Your Camera Could Be Too Cool

Summertime brings dreams of vacation on a beach, kids splashing in the water, and some great photos for the family album. You may have noticed that the humidity along a shore or coast line is very high, especially in the morning.

The way I keep my camera lenses from fogging when I take them from the air conditioned indoors to the scenic outdoors is to keep them outdoors. This may seem a bit dangerous but I lock my gear in my car in most cases. An alternate method is to put the camera outside on a guarded porch or a balcony first thing in the morning and waiting a hour or so for the lens to warm to the ambient temperature.

You'll need some good lens wipes because once the lens has warmed you may find some residue left by the evaporating water. You can also just shoot through the condensation and use your developing software to defeat the haze. That's what I did for this video.

Repaired or Restored?

Cutting to the punch line, Repairing a photo means, to me, fixing the scrapes and scratches so the photo looks like the only thing affecting it is time. Restoration, to me, means returning the photo to the original appearance, as if time has had no effect on it. This may be a distinction without a difference to many.

In this sequence I'm showing off a repair that took about 22 hrs. to complete mainly because the areas that were scratched included lots of detail on the CH-47. I used a wide selection of the Photoshop tools that would patch, replace and/or smooth parts of the image. Most frequently used were the clone stamp and spot healing brush. I even cut and pasted pieces of photos of other CH-47s and used blend modes to add to their authenticity.

The chopper pictured is "Easy Money" one of three "Guns A-Go-Go" CH-47s that were gunned up and used as troop support gunships for a short time in Vietnam. I happened to be at the pad while the crew was reloading the weapons.