Kat in Little Wild Horse Canyon
December 12th, 2011
“Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.”
– Edward Abbey
Here’s Kat being beautiful in a couple narrow twisty bits of Little Wild Horse Canyon. These were shot with my 8mm fisheye lens. In fact, this canyon and another that you will be seeing soon were the reason I decided to buy this fisheye lens. I thought the combination of the fisheye effect with the curves of the slot canyons and the lovely curves of my models would be an unbeatable combination. I’m pretty pleased with the results.
I’m also still trying to figure out the best workflow with the new software I’m testing. I made some more changes and I think it’s working better now. These were processed in DxO Optics Pro with no color adjustment (leaving white balance set to “as shot”), just keeping DxO’s automatic adjustment for highlights and shadows, noise reduction and sharpening. Then I exported the file as a DNG file and opened it with Camera Raw where I adjusted the white balance to “cloudy” which gives a more accurate view of what the red rock looks like.
I think this has eliminated the problem of Camera Raw not recognizing that I had adjusted the white balance before I opened the file in Camera Raw. Camera Raw was treating the adjusted white balance as “as shot” and really screwing up the colors as a result. I usually keep my camera set for auto white balance which tends to try to remove the red from the rock and make it a more neutral gray. Auto white balance usually gives me just what I’m looking for, but the red rock desert is a major exception.
So, I’d be interested to hear what you think of the colors in the last few posts. There are so many variables involved in showing photos on the web that it’s very helpful to hear what others are seeing. In the next few days I hope to find time to play around with some more “normal” files and see what I get with this new version of a workflow. A slot canyon in the red rock desert is such a major departure from anything that might be called “normal” lighting that it’s hard to tell if I’m on track or not.
Brooke in Little Wild Horse Canyon
December 10th, 2011
“The artist’s job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.”
–Edward Abbey
Here are a couple photos of Brooke down in Little Wild Horse Canyon. This canyon is fairly shallow and open, compared to some others, and we were there at mid-day, so we had a lot of sun down in the canyon. Direct sun is, of course, problematic, especially in a situation like this that presents dark, deep shadows. DxO Optics Pro seems to be doing a great job of holding the shadows and highlights from my raw files, though. But I’m finding that it is creating some other issues.
This shoot may not have been the best one to use to learn this new program. Figuring out what to do with color in a slot canyon is a serious challenge. The rocks are red. The light is red. So what’s a correct color? Anything that works automatically tends to remove the red…including DxO. On the last post I tried to adjust the color simply by adjusting the preset color balance…setting it for cloudy, which gave pretty close to a feel of what it really looks like.
But I seem to have caused a problem when I exported the files from DxO as DNG files. I then opened them in PhotoShop, through Camera RAW. And Camera RAW did not like what it saw in the files that had already been processed in DxO. I think Camera RAW took the adjusted color balance and treated it as “As Shot” which made everything too red. I tried to adjust that in PhotoShop, but was less than totally successful. I think Camera RAW was also applying some sharpening that I didn’t want as well.
So, I’m working on a different approach. These two files were exported from DxO as Tiffs, which avoided sending them through Camera RAW on the way to PhotoShop. The color seems to be more in line with the real look of these canyons. And you have two different situations to study, one in full sun with deep shadows and the other in a fully shaded area of the canyon wall.
Figuring this stuff out might have been a little simpler if I’d been working with a more “normal” lighting situation and subject matter. Back in the film days these would have just been shot with daylight film and they would have come out red, red, red. But digital allows for more subtle treatment of the light. Now I just have to figure out how these software programs are interacting with each other so I can get what I want out of them.
Of course the one constant in all of this is the lovely Brooke doing her usual great job of posing and relating her pose to her environment. And, slot canyons are a place for wide angle lenses. These were both shot with my 12-24 at pretty close to the wide end of the zoom range. I’ll have some fisheye shots to post soon.
Little Wild Horse Canyon
December 7th, 2011
“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”
–Edward Abbey
After our pause at the twin trees we headed on down into Little Wild Horse Canyon. This was my first time in this canyon, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but found it to be well worth the hike. Beautiful red rock walls, scoured by flash floods that create wonderful curves in the surface of the rock. And, as in all the slot canyons out in this desert, the light becomes intensely red as it filters down into the bottom of the canyon, bouncing off the red rock walls on the way down, getting redder and redder. By the time it reaches the bottom everything simply glows red.
These photos were took at one of our first stops after entering the canyon. Kat is lovely posing on a tiny ledge in the rock wall.
These files were processed in DxO Optics Pro and then received just a little touch-up in PhotoShop CS4. I’d be interested to hear what you think of the file quality. Of course, they have been greatly reduced to fit through the tiny tubes that are the internet, but you can get a general idea. I’ll be printing some of these from the full-resolution files soon. I’m very interested to see how they look printed large.
Blog Note:
Well, that was an unpleasant surprise. Ever since I moved my blog to wordpress a major annoyance has been that photos uploaded at a size wider than the column of the blog would be distorted and crammed into the space available. So I always resized photos after they were uploaded to make them fit. Recently I noticed that photos were being properly resized so they fit without distorting the proportions. All good, right? But shortly after I made this post, not resizing the photos, I was watching Jeopardy and checking e-mail on my i-pod when I clicked over to see how the blog looked…and found the photos in this post all scrunched up. So I just now fixed it. I wonder if other browsers were also showing the photos in a disproportionate manner. If any of you faithful readers out there have noticed this problem could you please let me know? And let me know what browser you were using when you noticed the problem? Thanks.
Edward Abbey
December 5th, 2011
“Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance accross the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.” – Edward Abbey
Moving On
December 5th, 2011
Getting back to the account of our trip out west…After spending some time at Goblin Valley, we moved on to Little Wild Horse Canyon, a nearby slot canyon. We had planned to dedicate a day to each of these locations, but thanks to the deer in Nebraska we were reduced to just one day for shooting in this general area. So we headed over that way when the sun got high in the sky and more people started wandering around in Goblin Valley.
But, before we even got to the slot canyon I spotted these two trees that just looked wonderful to me. And they looked even better with Brooke posing between them. I love the light and the contrast of textures.
Next post: Into the slot canyon.
For those who are paying attention to the technical stuff, this photo was first processed from the original NEF file in DxO Optics Pro. It was output from that program as a DNG file which I then opened in Corel PaintShop Pro for a bit of tweaking before I reduced the size and saved it as a jpeg for use here. In a week or so when I have more time I’ll download the ACDSee professional program trial and see what I think of it. But I’ve already learned that there are plenty of high quality alternatives to Adobe’s product at much more reasonable cost. Now it’s just a matter of chosing the one(s) I like best and that give me the best results with the least pain.
Corel…hmmmm…
December 3rd, 2011
I downloaded a trial of Corel PaintShop Pro today and gave it a try. I’m impressed. Not exactly the same as PhotoShop, of course, but a very useful, versatile program that looks like it could do everything I need at a very reasonable cost and no issues with upgrades or RAW processing for new cameras. Looks very good. I used it to edit the photo above, another shot from Goblin Valley with Brooke and Kat.
This could be the program I’ve been looking for. I’m still playing with DxO Optics Pro, though, and I just might end up buying it and PaintShop Pro…and still pay less than the cost of an upgrade for PhotoShop.
I think Adobe may have permanently lost this customer.
Goblin Valley
December 2nd, 2011
We return now to the days of Yestermonth. Our heros are finally freed from their Bambi-imposed stranding in less-than-scintilating town of Alliance, Nebraska. The truck is repaired and they set out again on their search of the southwest for beauty and art. After a breathtaking drive through Denver and over the Rockies at sunset they arrived in another town with not much to offer, Green River, Utah.
But, though Green River isn’t much to talk about, it is very close to some of them most amazing landscapes on this planet. We had planned to spend three days here exploring all that local beauty, but Bambi’s attack on the truck meant we only had one day to take it all in. First stop: Goblin Valley.
What an amazing place. Miles of small hoodoos, side by side, filling the valley. Not many people around. We had no problem doing our work without an audience.
Of course, the lovely models are Brooke Lynne and Kat. They had a pretty good time here. It was wonderful to get back to what we came out there to do after the three days of boredom waiting for the truck to be ready for the road again.
These photos were processed in DxO Optics Pro, but then exported as DNG files and worked on some more in Camera Raw and PhotoShop CS4. DxO didn’t seem to like that the rocks are red. It wanted to make them gray. A simple adjustment of the color balance did most of the correction needed. I hope I can learn how to fine tune what DxO does so that I can get it right in there. I love the way DxO sharpens and I’m pretty much ok with the optical corrections it does. I’m still thinking about those optical corrections, though. It knows what camera and lens I’m using and it “fixes” all the optical issues that the combination has. Problem is that I actually like the way my lens performs…I like some of those optical problems. So how I handle that will be an on-going exploration.
But for now I can say that I like what DxO is doing in general. And, it does it all automatically, so my time spent at the computer messing around with the files is reduced…and I like that.
Boycott Adobe
December 2nd, 2011
I’ve ranted here about Adobe before. I was upset when I found that they were not supporting the last version of PhotoShop, CS4, just one version back from the current CS5. That meant that I could not process the RAW files from my Nikon D7000 with CS4. I don’t upgrade every time Adobe comes out with a new version, usually skipping one version. I find that works much better for me and my budget. So I had to find another way to work with my RAW files, since I planned to wait for CS6 to do an upgrade. I did that by buying Elements 9 which includes the exact same RAW processing engine as CS5. That’s been working ok, although Adobe would only let me install Elements on two of my three computers, so I had pick one that would not have the ability to do RAW processing.
And I wrote a nasty letter to Adobe expressing my displeasure. Well, they must have heard me because they have now made an announcement that they are no longer going to allow upgrades from earlier versions of PhotoShop. So, when CS6 comes out, if I don’t already have CS5 I won’t be able to get the upgrade price, but will have to pay the full price for a new copy.
Well, that’s not going to happen.
I don’t do business with companies that abuse me like that. I won’t buy anything from Adobe unless and until they change that upgrade policy. That’s the last straw.
I urge you to do likewise. And to publicly express your dismay with this kind of abuse of the customers who have made PhotoShop the dominant product that it is. If we don’t rebel, we will continue to just be treated like ATMs that Adobe can use to withdraw money whenever the whim strikes them.
Meanwhile I’m looking for options to do my photo processing work. Right now I’m testing DxO Optics Pro. It looks promising, but I’m just getting started using it. I’ll be posting photos processed with it and writing about my experience using it over the next month while I can use the trial version. I’ll let you know what I think of it and if I decide to buy it.
DxO will not be a complete solution, though, even if I decide I like it. It doesn’t seem to have any print function, but is simply dedicated to processing images to produce an optimum file. So I’m looking at Qimage as a possible way to do my printing. I’ve had Qimage for many years and appreciated their promise of free upgrades forever. I have seldom used the program, though. I mainly used it to “up-rez” files to make large prints for a project several years ago. Overall I found it a bit complicated and hard to use for the simple job of printing, when I could just click print in another program.
But I pulled up my access code and went to their site to install the latest version on my current computer. Well, so much for free upgrades forever. The code wouldn’t work and it appears they have gotten around their promise by abandoning the program I have and introducing another “new” program that now has to be purchased. They do offer the option of getting a new key and downloading the last version of the old program…for a small fee. I’ve written to them to explain my situation, but haven’t gotten a response yet. I may just go ahead and pay the fee to reinstall the program I already bought and see how it works before deciding if I want to buy the new version. I’ll report here on how that goes too.
Calendar Discounts:
On a happier note, there are a couple discounts still available if you would like to buy one of my calendars:
Good through December 6: Free ground shipping by entering code SLEIGHRIDES
Good through December 31: 50% off with the code: HOLIDAYSUPERSAVINGS345 This one is limited to a total savings of $15.
Both of those discount codes can only be used once by each customer.
Now, I’m off to do some image processing with DxO and I’ll soon be posting the results here. Stand by.
Little Alice
November 29th, 2011
I’m slowly getting caught up on posting from my shoots from the past few months. Right before I left on my trip out west I did a shoot with a fine model who was down in Ohio from Chicago, Little Alice. This was the second time I’d shot with Little Alice, but our first chance to get outdoors and do some photos.
Mother Nature was not being good to us that day, unfortunately. It was a sunny day, which presented lighting challenges constantly. Add to that the fact that we were shooting in a new location for me, and it was more of a day of exploration than shooting. But Alice was wonderful. She’s a trooper and a very enjoyable model to work with. And we did manage to find a few spots where I could put together a composition without too much contrast from the direct sun.
My first shoot with Little Alice was a studio shoot for a project that has not yet been out in public, but which may soon be ready. And I do hope that I’ll be getting more opportunities to work with this beautiful lady in the future.
Now that I’m caught up to the start of the trip, I’ll be getting back to posting photos of Brooke and Kat that we did in some great locations out west. Coming soon to this very blog. Stay tuned.
Tuesday Calendar Discount
November 29th, 2011
Those discounts keep coming. I kind of wish the publisher would just do one for a few weeks and stop with the one-day specials, but I don’t have a say in that.
So, there’s a new discount today, Tuesday, November 29. And it’s good through tomorrow, November 30 at 11:59 p.m. Use the code CYBERTUESDAY at checkout and you’ll get a 30% discount on your order.
You can order here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/wayward
