Wednesday Landscapes, 9 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.

 

I'm relieved to say that last week's computer crisis got resolved, though it took some persuasion to convince it that I am indeed me and so should have access to my files. So I'm finally back to photographic challenges. The problem here, besides the weather (this started off as another gray rainy-day image) was lens distortion. This was made with a 10-mm zoom on a 1.6-crop-factor camera, with the camera angled down to emphasize the foreground. That left objects in the upper right corner tilted about 15 degrees to the right even after applying the lens correction in Lightroom. In Photoshop I first did a transform warp that dealt with about 10 degrees of the problem before things started looking strange, and I took care of most of the rest using liquify on individual clumps of trees. This is once again Trinidad State Beach in northern California, at about 8 am during a February storm. (ISO 400, 1/50 s, f/11.0)

 

I did this shot before digital, about 1993 on a camping trip with my kids. Nikon 35mm, color film with a 24mm lens. Scanned at 4000ppi, which is about the same resolution as a D7100 nowadays. I had to do a lot of adjustments with contrast and color in PS. I always like to start with a fairly "flat" scan to capture the dynamic range and lighten and darken things as needed.

I shot this at a nature preserve in my area ("Flamingo Gardens". The tree is dead and survived a large limb torn off by a storm.

Vineyards and orchards as seen driving near Greve in Chianti, between Florence and Sienna in Tuscany, Italy.

 

 

I chose my 17-35mm 2.8 for this shot, set at 25mm, on my D800E. It proved to be my go-to lens about 80% of the time on this trip, and has been in my bag for about 15 years. I love the weight to body ratio for shooting handheld.

Lets give this a try,

 

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Edited August 13, 2017 by tom_kessler

I saw this shot first in Monochrome because of the fall of the light, but looking at the color version, I rather like both for different reasons.

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