Dawn

do you use photoshop?...for example this mountain range is desert like but then u have another one (lookslike the same mountain range)that is covered in snow...did u do this in photo shop or did u visit this site twice?

Melissa,

 

I used photoshop to do things that are commonly called digital darkroom.

 

For this picture that means scanning (LS-2000) w/ 16-bit, cropping and adjusting levels in photoshop 6, a little bit of selective lightening of the entire lake area, converting to 8-bit, reduction to 800 x someting, adding the frame and saving as a JPEG.

 

The mountains in this photo and in this are the same, they were taken some 5 hours apart. For this pic I got up at 5:30 and hiked 10-15 minutes over talus up a slight slope. I exposed 1/2 stop below the spot reading of the sky, but you can still see some snowfields on the far left of the frame just above the lake and below the shadow of the peak a little bit to the right of the center.

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Nice effort, bottom half is a bit dull and might have been stronger with the sun a little higher. But I wasn't there so I can't say.

Jeff,

 

as you can see from my comment above I also felt that the lake was a little bit to dark, darker than I remembered it. That's why I decided to lighten it up a little bit.

 

But I find it hard to reproduce this kind of pic accurately on different computer systems, because if it looks too light the effect is gone (in my opinion). I don't have a super-duper calibrated system, but I have access to about 5 PCs, 20 Macs, a few Linux machines and 2 SGI's, all with very different characteristics, the PCs having the smallest gamma (=dark) and the SGIs having the highest (= a lot of stuff looks totally blown out), and this is not even considering color temperature. I consider this a more or less accurate estimate how different my pictures may look like on various computers of photo.net users.

 

This pic was taken when it was pretty dark, the sun had just crept above some distant mountain. I opted to present it in a way that it would not look to light on any machine. On my own PC it looks darker than I would wish, but on the SGI it looks like 7:30 not 5:30 and I can see a lot of detail in the shadow parts of the mountain and the reflection is much better visible.

 

I could have waited a little bit, but then the shadows on the mountains would be gone and the whole feeling of the place would be different.

 

And I had gotten up with out anything to eat, and I was cold and hungry!

 

Great! I like the similarity in the shapes of the shadows with the peaks and their reflections!

I do enjoy seeing your work. Congrats.

I find this picture (except maybe for the scanning quality) very under-rated... Maybe due to the bottom part of the image, that some might find to dark or too empty... The way I look at it, it is aesthetically perfect. The bottom brings the eye to the top, and the darkness is to my eye an enhancement of the mood - no objection to it at all... Colors are stunning. Great job !