When I used to hike in the Himalayas, my favorite times were when the large mountains, like Kanchenjunga or Everest, poked their heads out of the clouds, so that one saw only a mass of gray sky with a peak sticking out way up high where the sun should be. It was even more beautiful in the evenings when the protruding peak would be purple and gold. (Sadly, all my photos are on 35 mm slides, so I can’t reproduce them here.)
I don’t get those views any more, but something approximating them occasionally happens in Chicago. Here’s dawn just a short while ago:
Enjoyed 🙂
I live an exceedingly boring life.
Having grown up 10 miles outside the Chicago city limits in the 60s and 70s, and not having been back much since, that photo is an accurate representation of my memory of the city. But I’m reflexively thinking smog, not fog.
Wow… you been to the Himalayas?!! There’s got to be a way that you can print off just a handful of the best slides and then scan them into your computer!
You can scan your slides – I spent way too much time scanning slides from the 70s and they’ve come up with faster scanners now. Get a graduate student to do it for you 😉
D. MacPherson, I was thinking the SAME thing! I want to see scanned slides of Dr. Coyne hiking the Himalayas 🙂
Or, pay to have them professionally scanned. I sorted through all my old 35mm slides recently, narrowed it down to ~80, and had them scanned onto a CD for GBP20, including some light restoration. For me it was well worth it, and cheaper than buying a slide scanner.
Certainly cheaper if you have fewer than several hundred to scan.
Jerry: You *can* reproduce your 35mm slides on the site. I’m somebody, somewhere at the Unie has a slide scanner. Scan the slides and you’ve got digital copies. I’d love to see those Himalayan shots!
*sure
Whoops! Sorry for the redundant post!
We sometimes get the reverse here in Seattle: low clouds obscuring the tops of the towers, with the sun breaking through at the horizon to light up the streets in red.
I’ve also seen an effect where sunlight reflects from the tops of the towers to illuminate a cloud layer just above street level. So you’re walking down the street with huge prisms of light hovering in the air over your head.
Holy crap! Hiking in the Himalayas, forsooth!
Second the motion about converting your slides to some digital format. I know there has to be a way to do it–they converted all my Edison wax cylinders to MP3s last year.
Dr. C.: I can highly recommend the EPSON V600 Perfection photo scanner. I’ve scanned over 10,000 images over the last few years with mine. It does a simply superb job.
To make the most of your old Kodachromes (those were the vast majority of my old images), I also recommend either Lightroom or Photoshop Elements for a little fill light and contrast and saturation boost.
I recommend scanning at 2400 dpi as a nice compromise between speed and resolution. It will resolve the image completely (KR64) with slight over-sampling, and not take the age of time it would take to scan at, say 6400 dpi (where you get about 9 pixels for each KR64 grain.) Plenty good at 2400 dpi for any web use or printing even up to 13X19 inches.
It really isn’t as laborious as it sounds. I was also able to “recover” many images that were slightly off-exposure and make them lovely, where I was never able to project them. This was a wonderful unexpected bonus.
And: On top of all that, scanning allows you to archive all your most dear images and store them at various locations. My relief when I had all my most favorite images scanned and archived was palpable.
Please write to me if you want more on scanning. I would ask you to please do it. It’s well worth it! (I know you’re a really busy guy; but …)
For examples, please click here