tend to look dull and drab. The reason I do this is that I have a high quality digital negative with the RAW image file. I can then do the equivalent of developing the image when I convert it in PhotoShop.

2. I view the use of PhotoShop as the computer equivalent of what I used to do in the darkroom. When I am working with the image on the computer I am essentially printing the shot much as I would have done on an enlarger in the analog days. I always ask myself when editing if the edit I am doing could have been done in a darkroom. In most cases, it could be.

3. Due to the limited dynamic range of a camera’s digital sensor, it is difficult to capture with a camera what you see with your eye. The human eye has a much broader dynamic range then any digital camera on the market today. Since this is the case, I use PhotoShop to present the image closer to what I saw with my eye when I captured the shot. Sometimes this involves combining multiple exposures to achieve this result. The capture I made of a full moon over the Wasatch Range is an example of this.

My goal in using PhotoShop is to edit the image in a way that when it is viewed it does not appear edited. Today’s photograph of Noah is a good example of what I mean. I did the following to this shot:

– Crop unneeded area out
- Vignette edges
- Sharpen
- Reduce digital noise
- Increase color saturation
- Increase contrast
- Burn in around the edges and the bright areas on the forehead
- Dodge his right eye to brighten it

That’s quite a bit of editing, but the resulting image doesn’t scream PhotoShopped as much as just a beautiful golden retriever.

As a youngster, I have memories of my father sitting down after work in his chair and reading our daily newspaper, The Anchorage Times. With only 3 television channels, aside from the “nightly news”, this was the only way to find out what was going on in the world. Here it is 30+ years later and I find that when I want to read the news I sit down with my MacBook and an RSS reader. Many of my news sources are traditional in nature (newspapers, networks, etc.) but I have quite a few blogs in my subscription list as well. I like the independent nature of the blogs versus what the mainstream media reports.

What does this have to do with a photograph of a frozen stream? Many of the blogs I read serve as a conduit to pass along news from outside sources mixed in with a bit of commentary (digg.com for example). I am increasingly bothered by some of this blogging that purposefully attempts to be controversial or sensationalizing as a way of generating traffic and comments to their site. My goal with LeggNet’s Digital Capture is to give my readers a break from this type of blogging. I want this blog to be a safe place in hope that the few hundred people a day who visit will leave feeling enriched.

Today is Michelle’s birthday. To honor her, I dug into the archives and found this shot of her at the base of a climb on Suicide Rock in Idyllwild California. Happy Birthday!

There’s a little too much “busy-ness” in this photo for my taste, but a nice crisp winter scene nonetheless.