Today I discovered Simon Kolton’s Flickr stream (screen-name ••fly••), which exhibits many brilliant black-and-white and color images from Southeast Asia. These strike me less as travel photos and more as social documentary with a dramatic and intimate tone.

The image above depicts rice farming in the northern, Isaan region of Thailand. The low perspective and stark, monochrome processing brings out an ominous sky that matches the World to the intensity of the farmer’s expression and labor. Largely due to the farmer’s posture, but also the oppressive mood, this image reminds me of Diego Rivera’s Flower Carrier painting.

Oakland, California.

Train Coach D, by and © St Stev, used under a Creative Commons license.

It would be difficult for me to care any less about U.S. pro football, but I’m fascinated by sports photography. Via Scott Kelby, I read David Bergman’s write-up of a recent trip to shoot several football games, including some emphasis on Brett Favre after he was traded to the Jets. Most interesting is that Bergman’s tale is essentially one of logistics – how to get his full kit, and himself, ’round the country and arrive in shooting shape. He seems to be a master, embodying the old military proverb that “Good generals study tactics. Great generals study logistics.”

Ranier from Maury (HDR), by and © monkeytime.

Last Thanksgiving, I visited the Seattle area, staying on Maury Island (Vashon Island) in the Puget Sound with friends whose house had the back-porch view of Mount Ranier seen in this image. I shot this at about 5:15 p.m. The foreground was in deep shadow, while the mountain was still in relatively bright sun.

I bracketed several exposures with the goal of combining them into an HDR image. In Lightroom, I applied the LR/Enfuse plug-in to the RAW files of two of the bracketed exposures, importing the resultant TIFF back into Lightroom. I then applied an exposure increase, fill light and a graduated filter to further increase exposure in the bottom 2/3 of the image.

I haven’t been a fan of HDR because so many of the HDR images I’ve seen on Flickr look cartoonish or surreal. An image of the Los Angeles River by cinemafia, however, was so natural looking that I’m coming around.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass, “Meditations at Lagunitas”

Telegraph Hill and Tower, by and © monkeytime.

The 5D kit did not lend itself well to traipsing around San Francisco this month – or maybe I just didn’t lend myself well to carrying the load. At times I wished I had only my little Powershot, but, then, there would have been shots I couldn’t have gotten, like this one. I shot this just a few minutes short of Noon, against significant glare, which was compounded by shooting through an office building window.

In addition to shooting with the polarizing filter I made the following major adjustments in Lightroom:

• Preset: Punch (which, among other things, pushes Clarity to 50),
• Increased Contrast and Point Curve set to Strong Contrast,
• Increased Color Saturation, and
• Blue channel Luminance set to zero.

Beyond general improvement of the image, the primary reason for these adjustments was to bring out the blue/gray of the sky and the contrasting whites of the clouds. Of course, I could have held a polarizing filter in front of the point-and-shoot, but mine shoots only JPG, and I suspect that only in RAW could I have so easily drawn down blue luminance.