A collection of White Pocket image thumbnails courtesy Synnatschke, Parker, Ceccaldi, Liverman, and Schmickle…
Why Talk Trifecta?
Let's face it - if you've got a terabyte of hard drive space, finding an image or folder can be enough to break your heart. Say you want to write an article. Might take you a week; might take you two. After a while, things seem to get lost in all those hard drive folders.
Enter Lightroom 3. Yep, it's a beta. But, beta aside, Hurrah to skilled Adobe engineers! You literally see, in the newly revamped Folders Panel, I can do 2 very important functions
1. See all images relevant to the article, and,
2. See and work on other non image items in the folder to smoothly continue writing!
Thought of old graduate school days of library research, Xerox’s, or even handwritten notes …Arrggghhhh. With Lightroom 3 - you can see what you're doing, you can write your article faster, etc.. I estimate a 20 to 30% increase in efficiency just using LR3 this exciting new way. Unfortunately, it's still up to you to have that creative Muse grace your writing shoulder much less your viewfinder.
Cheers Aside - Let's Share a Rather Long Trifecta...
They always say, "Life's fine events come in 3’s..."!
This last few days seems like a fog; just about when free Lightroom 3 beta was announced, Frank Sirona, a German landscape photographer and good friend, wrote me a very intriguing letter.
Frank asked, "What would you think about putting together an article for... What I´m thinking of is an article describing geology and beauty of Coyote Buttes area in Vermilion Cliffs National Monument."
You guessed it; I fired up LR3b, looked at some of Frank’s images, then tried to segregate other Web images into three geologically distinct categories (Coyote Buttes North CBN, Coyote Buttes South CBS, and White Pocket WP).
So, why the fog?
Several reasons: flattered by Frank's suggestion, I went off on a geology/writing/photography bender. After reading several technical papers, I had a sense of not only some of the incredible beauty at Vermilion Cliffs, but of the truly remarkable origin and affects of ancient rocks that make up this wilderness. Almost immediately, I knew I was going to positively respond to Frank.
What I hadn't counted on was one of the facile new conveniences LR3b would provide. Without any manuals, but with instincts honed from Lightroom 2, I began the rather intricate process of writing the dual article - geology and beauty – with LR3b’s now considerable help.
What's an intricate response?
I like to collect images, put them in Microsoft Word, pick up a microphone headset, and talk to the images. You say; 'talk to the images'? By that metaphor, I mean dictate words for the article and watch them 'magically' appear around each image. What a marvelous way to simply let your memories, internal and external visual images, and spoken thoughts flow... it’s an amazing form of story tellin’!
With Lightroom 2, image segregation was facilitated in Collections. In Lightroom 3, it's both in Folders and Collections. At least in Windows, my writing process can spawn many folders following different ideas to completion of an article.
Welcome, LR3b - Adobe designer's now let me look through the Folders Panel not only at individual images, so I can organize them and my thoughts about the article – but - actually lets me go directly down to HD folder level where I can see relevant technical articles in Adobe's Free Reader PDF format. Talk about Nervana!
Now, I can both see and read as I compose. Frankly, I wish I'd had this facility years ago when I stepped out of the bachelors and began graduate work. It would've saved so much time...
Here's my current Folders evolution from LR3b. Mind you, these folders evolved as I created the article.
But what about dark chocolate atop the sweetest ice cream cone?
If I put a new image in an already used folder as the article grows, LR3b will quickly let me import just that image back into my proper folder. On screen, prior images are dark whereas new images are light and checked. You simply click Import...
what an incredibly subtle enhancement to reflective creativity!
Way_to_Go, Adobe engineers!!!
Ancient Culture
With years of writing about geology, I'm trained to look at rocks, confine them to a photograph, think about their origin, then try to explain all this in simple English. If you check Frank's request, that's just what he wants.
Of course, you always need to be prepared for the unexpected...
Geologic articles need to talk about similarities and differences of a region like Vermilion. That part was easy. The hard part was trying to recognize two different cultures were very present at two vastly different times and places.
All right, Joe, "What the hell do you mean - Two Cultures?"
Well, Frank, the first time I went to The Wave (CBN) 4 years ago, David Loope was kind enough to provide a GPS coordinate for Grallator tracks right across the valley. Oops - sorry folks, a Grallator was a small Jurassic dinosaur who lived 190 million years ago.
As geologic research for this article has progressed, Grallator's ain't the only dinosaurs on that part of ancient supercontinent Pangaea. Suddenly, I'm going from trekking an area and taking pictures to trying to learn where the area was when this huge Jurassic Navajo sandstone was laid down. Geologic words like equator, tropical westerlies, supercontinent, plate tectonics, breakup, continental drift, dinosaurs, dinosaur tracks, sand dunes, alluvial episodes, slumps... the list is quite long, but it's not my intention to bore you silly.
To make a long story short, I'm now sitting on a long manuscript which Frank has yet to see, trying to complete the seemingly tenuous link between two cultures. Yes, I've briefly described the geologic setting and its effect on millions of years of dinosaur life; Culture 1.
Recent Culture
But there's more...
as you can see from some images in our tentative summary above, White Pocket contains some of the most incredibly luscious photography nature photographers will ever capture.
I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Steffen Synnatschke, whom I've never met. It's Steffen's work, along with others listed above, which sets the digital bar and graces my visual steps back onto Pangaea. They let me see what it was like in those oases where dinosaurs cavorted at the equator, left tracks, but no bones, and gorgeous, candy colored rocks slumped from too much water recharge and overburden pressure. In these images (or tracks) would become what's now an seemingly ephemeral culture, preceding avid digital photographers. Ephemeral because our images will scarcely outlast dinosaur tracks.
It's also digital photography of people like Steffen which heralds the exciting Culture 2. Mind you, dinosaurs were only seeking water and food; they left no record of the awesome beauty they saw. But the avid digital photographer - willing to repeatedly travel across continents and use four wheel drives to brave deep sand can capture incredible beauty - he or she has left an incredibly awesome visual track a.k.a. a series of provocative fine art images.
So, in today's high-tech world, when we think of places to go and things to shoot (figuratively of course; perhaps capture our digital image would be more proper), we may not realize ~ we are the 'second' culture to leave tracks (oops - photos)!
Yep, you got it; Culture 2… and now, I've a trifecta!
Enjoy...
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