Yosemite I: Infrared Duotone

very well here for me. I love the dark sky and the little tuft of cloud hanging over El Cap. It gives almost a personification of the rock.

Nice work.

It is difficult to do something new photographically in Yosemite but you have achieved it nicely with these IR images. Fine work.

Comments, ratings, suggestions appreciated on this Yosemite shot.

 

Thanks.

I love that deep dark sky. The cloud coming over the top, could it be darker? It looks almost paper white with out any detail at all. The snow covered mountains back there in the distance, if they were paper white, that would be ok, there's no chance of seeing any detail in them, anyway. The position of the cloud is ok, but I can imagine someone not liking it. I mean, I can appreciate it being there as much as if it were not there. It neither adds nor detracts, in my opinion, except for its brightness. Clouds are not easy to find in Yosemite, I understand.

 

The foreground slope would be less prominent if it were darker, too, and would give more power to El Capitan as the central feature of this image. The slope has a way of blending into El Capitan which extends the subject area of the print to the bottom edge. Because of that, it has as much importance as the El Capitan. Darkening it would centralize the mountain and drive the eye towards the cliff. Do you think that making it darker would help?

Bob, thanks for your email. Maybe I was wrong about burning this. I tried it using the image you posted, and I wasn't too happy with the results. Because the foreground trees are so bright, they don't really burn too well. I burned them anyway, just to make them darker. I also burned the top ridge of snow on the left (it looks like the cloud, but it's actually snow) and the mountain in the background, and the talus slope on the bottom right. After all that, it's true the eye is taken right to the cliff, but I'm not too excited about the way the foreground turned out. So, I cropped some of it out, sort of as a triage kind of thing, and I'm a little happier with that, although I was hoping to hold on to the wider crop that you posted. In the uploaded images, the burned version is first, followed by a tighter crop, followed by your original. But something still bothers me about the way it burns, and maybe it is ok as posted.

Thanks Doug for all of the time you've spent on this. I like your first edited version best--better than the one I posted. Digital infrared is, as you noted, is sometimes quite difficult to dodge and burn, as well as hard to "previsualize" when shooting. Thanks again for your helpful comments.

Excellent shot! Looks like you're having a lot of fun mastering this techinique.

This folder is like a tribute to Ansel Adams. And it is a fitting tribute at that.

Thanks for your comment, Kevin. I was pretty happy with this one!

I think this is the best one of the series. I love the black sky and the painted clouds.

Palmi, thanks for commenting. The digital infrared creates some interesting effects.