Oak Tree. Almaden Quicksilver Park. September 5, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
A photo from a hike I took this morning.
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Olmsted Erratic
Olmsted Erratic. Yosemite National Park. August 13, 2004. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
Feeling lazy this morning, I have posted an older photo that is a favorite.
Olmsted Point is the renowned Yosemite high country overlook on the Tioga Pass Road. In one direction you see Clouds Rest and Half Dome, in the other the famous view of Tenaya Lake and the domes and peaks beyond.
These glacial erratics (rocks left behind by a retreating glacier) are a short walk from the parking lot. Spectacular thunderstorms were developing all over the Sierra on this afternoon.
Unfortunately, as much as I like this photo it will never make a very large print. It was taken on a camera that does not provide an extremely sharp image and a significant amount of cropping was necessary.
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Three Grass Photos
Last week I was contacted by a representative of a cosmetics firm in the UK about using an old image of some dry grasses that I had shot several years ago. It appears that she had found this image on one of my sites and recognized that a narrow vertical crop of a portion of the shot would work for a poster they were designing.
Their plan was for the image to fill the left edge of a poster that would be 1.5 meters high. Graphically, it made a lot of sense – the mock-up they sent to me looked quite nice. However, there was a problem.
The original photo was made on one of my first digital cameras. Unfortunately, not only was it limited to 4 megapixel resolution but it stored images in .jpeg format rather than RAW. The .jpeg format does not retain all original image information and it introduces (in most cases) compression distortions which, while not an issue for viewing small on-screen images, are quite ugly when enlarged.
Suspecting that the image quality would not be sufficient for what they had in mind but hoping that use on a poster might not require an absolutely sharp image, I sent them a full size copy to consider.
They were disappointed. I was disappointed. There was no way it was going to work.
To be honest, obtaining an extremely sharp image that will be cropped and then enlarged to 1.5 meters high would take fairly special gear. Medium format might work; a view camera would be better.
It so happened that last weekend I was back at the same place where I took the original 4 megapixel image a few years back. This time I set up the tripod and took a few similar images in RAW mode on my 8 megapixel camera. A few sample crops are shown at right.
Image information: Three Grass Photos. August 28, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
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My pictures suck… and so do yours!
From Mike Johnson’s article (“The Magic Bullet”) at Luminous Landscape:
To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody’s pictures suck, that’s how. I’ve seen Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand’s exposures sucked. It’s the way it is.
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