Photoshop Tutorials

I find myself not getting much work done today because I keep running into interesting Photoshop tutorials everywhere I look. And I look.

Some of them are so good I thought I would pass them along for anyone interested in going beyond the basics in Photoshop.

Jimmy McIntyre has become a great source for Photoshop education. His weekly newsletter not only gives links to his latest offerings, but also links to others he has found over the week.

This week he hit it out of the park in a tutorial on landscape image editing he did for 500px at http://iso.500px.com/post-processing-tips-for-landscape-photos/. There should be enough there to keep you busy for a few hours.

Julianne Kost is my prime source for all things new in Photoshop and Lightroom. Any time there is a new release she is all over it with videos on the new features. This week she gives a very good review of what is new in the latest Camera Raw 8.2 release at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4UTmTai5FU#t=375. I learned several new things I did not know in that 15 minute video.

Lastly, I discovered an amazing new natural light portrait photographer, Lisa Holloway, from a link in Jimmy McIntyre’s newsletter (you really ought to subscribe, it’s free) at http://iso.500px.com/backlight-natural-light-portrait-photo-tutorial/. It is also on 500px, which is coming up with some very good tutorials lately.

Those ought to keep anybody remotely interested in improving his or her camera and Photoshop skills busy for several hours.

Newborn Fawn

Doe and Fawn

I found this black-tail doe and newborn fawn near Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park in Washington state. The series of photos that ensued told a story. These are all straight out of camera. None of them are great photos in and of themselves, but I like them as a series.

Newborn Fawn

Momma decided to move away and stepped over a fallen log.

What’s a Fawn to Do?

The log was Mt. Everest to that little fawn.

He threw himself at it.

He threw himself at it with all he had, but fell back on the first try.

The Second Try

His second attempt looked like it was going to end with the same result…

Kicking

He was high-centered, but he managed to get his feet under him and start kicking his way over.

Success

He made it.

Reunited

Time for some security time beneath mom.

On the Road Again

This image is all blurry, but shows how tiny and fragile this little guy was.

Hopefully, they lived happily ever after. The End

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Web Site

SmugMug Web Site

SmugMug

I have spent some time this weekend working on a new web site on SmugMug. I was getting bored with what I had before and it didn’t seem to be working very well so I decided to mix it up a bit and launch the portfolio site I have been thinking about for a long time.

I had heard SmuMug displays images well so decided to give them a try. Unfortunately, there has been a major upgrade recently at SmugMug and everything has changed so the help forums are mostly outdated. There is very little help in how to set up your site and it is not for the faint of heart. The only training videos are hour long webinars!!! From the comments attached, I am not the only one who thinks that is rather sadistic. Little five minute snippets on a specific topic are the norm everywhere but SmugMug.

Needless to say, it has taken days to accomplish simple tasks. For instance, the theme I picked comes with a stock image on the homepage. It took me the better part of three days to figure out how to get my image on the homepage, instead. Even after sitting through the damned one hour webinar, which was no help for that task at all. The webinar was helpful in setting up an About Me page. I am not a web designer (obviously), but I’m not stupid and have set up several other web sites before.

After three days I finally have a few images on the site and the painful part is mostly over (I hope). I did have to re-upload all of the images at least once. Some had a watermark that said PROOF across them for some reason, their default watermark, I assume. Once I had my personal watermark uploaded I found out the only way to apply it was on upload so I had to delete and re-upload everything to get the watermark applied. Unfortunately web images are a lot like gym clothes in school, if your name isn’t all over them in indelible ink they are bound to be stolen.

Now that most of the pain is over I think I will enjoy the site. I have anted up for the first month, anyway. Just be forewarned to experiment with the free trial before committing and getting in over your head. For a while I thought maybe there were just things I couldn’t do on the trial version. Not true.

By the way, the Homepage image swap was accomplished by clicking on Customize in the top toolbar, choosing Homepage on the right sided panel, choosing Theme (of all things, you would think it would be under Content), and (here’s the good part) if you hover the mouse over the name of your web site (Thomas in my case) a couple of symbols magically appear to the right. You want the wrench symbol. So intuitive (NOT). I am surprised I ever found it.

Sea Stacks

500px

I am starting to like 500px lately. Flickr’s recent change to becoming totally unusable helped. Not only is the quality of the images on 500px better, but the feedback I get on images I post seems to be better. Nobody is going to rip your image, but the silence is deafening if you post something that is not appreciated. They either love it or hate it. On Flickr, there is no apparent logic to feedback. Some of my best images have 24 views on Flickr. On the other hand, the image above has only 24 views on 500px, but 600 views on Flickr so you never know. Isn’t it interesting that the two can yield such completely different results?

500px seems to be more competitive. I don’t know why. It’s not a contest. There are no cash prizes involved. It is all ego driven. The need to feel loved in this faceless society we live in today? I don’t know why.

I used to pay Flickr a few shekels a year to be able to parse out some statistics, but now the only pay plan is too expensive for what it does. If they have a strategy at Flickr, alienating photographers seems to be on the top of their list these days.

Red and White Dahlia

I was trying to be so creative and innovative on my dahlia shoot last weekend. It turns out the image that has gotten the best feedback this week is the image above, which is pretty much a straightforward, could have taken it in Program mode whilst falling out of a truck image. Which reminds me of a couple of stories I have heard. I believe it was Willard Clay who was once asked how he made a tree trunk look so beautiful? He said “Because I looked at a thousand tree trunks and photographed the most beautiful one.” The other story was by Joe McNally, now a National Geographic photographer. When he was a young newspaper photographer he approached one of the grizzled veterans who had consistently better photos than Joe and asked him how to take more interesting photographs. The veteran eyed him and said “Put more interesting stuff in front of your camera.” Joe apparently took that to heart, with self projects that have included circus performers and elephants, ballerinas, and a lady painted in snake scales holding a boa constrictor. This week I guess being arty lost to mother nature again. This was the most interesting thing in front of my camera this week.

The Colosseum image at top was an image taken on my first night in Rome. Arrived at my hotel at 4 pm. Shot that image about 7:30. I was so jet-lagged and exhausted it was all I could do to stand up and push the shutter button. Those were the best shots of my trip. I suspect it speaks to getting out of your own way and not over-thinking everything. Let your instincts take over. Either that or it was just one hell of a great subject and I never got back to it due to rain.

Changes

Rialto Beach

I blogged about this photograph earlier and how it surprised me because it didn’t seem like great light when I shot it, but I made an HDR and it turned out kind of nice. Nice enough to earn second place at the Oregon State Fair, it turns out.

The theme this week seems to be changes in photography. Specifically, does previous experience with shooting film, working in the darkroom, or even old Photoshop skills have any advantage?

I actually think learning to shoot in the film era was easier. Things weren’t changing so fast. New films came out. That was about it. Cameras were like rocks and auto-exposure was about the only new advance in ages. Even then, most camera instructors were decidedly in favor of using manual exposure. I used manual exposure mode exclusively in my film camera days. We did have to learn how to get a proper exposure then. Now, the very instructor that taught millions who read his books how to get a proper exposure by assessing the tonality of the scene tells people to “take a shot, look at the histogram, adjust.”

Now we have digital, and with it comes auto everything. A good digital camera makes getting a decent photo so easy that wedding photographers are complaining that laid off workers are making some extra money shooting weddings on the cheap and affecting their business. It doesn’t help that couples are marrying much later in life so are paying for their own weddings and wedding photographers and are less inclined to go for the expense of quality that their parents may have chosen.

With HDR and the latest software, even having great lighting is not as important, though strongly preferred. I recently listened to a wedding photographer say that he doesn’t waste a lot of time trying to get his lighting perfect now. It’s faster to fix it in Lightroom with the Fill slider and time is money when you shoot 800 frames on a weekend and have to get 150 of them processed for the client before the next wedding.

Samburu Warrior

The above image was made in deep shade with a bright bright background. Lightroom 4 is now good enough to tone down the bright background and bring up the shadow detail without artifacts. Bad lighting just isn’t the shot killer that it used to be. This was a moment that wasn’t going to wait for better light.

Last night I watched a discussion about dark room versus Lightroom. The contention was that having darkroom experience was of no value. I wouldn’t go that far. I think it taught killer editing skills. You were going to devote a lot of time into making a print in the darkroom, it had better be worthwhile. Now it is pretty easy to fine tune an image in Lightroom and post it so there is a lot of weaker work getting displayed. Darkroom does not prepare you to push sliders in Lightroom, but it prepares you to better decide what images deserve to be processed. There was a lot of argument about whether darkroom experience helped one to recognize what areas of an image need worked on and what needed to be done to them. I think experience is experience in that regard.

I think color darkroom work taught me how to recognize a color shift. You had to print little test strips and figure out which colors to tweak and how much. It was laborious and good riddance. Not to mention that now days you’d have to call the Hazmat team to get rid of the chemicals we used in those days.

Lightroom 4 and plug-ins like Nik, Topaz and OnOne filters have been game changers. They are getting to the point where Photoshop is not used as much or in the same way any longer.

Scott Kelby left the chapter on how to use a Curves adjustment layer out of his Photoshop CS6 book because the contrast slider in Lightroom 4 and Camera RAW 7 is now good enough to replace it. I still use a contrast layer right after I’ve added Tonal Contrast or whatever else I do in Nik Color Efex Pro. It adds a different kind of contrast. Curves doesn’t have to be the intimidating thing to learn that it was in the past. I hit the draw down menu and click on Linear Contrast. Then I usually lower the opacity to 50% for images that were processed with CEP4. It adds just a little je ne sais quoi. It is not THE way to add contrast any longer.

The point was made that Lightroom 4’s noise filter was all anyone needed so plug-in noise reduction is unnecessary. I still prefer to use Nik Define for two reasons. I like the results better and I always mask it in Photoshop. The lighter areas of the main subject like a face, eyes get 0-50% opacity, the sky and dark areas get 100%. You could try to do that in Lightroom with the adjustment brush, but it would be harder, take longer, and not look as good.

Things are changing faster and faster and the changes are making it faster and easier to get a great looking image so we ought to embrace them. The Buddhist philosophy is that change is going to happen whether you like it or not so you may as well embrace it or you will just become bitter and unhappy.

I think the one thing that hasn’t changed is that the old artists think their experience is invaluable and the younger artists think it is time to do things differently so experience is worthless. Then they age and become the old artists.

Samburu Boy

 

When Not to Shoot?

Rialto Beach

Art Wolfe once said something like, “The mark of a professional photographer is that he knows when not to shoot.” Mostly he meant that an experienced photographer knows when the light is really not going to create a good photograph. You can also tell a beginning photographer’s photos by the lack of attention to the backgrounds.

The backgrounds are still important, and it is nice to have warm, soft light, but advances in Photoshop, especially HDR, make it now much more forgiving to shoot in marginal light. I find myself shooting bracketed exposures in those situations, just in case. Remember, Art said those words in the days of film.

The above photo is the latest one to surprise me. It was an overcast Washington coast morning. I had hiked a mile down the beach to get to this spot to shoot tide pools on my last morning, and wasn’t coming back, otherwise I would have made a mental note of the composition and returned when the light was better.

I shot a five exposure bracket, knowing that I wouldn’t like the results of straightforward post-processing of a single frame because of the flat, gray light. When I ran it through Photomatix at home I loved the result. I wasn’t expecting anything great at all.

I don’t habitually make HDR’s, but when I know the light is not going to create anything stunning in a single frame, but I love the composition, I’ll shoot a bracketed burst. It doesn’t always result in anything useable, but it is fairly quick and easy to go from Lightroom to Photomatix and back again to see what you may have.

Lake-side chair_Lake Quinault

My self-assignment with the chair was to make a photograph that made the viewer really, really wish they were in that chair right now. It was sunset, it was a warm summer evening. Never mind about the damned mosquitos. This was a single frame. I actually made an HDR, but discovered HDR does not know what to do with ripples in water and makes a mess of it.

Lake Quinault Lodge

Here is the view looking the other way. Now do you wish you were there?

 

My Summer Vacation

Lake Crescent

As you can tell from the photograph above, it must be summer vacation time. Coming to the Olympic Peninsula in early July is only slightly less nutty than going to the Arctic in early July was. Seems I have a death wish for getting snowed on on my birthday, July 3rd. Yesterday I managed it on Hurricane Ridge, just above Port Angeles, Washington, which is a mile high in elevation. It was actually a balmy 35 degrees, but snowing sideways and sticking, all the same.

Even the ubiquitous blue grouse I had seen the day before all called in sick. I never did see a marmot up there in three days and they are usually everywhere, as well.  I visualize marmot and ground squirrel dens as being really cool places with satellite TV and computer games. They only come out when the weather is perfect and stay below from August to snow melt time so they must have something pretty cool down there.

I had one good morning up on Hurricane Ridge on Sunday. I got above the cloud ceiling and it was sunny. Of course that means driving through the clouds on the way up and the fog on that road is a fair bit thick. Hoping you don’t lose the white line on the side of the road or you won’t have any idea where you are thick. I made the mistake of coming down that road in the fog after dark one night. Hey, I was hoping to get above the clouds for a sunset.

Hurricane Ridge

On the sunny morning on Hurricane Ridge I was exploring and photographing some of the deer population up there when a yearling curiously approached me. I must have seemed innocent enough so he came right next to me as he passed. His entire herd of about ten deer followed suit. I was happily surrounded for a while there. No movement I made seemed to bother them, but they startled at any noise from anywhere else. Once I was among them I was no longer a threat. It was really nice to be accepted like that. They can be skittish at other times.

I have noticed before that when I stand behind a tripod I cease to be a human to animals. Last fall a coyote came right up and by me about five feet away. Once beside me he glanced up at me, startled, and ran away. I had a nutria come towards me and once he was too close to focus I said hello and he jumped in the lake. I really didn’t want to be that intimate with a nutria. Too many freaky orange teeth.

On windy and cold Monday morning two of the buck deer on Hurricane Ridge were just up to no good. You know how you can tell when somebody is up to something naughty? These guys were hanging out in the parking lot, eating junk food people spilled out their cars. This is at five am so I am the only human there and I’m not getting out of the car in that cold wind to photograph deer in a parking lot. Maybe they were high on anti-freeze leaked from a leaky radiator, I don’t know. They just strutted around the entire length of the parking lot and had no desire to go feed in the meadow or do anything constructive. It was like watching two teen-aged boys on a Saturday night. Just looking for trouble.

The Bad Boys

Don’t they just look bad? One of the other bucks came over from across the meadow to investigate what they were licking in the parking lot and when they didn’t back off and show him respect he kicked one their little hindies. I took photographs, but they are blurry because it was dark. They both reared up and came together like two wrestlers. I guess they don’t dare butt their velvet horns and damage them.

How Deer Fight When They Don’t Have Antlers

 

The top photo was from Lake Crescent, about 15 miles west of Port Angeles and a beautiful lake. I highly recommend the lodge there as a very romantic place to stay. I booked too late and couldn’t get a room there this trip, but spent an evening around the lodge and surrounding area, anyway. I was hoping to reproduce a fabulous sunset photograph I took ten years ago on film from in front of the lodge. Not even close to a sunset this trip so far.

James Island, La Push, WA

The closest so far was last night on Rialto Beach outside of Forks, Washington. Then a big black cloud came along the horizon and stubbornly sat there. It is supposed to clear off for the rest of the week so there could be a sunset at Rialto Beach tonight.

I don’t mind rain. I live in Oregon so that works out well. But yesterday in the Sol Duc River Valley it started kind of wearing on me. Photographing the falls there requires a mile and half hike and the downpours yesterday were enough to discourage any desire I might have had. Sol Duc is kind of awkwardly placed in between locations and I just hit it as I’m going through so the chance of getting good light to shoot the falls is pretty low. You can stay there overnight, camping or in the lodge, but it is not that great of a falls to shoot and has been done…and done and done. It is one of those weird falls that you photograph from above so not a lot of angles to be had, and most of them require bushwhacking through brush. Sometimes very, very wet brush.

The tide pools at Second Beach were a huge disappointment this morning. I remember them as the best I’d ever seen ten years ago. Not sure what changed. There was an awful lot of sterile sand today. It was a -2.4 tide, too.

All of the images today are straight out of camera since I am on the road with just the lap top so the color correction, etc may be less than perfect.

Lightroom 3

Lake Crescent

I purchased Adobe Lightroom 3 about 6-8 weeks ago. I have used Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw for viewing and converting my images for six years, so was obviously not overly impressed with Lightroom before. In fact, I have downloaded trial copies of both previous versions of Lightroom and uninstalled them from my computer after one week. I didn’t just not like them, I actively hated them.

Then I made the mistake of watching some of Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowskis videos on 100 Ways Lightroom Kicks Bridges A**. They actually made a separate video for each of the 100 reasons (must be nice to have that kind of time on your hands. And why do they hate Bridge so much?). I watched the first thirty and had found only four of them relevant in any way to my work flow. But the four reasons were good ones, so when Lightroom went on sale for about half of its usual price I bought it (does a sale on Lightroom 3 mean Lightroom 4 is imminent?).

I’m kind of regretting the purchase now because Lightroom does four things really well and for the rest of it I still need to have Bridge open to get anything accomplished, and now I have one more program to worry about because now that my images load faster and are sharper on full screen preview I can’t live without it. At times I have Lightroom, Bridge, Photoshop, and Capture NX (There are some Nikon RAW files that just do not convert well in Adobe) all running at the same time. Oy Vay!.

The four reasons I bought Lightroom, in order of importance, are:

1. Speed – My biggest complaint about Bridge, and the reason I finally gave up on it is that it seems to be loading images slower as time goes on. Lightroom is faster. Not FAST. But faster. Breezebrowser still kicks its butt on speed, if that is the only thing you are worried about (which makes you wonder how Adobe, with all of its money and brain power, can’t match other programs, seemingly ANY other programs, on speed). Huge advantage to Lightroom.

2. Full Screen Image Preview Sharpness – The first thing I do after uploading new images is to edit them in full screen mode and in Bridge I can’t delete images based on marginal sharpness because the previews are all unsharp. Of course, I often do that first edit in the field on my laptop and I am not able to judge sharpness on my laptop and have no intention yet of loading Lightroom on the laptop, anyway. But, for the images I upload at home I hope to be able to edit more viciously on the first pass with Lightroom. Marginal advantage to Lightroom.

3. Keywords on upload – The Lightroom upload utility is, disappointingly, slower than Bridge’s, but I console myself that it is adding keywords while it uploads (it is more likely slower because it is having to ‘import’ every file). Bridge does not allow you to add keywords on import, but I usually just select all of the images (Ctrl A) and do it immediately afterward, so a marginal advantage to Lightroom that is lost due to the slowness of uploading. A draw.

4. Contact Sheets – Adobe took the contact sheet function out of Photoshop with CS5. Some editors still want a printed contact sheet with DVD submissions so they have a quick visual reference to what is on the DVD without having to open it. Advantage Lightroom by virtue of an unexplainable loss of a useful  function in Photoshop.

Tie-down Horse

I wish I could end there, short and sweet and positive. At the risk of ranting, it is only fair to give a few of the 100 ways that Bridge is, indeed, better than Lightroom, and why I now have to use both programs to accomplish anything.

1. Lightroom is a catalog, Bridge is a browser. I don’t need a catalog. I think. It must be a necessary evil to allow putting the Develop module inside of the program because Apple’s Aperture employs it as well. Bridge (any browser) will happily show me every image on my computer. Lightroom will snootily ignore every image on my computer until it has been properly introduced via an ‘import’. But that’s not the worse of it. Oh no. If I open an image in Photoshop from Lightroom and work on it, it will faithfully save the psd file right there next to the RAW file. Good boy. Bridge will put the psd file any old place it feels like putting it, but almost never next to the RAW file with the same name. Do people in the Lightroom and Bridge divisions at Adobe even talk to each other? BUT, if I then make a jpg file for the blog, Flickr, etc,  as well, it will not be in Lightroom, I have to import it back in. ARGH! Second problem. Somewhere around CS4 I stopped having that Maximize Compatability box checked when I saved a psd file in Photoshop. The result of that is that Lightroom refuses to show me about half of my psd files. It knows they are there. If I try to synchronize files it will tell me the name of each and every one of them, along with a snooty message about what I have to do before it will be willing to consider befriending them. To see them in Lightroom I have to find them (in Bridge) and open them in Photoshop and do a Save As with the maximize comparability clicked on – THEN import them into Lightroom. One of the major reasons I have to have Bridge open to find files.

2. Filter Tab (or the lack thereof) – The other reason I have Bridge open to find files is that there is a heavenly, elegant, perfect tab called Filter in Bridge. If I just want to see the psd files, I click on psd. If I want to see five star files with a red tag, I click those two. If I click on a keyword it shows all of the files with that keyword. Lightroom, inexplicably, does not have the Filter tab that its FREE cousin has. It has what amounts to a Find or Search function that is so onerous I will never use it as long as I can just go to Bridge and find the image in half the time. Like I said, these guys at Adobe obviously don’t talk.

3 Develop – One of the things Scott and Matt repeatedly brought up in their videos was how with Lightroom you have it all in ONE program. Not really, but even then, going from the Library module in Lightroom to the Develop module is every bit as cumbersome as double clicking an image in Bridge and having Adobe Camera Raw open. You still have to go back to the Library module to open a different folder. Back and forth, back and forth. I am used to ACR and have yet to like the Develop module. They do the same things, but in the Develop module you have to scroll constantly to go from one tool to the next if you don’t know all of the keyboard shortcuts (none of which make any sense so depend on rote memory and repetition to learn). In ACR the tools are in tabs up top. No scrolling.

4. Folders – I will end my educational dialog (not rant) with folders. In Bridge folder hierarchies are maintained. I have an Africa folder with 18 subfolders and several sub sub folders. I also threw images in the Africa folder itself that were the touristy photos, or photos that were too few in number to warrant a sub folder of their own. I know where they are.  Works great – in Bridge. In Bridge when I click on the Africa folder to find my touristy photos I see 19 sub folders and few image files. In Lightroom, oh my my, when I click on the Africa folder I weep. I weep because there are 3,029 unorganized images in random order. Lightroom displays the sub folders in the side bar, but ignores their existence otherwise. Scott Kelby highly recommends using Collections in Lightroom instead of folders. I see why. I don’t want to use Collections. I have a system that has worked for me for six years. Another reason to have Bridge open. Sigh.

American Flag

It must be frustrating to work on Bridge development at Adobe. They give it away free with the purchase of Photoshop. If they made it really excel, built up the speed of image loading, sharpened up the full screen previews, and added keywording to the uploading utility, then people like me wouldn’t buy their expensive product – Lightroom. So, Bridge’s goal seems to be to offer a useable program for the casual user, but to remain mediocre enough that there is an incentive to buy Lightroom. What is harder to understand is why Lightroom hasn’t employed the concepts that really work well in Bridge and ACR, like the Filter tab and putting the Develop tools in tabs at the top so you don’t have to constantly scroll to find them. Maybe they will in Lightroom 4. Maybe I’ll download the beta version whenever it is available and try making some constructive suggestions to make it better.

I am obviously struggling to adapt to Lightroom after using Bridge for six years. I am sure starting out with it early on would be easier. Without something to compare it to some of its obvious flaws might not be so obvious. One could start out building collections instead of clinging to a file system that doesn’t seem to work in a catalog. On the other hand, I remember using Bridge for the first time was a bit rough. But then I was going from editing slides on a light table and storing them in files in a file cabinet to designing a whole new digital system then. This whole digital world is a wild ride.

What would work best for me is if Adobe offered an upgrade from Bridge for which they charged, maybe, $50. It would be faster and have sharper full screen previews. Maybe you could even add keywords on upload. It wouldn’t need a Develop module because we have ACR a double-click away. Just a lightning fast browser with a Filter tab. We could call it Light Bridge or Bridge Room. Or, they could name it Bridge and re-name the current free version Bridge Lite. I think the engineers at Lightroom and Bridge ought to trade places for three months, just long enough to become familiar with the other program and see what works better than what they have been doing.

Independence Day

Lake Crescent Sunset

     The Fourth of July is approaching and in my neighborhood that means being tormented by firecrackers at all hours of the night for a good ten days in a row. I always remember back to the most peaceful Fourth I ever spent, which was at Lake Crescent Lodge in Olympic National Park in northern Washington state. Being a national park, fireworks were prohibited and, somewhat surprisingly, the rules were obeyed.

     The above photograph and the photos below were all actually taken on the Fourth of July evening. I could have taken two of them from the exact same spot, though I probably moved the tripod a little bit. I published a magazine article on the Olympic National Park and they did not choose the photograph I would have selected (they rarely do). It was one of these three.

     It was not the one above, which is my personal favorite. I could understand that because it was a travel magazine and they are all about accomodations. They are also all about advertising revenue and publishing a photo of a lodge gives them a good pitch to ask for an advertisement in that issue.

     My choice for the article would have been this one, which could have been shot from the same position as the one above, so you can see what the view is from the lodge!

Lake Crescent Lodge

     The article as I wrote it was a work of art. It would have made you laugh, it would have made you cry. What they published was a heavily edited skeleton of what I wrote that said “I went…, I saw…, We stayed at…” I found out that travel magazine writers get no respect. They also published the weakest of the photographs (slides in those days) that I sent them. Needless to say I don’t brag about that article a lot. Here is the photograph they published.

Lake Crescent Lodge

     I highly recommend the Olympics for a summer visit. There is Hurricane Ridge, with vistas of snow-capped peaks and habituated deer with huge antlers to photograph. There are some of the best tide pool beaches in the northwest. And everybody seems to like the Hoh Rain Forest the best, with its moss draped trees and forest floor, but I live in Oregon and it just looks like home to me.