Geological Photography Field Trip

Today I'm at the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and attended the short course/field trip on Geophotography.  It was led by +Ellen Bishop , +Marli Miller , and +Stephen Weaver , all of whom are talented photographers specializing in geological work.  Look them up, their work is really fantastic.

I first got interested in photographing geologic subjects when I began teaching a decade ago and found it was really difficult to find good quality photographs of the various features I was trying to teach my students.  Most upper-level geoscience textbooks only provide black & white images, and of course they don't provide multiple images of all the various features one might want to view.  Finding good photos of all the geology things is really, really challenging, and students need to see lots of examples.  Lots!  Fortunately there are websites like the Earth Science World Image Bank, the Earth Science Picture of the Day, and the EGU Imageo site, but there are still lots of holes to fill for good quality photos of geologic subjects.  So my passion for geoscience education has led me to try to contribute.

I've put out a number of Geology Field Photos on my Google+ page (search Carrigan #geopic) in the past couple of years.  It's been rewarding to share these with my followers.  I've also blogged about that effort in the past, so no need to say more here.  I will continue to primarily share my geophotos in that manner.  Don't get me wrong - I don't have some overinflated ego about the quality of my photographs.  I enjoy doing it, but I've got a lot to learn and a lot of room for improvement.  

Geological Photography essentially blends aspects of the art of photography with the science of geology - how do we make visually appealing, high-quality photographs of geological features.  Although I've been interested in this for a few years now, it's only been in the past year that I've wanted to push my photography skills beyond shooting with automatic settings and little to no editing.  The fact is that with a good camera and a decent eye, you can take a lot of decent shots that will be beneficial for student learning.  That will only get you so far, so this past year I've been learning how to take photographs manually, to control all the various settings - aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, etc.  OK, I take that back - I still let my camera control the focus.  My few attempts at manual focus have been disastrous.

I'll tell you one truth: when you go from fully automatic to fully manual, the quality of your photos will decline at first!  My wife can attest to this, as the pictures of our kids from this past year were sometimes, well, not so good.  It takes time and practice to learn new skills, and I'm definitely still on that journey.  I've taken a lot of shots over the past year where the exposure was just all wrong.  Sure, you can adjust some of those things in software afterward, but the best thing is to get it right when you first take the shot.  Today I was in full manual mode; no more training wheels.  We left in the morning and headed out to Roxborough State Park, the geology of which is a lot like other areas of the CO Front Range - upended Pennsylvanian Red Sandstone Fountain Fm., followed by various other units until you get to the Dakota hogback.  Lots of good scenery to photograph, and I purposefully did a lot of experimenting with various settings.  Definitely some real buggers, like the times when I adjusted the aperture but not the shutter speed - oops.  I still need to look through the bunch and pick out the good ones and do some editing, but it feels obligatory to include some photos in a blog post about geophotography, so here are a couple of shots from today that aren't too bad:  

Tomorrow we head to the convention center with laptops and our RAW files and are learning about post-processing of digital photos.  Here's an area where I know next to nothing, so I'm really excited about this.  Hopefully I'll have more & better photos to share in the future.

Anyone out there care to share their experience photographing geologic subjects?

New Animated Landscape Cover Photo for my Google+ Profile

When a lot of people hear the term "animated gif" they shudder.  Unless it has cats in it, then a lot of people squeal with delight.  On Google+, I've seen a few people use animated gifs in some really cool ways, so I decided I'd take a crack at it with the cover photo.  


The cover photo is a very wide shot, 940 by 180 pixels, so landscape panoramas work well.  While I was out west teaching field camp earlier this summer, I got to visit a number of cool geological sites, and I took a number of photos of places like the Black Hills, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, the Beartooth Mountains, & others.  Of course, a regular camera doesn't take pictures with such wide dimensions, so at several locations, I took overlapping shots so I could stitch them together.  I stitched the photos together in Photoshop to create each individual panorama image.  This is fairly easy through the photomerge function.  


The first one is from Badlands National Park, in an overlook area where these colored rocks are located.  The Badlands are notoriously white and shades of gray and lacking in much color, but here a couple of Fe-rich layers stand out nicely as yellow & red layers.   

The second is from Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone National Park, a short walk from Old Faithful.  The colors here are fantastic; I didn't really capture the deep blue in the center of the pool, unfortunately.  

The next is a shot of the Grand Tetons.  Here I really liked the various shades of blue and green in the sagebrush and other vegetation in the foreground paired with the blues of the mountains and the sky in the distance.

The next is within Grand Teton National Park, along Cascade Canyon Trail, looking up and to the North.  My goal with this one was to capture the height of the peaks in the distance in contrast to the talus pile in the foreground.  Sometimes it can be tricky to keep the trees all upright in an image like this one, but a "cylindrical" stitching usually works to keep the trees upright.  I've found that different stitching options in Photoshop work for different situations, so many times I'll stitch a set of photos together in a couple of different ways and choose the one I prefer.  

The last is from the Beartooth Mountains, a view of an enormous glacier-carved valley.  A number of glacial features, such as cirques & hanging valleys, can be seen in the image.  

To overlay them and animate them, I must give credit to Scott Horwath, who has a fantastic cover photo; I modeled mine after his.  Back when Google+ had "Scrapbook photos" (5 small images instead of one large one), he wrote up a great tutorial on how to created animated scrapbook photos, including a video he posted on youtube, and a .tiff template file that you can download.  I originally put something together for the scrapbook photos, but those are now gone and it was time for an update.  The template file Scott has created has guidelines showing what the image will look like in Google+.  The panoramas that I took and stitched together were much, much larger than the size of the Google+ cover photo, so shrunk them down and imported each one into a layer.  Then it was a matter of tweaking the size and position of each one to fit in the template.  The simplest animation would be to simply flip through the pics, but that's a bit boring.  To get this thing into awesome mode requires just a bit more in my view, so I went with a simple fade between shots.  This is fairly easy to do in Photoshop.  The animation consists of each photo being displayed for 3 seconds, followed by 0.1 second steps where the photo becomes more & more transparent (10% each step) until it is completely gone.  As the photo becomes more and more transparent, the image below comes into view.  The animation ends with the original photo showing up under the last one, and then the animation loops & repeats the sequence over again.  If you haven't seen the final product, check it out on my Google+ Profile.

Beyond just showing some pretty pictures, animated photos could be used could be used to highlight one's areas of expertise, or show off places from a recent trip as mine does.  But to make this a bit more scientific, an animated photo could also be used to demonstrate a process, such as the rock cycle, or the development of a structure or feature.  To understand materials that form over millennia, geologists look at similar features that are in various stages of formation, and try to connect the dots between them to understand the underlying process.  Also, I didn't include anything this time around of considerably smaller scale.  I'm thinking the next one I create might include some thin sections images.  


What say you, geos?  What other kinds of photos would work well here?  How could this type of thing be used to do something cool?  

A Growing Collection of Geology Field Photos

Today over at Georneys, Evelyn suggested, in what's sure to become a geoblogmeme, posting geology pictures.  I love it when geologists share their photographs, and since late August I've started building my collection of geology photos and posting them on Google+.  It all got started when I decided to take a leap and submit one of my photos to the NASA site Earth Science Picture of the Day, and they accepted it.  I mainly did that because I was a bit bored of all the cloud formations that tend to dominate the EPoDs (need more geologists submitting their pics to this site!).  Anyway, that experience as well as the huge amount of great photo sharing on G+ led me down this path.

Isoclinal folds in high-grade gneiss, eastern Blue Ridge, Southern Appalachians.

The pics are being collected in an PicasaWeb album.  When I post them on G+, I give a longer description & explanation so my followers can learn something cool about geoscience.  All of the photos are geotagged and their locations can be seen on the map in the PicasaWeb album (unfortunately, the same album viewed in G+ does not have the spiffy googlemaps with it), so that others can visit these locations and see for themselves.

Chilled margin in granite, St. Francois Mtns., MO

I've cross-posted the links to the G+ posts on my BookFace & Twitter accounts, but so far the blog here hasn't seen them.  I've also tagged each of these posts with the hashtag #geopic.  In this way, anyone can see the photos and search for the descriptions I wrote about them easily on G+.  I'm happy to let any geoscience instructors use them (unaltered, of course) as examples in their lecture slides.  A lot of photographers post beautiful pictures of landscapes, and I'm not a serious photographer in that way; these are meant for science, not necessarily for art.

Deformed mudcracks, Valley & Ridge Province, east TN.

So without further ado, here's the link to the collection:

https://picasaweb.google.com/106934864033790932269/GeologyFieldPhotos

The collection so far includes 14 pictures (I post about 1 per week).  I also upload the photos to my panoramio account so they can be viewed in Google Earth & Maps.  The collection so far includes about 10 structures (3 folds, a textbook delta clast, deformed mudcracks, en echelon veins, liesegang rings, a chilled margin in granite, and GIANT-size joints & cross beds), 2 landforms, 1 fossil, and 1 mineral/crystal.  I guess that's a bit skewed toward the structures!

Delta clast in gneiss, Parry Sound Shear Zone, Ontario, CA.

GeoPic: Diamond Head Crater

I readily admit I'm not a great photographer, but occasionally I get a shot worth sharing. Here's a picture I took of Diamond Head Crater while on vacation in Hawaii.

The shot was taken from an aircraft (obviously); we were on a commercial flight from Honolulu to Hilo. I had a window seat and was looking north. The clouds parted just perfectly for a moment and I was able to get this shot. My wife and I had just climbed Diamond Head a day or two before, but seeing it from the air was really stunning.

Diamond Head crater is interesting geologically because the volcanic eruptions from this crater, and a number of others like it on Oahu, are much younger than the rest of the island. Most people are aware, I hope anyway, that the Hawaiian Islands were formed as the Pacific plate moved across the top of a hot spot. The hot spot is still active today, producing volcanism on the Big Island. Most of the volcanic rocks of Oahu are between 2-4 million years old. Oahu is now over 200 miles from Kilauea, and the age of the island is consistent with the modern tectonic rate of movement of the Pacific plate at around 9 cm/year. But Diamond Head and a number of other volcanic craters are much younger, less than 500 thousand years old. By this point, Oahu was well beyond the hot spot, and most of Oahu had been undergoing erosion for over a million and a half years! So based on all of this, these young volcanic craters on Oahu are very strange - if Oahu was not over the top of the hot spot anymore, why were these volcanoes erupting? This is a point of current research & debate among geoscientists.