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.

Photoshop Discoveries 1

I stumbled across a very effective technique tonight.  But first a little background.  The image I was working on was a 4 photo HDR shot.  I processed each of the four first in DXO, then LR and finally Photomatix.  The first pass resulted in a sky that was very strange.  The word that best describes it is ‘posterization.’  No other area of the image had this problem, just the sky.  Where it transitioned from a darker blue to a lighter hue the transition was splotchy and pixelated. 

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Zion Canyon Journal – Session 2

Well, as anticipated, I didn’t particularly like the print from last night.  I seem to be having a problem with creating images that are way too cool in the shadows.  So, how best to warm up the shadows?

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Zion Canyon Journal – Session 1

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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7 Weeks, 6 Days after the Fire – Thoughts on the Stables

There are several miracles related to the fire.  One is an apple tree at the stables.  It’s about five feet tall, just a small thing.  But it produces tiny apples every season.  Rumor has it that it was planted by a grieved person who lost a beloved horse.  What better gesture than to plant an apple tree.

So we all had a big question in our minds after the fire, “What happened to the apple tree?  Was it destroyed?”

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Christmas Cards

The idea of creating note cards is taking shape.  Tonight I printed a series of Christmas cards on sampler set from Red River Paper in Dallas, TX.  For a first cut, they turned out very well – after I figured out how to get my Epson 4800 to accept such small paper (7×10).  That only took about an hour of fumbling and stumbling around.

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Aftermath at the Barn

The fire really changed an important part of our life in an unexpected way.  We were leasing a horse at the stables not far from our house.  When the fire roared through Monday night it continued on and burned through the stables.  The big wooden barn burned to the ground. 

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Rain on Denuded Slopes

The rain this weekend wasn’t as bad as expected.  It was cold by Southern California standards.  But that doesn’t affect runoff.  We were treated to snow and ice atop Santiago Peak (over 5000 ft).  All the radio towers up there glistened in a sheath of ice.  Modjeska Canyon was under mandatory evacuation again due to the fear of mudslides.  But rumor has it that only 30% of the people actually evacuated.  When it was all said and done, there wasn’t much mud on roads this time.  There are signs of minor erosion in the hills behind our house but no gaping chasms.

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What Constitutes a Fine Art Photograph?

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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