Tag Archives: black and white

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

Alcatraz, Treasure Island, East Bay Hills

February 6, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Black and white photograph of San Francisco Bay with Alcatraz, Treasure Island, and the East Bay Hills beneath a morning winter sky.

On this early February day the rough plan was to head up across the Golden Gate Bridge before dawn, shoot a bit from high in the Marin Headlands as the sun rose, and then continue on to most likely shoot at Muir Woods. However, I ended up spending at least two hours shooting from the headlands, and by the time I finished I knew that the tourist hordes would be arriving at Muir Woods, so I only did a bit of additional shooting from the hills before heading back home.

This photograph was made just before I left the Marin Headlands, near the last turn before the road crosses highway 101 near the Golden Gate. It is a familiar location and I’ve photographed from here many times in the past. I don’t always stop, but if something is a bit special or unusual about the conditions I will. That was the case today as someone unusual weather conditions had left the bay mostly clear, but with a thin layer of fog over Oakland and other areas along the east side of the San Francisco Bay – and impressive high clouds were floating above. Alcatraz Island is at the left, Treasure Island and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge are in the center, and beyond that the tops of buildings in downtown Oakland are visible against the backdrop of the East Bay hills.

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Ideas, Reviews, Technique

Review: “Light & Land” by Michael Frye

February 4, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to go through Michael Frye’s new ebook, “Light and Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom.” Many are no doubt already aware of Michael’s reputation from his photography, his workshops, and his other publications including his “Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite” and “Digital Landscape Photography: In The Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Masters.” I have the .pdf version of “Light and Land”, and I understand that an iPad app version may also be available.

It is typical for photographic “how to” books to focus on specific techniques, and to be organized around a presentation of these techniques – perhaps with a section on curves, a section on black and white conversion, and so forth. This approach has its place, especially for certain types of learners and at certain points in the learning process. It is important to understand the basic techniques and operations that are available in the “digital darkroom” of such programs as Photoshop, Lightroom and so forth. That said, the bigger and more important issue is how to call upon these techniques creatively and effectively and appropriately in order to make photographs. Not all “how to” books do an effective job of illustrating this.

Michael’s “Light & Land” takes a different approach, and one that more accurately and realistically reflects the thought process of a photographer who is calling upon this arsenal of techniques in the service of creating beautiful photographs. He writes:

“The digital darkroom gives us tremendous control over our images. We can make them lighter, darker, add contrast, change the color balance, increase saturation, turn a color photograph into black and white, remove telephone poles, blend exposures with HDR, combine ten images to capture infinite depth of field, or put a winged elephant in the sky.

But what do we do with these choices?” Continue reading Review: “Light & Land” by Michael Frye →

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Bird, Flooded Fields

January 31, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

A bird wades in a flooded Central Valley winter field in front of a receding line of power poles and some farm buildings on a levee.

This is (yet another!) photograph of the flooded fields along a country road near the Cosumnes River in California’s Central Valley. I was shooting almost directly into the sun through remaining fog and haze near the middle of a winter day. The building sits on a levee between the fields and the bird was kind enough to pose for me while I made the photograph.

Given one of the subjects subject that I’ve been discussing at the blog during the past few days, it seems reasonable to point out that this image involved significant work during the post-processing phase – what we used to refer to as “the darkroom,” but which we now refer to as “photoshop.” I used a variety of techniques to push this image towards what I had in mind – a very high key interpretation that I hope evokes the sensation of looking into a backlit hazy atmosphere that is so bright that you can barely look at it. (In fact, it was very much like this when I made the photograph – as you can see it required a 1/1000 second exposure at f/8 and ISO 100. That’s bright!) In general I brought the overall brightness up to nearly pure white in the lightest portions of the image, and I employed some other techniques to lower the amount of contrast in the sky yet keep the building, the poles, and the levee fairly dark. Although all of this was accomplished in the “digital darkroom,” all of the processes are equivalent to those that might have been applied by photographers working in the traditional darkroom.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Central Valley Sky, Winter

January 30, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Thin winter clouds drift above farmland, Central Valley, California.

Photographing these beautiful winter clouds above the California Central Valley near the Cosumnes River between Stockton and Sacramento involved a certain amount of luck. For the most part it had been an extremely foggy morning – so foggy that at a few points early in the day I simply couldn’t find anything to shoot. Eventually the light began to filter down through the tule fog and I had some good luck shooting further up the valley at the Cosumnes River Wildlife Preserve.

At a certain point as the fog begins to thin it goes through a phase that is not so photographically compelling. The very thick fog can be quite interesting, and the light can be very special just as the sun starts to force its way through the fog as it starts to clear. But they there is a period when it is sort of sunny and sort of foggy, and but perhaps lacks the best aspects of each of the two conditions. That is how it was at about the time I left the Preserve and started back down the valley on my drive home.

Much earlier in the morning I had visited this side road near a bend in the Cosumnes River, so I decided to try it again since it was only slightly out of my way on the return drive. I drove slowly all the way to the end of the side road – to where it runs into the levee at the river – and then turned around to start back. I saw lots and lots of waterfowl, including impressive sandhill cranes and beautiful white egrets, but they were all too far from the road or in areas that didn’t provide the right kind of background. Near these flooded fields I stopped to consider trying to photograph some of the birds, changed my mind, and instead decided to see what I could do with these buildings, the flooded fields, and the sky. It was my luck that this final stop coincided with the near clearing of the fog and the appearance overhead of these wonderful clouds.

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