Can confirm the ‘sylvan’ part
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has mentioned the multitude of recreational trails in the Pittsburgh area before. As has often been described, walking around with the camera isn’t just another one of my obsessions, rather I have to walk a certain number of miles a week to maintain a good state of health. That’s how this whole deal got started, all those years ago, when a younger but already quite humble narrator first marched off – with palpitant heart – towards a fabled eidolon called Newtown Creek, camera in hand.
Weather permitting, I try to get out every other day for a walk of at least a couple/three miles, and then really burn out a lot of steps once a week with a 5-10 mile scuttle. Short ones, long ones. That’s the plan, anyway.
A recent short walk saw me marching around north of the city, up in the Glenshaw section, at ‘Fall Run Park,’ which I’ve described here before.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’d been uncharacteristically dry in the region when these photos were taken, about 3 weeks without measurable rain had passed by, so the waterfall pictured above was a bit of a trickle this time around. This park is built into a valley’s slope, so the way in actually offers pretty decent ‘cardio.’ I try to walk at the same speed whether it’s up or down, pushing at the hill in the same steady stride I’d use on a flat surface. That really gets the ticker ticking, I tell’s ya.
It’s odd, having produced so many pretty photos of ugly things over the years, to be pointing the camera at something positively… nice. I keep looking for a leaking 50 gallon drum, or maggots on the corpse of some critter… but everywhere you look, it’s nice.
Weird, no horror.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is one of those specialty shots which I’ve described in the past as being ‘focus stacked.’ There are multiple shots with different focal points and exposures which are stitched together in the image above. Everything is acceptable as far as sharpness, from the foreground to the background, which is the point of the exercise. There was a filter on the lens, a 10 stop Neutral Density. That allowed me to slow the exposure down as well, creating the mirror surface water but also retaining a bit of the surface texture of the flowing water.
Not the best thing, composition wise, but while I’m out exercising my body, I like to also use a scene like this to play around with what the continually evolving digital photography workflow can do. What… there was a lot of bending involved and I actually had to stand in the water… screw off.
Back next week, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
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The Newtown Pentacle 
When you focus using “stacking” how come the end result isn’t, at times, an image that is completely out of focus? Why does the algorithm make everything sharp?
georgetheatheist . . . fuzzy pix
June 23, 2023 at 3:24 pm
It’s not an algorithm. Instead, photoshop goes looking for the sharpest/contrast areas of two or more photos and includes them in a mask which overlays the mask in the other creating a contiguous field of sharp. The point of the exercise is to a) learn what the application is locking onto as far as the masking, b) to figure out a way to ‘game it’ creatively. I’m also able to use shallow depth of field shots for this, f 1.8 and so on. When you marry them together, the effective DOF multiplies in a seemingly logarithmic fashion, ie 5 f1.8’s become f18. Where I’m trying to get is to reliably produce the effect without surprises, easier said than done. Give it a shot, interesting ‘digital darkroom’ stuff and especially so with exposure stacking.
Mitch Waxman
June 23, 2023 at 3:43 pm
Here’s a pretty good video explaining the process- https://youtu.be/oMQzjzk-tFo
Mitch Waxman
June 23, 2023 at 3:44 pm
Thanks for the link. It explains it nicely. However, I cut my teeth on employing the hyperfocal technique with wide-angled lenses stopped down for sweeping depth of field for broad near-to-far sharpness. Just curious what Ansel Adams would have thought about focus stacking when he got everything sharp in his film view camera with the lens set at f/64. (I do miss those hyperfocal distance scales on the old manual focusing lenses. They helped get everything sharp from near to far without all this computer-generated imagery. Sad they no longer exist.)
georgetheatheist . . . fuzzy pix
June 24, 2023 at 4:04 pm