Wednesday Landscapes, 16 August 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.

 

Steve Murray’s beautiful post last week motivated me to again try scanning some of my film photos, and JDM’s posts in threads on scanning from several years ago solved some technical issues for me—thanks to both of you! In going through some long-stored boxes I found the first color photo I ever made, taken using an old rangefinder of my Dad’s. All I know is that it’s Kodachrome, and the background peaks are the north end of the Minarets, above Lake Ediza on the east side of the Sierra Nevada (in what's now the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area). Post-processing was a challenge here due to the age of the film—lots of discoloration, webs of fine cracks, and immobile dust. After some basic adjustments in Lightroom, I went to Photoshop to use the dust-and-scratches filter. I applied a low level to most the frame (masking off the bushes, where the dust-removal algorithm would have wreaked havoc with the fine, high-contrast texture and where the dust was well-camouflaged anyway). I then masked everything but the sky and hit it with a more assertive dose. Finally, I went over the frame with the spot-healing brush to touch up the remaining noticeable spots (helped along by a Bach harpsichord concerto). Back in Lightroom, I used the adjustment brush to add some extra sharpening and clarity to the parts of the frame that had been softened by the low-level dust removal. I wish I knew what kind of camera it was…my only clue is that the image size (1 1/8” by 1.5”) is slightly larger than a full-frame 35mm transparency, and the camera probably dated from the 1940s or ’50s. (Scanned on a Plustek 8200i using Vuescan).

 

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Leslie, while I always enjoy your description of what you did with a picture, I think this one would have been a more interesting picture and a better picture with the dust and scratches left in.

 

I'll be interested to hear what JDM thinks about dust and scratches in old pictures.

I think this one would have been a more interesting picture and a better picture with the dust and scratches left in

 

That’s an interesting perspective, Julie. I suppose it comes down to what one assumes to be the objective of the photographer in posting the image: is it to convey the photograph as an historical object (and thus preserve the changes that the object experienced over the intervening years), or to represent the object that the 10-yr-old photographer originally perceived as being worthy of preserving (and so attempt to restore the photograph as originally seen)? Here’s the version as it came off the scanner, corrected only for gamma. The changes I made in Lightroom were to open the shadows (which had been darkened by the scan--I probably should have been more careful setting the black point) and adjust for the blue color cast (memory is tricky here, but I think it’s become a lot bluer with time).

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Thanks for posting the unedited version. I was hoping to see what the photo looked like 'in-hand' before scanning. On my monitor, this doesn't look like anything I've seen in an aged color, paper photograph, either in tint or in value. Oddly, the only spots I see look like sensor dust (in the sky just above the horizon), which they can't be. LOL ... think I see those blobs in my sleep.

I shot this at about 9:10 PM from the balcony of a hotel along the beach in the area of Stuart, Florida. Using a Canon 60D with an EF 35-135 mm lens, the settings were as follows: 1/800 sec, f9.0, ISO 100, aperture priority.

this doesn't look like anything I've seen in an aged color, paper photograph, either in tint or in value

Yeah—Kodachrome transparencies have remarkably stable color through time, but it’s one of those good news-bad news situations: the image is only stable in the dark. Kodachromes fade more quickly than other ‘chromes if exposed to light (=if looked at; so the colors are great as long as you never see them. The corollary: it's your favorite slides that degrade the fastest). When these slides are stored in the dark, what disappears first is the yellows; hence, the blue cast. In thinking about it, I probably should have corrected the color cast with curves instead of with the Lightroom color balance sliders.

My wife and I "discovered" this spot a few days earlier and on this particular occasion waited for over an hour for a train - which, of course, then had to come from the "wrong" direction to get a shot of the train approaching through the curve. Only much later did I learn that this is actually a spot made famous by Nicholas Morant who was a staff photographer for the Canadian Pacific Railway; he took photographs of trains traveling through this spot for CPR during the middle of the 20th century and this spot is often referred to as "Morant's Curve".

 

In processing the image I made the choice to have it look a bit "old-fashioned" and played around with various setting in Color Efex Pro until I arrived at this de-saturated, off-color look.

 

Morant's Curve

Here's a Nikon Coolscan VI ED scan from a Kodak Etkachrome VG100 slide. The Nikon scan software has dust and scratch removal built in. I just did a little basic level adjustment, resize and sharpening.

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, 2004

Lighthouse at Ile-aux-Perroquets, Quebec

 

I was here for a puffin photography workshop. I would carry two rigs down to the beach, to shoot puffin. One rig was my full-frame Canon 5DS-R and a 100-400mm for hand held shooting. That's what I used for this shot, as I walked back to my room, in a second house that you don't see here. This is handheld, at 142mm, f/8 and 1/640-sec. RAW conversion in DxO Optics Pro 11.4.2:

 

Evening View by David Stephens, on Flickr

Late to the party, as usual... Posted previously under B&W: