Untitled

Quite moment.

Good shot. Good colours, composition and details. Congrats!

 

Torfinn

Beautiful place Dave, love those mountains, it makes a lovely background contrast with the green . Regards Andrea

Thanks Torfinn and Andrea!

Not only is it a beautiful landscape....rugged mountains, green foliage, clear blue sky and a pristine stream...it's also a well composed and exposed image. I'm curious how much PSing you did to enhance this composition or is it pretty much straight out of the camera and do you shoot in RAW? Nosey ol' broad, but I think I can learn much from your examples if I just understood how you got there. Although I am my own worst enemy, I just hate spending time on this damn contraption.

Well, your asking me about a pretty clean image to begin with. It was 0630 in June, humidity was 17% and I was at 8400 feet. I normaly shoot in RAW as this one was and slightly under exposed. If a photo has noise, I use Noise Ninja - did not need it on this photo. I've used Fuji Velvia, since it's been available, in my film camera and love the saturation. So, because of the draw of color saturation, I have a Velvia plugin that has the algorhythm that I like when needed. I've added about 10% of the velvia algorhythm to this photo, that's all it needed. You could do the same by saturating the various color channels. I sharpened the edges slightly and reduced it by 50%. Lastly, I cropped it down so that the slopes on the sides didn't over power the mountaines and eliminated some of the foreground water. Oh, then did the matting to keep focus on the image.

This was taken with me standing in the middle of the stream (kind of cold) with the camera on a tripod approx 12inches above water line. I had a UV filter on the lens which was an 18 to 70 zoom set at 22mm focal length, shutter speed 1/40 @ f/22 and ISO 100.

It may sound like a lot but mostly slight tweeks. Susan, don't think of it as being on the computer but living in the picture (your in the scene adjusting nature).

Hope this helps some and keep in touch, Dave

When you compose and take a picture it's a little more than just "point and shoot", with all the arguments about digital versus film this one would support the continual use of velvia film for wonderful colors. Do you notice a lose of quality when you scan your film and convert to pixels in order to use PS on the computer? I need to buy a ND filter to help "hold back" the skies in my images. I do have a polarizer but have yet to really learn how to use it (practice makes perfect), I tend to over darken the skies and I don't like that look. Your suggestions and "reworks" are very helpful, now if I would just implement them, gracias Dave.

Forgot about asking about the UV filter, I have read in some of the forums that it's not necessary to use a UV (most say it's for protecting the lens) as each layer of glass degrades the image, so I use a hood. What think you? And I love what you said about "living in the picture", my images are about where I live and what I do and how I "see" my environment.

Susan, I don't disagree with the UV issue at all, it will also develop some hazing on the inside if it's not removed and cleaned frequently (as will the lens).

Check this out; http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4500222 (or go to my landscape photos and view the one that's titled "Maroon Bells - color" but view the larger version. This is a scanned transparency of maroon bells, I have a Nikon coolscan to digitalize all of my slides and negs. I didn't add anything to that image but had to remove noise created by the scanner and there's a lot of artifact that's very visible in the sky from the emulsion in the transparency that had to be removed. Oh, the lens used for the transparency photo was a fairly inexpensive nikon zoom. Digital cameras on the upper end have better resolution than analog cameras. Because of that, I can't use that zoom on my D200, the results are horrid. There are several photos in that folder from scanned slides and or prints.

As for "point and shoot" remember, Ansel Adams didn't just point and shoot.

Get out there and take some photos, Dave

An informative and encouraging response as always, much appreciated. My all time favorite A.A. photo is Moonrise Over Hernandez..... titled something like that.

Another beautiful shot, Dave. I've been there a few times, and the water really is cold, but the scenery is magnificent. Great work.