A few years ago, I decided that I needed some kind of creative-ish outlet that didn’t involve sitting at a computer typing things, so I started doing “photo hikes” on weekends with my DSLR camera and various lenses. These mostly involve hiking a few miles through one of the many nature preserves in our area (it gets real rural, real fast once you get outside of Schenectady), but I vary it up now and then by tromping around a more built-up area. The idea is just to take photos of random things that look interesting.
The critical flaw in this plan is, of course, that after the hiking part, it involves a lot of sitting at a computer cropping and color-correcting photos that I took, which is not all that distinguishable from sitting and typing. And so, the photos sometimes languish on the hard drive for a long time before I do anything with them. The processing of images does, however, provide a nice diversion from doomscrolling in weeks like this one, where the Internet is just chock full of enraging material.
In this specific case, I have two batches of recent photo-hike pictures from our California trip a couple of weeks ago. I took about 1700 photos total (digital cameras are a wonderful thing…), most of them while hanging around with the family, but there were two days when I went off by myself for a while, just walking around with the camera. The first of these was in Modesto, where we were visiting my sister; she enlisted the kids as helpers with a home renovation project that was going on in a loft/attic space that I simply don’t fit in, so I wandered off to give them space and time to work. I cleverly forgot to turn Strava on, so I can’t tell you how far I walked, but it was a hair under two hours, during which time I took something like 170 pictures.
This probably feels like a low-rent Chris Arnade thing, but this is very much for my own amusement, and not part of a larger project. I mostly try to avoid taking photos of people, though when I’m walking in a built-up area, it’s kind of hard to avoid at times.
I also try to be careful to avoid slipping into poverty tourism, taking photos of the miserable conditions of people I don’t know or interact with. It’s kind of a tough line, though, because a lot of time, run-down homes and businesses are some of the most visually striking things around.
The end result is a lot of shots of various kinds of landscapes, which in Modesto largely means industrial-scale agricultural stuff.
And there are also a lot of shots of random wildlife.
On a technical level, I tend to like photos with a narrow depth of field, so I keep the camera on the aperture priority setting, with the aperture open pretty wide. Beyond aesthetics, this is helpful when taking photos of the kids, who are often in rapid motion and not necessarily in great light. The down side of this is that a lot of my photo-hike pictures end up with the focus being either rather soft, or just a bit off because the auto-focus on the camera latched onto something a bit in front of or behind the thing I really wanted to get. One of my unstated rules of this, though, is that I try to keep moving as much as possible (this doubles as low-impact exercise), so I end up having to discard a fair number of photos that I thought might be great.
I do sometimes take the time to set things up, when there’s a particular shot that I really want to get. I probably looked like a crazy person when I spent a couple of minutes shuffling back and forth looking for an angle to get this hoop aligned with the church behind it, but I like the combination:
(I couldn’t get to a spot where the hoop was against the white wall, alas; this is shot over a fence. I really should’ve closed the aperture down a bit for this one, too…)
Some of this could probably be addressed in GIMP (which is what I use for photo processing) with judicious use of the Unsharp Mask filter, and I do sometimes break that out. I try to keep the processing fairly minimal, though— just rotating (these hikes have made it clear that I am incapable of holding the camera straight and steady), cropping, and color-correcting. As it is, I can spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the exact degree of rotation— which thing should be most perfectly vertical?— and finding the exact right points to crop it. (I crop all of them to 4:6 or 6:4, because that’s the original aspect ratio of the camera, and if I add the extra degree of freedom, it’ll take even longer to work through these than it does now…).
My big processing headache is that the auto-color-level tool on GIMP, when given a photo of blue sky, always wants to “correct” it to a sort of greenish tinge that just looks ugly, so on nice days, I have to do more manual futzing around than I would like. There’s probably a setting somewhere that would fix this problem, but it’s just short of being annoying enough to devote serious effort to figuring out what that is.
Anyway, these mostly don’t result in technically brilliant pictures (though I did have a collage of a bunch of my best wildlife shots printed up to hang with our other art in the living room), but it’s a pleasant diversion. Particularly on a week like this one, where everything and everyone seems to be trying to piss me off in ways that make writing stuff mostly unappealing.
Here’s a Google Photos album with the whole set of the Modesto pictures that seemed worth keeping and processing. And here are a few more of my favorites from this batch:
Anyway, that’s been a useful mood booster for me. Here’s hoping next week online is a little more pleasant. And if it’s not, well, I’ve got a few hundred photos of downtown San Francisco in the can…
This is throwing length warnings, so I’ll just add the subscribe button:
And if you have anything to add or suggest, comments will be open:
It's interesting to think about why photos of run-down buildings and objects, or even of "urban ruins", are so visually interesting--I find them the same. I think it's partly because they're so idiosyncratic. Everything that decays does so somewhat differently. It's also that they offer interesting contrasts of color, shape, etc. that are organic and unplanned. Highly maintained physical environments, buildings, cars, etc., all tend to converge on some of the same aesthetics. It's also probably unfamiliarity and that's where the "poverty tourism" trap can kick in--that the thing you don't see often catches your eye, but for someone else, it's a thing they see every day and not with pleasure.
Growing up in Sacramento, I mostly know Modesto because TV stations would sometimes say they're in Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto. But I don't think I've ever been there. Nice to have some images of it!
If you're going to do color correction on photos, I *highly* recommend the books by Dan Margulis. They're about Photoshop; not sure how much can translate to GIMP, as some of the techniques make extensive use of Lab color. They're the rare inspirational computer book, in that they make you want to sit down at your computer and work with images. (Sort of the way Mastering Regular Expressions makes you want to find some text to search through.)
I used to do photo walks like that (although mostly in nature) back in grad school when I first got into photography. Now I pretty much only take photos of my kids, but I can see myself doing that again when I'm less involved in their lives and activities. But I have learned to be prompt about sorting and processing, mostly to pick which photos to share with the thousands-of-miles-away grandparents.