The Antelope slot canyons and the dozen more around them have provided me a wealth of beautiful images. Every now and then I decided to look at old files and re-work and image as I did with this one. This is of one of more well know views in Lower Antelope. Made with a Phase One IQ180 and some work in post.
There is no questions the Tuscany landscape is a photographers dream. As good as it is though it is a challenge to shoot as so much of the landscape is far away and there is little foreground subjects to aid in composition. So, when shooting you need to look at things different. In this case I let the sky be dominant and it then draws you to the subject matter which id the chapel on the hill as some otto the other buildings. I also let the clouds above the chapel anchor the eye to the bottom 1/3⅓ f the image. Shot with a Phase One IQ260 and 240mm lens.
Sometimes the light gods watch over you. This image was made on a trip back from Beatty, NV. This is a small town of about a 1000 people living in the absolute middle of no where. More on Beatty in another post sometime. As I was returning to Death Valley I looked west and saw these clouds. I pushed it and crested the top of the mountain and looked down in the valley back to Furnace Creek and this is what I was greeted with. It was made with a 28mm lens on an IQ180 Phase One camera. Sometimes you just luck out.
Here is another train shot made shooting between two old box cars. Tried once again to present a different look that would accent the rust and colors and drive the eye to someplace different.
After a few Canadian picture days I decided it was time to come back to the good ole USA and to my train project. Here is another from the Noblesville, IN train yard. Shot with a Nikon d800 and 70-200mm lens I compressed the image and then used a single image tone map in NIK software to get the look I wanted.
Once more we were driving around and we stopped for gas. We are out in the real rural area of Ontario Canada. The gas station is a gift shop, garage, ice cream store and a general place to meet for the locals. I loved the color and was attracted by the colored chairs out front. So, I grabbed the camera and did some images. All shot in 5 exposure bracket mode. I knew I wanted to really punch and exaggerate the colors. I processed the image in Capture One and then used NIK HDR to blend the images together until I found a combination that I liked. I am not a super big fan of HDR especially when you can tell it was an HDR but in this case it works. What do you think? Shot with a Nikon D800E and 24-70mm lens in 5 image 1 stop bracket mode. One final noteI used a cool feature in Capture One to correct perspective so the building didn’t look like it was falling backwards.
While driving around the back roads on Cremore, Ontario Michael and I stumbled upon this great yellow field. Contrasting with the blue sky we spent a bit of time shooting it. I made panos, B&Ws and horizontal crops. I ended up settling on this and messed with in post processing. I did what many of my friends are saying about me lately Raberized it. Shot with Nikon D800e and 24-70mm lens.
Like in my previous post this image was made on one of our daily excursions to see what we could see. So much possibility for images is close to home. You just need to keep your eyes open. This shot was made at an old abandoned garage. On the wall of the building was an old Goodyear Tire sign. It was rusted badly and since I love rusty things so much I was attracted to it immediately. And, rather than just shoot the whole sign I looked for an image in the image and played around to I came out with this composition. This was not a crop but made while looking through the viewfinder. Shot with a Nikon D800e and 24-70mm lens. Processed in Capture One and then into NIK HDR single image tone mapped.
I just got back from a week in Canada. During this week I have been working hard with my business partner Michael Reichmann on our web site Luminous-Landscape. We are planning all sorts of new and enhanced things for this site. It is one of the most heavily visited photography websites on the internet. every day after we accomplished what we had on our agenda we rewarded ourselves by going out shooting. We would aim the car and just go and with no specific place in mind we would just find stuff. Always a lot of fun not only shooting but having a great conversation while seeing the countryside. While we were driving we both saw at the same time this one tree on the hill with these great clouds behind it. We stopped set up our gear and shot. We both have different interpretations of the shot. This is mine. Shot with a Nikon D800e and 80-400mm zoom lens. Tis was 5 exposures combined in HDG then converted to BW image.
Lately I have been shying away from the HDR look. This is a grungy look that many photographers use to add artistic effects to their shots. It really is used to recover shadow and highlight details in images by combining multiple exposures of different ranges in exposure together. Sometimes in can be done in such a way that the image looks very natural. Other times it kind of goes over the edge. This is one of those other times. It works though with big old locomotive and the sky and the colors. Shot with a Nikon D800e on a tripod. 24-70mm lens. Processed in Capture One then the output was HDR’ed in Photomatic.