Sean Duggan Blog

Machu Picchu by Night

Temple of the Sun, Machu Picchu, Peru
[Canon 10D; 6.4 minutes at f/7.1; ISO 400]

This is from last year's trip to Peru, and my very intersting night visit to the ruins at Machu Picchu. My guide and I were the only ones there...quite an experience! The Temple of the Sun is regarded as one of the most important places at Machu Picchu; when the site was occupied it served both as a place for religious ceremonies and an astrological observatory. At a certain time of year the sun rises above the mountains at dawn and its beams enter a small window (I believe the one high on the wall in this photo) to fall precisely on a key spot on the sacred stone within the temple walls. The reddish glow in this image is from a large dam that is a few miles downriver. The stone walls were "painted" with a small flashlight.

I am returning to Peru at zero-dark-thrity on the 30th (only 6 hours away now) and will be gone until July 15th. There may be an update or two posted from the Andes while I am away, but I make no promises.

Lensbaby Dimension Warp

Evening Walk, Mills College, Oakland, CA
[Canon 10D w/ Lensbaby 2.0]

OK...one more lensbaby shot (just because they're new, easy to get to, and don't interfere too much with my preparations for the Peru trip).

I like this image specifically for the wild, exaggerated warping going on with the focus (or lack thereof). The spherical blur on the right side that flares out into a streaking effect on the left is very cool. It reminds me of a special effect that shows a person entering another dimension.

Usually I like my Lensbaby images to have something in focus, but on this evening I was channeling my blurry muse and I took a lot of shots where most of the image was blurry.

Aside from some minor cropping, and processing through Adobe Camera Raw, this image has not been altered in Photoshop. The blur effect is all Lensbaby.

Eucalyptus Avenue

Eucalyptus Avenue, Mills College, Oakland, CA
[Canon 10D w/ Lensbaby 2.0]

Another Lensbaby shot, but this one is different from the previous post in that it is a combination of two separate exposures that have been layered together in Photoshop and blended together using layer masks. One of the images was completely blurred (you can see it on the front, left  and right sides), while the other was only partially blurred (the more "in focus" areas in the center of the image). I almost posted the totally blurred image because it had such a lovely, creamy blending of the tonal values, but then I started playing around and ended up posting this combination. Rather than use Photoshop's ever growing array of blurring filters (three new ones were added with CS2), I sometimes will photograph three or four images and purposely vary the focus in each one and then combine them in Photoshop. This gives me the benefit of real world optical blurring and layer masks to decide where I want the blur. Yes, I could probably achieve exactly the same thing using the Lens Blur filter and precise masking, but sometimes I just like to do things in the camera.

It's hard to decide what category to place this image under. I think I may need to add a "Beauty of the Blur" category for these type of shots...

[several hours later....Beauty of the Blur category has been added]

Window Shade

Window Shade [Canon 10D and Lensbaby 2.0]

This was taken in my room at Mills College last week when I was teaching a couple of Photoshop classes for the Golden Gate School of Professional Photography. One of my students had loaned me a Lensbaby 2.0 to take for a test spin. I already own a Lensbaby 1.0 and was interested to see the differences in the new one. There are now two lens elements, coated glass, a wider maximum aperture (meaning a brighter, "faster" lens), easier changing of the aperture rings, and the "sweet spot" of focus is sharper than in the original version. Though, since the  whole point of this bendable lens is soft, warped and moveable focus, the addition of sharper focus in the sweet spot seems a bit of a contradiction. I did not do any comparitive testing between my original Lensbaby and the 2.0 version, but I could tell that the new one was sharper. It still gives the same lovely focus tweaks and chromatic shifts as the colors blur and stretch. A very useful accessory if you appreciate the beauty of the blur and think that modern digital SLRs can sometimes be a bit too sharp.

Andes Peak

Mt Chicon, Peru [Canon 10D]
(click in the image to see a larger version)

Another in the ongoing series of Peru revisitations: This was taken on the drive from Ollantaytambo to Cuzco. It is truly an incredible landscape. We asked the driver to stop to we could get out and do the vista justice (shooting out the window of a moving car just doesn't cut it). The mountain is Chicon (5530 meters) and is located near the city of Urubamba.

I may make only a couple of posts for the coming week as I am teaching two back-to-back Photoshop for Photographers workshops at the Golden Gate School of Professional Photography in Oakland, California. Depending on the state of internet access and how busy things are, it's entirely possible that I may not make any new posts until next weekend. After that workshop, I have a week to recover and get ready for the Peru trip.

For More Information on the Upcoming Peru Workshop:

Bridges to Understanding

Bridges International Workshops for 2005

Phil Borges, internationally renowned photographer and founder of Bridges to Understanding

Retro Robot Parts

Retro Robot Parts [Canon 10D]

These are not really robot parts, of course, but that's what they looked like to me when I saw them piled in the old machine shop. The impression was even stronger once I had isolated them in the camera viewfinder, especially the top, rusty one that looks like a face.

This was taken during a visit to an old gold mine during a custom digital photography/Photoshop workshop and even though I had been to this location many times previously, I had never seen the "face" before. This must have triggered a switch in my brain, because I found another "face" a short time later in the rusted skeletal remains of an old industrial-strength drill press out in the mine yard.

Tree Candles

Tree Candles [Canon 10D]

Bug Funeral

Bug Funeral [Canon 10D]
(click in the image to see a larger version)

From the far away scenes in the previous two posts, we return now to environs close to home, namely in the forest behind our house. I post this image because sometimes the simple scenes close to home, the every day wonders, are often overlooked as we cast our sights far afield in search of photographic inspiration. This photo, while not any great composition, or stirring subject matter, is important to me because it is an impression of the innocence of childhood which also hints at the larger theme of mortality.

My four year-old daughter has recently developed a fascination with collecting bugs. Though we try to make them as comfortable as possible, sometimes those bugs do not last long in captivity (the butterfly above is an exception...we found it expiring all on its own). In addition to bugs, she also is very keen on the idea of funerals and burial rituals. These three insects are seen just prior to their internment beneath the lofty pines and redwoods (a 3-for-1 special!). Earlier in the morning, my daughter had been excitedly running around the house chanting "Funeral day! Funeral day!". Given that in the last three months we have had a very close friend die of leukemia, as well as buried our 18-year old cat, her enthusiasm for the anticipated burial was an interesting counterpoint to the real sadness of those previous events.  Young children live so much in the moment, and this is one of the things they teach the adults in their lives. While looking ahead to the future is certainly important, I think that, on a personal level, taking time to appreciate the moment at hand can be very enriching to the flow of every day life.

Bull & Aqueduct

Bull and Aqudeuct; Ollantaytambo, Peru [Canon 10D]
f/13, 1.6 seconds, ISO 100

Here is another shot from Peru last year. This was taken in the town of Ollantaytambo, which is where we are based for the nearly two week Bridges to Understanding workshop.

I had gotten up extra early on this day to photograph around the town before it got too busy. In this location I was using a tripod and long exposures to photograph one of the Inca aqueducts that run through the town and that are still used by the locals. I had already taken several good shots that resulted in some nice motion blur in the water when a few bulls lumbered onto the walled cobblestone street and began heading in my direction. Leaving the camera on the tripod,  I had time to take two shots of about 1.5 seconds each before I had to stop the last exposure, grab the tripod and jump out of the way.

My schedule has gotten a bit crazy the past couple of weeks, hence the slower pace of updates (4 days since my last post...scandalous!). I am currently working on the next version of Photoshop CS2 Artistry as well as preparing for several workshops this summer and the upcoming trip back to Peru, so the time of regular daily posts to this blog are over for the next couple of months. But there should still be posts a few times a week.

For More Information on the Upcoming Peru Workshop in July:

Bridges to Understanding

Bridges International Workshops for 2005

Phil Borges, internationally renowned photographer and founder of Bridges to Understanding

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu [Canon 10D]
(click in the image to see a larger version)

This image is a composite made from multiple tripod-mounted RAW exposures. The multiple exposure technique was used for two reasons. First, the late afternoon sun was so bright that there was no way to retain the subtle shadow details on the side of the mountain and keep the clouds from blowing out to a total white. To fix this, separate exposures were made for capturing good detail in the shadows and holding detail in the very bright highlights. The other reason for the multiple exposure was that my lens did not have a wide enough field of view to capture as much of the scene as I wanted. I took horizontaol shots and them stacked them on on top of each other and blended them in Photoshop. The final image is made up of three exposures; two for the overall view of the scene and a third to control the bright highlights in the clouds.

Machu Picchu is a very impresseive site. Even after seeing a lot of photographs and reading about it, I was unprepared for the vastness of it. I spent an afternoon and a second entire day there, including a visit in the dark of night, where my guide and I were the only ones present under a stunning canopy of stars (night photos taken at that time will be posted at some point in the coming weeks). It is also a very tiring site to explore, with a lot off climbing up and down on the uneven stone steps in the hot sun. And hiking down the mountain  after our night visit on the worn Inca steps that wind through the jungle (the bus service doesn't run at that hour), with only the light of a small flashlight remains one of the more memorable (and exhausting) photo adventures I've had.

I will be returning for a second visit when I am in Peru for the Bridges to Understanding workshop in early July (more info on that below). As a photographer, I find it is always interesting to re-visit a favorite location. Your eye knows what to expect and can focus better (pun intended) on the images you want to make. Of course, sometimes, even if you think you know what type of images you will make there, circumstances surprise you and you end up making images that you had not foreseen.

For More Information on the Upcoming Peru Workshop:

Bridges to Understanding

Bridges International Workshops for 2005

Phil Borges, internationally renowned photographer and founder of Bridges to Understanding