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Wednesday Landscapes, 26 April 2017


Leslie Reid

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This is the second week of our experiment with a new thread, and you are again invited to upload one of your landscape photos (or more than one, if an extra would help illustrate your objectives or process). I also invite you—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 I further invite you to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. My ideal for the thread would be for this to be a place where we can learn from one another. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

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Thanks to all who participated last week—your responses inspired me to go out and try some new things. We had a few hours of sunshine here this week, so I spent a morning experimenting with a polarizer. I like what it does to foliage color saturation, but I miss the two stops it’s extracting in exchange. If I remember right, this frame was about half-polarized (I didn’t want to lose the reflected color in the stream) and hand-held at 1/5 s (camera jammed against the huge Sitka spruce you see part of on the left), ISO 1600, f/11, 18-135 mm lens at 18 mm (Canon 80D). I shot a burst of six because, although lens stabilization is miraculous, I’m not.

 

All post-processing was in Lightroom 6. This is uncropped, with reduced highlights, increased whites, and reduced shadows, and with a slight increase in contrast. I adjusted clarity in several ways here: no adjustment on the water, +20 over the rest of the frame, and a further boost in the foreground, with slight increases in saturation where needed to compensate for the loss in saturation that comes with the increased clarity.

 

I wrestled a bit with the upper left corner—it had been close to blown out. I used an adjustment brush to tame it using strongly reduced highlights and a 1-stop reduction in exposure. The tree trunk in that corner had been relatively dark toward the top, which made the background look even lighter than it actually was. I first encouraged the moss to grow farther up the trunk, and then I used another brush to lighten the upper part of the trunk, moss and all.

 

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One of the many Mill Creeks in Humboldt County

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Another two installments from my rainy weekend in Zion Canyon. My issues and comments from last week's two images apply equally to these. First, the Court of the Patriarchs:

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And this is a very ephemeral waterfall across the canyon from the Zion-Mt. Carmel tunnel:

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The water stopped flowing within five minutes of the rain stopping.

 

Your thoughts and recommendations on the best methods for shooting and processing images like these, captured under heavy clouds, in the mist and rain, are sincerely appreciated.

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I like David Triplett's (unprocessed?) color picture very much. I like it because it's flat (black-less) and the colors are soft and not quite "right." It looks like a memory and I love that.

 

Heavy black and loud colors make "good" photos but bad pictures, IMO. Triplett's color picture is simply lovely and doesn't trumpet his presence to the detriment of what the picture gives to me.

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This is an old farm house in Teton Valley, Idaho. The photo was taken perhaps ten years ago with a 4x5 Wista field camera, 135mm Rodenstock lens, and the negative "scanned" recently using a DSLR. I probably used a yellow filter to help bring out the clouds. Sometimes I miss the slow deliberate pace of using a view camera, but I use the camera only infrequently these days.894385195_oldfarmhousetetonvalley4x5s.thumb.jpg.89758a8442c5d6c15e790bdecc3a7866.jpg
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This was one of many I took on a beautiful day last May hiking the Cinque Terre trail in Italy.

 

It was breathtakingly beautiful, often quite rigorous and occasionally dangerous. The earliest documentation on the trail dates to the 11th century. The trail links 5 fishing villages and is backed up by a 19th century railway system that cuts through the mountains from village to village, allowing you to catch a quick ride back to your accommodations from whichever village you may have wandered into. Since 1997 the trail is a designated Unesco World Heritage Site.

 

We spent three days exploring the villages, each day hiking to a different one and due to the situation, I chose to only take three lenses, batteries and a polarizing filter with me. In lieu of a tripod I used a beanbag approach when there were convenient railings or low walls and 'mirror-up mode' with remote cable release.

 

This shot was taken with a D800E, AF-S 17-35mm, f11, 1/200, ISO 200.

 

Leslie, thanks for hosting this thread!

 

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I like it when there is some nice clouds in the sky; the shadow play on the ground also adds interest. This image was made in the Carrizo Plain National Monument with a Sony A7II and a Voigtlander Heliar III 15/4.5, the widest focal length I currently own. Lens tilted upward to eliminate some of the foreground in favor of capturing more cloud cover.

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I like David Triplett's (unprocessed?) color picture very much. I like it because it's flat (black-less) and the colors are soft and not quite "right." It looks like a memory and I love that... ...Triplett's color picture is simply lovely and doesn't trumpet his presence to the detriment of what the picture gives to me.

Julie, thank you for your kind words. In point of fact, my image is HEAVILY processed, but with the intent of giving the feeling you describe. The light was so flat and dim, severely filtered by the mist in the air, that the source NEF file required PP to be usable as an engaging image. If you and others find the result pleasing and effective, then I will count myself as having succeeded in my intent. Your input is sincerely appreciated, particularly in that this is my first real foray into photos in the rain.

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I wanted to take the farmhouse, not a problem it is there, the Spring flowers, they are flowering for about a week, some sunshine at the right time of day and nice clouds. I went there four times and was not very lucky with the clouds. Eventually the desired clouds emerged but then most of the flowers were gone. I'll try again next year.

Ferdi.

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There are hundreds of volcanos in Iceland. Fortunately only 30 or so are active, hopefully not this one. The sky was generally overcast, making the contrast very low, even by Sony A7 standards. Consequently I shot many scenes using using bracketed HDR processing. Most of the time, except for glacier scenes, a 3 shot, +/- 2 stop sequence was sufficient. I carried a tripod, but since image stabilization is so good in the Sony, I didn't need to use it all the time.

 

Sony A7Rii + 70-200/4 G OSS, 1/1250, f/8, ISO 100

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I use tone mapping to enliven the images. HDR has more headroom for tone mapping. When the sky is totally overcast, you can bring out details in the clouds barely visible to the eye, while keeping details in the deepest shadows (or black rock), like the basalt cliff in the photo above. The sky was blue to the north but completely overcast at my back. The rocks were very dark in the single best exposure of the string (of three).

 

Many times I could do without HDR, but when you have so little time so far from home, it's best to not take chances.

Edited by Ed_Ingold
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