The Oaks

The Oaks

(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse -All Rights Reserved

The Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon once was covered with oak savannahs.  Clusters of oak trees still populate the valley floor, in greatly reduced numbers though.  Often on private land that is inaccessible. For a couple of years I've been looking for a good pair of oaks and a single oak near my home that I could return to easily, in all kinds of weather and at all times of day.  I wanted them on some kind of low knoll, without a lot of telephone wires, houses etc to clone out.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I stumbled on the perfect oaks - two on a knoll and then a single oak a few hundred feet to the left on its own little knoll.  This photograph is of the pair.  Love the road in front that can lead the eye right to them. And they are within a couple miles of my home in Ashland OR, easy to reach in 5-6 minutes.  There's even a rural driveway at the base of this road where I can park my car off the main road which is an important thing on country roads that often have no shoulder.  You'll see the single oak one of these days soon and all three will undoubtedly make frequent appearances here, in color and in infrared.  They are just so beautiful!  Look at the curly-que limbs on the left-hand oak. They are just yummy to my eye.

About this photograph:  This is an infrared photograph made on a September morning, just before noon.  With infrared the time of day isn't as important as it is with color and traditional black & white. Different times of day create different levels of intensity but infrared can make magic during the times of day when color images get harsh and unattractive.  The beauty & grace of an infrared photograph made at noon or at 2PM was the tipping point in my decision in the 1990s to begin shooting infrared film.

Camera: converted Nikon D90. Lems: Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8.  Settings: 1/200 at f/13; 70-mm (35-mm equivalent = 105mm); ISO 200.

I developed this image completely in Lightroom.   After converting it to grayscale, I deepened the blacks and made some color adjustments in the HSL/Color/Grayscale panel.  I substantially increased red and orange, slightly increased blues, purples & magentas, decreased green and aqua. Then I went to the split toning panel.  For the highlights I selected a dusty yellow-bronze color (hue 48, saturation 37).  For the shadows I picked a soft mauve (hue 237, saturation 24).  I finished by adding a slight vignette -- I  like a subtle darkening of the corners, sometimes just barely visible to my eye. 

I hope you enjoy this minimalist photograph of two elegant oaks.

On the dolly dock, Port Orford, Oregon
(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse - All Rights Reserved

This past weekend, David Lorenz Winston and I co-led a photography workshop at Port Orford and Cape Blanco on the Oregon coast. The weather was great, no big winds at the Cape, partly cloudy skies. The photo ops were many, and we all had a great time exploring the beaches and docks with our cameras. "On the dolly dock, Port Orford, Oregon" is an infrared photograph I made while there.

About the dolly dock: Port Orford is unique. It has one of only two dolly docks in the United States. The harbor is too shallow for safe mooring and so boats are hoisted onto the dock with a huge pulley, placed onto custom-made dolly-trailers, and towed to their "mooring" space on top of the pier. This is a photograph of a commercial fishing boat being lowered from the dock to the water.

About the photo: This photo was made at about 9:45 AM (PDT) on August 28, 2010, with a Nikon D90 that has been converted to infrared. Metadata: 18mm lens, ISO 250, 1/200 sec at f/10. Post-processing included converting to black and white in CS3; levels and curves adjustments to pull out the drama in the sky, increase the contrast a bit, and deepen the darks; and sepia toning. In Lightroom I added a graduated filter to darken the sky and further accent those great, sweeping clouds. I also added a vignette.

This is not the usual infrared photograph, with lots of foliage turned white. There is some grass in the background that has turned white, but none on my subject -- the fishing boat. An infrared photograph of a non-landscape scene can create an image full of drama and texture. If there's anything in the sky at all, infrared will bring it out, even if it seems insignificant to our eyes. The dreamy quality I associate with film infrared is present in this image -- and has combined with the drama in the sky to make this an image I like a lot.

Golden, Oregon

(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse - All Rights Reserved

My newly-converted camera arrived Tuesday, and I spent Wed., Thurs. & Fri. testing it. This is one of the photos from maybe 200 infrared images I shot on those three days.

Golden, Oregon is a small ghost town in Josephine County, Oregon. There are 5 or 6 buildings still standing plus some equipment from this once-bustling mining town. It is located off Interstate 5, near Wolf Creek Oregon.
This is a classic infrared image -- black and white, trees and grass turn white. I have developed the image in Lightroom and CS3 - mostly exposure and contrast adjustments. I also added a slight vignette to draw your eye to the center of the image.


Metadata: Nikon D90 converted to record infrared light spectrum. 24-mm lens. ISO 200. Exposure 1/100 second at f/11.

Abandoned Barn & Cattle Chute, Ashland OR

(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse, All Rights Reserved

Kodak made me do it. I fell in love with infrared photography in the early 1990s and had been shooting High-Speed Infrared Film (HIE) ever since. When Kodak announced it was discontinuing HIE, digital seemed like my only choice. But I went there kicking and screaming because I so loved the soft, surreal images that HIE gave me, and digital infrared has a sharpness that creates a different kind of image. I bought a dozen rolls of HIE before it was forever gone, though, and still have a couple of rolls in my refrigerator...and an Oregon source for developing them.

Abandoned Barn & Cattle Chute is on a farm across the street from where I live. The City of Ashland decided to develop the land, for affordable housing, much needed here. Talk about mixed feelings -- I loved photographing at this farm, now abandoned, but am also in favor of affordable housing. SO...I spent the summer of 2009 photographing over there almost everyday. A week after I made this photo, construction started. The farm was fenced off. Trees were trimmed, old outbuildings torn down. The barn is still there but no longer accessible.

This version of Abandoned Barn is actually a composite of two. When I looked at my images in the computer, I saw white PVC pipe laying along the fence, to the left of the cattle chute and not visible in this version. So I went back the next day and reframed my image. But...when I looked at it in the computer...NO CLOUDS. And the clouds are essential to the success of this image. For two days there were no clouds in the sky. And so I created a composite, using the clouds from the first image I made. I chose the sepia tone because it adds a vintage, romantic feeling that I felt while I was photographing the barn.

A bit about digital infrared: To make this image, I used a digital SLR that was converted by Life Pixel to capture infrared. A Nikon D50, my first digital SLR, my learner camera after 20 years of shooting film and reluctantly coming to digital. With the conversion, it became a dedicated camera, used only for infrared work.

Because of the calibration process when a camera is converted, images are sharper than those made with film. And unlike trying to shoot infrared with an unconverted digital SLR, exposure times are as they would be with a traditional digital SLR. (Exposure times for infrared using my unconverted D300, for example, were in the 50-60 second range.) Late summer/fall 2009 I lost my D50. After a winter of tearing my house, storage area, and car apart -- more than once -- and not finding it, and a spring of testing the unconverted D300, I finally accepted reality bought a new digital SLR. It's in Washington state right now, being converted by LifePixel. My new dedicated camera should be here this week (YIPPEE!), and I will be SO glad to be back in the infrared business again! It feeds a part of my creative self that nothing else does.

To see more infrared images, digital and film, check out my fine art gallery on my website.

Metadata: Nikon D50 converted SLR. Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 18,,. ISO 200. Exposure: 1/320" at f/11.