(I guess I'm out for good now!!!)

 

 

Civil War Reenactment, Corona, California

 

"Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule."
-Jefferson Davis



Tom's Farms in Corona, California hosted their inaugural American Civil War reenactment last weekend.

I've wanted to shoot one of these events for several years now, but because of this and that, the chance never manifested itself. There are several of these events held in SoCal, probably the largest one in Moorpark. Vista also has hosted these events in the past. These reenactments are produced by various groups and clubs for the sheer pleasure they provide for the participants. Many are history buffs, while others lay claim to sharing Union and Confederate blood coursing through their own veins.

The War Between the States was fought from 1861 through 1865. It was the bloodiest war America ever fought and the most soldiers we ever lost in one war. One estimate is 750,000 soldiers and an undetermined amount of civilian casualties. Neighbor against neighbor, family against family, brother against brother, and father against son were pitted opposite each other, some fighting for the North, others fighting for the South.

There are various categories of reenactments. There are the casual ones where attention to detail and authentic period pieces are not rigidly held to, to events insuring every bit of detail is checked to make sure they are authentic looking. Some are held where only the participants are invited, immersing themselves in the time, the manners, manner of speech and even the food eaten.

The one at Tom's Farms was fairly authentic, with authentic period clothing and uniforms, mannerisms and speech, although some participants were allowed a bit of laxness in their costumes due to the high expense these period pieces can command.

 Fixing morning's victuals in the Confederate camp.

Two camps were set up, one North and one South. I found the Confederate camp to actually be more open and friendly than the Union camp. I can only attribute that to southern agrarian hospitality vs. northern industrialism.

 Union marching band director.

It was a lot of fun walking around through the various sections of the two camps. Everyone pretty much played their roles and it was especially fun to listen to some of the southern gentlemen speak with a decidedly pronounced southern drawl.

Confederate canon battery.

This particular reenactment was of the Battle at Gettysburg. I went on Saturday, that day being the day the Confederates won. Sunday was the day that the Union won and ultimately defeated the South in this decisive battle.

Rebel troops mustered in the field before battle.

All firearms used in the reenactments are authentic in design as to what the armies used. The rifles are muzzle loaders (usually firing a .50 cal. minie ball) while the pistols fired predominantly percussion cap pistols and brass cartridge rounds in .44 caliber, of which this war introduced the modern brass cartridge. I don't know if these pistols could actually shoot live ammunition, but the rifles are capable of firing live rounds. Of course for the shows they use blank rounds.

Union canon battery behind earth works.

Union canon salvo.

What was real cool were the many smoke rings created by the canons. We all got a kick out of it, especially the kids in the audience. The large amounts of smoke is the product of black gunpowder that was used in their weapons at the time. Smokeless powder wasn't invented until after the Civil War.

 This is the littlest Johnny Reb I saw that day.

The costumes and requisite accoutrements are very authentic looking as showcased here on this Union cavalry soldier.

The ultimate goal for attending the show was to shoot pics in order to transform them into the old photographs one sees of the Civil War. Using Photoshop magic, below is what I created:

 Starting from this, it ultimately was transformed to this:

Most Civil War photographs were taken using tintype and Daguerreotype cameras. There was the wet plate method too, but because of the long exposure times needed in order to create a picture, it wasn't used as much in war settings due to the constantly moving action.

 Confederate infantryman.

  Rebel soldier.

Most photographs recorded during the Civil War came out black and white, but over the course of many years, some of these photographs degraded to brown and sepia tones, especially those that were not well protected against the elements.

 Confederate drummer boy.

Drummer boys were used in western armies well into the late nineteenth century. Some were as young as twelve. Being a drummer boy was seen as being glamorous and highly prestigious. This drummer boy was in camp getting ready to call the soldiers to war.

 Southern general mustering his troops before battle.

 Cavalry skirmish. I really distressed this one in order to simulate an old and especially battered photo.

 Battlefield strewn with Yankee and Rebel corpses.

All in all, it was a great day, I learned a lot about the Civil War, and enjoyed the opportunity of immersing myself in the day to day life of Civil War soldiers. The kids attending the show gobbled it up; beats sitting in a stuffy elementary classroom plopped down in front of an American History book.

If one has the time and the inclination, I would highly recommend attending a Civil War reenactment. To make it worth your while, get there early and stay a bit later after the battle scene. Wander around the camps, ask questions, and you'll be amazed at what you can learn and how fun it is to plunk yourself down into a moment of history long past.

Yours Truly,

-Mathew Brady Jr.

either current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.
Jefferson Davis
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jefferson_davis.html#mMG79yfOAqMaF1vF.99

Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.
Jefferson Davis
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jefferson_davis.html#mMG79yfOAqMaF1vF.99Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.

Jefferson Davis

Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.

Jefferson Davis

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeffersond134316.html#0TGAvPWd0GTK8w7C.99

Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.

Jefferson Davis

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeffersond134316.html#0TGAvPWd0GTK8w7C.99

Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.

Jefferson Davis

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeffersond134316.html#0TGAvPWd0GTK8w7C.99

Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.

Jefferson Davis

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeffersond134316.html#0TGAvPWd0GTK8w7C.99

Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.

Jefferson Davis

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeffersond134316.html#0TGAvPWd0GTK8w7C.99

Zion National Park, Utah. Part IV

"The towering trees are my cathedral wherein the shimmering streams of sunlight dance through the branches and leaves with an effect akin to stain glass in motion.  I sit on a pew of  stone or clay or grass and listen to a choir of birds sing with the sound of running water and the soft gentle breeze as it moves through the landscape.  And I hear the sermon of  God in nature."
-Andrew Kliss

 I don't remember writing the above quote quite so eloquently to a friend of mine that went on a Mormon missionary journey to England shortly after we graduated from high school. I wasn't a practicing Christian at the time - if I could have even been counted as a nonpracticing one back then.

In a recent correspondence, Roger sent me that snippet from a  letter I wrote him while he was still in England. Upon reading it now, it has even more meaning, and with it a deeper appreciation of nature today than when I wrote it 40+ years ago.

Why did God create such beauty and majesty? In order to point us in His direction, for who can ignore a majestic, or tranquil, or breathtaking, or heart palpitating view and not wonder who is the Artist behind the creation?

This is the last post for photos I've taken over the past seven years since earnestly going digital in 2006.

There are so many other places that beckon, especially the southwest. When I retire soon, the possibilities and opportunities of visiting and capturing on "film" these wonderful, majestic, iconic, and inspiring venues will certainly afford me avenues with which to fulfill this wanderlust that burns a hole in my heart. Hopefully, finances won't char too deep a burn in my pocket! I've kind of put it aside for now due to shoulder surgery some months back, and the subsequent slow process of recovery afterwards, plus a lot of time has been spent these past months in scanning and archiving family photos.

I was thinking of posting some of these family photos that go waaaaaay back until the present, but I love and respect you all too much to put you through such agony and misery. As I start getting back out into the world of photography, several things are on the subjects plate:

• Getting more involved in street photography, especially with black and white in mind.

• Local wildlife photography. There are many opportunities in and around easy driving distance from where I live in San Marcos, California. Insects, birds, sea animals, to name a few. Not only those, but there are the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Parks (formally known as Wild Animal Park) where photos ops abound for the more exotic species.

• Seascapes. Haven't done much at all in that realm. There's a plethora of camera candy all the way from San Diego to Laguna Beach and beyond.

 If there is a tremendous groundswell of demand for family photos, I will oblige, but seriously, it's rather doubtful such a thing will happen.

I thank God for making creation so beautiful and magnificent! Without His speaking it as such into existence, life would be so dull and drab.

HDR photo of Lower Emerald Pool grotto. The Emerald Pools Trail takes one to Lower, Middle, and Upper Pools. The trail to the lower pool is relatively easy to access. There are some elevation gains and drops, but it is paved with asphalt. The rest of the pool photos are of Lower Emerald.

Shot with a 10.5mm fisheye lens. Quite a different perspective of the same grotto.

The Watchman standing guard over the Virgin River. The sun has just set behind the canyon walls and buttes, casting a blush upon the cheeks of The Watchman.

Thank you all for your kind words and support throughout all of my digital photography endeavors, and for family and friends freely offering their manifest love, support, and friendships.

I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. This is a photo taken of the family in 1990 on a camping trip up at White Rock Lake, north of Lake Tahoe.

Front row: my oldest daughter Sarah and Son Eric.
Second row: daughter Anna, my wife at the time Laurie, and myself holding Daniel, a good friend of mine's son.

Ciao for now!

Sincerely,
-Andrew (Andy) Kliss

Zion National Park, Utah. Part III

"Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution."

-Ansel Adams


 It's been a while since my last post. I've been very busy scanning and digitally archiving family photos for the past six months while having the luxury of a large chunk of relatively uninterrupted time in order to accomplish it in. Crunch time is here. Within the next week or two, I will know what path my work future will go down. If I go back to work, well, there goes the requisite blocks of time needed in order to finish archiving within a relatively short amount of time. I'm almost there! Only a couple of dozen or so more to go... As Bill D. Cat would say in the now defunct Opus and Bloom County cartoon strips: "ACK!"

These photos were taken in the upper elevations of Zion along Zion Park Blvd. that zigzags up and towards the east where one can eventually hit the highway that goes past Bryce Canyon. Zion Park Blvd. is known for its long tunnel cut out of the surrounding rock in one section. This is an interesting section of the park with a much different feel with regards to the massive, all encompassing, and seemingly confining walls of the canyon below it.

This upper elevation area is home to a myriad of naturally sculpted bonsai trees. Most of them are pines, with occasional western maples and a few stunted cottonwoods interspersed here and there as bonsias.

The western maples in this area can give some stupendous fall color, sporting shades of orange, and all the way into deep and bright reds. These maples are scattered about the landscape, and are few and far between. Remove from your mind the thought of groves of them as are found in the eastern regions of our country.

This little pine has to be the most photographed tree in all of Zion National Park. Shot using HDR.

Found this piece of dead wood to my liking, especially against the hues of the rock it's perched upon.

 

Just outside the east entrance to the park as one is heading towards Bryce, is a souvenir/gift/food stop shop that caters to those passing through. Outside sits an old (I think '56 or '57 Chevy truck) dripping with character. I proceeded to take a whole series of photos of it from all sorts of angles and perspectives. Using HDR seemed to lend an even greater sense of character to the photos posted of it. 

Zion National Park, Utah. Part II

"Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!"

-Henry David Thoreau

Pardon me. In the last blog, I stated that those photos were taken in the fall of 2011. They were taken in the fall of 2010, but hey, who's counting? These photos are a mix of 2009 and 2010 trips.

When one first enters the canyon, a sense of better things to come pervades the atmosphere. The striated walls begin relatively low, getting steeper and more dramatic as one travels deeper into it. At the end of the road (Zion Canyon Scenic Drive), it enters into an area known as the Temple of Sinawava. This is the terminus, ending in a parking lot where one can park and hike up the Narrows Trail.

On the way up to Angel's Landing and approximately half way up to the top is a nice viewpoint one can stop, rest, and enjoy the scenery. This HDR photo was taken towards the end of the afternoon, looking down into Zion Canyon with the Virgin River coursing through it... and no, I didn't climb the chain all the way to the top of Angel's Landing. I didn't want the opportunity to manifest itself of  potentially becoming a fallen angel. Did make it to the flat point just after Walter's Wiggles at the base of the chain path, though. The bottom part of Angel's Landing Trail can be seen in the lower, right hand area of the photo.

The Virgin River during the first week of November.

 

Both 2009 and 2010 were particularly good years for fall color in the canyon.

Plopped right in the middle of the Temple of Sinawava are two huge monoliths named The Pulpit. Impressive they are, especially in the context of their location and placement in the temple area. The photo above utilizes HDR.

Zion National Park, Utah. Part I

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show."

-Andrew Wyeth

Zion National Park is one of those places of natural beauty that literally floored me the first time I laid eyes upon it. The majesty of this canyon and its environs, carved by the Virgin River, confirms to me that God is the Master Artist.

Temple of the Virgins at sunrise. Photo composite using the HDR technique.

The fall color in 2011 was particularly good in the Zion area as can be attested by the photographs above and below. This path leads to Weeping Rock.

Graceful trail cloaked in fall color leads to the Emerald Pools.

Looking upstream on the Virgin River. Both sides of the stream have hiking paths at this point alongside the river.

 

Petroglyphs etched by Indians thousands of years ago. One universal Indian symbol utilizing the coil is meant to convey the passage of one's life, a sense of time, passing of time, or timelessness according to some experts. I find petroglyphs and pictographs particularly intriguing; sending one to eras long gone and forgotten. Stories of peoples who lived, died, and passed through, which are no more. What do they tell us? That my friends is mostly lost to us. How will people two thousand years from now attempt to explain the mystery of our own bio-hazard symbol?

Yosemite National Park, Twilight and Night

“...full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons of life, mountain building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stone, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful with humanity.”
-John Muir


The following photos were taken from late afternoon into nightfall.

Tunnel View. Looking down the Yosemite Valley floor from the Tunnel View lookout point.To the very left is El Capitan, the valley floor, followed by Half Dome in the distance. To the right is Cathedral Rocks. The waterfall below them is Bridalveil Falls.

A lesson in being aware of your surroundings: I was all set up for taking the photograph below. The legs of my tripod were splayed out, camera mounted and focused for the photo I wished to capture. All that was needed was to wait for the natural phenomenon to appear... or maybe not. Nature is fickle.

Standing there, waiting and talking to other photographers also set up for the spectacle, most of us were oblivious to the large moon rising over Sentinel Peak directly opposite of our collective attention. Someone in the crowd suggested we all look behind us. We did, and were rewarded with the vision of a large, gorgeous moon cresting the top of the peak. We immediately readjusted our tripods and cameras to capture the surprise behind us, and then reset our equipment to accomplish what all of us originally gathered there for, the naturally occurring Firefall of Horsetail Fall. Talk and conversation resumed, we waited for the phenomenon to occur, and all were amply rewarded that dusk with an incredible spectacle.

The moral of the story (if there is one)? Always be aware of your surroundings, for invariably you will be rewarded with surprises when practicing due diligence. The rising moon shot isn't a gallery quality photograph by any means, but nonetheless, experiencing it was extremely rewarding and we walked away with yet another keeper for our photo archives.

Horsetail Fall. A phenomenon that only manifests itself in the winter, Horsetail Fall transforms into a fiery-colored plume of water, more commonly known as the Firefall.

This is not to be confused with the old "fire fall" of yesteryear that was put on by the park rangers, and visible from Camp Curry on warm, summer nights. That ceased around 1968 when conservation concerns came to the forefront regarding bulldozing large quantities of live fire and embers over Glacier Point into the valley floor below.

As a kid camping with my parents in Camp Curry, we sat around a large campfire with one of the rangers who spun tales and educated us on Yosemite flora, fauna, history and lore. As the evening wound down, we were instructed to look up to the tippy-top of Glacier Point and get ready for an event of a lifetime. It was then that a dozer would push a huge pile of fire and embers over the side, much to the delight of we onlookers in camp. It truly was spectacular to witness!

But that is not the same as what is referred today as the Yosemite Firefall. In order for it to appear, certain criteria have to be met. It happens only in the winter, February being the optimal month, with a fair amount of water flowing down Horsetail Fall. During some years there isn't enough snow melt to cause Horsetail Fall to cascade, so the show doesn't go on. Also, there can't be any clouds to the west to block the sunset rays from transforming water to fire. The transformation takes place when light rays from the setting sun arc over the mountains at a specific angle to light up the backside of  the fall as it cascades down the face of El Capitan.

This is not a "Photoshopped" picture in the sense of putting lipstick on a pig. God naturally applied makeup to the scene. The only work performed on it was transforming it from a RAW to a TIFF file, adjusting the contrast through curves, bumping up the saturation a bit to what I remember the fall being, as RAW files can be rather flat, and then sharpened it. The TIFF was then re-saved as a JPG for posting.

Some other photographers I was with shot it again the following sunset while I went to Tunnel View. The intense color they came back with was literally unbelievable. It was so red, it looked like molten lava. If I didn't know them personally in the collective, I would have had serious doubts as to the authenticity of the colors they captured.

Yosemite Falls. The highest measured fall in North America at 2,425 feet. Taken at night from the Yosemite Valley below. The shutter was set to stay open for 30 seconds in order to capture enough light to render the photo. If one looks closely, it becomes evident that the earth turned ever so slightly on its axis, causing the stars to shift and create smears.

That's it for Yosemite. The last and final destination we will head out to is Zion National Park in Utah.

Yosemite National Park, Daytime

" For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

-Romans 1:20

It seems to be a consensus that Yosemite National  Park is perhaps one of the most beautiful natural spots on this planet. The numbers of people that visit Yosemite each year will vouch for that.

Most people who sojourn there, do so in the summer months and in late spring. Visiting during the winter affords one the delectable pleasure of very few visitors during the weekday; weekends though, are another story altogether. 

These photos were taken in the dead of winter back in 2008. Yosemite Valley, being situated at a mean elevation of roughly 4,000 feet, make it quite rare that mounds and masses of snow gather to any appreciable depth at this latitude. On the average, as weather systems move in and dump snow, it then proceeds to melt immediately when the sun reappears. At times, the fronts are not cold enough to produce snow, only to cause it to rain on the valley.

I was fortunate to visit during February at the same time a cold front was moving through, adding about six inches of new snow on an existing base of roughly eighteen inches. 

Doing some exploring on a mountain slope between Bridalveil Falls and Tunnel View, I came across an area within the small boulders and scree that covered the lower section of a mountain slope that was festooned with this beautiful moss covering just about everything in the vicinity. Located under a dense canopy of pine and hardwood trees, the shade and retention of moisture afforded an ideal environment for it to flourish.

Looking at Half Dome from a bridge spanning the Merced River below it.

View of Yosemite Falls looking up through the valley floor pines using a wide angle lens.

The peaceful Merced River flowing alongside the base of Cathedral Rocks.