Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Butte and Petrified Dunes, Arches National Park

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Butte and Petrified Dunes, Arches National Park - Morning light on buttes and petrified dunes, Arches National Park
Morning light on buttes and petrified dunes, Arches National Park

Butte and Petrified Dunes, Arches National Park. Arches National Park, Utah. October 10, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on buttes and petrified dunes, Arches National Park

While I’m fascinated and amazed by the namesake arches in this park and by the monumental sandstone buttes, mesas, fins, canyons, towers, and more… I also find that the light and the atmosphere can produce some of the most interesting subjects in Arches National Park. Because this particular butte and the terrain beyond are seen from a spot that is also excellent for photographing certain other nearby subjects, especially in the early morning, this was not the first time that I photographed this scene – though the atmosphere and light were so different on the two main occasions that you might hardly see them as the same subjects at first.

After photographing some impressive nearby sandstone formations in early morning light, I watched as the sun rose high enough to slant its light across the tops of the low formations known as petrified dunes. This is one of several photographs I made there were largely “about” that light and those dune structures, though in both cases I used them as elements in a larger scene rather than the primary subject. Here the backlit morning haze was thick enough to almost render the furthest buttes in the upper right corner of the frame invisible. They are a good distance away, being on the far side of the canyon of the Colorado River, which is visible in front of the buttes. The large, close butte at the lower left posed a challenge as the “front” side was in shadow. (Though the challenge here was less than the last time when I shot here – on that occasion the backlight was so brilliant that I could keep almost no detail in the front of that butte.)

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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Annual Favorites, Commentary, Site News

2012 Favorite Photographs – Final Candidates Gallery

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These are my current forty (!) final candidates for my “2012 Favorite Photographs” post that I hope to share later this week. This is still way too many, and my target is to try to get the number down to about half of this. I’m happy to hear your feedback in whatever form works best for you: identifying one or a few favorites, suggesting your “top X number” of them from within the group, your favorites of each of the various types, or even suggestions of photographs of mine that are not included in this list.

If you didn’t already know, this is a tough job!

Some of my criteria for the final selection include:

  • representing a range of genres – landscape (both large and small), night photography, wildlife, urban landscape, nature, and so forth.
  • incorporating both color and monochrome work.
  • balancing representational work with photographs that are a bit more conceptual, atmospheric, and so forth.
  • recognizing work that others tell me they like.
  • sharing photographs that are personal favorite of mine.

The gallery thumbnails show below are small and may omit portions of images, so click on an image to see a larger version. Once you click on that first image you can use the right/left arrows to navigate through the larger versions of the photographs throughout the entire gallery.

Thanks for looking and for whatever feedback you are willing to share. (Leaving a comment below is a great way to do this.)

Dan

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Commentary, Equipment, Post-processing Workflow, Technique

Post-Processing: A Shadow Recovery Example

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Note that this is an older article from 2012. While the concepts are largely the same with contemporary cameras and software, some aspects of the article are now a bit date.

(In another forum someone asked a question – actually, more like posed a challenge – related to how much usable detail and quality could be extracted from a raw file that contained areas of very low luminosity, as could happen with a badly underexposed image or with an image of a scene with a very large dynamic range. Since I went to the work of responding and illustrating my response, I figured that I might as well share it here, too. With minor revisions, here it is.)

First, I actually have a “real” version of this photograph in which highlights were slightly blown, but which I preferred to use since I could bring them back in post and get a bit more shadow detail to start with. (It looks a bit bright to me as an on-screen jpg, but it makes a fine print.) That photograph ended up looking like this:

Morning light slants over the top of sandstone cliffs above early autumn foliage in Kolob Canyon, Zion National Park

This photograph and the other I’ll move to below were both shot from a tripod with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II at ISO 100 using the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS at f/16. While the “keeper” used for the photograph above had a 1/4 second exposure, the example I’ll use below was shot at 1/30 second.

The exposure challenge in this scene was the very large dynamic range between the bright spot of sky at the head of the canyon and the much darker colorful foliage in relatively deep shadow in the foreground. Exposing for optimal quality in the foreground would completely blow out the sky, while exposing for the sky would necessarily grossly underexpose the foreground.

I originally thought that I might like to have four bracketed exposures in case that would let me produce a better final image via layer blending, but it turned out to be unnecessary and the final image (as shown above) has a single source file with no blending. However, this means that I still happen to have one very badly underexposed (by three stops) version at 1/30 second which I’ll use here as the starting point for what I plan to illustrate in this post. Follow along with me and see what I can do with the very underexposed version of the file…

Continue reading Post-Processing: A Shadow Recovery Example →
Commentary, Site News

Selecting This Year’s “Favorite Photographs” – The Third Cut

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I’ve taken one more step in the process of whittling down the original candidates for my “2012 Favorites” post –  the number now stands at forty. This still seems like too many, but it become harder to give up images at this point! (In fact, there are a few I removed that I really want to put back in!)

If you are interested in seeing them a bit larger, you can open the image and see it large enough to see a bit more detail. I’d be interested in your thoughts about these or even about some that have been left out.

2012FavoritesThirdCutScreenGrab

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.