Image Autopsy - Forked Tree

Welcome to the second of my series on looking at one of my own images, how it came about, the technical details and what I think works (or doesn't work) in the image.

Circumstances - it was about 1977 and I had some holiday time during my residency in family practice and we drove 1500 miles from Edmonton to Vancouver Island (ok, so we had to take a ferry). Cathedral Grove is a preserved area of old growth forrest with some of the largest trees in Canada and was then (as it is now) a popular stop on the way across the island to get to Tofino and Long Beach on the west coast. These huge Douglas Fir and Cedar trees are up to 15 feet in diameter at the base and 250 feet tall. Sunlight makes it to the ground in splotches but fortunately this was a dull day.

I'm lucky I have this photograph because only a few hours later I tripped as I hopped and jumped around a lovely waterfall, falling forward and very cleverly just stopping the tripod and mounted camera from hitting the ground. The force however of stopping suddenly ripped the tripod socket out of the bottom of the camera and it proceded to bounce down the rocks.

I'm not sure if this huge tree even exists today - though it had been growing for 700 years when I photographed it the first time, a huge wind storm came through a few years ago, knocking down many of the trees including some of the giants.


The Search - I've been back to Cathedral Grove last Fall, and frankly it isn't easy to photograph. There's no way to capture the majesty of the trees when you are only 30 feet away at most (and you can't see them if you are further). At best you are only going to capture part of the trees. I was lucky to find trees that weren't simply vertical, that offered some diagonal lines.

The Setup - Nothing complicated here, simply a matter of manouvering around until a pleasing composition could be seen.

The Equipment - The Ikonta is in fact a very nice camera - one of few which can allow you to slip a 6X6 cm. camera into your pocket. It's manual focusing but with landscapes that's often not a big issue as in attempting to get adequate depth of field, we are using hyperfocal distances and simply guessing the distance to the tree trunk then stopping down to f22 or 32 is all you can do. Framing with this camera is a nightmare as it has to have one of the world's worst view finders, even 'more worse' for those of us with glasses. Lets's just say that framing with this camera is not n exact science.


The camera's Tessar lens is extremely sharp in the centre, slightly soft in the corners, uncoated (in my version) and produces a lovely tonal palette. Of course the lens isn't interchangeable (no decisions to make there) and square format (so I don't even have to decide which way to mount the camera). Winding on film is a matter of using the little red window in the back to observe the frame counting numbers roll by on the film paper backing (oddly, I have a new Shen Hao 6X12 cm. back for my 4X5 that works the same way - completely reliable if you aren't standing in the sun). The simplicity of my Ikonta has resulted in a number of good images over the years and I have since replaced it on ebay, though largely for nostalgic reasons as I now shoot digitally).

The film was Ilford FP3, the exposure long forgotten. Though the camera only went to f22, the f stop ring actually went past and produced a creditable f32 without enough diffraction to negate it's advantage.

Post Processing - Can't remember the developer for sure - I switched to HC-110 around that time on the advice of Fred Picker. The negative is quite thin (I have a sneaking suspicion that the smallest aperture might actually have been smaller than f32). It has been difficult to print, requiring all my skills to bring out good detail in the tree bark. The advent of scanning and digital printing has made my life a lot easier. The negative was scanned with my Epson 4870 flatbed and with various masked curve layers in Photoshop I have been able to produce a print (on matte paper) which exceded anything I was ever able to produce in the wet darkroom. This is not an uncommon phenomenon - people rescueing marginal negatives through scanning and computer work.

Image Analysis - note the splayed vertical lines caused by the small tree in the bottom left, the two big trunks, and the smaller branch on the ground angling up and right in the bottom right of the image. This fanning of lines is visually attractive, but normally runs the risk of simply allowing the eyes to wander out the top of the print, never to return. In this image, we have the matched downwards angling branches on both left and right keeping one's eyes within the print. The fallen log that runs low right to upper left behind the two big trunks counters the verticals of the two large trunks. I like the cross made by the twigs in front of the right trunk, though the twig to the left of them is less than ideal. It doesn't bother me enough to warrant removal in Photoshop, though it would certainly be an option. The foreground objects are not within the depth of field (one of the joys of using medium format is a lack of depth of field even when stopped down) but despite being out of focus, it doesn't jar the eye and frankly has never bothered me. Note that using a tilt - shift lens wouldn't help in this situation.

Despite the deficiencies in the negative, the image has rich tones throughout and the distant upper forrest is light without being glaring (the joys of a dull day).

All in all, the way the varioius parts of the image come together pleases my eye, whether they follow any compositional rules is of no importance to me. It's been 30 years since I shot this image and it still holds together for me and other people like it too so it isn't just me falsely ascribing elements to the image which are remembered from the occasion but not actually recorded in the picture - always a risk when you are in a place that really moves you.

Sales - as indicated last time, I'm making prints from these 'image autopsies' available inexpensively for purchase ($40 incl. shipping for 8.5X11) - order them as for the print of the month and specify which image it is you want. I suspect this image would look good on the new inkjet papers which mimic glossy dried matte and will experiment accordingly and sell using that which works best.

Badlands Digital

More from the badlands, this time three horizontal shots from a 10D, stitched with PTGui. Although there were parts of the image that worked, the dark grass in the upper right, and the rocks in the lower right didn't balance what was on the left.

A combination of cropping and 'filtering' and lightening the grass with an extreme curve and dodging the rock highlights gave things better balance. Akvis Enhancer seemed to further balance tones while increasing local contrast.

From The Badlands, Alberta

Shot in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta - one of my favourite locations and good for an annual trip. This is an older image, shot on 4X5, scanned with my Epson 4870, and edited and cropped in Photoshop.

Below is the first upload and after previewing the blog I was unhappy with how light the left hand side was in general and in particular in comparison to the right. Three curves layers later I'm happier with the result. It would need fine tuning for printing but for on screen presentation, I like the adjusted version better.

Canon iPF5000 Printer update

WARNING

the canon 5000 wiki does not recommend the purchase of this printer until and if major issues of ink cartridge failure and lack of replacement are resolved. Currently you have one month to install and use a cartridge - any failure beyond that is not covered - I have $1000 worth of replacement ink cartridges waiting for use, all of them over a month old - so presumably if any fail, I am out of luck.

This MUST be resolved before considering purchasing this printer (and you have to wonder about the advisability of purshasing any canon printer at this point.

My status is as follows:

- none of the starter cartridges is anywhere near empty after making about 75 8.5X11 prints and about 25 13X19 prints - boy does it use less ink than my Epson 4000!

- none of the starter cartridges have failed - fingers crossed.

- using this printer has been an absolute pain in the ass - before upgrading the firmware (took several attempts), sheet after sheet of manual feed was rejected for being skewed - not that I could see.

- lining up paper to the right edge is easier than with my Epson 4000 but that micky mouse sliding left edge holder for manual feed is almost useless - too tight and it binds, not tight enough and as paper moves back and forth in the loading process, the paper can become skewed (enough even I can see it - so even with new firmware which is more tolerant of skewing - I run into trouble often).

- having to press buttons on the printer several times for every sheet of paper is outright silly - someone needs their wrist slapped. Bad programmer! Bad programmer!

- updating the firmware was in no way obvious - you have to install the installer - but that doesn't do the update, then you have to install the update, then you have to perform the update - ridiculous!

- in black and white, you have no profiles - because you have no colour - what this means though is you are totally on your own to develop custom curves for each paper you use - I'm not clear on why we can't have icc profiles for black and white too - which would set the tonal curve. Fortunately you can save curves and the Photoshop 16 bit print utility saves the last curve used anyway.

- the updated software at least lets you use most of the manual feed papers print surface - the old version didn't let you use the last inch and a half of paper in each side - so you lost 3 inches of paper each way - but now when I specifically set manual 3 mm. I'm told it won't work with the paper choice I made, but that was critical for matching my paper choice - round and round we go!

Does this sound like you are ready to fork out $3700 Canadian for this printer (printer plus one full set of replacement inks)? I thought I had waited long enough before purchasing it to avoid teething problems - sigh.

-Oh, by the way, when you can get it to work - it does make nice prints.

'It Looks Like A Painting'

More than occasionally someone will comment that one of my colour images looks like a painting. As I never did colour work until I switched to digital, this leaves me a little uncomfortable. Are they telling me that the images don't look real, or that they are too manipulated, or that the digital process has for better or worse added something to images that wasn't there?

After 40 years of dodging, burning, bleaching and generally manipulating black and white images, it never occurred to me to not do the same thing in colour so it was certainly possible that these comments were 'fair'.

Oddly, though, the comments weren't necessarily directed at some of my more manipulated images or my more abstract images. They used comments like this at images which had little done to them and were fairly normal looking landscape photographs.

Could it be the matte paper - after all people are used to glossy prints - but they make these comments about images behind glass too so that wasn't it.

It's quite possible that I'm completely missing the boat - but given the wide range of non painterly images to which they apply this comment, my suspicion is that they make this comment using as a frame of reference their own colour snapshots of similar scenery.

They don't take into consideration (they simply don't know about)the effort we go to to pick lighting which will best show the subject, or the amount of work on the image to open up shadows and control highlights.

Their snapshots have black shadows and pure white highlights, haze obscuring anything distant and colours that come from shooting at noon.

Perhaps I'm completely deluding myself. Maybe digital is doing something to the images that didn't happen in film days. Michael Reichman has addressed this issue by simply defining the 'new' real, suggesting that digital is capable of doing things film was not and that the images more closely match what he 'saw' but in the past could not have recorded, putting the issue squarely back in the lap of the viewer.

Anyway, I'm interested in your experiences, your theories as to the explanation, and how you deal with such comments (assuming you get them).

Goals, Expectations, Predictions, and Hopes

I had written about negative thinking and it's costs and had casually mentioned that assuming you were going to shoot a masterpiece today was at least marginally better. G Dan Mitchell made the very sensible point that photographers have to believe that they can and will shoot a masterpiece - that we need to believe that to keep shooting.

I'd like to expand on that a bit. I think it's important to recognize the differences amongst goals, dreams, aspirations, expectations, standards, and intentions.

I intend to shoot a masterpiece today. I hope to succeed, I expect to be disappointed more often than not, but am aware that if I don't try I certainly can't succeed.

It's also important to note that it's one thing to believe that I can create a masterpiece but that it's destructive to expect that it's got to be today and that if it isn't I'm a failure.

I remember from my film days shooting 4X5 and developing film but not proofing or printing for several weeks, the anticipation building, the expectations rising, only to make prints and find out that I had way oversold myself. Cycles like this were responsible for me buying a lovely new 4X5 and never using it or any other camera for 15 years.

More than likely you aren't that dumb but failure to meet expectations can be pretty darn expensive.

I hear of photographers who shoot for an entire year before hitting the print darkroom - I admire their confidence and know I could never ever do that - in fact one of the joys of digital is I can head out again the next day and reshoot something if what I find isn't quite right. Perhaps I'm kidding myself but I do feel that rapid feedback is helping me improve my skills. When image problems don't show up for months, it's pretty hard to relate them back to issues of technique, when it's only two hours later, the lesson tends to be pretty powerful.

Dan is absolutely correct - we have to believe we have great images in us, that we are capable of producing them any moment now. It's helpful to feel confident enough to predict that we will be a success, but putting a time frame on it might not be helpful.

Seeing Things In Photographs

How do you deal with people who see animals and such like in your landscape photographs? Do you deliberately search them out? Do you typically see the same things your viewer does - and before they commment? What do you see in the above image? Do you care?

For myself I note that I can see something in the image when I see it small, and nothing when it fills at least half the screen. This makes you think about relationships in images - how close they have to be to each other to have meaning. I wonder if there is something to be learned here?

If There Were A Prize For Negative Thinking...

Ever talk yourself out of something by convincing yourself beforehand that
a) it's a dumb idea
b) it won't work
c) others have done it better
d) my camera equipment isn't good enough
e) there's too (much/little) (sun/wind/cloud/etc.) for good photography
f) not enough time
g) I've been shooting crap lately so this will be crap too.
h) I've tried my best and it just isn't good enough.

or any number of other negative self talk messages.

Arguably negative self talk like this is marginally better than the opposite - today I'm going to shoot a masterpiece, a photograph to transcend all others I have ever shot.

On the one hand you set yourself up to fail or not bother, on the other you set standards so high and unrealistic that meeting the standard is unlikely in extreme.

Perhaps more realistic thinking somewhere between might be best. Even better is to go out with the attitude that 'I'll make the best of what I find', I may not make a masterpiece, but I know I won't if I don't go out and shoot.

Here's some observations:

1) Most photographers get better with time - I have a nice book of Ansel's early mountain work - but frankly, it would never have seen the light of day if he hadn't already been famous - trust me - he got better with time.

2) The only way to not make progress is to keep screwing up the same old way - so get creative - find some new ways to screw up (and more to the point - stop screwing up the old ways).

3) Most photographers fail for lack of effort or skill, not talent. At workshops, most of the prints fail for pretty basic reasons - technical glitches, poor printing, weak composition - it's unusual for them to fail because the photographer had a dumb idea or couldn't find anything interesting to photograph. This means that any lack of perceived success on your part is overwhelmingly likely to be from fairly simple errors of insufficiency of skills, which with a bit of work could be overcome.

4) There are more photographs out there waiting to be taken than you have time to shoot - lack of something to photograph is really just laziness or pessimism or discouragement - just get out there.

5) failure to find anything worth shooting is fairly common, but often it's because we have preconceived ideas of what we are looking for - and on being there at the wrong time or under the wrong conditions to find that, we can't change gears and look at what is there. If it's February in Inuvik, perhaps wild flower photography isn't your ideal objective. On the other hand, snow drifts, ice crystals, northern lights, and day long low sun might be the order of the day.

Favourite Books - Examples - Ansel Adams

Examples : The Making Of Forty Photographs
Ansel's discussion of the making of each of the images is well worth reading, the images themselves are both good and varied, close, far, grand landscape, buildings, portraits. My copy has excellent printing quality - definitely one of the books I return to.

The images are of course all black and white but I think any photographer in any medium would benefit from this book. Highly recommended.

Photo.Net

Just spent some time looking through 7 years of photo of the week on Photo.net and was very impressed with some of the work - sure there were the miracle shots, the dramatic colour shots, the pets and so on, but there was a significant number of really good images, often taken with inexpensive cameras, putting those of us who spend thousands on equipment to shame. Well worth a gander through. I checked out the 'best photos' and wasn't as excited - more cliches and bright colours, but a few really nice images too a few pages down.

Getting Tough, Getting Smart

You know that little flaw in the image that you want to overlook because otherwise it's a great photograph, hate to tell ya, but it's only going to get bigger, stick out more and bug you much more.

The odds of an image weakness you can see now somehow fading from your consciousness is near zip.

Either fix it or throw it - some image flaws can be reduced to the point they do really fade, but if that's not possible, better to chuck the image now and move on - the time you spend working around the flaw could be far better spent.

That said, here's some things I have done successfully in the past.

- the darkness of one corner is completely out of balance with the rest of the image. A good job with curves and a mask might be enough to make the corner match. Just because you know it was a darker material than what was in the other corners doesn't mean it has to appear that way in the photograph.

- the lovely lines and curves of an image are spoiled by, say a branch. I think it's entirely reasonable to take out dead branches with some Photoshop cloning, unless you don't think you are creating art, in which case leave the branch or the pop can and hope people buy your 'authentic' argument.

- things don't quite line up in the corner - consider using a free transform and slightly stretching the image - watch for odd distortions if you do it too much.

- something really distracting in an image - could it be the colour - would a black and white conversion with appropriate filtering make it fade from view? I'm not above some subtle colour changes with a mask in a colour image to save an otherwise nice image.

- skilled work on local brightness and contrast (by whatever method) can not only save an image - it can literally make an image. You thought Ansel's contact proofs looked even remotely like his final prints - I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to even recognize the images when you flip through the proofs - he made This from That? Yup!

Tripod Centre Columns

Photographers tend to either be strongly for 'em or not.

The argument against centre columns is that it encourages the use of an essentially unstable camera position - at the end of a long pole.

I see things this way. I buy a tripod which can go to eye height without any use of the centre column - I think this is very important - odd when so many reputable tripods don't. I then use the first two inches of tripod column for minor height adjustments on occasion (perhaps 5% of my photographs). I figure this much column isn't a big deal.

On rare occasions, I use the full height of the column to get past an obstruction - significantly less than 1% of my pictures - but the only way to get an image sometimes.

On my Gitzo 1348, there are no stability issues with the existence of the centre column, only it's use - on those rare occasions when I use it more than a couple of inches, I need an absence of wind and give the camera longer than usual to stop vibrating.

The only real downside to the centre column has been the fact that the camera can't get as low to the ground as I'd like. I have even considered cutting the column short (exc. that I do use the full height in rare cases).

As my routine is to set up the tripod so the camera is at least at eye hight without any centre column application, I'm not tempted to rely on the centre column to do things I should have done with the legs.

So: buy a tripod that can go to eye level without help from the centre column, then it's your choice whether to use one or not, for special occasions only. If you do a lot of low work, I'd not have a centre column - eg. someone interested in flower photography (not unless it was one of those tripods which can mount the centre column horizontally). Find yourself standing on 45 degree slopes, you might just want that centre column.

Camera Height

I still remember reading Ansel Adam's Basic Photo series and seeing a picture of Ansel standing on top of his International photographing from a roof platform. So, just how high should the camera be and are there implications for various heights.

Eye Height has the advantages of convenience, especially if hand holding. It could be argued that it's the most natural position to view the world, but alternatively one could make the argument that serious photography is about showing people things they hadn't seen or didn't notice before - so perhaps anything but eye height would be best.

We are used to looking at faces from eye height, yet many of the great portraits were photographed with a waist level finder and position. Such a position shortens the chin and nose and presents the whole body in correct perspective - not leaning back if photographing from the floor, or looming forward, if shot from eye level.

A low position tends to emphasize foreground which is ok so long as you have the depth of field to use it - perhaps a reason why most low position shots are made with a very wide angle lens.

Low tends not to work well when there are tall grasses or small bushes in the way. If the path is clear though and if you can tilt the camera back or lens or have enough depth of field or are using Helicon Focus to blend several shots at different focus points, then it can be dramatic.

You could of course shoot from low but aim high enough to avoid foreground but you need to be aware that from this position everything is going to look like it's falling backwards unless you have lens shift. I'm quite happy to make the correction in Photoshop. I know many people don't like the additional processing and the throwing away of some pixels that this engenders, but they are the same group who when shooting large format were happy to use the unsharp edge of their lens coverage to get the same effect - bottom line, I'm quite impressed with the results of perspective correction in Photoshop.

What about higher than eye height? It's a bit of a hassle. Either you can't see the viewfinder or you have to bring your own step ladder. I have a few times needed to get over something in the foreground or had to eliminate something in the distance. As I don't normally carry a step stool with me, I have been known to rely on auto focus and used the fact that my tripod does have a centre column which won't rotate to set everything up, then raise the camera a foot or so and take the picture, re-aiming as needed after checking the LCD.

I have shot from the roof of a suburban but as I typically don't shoot grand landscapes, don't often have a need for a high position and when I do, I'm off in the boonies with no vehicle in sight.

More From Fall

Suffering For Your Art

The best view of this small fall was right in front, a view only possible via being in the pool below. Actually, it wasn't as bad as I'd expected and I quite enjoyed myself being right next to the fall and the wonderful ice patterns.

Ice Forms

More from yesterday's shoot.

Breaking The Composition Rules

Not only is this image way too tall and skinny, it isn't divided into thirds, and the left side is white, the right black, the trees are chopped off near the ground. That said, it works for me.

Ice Wave

It's after midnight so this was a shot from yesterday morning. I'd already tried the more standard shot taken from below the 'fall' and looking straight at the ice formation, but I decided it might be worth checking from above and found these lovely curves. There was a lot of the image off to the right and while it had some interesting features, I found that keeping the rest of the image in weakened the best part which you see here.

It doesn't matter how good the material is, if it doesn't strengthen the image as a whole, it has to go.

Misery Loves Company

I was supposed to go out photographing this morning with a friend. Last night I walked the dog and it was pleasant walking but cold enough I thought standing around photographing was going to be less than fun. I checked the weather and it was forecast to be windy - we were shooting landscapes.

Had it not been for going with a friend, likely I would have slept in this morning. Because I was going with a friend, each of us encouraged the other and the net result is we got up early and headed out in the dark.

At one point the wind was blowing about 60 klicks (40 mph). the snow was blowing hard and had I been on my own I would have headed home. Instead we stopped the car and attempted to photograph the blowing snow - no great shots, but we felt good having done it. At one point my hat blew off and half a mile later I found it at the bottom of a hollow.

With considerable misgivings we drove on to Big Hill Springs Provincial Park, fully expecting the wind to put the brakes on any photographing. To our surprise, we turned the corner, dropped into a ravine - no wind. Not only that, the weather warmed up and we have a lovely morning photographing an icy stream.

About half way through the morning I decided to get brave and enter the water to photograph the ice from a better angle - must have been a warm spring feeding the stream because it wasn't that bad. I spent the next two hours wading around in foot deep water having a blast.

Point is, there were several opportunities to duck out of this shoot and decide it wasn't worth it - too cold, too windy, but because we were going together, there was no question of letting the other fellow down - and off we went.

Image Autopsy - Tree Reflection

I am about to start a new series. In it I am going to pick one of my images that means a lot to me and explain the circumstances of shooting it, what I was trying to achieve and what I did to the image(s) to get there. I'm going to talk about the elements of the image which are important to me. It will be up to you to decide if they work but I'm not looking for feedback on whether it's a nice image. Rather, what I hope is that you may get something from my own struggles, sucessful or not. I definitely want feedback on whether the whole autopsy idea is worth while.

Some time ago I did a series on dissecting classic images but difficulties in getting permission to reproduce the images meant only that I could provide a link and any comments I made about the images were largely speculation about the intents of the photographer. Time has shown that such analysis may explain why an image is good but may be completely off the mark in explaining what the photographer was doing and why. This time I have an intimate understanding of the photographer and the only limitation is my memory, faulty as it can definitely be.

Circumstances - I was looking for interesting patterns in the thawing ice of the Elbow River near downtown Calgary (pop. 1 million). My back was to the bus barn and across the river was Inglewood, an old and now artsy part of town with quaint shops, live theatre, galleries and restaurants. It was January during a warm spell and about 10 degrees C. (50 F.), brilliantly sunny with a strong blue sky typical of Alberta. There were a couple of clouds hanging around.

The Search - I didn't find any really strong patterns in the thawing ice. A number of shots were taken, none have seen the light of day. As I worked my way along a bicycle path next to the river, I came across a very slight inlet in the river edge. Itmade a sweeping curve which could be accentuated by use of a wide angle lens. At this time of year, multiple freeze thaw cycles had given the ice at the edge of the river a large crystaline structure, easily visible. I looked both upstream and down for intersting patterns in the ice leading away from this foreground curve but nothing struck me. Then I realized that water running along over the ice in mid stream was reflecting the few clouds. Further, by positioning myself I could get the water to reflect the upper part of a tree on the opposite bank.

The Setup

I set up my tripod and moved it around to fine tune the image. I was already into stitching and it was a simple matter to use my zoom to frame the image vertically, then simply create however many images I needed to set the horizontal boundaries of the image. As it happened, this meant only two images and a square format, largely determined by the limits of the curving inlet and overhanging bushes to left and right of me. As I like square pictures, this was no problem.

As I was setting up the shots, the sun went behind one of the few clouds. This resulted in better control of contrast, avoided harsh shadows and unbeknownst to me at the time, gave the image a blue cast since the scene was now lit entirely by a deep blue sky.

The Equipment

At that time I was shooting with a Canon 10D, using my new 17-40 mm. lens, set at 27 mm. (don't forget the 1.6 X factor for the small sensor, more or less cancelled out by stitching).

A similar image before any manipulation looks like this:



You will note the really subtle colours, also some telephone wires needing cloned out. Still, you can see the blue tones of the blue skylight.

At that time I was using a wooden Berlebach tripod with built in ball joint centre post combination. This tripod served me very well for several years for both 4X5 and digital. I was already using a Really Right Stuff L Bracket and with a purchased RRS lever clamp and a piece of oak, I fashioned myself a nodal point arm which would let the camera body sit behind the rotation point of the ball head. The ball swivel/centre column fitting on the tripod meant that I could level the centre post and rotate a real ball head (Arca Swiss B1) perfectly horizontally, even if the camera aimed up or down. In this case the camera was aimed down - the horizon is slightly above the top of the image.

It's important when stitching with the camera angled down this much to note that your carefully found nodal points are no longer accurate - the rotation point moves back to the camera body as you tilt the whole mechanism down. The resulting images have angled edges and you need to be absolutely sure you have enough image at either end to end up with a proper rectangular image (unless you are into trapezoidal prints - a limited market).

I subsequently lost that home made nodal point slider and have since replaced it with a RRS one.

To take the picture, I used mirror lock and cable release. Exposure was 1/15 at f11, ei. 100.

Post Processing - Camera Raw, whatever version was extant at the time. A number of images I have reprocessed with more recent versions. The first big step was going to 16 bit and subsequently better sharpening algorithms. I'm a great fan of smart sharpen but I have never reprocessed this image so suspect the original camera raw output was 8 bit.

Once in Photoshop, I applied a series of curves layers to increase contrast, get some dark tones and most importantly reveal the ice crystal pattern. it is in the nature of Photoshop to increase colour saturation at the same time as increasing contrast with an S shaped curve. This gave the image it's dramatic blue colour. While the original blue was real, it wasn't seen by the eye which rapidly cancels strong colour hues (try wearing orange coloured sunglasses for a while). In the end I probably had more than 20 such curves, gradually increasing the contrast, in each case locally only through the use of black masks and painting white into the mask with assorted levels of opacity.

The near ice received the greatest changes and in fact I had to tone down the colour saturation several times as I worked on the image, because of the increased contrast. At that time I didn't know about the luminosity setting in the layers palette which means that saturation doesn't increase when you increase contrast.

The image isn't in fact super sharp and it took some work with creative sharpening with Photokit Sharpener to ge the ice crystals sharp. In hind site, f11 wasn't enough depth of field for such a near far composition. Nowadays I'd shoot multiple images and blend with Helicon Focus, having determined that f16 is the smallest f stop on my current 1Ds2 which actually increeases sharpness in the out of focus areas. A smaller stop just makes the in focus bits fuzzier while not sharpening the out of focus bits any more (diffraction).

This is, however; one of those images which doesn't need to be super sharp and I actually like a 3 foot square image I have at my office.

The telephone wires were cloned out as was a very sharp straight line of bubbles in the water which looked more like a negative defect than real. A single dark coloured leaf had started to melt its way into the ice and was cloned out.

The End Image - this is one of my favourite colour images, and that the colour is exagereated doesn't bother me one whit. I like the centering of the tree while the curve of the near ice on the bottom isn't centred (enough is enough). I love the clouds reflected in the water and the brush stroke like effect of the melting ice on the far side of the river. Note how I darkened the two bottom corners to keep the eye within the image - too much? - perhaps, but it doesn't bother me.

I'm not one for rules but certainly this image is very much divided into thirds vertically.

There is a consistency of colour throughout the image - given that the reflected sky is part of the image and the rest is lit by sameself sky, this isn't too surprising, though I did have to do some subtle colour balance work for the real image to look this way.

It's really important to have a profiled monitor for this image as subtle changes can make the blue look purple or turquoise, neither of which works.

If you go back to the original image file shown near the top of the article, you will get a sense of the amount of work done on the image. This was done over half a dozen different sessions complete with about three total restarts from scratch. Total time working on the image was probably about 20 hours. Who says digital is easy?

To many people the image is very disturbing because of it's upside down nature. At the time I was completely unaware of this aspect of the image and it has never looked upside down to me. It gets a lot of comments and some sales, but not as many as my more conventional images. People tend to 'get it' or not. Those who have to work to see it right way up typically don't buy it, but a small number of people absolutely fall in love with it.

About 5% of the public see it as a reflection immediately and about 30% never get it, even after having it fully explained to them.

Sales - I'm a little uncomfortable tying sales hype into what is supposed to be an information and discussion blog, but what the hey - I'm going to sell prints of each image discussed in this series (if it's popular). Prints on 8.5X 11 (approx. 6.5 inches square) will be $40 Can., regular postage included, anywhere in the world. Prints on 13X19 (approx. 10.5 inches square) will be $69 Canadian. Both will be shipped flat and well protected and guaranteed to arrive safely. Prints will be on whichever archival paper and made on whichever archival printer/ink which seems best suited.

The series are open, prints are signed.

Payment can be made by Paypal using my email address george dot barr at shaw dot ca and specifying which print it is.

You can also send me your visa or mastercard number and expiry date. I would suggest spelling it out - eg. two four nine... just in case someone is trolling for entries with the word visa and a 16 digit number in the same email. Alernatively you can fax your request to (403) 256-4852 and address it to George Barr Fine Art Photography, so my secretary doesn't throw it out as a junk fax.