In the Mangroves

Red Mangroves, Los Haitises National Park, Dominican Republic

Los Haitises is the Dominican Republic's largest national park, an almost inaccessible wilderness of steep karst pinnacles, dense rainforest, and the largest collection of coastal mangroves in the Caribbean.  It is also just over an hour from Santo Domingo, the nation's capital, but so little known or understood that a plan to build a vast cement plant at the edge of the park was seriously considered - until public opposition stopped it.

I spent only a few hours here, mostly photographing some of the thousands of caves - some of them decorated by ancient Taino art - and the tangled mangrove stands. These red mangroves caught my eye and I stood in the bow of a small boat photographing the wonderful patterns of stilt roots. When I got home, I decided that the image lacked color, and looked better in black and white, so I made the conversion. The result?  A riot of lines and curves - good fun.

Nikon D3 with 17-35mm lens

Merry Christmas, One and All

Sea Ice Breakup, Port Lockroy, Antarctica

Tomorrow is Christmas, and we'll be heading out soon to spend it with family on the Oregon Coast. A week ago, however, we were busting through the pack ice in Antarctica.  As I have previously posted, the light was not always what I might have hoped, with almost constant clouds and snow. But when conditions are less-than-generous with color, it's often a good time to switch to black and white.

This image was originally shot in color, but with digital cameras it is easy to transform a dull color landscape into a rather nice b&w one. There are many ways to do it, but my technique is to simply de-saturated the color image (saving the original RAW in case I ever want to go back to color) and add needed contrast through Levels or Curves - the ideal is to create a histogram with the complete spread of gray tones from left to right (rather than bunched up in the middle). Snow, it turns out, is filled with all sorts of nuances - light and shadows - and lends itself perfectly for this kind of treatment.

Enough Tech Talk - go spend some time with your loved ones, and stay warm...

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm lens

Visions of the Forest

Forest Stream, Mt. Tompotika, Sulawesi

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I spent several weeks in Indonesia, documenting diversity for a small NGO.  For the first week, I concentrated on the endangered Maleo (see below) but I also spent several days exploring the montane forests on the slopes of Mt. Tompotika, in a remote corner of central Sulawesi. With few trails, we hiked up the bed of an un-named creek, swollen with water from recent rains. Except for the stifling heat, I felt right at home in an environment that looked very much like the temperate Olympic rainforests near my home.

For this shot, my eye was immediately drawn to this cluster of leaves growing on a stream-side boulder.  Moving in close with a 17mm lens, I was able to fill the lower part of the frame with these boldly shaped leaves, and use the upper part to give a sense of the stream and surrounding forest.

The leaves were wet, however, and reflecting the silver light from the cloudy sky, so I used a polarizer to cut that glare, saturate the green, and slow down the motion of the water.

Nikon D3, with 17-35mm lens, Polarizer and tripod