"Goodnight Green Valley, Farewell Green Spring"

The low angle of the setting sun adds texture to a rugged landscape. Taken in early April, the foothills of the southern Sierra Nevada were already showing the browns of summer. In the next few weeks, more moisture will begin the winter process, returning these hills to a vibrant green. By February, the flowers will begin to emerge and Spring will return. Within two months of the first flowers emerging, the landscape will begin to dry from lack of moisture. These hills will then begin to endure numerous consecutive days of cloudless blue skies. Three weeks without a single cloud is not uncommon. Everything that colors the land will go dormant until the next rainy season. A never ending cycle of abundance and sparseness. Thanks for taking a look and please enjoy the Larger preview!!

Thanks for any discussion!!

Mark.... Gorgeous warm afternoon light and your trademark detail. Well titled and the ominous near cloud reflects changes coming.... as always, great stuff... Mike

 

 

I like very much how the shadow model the hills, like the blue of the sky and the cloud, but I don't like the clouds on the top, I'll crop them out, though.

well done

Mark,

Beautiful capture. I love the warm afternoon light. Great job. Regards, Patsy

Outstanding scene..congrats.

a wonderful place for taking photos, lovely trees and hills. nice colors and light. well done.

What a beautiful place, Mark, and well photographed. The low angled light adds a lot of depth, and I like those small, sparse trees on the hills. 7/6 anon.

 

Cheers,

Paolo

Hi Mark, this is a wonderful photograph! Wonderful light and just the right amount of moody sky above those rolling hills. Love the detail in that valley.

 

Now, don't take this the wrong way, but it looks like you did some post-shoot processing here; something along the lines of an Orton effect. I really like the way this image looks and if you did do something special to get it to look this way I would appreciate being let in on it. Regards.

Thank you Mike, Vincenzo, Ernest, Patsy, Keith, Zsolt, Paolo and Walter! I have grown very fond of these simple compositions just east of my home in Bakersfield. I wasn't sure how it would be received and I am glad to see the positive response. Walter, I am familiar with and have experimented with the Orton effect or variations of. No Orton effect here, but the scene does glow. Even when I can keep a scene within the histogram, I still like to blend varied exposures. Even though this scene was outside the histogram, I probably could have made it work with one exposure. Meanwhile, because I have used a brighter exposure to work with the shadows, this has allowed me to pull good clean detail out of the darkest areas. In this case, the green valley has been brought into a brighter tonal range, yet the subtle blend disguises it from the casual view. If you look at the distant hill, the shadows are darker than the foreground valley. The glow is most noticeable on the lower left hill, the first place the eye finds in the image. This is actually a blend of three exposures. The sky exposure was a slightly different white balance (bluer), which added depth by increasing the color contrast (warm colors jump forward while cool colors recede). As our own eyes scan a dynamic scene such as this, our pupils adjust to the varied light real time, something a single exposure from a camera cannot do. The blending of exposures recreates the scene in a similar manner. I like to work with subtle, almost transparent blending to pull the viewer in, giving a "feel like I'm there" effect. When I was shooting this scene, it was truly glowing in the light, even in the shadowed areas. Blending brings that experience to the two dimensional medium. A lengthy answer I know, but I hope it explains what I think you are seeing!

Many thanks for the info, Mark! Were these "normal" blends or did you use other blending modes (like darken or multiply)? Regards.

I use a multiply blend mode to deepen colors and darken (or burn) areas. In this case, I added density to the sky and the nearest foreground. While I do apply some vibrance and saturation in ACR, I prefer not to use the saturation slider in Photoshop. My preferred method is to apply a channel mixer layer with each channel set to +120 for the color of the channel and -20 for the other colors. I then change the blend mode to color and fill the mask with 50% gray. If the adjustment is too strong, I just use a black brush to decrease the vibrance, if I want more, I use white to increase the vibrance. If the overall vibrance is too strong, I decrease the opacity of the adjustment later. This is a trick I learned from Floris van Breugel (I modified the action with the fill of 50% gray). It gives me that Velvia look that I am missing with digital.

Buena composición y color, Saludos

I like this shot Mark. The clouds do have a greenish tint (WB ?)

Interesting about your seasons. Where I am at, we will be snowed in until May, and then a nice green Summer :-)

Thanks Gallego and Brian! Yeah, Brian, I lived in Littleton, Colorado for a couple of years. What a contrast. It is similar here if you go to the higher Sierras. The wildflowers don't get started there until July. I think the season started here 2 weeks early last spring, but for sure, the grasses are at their greenest in February and March when we have rain. In fact, I remember the last rain coming in March. I don't think we have had a drop since!

Hey, thanks again Mark for the info. I wish more of the PhotoNet "Masters" would be as open. Floris has a great technique; a lot to learn from over there. I give you a 7 for the info and a 7 for the photograph. Regards.