July 10, 2012

0

4x5, f164, Fine Art, journal, Nature, science, signature, silver, technique, travel

Ghostlands

Ghostlands – Eastern OR, Spring 2012.

It was towards the end of our Winter 2012 your. More like Spring as it was late already early May. But we were still on the road and winding thru the nearly deserted back country of Oregon towards home. These are hills and forest where you find a tiny town every hundred miles or more and if you’re lucky it might have gas and groceries.

I saw this neat old house turned store turned abandoned farm off of the highway and turned the truck around in a truly tiny town a mile or so down the road. I returned and setup my for large format film, using the height of our camper roof to get me a high vantage point.

I must have taken at least a half and hour setting up for a single frame of film. When I finally had it composed just the way I wanted I waited for the late afternoon sun to peek through just right and release the shutter. The light and shadows were magic and the result is exactly what I had hoped for. Ghostlands.

Release details: Prints Available.. Order Open Edition originals above.. Master prints and Signature Limited Editions are listed below and can be ordered by contacting gallery.. Learn about Limited Edition values here.

Released prints….

For Photographers. How it was made…

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April 6, 2012

0

f164, journal, musings, Nature, science, technique, travel

The Night How Bright – A Night Exposure Study Image.

A study image only. Canon 5D MK2, 50mm 1.4 @f5.6, 1 hour, ISO160. Bright rock light from the moonlight

An image study for photographers.


Star trails, turning night to day, midnight landscapes. There is amazing image potential for the photographer willing to do their homework and pre-plan setups to take those grand steps into the dark of night.

This photo is lacking. What it shows me is not. I was in the New Mexico highlands. The sun has long set and the light is only from moon and stars in this one hour long exposure. This image is not fully up to my standards and hence may never make it into my Signature Collection. That said there’s something to be learned from it.

I’m trying to develop some baselines and ideas for working what I call ULE’s (Ultra Long Exposures) and I wanted to share some of those here. This image represents the first time I used “only” past experience to determine exposure time, running a single one hour exposure at 5.6, ISO160.

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January 2, 2012

2

4x5, beauty, f164, Fine Art, journal, science, silver, technique, travel

Isabella Breeze – My First Ever 4×5 Scene.

Isabella Breeze. Lake Isabella CA. Spring 2011. Linhof 4x5.

This has been sitting for the summer, but as we start traveling once again for 3 months of road touring, I decided it was worth posting.  It’s my very first 4×5 exposure. Well, not including the accidental frame I ruined because I forgot to shut the lens. 4×5 film is something I’ve spent 2011 falling in love with. This frame is imperfect, but I wanted to share because I never want to forget the feeling it gave me. A sense of wonder at the sheer simple function, yet inspiring complexity and quality of the large format medium. It’s an operation that by it’s very nature forces one to slow down, to think and to visualize.

I stood right on the shore of Lake Isabella, almost at the water line at sunset on this early Spring day in 2011. It’s actually the very one I talked about on the drive back, during this Episode of the Photo Couch podcast. It’s was a calm relaxing sunset on the edge is this beautiful lake and it felt good. Once the sun had faded I packed up and drove to the other end of the lake where we had camped the trailer on the shore. Where kids and my beautiful wife were waiting with a hot spaghetti dinner.

For Photographers… 

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December 14, 2011

0

f164, science, silver, technique

Dynamic & Tonal Range in the RAW File.

Right cut. Original RAW file desaturated in LR. Left cut, same file with the Dynamic Silver III preset from Silver Shadows 2 applied in LR.

Just a few quick observations today. One reason I stay in a RAW as long as possible is that quality and dynamic tonal control is at it’s highest on an original RAW file. Once we leave that environment, we can certainly still work with tonal values, but we throw away some of that precious information.

On the right is a sharpened and desaturated original file from Sunset’s Hidden Falls. On the left, the same file with nothing more than applying Dynamic Silver III from my new Silver Shadows 2 toolkit. This effect pulls out dynamic range without flattening the shadow and contrast too much. It could also be done manually of course.

Once I have the dynamic range under control, then I’ll move on to external edits as needed. I don’t hesitate to go into Photoshop (though I try to stay in 16bit mode) for detail work. I did plenty of that on the final version of this). But getting my basic tonal range managed before I leave the RAW file behind gives me better results and helps me maintain that quality as high as possible for my wall prints. It’s a better wokflow and a better image.

Gav

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July 6, 2011

4

color, f164, journal, musings, Nature, science, technique

The River Fork… A Look at Sensor Noise and Heat.

River Forks, Snoqualmie National Forest, Summer 2011. Non released example image, 8 minute exposure at ISO 100.

This is for you photographers. It’s an 8 minute exposure I did just after sunset on the river. I processed it with the Velvius preset from Power Workflow3. It’s not a stunning image and that’s not why I posted it. I felt it was a good image to use to talk a bit about pixel science.

To me, what merits discussion is the noise. I’ve done images much longer than 8 minutes. The longer the exposure, the more potential for noise to be generated as the sensor heats up. But, as myself and some others have found, the warmer the environment, the worse it seems to get. It was probably in the low 70’s here in the mountains, and the warmer temperature seemed to make a great deal of difference compared to images I’ve done in cooler environments.

Look at the image and the crop section I posted below. The noise produces a banding-like effect on the frame that really reduces quality. The large color artifacts are easy enough to fix, but there’s an almost patterned, under-the-surface noise that really is a challenge. And this was with in camera long exposure reduction turned ON.

I talked about this type of noise in depth in the making of 140 Minutes of Night ( 2+ hour long exposure) and looked at techniques to deal with it, but it’s not easy to correct. When you get into bad heat noise, the plethora of noise plugins and tools we have won’t just take it away. Well, they will, but only at the cost of losing a lot of detail everywhere else. And that’s just not acceptable.

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