The Nature, Wildlife and Pet Photography Forum - Fine Art Landscape Photography

Death Valley photos

Posted By: Sander Meurs

Death Valley photos - 02/01/06 01:39 PM

Hi there,

I wanted to share some pics with you. I already posted a plethora of pictures on dpreview, so I'll include a link (below the 3 photos) to that post where you can see more photos.

All made with a Nikon D2h, early october 2005:







This is a link to the dpreview post with 29 photos.
Posted By: rustin

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/01/06 01:51 PM

Great shots. What was the focal length of the lense you were using? Rustin
Posted By: Sander Meurs

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/01/06 02:13 PM

Hi Rustin, thanks!

These were at 12mm; I used a Nikkor 12-24DX lens for these shots, and in fact used the 12mm posotion most of the time.
I also brought a 18-70DX which came in handy sometimes, but I usually switched to 12mm when going wide.
Posted By: Loopman

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/01/06 05:14 PM

These are beautiful. Was the last image of the desert sands enhanced for color?

Lou
Posted By: Sander Meurs

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/01/06 11:03 PM

Hi Loopman,

yes it was, I used ACR to convert the RAW file, introduced lots of contrast, a severe vignette and toned down the exposure. Additionally, I dialed in some warmer WB until it looked like this.
Posted By: James Morrissey

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/02/06 05:39 AM

Hey Sander,

I know you just stated how you did these images, but it might be it would be interesting to see how you took an original image and broke it down into the art that you finally produced. It seems that your post processing skills are as good as your photographic ones!

James
Posted By: Sander Meurs

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/02/06 12:16 PM

Hi James, that's a good idea.

I'll make a comparison composition with ACR settings tonight, if time permits.
Posted By: Sander Meurs

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/02/06 06:31 PM

Here's a comparison between a Death Valley RAW file seen at default settings, and the RAW file seen after I made the ACR adjustments.



The picture was of course taken, on the Badwater Saltflats.

On top, you see the settings at 'Camera Raw Defaults', what is different from the standard settings however, is the fact that I have saved adjustments to my 'Calibrate' tab to represent the D2h color profile. I learned about doing this at dpreview.

The below view shows you what settings I adjusted in ACR, most importantly you see a boost of contrast and saturation. This is of course a personal taste, I'm still trying to find a style I like. I tried raising shadows without blowing highlights by reducing the exposure and increasing the brightness, finally I tuned WB slightly, but pulled up the tint all the way to +50 for a very punchy sunset horizon. The image also looks good with a tint setting of +25 (more natural look) but I opted for this one instead.

Additionally, I've added a vignette from the 'Lens' tab, with the settings -35 & 0.

This is a pretty typical example, hope someone has any use of this.
Posted By: Loopman

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/03/06 07:57 PM

Wow. Thanks for taking the time to do this. How did you get your screen to appear here?

Lou
Posted By: James Morrissey

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/04/06 05:26 AM

Hey Sander,

Let me second Lou's statement and thank you for making the effort to do this. So, all of the corrections are done in the raw file then? Nothing done in PS outside of ACR raw? Perhaps it is time I started using it as it looks like it gives you some nice options that CO does not.

James
Posted By: Sander Meurs

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/04/06 10:22 AM

Hi Lou and James,

Lou: I made a screenshot of the before and after settings, and combined them in one image. On the mac you just hit command-shift-4, and you pull a rectangle over the part of the screen you want to capture. The resulting capture presents itself on the desktop. On a pc you can hit printscreen, than open a new image in photoshop and hit paste, your screenshot will appear in the new image.

James & Lou: Yep, around about 80% of the shots are just run trhough ACR like this and that's it. Just resizing for web and adding my signature after that. The other 20% are either right on the money, great from the get-go and need no work at all, or the other side of the spectrum, meaning that they need ACR conversion AND some 10 to 20 minutes of Photoshop.

What I usually do in Photoshop is blending 2 renditions of the same file with differently rendered exposure values. Sometimes, enhancing local contrast, correcting haze-afflicted parts of the image, in a few cases even remove some annoying from the image entirely. Afer this I just hit save and the PSD file sits next to the original NEF in the same folder.

Here's an example of some Photoshopping:



On the top row of the resized screenshot, you see Rogier standing near Ubehebe crater. The middle image was the original, which I duplicated. I darkened the duplicated (left) image with ACR, brightened the original (center) image with ACR, and blended the two into the PSD file (right image), which is now properly exposed for foreground and background.

A more true photoshopping example is in the bottom row, you see the 2 cars, the left one is the original file, but I didn't like the way the cargo door was open, so I removed it and saved it as a PSD file (center image).
Posted By: James Morrissey

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/05/06 11:36 PM

Hey Sander,

Thank you again for the added material. I am going to Death Valley in March and I look forward to stealing some of your techniques, if that is OK with you. Thanks for sharing a lesson or three.

James
Posted By: Sander Meurs

Re: Death Valley photos - 02/06/06 08:32 PM

Sure James, looking forward to the results of your trip and your blends

This digital blending of exposures is one of the best things available to us photographers, it's the digital equivalent to bringing a complete collection of ND Grads into the field...
Usually I just put the darker exposure on top of the lighter one, and mask it with the gradient tool until it looks good.

I wish they uncluded this simple blending technique in the next version of ACR... Should not be difficult IMHO.
© 2024 The Nature, Wildlife and Pet Photography Forum