Mono Lake Sunset, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

On Flickr, Nadine comments about this photo “I don’t know if you had a chance to witness such beauty or whether you created this awesome image…”

It’s not at all unreasonable to suspect me, as Nadine does, of partially concocting imagery. After all, I believe that any interesting digital photograph is created using one part photography and one part post-processing tools. Nadine herself aptly summed up a recent essay of mine, A Pixel Is a Pixel, about digital manipulation as folows: “ALL digital images are manipulated.”

Point granted. Even the act of creating a JPEG using an automatic point-and-shoot involves digital manipulation, although the manipulation is performed by software, and most of us don’t think about it as manipulation. At a different level, most professional digital photographs have been at least routinely balanced and sharpened.

Along with the premise that all digital images are manipulated, I have two related hobby horses. First, I don’t want to see basic photography skills, and ways of seeing, lost in the oncoming rush of all things digital. And finally, it is clear (at least for me) that digital photography is now a bifurcated craft, blending the job of the photographer with that of a digital technician.

For myself, though, the scene I photograph needs to contain the seed of the final image, in the sense that the child is the father of the man, or what I create ultimately is some kind of Platonic ideal of what I saw when I photographed. There’s always a connecton between my subject matter and the final image, even if I do use digital techniques to fix flaws and make the scene grander.

Here’s the backstory of this photograph of sunset at Mono Lake. Julian and I were hanging out at the South Tufa Area around sunset. Julian was playing on the beach and I was taking pictures.

The light was beginning to fade, and I was just about to pack it in. I looked up and saw a large cloud start to glow with the sunset. I grabbed Julian, my camera, and tripod, and ran for the car. I figured I’d get to higher ground where I could capture the light from the cloud reflected in the lake.

This plan worked although as it turned out by the time I got to a good vantage point I only had a few seconds before the sunset faded, so I was only able to snap a couple of quick photos. This one was handheld at 1/20 of a second, which I only got away with because it was a wide angle view, and thanks to the len’s Vibration Reduction (image stabilization) feature.

How vast Mono Basin seemed in the oncoming night alone with my nine-year-old as I took this picture! How wonderful, savage, lonely and beautiful.

Back at the computer, I multi-processed the RAW original, “painting in” varying exposures using layer masks and the Photoshop Paintbrush tool to increase the vibrancy and the cloud and the water color, and to make the photo look more like the scene the way I remembered it.

Tufa, Mono Lake, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

Nature created the tufa towers in Mono Lake by combining the carbonates found in salty lake water with the calcium found in nearby freshwater springs. The tufa towers are composed of calcium carbonate, and formed when a freshwater spring wells up through the salty Mono Lake, which is highly alkaline and rich in carbonates.

Julian and I visited the South Tufa area at sunset. From a distance, Julian thought that the fantastic knobs and spires of the tufa towers were some giant’s sandcastle. Closer up, Julian wanted to build his own sand structures on the beach of the inland sea that is Mono Lake while I took photos.

Starting in 1941, the city of Los Angeles began draining water from Mono Lake for its lawns and swimming pools. By the 1980s, water levels had become so low that the ecosystem was seriously in danger. For example, islands used by nesting birds were now connected to the mainland, and could be accessed by predators.

In 1994, after 16 years of court battles, an agreement between Los Angeles and environmental organizations was reached that stabilized the water level at 6,392 feet above sea level for twenty years (until 2014 that is).

In light of this recent history, it’s good to see that the heavy snowmelt of the last two seasons has raised the level of the lake, so that waves now lap over the boardwalks and the information signs in the South Tufa area. Although of course there is a great deal of work still to be done to preserve the wonders of this very special place.

This photo was triple processed from the RAW, once for the sky and tufa, once for the foreground, and once for the reflection in the puddle. I used layer masks and the Paintbrush tool to combine these different exposures in Photoshop.