I mentioned in an earlier post that I was using DxO now.  I was introduced to the product in November at the Digital Summit workshop in Zion National Park.  It looked pretty interesting and besides I got a deal I couldn’t refuse.  I waited for the release of DxO Optics Pro 5 before jumping in.  There were a lot of improvements made to version 5 that corrected some of the more serious shortcomings of version 4.

First of all, DxO works with RAW images.  And given the sorts of corrections it applies, it makes sense to use DxO before any other RAW converter like LR, ACR or Capture One.  So that’s where it comes in my workflow.  Actually, I generally import RAW images into LR first, review and rank them in LR.  When I determine the images I want to work on I then bring them into DxO and work on them there before returning to LR.

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The First Surprises 

The recovery after the burn holds one surprise after another.  The first surprise was how quickly the thistles started growing back.  They didn’t even wait for rain.  It only took a few weeks and they were sprouting.

 The second surprise was how quickly the grasses came up with just a couple of inches of rain.  And they’ve been nurtured with additional rain and are growing rapidly and spreading.

With the grasses growing the color combination of the hills was rapidly becoming green and black, not a combination of colors that I found particularly appealing.  The colors looked harsh.  I longed for the more familiar greens and browns typical of Southern California hillsides in spring (at least when we’re not in the midst of a drought year).

Well, as they say, be careful of what you wish (or long) for.  You just might get it.

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Last night marked two months since the fire came through our ‘back yard.’  Since then we’ve had about four inches of rain.  In fact, there was more rain in one storm than all of last year.  As a result the scorched hills are starting to turn green.  We’ve seen crop duster planes flying over the foothills and mountains seeding the slopes to help control erosion.

Last night’s sunset was spectacular!

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What I’d like to do is keep a journal of the steps I go through and the decisions I make when creating the Zion Canyon print.  It was shot on 11/24/2007 near the Great White Thrown turnout.  I was there the day before closer to sunset and realized this shot needed to be taken about an hour earlier.  So I came back at 4:15 the following day.  The shot required both stitching (vertical panorama shots) and HDR (three exposures bracketed at +/- 1 stop) for a total of six shots.

The image was shot down by the Virgin River although it’s not in the picture.  The foreground is a meadow in the shade with two cottonwood trees.  The middle ground is a Navajo sandstone cliff jutting in from the right, also in the shade.  The background is a tall cliff, also Navajo sandstone, that is still catching some sunlight.  The sky is cloudless and blue.

Here then are the steps I’m going through to take these six shots from RAW to a finished print.  It will probably not be completed today.  Sorry I can’t show the before and after of each step.  That would be interesting.

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At shows I’m frequently asked the following questions:  “Do you use filters?”  “Do you enhance these photographs?”  “Are these colors real?”

The answer is simply, “Of course.”  But I often want to respond, “If these were paintings would you be asking me whether the colors are real?  Or would there be an assumption that as a painter I interpreted the scene before me and selected the colors that contributed to my artistic vision?”  This leads to another question.  “As an artist, is a photographer any less free to express her feeling by whatever means the medium allows,  Is a photographer expected to hold to a different standard than a painter, sculptor, poet, novelist or composer?”  So, “Of course” is the simple answer but there is oh so much more behind it.

A follow up comment I often make is something to the effect that there are many, many hours that go into each photograph to get it to express my artistic vision.  Sometimes there are as many as 30 or 40 hours often spread out over a period of months or even years.  If we snapped a picture and took it down to Costco for a print would it be fair to call it fine art?  Or, if it took a photographer any less time to created a fine art print that it did a painter to create a painting, would it be fair to call that fine art?

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