A cream across dimensions?
Sometimes we simply take a snapshot, just because the moment is there…
As I walked across Mumbai, this caught my eye; was it just a leftover from a poster advertising an art exhibit, or was it an inter-dimensional being trying to traverse into our dimension?
I might never know…
A quick take on amazing landscape
For this late post, I thought this recent shot might be appropriate…
On my last foray into Valley of Fire, this was a test shot for setting up a pinhole image. I wish are that in a future post.
Bozo the Clown on color TV!
As I’m wrapping up my day, I thought it might be fun to look at old slides. Here’s one that I came across…
This is definitely old-time TV with Bozo the Clown. My thinking is that either the camera or the TV were new to take this picture. I will definitely scan it at higher resolution at some point, as this is a fun image!
How do you park your bicycle?
As I got waylaid by too many items in my todo list, I thought I’d share something quick and amusing…
During one of the photowalks at the New England Camera Club Council meeting of 2022, I saw this interesting bicycle on the University of Massachusetts, Amherst campus.
The image was shot with a camera converted for Infrared photography.
In the land of giants?
Last week’s landscape image for Travel Tuesday – Ep.5 was right out of Star Wars! It might have been, but then again, it was the Isle of Skye and the majestic Quiraing range.
This week I went a bit further back in my catalog, all the way to 2002…
This shot was captured using an Olympus CAMedia CA-3100 Zoom camera with a whopping 3 Megapixel resolution! Our camera technology has progress a bit since then!
I expect that this is a pretty easy location for some of you to guess, as it is a much-visited attraction! Where would this be?
That Old Dutch feeling
For this edition of the Monday series, I thought I’d go back in time a bit and take an image from 2008 and treat it a little differently…
How about bringing a bit of that very Dutch feeling into a scene? Canals, brick houses, a clocktower and a flag.
A field of peace
A moment of reflection from last year’s voyage to Iceland…
A moment of serenity from Hellisandur.
A Saturday of discovery!
As I sit here watching a bit of Premier League football after breakfast, a quick post to provide an idea for a Saturday if you happen to be in the Netherlands…
The Institute of Sound & Vision in Hilversum is an architecturally stunning building, both on the outside and the inside, as captured in this image. Striking colors and angles make this a sight to behold!
Additionally, the exhibits are always thought, ear and eye provoking making this a wonderful visit.
Rock of many colors
In between work on the larger blog post, here’s a quick shot from the recent Valley of Fire trip…
This was one of my iPhone shots looking back into the slot canyon that is part of the White Domes loop trail; I use my iPhone to get a quick view of what a shot will look like at different heights, so I only set my tripod up once.
One of the things that struck me about this canyon is how some of the rock is just about grayish white and almost integrates with the red rock next to it. It gave me the sense of a selective color image, which I don’t expect in Nature.
The Steps in the Process
In this post, I’d like to give you a view of some of the approach that I take in developing the final image from the shots that I capture on scene.
This particular shot was taken at Gold Butte National Monument in Nevada, as we were exploring some of the Joshua Trees, rock arches and beautifully colored landscape. I came upon a deposit formation in the rocks that caught my eye…
Sometimes our minds make an immediate connection with something that we see, which occurred for me in this case; at the angle that I viewed this through the lens there appeared the eye of an elephant imbued with high intelligence. This regal creature was bejeweled running down its trunk, and I could see tusks protruding to the lower right. In my mind’s eye, I saw it trudging through a challenging mountainous landscape in severe weather conditions, which led me to the working title of ‘Alpine Crossing.’
As I wanted to get as much detail into this image as possible, I opted for using the Focus Bracketing on my Canon EOS R5. If you’re not familiar with this technique, it is a method of taking the focal point in a series of shots from the near to the far; this allows for compositing of the images into a single, high depth of field image. For my options, I chose to shoot a set of 5 images and a somewhat below mid-range focus increment; reason being that I was shooting with a 21 mm focus length at f/8, so there was already significant depth of field. This series of images was the following…
The eagle-eyed among you might be able to spot the transition in focal plane, which is hard to see until examined on a big monitor.
The next step is to do some basic editing on these images, for which I use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), which I find easiest to access through Adobe Bridge. In ACR, there are 2 main features that I tend to lean on, as they make life easier: Profiles and Calibration. Let’s start with Profiles…
If you’re not a frequent user of ACR, you may not be aware of the wonderful selection of preset profiles that are provided here. They are a great shortcut to closing in on a look that you have in mind for the final image. In this case, I used the Artistic 04 profile and set the opacity at 81% to tone it down a little bit. Note that I’ve selected all 5 images for this edit; if you find yourself editing only one of the images, don’t worry, as you can sync your edits across all of them. If you wonder how to access Profiles, the arrow in this image shows the way…
Calibration is another quick way to take a look at the colors in your image and allow them to pop. Note that if you have a large amount of one color, such as a blue sky, you may want to de-emphasize that color. In a lot of cases, I find that working just the Blue and Green primaries does the trick; as you can see, I added some Red as well.
Next step will be to take the process into Photoshop, which I’ll cover in tomorrow’s post.
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