Lane Scheideman

Both obsidian and pumice are considered volcanic glass containing a high amount of silica, the primary difference is that pumice has air bubbles trapped in it, while obsidian does not. The color of Obsidian is determined by the amount of iron minerals. The obsidian found and Newberry Caldera is primarily black; at least I couldn’t find any red obsidian there.

My analogy for how obsidian and pumice are both formed is as follows:

Imagine that you have a Caffe Macchiato (not the Starbucks macchiato), which is a shot of espresso with a dollop of steamed milk placed on top of the espresso. (For this thought experiment we need to imagine that the coffee and the milk have the same chemical makeup.) Once you have your drink, through the magic of science, you flash freeze the drink. The result is a frozen chunk of espresso that appears like glass, with no air bubbles trapped inside, and at the same time you have a frozen chunk of milk which still contains the pockets of air that were in the steamed milk.

This picture, to my best guesstimation, shows what would have been that part of the caffe macchiato where the milk and espresso had started mixing.

I took this image from the top of Paulina peak (Elevation: 7984 ft) Looking NNE.

Ages:
Earliest Dated Human Occupation of Newberry Crater (Paulina Lake): 9050 BC
Central Pumice Cone: 5250 BC
Big Obsidian Flow: 700 AD
Astronaut Training Ground: 1966
Designated National Landmark: 1976
Designated National Monument: 1990

As I go through and work on my photographs, I sometimes jump into performing a black and white conversion, typically with landscape shots. By using some advanced Photoshop techniques (the quickie greyscale conversion never lives up to what I can do manually) I come up with a version that I like. However, I always go back to the color version and wonder if I should have left well enough alone.

So, this is where you come in. The above picture has the original color image, and my converted black and white image. Both of them stand completely on their own in my mind, but I’m curious which image style you prefer.

I understand that this is completely subjective, and that opinions about style will sway most of you, but that is part of the learning process.

Please voice, textually, your opinions in the comment section.

This image is composed of 8 individual pictures I took of Crater Lake. Over the course of 3+ hours using Photoshop I was able to create the panorama you see here. My first attempt of using Photoshop’s stitching program didn’t work so well, because all of the images had a slightly different color cast, due to the slight changes in time between the shots and the changes in amounts of blues, browns greens in each section. I used a technique in Scott Kelby’s “Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers” and had to tweak it a bit to get the sky to match up from shot to shot. There are a few areas where I couldn’t get the color perfect, but I think I know how to fix that when I try to re-do this.

The images were taken with my 105mm lens, which reduced the optical distortion (curving) that would have resulted if I used one of my wide-angle lenses. The slight tilt you see results from my eyeballing the level of the panorama through the viewfinder, but not paying attention to the bubble level on my tripod.

Contact me if you would like a copy of the full (8MB) image.