On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
“The road goes ever on and on” – Bilbo Baggins
When I first subscribed to Photoshop and Lightroom, I expected to use them to edit pictures. But Steve from Mendocino and I quickly fell into a pattern where I took the pictures and he did the post-processing, and for me, Lightroom became primarily a tool for keeping my pictures organized.
At a certain point along way I started to use Lightroom’s “Collections” feature to put pictures into categories, like “snow” and “fall color” and “Augusta” and – to my own surprise – “paths and roads.”
These pictures are some of our favorites from the “paths and roads” collection.
A path in a cemetery in the town where I grew up. The picture was in the OTR set in 2020 that prompted Steve to wave at me from afar and ask if we could talk about my pictures. This is his edit of the original, which had had no post-processing; at that time I was so uninformed that I thought Photoshop was for adding flying saucers to pictures of American cities. (Per this cover from the July 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review.)
Bigger version of the picture here.
The Kennebec River Rail Trail from one of the Hallowell access points.
Bigger version here.
Looking west from the village center of Readfield, Maine. I passed an even better pair of adjacent signs the other day, one of which said “9 East” and the other “196 West,” but I was in traffic and couldn’t stop to take a picture.
The signs are a perfect symbol of the way roadways meander in a state as hilly as Maine. The pattern is very unlike the midwestern grid in the town where I grew up, much less the perfectly NSEW grid in Milwaukee, where I lived in the early 1980s.
The town where I grew up is on Lake Erie, and my mother could never understand how/why some of our friends had no grasp of maps or directions. “Could you get to the lake from here?” she would ask a longsuffering friend of one of her kids. “Yes” was usually the answer. “Well, the lake is north” – and everything else followed (as far as my mother was concerned). Milwaukee was an even more regular grid, and more rigidly oriented to the points of the compass, but the lake was east, which did mess up my brain a bit when I lived there. Now there’s a lake to the south….
Bigger version here.
A neighborhood in Augusta, near where I go to get my car worked on. Since covid, unless it’s really pouring outside I take walks (and sometimes pictures) instead of sitting in the repair shop waiting room.
Bigger version here.
An intersection in Westbrook, Maine, in the spring.
Bigger version here.
“The school road” (its nickname). I live on the corner of this road, a half-mile-long dead end leading to a middle school / high school complex that serves four rural towns. I’ve walked up and down this road several thousand times in the thirty-seven years I’ve lived here. When I was younger I went up the hill almost every day, usually past the school and into the woods, where there are x-country skiing and running trails as well as nicely groomed snowmobile trails, perfect for walking in the snowy woods under a bright moon. In recent years some trails have also been constructed specifically as walking paths.
The road has changed over the years – been tamed, made more civilized – acquired a sidewalk with Obama infrastructure money – and as I get older I don’t go far into the woods much anymore. A school is an interesting neighbor – busy with traffic nine months of the year, but also offering fun activities that are open to the public (sports, music, theater…).
Bigger version here.
Castle Island Road, looking west in the early evening.
Bigger version here.
California Route 1. Turns out Steve takes pictures of paths and roads too.
Bigger version here.
Also California Route 1, north of Fort Bragg. This one has been posted as part of an OTR set before, but just as I keep learning more about taking pictures, Steve keeps getting better at editing, making new, improved versions of old pictures as he goes along. This is one of those.
Bigger version here.
Castle Island Road again, half a year onward and further west.
Bigger version here.
*****
“The path is under your feet” – Issan Dorsey, Street Zen
Dorothy A. Winsor
Those roads are both beautiful and suggestive of adventure. Lovely to wake up to.
Geo Wilcox
Cemeteries are where you can find some of the biggest trees outside of the redwood forests. We scout them out whenever we stumble across an old cemetery.
Gloria DryGarden
A friend used to live near ft Bragg; it’s sweet to see the scenery she must have driven through, though I never visited her there.
The Maine photos take me back to a few trips I took to visit my parents, and then to attend a funeral for one of them. I did some driving around around Bangor, and to Eastport, lubec, and also over to Augusta. Such wonderful lush trees. Sweet memory
Layer8Problem
Lovely work here. They put me in mind of how some the of the best times my partner and I have had together have been on scenic roads on a long drive between one place and another.
How is Steve from Mendocino? I haven’t heard anything and for me the last time I recall him active on Balloon Juice was when he had his French Pyrénées and Basque country pictures in On The Road.
frosty
Interesting topic! Technical details? What kind of editing is Steve doing? I’ve basically just changed exposure, brightness, and maybe contrast in MS Photos because I haven’t mastered the camera settings yet. What kind of camera are you using? (Sony a6000 here)
Steve from Mendocino
Steve from Mendocino is well and feeling old, visiting his adult kids in Canada at the moment. I’ve stopped posting here for complicated reasons that include not taking pictures any longer. You can see my work in Janie’s photos.
I’ve always enjoyed darkroom work, and with Lightroom/Photoshop there is so much more I can do. Janie’s photos have gotten better (and more similar to mine) over the past several years and speak for me aesthetically. As a result I no longer have a need to take pictures… and I’m lazy. I’ve said what I want to say about Mendocino (although I still have a couple of posts worth of unposted good ones in my portfolio). As I said, it’s complicated.
I read Balloon Juice faithfully every morning and would miss it terribly if it went away.
Best wishes to all.
Steve
Layer8Problem
@Steve from Mendocino: ” . . . and I’m lazy.”
We share a tragic flaw.
“Best wishes to all.”
And to you as well!
MelissaM
I’m curious to see the befores with the afters, possibly with one marked up.
Janie, you do have a great eye! All these paths are intriguing and makes me want to click on the google maps arrow to go further down the road.
JanieM
Will get back to questions in a bit, but the link to the bigger version of Steve’s picture in #8 (“South of Albion”) is incorrect — the real one is here.
JPL
The pictures are amazing but I really enjoy hearing from both of you.
JanieM
@frosty:
Your question about Steve’s editing needs its own answer, but as to the camera question:
These pictures were taken with four cameras, three of which I still use.
The first (cemetery) one was taken with my beloved Nikon Coolpix, which I had for ten or twelve years and took on many adventures, including trips to London, Edinburgh, and Brussels.
But the Coolpix didn’t take RAW, and when I started working with Steve that lack was hampering our process, and my progress. So with his guidance I started using a Canon Powershot G7X Mark II – pics 3 and 9 in this set were taken with that camera.
Most of these pictures (2, 4, 5, 6, 7) were taken with a Sony DSC-RX100M7, which has mostly replaced the Canon as my “carry around in my pocket” camera. I still use the Canon as a backup and for people pictures indoors, because the autofocus on the Canon is much faster than on the Sony. The Sony, on the other hand, has better edge sharpness and a wider zoom range.
Steve’s shot “South of Albion” was taken with a Nikon D800.
The last shot was taken with a Nikon D850, which takes other-worldly pictures but which I haven’t really grown into yet. I have some mental barriers to get over, not least of which is that I’m shy about using the tripod in public places. The road goes on and on….
ETA: Edited to remove extra space…..the remnant of composing in Word.
Steve from Mendocino
@frosty: My editing includes adjusting curves, contrast, color balance, brightness, saturation, and a good bit of burning. I do localized work in Lightroom where I can adjust all of these things in a specific area and in a specific range (shadows or highlights as needed while leaving the other part of the range intact). I find that color balance is much much better handled by Photoshop. I also do moderate sharpening if necessary.
Steve from Mendocino
@frosty: My editing includes adjusting curves, contrast, color balance, brightness, saturation, and a good bit of burning. I do localized work in Lightroom where I can adjust all of these things in a specific area and in a specific range (shadows or highlights as needed while leaving the other part of the range intact). I find that color balance is much much better handled by Photoshop. I also do moderate sharpening if necessary.
columbusqueen
Love all of these. Where’s the cemetery in Ohio? My husband & I like to go exploring in them.
JanieM
@columbusqueen: It’s the Chestnut Grove Cemetery in Ashtabula. There’s a monument there to the people who died in the train disaster in 1876. From the Wikipedia article:
ETA: I love cemeteries myself. There are quite a few in Ashtabula County that house the graves of my ancestors, and when my mother was alive she and my sisters and I would go exploring. I haven’t been out there since covid, and my mom died in April of 2020 so I haven’t even visited her grave yet….
way2blue
@Steve from Mendocino:
Steve—Thanks for explaining which aspects of the photos you tinker with. Would love to see the before & after versions too. I have Photoshop & Lightroom albeit the CD versions rather than yearly subscriptions. I always get stuck however at the step of just organizing my photos and deleting duplicates that overwhelm my libraries…
Miss your OTR contributions, yet remember when you & Janie both took a pause…
BigJimSlade
Loveliness!
Chris T.
Virginia has some of those roads (that go both “east” and “west” at the same time). I used to joke that you could be driving on East 123, West 456, and South 79 simultaneously, and you would probably be going north at the time.