A reader sent a nice message today which included the following:

I am always amazed by the detail of your photographs, the sharpness (I sometimes wish you’d elaborate a bit more on your settings of the shot ).

Thanks for the nice comment about detail and sharpness. Let me give a little overview of some of what I do. (Of course, to really see this you would have to look at a print. :-)

• Almost all of the photopraphs were made with either an 8 megapixel Canon 350D/XT or more recently with a 12 megapixel Canon 5D.
• I use high end Canon lenses – 17-40mm f/4 L, 24-105mm f/4 IS L, 70-200mm f/4 L, 50mm f/1.4.
• I tend to shoot at smaller apertures unless the depth of field requirements of the shot (or limited light and moving subjects) require larger apertures. For sharpness across the frame, I generally shoot at f/8 on the crop sensor 350D and at f/11 or f/16 of the full frame 5D.
• In most cases I shoot from a tripod and use a remote release and mirror lockup.
• I post-process photographs and appropriately “work” the images using methods comparable to those used by traditional film photographers (dodging, burning, contrast selections, etc.) and some that are available in Photoshop (localized levels, saturation, color balance, and others).
• I apply two stages of sharpening to the full size images. First I apply “smart sharpening” to produce the greatest micro detail, while being careful to avoid unnatural sharpening artifacts. Then I apply some unsharp masking to provide “local contrast enhancement.”
• After downsizing the images for posting here, I do one more subtle unsharp mask operation to slightly increase detail in the smaller .jpg versions posted on the web.

Whew!

And that’s only a general summary. Individual images require different processing and different techniques. For example, it would not have been appropriate to do a lot of sharpening in my recently-posted photograph of evening rain in Yosemite Valley. On the other hand, in order to produce the best image it is sometimes necessary to use even more extensive post-processing techniques, such as in recent photos of early morning on the floor of Yosemite Valley, where the scene had an extremely wide dynamic range.

I’m usually happy to explain more about a particular image if you are interested, so just ask! :-)
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