Slickrock and Shadow

Yellow Wildflowers growing among Lava Rock Unexpected beauty in the bleak desert is the reward that "desert rats" have come to love.  On a Sunday evening I went out for a casual drive to Joe Blake Hill.  Never knowing what I would find, I got out and looked around.  In the peak of bloom these yellow flowers popped with color.  The black lava rock provides a natural dark contrast to the lovely yellow.  I adjusted my ISO to allow a quick enough exposure to prevent wind from blurring my flowers.  Then I composed my shot and pressed the button.  Sometimes I just don't know if a shot will be any good but I shoot with hope.  This was one of those moments.  I believe there are several stages to photography. 1.  Planning the excursion. 2.  On-site photography:  composition and camera settings to capture the moment. 3.  Post-processing to polish and develop what I saw in step #2. On this occasion I only saw the p...

Green Glow, Smooth Flow I discovered this photo in a group of RAW files I never got to during the 2017 year.  In sorting through them, getting rid of the rubbish, I found this one and said to myself, "there's a jewel."  I began processing the photo primarily by adjusting the luminance of various color channels to help the falling water retain it's bright whiteness.  This was easily done using the blue color channel in Lightroom.   Then I turned to the greens.  The greens are under and above the water in this photo and (as always) I try to process them to look like they did in reality.  I was there.  I saw all this and even swam in the water.  This is what it looks like.  The only missing element is the sound of falling water.   With this longer exposure, I blurred the waterfall and smoothed out the water's surface.  I also captured some blurred motion in the foliage as it swayed in a slight breeze.  Some of th...

Snow Canyon Overlook with Tree in Foreground This entry will be about two things:  blown highlights and finding the right foreground subject. Blown highlights are a photographers' worst nightmare.  A blown highlight is just white, no color, no detail, no definition, nothing but white.  You cannot create anything with it.  Many cameras including mine have flashing red pixels on the LCD screen to alert you to blown highlights.  When shooting, they are to be avoided. In processing the above photo, the subject is a darker object against a brighter background.  This calls for processing to lighten the details in the tree while still keeping the detail in the brighter distant cliffs.  There are ways to do this which look fake and I don't want that.  Sometimes a photo will look more real, believable if you just let the highlights blow out, which is what I did here in the upper left corner of the photo.  There is just white, not blue, sky. ...

Pololu Cliffs at Sunrise.  The glow on the water is enhanced in post-processing. Processing a photo after taking it is often underestimated in the importance of the photographic process.  There is a lot more glamour in climbing a mountain with all of your camera equipment at sunrise to take a picture.  Comparatively, sitting in an office looking at a computer screen adjusting the contrast and color saturation is not as thrilling. There is also quite a bit of secrecy about how processing is done.  Everyone seems to have their own special technique.  I typically shoot with one exposure and try to process the photograph in my RAW processing software.  Currently this is Aperture from Apple.  (Unfortunately this particular software will not longer be supported by its maker and I will have to switch to light room at some point.  That's a whole another subject.)  After doing the standard adjustments for exposure, highlight recovery, black poi...