The first annual Joshua Tree Gathering is scheduled for January 18th through January 20th in Joshua Tree National Park. We welcome photographers of all levels of ability. If you’re interested, leave me a comment to this post.
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Author: doinlight
Ralph Nordstrom is an award-winning fine art landscape photographer and educator. He lives in Southern California and leads photography workshops throughout the Western United States.
New Camera on the Way
It shipped yesterday, my new Canon 1Ds Mark III. I should get it next Wednesday. Stay tuned for first impressions. The excitement is running high.
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Welcome Roger Nordstrom
My brother, Roger, just launched his own blog yesterday. I added his site to the Glogroll and will be adding an RSS feed. I encourage you to check it out at RogerNordstromPhoto.blogspot.com. He also has a very nice website with some of his amazing work. You’ll want to check that out also at RogerNordstromPhoto.com. You’ll love his work.
Welcome Roger.
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Experiences with CIE Lab Processing – Follow-up
I worked more on the CIE Lab photo from the previous post and have some thoughts on what I’d do differently.
First, I didn’t do a whole lot of value and contrast adjustments the first time. I just created one Curve to adjust luminance. Next time around I’ll add curves for brightening/darkening and for contrast enhancement/reduction. All of these will operate on the L channel.
What I won’t do is get into Hue/Saturation or Selective Color. If that’s needed I’ll do that once I get back into RGB mode. Hopefully not much will be needed as we’re back with the old problems of RGB.
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Wandering in the Fog
I worked on two photographs tonight that have been giving me trouble for the last week or so. Both were shot in Zion NP. The one I’ve been working the longest on was what I finished up on tonight. Hopefully I have it. We’ll know tomorrow morning.
My point in this post is I often get the feeling I’m wandering in the fog. You can’t see where you’re going very well and you just stumble around. You take a step, look around and decide where to go from there. It’s a slow process. I make a print. It takes several minutes for it to come off the printer. Then I look at it. Often times it’s very disappointing, especially tonight. Think about what’s wrong with it for a while, make the changes in PS and make another print. It’s disappointing so think some more, fiddle in PS some more and make another print. Hours go by.
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Experiences with CIE Lab Processing
Last night I tried processing an image in Lab color space for the first time. If you’re not familiar with Lab, it is the most accurate color space and has a gamut that covers the entire human visual spectrum. There’s an interesting article written by Jeremy McCleary that describes how human vision works and compares it to the Lab color space which is as close of a match as you can come – Human Vision and Digital Imaging.
Basically, Lab separates luminance (think black and white) from color. Similar to RGB, there are three channels. However, with RGB the channels are Red, Green and Blue. With Lab the channels are L for luminance (brightness and darkness), a for magenta green opposition and b for yellow blue opposition.
The advantage of Lab over RBG (or CMYK) is that the luminance can be adjusted without affecting color and vise versa. In RGB changing luminance will affect color saturation; in Lab it doesn’t.
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Photoshop Discoveries 2
I have an image that is a shot of the Eastern Sierra at sunrise. There are gorgeous clouds hanging over the peaks. The early morning sun lit them on fire along with the mountains. It was amazing!
My exposure was pretty close to being right on. And yet, there was one part of the clouds that technically wasn’t clipped but was very close. The RGB numbers were not 100% but were in the high 80% to low 90%. The thing was there wasn’t much detail and it really stood out.
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Welcome Jack Graham
In photography one of the most powerful means of growing is through interactions with the other photographers we meet, be they in workshops or in the field. Not only do you learn from artists who create amazing photographs but you also build friendships.
One such chance meeting of an outstanding photographer and friend is Jack Graham. We met on the banks of Mono Lake in October of 2006. I was there by myself; he was leading a workshop. We were shooting the South Tufa at sunrise under the harvest moon setting in the west above the imposing Sierra Nevada range.
I added the address to Jack’s blog in the blogroll. You can also click here.
You’ll also want to be sure to check out his work. You can click here.
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DxO Impressions 1
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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More Surprises
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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