On this day it was quite beautiful with the stormy clouds flying in the air and the play of light and shadows on the water. I didn’t even notice this shot at first. There were five kite boarders on the lake and I was photographing them. I happen to look to my right just in time to catch this image. Luckily I had just changed from my telephoto lens to a wider angle one when I saw it.

I guess the lesson learned is to always have your head on swivel and be looking all around. If I had stayed focused on closeups of the kite boarders I most would most likely have missed this beautiful scene off in the distance.

This photo is of the Humpback Covered Bridge in Covington,Virginia. We stopped there on our trip to Norfolk back in March. I hadn’t posted any of the pictures from that day because I wasn’t real happy with them, but tonight when I looked at this image I saw something in it that I hadn’t seen before and this black and white was born.

This bridge was built in 1857 and remained in public use until 1929. In 1953 the bridge was reconditioned and the land around it was purchased and turned into a park. This is one of the few remaining “humpback” (Meaning the middle is higher than the sides.) covered bridges in the country and is the oldest covered bridge in Virginia.

This photo, taken at the Eureka Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park, is actually the very first black and white that I made in Photoshop back in 1999. I don’t know if it’s still there, but there use to be a print of it hanging in Speed of Light Photo in Mammoth Lakes. I have no idea what happened to the original black and white file of this image, so I remade it last night.

Eureka Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Park, CA

]]> http://sbdigitalarts.com/erureka-sand-dunes/feed/ 1 http://sbdigitalarts.com/the-art-of-visualization/ http://sbdigitalarts.com/the-art-of-visualization/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:31:38 +0000 Steven http://sbdigitalarts.com/?p=499 How often do you think about photography and the photos that you take? I do it all the time. Not a day goes by that some thought about photography doesn’t pop into my head. Many times these thoughts are ideas, or visualizations, about pictures that I want to take when the conditions are right for a certain subject

Take this picture of the Wind Point Lighthouse along Lake Michigan in Racine, WI for example. Not to long ago I read a blog post by Greg Russell on his website Alpenglow Images. The post is titled House on Fire ruin – A Vertical Panorama and it’s about how he shot a vertical panorama by stitching together three horizontal pictures. The minute I finished the post I knew the subject I wanted to try this technique on, Wind Point Lighthouse.

Having shot the lighthouse many times, under many different and conditions, I knew in my mind the composition I wanted and the conditions that I wanted to take it in. Let the waiting game begin….

About a week later the conditions I wanted came to be. We had been out shooting an old mill in Illinois when, on the way home, I realized the conditions were perfect for my lighthouse shot. So we drove out there and I took my three horizontal pictures of the lighthouse. When I got home and stitched the pictures together, I was blown away by the result. There in front of me was not only the image I had envisioned, but something much nicer. This was the best picture I had ever taken of the light.

Then another vision came into my head, I saw this picture in black and white. I immediately began to work on the black and white version that I saw in my mind. Everything fell together nicely and within an hour I had this image.

I find that as I get older and more experienced in photography, I’m pre-visualizing photos much more. I still love going out, being spontaneous and taking what Mother Nature gives me, but there is a certain, wonderful feeling when you see an image in your mind, wait for the right conditions, and then make it a reality.

Last night I was glancing through some  older photos when this shot of the Minarets, in California’s Sierra Nevada, caught my attention. Now, I’ve had this image for 5 years and I’ve never imagined it as anything other than a color image, but when I looked at  it last night, I immediately saw it as a black and white and knew exactly how I wanted it to look.

It’s moments of inspiration like this, that keep my love of photography so strong. With the modern digital dark room anything is possible, and it’s a wonderful feeling to know that at any time one of my older images can be reborn.

Purchase Prints or Usage Rights for the Print

When I shot this photo last November, I remember liking the way the main elements in the image contrasted. To me, the chaotic nature of the tree branches working with the simplicity of the tree trunks and snow covered ground create a very interesting scene. That contrast didn’t show up to well in the color version, but in the black and white it’s very powerful.

When I began working on the black and white image I had a hard time getting the scene to look like I wanted it. The tree trunks kept going black on me and the branches had way to much contrast. I also had problems with the snow on the ground wanting to blow out and go pure white. I was getting  pretty frustrated and  considered giving up on the image. That’s when I had an idea that I had to try. I thought maybe  if I did an HDR of the color image and then turn that into black and white I could keep some detail in the tree trunks and the snow. It worked nicely. Not only did the HDR keep the snow from blowing out, it also preserved the shadows on the ground that are such an important part of the image.

I then proceeded to process the image the way I do all of my black and white images. In Photoshop, I use a combination of Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro and adjustment layers to get the look I want, (Someday I’ll have to do a tutorial on my B&W technique.)

We drove 150 miles, one way, just to see this beautiful little mill. It was worth every mile. When we got there it was very cloudy, perfect conditions for shooting the mill. The sun came out a little later and the scene became way to contrasty. Along with the mill there is an old blacksmith building, a bunch of grinding stones and three old rusty turbines.

In processing this image I did something I’ve never done before. I used Lightroom’s develop presets. Normally when I work on a black and white, or in this case sepia image, I do all the work in Photoshop and use a combination of Nik Software’s Silver Efexs Pro and adjustment layers. I wanted to do a black and white image of this scene and for some reason I started clicking on the presets. When I clicked on the sepia one I liked what I saw, then I clicked on a couple more and things really got interesting. I played around with the contrast, added a vignette and then exported the image.

Then I opened it up in Photoshop and continued to play around with it. I used Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro to add a little more vignette and to reposition it a little. I also did some burn work here and there and did some more contrast work with adjustment layers.

Before we left on this trip, I had a vision in my mind of the image I wanted from the mill. This image is pretty close to what I saw in my mind. It’s almost as if my subconscious knew what I wanted and clicked on the right Lightroom presets to give it to me.

Here’s a new black and white image from our trip to Badlands National Park in South Dakota last spring. I’ve been trying to find the name of this formation, but I can’t find it online. If anyone happens to know it’s name, please leave a comment for me. Thanks.

Though I didn’t care for the lighting in the picture, I was intrigued by the the fisherman sitting at the end of the pier. So I cropped the image vertically in order to make the fisherman a more important part of the scene. Then I forgot about the picture.

A couple weeks later I was looking through my images for possible black and whites when I came upon this picture. I thought it might make an interesting black and white, so I began playing around with it. Almost immediately I had a nostalgic feeling about this shot. It just felt old to me. Something about the lighthouse and that fisherman. This image could just as easily been taken a hundred years ago in 1909.

Because of that nostalgic feeling, I decided to give the image an aged look. I added grain to it and a fairly heavy vignette. I felt that the grain added texture to the image that gave it that older feeling I wanted. The vignette also added to the old feel, and it helped fill in that washed out sky.

This image is a good example of never giving up on a picture. Maybe the original wasn’t the best shot I’d ever taken, but with a little artistic vision and modern imaging software, I was able to create an image that I like a lot and that I’m very proud of.

Then along came the digital darkroom and my dreams began to come true. Though I’ve been working with Photoshop for almost 10 years now, it wasn’t until this last winter that I began playing around with black and white. What I’ve discovered is a whole new world for my artistic expressions to bloom in. I’ve also found that many of my images that didn’t quite make it in color, can be turned into very dynamic black and white images. This Mt Whitney image is a perfect example.

This image was shot from the Whitney Portal Road. The camera I was using at the time was a Minolta DiMAGE A2. The lens on the A2 is a fixed 28-210mm zoom lens. I have an additional lens that screws on to the main lens and takes it up to 400mm. To get the composition that I wanted I ended up shooting this at 300mm.

For the conversion to black and white I used Photoshop. Within Photoshop I used a combination of adjustment layers, layers mask and the burn tool to get the final image.

Photo Details:
Minolta DiMAGE A2
Fixed zoom lens 28-210mm with telephoto lens extension.
Shot at 300mm
ISO 64
f/11 at 1/200 sec
Tripod mounted

Purchase Prints or Usage Rights for this image.