The Wood River

Nature Trail along the Wood River, Oregon
(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse - All Rights Reserved

One of my favorite places to photograph is along the Wood River in Klamath County, Oregon.  The river is shallow and narrow, laps softly against low-lying banks, loops and snakes through the valley in ways that beg to be photographed.  Willows and other trees dot the banks, interspersed among wooden fences, grazing cattle, rustic barns and ranch houses.  And from some locations, the mountains that ring the east side of Crater Lake form a dramatic backdrop.  This image was made at a nature trail that winds along the Wood River on the east side of the small cattle-ranching town of Ft. Klamath.  The trees and pasture on the far side of the river are part of a ranch.

Getting there:  From Medford OR, take highway 140 east to the Rocky Point/Ft. Klamath turnoff which is well-marked.  Follow this road to Ft. Klamath.  At Ft.  Klamath turn right at Highway 62 which goes to Klamath Falls -- also well-marked.  Turn left onto Sun Mountain Rd. just before you reach the old military fort.  The nature trail is poorly marked -- it's a left turn at a small brown road sign that says something like day use park.  But the sign is small and postitioned right at the turn off into the park.  The  access road is a loop road -- park, and then follow the trail. The trail is nicely developed, providing good access for everyone. 

Klamath County has been suffering through a severe drought, and the effects of the drought were apparent on this trip earlier this fall -- the aspen had not turned color yet, and the leaves looked like they would shrivel and fall off before the color came up.  Willow trees still had green leaves on them.  I chose to work in infrared, a format that doesn't need color to create dramatic images.

Metadata.  Nikon D90 camera, converted to infrared.  14-24mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens at 24mm.  1/125" at f/11.

Developing work:  I have created a user preset in Lightroom 3 for use with my infrared images.  The preset worked perfectly on this image (though it doesn't work on all images; I tried it on the photo of an oak tree made last week, & it didn't work at all).  The steps the preset automatically executes include black & white conversion, adjustments to the B&W mix in the HSL/Color/B&W panel,  increasing contrast, adding grain, & split toning.  

 

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.

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.

Pismo Beach Palms in Infrared

Palm Trees, Pismo Beach, CA
(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse - All Rights Reserved

Infrared photography is a special love of mine. The dreamy, surrealistic images. The graininess. The contrast between the white-whites and the black-blacks. "Palm Trees, Pismo Beach" is a favorite of mine from my archives. I chose to share it this week because infrared is on my mind. Last summer I lost the camera that had been converted for digital infrared. After much testing to see if I could shoot infrared with an unconverted camera, I just this week purchased a new camera that I am having converted to shoot digital infrared. So I'm excited and eager to be back in the world of infrared photography again.

About this photo: I found these palms at Pismo Beach, California during a visit with my son and daughter-in-law. On that trip I discovered what perfect infrared subjects palm trees are -- the contrast of trunk and leaves, the feathery quality to the palm fronds especially appeal to me -- and made several. This is one of my two favorites from that trip. Because this was done on film, I don't have the metadata. I do know that it was made on Kodak HIE (high-speed infrared) film with a red filter, 35-mm. film format, probably done with my Nikon FM2.

What I love about this image: The palm trees. There's such an other-worldiness to them. The curved wall of the planter they sit in. Also, the curved wall and the building behind the palms have an Art Deco quality that I remember from the Miami Vice TV show, even without any color.

A little about infrared photography: I began photographing with infrared film in the early 1990s after seeing a portfolio of work in a photography magazine. What interested me was the surreal quality of the images and the fact that the best infrared photographs are made during the time of day when visible light photography is at its worst -- 11 AM to 3PM.

The infrared portion of the light spectrum lies beyond what our human eyes are capable of seeing. Infrared film reveals this unseen world to us. I don't know much about the physics of it -- HOW it works doesn't particularly interest me. My interest is as an artist. Somehow, magickally it sometimes seems, in the infrared world grass and green leaves turn white while water and blue skies tend to go black or at least very dark. Kodak HIE added some graininess that I liked a lot. And because of the makeup of the film emulsion itself, there was a soft glow to subjects. Oh, and because of focus issues, there was an added softness.

Kodak has since stopped making HIE which is a great loss to all of us who ever shot it. But there is digital infrared now. Definitely a different animal in many ways -- but with its own special qualities and a unique beauty.

Next week I'll be writing about digital infrared -- how it's different, what makes it special in its own right -- and posting one of my favorite digital infrared images.