marcadamus

Thanks all for your comments. The light source at the sun and around the sun and some of the nearby branches is real and strait from RAW. The rest is done with simple highlight dodging and burning. There was no additional saturation added, but the range of color was changed slightly. This is absolutely one of my most surreal pieces and it's intended as such. You can't imagine what a surreal moment it was being there! The forest is magical to me and there's magic involved to get this picture to look like this, but it wasn't any sort of days-long process in PS or anything. It was amazingly simple. Yes, the light looks subdued like a painting and not harsh like a photograph and that's intentional in this particular case. I appreciate all of your commentary except the guy who didn't like my title - come on, man! It's a freaking title! Let me choose what I feel best describes my experience and the piece, and know that it came from my heart and a passion for the place I captured, not a garage sale. That's just low.
Again, thanks! There is way, way, way more processed stuff out there than my work these days and it's very common to see that. There's also far, far, more photo-realisitically rendered stuff. I just do what I like, and here it was a more surrealistic rendition, and that's my choice as an artist.
It's always interesting to see how people perceive these things, because they are so often so far from the reality of what was done or not done to a photo. For example, someone linked an '07 shot of mine on the Nat Geo site to this and made the claim that it was so much 'more natural' looking, or along those lines In fact, the light in that photo was every bit as manipulated as this, and I would say more so - if you were comparing the two from their origins. It just goes to show that people really don't know what they are looking at from the same perspective as the artist, or from the perspective of what is real or not. And why should they? If you wanted to see what was real you would have been there!

It seems like I've seen Double-Arch under the stars more than any other shot from Arches over the past five years or so.  Easily hundreds of attempts I can recall.   For many reasons though, this is the best of them.  I can't think of a vertical perspective quite like this and of course, the positioning of the figure could not possibly be better.  Very impressive rendition that gives scale, power and mystery to this amazing scenery. 

I do both.  Just depends on what I want.  The only line for me is not changing the subjects themselves, as I do want people to see those.   I have always ranged from true to what I saw to an exploration of what's possible with the tools we have.  Probably always will. 

Here's the kicker:  This thing you see here, is 12 inches tall!  I wanted to make it look huge, and maybe it does?  The entire thing was DOF blended with a light source I created.  It took about 1 hour to finish all the exposures needed to pull it off at night.  The sky and all was really there, the camera did not move.  Sometimes I get bored with reality and sometimes I want to find new places or new ways to record things entirely.  I've been doing this awhile now, and if I find one thing more true than anything else, it's that creativity is more fulfilling to me than anything else.   I think that in this day and age you see more copies of the same type of stuff and more similar compositions than ever, so why not?  Thanks!

A blending for depth of field was utilized to create this unique

rendition of Oregon's famous Elowah Falls.

Larry, no.  I never have used what most people call HDR.  The blends were for other things, like less noise in the unmoving tufa, the best water exposure and tack-sharp sky.  Everything in my style comes from a fully manual adjustment of everything from tones to color, exposure and more.  I do not use automated processes because I am the artist.  My unique version of Photoshop work involves completely different ways of doing things, of my own creation.  I use no layers, masks or anything.   I could do all of it with the most basic tools but I do no harm to the image quality and I do it all with accuracy and a vision that is my own.  It's been learned over a very long time and works for reasons that are sometimes innate or specific to the artist.

In the sense that some of my scenes record a high dynamic range, yes, I use what you might loosely call HDR, but everything is painted together manually and I am in control of it fully.  I blend (paint) all the time in PS.  This scene had no more than a stop or two of dynamic range though, so that was easy.  My work in Photoshop was aimed entirely at contrast adjustments to the sky, color accuracy, noise reduction and so on.  The image comes from the exposures I listed in my description, but how/why they are painted together as they are is a topic worth an e-book or more.  It took about 30 minutes in PS for me to finish this work and it prints well, considering.  Everything you see here was recorded by the camera on the night of the capture without moving the camera though, and that's about as much as I can elaborate. 

Thanks! 

Such a wonderful balance and complimentary warm/cool color palette here.  Excellent!

Thanks.  I've been here leading groups 10-20 days per year for years and this was one of only 2 times I've ever seen this foam swirling around like this.  It was the icing on the cake, so to speak! 

This is a macro telephoto of oil catching light on the ocean, and is

natural! I chartered a boat off the California coast to these oil

seeps which have been there for eons, just to photograph them. It was

pretty neat! Really triggers my imagination.

Action: It's important to landscapes too! This is from the

middle-east, in the United Arab Emirates. I was conducting a workshop

there (among other things) recently and had a great time! Thanks for

your thoughts.

Air temperature 15 degees F at 4am (air temp is very important to

night photography, as your sensor overheats easily when warm!), Mono

Lake, late March. 4, 20mm exposures total: 2 exposures at f/2.8, ISO

3200, 1 minute for the Tufa stacks DOF blended. 30 seconds at ISO 5000

for the water. 30 seconds at ISO 5000 for the North end of the Milky

Way above which took a HUGE amount of well constructed contrast

manipulation to get it to look like that, but nothing else was added

there. Light comes from the towns of Lee Vining and Bridgeport and a

small amount of light paint added to the Tufa shots.

I don't know where it's all going, Jeff, but I can tell you that there is even less manipulation in the recording of this 180-degree field of view than a photographer using a fisheye to bend a scene that is also outside of one's field of view.  The fact that I used multiple exposures simply makes what was not possible before, possible.  That's it.  All the subjects depicted here are processed in the same manner as many digital images today, with RAW adjustments, dodge/burning and various levels adjustments painted on in different levels of my design.  What is Photoshop?  It's a way of expanding what's possible.  The subject matter here - rocks, water, sun, everything like that is how optimized extensively but the details themselves are unaltered and the sky and light were really there. 

All that said, I couldn't really care though, as this is really art for me.  Strict documentary photography (think journalism) has it's place but this isn't it.   I could have painted this scene.  It wouldn't matter.  I saw a Pixar movie yesterday, captivated by the beauty they had brought to life.  That's what I want sometimes - beauty.  It's just that I choose to let people know what's been done to my photographic images.   I do so, in part, because I also want people to know that they can go there themselves and see at least the same subjects I captured!  Some do, some don't though.  If you want to hear my thoughts on it all, it's on my website.  Thanks!

By the way, I would tell you that "Cold and Alone", while I do enjoy that more than this myself, took just as much Photoshop work.

Because the native maximum size you can post here is 640 pixels - that's it.  Any bigger than that and what you are seeing is an auto-compressed file, which is softened a lot.  I don't want you to see that first and then have to click on the 'larger image' just to see it bigger.  If you want to see it bigger, you can look at any of the other photo websites I post to, like FredMiranda.com, which display large image sizes in their designated display areas. 

In fact, here:  http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1124034/0#10734062  ..............that's the most useful article I've probably ever done on my night stuff, and you can see them bigger.

This is a sea cave located in Los Angeles, of all places. You haven't

seen pictures of it before because the only way you can shoot it is to

merge ultra-wide images together for an enormous, 180-degree field of

view, which is very difficult to do in some situations and harder to

visualize. I made many attempts at it before getting this sunset here.

My friend and fellow full-time nature photographer, Abdullaziz bin

Ali, walking alone through the endless sands of the Empty Quarter, in

the United Arab Emirates.

A winter night while backpacking alone in the White Mountains of

California. Below zero temps but worth it for skies like this! This

image is 4 vertical images stitched together for a huge field of view

and blended with 4 more across the landscape for the best detail and

dynamic range.

6 inches of new snow in the middle of June in Oregon....can't complain

about that! What a great morning it was! Definitely kept the

mosquitoes down ;-)

Violent winds blowing snow across meter-thick translucent clear ice at

Icefields pass in the Canadian Rockies. This is a single exposure.

Composition and idea where pretty standard fare here, but in that

light, who could resist?

I've always mixed in a fair amount of much more subtle and intimate work with my more dramatic stuff.  Things have been more dramatic of late though and that's just a result of where I've been - two of the continent's most rugged and steep mountain ranges and lots of great light. 

Dramatic skies behind the most dramatic peak in the north. Yukon

Territory, Canada. Taken from my campsite while backpacking the range.

If you were on my Glacier National Park tour you'd have seen that there was nothing fantasy about this scenario we all photographed here :-) 

Jeremy, I used a Hoya HMC Pro 1 ultra-slim 1.2 and a B+W 3.0 combined for 14 stops on my Canon 17-40 at 17mm.