Image Autopsy - Sundance Rose

The Circumstances
I was on a medical conference - lectures from 8 to 12:30 every day, but afternoons off (ok, I skipped some boring stuff). now you wouldn't normally think of mid afternoon as good photographing time, but you take what you can get. Also, this was February and mid afternoon is in fact late afternoon, especially considering I was in the mountains in Banff and the mountains blocked the light well before sunset. I headed straight out from my lecture and decided to check out Sundance Canyon. It seems you can no longer drive there - you park at Cave and Basin and hike 4 km. to the base of the canyon.

At the base of the canyon was a small stream with some ice formations that I spent about 30 minutes trying to find a combination of circumstances that would make a picture but no luck. I abandoned the stream and started up the trail into the canyon. Conditions were brilliant sunlight on one side of the canyon, shade on the other, lit only by the deep blue sky and by light reflected off the other canyon wall - potentially a useful combination. The sunlit side was way to harsh for anything, but the shaded side showed some possibilities. I made a few photographs, nothing really exciting but about half way up the canyon, on my left and right next to the trail was a wild rose, nicely covered with scarlet rosehips. Not only that, behind the rose was a rock covered in light grey material (bird poop?). Whatever it was it provided a nice background for the rose. But even better was an incredible rock further behind in lovely colours which would complement the rose.

The Search
So I knew I had to shoot the rose, but how to do so. THe direction was simple, I wanted the two rocks in the background, now the only issue was what was how far from the rose. I tried a normal lens - didn't work, I tied wide angle, but now the second and background rock wasn't large enough to fill the frame, and it's edges and the material beyond them weren't attractive. Eventually I settled on shooting with my 70-200 at 91 mm. I could shoot the rose and the two background rocks.

The Camera
I hadn't discovered helicon focus at this point so I knew I wasn't going to get the whole shot in focus - just too much to cover, no matter what f-stop. Desperate to get what I could, I stopped down to f32 (this was before I found out that after f16, diffraction robbed any increase in depth of field by blurring the whole damn image). Shutter speed was .8 seconds, tripod mounted obviously, mirror lock, cable release. I had found that my f4 70-200 lens tended to shake on my tripod when the camera was mounted on the tripod. I now use a lens collar with quick release bracket to mount it to my tripod, the camera hanging off the back of the lens. This provides a much sturdier platform.

I focussed a bit behind the rose hoping for the first rock to be sharp, and knowing there was no way the second one was going to be sharp.

Post Processing
Although the colour on the right of the background rock was oranger than I thought ideal to complement the rosehips, after looking at the raw files, it was practically yellow in parts, though the colour on the left side of the rock was just right. I was able to use selective colour and hue/saturation masked adjustment layers to change the colour back to what I remembered and a bit less yellow than even that, to now complement the rosehips nicely. The background was blurred but I didn't think that mattered. The image wasn't optimally sharp as one could have predicted from f32, but I have found that diffraction blurring tends to respond to sharpening quite well (unlike other types of blurring) and as a result, I have been able to make 20X30 prints from this single image photograph.

Local increases in contrast were applied as necessary through masked curves layers. In all there are several hours of work on this image in Photoshop.

Image Analysis
This is another in my images which while almost straight photography, looks both abstract and painterly. The big rock in the background in particular looks like an abstract painting. Note the foreground rock meeting at the lower cornerrs of the image, and the opposite line running from top left down and right, and the streaks on the background rock radiating out from the foreground rock and running parallel to the edges of the foreground rock.