Photoblog 2.0

Fabric of Stone, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I think this mid-key photo looks more like a textile or fabric than the reality it depicts: the vast stone walls of The Wave.

Cathedral Spires and Bridalveil Falls, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a view of Bridalveil Falls and Cathedral Spires in Yosemite Valley processed to simulate a pinhole camera: vignetting at the edges, softness, brightness in the center, high depth-of-field, and an overall antique look.

Digital simulations of “looks” from the back pages of classic analog photography are great fun!

Mare Island Infrared, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

While on the topic of infrared captures, this is an IR photo of a drydock at the old Mare Island naval shipyard. I particularly noticed the way the infrared capture increased the contrast and drama in the sky.

Winter Vista, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

To enhance this monochromatic winter vista of Yosemite, I used a split toning effect. I added a deeper sepia tone to the darker tones, and lighter sepia to the brighter areas of the image.

In the analog darkroom, toning was a function of paper, processing and chemistry. Split toning was achieved by altering the process so that highlights were handled differently from the dark areas of the photo; for example, by stopping a chemical bath at an earlier point than normal.

In the Photoshop darkroom toning and split toning are, of course, virtual—like the entire digital monochromatic process. Digital black and white is an aesthetic intention with soul, a willful abnegation of color, and an intentional and anachronistic reference to the historical craft of photography.

You can learn more about toning and split toning techniques in Photoshop in Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Technques.

Reach for the Sky, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a black and white rendition of my rather dramatic fisheye image of Bristlecone Pines, some of the oldest living things, photographed in the White Mountains along the California-Nevada border.

Stone Wave, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The Wave is a marvelous rock formation on the Utah-Arizona border. You can read about some of my adventures visiting The Wave in this story written a few years back, and see some of my other photos of the place. Lost in the Desert continues the story of what happened after I photographed The Wave.

Most of my photos of The Wave are in color—but this is a good subject for black and white as well. In this photo, the monochrome helps to mask the scale of the place: you don’t know at a glance whether it is big or small. Answer: very, very big.

Mountain Mist, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I photographed this scene of mist in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during a winter trip to Yosemite Valley a few years back. The image always intrigued me when I looked at the RAW file in Adobe Bridge, but I never could see it as a color photo.

But black and white is another story! I did the conversion to black and white in the process of creating a demonstration for my upcoming new book in my Creative series, Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips and Techniques.

Marin Headlands, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On a bright, blustery winter day I wandered the Marin Headlands with photographer and friend Steven C. It’s amazing how close this beautiful area is to downtown San Francisco. This shot is looking towards the opening to Tennessee Beach from the ocean side (you can’t see the beach itself).

This was a day of extraordinarily heavy surf, and I spent most of my time photographing the explosive action of the waves—as close to the action as I felt safe. But I couldn’t resist an overall shot of the spectacular landscape, captured in full, living RAW color, multi-RAW processed to extend the dynamic range, then converted to black and white using a layer stack of Photoshop adjustment layers, primarily the Red Filter preset and the Infrared preset (for the sky).

In other words, the photo is a sort of non-HDR HDR created by hand—meaning that the tonal and dynamic ranges are greater than you would normally get from a single capture, rendered in black & white, and without the garish look so common in HDR photography.

Rift in the Clouds, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

New Year’s Eve featured a blue moon rising early, but the layers of fog and clouds that swept over San Francisco Bay made a capture seem unlikely.

When the moon made a brief appearance through a rift in the clouds I was ready, with an exposure biased towards the moonlight. The composition is based on the idea of letting everything besides the moon and its light on the water go pitch black. And also on the aesthetic pleasures of grain, er, I mean noise.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 65mm, 1/30 of a second at f/5.0 and ISO 3200, hand held; yes, folks, you read that right, ISO 3,200. Look ma, no tripod.

Yosemite, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In my previous post I showed a photo taken a few years ago of Yosemite Valley—and noted that the work of a digital photography is never definitively done. It’s tempting, and often but not always an improvement, to rework the post-processing of older images; or to process images bypassed in the first edit.

You also don’t need to make an either-or choice between color and black & white. This image shown in this story was re-purposed into monochrome from the color photo in the last story. I created the dramatic black-and-white sky using a high contrast Red filter b&w adjustment layer in Photoshop, in case you are interested.

There’s some disagreement over on Flickr as to whether the black & white or color version is preferred (see the linked comments). I say, why not have both? A “two-fer”…

Yosemite, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Love may mean never having to say sorry—but digital means you’re never definitively done. This is a re-work of a RAW file originally shot in 2007 of Yosemite Valley in late February following a dusting with snow.

Lonely Islet, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This lonely islet sits in San Francisco Bay off China Beach a few hundred feet from the shore. It’s bigger by far at low tide (shown here).

On a fogswept evening it is possible to imagine being marooned on this tiny spit of land, and feeling alone in a forlorn world. The lights of a distant freighter can be dimly seen in the distance. But all too likely the islet is hardly visible from the ship, which will pass by in the dusk.

Stinson Beach Sunset, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A virtue of the short days of winter is that one doesn’t have to wait long for sunset. This photo—of a brief but spectacular sunset over Stinson Beach, California—was taken shortly before 5PM on December 21, the winter solstice and shortest day of the year.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 18mm, circular polarizer, 1/50 of a second at f/9 and ISO 100, tripod mounted; multi-RAW processed using five versions of the original RAW capture.

Escape from the Shadows, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A few weeks ago there was a freak snowstorm in the coastal hills above Berkeley and Oakland, California. It doesn’t usually snow here, so I rushed up with my camera.

Temperatures were above freezing, so the snow on branches took on a look almost like ice.

This tree was lit with subdued sunlight in a nook with towering dark fir trees behind. I intentionally underexposed to let the background go dark, and to bring out the contrast between the white branches and tha dark background. During the black and white conversion process, I worked to bring out the subtle properties of the light.

Puente Bacunayagua, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On the highway between the tourist beach enclaves of Veradero and the gritty provincial capital of Matanzas to the east, and about 60 miles from La Habana to the west, sits Puente Bacunayagua. At close to 1,000 feet above the Rio Bacunayagua gorge and 350 feet long, this is the longest and highest bridge in Cuba. The bridge was built as part of the highway construction program heavily subsidized by the Soviets, which came to an abrupt end in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I took this photo from the terrace outside a small tourist restaurant, bar and souvenir complex on the west bank of the gorge. I was shooting for HDR on a tripod. This image is created from six captures, each capture at 15mm, f/8 and ISO 100. The range of shutter speeds was 1/160 of a second (darkest) to 1/6 of a second (lightest). There was quite a wind, so you can see the motion blur in some of trees.

I fed the RAW captures straight into Photomatix, generated an HDR composite, and fiddled with the tone mapping a bit. I was pleased with how well this came out without having to do individual RAW conversions in advance of running the captures through Photomatix—a nice simplification of my usual workflow.

To get the bus on the bridge with clarity, I composited the highway from the capture with the bus over the Photomatix HDR.