Singh-Ray grad ND filter question

Signs & fragments

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Signs & fragments

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Summer corn, summer storm

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Summer corn, summer storm

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Horizon, summer rain

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$12.66

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$12.66

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A street portrait

A
A street portrait

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DREW WILEY

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Believe me, Alan, nobody around here took him seriously as a photographer except in some travel magazine and ski poster sense. He knew that himself. He was sought out for expedition planning advice. And frankly, Outdoor Photographer is basically a stereotypical postcard venue. I recommend studying real mountain light with one's own eyes, and appreciating it for what it really is, not faking it just for commercial effect, like Galen often did, though nowhere near as blatantly as today's Fauxtoshop genre. His success was short lived, and would have been curtailed even if he hadn't prematurely died in a plane crash (neither he nor his second wife were young at the time - I don't know where you got that misimpression). His former gallery in the old bank building in Bishop is now a massage parlor on one floor, and a used outdoor equipment exchange on the other. There was very little momentum to it once outdoor sports stills stock photography passed its heydey, and endless digital equivalents became darn near free. Now you'd make more money panhandling on the street corner.

Galen was a local auto mechanic turned endurance climber and expedition guru, who got a lucky break with Natl Geo, and gradually turned it into a living. I had only a little bit of personal conversation with him, but in person he didn't even pretend to be a serious photographer - all of that was just a superficial marketing persona. He actually seemed embarrassed around skilled photographers. And he didn't just bracket specific shots - he shot wildly, and then tried to sort things out afterwards. It was a game of odds. But that's what Natl Geo itself at the time coached - burn a lot of film, and let them root through it afterwards. He led a full and relatively long life - quite a bit longer than most expedition climbers, but had quite a few speed bumps along the way.

I know quite well how it feels to have a 35mm camera dangling around your neck while clinging with your fingertips onto a loose rock cliff. But I also know how it feels to be hacking your way with an ice axe up a long stretch of steep ice with an 85 lb pack on, including serious 4x5 camera gear, sometimes even 8x10. And long before any of us were born, people like Vittorio Sella hauled far bigger cameras to far more remote places, up to as high as 23,000 feet, and made timeless classic images that way. So it's all relative. But big cameras in remote locations do teach you not to waste film (or precious glass plates back in the day). Bracketing is not an option.
 
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Believe me, Alan, nobody around here took him seriously as a photographer except in some travel magazine and ski poster sense. He knew that himself. He was sought out for expedition planning advice. And frankly, Outdoor Photographer is basically a stereotypical postcard venue. I recommend studying real mountain light with one's own eyes, and appreciating it for what it really is, not faking it just for commercial effect, like Galen often did, though nowhere near as blatantly as today's Fauxtoshop genre. His success was short lived, and would have been curtailed even if he hadn't prematurely died in a plane crash (neither he nor his second wife were young at the time - I don't know where you got that misimpression). His former gallery in the old bank building in Bishop is now a massage parlor on one floor, and a used outdoor equipment exchange on the other. There was very little momentum to it once outdoor sports stills stock photography passed its heydey, and endless digital equivalents became darn near free. Now you'd make more money panhandling on the street corner.

Galen was a local auto mechanic turned endurance climber and expedition guru, who got a lucky break with Natl Geo, and gradually turned it into a living. I had only a little bit of personal conversation with him, but in person he didn't even pretend to be a serious photographer - all of that was just a superficial marketing persona. He actually seemed embarrassed around skilled photographers. And he didn't just bracket specific shots - he shot wildly, and then tried to sort things out afterwards. It was a game of odds. But that's what Natl Geo itself at the time coached - burn a lot of film, and let them root through it afterwards. He led a full and relatively long life - quite a bit longer than most expedition climbers, but had quite a few speed bumps along the way.

I know quite well how it feels to have a 35mm camera dangling around your neck while clinging with your fingertips onto a loose rock cliff. But I also know how it feels to be hacking your way with an ice axe up a long stretch of steep ice with an 85 lb pack on, including serious 4x5 camera gear, sometimes even 8x10. And long before any of us were born, people like Vittorio Sella hauled far bigger cameras to far more remote places, up to as high as 23,000 feet, and made timeless classic images that way. So it's all relative. But big cameras in remote locations do teach you not to waste film (or precious glass plates back in the day). Bracketing is not an option.

Rowell was an experienced pro mountain climber who subsequently combined photography with it to be become accomplished and famous in both fields writing 18 books on mountaineering and outdoor photography many that were extremely popular and well received. Photographers don't accidentally get published by Nat Geo if their work isn't special. His intro to them occur when Rowell suggested an ascent of Yosemite National Park's Half Dome that he documented by himself. National Geographic decided to make it a cover story when they received his pictures. He also published photos at Outdoor Photography another famous mag and had a monthly column there as well. I consider dying at 62 (his wife at 54) comparatively young. I'll let other read about him if they wish and make their own determination of his ability and skills.
 

DREW WILEY

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Heck, my Grand-nephew did the face of Half Dome on his 11th birthday; and it was climbed many many times before Rowell's story. NG has a habit of tooting its own horn way too much; and the only thing Rowell did is rely on pre-manufactured chocks to do it instead of pitons. But people had other kinds of "chocks" all along - whether blocks of wood crammed into cracks or the famous sawed-off iron stove legs that Warren Harding used on the first ascent of El Capitan. There were a number of far better outdoor photographers right in this same neighborhood, as well as many famous climbers, some of whom I also hung out with personally. Don't mistake self-promotion for the real deal. A traveling photographer does need to promote himself to make a living, it's just part of the game, especially if one wants to get funded expeditions. I saw all of that first hand in my own household. I also know the difference between catering to average tourist taste versus perceiving things in depth, and actually putting them into picture frames in an eloquent manner. And Galen was categorically not in that club, not by a long shot. Natl Geographicky says it all - interesting story telling and suitable illustrations about exotic locations.
I give credit where credit is due. But getting your first glossy magazine article based on an alleged eco-theme (chocks don't scar rocks as much as pitons) didn't go over too well with those of us who also knew the less eco side of the man.
 
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Bill Burk

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My son is in an issue of Sunset riding the ferry across Florence Lake.

Those pros take their work seriously. What started out as just a normal ferry ride turned into an adventure of crossing back and forth trying to get Florence rock in just the right light.

They even stopped at a little island and let us off to pet the wolves.

Come to think of it, that’s the same trip when I used the ND grads.
 
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...
I give credit where credit is due. But getting your first glossy magazine article based on an alleged eco-theme (chocks don't scar rocks as much as pitons) didn't go over too well with those of us who also knew the less eco side of the man.

I guess no one's perfect.

Rowell was the winner of the Sierra Club's Francis P. Farquhar Mountaineering Award for 1977.[5]

In 1984, the Sierra Club honored Rowell with the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography. https://www.sierraclub.org/library/collections/fine-art/ansel-adams-award

Rowell was posthumously inducted in the fellowship of the International League of Conservation Photographers as an Honorary Fellow in 2009.
[10]
 

DREW WILEY

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Interesting you mention that, Bill. The couple who built the ferry and the Diamond D dude ranch across the Lake (now the Muir Trail Ranch) had their winter range just over the hill from us (if you didn't mind a steep 3000 foot climb then a 300 foot cliff at the top, then down the backside) - or, after I learned to drive - 15 minutes away in the pickup. I went to school with their daughters, who would spend entire summers on horseback up in the high country, living on trout. They ended up inheriting the business; but yet another generation might run it now. The last time I was on that ferry it almost sank in a rough storm. The summer I was 16 I worked for a pack station up there. Pretty much my own backyard anyway. I can't even remember how many dozens - probably hundreds - of backpacking trips I've done out of Florence and Edison Lakes, or the Bear Creek drainage in between. And yes, the light can be compelling.

Or if you want to go even earlier, read the biography of the "last of the mountain men", Orland Bartholomew, who was a stream gauger when the Florence Dam was built, and the first person to do the Muir Trail in winter - fully 50 years before anyone else did it - namely, using homemade wooden skis and carrying only a real buffalo robe for both sleeping and shelter. My older sister grew up with his kids, and a friend of my father wrote the biography.

I wanted a pet wolf real bad, but they're technically illegal and can be darn loud. Another neighbor, less than a mile away, had one penned in their back yard. We ordinarily had dozens of coyotes around, but they left the area for three full years out of instinctive terror to wolf howls, until they finally figured out it wasn't free. I had three customers here who brought their pet wolves to my office - a classic gray one, a stunning black one with intense yellow eyes, and a white on with blue eyes. Very intelligent yet sensitive animals, who seem to psychoanalyze people more than acting dog-like.
 
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DREW WILEY

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Give it up Alan. None of that impresses me a bit. I just referred to how I grew up. And we locals weren't a bit amused being preached at by certain clubs who brought in convoys of up to two hundred horses at a time, and left litter in the wake, and did horse racing in fragile mountain meadows. Fortunately, the time eventually came when they were forced to follow their own sponsored regulations; but it should have been 30 years earlier. I also didn't care much for how their official climbing records omitted the achievements of others before them. Some of those summits were even reached on horseback by local cowboys decades before, or had individuals way up atop summits sharpening spear points over 12,000 years ago. Believe me, seagulls didn't take obsidian flakes way up there. 19th Chinese sheepherders took certain routes so difficult and remote that they've never been repeated since. I climbed certain remote ridges before Rowell did and bragged about it in publication form. That's just how we grew up; I don't pretend to be a climber myself, just a foolhardy country kid out looking for a high viewpoint.

I won't go into any specifics in the case of personal eco hypocrisy; let the dead rest in peace. But there are others on this forum and the LF Forum too who know exactly what I'm talking about. Someone gets a little publicity, and they think rules are for everyone but them. Several of those known cases were flagrant. I'll leave it at that.
 
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Bill Burk

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I loved Galen Rowell and hung on his every word.

Switched from Kodachrome to Velvia, rated it 1/3 stop higher to get the richer colors. I was shooting a new OM-4 so benefited from its unique spotmeter.

Here’s the shot in question. One with and one without the grad.

IMG_6424.jpeg
IMG_8924.jpeg


You can see the “slide show” if you feel like it, disregard that I called it “Huntington”, it’s Florence.

I used a Rollei 35 for the shots with the eagle flying.

And the evidence from the last shot shows us loading up the rental boat… this wasn’t the trip with Sunset Magazine photographer after all… on that trip my boy and I had to leave early so we caught the ferry.

 

DREW WILEY

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Oh my. The Velvia era. Publishers hated it. Too much contrast. A grad wouldn't help much in that kind of scenario. They sorta work if there's a consistent skyline or other linear angle can be adapted to, which I presume was the idea in the right hand shot. I reserved Velvia for low contrast situations. I only shot Kodachrome in my youth, or 35mm at all.
Then, after a brief phase of P67 work and Ekta 64, I switched exclusively to 4X5 for the next 25 years. Since I specialized in Ciba printing, itself a contrasty process, I had to be real careful with film choice. Good ole Ekta 64 was cooperative and handled some hue categories wonderfully, others so-so. Then then Fujichrome revlolution began, and I shot a lot of Fuji 50D in the mountains, the precedessor of both Provia and Velvia. Then just about every sheet film Fuji and Kodak made, clear thru my 8x10 days next. Never used anything resembling a grad even once. Didn't need to.

Of course, to master Cibachrome, one had to also master masking, to get everything they could from an exposure. Drum scanners didn't better that, just made it a lot easier for commercial workflow in print shops. Galen submitted a particular slide to Evercolor - an expensive offset carbon process - and I happened to be visiting that facility, and asked what was wrong with the shadow reproduction. "Nothing down there to recover at all". Bingo. Velvia in a full sun Patagonia scene. Might have looked good on a light box, but enlarged, sure didn't. That's why it helps to be an actual printmaker. You understand the limitations of your media better. Bracketing and grads will only get you so far.
 
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Mike Lopez

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A former supervisor of mine was high school classmates with Galen Rowell, and stayed in touch with him well into adulthood. Everything that Drew has said here comports with what I've heard about Rowell from someone who knew him well.
 

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Don't mistake self-promotion for the real deal.

Food for thought…
 

DREW WILEY

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I'm not trying to bash anyone. Here was a hard working guy who wanted a traveling outdoor lifestyle (at the expense of a domestic one, the first round), and needed a way to fund that. It's a story I've heard numerous times before from mountaineers. He found his niche. But things need to be kept in realistic proportion when weighing the pros and cons of that lifestyle. And in his case, he built up a photographer persona which really didn't match his quite ordinary level of visualization. Reminds me of David Muench, the king of calendar photographers, Arizona Hwys Magazine, etc, who traveled many wonderful places in the West shooting mainly 4x5 chrome film, and made a very good living with his photography, but never till the end of time will have that work accepted in art circles. Nor will Galen. That extra "something" just isn't there in either case. But it did pay their bills. Others of us have chosen not to pander to public demand, but to shoot and print exactly what we want instead, so have mainly supported ourselves with "day jobs" instead.

I'm just 15 min away from John Muir's mansion, now run by the Natl Park Service, and the staff there are very well informed about his real history. When he arrived in Yosemite Valley, he was actually running a logging mill right below Yos Falls, as the trees were being cut down to build a big sprawling hotel, and the valley getting ruined with cattle herds for sake of serving the beef, a far worse mess than now. He wasn't instantly a great enviro crusader. But he did love his days off wandering in the high country and continuing to write. And quite a few things he wrote were tall tales for sake of Eastern audiences, which allowed him to sell a lot more books. He wasn't the only one who was full of it when penning stories. So was Clarence King, another great western writer, Buffalo Bill, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). People read books for entertainment back then, and stretching the truth could be lucrative for clever writers.

Ansel Adams had his personal contradictions as well. So did David Brower. Pick whatever heroes you like, but don't mythologize them. On a different thread, a moment ago I made a remark about Minor White's kookiness, making the Zone System almost a religion. Even his most devoted students noted that. It doesn't mean his prints weren't great; many of them were. People can be complex.
 
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takilmaboxer

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I met Galen at a social event. We talked photography. He told me he did not consider himself an art photographer at all. Just a commercial photographer who got lucky.
Period.
 

BrianShaw

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I met Galen at a social event. We talked photography. He told me he did not consider himself an art photographer at all. Just a commercial photographer who got lucky.
Period.

... and there's nothing wrong with that!
 
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I met Galen at a social event. We talked photography. He told me he did not consider himself an art photographer at all. Just a commercial photographer who got lucky.
Period.

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.
 

DREW WILEY

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That pretty much sums it up. But technically, he wouldn't have made it even as a typical commercial photographer per se. But he did find a fortuitous niche. And no, Alan, there's nothing wrong with that. But the whole point in my bringing it up to begin with is that if one thinks their results are going to be improved using ND grad filters, they better be a lot more skilled at it than Galen himself was. I wasn't kidding when I said his own examples looked fake. For example, a brighter more colorful reflection in a stream pool than in the corresponding portion of sky itself is a dead giveaway. I've had friends who were barely photographers comment, "something looks fishy here", viewing such images of his. A good magician doesn't show his hand. And ideally, the fact a ND grad has been used shouldn't be obvious at all. If someone likes them and is successful at them, fine; but they are in fact difficult to use seamlessly unless one is dealing with a simple horizon line.
 
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MattKing

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That pretty much sums it up. But technically, he wouldn't have made it even as a typical commercial photographer per se. But he did find a fortuitous niche.

The "niche" was in many ways a place where almost all the commercial and art photographers couldn't even reach - up the side of a mountain!
Galen Rowell took and marketed photography that other people enjoyed, were inspired by and paid money for. He was also apparently happy with what he did.
Sounds successful to me.
 

BrianShaw

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Yep… successful and has a body of work actually seen by others. A generally well recognized name… well beyond that of his own self-proclaimation.
 
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DREW WILEY

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Matt - that is sure an uniformed statement. There were dozens of people right around here way more distinguished as climbers, and certainly vastly better outdoor photographers,
some even using large format equipment under extreme conditions. On my own shelves are books of the great mountain photographers - Shirakawa, Shirohito, Sella. Even many classic old black and white photographers were skilled getting around rough places, and with big cameras - they had to be. And even among the Natl Geo pantheon, Bradford Washburn was head and shoulders over Galen as a mountain photographer; and that's an understatement. And being on the "side of a mountain" was just called getting from Point A to Point B where I came from. We didn't have theaters and shopping malls, but cliffs, caves, and rapids.

The lives of numerous expedition types, including Galen, weren't always happy by any means. Like I hinted, you choose one lifestyle, you potentially give up another. Wives get fed up with their husband always being away, and possibly never coming back. I heard that with my own ears in relation to an even greater Himalayan climber - when he finally returned from K2 after being presumed dead for three months, his wife was no longer waiting for him, just plain fed up already. The burden of logistics, preparing for long trips, can be worse than a full time job. When back in town, Galen was hounded by people nagging him with travel questions, and had to dodge his way around. But he was a good match for Natl Geo and its then emphasis. (I quit subscribing once it became heavily editorialized with political preaching each month - not a matter of whether I agreed or disagreed with any particular stance - I was just sick of hearing that kind of thing over and over again).

And the notion that "success" is simply commercialistic sounds awfully shallow to me. He probably would have made more money remaining an auto mechanic. Much of his later monetary "success" was due to that fact that he married into that, the second round. Then he got a boost form stock sales right at that brief fortuitous decade or so when there was advertising demand for that kind of genre for sake of SUV's and ski gear etc. Reputation-wise, he earned his keep as an endurance climber, rather than an extreme one, but failed to get respect from the serious photographic community, even in this very neighborhood. He knew that, candidly admitted it in person, but still maintained his commercial persona too, pretending to be some photo guru he really wasn't at all. It was an open secret; self-promotion just came with the territory. My nephew learned that strategy when seeking his own expedition funding - promote brand gear via extreme location climbing photos which weren't really notable otherwise. Climbers had all kinds of tricks to keep doing what they wanted to do; I heard it over the dinner table for years. My nephew just happened to be very fortunate because his wife was also an avid climber.

Were it not for the exotic locations, I thought of Galen's work as dime a dozen amateurish, devoid of any compositional sophistication or any real understanding of color - around 1 on a scale of 10 perhaps. Just being honest - don't take offense at it.
 
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The "niche" was in many ways a place where almost all the commercial and art photographers couldn't even reach - up the side of a mountain!
Galen Rowell took and marketed photography that other people enjoyed, were inspired by and paid money for. He was also apparently happy with what he did.
Sounds successful to me.

Exactly. He was a mountain climber first who learned to bring along a camera. He dovetailed his mountaineering with photography and wrote as well as photographed for publications like Outdoor Photographer and produced 17 books.
17 Books:

Here's his list of climbing accomplishments. Are there others who climbed higher? Sure. Were there better photographers? Again sure. But he combined both into a successful career.

Mountaineering achievements[edit]​

  • More than 100 first ascents of technical climbs in the Sierra Nevada
  • First one-day ascent of Denali (during which his camera froze)
  • First ski circumnavigation of Denali
  • First one-day ascent of Kilimanjaro
  • First ascent of Great Trango Tower in Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya
  • Second ascent of the Amne Machin peak in 1981 with Harold Knutsen and Kim Schmitz, reporting its true altitude at 20,610 feet.
  • First ascent of Cholatse, the final major peak climbed in the Everest region
  • First ascents of numerous lesser-known but challenging peaks around the world, including the Andes, Alaska, Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya, Tibet, Nepal, China, Greenland, etc.
  • Oldest person to climb Yosemite's El Capitan in one day at age 57
 

takilmaboxer

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GR had some killer stories to tell, about things like hanging onto the side of Half Dome by a simple climbing rope, trying to take pictures. Or barely making it off the Eiger alive! That's why I enjoyed his pics - I was a climber too ( not anything like him, of course). Doug Scott and Dougal Haston had even wilder stories, but didn't take their cameras along😁
 

takilmaboxer

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And let's not forget that big climbing is not cheap. Unless they were independently wealthy, these climbers were sponsored by somebody. So the choice of a graded filter had a practical purpose in addition to an artistic one. All I can say is, he made it clear in our discussion, that his purpose was more pragmatic than artistic.
 

DREW WILEY

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Does anyone really think it's realistic to fiddle around with NG grads while on a dicey climb? Maybe it was once done by Galen for publicity purposes somewhere relatively accessible in Yosemite; but the darn things aren't practical in bad weather, let alone under dangerous circumstances. I have a pretty good idea what high altitude climbers were doing at the time, because we chatted almost weekly when they weren't away. And I know about the sheer weight and cumbersomeness of big wall and ice gear - it was laying all over my house at one time, including for a Cholatse climb. And I sure as heck know about filter issues in general in mountain conditons. I've only been doing it for half a century.

Alan - I'm not aware of any first ascent of any Sierra peak per se by Galen. Nearly all of the summits were already reached by his time. I managed to bag two remaining summits as a teenager, one of which is now regarded as a classic climber peak - reckless country kid style, darn near peeing my pants the whole time. Galen did have some minor Sierra walls to his credit, and probably one significant one, if I recall correctly. Otherwise, the element of self-promotion and exaggeration seems to have gotten involved. His endurance climbs like Denali in one day and Trango Tower are well known. But the most difficult big wall climbs ever done in the Arctic and Andes were by certain young folk in my own house. Now all kinds of crazy things are being done for sake of catching some publicity. Not all of those end well. And now it's more about headset and accompanying drone video, not stills. I personally have no interest in adventure sports photography myself - I want to communicate the dignity of the light and weather and geology for its own sake. That takes some quality time and contemplation to do well. Too many people are in too much of a hurry today to understand what that means, so are susceptible to various forms of visual fakery; and that started running amuck once Photoshop arrived. Visual fast food, junk food.
 
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