Tag Archives: layer

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Southern California

Eroded Terrain Near Natural Bridge Canyon

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Eroded Terrain Near Natural Bridge Canyon
Eroded Terrain Near Natural Bridge Canyon


Eroded Terrain Near Natural Bridge Canyon. Death Valley National Park, California. March 27, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Rugged and eroded terrain near the entrance to Natural Bridge Canyon in morning light at Death Valley National Park, California.

Natural Bridge Canyon is located at the foot of the Amargosa Range Black Hills just a short distance north of the popular Badwater area. As is typical of many of the canyon entrances in Death Valley, the approach is by leaving the main road paralleling the edge of the Valley and driving up a large alluvial fan on a gravel road towards the hills. The road ends and the canyon quickly narrows.

This photograph was made along this gravel approach road and shows a bit of the fan in the foreground, the cliffs alongside the was in the middle distance, and beyond that the convoluted and colorful strata of the lower section of the mountain range, here with low-angle back light from the morning sun coming from the other side of the mountains. This photograph also shows something that I found remarkable on this visit, namely the incredible profusion of plant life that was coming to live in the wake of some unusually heavy rain fall earlier in the season. During normal years and during most of the year even in wet years you’ll see almost no green at all on terrain like this aside from a few small and isolated bushes. But on this late-March visit there was plant life springing up everywhere. When I looked closely I could find a fringe of green almost everywhere. Here, not only is there obvious growth in the gravel of the wash at the bottom of the frame, but there is a fringe of green along the edges of the cliff and even in the far distance on the higher slopes.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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Technical Data:
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 73mm
ISO 200, f/13, 1/40 second

keywords: death valley, national, park, california, usa, north america, scenic, travel, nature, desert, rugged, erosion, eroded, mountains, hill, cliff, gully, wash, pink, strata, layer, green, plant, growth, spring, rock, morning, light, natural, bridge, canyon, landscape, nature, stock, plants, rock, gravel, red, black, amargosa

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Offshore Squall and Layered Clouds, Point Lobos

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Offshore Squall and Layered Clouds, Point Lobos.

Offshore Squall and Layered Clouds, Point Lobos. Point Lobos State Reserve, California. November 22, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white seascape photograph of a passing offshore squall and layered clouds at Point Lobos State Reserve, California.

This is a somewhat subjective impression of a scene that I witnessed last weekend late in the day along the California coastline as a small weather front passed Point Lobos, causing the weather to quickly switch from sun to brief showers and back to sun. Here the foreground water is in shadow, rain is falling from a luminous stratified cloud and being illuminated from behind. Conditions changed rapidly and this effect was gone in a moment.

This image belongs to a category I like to describe as “imaginary landscapes.” The scene is real and nothing has been added nor taken away, but the photograph has been post-processed in order to create a more subjective view of the scene that I had in mind – it corresponds to something I saw in the scene, but I did not restrict myself to trying to produce an objectively “real” version of the scene.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Twitter | Friendfeed | Facebook | Facebook Fan Page | Email

keywords: point, lobos, state, park, reserve, carmel, monterey, peninsula, big, sur, california, usa, ocean, sea, pacific, coast, shore, scenic, stock, travel, nature, off, shore, storm, clouds, layer, form, shower, squall, passing, seascape, weather, rain, light, sun, reflection, sky, stock, black and white, monochrome

Technique

How I Sharpen – An Overview

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(I originally wrote this article way back in 2009. Some portions were revised in February 2019 to reflect changes to sharpening tools and some different ideas I have developed regarding sharpening settings. It was updated and modified again in 2023.)

I just posted something elsewhere about how I sharpen for prints and I figured I’d get some extra mileage out of it by posting it here as well. First, few disclaimers…

  • The title of this article originally referred to a “quick overview.” Clearly, it is too long for that! But there are whole books on sharpening, so by contrast I think this qualifies as a quick description. In fact, I’ve left a lot out of the description!
  • There are people with far more expertise on this topic than I have, and I have no illusions that this description represents the “right” way to do this, much less the “best” way!

The subject of how to sharpen photographs in post for print or electronic output is one that confuses many people… and a subject to which many books, online articles, and forums posts have been devoted. There are any number of ways to get the desired results via sharpening, and different techniques are called for depending upon taste, the nature of the image, and the final form of presentation: size? print? jpg? etc…

Here is a general description of what I do when I print. I’ve left some variations out of this description. The description also covers software that I use in my workflow — you might prefer something different, but you might still be able to adapt these ideas. You’ll note at least one controversial method later in the list, but try it before you dismiss it. The approach I use could well be “over-kill” if you just want to pump out a bunch of jpgs to share with friends and family or if you want to make some small prints — my end goal is good sized prints, and I work on each one rather carefully rather than mass-processing them and printing a bunch at one time.

And please understand that I’m most certainly not implying that my way is the right way. It works for me, and that people who view my prints often remark on their sharpness and detail. (And a few other things, too, I hope! :-)

Continue reading How I Sharpen – An Overview →

Commentary

A Couple Quick Updates

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PeterP wrote left a “comment” asking how I do black and white conversions. I replied with a brief overview of my approach to using the “Black and White” layer in CS4 and then working with multiple masked curves layers to fine tune the resulting image.

I returned yesterday from a four-day pack photography backpack trip into the Young Lakes area of the Yosemite back-country out of Tuolumne Meadows. I’m currently going through a few hundred RAW files and beginning to work on a few of them. Conditions in the Sierra this past week were “interesting” – meaning some pretty good sized thunderstorms every afternoon and lots of interesting light somewhat marred by occasional smoke floating up from a wildfire burning lower in the Tuolumne River drainage.