christiankiely

Digital mosaic of 19 separate images ... 61 Megapixel Final Image

providing a field of view not typically possible.

Hmm... depends on the year. This shot was from the 2003 bloom and taken in March. Last year we go so much rain (an absolute ton) there were spotty blooms on 26-Dec-2004!!! But the big explosion was in Feb-2005.

Sorry to say that so far this year the rain has been non-existant. Just about all of SoCal, from LAX to San Diego to Palm Springs has received between 0.75" to 1.75" of rain since 01-Jul-2005.

To put that in perspective, over Thanksgiving Day weekend last year a foot of snow fell in Joshua Tree and there were flash floods all over the deserts... the Palm Oasis canyon in Anza Borrego was basically destroyed by floods last year.

So... you're guess is as good as mine, but the later the better, and keep an eye out for some rain down here.

This is a blended image... tripod mounted. One exposure @ 6 seconds (for the highlights), the other @ 20 seconds (for the shadows), both @ f11. Then layered the darker image over the lighter one and used a layer mask w/ gaussian blur to increase the dynamic range.

There's no way that a camera can accurately show all of the dark and light tones in this scene. You'd either get the detail on the bottom and the top totally blown out, or nice tones on the top and pitch black on the bottom.

Just to jump in on this conversation... Eugene: the "sun beams" only occur from the spring solstice to the fall solstice... so, summer for those.

Due to the way the light falls in the canyon, the winter gets more "blues" in the wall due because of the lighting not getting all the way to the bottom most of the time.

Exposures range from 5 - 30 seconds and you can count on having to take a shot about 3 times because someone will walk thru it. The only other thing to do is to shoot above the crowds and find details in the upper walls of the canyon when the next tour group is on their way thru.

re-edit of an image posted yesterday. Blended image of two

exposures... both Infrared. 10 sec for the top image to render

the "ghosts"... stacked at 70% opacity over a shot w/o the carriage

or horses to add transparency to the figures. Selected features from

the background image brought out to the front to convey more from the

image.

I like what you're trying to do here, but there are two issues that I see, and they're both pretty much related.

The horizon being cut by the rock breaks the continiuty of the scene and to my eye is a bit disturbing. The other issue there is that since that element is there, you had to start the grad below it, which cripples the shadow detail and is giving the tell tall grad line.

PS The sky is perfect, but I agree that the FG needs to be darket... there is no direct light on it.

Jake,

Nice shot, but definite red cast to the image.

Try this, bring up Curves (CRTL-M), then CTRL-1 for just the red channel. Slide the bottom left point from 0 over to about 18 or 20. Then bring up hue/sat (CTRL-U) and drop down to pick red, and reduce red saturation by about 20%

Jake,

No doubt that grads were needed and this is a wonderful composition. I'd suggest that it might be a just a touch overdone w/ them.

Thankfully this can be mostly be resolved in Photoshop. The foreground seems to be too bright in compared to the setting sun, and the top clouds are particularly dark (the biggest evidence of grad use).

I created some layers and darkened the foregound, and then added some light into the top clouds w/ a masked layer. Then toned down the blue saturation and bumped up red and yellow a touch.

Hopefully this is helpful.

PS what this type of image screams for is a "reverse" ND Grad... see on this page: http://www.singh-ray.com/grndgrads.html