Tashi Choling

Tashi Choling

(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse, All Rights Reserved

Last week Bill Exley, a friend and photographer, and I spent the morning photographing in the Colestine Valley, a rural valley south of Ashland that straddles the Oregon-California border.  We were treated to old barns at historic farms, railroad tracks, and the serenity of the meditation garden at the Tashi Choling Center for Buddhist Studies.

This photograph is of the pond. To the right you can see prayer flags and the top of a roofed area that houses one of the three statues in the garden.  I love the contrast of light and dark in this photo.  And the feathery-ness of the trees.  I have a feeling of serenity and balance when I look at it.

Metadata:  Nikon D90 camera converted for infrared.  14-24mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens at 18mm (35-mm equivalent = 27mm).  Hand-held.  ISO 320.  1/320" at f/11.  This photograph was made at 11:20 AM PDT.

All the post-processing work was done in Lightroom.  I converted it to black and white. In the point curve box, I selected strong contrast.  In the Color/HSL box, I adjusted the red, orange and yellow.  I also experimented with adding grain, hoping to make it look a bit more like infrared film.  I used the split toning option again -- I really like that look. This time I selected a gold/mocha-like color (hue 22; saturation 18) for the highlights.  For the shadows, I chose lilac (hue 271, saturation 18). I placed the balance slider at +70.  And then added a vignette.

Thanks for coming by to take a look -- I hope you like it.  It's a beautiful, peaceful, serene place. I hope I've done justice to it.   ~ darlene

Oregon's oldest lighthouse

Cape Blanco Lighthouse (infrared)

(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse - All Rights Reserved

The Cape Blanco Lighthouse is Oregon's oldest continuously operating lighthouse AND its most westerly.  Poised on the point of a bluff six miles north of Port Orford, Oregon, with no protection from south, north or west, the winds can be fierce.  The fresnel lens was lit for the first time on December 20, 1970.  The lighthouse is still active today.  You can learn more about this exquisite lighthouse here http://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=125

Besides being Oregon's oldest and most westerly lighthouse, it is also elegant -- with beautiful lines and textures.  From any angle, it presents an intriguring, strong, beautiful face to all who visit her.

This photograph was made during the workshop David Lorenz Winston and I co-led in August.  When we arrived at the lighthouse, it was enshrouded in fog, barely visible from the road.  The fog lifted, allowing us to photograph it with fog swirling around it and then completely clear of fog.  In all kinds of weather, the lighthouse at Cape Blanco never disappoints. 

While this is very much a photograph of the lighthouse, the addition of the people interacting with the lighthouse -- one entering, one leaving -- was important to me.  For my eye, other photographs made at the same time but without people lack the power and emotion of this image. 

About this photograph.  This is an infrared (invisible light) photograph made with my newly-converted Nikon D90,  using my 14-24 mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens at 21-mm (35-mm equivalent = 33mm). Minimal post-processing: I converted the image to grayscale and increased the blacks, clarity & contrast to enhance the black-white contrast. 

Flora Oregon

Flora, Oregon, a living ghost town
(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse - All Rights Reserved

This is an older photograph, made on film actually, in the 1990s. But recently I worked on it to create the mood that I had hoped I'd find on that trip to Flora -- but which just didn't happen. Part of being a fine art photographer is expressing a feeling about a place or an event. And the digital darkroom makes it possible for us to create in ways I never managed to do in the traditional wet darkroom.

About Flora. Flora is located in Wallowa County, northeastern Oregon, about 35 miles north of Enterprise, on Oregon Route 3. There are occupied residential buildings in Flora, but mostly it's a ghost town. The area is beautiful, rural, agricultural. Worth spending time exploring with your camera if you've never been there.

About the photograph. This is a composite of two photographs. The sky is one photograph. The buildings and foreground are from another. When I was at Flora, the sky was flat gray. For the feeling I wanted to evoke with this image, I needed a dramatic sky. I pulled this from another image and desaturated it. The buildings are color-corrected (they had a strong blue-ish cast) but otherwise unchanged. the grasses in the middle-ground and foreground have been painted in Photoshop using a brush in Color blend mode. My thanks to my colleague David Lorenz Winston who taught me this technique.

I hope this photograph evokes the sense of isolation and drama I saw in the Flora landscape.