Wednesday Landscapes, 13 September 2017

You are invited to upload one or more of your landscape photos and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on? And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

 

I’m still playing with the scanned color negatives—this one is from November 2009 on the Eel River (Fuji Superia 400 ISO). I first got a reasonable white balance in Lightroom, then went to Photoshop and switched to Lab mode to do the color corrections and to remove dust and scratches. Then back to Lightroom for some fine-tuning in the Basic and HSL panels. I used an adjustment brush to lighten and brighten the foreground yellow foliage, and another to reduce saturation in and darken the grass in the lower right corner, and I ended up by giving the R curve a boost in the Tone Curve panel. At that point I decided I wasn’t all that happy with the composition—too much gravel bar, too little cottonwood. I went back to Photoshop and duplicated the background layer, compressing the bottom one sideways about 10% and stretching the top one the same amount. I then used a layer mask to suture the two together just to the right of the right-most yellow foreground bush, diagonally across the river, and irregularly upward from there. Actually, in thinking about it, the composition was just an excuse--I really just wanted to see if I could do it. The bottom line is that I’m having way too much fun with Photoshop.

 

Sony RX-100 taken on my walk to work from the parking lot last week.

 

wonderful photo Gordon. a mixture of this world and the next.

View west, from Buena Vista Peak, Kings Canyon NP, California.

 

Milky Way over Teton mountain range

Sorry that I'm late. I visited Versaille the other day and took only my 14mm and full-frame Canon 5D MkIV. It was a mostly cloudy day, but the sun would occasionally break through the clouds, yielding gorgeous light, that was worth the wait:

Infinity Perspective Versaille Gardens by David Stephens, on Flickr

I forgot to add text to my image above: Following Leslie, I present this scanned 2 1/4 ektachrome shot with the Bronica and 50mm lens in the early 2000's. I had to do numerous local adjustments of both color, contrast, saturation of various colors, and so forth in ACR.

Early September sunrise on Mt Rainier.

Milky Way over Teton mountain range

That's a stunning image, Glenn McC--what exposure did you use?

 

Early September sunrise on Mt Rainier.

And Glenn C--I'm enjoying how clearly the near craggy ridge stands apart from the mountain

I only see Glenn's image briefly, then it vanishes without a trace.

Nevermind, firefox memory issue it seems.

Edited September 18, 2017 by Dieter Schaefer

I only see Glenn's image briefly, then it vanishes without a trace.

That's usually a sign that the file was too large, but the problem only shows up on some computers (and maybe browsers). Your mentioning it made me realize that I've had no problem seeing posted images since I upgraded my computer, and it used to happen to me a lot. I'll mention the problem on this week's thread--thanks for pointing it out. Too bad you can't see it, though--it's a beauty.

Milky Way over Teton mountain range

Glenn - if you see this, it'd be great if you could post another version on this thread at a <1 MB file size--that's a photo that deserves to be seen by all.

Too bad you can't see it, though--it's a beauty.

Restarting firefox cleared things up for me - it's definitely a firefox memory issue; my computer has 32GB memory which are never fully utilized.

That's usually a sign that the file was too large,

Yep, it is: 4,639px × 4,192px, 9.5MB.

That's usually a sign that the file was too large, but the problem only shows up on some computers (and maybe browsers). Your mentioning it made me realize that I've had no problem seeing posted images since I upgraded my computer, and it used to happen to me a lot. I'll mention the problem on this week's thread--thanks for pointing it out. Too bad you can't see it, though--it's a beauty.

 

Glenn - if you see this, it'd be great if you could post another version on this thread at a <1 MB file size--that's a photo that deserves to be seen by all.

Nope, the other Glenn: glenn_cummings|1

Leslie- more than one exposure. I set up the tripod and exposed for the foreground in twilight, and then waited for total darkness for the sky. The sky was exposed in a series of five or six 10s exposures at f:1.4 using a Rokinon 24mm lens and then composited with StarryLandscapeStacker software, which accounts for the movement of the stars between frames. I then blended in the foreground, and removed a couple of distant lights using Photoshop. The photo(s) were taken near Felt, Idaho on the western side of the Teton range. Here is the image at 360 kB.

Here is the image

Thanks, Glenn! I think one of the really striking things for me about the image is that it makes the universe both unfathomably large and intimate at the same time--the horizon makes our world so small, yet the colors of the galaxy are carried into the grass at our feet. Beautiful.

Thanks Leslie.

And, as the owner? of a black cat, I really like your black cat menacingly peering over a fence in last weeks Monochrome Monday.