Wednesday Landscapes, 11 October 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.

 

 

This is sunrise last Sunday at Redwood National Park, and this is a Plan B shot—I was expecting to photograph an elk herd at the north end of the meadow, but they didn’t show up. I sprinted to the south end, which, absent elk, had more visual interest, and got there just before the sun appeared; the mist was gone five minutes later.

 

Processing on this image was complicated. The raw file was basically gray and dark—the sort of image I would have passed right over if I hadn’t been there in person. In Lightroom, I further reduced the exposure, then increased the white point a lot, lowered the shadows, greatly increased contrast, clarity, and vibrance, and increased saturation a little. I used an adjustment brush to further increase contrast and clarity in the sunlit parts of the trees, and one to reduce clarity and contrast in the lower left corner. I ended up adding a gradient to reduce contrast even further in that corner by un-dehazing it. The trees were still anaemic, so I went into Photoshop and applied curve adjustment layers to the L, a, and b channels, which helped for the color, but still didn’t give enough definition in the foliage. Back in Lightroom (…gracefully omitting several hours of unsuccessful experiments with channel masks and blend modes in Photoshop…) I went into the HSL panel, reduced luminance in orange, increased it in yellow, and got the definition I was looking for. (ISO 200, f/8, 1/250)

 

Joshua Tree National Park, California

 

Cottonwood Sparkle Ricoh GXR with A16

Swan Valley, Idaho Edited October 11, 2017 by Glenn McCreery

McGee Creek Canyon and Lake Crowley

A tranquil scene in the north Atlantic seaport of Bonavista, Nfld. A few months earlier and it would have been spotted with icebergs and maybe a whale or two.

 

For this one I used my D800E with a 28-70mm zoom.

 

 

White Slough, Vallejo CA, taken this morning (Oct 11, 2017). No PP. Haze and color due to Atlas Fire, still raging near Napa CA.

Spring scene from the woods where I trail bike every day with our dog. The foreground was a little flat so I added a layer mask in ACR and bumped up the Clarity a little bit just in the foreground plants. Shot with D7100 and 18-70 lens.

Ocean City, MD.

 

 

 

Edited October 15, 2017 by tom_kessler