Daily Image - Nov 2013 Archive

All the Daily Image mailings for the month of November 2013.

01 Nov 13. I trust everyone enjoyed a sane Halloween and was spared any attempts to decorate their property. Now all that remains is how best to get rid of either all the candy the kids collected or that which remains that other's kids didn't collect. Since I received a critical complaint this week from a noted photographer friend about converting my images from color to B&W, I thought I'd share Tuesday's B&W image with you today in the "original" color. I've made a slight change to it in that I've endeavored to make the clouds appear to be coming out of the photo towards you, so once again move back a couple of feet for the effect. If you divide the image vertically in half, and horizontally in fifths, in the middle of the line representing the lowest fifth you will see two full sized vehicles, at a distance of perhaps 0.5 miles distant. That should give you something to use for scale in appreciating the magnitude of the Rockies in Glacier National Park. The snow had fallen the night before, and more was forecast for later that night, but we didn't return the next day to see if it actually did. But based on the activity we experienced all day, I'm betting it did. This image shared all the step in creating it as did Tuesday's, except the I swapped the B&W conversion layer for one in which I enhanced the clouds. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 @ f /11.
04 Nov 13. Continuing west along the Road to the Sun Highway, and having passed the Visitors Center where I encountered my first ever wild Black Tailed Weasel, which three Rangers were convinced was a large squirrel (we really do need to do something about our educational system!), we began the drive down hill towards the lakes area when we noticed a group of folks parked alongside the road in a location in which there was no pullout. That could mean only one thing, some kind of animal, so we pulled over also and began looking. Nothing obvious was in sight until I glanced way up high to a point where the vegetation stopped, and as there were no trees, I'll call it the vegetation line. There, all by himself, probably enjoying the solitude, was one adult Mountain Goat just meandering along and grazing as he went. To get the shot, I needed my longest lens, my 12 year old and very first VR lens, and Nikon's as well, the 80 - 400mm, which on my D300s body is the equivalent of a 600mm lens on a film body. That however wasn't quite enough, so I added a 1.4 tel-extender to further increase my reach which now gave me the equivalent of an 840mm lens. With that combination I was able to fill about 2.5% of the frame with him. He was that far away. So I haven't cropped the original at all as doing so would result in a very soft image which is already soft enough. The composition as you have it can be criticized from several aspects among which are the animal is too close to the right side of the frame, he is too small, and the shot is divided almost in half between rock and grass. The last of these I could easily correct, but didn't as you would loose some of the perspective. If you can recall the majesty of the mountains from Friday's image (if not look here, and recall the perspective is provided by the cars), this goat is walking on a mountain side of equal height!! I created what you are seeing by starting with the base image, adding a bit of detail enhancement, painting it over just the rocks, then a layer for a relative contrast adjustment, and the lightened up the goat to return it to its original white, some of which got lost in the corrections. I then added a layer of water color look which I applied disproportionately throughout the image to alter different areas selectively. Then the normal conversion for web and monitor. Nikon D300s; 80 - 400 with 1.4 tel-extender; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/200 sec @ f / 6.3.
05 Nov 13. Over the weekend I attended the annual Kenmore Camera Digital Photo Expo, Classes & Lectures, an event I've been attending for the past 7 years. Each year it seems as though the featured big name speakers are becoming more and more self centered, speaking with one arm behind their shoulder, and sharing less and less information as to how one goes about creating a good image AFTER it has been captured by the camera. I walked out on both of the featured speakers their talks were so bad! One gentleman, whose talks last year I found to be worthwhile, proved to be offering material of the same caliber this year. Of interest to me this time around was his talk entitled "256 Shades of Grey: Seeing in Black & White." He spent 90 minutes trying to educate folks on what it is to see color as shades of grey so as to visualize what you are photographing in color will look in black & white. He lost the interest of a goodly proportion of his audience when he answered a question from the floor which was "how much time should one expect to have to work on a color image to get a good B&W' with his response of "I usually spend at least an hour, or more, to get my B&W image." A honest speaker for a change. His presentation did a very god job of showing how to interpret the colors we see as they will appear in B&W, and was just about the only thing of value in the entire day. This was likely my last time to attend this conference! Now to try and put into practice what he taught. One part I have down pretty well already; this image took roughly 90 minutes create, and even at that, it graphically displays in the sky the fact that I have a lot yet to learn!! The halo around the mountain is actually there, an "artifact" resultant from the sunlight coming from behind the mountain, which in the original color version is virtually impossible to detect, but the moment I converted it to B&W it was immediately obvious. I tried many things to get rid of it, but this was the best I could do. This is a shot of the far eastern end of St Mary Lake, which runs quite a distance through the eastern side of Glacier National Park. This is one of the earliest views one gets of the lake, and at this point it doesn't look like much, but after you've driven several miles and it is still with you it begins to become obvious that this is a rather large lake. And beautiful as well. To get the finished image took 8 different layers of "correction" which go as follows. Starting with the background layer, I first converted it to B&W, then employed a curve layer to darken the sky, then added a dodge and burn layer to further work on selected part of the sky, followed that with another curves layer to further darken the sky, then another layer to burn in selected part of the sky, and finally a noise reduction layer to smooth the sky. Remember, noise reduction programs work by blurring the image, and very slight blurring serves to smooth things out. Most of these layers were needed to try and fix the halo problem in the sky. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f /11.
06 Nov 13. A short distance - by vehicle - from where yesterday's image was shot you come to Sunrift Gorge, which features a small bridge that crosses over a stream which, from the bridge, isn't much to look at, and in fact is situated such that you can't see but a small portion of it. For those hardy souls who are willing to venture beneath the bridge and traverse the potentially slippery rocks, there is a small and beautiful waterfall on one side and a meandering stream on the other. We elected to view both sides and were rewarded with two stunning views. Today's image is of the stream side, and at the time we were there was primarily in shade with small areas in bright sunlight. As far as I can ascertain from our short visit there, it is always that way to varying degrees, so this called for a high dynamic range (HDR) approach to capturing what our eyes could easily view with their ability to handle 25 (photographic) stops of light, as compared to the camera's 8. Earlier in this series I commented, perhaps more than once, about the red rocks in Glacier. Now it is time to comment about the blue rocks also found there, in some places, in abundance. The blue color you see on the rocks in the foreground in this image is not the color I saw when I took the photo, they were in the shade and much duller, but that color was what I saw on those pieces of rock in the sunlight, so I've adjusted them to match the color of the sunlit rocks. These were not the first blue rocks I saw there, you may recall the earlier Snyder Creek image that had lots of them. The green of the water came out as I brought out the blue, and, as it was also in the shade when I took the shot, I've left it as green as it is; my thinking is that it would have looked like that when lit by the sun. The overall image is a bit soft and I made it that way, the original is tack sharp, but it was just to "harsh" when totally sharp. To get to the end image, I proceeded as follows: first I combined 5 images, all shot one stop apart from 2 stops under to 2 stops over into a single HDR image, to that I applied a levels correction to darken the bright areas remaining after the HDR creation; next I applied a combination of global contrast adjustment and overlaid that with a neutral density filter to limit the effect to the upper portion of the frame; next I applied a filter to give the image an over-the-top vibrancy look which I then painted out for the most part leaving just small areas with the effect where I thought it was needed; finally I made a watercolor layer and then decreased its opacity by roughly 67% to give the final composite a softer look as I mentioned earlier. Then the normal conversion for web and screen. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/60 sec @ f/8 on a tripod.
07 Nov 13. If you pay a visit to Picture Lake at the end of the Mt Baker Scenic Highway, you will find an informational display at one of the sites set aside for photography that discusses how the lake is in a transformational state and will, in the next several decades, completely fill in with vegetation and be a lake no longer. This is a completely natural thing and not attributable to some dramatic climatic or human activity. I remember reading about this type of activity in an undergrad ecology class back in the 60s, but I had never seen a really good example of it until I first visited Picture Lake. A couple of miles inside the western gate at Glacier we found a small area of water with some nice reflections in it, and upon closer inspection of the reflections realized that it was similar to Reflection Lake although at this stage in its life much smaller and substantially more shallow. There was one tree in particular that was casting a lovely reflection right down the middle of the water, and I used it to form the central point of interest in several of the shots. With the fog still heavy at that time of the morning, it was a game of hide and seek with what sunlight there was trying to get the pool of water sufficiently lit. The original shots came out O.K., but converting them to something a bit creative worked even better. There was a little color in some of the vegetation scattered throughout at the edge of the water which served to partially frame it, so I thought that depicting the area as an oil painting would work well. In my mind it did as it tended to blend all the vegetation together giving it somewhat of a glowing feature. With the exception of the dark colored area near the back of the picture, most of the water was less than two feet in depth; thus, you can see from the bottom cleanly to the surface and then the vegetation protruding further. A couple more years and this should be a very nice small meadow. This was rather simple to create. Starting with the background layer, I cropped out a few things that were not adding to the image, performed a slight contrast adjustment, then converted to the oil painting look. Then the normal conversion for web & screen. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/20 sec @ f/8 on a tripod.