Some Old Landscape Photos

I was on a search, deep into my archived hard drive, for a specific old photo yesterday morning (I don't even remember what I was searching for because my mind was distracted by other photos while searching!) and I came across a folder of photos that I never did anything with at the time because I was so incredibly frustrated with the whole shoot on that day.  Every photo was soft, unsharp, flat, dull with a significant blue hue throughout the entire image.

I don't like to waste energy.  My health is relatively poor and I have to constantly manage what little energy and reasonably good health I have every single day, all day.  When I do an activity, I need to get something positive out of it otherwise I feel I wasted much needed energy and run down my health for no purpose.  If I had an active day, it takes a lot out of me and I need a day or two to recover, sometimes I need a week or more to recover.  Needless to say, I don't like to waste my active time.  

After the day of this photo shoot, I felt as though it was a wasted day.  Worse yet, I came home soaked and feeling like crap due to getting caught in a heavy downpour before I could get to the car.  

Actually, just getting caught in a downpour is enough to ruin my day.  I do not enjoy being out in the rain.  My eyeglasses get wet which means I can't see...  I get cold...  my clothes are uncomfortable because they are sticking to my body...  then, while I'm still drying out, any air conditioning feels like being trapped in a freezer.  When I was a kid, none of this bothered me, however, early in my career in the Air Force, my feelings toward inclement weather changed drastically to how I feel about it today.  I learned that rain means mud getting into everything.  Now, I hate getting caught in the rain and don't even think about asking me to go "camping".  So, getting caught in a downpour on this day definitely did not improve my day after all the difficulties I had with my photography.  Much of these bad feelings and frustration was turned toward my camera gear at the time because the problems I encountered while shooting delayed my return to the car which caused me to get caught in the downpour.  

I've revisited these photos a handful of times over the years since that dreadful day but I was never able to salvage anything I captured that day.  Now, eleven years later, I was seemingly trapped inside this folder of photos again dredging up bad memories of frustration and wasted time and energy.  But...  I was also wondering if I could possibly salvage any of these photos from that dreadful day of poor weather and terrible camera gear.

Considering how these photos look in this archived folder on my storage hard drive, I was pretty disgusted with the quality of the photos coming out of this camera and I do have to say that I was absolutely right to be disgusted and frustrated.  These photos, right out of the camera, were horrendous.  I had never before had a camera that produced such miserable results.  I was feeling as though I had taken a huge step backward in my decades long photographic journey by purchasing this particular camera and lenses.   

Part of the problem was that, quite consistently, this camera seemed to always captured less-than-sharp photos.  I don't know if it was a sensor issue or an image stabilization issue (the likely culprit) or simply the smaller sensor format but I know the camera consistently captured less-than-sharp photos and I found this incredibly frustrating.  

I have recently learned that another culprit causing the lack of sharpness was the supposed "outstanding" lens I was using.  This lens was touted as being an outstanding lens (by other photographers) but I rarely seemed to get outstanding results from it.  My older cameras with smaller sensors captured far better results and far sharper results.  

To compound this problem is that this camera system had very few lenses available.  I only purchased this camera and lenses because the camera with a few kit lenses cost next to nothing.  I needed to progress in photography and this inexpensive option was the logical choice...  in that moment.   I can admit that I was wrong and...  I was definitely wrong.   I wasted a few years trying to make a piss-poor camera system work for me and I never made any headway.

This was one of my Olympus cameras with Olympus lenses and I would soon decide to completely abandon Olympus.  I was right to abandon Olympus as a whole and I'm still left with very, very bad feelings toward Olympus.  Eleven years have passed and I still get a knot in my stomach every time I merely think of Olympus.

Not only did I abandon Olympus, but Olympus also felt the need to abandon this camera system format and, shortly thereafter, their entire Imaging Division.  

I was hoping this system would grow and more lenses would eventually become available but, instead, the whole line was killed before any decent selection of lenses were produced.  Naturally, since the whole camera line was killed, production of lenses also came to an abrupt halt and third party manufacturers stopped supporting this system altogether.  This really pissed me off and rendered the future of my camera system obsolete.  This was supposed to be a stepping stone to growth but it seemed to be more like a sudden dead end.  It meant I had to start over in a new camera system (camera body, lenses, batteries, charger, flashes, etc) which was something which would be very difficult to afford.  This situation was also leaving me feeling as though I had wasted a great deal of time and energy on a losing proposition.  I was kicking myself too.  After decades of photography experience, I should have known better than to put all my eggs into this crappy basket. 

I'll admit that the newer camera system that Olympus created after abandoning this camera system was better but I couldn't afford to give Olympus any more of my money because I no longer trusted them.  Before long (after I moved to a far better system), Olympus sold off their imaging division so I made the right decision in not trusting them and in abandoning Olympus altogether.  Imagine how I'd feel today if I had reinvested in the new Olympus camera system format...  camera bodies, a collection of various lenses for various types of photography, batteries, chargers, flashes, etc, and then they sold off their imaging division...  I'd definitely be angry with myself for getting burned by Olympus a second time.  

For this reason, I am indeed thankful that I abandoned Olympus in the beginning and moved on into far greener pastures.  This doesn't mean I don't get a knot in my stomach every time I see one of these crappy photos from my old Olympus camera.  I do.  In particular, this particular folder with the photos from Oakledge Park in Burlington that I again stumbled upon in a search of my archived hard drive put a major knot in my stomach.

Olympus' imaging division was purchased by a financial holding company and the name "Olympus" was changed to "OM Systems" which sounds more like a financial, point of sale, payroll service or administration company than a camera manufacturer.  This new holding company who purchased the Olympus Imaging Division, OM Systems, makes me sick to my stomach and there is no way I could go out in public with a camera that had "OM SYSTEMS" embossed across every piece of photographic gear.  What an incredibly stupid name of a camera line!  Holding companies such as this one typically cannibalize whatever corporation they purchased and then just leave the bones and scraps to rot.  So, my point is that the final chapter of Olympus cameras...  well, OM System cameras now...  has not even been published yet but I am confident that things are likely to get worse. 

To put it mildly, in the 2014/2015 timeframe, I was definitely done with Olympus and everything related to this format of cameras after only a few short frustrating years of use.  It was time to find something better and to chalk up my experiences with this format as a hard learning experience that still remains painful to this day.  

That should be enough of the background story pertaining to this particular folder of photos on my archived hard drive.  I know that these photos below look really nice at first glance but, believe me, the quality of all the photos I have in the folders from this time period really is horrendous and it required a lot of time, effort and specialized software to get them to look as they do below.  If I printed them larger than 5x7, they would look terrible and even at that size my trained eyes would see all the flaws.  

These original photo files are dull, lifeless, lacking any amount of sharpness, lacking tonal depth, noisy, and the overall hue of each of them was completely blue.  Getting the right color balance near water was impossible with this camera.  Everything...  everything...  from top to bottom, left edge of frame to right edge of frame...  in any of these photos or any photos captured near water was a hue of blue totally enveloping the entire image.   

If I just quickly glanced at these photos and didn't look too closely, however, some of the photos had some redeeming qualities and possible potential regardless of the lack of sharpness and other issues.  And when I say potential, I mean that I would need to spend a lot of tedious time processing these photos with specialized software (that was not available in 2014) to make the color nice enough to distract from the poor sharpness.  But, some of these photos were captured in a nice composition so, at first glance, I kept saying, "Hmmm...  that could be nice."  So, that was yesterday's project...  improve the color selectively, eliminate the excessive noise, while also trying to eek out some much-needed clarity.

This first photo was from a folder from our first days at our lake house rather than the aforementioned dreadful day at Oakledge Park (but the rest of the photos below are from Oakledge Park).  This photo, like all others captured near water, was enveloped entirely in a blue hue so I always wanted to work on this photo too.  

I spent some time isolating different parts of the image to correct the blue hue that was prevalent throughout the entire image.  With some fussing, I found that there were actually other colors under the blue hue!  I found greens, yellows, and even pure whites!  Pure whites!  That was something I rarely saw with this Olympus camera!  Small fine details and sharpness overall is still lacking in a big way but, at first glance and from a distance, this is looking pretty good...

Now we move to the aforementioned Oakledge Park photos.  

In this photo, below (Oakledge Park on Lake Champlain looking toward the Adirondack Mountains of New York), after doing my best to eliminate the overwhelming blue hue throughout the image, I noticed some seemingly stray pink/magenta in the lower part of the clouds on the other side of the lake that I couldn't remove.  It was just enough to be bothersome while the whole rest of the image was still mildly tinted in a blue hue.  Even after correcting the blue hue, I still couldn't get rid of that pink/magenta color cast in those clouds so...  I embraced that odd pink color and left it there.  

There was rain falling from those clouds so, in hindsight, I suppose it is possible that the sun reflecting off those raindrops was creating this pinkish hue.  Those clouds kept getting closer and closer until it was pouring rain on this side of the giant lake too.  

There was always something about this composition that appealed to me but the overall quality of the image file was always very frustrating to me.  I had to do a lot of selective sharpening and even more color corrections to get this even close to acceptable.  

What I do like about this photo is the composition...  that one rather stark rocky peninsula jutting out, all alone, into the frame...  I like the young tree at the end of the peninsula with yellow-green leaves...  I really like the reflections in the water in the foreground...  and I like the softness of all those storm clouds off in the distance.  The haze adds to the depth of this image so that is working for the image as well.  Fixing the color made this a presentable photo but it required hours of work to get it to this level of mediocrity.  

As the storm clouds slowly approached us, I was able to see less and less of the Adirondack Mountains in New York.  I like the soft pastel glow of this image (admittedly, which I added for visual interest...  previously, everything in the image was a dull blue), which shows how hazy it was especially where the rain is falling on the right side of the image...  the rugged high peaks of the Adirondack Mountains are completely obscured...  the dark band which looks like a horizon is actually rough water in the middle of the lake.  

This Lake Champlain shoreline in Oakledge Park has some very old ruins hidden among the trees and brush and I found some of these ruins.  In this one, below, you can see the remnants of a chimney where a cottage once stood overlooking the lake...

The worst part of this storm...  which is to the right of the trees and just outside the frame of this image below, was about halfway across the lake now.  I knew I needed to pack up my camera gear and get closer to the car.  I did end up getting wet on this day but my gear stayed dry in a backpack. 

Here are the two last photos from this same day at Oakledge Park before I packed everything up and headed to the car.  I changed lenses from my widest lens that I was using for landscapes to my longest lens to see if I could capture this fisherman out on the lake (seen below).  

As I was capturing the fisherman, two F-16's passed by while returning to base at Burlington so I focused on them up in the sky skirting around the storm clouds as the storm approached Burlington (the last photo below).  

Although these photos were good enough to share here and the colors make them look pretty good at a quick glance and these small sizes, I'm still unhappy with them and would not waste the money in printing them.  Uggck...