A Photographic and Cinematic Adventure On The Creative Frontier
A couple weeks back we had quite the series of thunderstorms roll through Colorado’s front range. They put a premature end to any type of bike ride I tried to do in the evenings. Well, if you can’t beat them…join them! I decided to go out and make portraits of these amazing sculptures in the sky. I will be sharing these images the rest of the week in this short series. I hope you enjoy it!
I have enjoyed putting the series together. If you don’t already have a place to go out for a walk, run, or ride I hope you decide to go out and find one to call your own. It actually motivated me to venture off the beaten path and explore a small pond I have been meaning to visit. After spending about an hour or so making images here, the sun set and forced me to leave. I would have stayed a bit longer, but there was a big animal moving around in the brush behind me. Elk? Deer? Sasquash?
Photo Note: Lately I have been using Photomatix 4′s Tone Compression process instead of the Details Enhancer. I like the natural results it yields. If you don’t already, it might be something you might want to try.
This is my favorite part of the run. I actually go out of my way to run it. Its a mysterious little section of the forest that lies between a meandering stream and a small pond. I wanted to convey a bit of fantasy, so I used the 45mm PCE. It was able to keep a majority of the image out of focus and allow your imagination to fill in the blanks.
Our adventure seemed liked it only started yesterday. However, tonight is the end of an trip that spanned thousands of miles over 12 days. The adventure began in Alaska with a visit to Denali National park and ended with a relaxing weekend in my new favorite city, Vancouver. In the middle was a cruise to celebrate my folks’ 40th wedding anniversary (Congrats team!). There are gigs worth of images and several great stories to tell over the coming months. Look for a week’s worth of posts that will tell the story of our flight to Denali and the landing on a glacier at its base. Personally, I am having a hard time waiting on that one. I can’t wait to share it with you! For now, I wanted to share an image from the beginning of the adventure, our trip into Denali National park by bus. If you ever have the chance to visit this park, take it. It is an incredible place. If you do visit, I have two tips for you. 1) Expect bad weather. That way you aren’t too bummed out when the clouds shroud Denali. Only 30 percent of the folks that visit actually see the mountain. Don’t worry, there is still an incredible amount of wildlife to experience. We saw 6 grizzlies over the course of our trip. This leads me to my second tip. 2) Bring long fast glass!
It started out like any other Saturday morning. Wake up early, make some coffee, head to the darkroom, and process a week’s worth of images. This has been my standard operating procedure for the last couple of months and it seems to work pretty well. I will dive into my holding project entitled “On Deck” and grab and couple of stacks that I want to process and post for the next week. Everything is quiet, the coffee is bottomless (which isn’t necessarily a good thing), and I’m taking a stroll down memory lane as I review images and remember the great times while making them. I was on my second cup of coffee when I began to process this image. I finished it well after the coffee pot was empty. Not only were the clouds a bit of a struggle, the canyon walls (both left and right) were riddled with Chromatic Aberration. The left side was plagued with magenta fringing on the vertical lines and the right side was spotted with a touch of blue fringing. To solve this problem, I processed the images where the problem was prevalent. This was the the two overexposed captures from the bracketed sequence. However, the CA really became an issue because once the right side was corrected, the left side was worse and vice-versa . Eventually I was able to establish a reasonable balance and carried on with my standard HDR/Tonemapping process. Now that I think about it, I might have been better served to process each problem image biased towards the specific CA fringing (one for magenta the other for blue) and then blended the two images together prior to processing. Hmm…a more appropriate tile would have been, Never Retreat, Never Surrender, and Hindsight is 20/20? Next time!
Scene: This image of the Canyonlands National Park, outside of Moab Utah, was shot on a short hike, about half way down from the mesa above.
Capture Notes:
Nikon D300
Tokina 11-16 ATX Pro
Gitzo Traveler
Aperture: f/22.0
Focal Length: 11 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Processing Note:
Capture – 8 images @ 1EV
Adobe Camera Raw – Raw conversion (CA correction on 2 images)
NX2 – Raw conversion on 5 images
Photomatix 3.2.9 – HDR/Tonemapping
NIK Define 2.0 – Noise reduction
Photoshop – Curves adjustment global
Nik Color Efex Pro – Tonal contrast
Photoshop – Lens correction (CA fix)
Nik Define 2.0 – Noise reduction selective to sky.
Nik Color Efex Pro – Correct color cast, still wasn’t happy, so I cooled it down a bit.
Sized For Web
Nik Sharpener 2.0 – Display 50%
LightAsMagic.com
….ugghhhhhh
