Road Trip, Part 7

[compilerbitch]

Finished Medium Format Images

I shot about 100 frames or so with the medium format system in Joshua Tree National Monument and in Petrified Forest National Park. I'll add web versions of final versions of the 'keepers' from this here.

Rocks and Boulders, Joshua Tree National Monument

Bronica ETRS, 45-90 zoom, deep red filter, Megavision E4 16-Megapixel Monochrome Back

This looks fairly simple, but it actually took about 4 hours in Photoshop. It's a composite of two frames, both of exactly the same scene from the same position, one focussed on the near rocks and the other focussed on the far boulder. I did some fairly robust sharpening on both frames, tweaking the settings in each case to optimise the results. When the composite was done, I used a levels layer and a curves layer to tweak the image to make it 'pop', then I did my own take on dodging and burning, actually with four separate curves layers with hand-painted layer masks. This is a common trick of mine -- I'll look at a bit of a frame, decide I want to manipulate the contrast in a particular way, then create a curve that does what I want for that area (though usually messing up the rest of the image in the process). I'll then paint the layer mask so that the curves effect only touches the bit of the frame I want to affect. I also use essentially this technique to do dodging and burning, but doing this with curves and a layer mask makes the process nondestructive and endlessly tweakable after-the-fact.

Snow in the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest National Park

Bronica ETRS, Super Angulon PCS 55mm shift/tilt, no filter, Megavision E4 Mono

Looking at this, I could be standing on Mars or maybe even Titan. I arrived at the location a day after the whole area had received quite a lot of snowfall, so the white highlights you can see dotted around are actually the remains of this. I've not printed this yet, but I'm expecting good results. I shot the scene using the shift lens shifted full left then full right, and then used Photoshop to stitch the result so I ended up with a roughly 6500x4000 image. Not quite as extreme as the Better Light, but not far off, and that lens really is very sharp. Unlike the Canon shift/tilt lenses, the Schneider has independent fall/rise and left/right shifts, so I was able to do a little perspective correction. I used a tiny amount of tilt to help keep everything sharp up to the horizon, though this may not really have been necessary.

Comments

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Great pictures!

You could try to sell them as a picture of another planet like Mars. You might get lots of money.

[k-kojootti.livejournal.com]

Great stuff, I wouldn't hesitate a second to hang one of these on my wall!

The Rocks and Boulders stroke me as somehow unnatural, and I was wondering how much of it was because of the actual scene and how much because of Photoshop editing (I don't know enough about photo editing to fully understand your explanation, unfortunately).

But I understood from your earlier post that you don't necessarily aim for complete realism?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Indeed -- you hit the nail on the head. I often strive to *avoid* having things look entirely natural. I rarely actually fake anything in a scene, beyond something like editing out some trash lying on the ground or something like that, but I do manipulate dynamic range and lighting effects quite a lot in order to give a slightly surreal feel. I also shoot in infrared quite a lot, mostly for the same reasons.

[k-kojootti.livejournal.com]

Well, in Rocks and boulders the two rocks in the foreground disturb me somehow (but cannot decide if that's actually something negative), maybe it's the sharpness, maybe it's lights and the shadows?

Would be very interesting to see the original shots! (But then again, perhaps these are artistic secrets...)