Back on the blog after the summer recess...

Utah by Two Different IR Cameras

Both of these shots:  The top is Quail Creek Canyon and the bottom is "Orson Adams House" are from the Red Cliffs National Recreation Area, outside of a small town called Leeds, about a half hour north of St. George.  The cabin is from the original Mormon settlers of the area is on the road that leads up to the park.  Quail Creek Canyon is a slot canyon that was about a mile from the park entrance, uphill through a sandy path in 100 degree heat.  The best time to photograph slot canyons is noon since the light shines down most vertically illuminating the walls the best.  The top picture was taken with my Nikon D70 and the bottom is from the Olympus 2020Z.  Although the bottom picture looks a little sharper, the image size is jpeg only and is of a small file size so is not able to be enlarged significantly.  The top image was shot in raw and then converted to duotone.  The shutter speed is quite slow (since I didn't want to hike a tripod in as well) so not quite as sharp. 

Color vs. Black & White

Both of these shots of petrified sand dunes in Zion National Park are processing of the same image.  The top one has all of the color desaturated to leave only the lines and textures, while in the bottom one, the color is so bold that it becomes the story (with the textures becoming the subtext).  The bottom one was done first in Photoshop and Photomatix with HDR processing, then the color was used in the "Black and White" command in Photoshop.  

The photo was taken along Highway 9, just before the Zion-Mt. Carmel tunnel (heading west).   These are sand dunes that were once buried and became petrified.  Even though the ripples look like wind blown sand, it is solid Navajo Sandstone.

An IR Kind of Day in Utah

I'm channeling Ansel today.  This shot is of trees along the Virgin River in Zion National Park in Utah.  I'd like to think that if Ansel Adams was around today, that he'd be shooting IR (infrared).  Ansel was known for his landscapes in western national parks (especially Yosemite) and used sharp contrasts and depth of field.  He, of course, shot with wide format cameras on film with long exposures and using a tripod, but I'd like to think that if had the option of infrared, he would have loved it.  It is also little known that near the end of his life he also shot in color, which leads me to believe that he would have also used all the tools available to him, including HDR photography and digital cameras.

This shot was with my old Olympus, only 2.1 megapixil and non-DSL.  The light was perfect and at this moment the wind was rustling so gave some of the leaves a bit of a feathery look while the higher leaves were more still and clearer.  

A Fun Flickr Game

Here's a fun game to play on Flickr.  This mosaic was made using FD Flickr Toys by searching on Flickr with the answers to questions below and then using a photo from the first page of the search results to form each tile of the mosaic.  Here are the questions:

1) First name 2) Favorite Food 3) Your high school 4) Favorite Color 5) Current celebrity crush 6) Favorite drink 7) Dream vacation 8) Favorite dessert 9) What to be when you grow up 10) What do you love most in life 11) One word to describe you 12) Your flickr name  Go to the photo page to see a better description of the steps to make it and the url's of the pictures that make up the mosaic.  See if you guess what my search terms were...some are easy.

Arlington National Cemetery

More on Posterization

This image shows how you can improve and change an image with Photoshop, especially with posterization to hide a lot of sins.  This shot was taken at a wedding with available light (didn't want to disrupt the wedding with my flash) and from my pew with a 200mm zoom (120 mm for this shot).  The original image exposure was 1/30 sec, F 4.8 at ISO 450.    As you can see, it was too dark, had a lot of distractions, and had a lot of motion artifact.  I processed the raw image by increasing the exposure, cropping out the unwanted parts to concentrate on her action, adjusted the curves, and then added a posterizing filter.  A pretty good save of an image that otherwise would have ended up in the trash, I think.