Finally, it's done...

[compilerbitch]

I've finally finished processing the landscapes from my trip to the arctic this summer. If you've looked closely at my LJ, you'll have seen most of the images already, but there are another 17 images you've not seen before. The whole thing is sitting in a photo gallery on my web site here.

So, without further ado, here are all the new ones:



Beyond





West from Base Camp




Boulder Field




River Bed




Jellyfish




Planet of the Apes Valley - 2




Planet of the Apes Valley - 3




Planet of the Apes Valley - 4




Planet of the Apes Valley - 5




Planet of the Apes Valley - 6




Breccia Flow




Breccia Overlook




Pat's Cove




Sea Ice - 2




False Hills




Dagger




False Sky



This batch of photos are a little unusual for me, in that I processed them in Adobe Lightroom rather than my more usual Photoshop. I seemed to get roughly equivalent results, but I think I was processing images several times faster, which on a project like this probably makes a lot of sense. I also used Lightroom to generate the Flash gallery linked above, and to automatically generate the images for LJ. It seems really good at that kind of thing. I'm a little worried about it maybe being a bit too easy, so I won't deliberate so much with images, but these all seem to look pretty good. I think I'll fiddle with it a bit more and then decide.

Next project will be a book. I did have a play with the Blurb book creation software, but I found that it blew considerable chunks, so I am going back to using Adobe InDesign and rolling my own. I'll probably have it printed by Lulu because they can handle PDFs generated by InDesign without any difficulty.

Comments

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Beautiful pix! Except for the bit with water in them (glaciers, sea etc.) it's easy to see why the arctic is so frequently chosen as an earth based training ground for space missions to the moon or Mars. Thank you for sharing them.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, that's exactly why we were there. It is very disorienting when you get off the Twin Otter -- there is a definite sense of, hey, other planet, phew, can still breathe, gravity about the same, yeah we can work with this...

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

i really like the flash gallery, nice and simple and loads well. i like how the pictures resize to the browser window. the thing it's missing for me though, is your titles.
False Sky is my immediate favorite - stunning.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I should sort out the titles thing. I was hitting a wall and wanted sleep so typing 120 of them in didn't fly. I'll update it and post again.

[woodenfriend.livejournal.com]

Yeah, ice pix are great, one called false sky is truue thing, I was staring at it for minutes, hypnotizing! :)

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

If it weren't for the water and floating ice, most of these really look like they could be on Mars. Well done.
I'm also glad that your landscapes are SFW. ;o)

Lightroom is great, especially if you have a series of photos that have all been taken at the same conditions with the same camera settings, so you can adjust what needs adjusting in the first image and use those settings for next images where only minor adustments will be needed.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I felt that I needed to almost start from scratch nearly every time, but most of the settings ported across from image to image fairly well in practice and it was MUCH faster than Photoshop. That many images would normally have taken me a week of spare time.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

I guess it's because Lightroom is designed to just fiddle with photos, nothing else.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

I love them! Especially the ones with the sea ice.

Also, yay for Lightroom - it's all but relegated Photoshop to being used for line art and suchlike for me.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Hmm... that's definitely possible for me too, unless I'm going to be working on something that needs a lot of actual editing rather than just retouching.

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

On books - saw an article in the indy that suggested that coffee table books by people like tasker (i think) wer selling for hundreds of pounds right up to satchi's book of hiss artworks which sells for thousands

on a separate thread have you heard of the noisebridge hacker space in the mission district https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Vision. It looks right up your street

"As a space for artistic collaboration and experimentation, we are open to all types of art - with a special emphasis on the crossover of art and technology. From hardware labs to electronics, cooking, photography, and sound labs, anything that's creative is welcome.

We provide infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for people interested in programming, hardware hacking, physics, chemistry, mathematics, photography, security, robotics, all kinds of art, and, of course, technology. Through talks, workshops, and projects we encourage knowledge exchange, learning, and mentoring."

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Impressive - and it's easy to forget how disorienting it is to see a landscape that is entirely devoid of living things.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

It is surprisingly difficult to get any real idea of scale -- this also applies to being there, not just photos.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Stark and impressive. And... did you get all of those Planet of the Apes shots just during the 20 minutes we were fixing that flat ATV tire there?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Believe it or not, yes, that was the only time I got to shoot there.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

I like False Sky and the curve in Planet of the Apes Valley 3 :-)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

These are great. The waterless lifeless landscapes really do look like another planet. Boulder field in particular looks very like similar shots from Mars probes, as I'm sure you were thinking.

Lightroom sounds like it fills the processing niche I get from Bibble Pro -- doing similar things to a group of photos, but with the option of making individual nudges. That's very useful for higher-volume types of things, which I do quite a lot.

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

I really like the not-what-you-think aspects of False Hills and False Sky. :^)

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Also, "Pat's Cove" is actually a small glacier, roughly 120' high and the width of a football field... but looks much smaller, given the lack of visual references likewise.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Yes, Lightroom is very fast, and if it had Color Mechanic, and stitching, and a few other features, I'd probably be using Photoshop much less.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I'd like to try it on another project or two, but I suspect that it will become a fixture of my workflow, with PS basically being relegated to just being used to fix things that Lightroom can't quite manage.