Actually, today we have mostly travel photos from reader Ken Phelps. I’m still going to concentrate on wildlife in the future (and perhaps the occasional landscape), but because these scenes will soon be gone when Cuba turns into another Aruba, I thought I’d put them up to document an endangered culture. The cars are endangered, too: there are many old U.S. cars from the fifties that are kept running, because they can’t afford (or get) new ones. That too will change.
Ken’s notes are indented:
A couple fine examples of Homo sapiens, captured in Havana. Shot from the hip with 50mm f1.2. Triggered with wireless remote in my other hand as I walked by.
This old guy was just the gentlest looking soul. I had a 70-200 on a tripod shooting cars in Havana Centro and he was watching from across the street. I gestured to ask his permission to shoot and he nodded OK. As soon as I had taken the image I walked across and showed him. He was extremely pleased and seemed curious about me. Being a unilingual churl, I hand-waved a bit and then brought out my phone where I keep a file of scenic B.C. images for such occasions. This has proved to be an extremely good ice-breaker and substitute for language on many occasions.Bonus shot of a car in Havana. 24mm tilt-shift lens to flatten focal plane and give increased depth of field without stopping down the aperture too much.
This is a small slough along the Nanaimo River between Second and Fourth lakes. The imaginatively named lakes are in series along the river, except for Third lake, which is small and of no account:
Wonderful pictures. You have an eye for composition. It makes me want to go out and try some scenery pictures, but it is 5 below right now…
Lovely stuff Ken. Very nice shots from Havana, esp. the second portrait. Well done.
Being from the desert, moss on the trees just kills me.
And moss on the rocks. On rocks!!
In the Seattle WA area you will see very thick moss growing on the roofs of houses.
In the Pacific NW moss will grow on you if you don’t move fast enough.
Yes, one of the fun chores one must do around here every few years…pressure wash the roof! Though 4 years ago we installed a metal roof, and that solved the problem…though the rain is a lot noisier; give and take I suppose.
Cuba is a place that got stuck in the 50s. Thanks Castro…
Beautiful!
Beautiful photos! Are some of them HDR composites? If so, they are very well done.
I have come to know many Cubans passing through my adapted country of Ecuador, which seems to be one of the few New World countries allowing Cubans hassle-free entry. Their situation is heartbreaking. The ones I meet often come here to start a long, dangerous voyage by land and water to the US border, where they think they will find paradise. They will risk death by drowning, exposure to extortion attempts and sexual abuse, and perhaps prison. They are invariably well-educated (maybe better educated than the average American). One of my Cuban friends was a medical student in Cuba; even the life of a doctor in Cuba is apparently so impoverished that it is worth risking life and limb to get out.
It makes me extremely sad to think about how US policies have helped lead to this sad situation there. Constructive engagement with Castro early on could have led to a very different outcome for so many people.
Yes, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 89 it has been really poor policy to continue as before. Too bad our policy on Cuba has been run from Miami and the likes of a certain politician down there now thinking it’s time to run for president.
Yes, the yellow car and the one below it are HDR, as are both the Nanaimo River images. The motorcycle repair I can’t recall, but I suspect it was. The yellow car was terrible light, as the car was half in sunshine, but the HDR thing more or less salvaged it. It’s really important to remember that “less is more” when using HDR.
If you’re interested in that sort of thing, the vintage looking street photo is a black & white layer over a juiced up color layer. The BW layer is then selectively erased to let some color through in the parts of the image where you want it. Having the color extra intense in the bottom layer gives it a bit of that hand tinted look.
Thanks for the details, Ken. Your use of those techniques is exquisite. You do just enough to lift the photos to the level of art, without overpowering us, so that the techniques themselves stay in the background. Wonderful work. I also admire your evident perfectionism–tilt/shift lenses, etc.
May I ask how you get those landscape HDR images to look so natural? They remind me of my old large-format landscape photos on Ektachrome film, with nice rich tonal gradations and a wide color gamut.
I use Photomatix, and just keep a light touch. I also tend to take the resulting image, make a duplicate layer, blend (in PSE) using either “overlay” or “soft light”. I then usually reduce the opacity of the top layer to maybe 10-20%. This has the effect of increasing contrast and intensifying the color a bit. You can also use the high pass filter with an overlay blend. This tends to give a bit of a gloss to reflective surfaces like cars or waves. Jerry posted a brownish wave picture a while back that illustrates this.
I don’t actually use HDR all that much, this set notwithstanding, but I layer and blend most images these days.
Thanks very much for that advice. I also use Photamatix but never tried the layering. It will be fun to experiment with that!
Also, I save raw images, adjust as much as I can in RAW, and do all the rest of the work on uncompressed TIFFs. Doesn’t hurt to shoot on 5D2 or 1Dx with prime lenses when possible either.
Love the British Columbia photos. Living in CO, I sometimes miss green.
The yellow car is reminiscent of a Peugeot 203 but isn’t. I think it’s Russian but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is. Below that in b/w is a ’53 Mercury. The blue/white one is a ’56 Chev, and the silver one behind the purple bus is a ’51/2 Chev. Green in that shot, another ’56 Chev with another of those unidentified Peugeot-esque jobs leading the pack.
Cubans may well discover that they’re sitting on a small fortune of collectible cars. I fear, once relations are fully normalized, there’ll be a near-instantaneous car-for-car swap of these classics with generic modern econoboxes.
Progress, I suppose.
b&
Those two bw street photos are absolutely stunning. Bravo, Ken.
I know that opening up trade with Cuba will bring some of our societies’ problems their way and also infuse Cuba with shlocky tourism, but on balance it should be a positive thing to the Cuban people. I doubt there are many Chinese who would want to go back to the days of isolation and 360 degree repression.
Great quality photos of Cuban life; it will be interesting to see how long it takes to see noticeable changes on the streets. I know many people (like me) are nostalgic for old cars that reveal an aesthetic quality that once prevailed in automobile manufacturing. That being said, today’s cars with all the bells and whistles like gps/navigation, satellite radio, fuel efficiency, air bags and other safety features are something I wouldn’t give up. Though it would be nice to have a token automobile from the 50’s.
Lovely photos and so typical of Cuba.
Cultural, language, historical, musical, and photography tour! Someone arrange quickly!
In the culture dept., there’s a mambo event in the Vedado district of Havana every week. It’s held in an odd, crowded alley kind of venue. Very intense, very African. A must see.
I, for one, am very pleased that this is an “endangered culture” – to put it in Jerry’s words. I hope that turns out to be true with the recent agreement between Cuba and the US, although time will tell. And I hope that Cubans are finally given some voice and say in what their country becomes and what relations they decide to have, political or economic, with the wider world. Maybe they choose to be another Aruba – whatever that means – or maybe they make another choice. But it needs to be on the basis of the free and fair exchange of information and ideas in a way that we, for the most part, seem to take for granted and which we enjoy very much by participating on these discussions on this website. This has been lacking in Cuba for a very long time. I don’t mean to speak for the man in the picture or substitute my interpretation for that of the photographer. He was there and I was not. But I wonder whether he is the “gentlest looking soul” in part because of the disillusion that may accompany the uninterrupted stream of misinformation, abuse, lies, distortion, oppression and manipulation which has been his daily fare most of his life. Or maybe he has actively participated in these activities himself. I don’t know. I wish, however, that our hopes and aspirations for Cuba and its people would rise to something above this naive view of their country as some little piece of heaven on Earth that is about to be despoiled.
Judging from the risks so many Cubans are willing to take to get out of there, and the things they tell me once they are here, Cuba is a terribly depressing place that suffocates the hope out of its citizens. However, I don’t believe for a minute that the US politicians agitating for change in Cuba care about human rights. They care about markets for their big-business “owners”, and they care about having compliant neighbors rather than independent states capable of standing up to regional US hegemony. The lobbyists who most publicly celebrated the renormalization announcement were representing pharmaceutical companies, soft drink companies, and the like.
I think US “democracy” nowadays has become a cleverly disguised plutocracy, and democracy abroad is often a cover for corruption and US imperialism in many third world countries. Democracy is not a magic bullet–it is only as good as the citizens who vote, and lately most of the voters seem easy to hypnotize with mass-media advertising, faux news, etc.
Such transporting, breathtaking photography! What a pleasure it is to study these. Thanks, Ken!
Amazing.
Beautiful photos, all. Jerry, you can easily go to Cuba if you fly in from Canada or Mexico. I’ve been twice from Toronto, with U.S. passport. You just ask immigration not to stamp your passport and they give you a loose piece of paper with the stamp on it. They seem to be happy to have Americans.