Badlands Gully

31 years I have been visiting Dinosaur Provincial Park and have yet to get bored with it. Time moves on though and this time I had to contend with mountain bikes instead of boy scouts. Still, there was enough left to satisfy me.

Dinosaur Provincial Park 2016

It's been a couple of years since the last visit - and I always enjoy exploring. We'd hoped for sunset light but this was as much as we got and this was weak sun through cloud, and even that disappeared shortly after making this image. It's a stitch, using the 120 macro on my Pentax 645Z.

I realized that one reason I like to stitch is that the image is larger on the LCD, and composing carefully is more successful. I wasn't sure where to start and end the image so went over, using seven vertical images - but in the end trimming down to about four - for a 130 megapixel image file.

There's a bit of colour in the foreground plant material but in the end it was more distracting than helpful and I was not surprised to find the black and white image more sucessful.

The left hand side of the image is in shade, the right in weak sun, so there's a fair bit of editing to balance things, including some curves layers with the top right corner shifted left, as well as some Akvis Enhancer selectively applied, more to the background cliff face than to the columns.

Grandfather Tree

Located at Cochrane Ranche, a short distance west of Calgary, this 300 year old tree is most impressive. I wanted to make an image that might be a little different and so chose to shoot it wide open, with a very narrow band of sharpness on the base of the trunk. I wanted a low contrast image and so used curves to further emphasize the trunk compared to the background., with some subtle field blur at the edges of the image at the far left and lower right. It was then toned with my brownblack toning action, then adjusted further by double clicking on the layer and then changing the blending by shifting the output right hand split slider (option move). This latter reduced the rather heavy sepia look and especially the pinkish looking light tones.

The image is 9000X15500 pixels, three images stitched from the Pentax 645Z. I just can't stop myself from  stitching after years of not having enough pixels. Guess I'll have to make a 60 inch wide print some time.

Yet Again

And Another Car

Back Out Shooting

Yes, it's been months since an entry. One thing and another, and the addition to our household with Sophie, our now six month old Standard Poodle.

For example, today we went in the morning to the off leash park, then there was leash training , then this afternoon, more leash training on the way to the local park to practice Fetch with a tennis ball, and then back to the Off leash park, and now she's rested up and ready for action again and she's not tired but I am.

Anyway, Ken and I popped over to Gasoline Alley at Heritage Park to photograph the old vehicles and a good time was had. For convenience I took the Sony 6000, and did enjoy the convenience of the zoom, but sure missed the simple manual focus of the Pentax 645Z - sometimes the image would magnify but not for long, and trying to move where it magnified was more than challenging.

But it was sure nice to be shooting again.

Two weeks ago we went back to Jura Canyon and not all those images are even processed at this point - stitching and blending in progress.

 

And the image below is from Maligne Canyon a year or so ago, discovered on the SD card and I thought worth working on.

 And from Gasoline Alley:

And this gas pump glass:

Jag

1956 Jaguar XK150, an ongoing project to which I'll be returning. I might try cropping the bottom image on the left, dramatically reducing that white horizontal blob, losing the curve in the bottom left but resulting in a cleaner and stronger composition of the verical white against the steering wheel and background of the seating.

Hearth

Back and sidewalls of a blacksmith's hearth, standing outside. I'd photographed the right side previously and liked the image but wanted to include both sides. I used focus blending on two separate halves, then stitching the blended images after.

To Crop, Or Not To Crop, That Is The Question

 

 

The original image, immediately above, always bothered me. Too much of the floor, and too bright too, and extraneous details in the upper left, and I wasn't wild about including the whole reflection in the bumper - to literal.

I really wanted that upper left tip of the fender though - but I could not find a way to keep it while emphasizing form, and in the end decided that it was better to get rid of a relatively subdued shape, even though nice, to empasize the two wheels.

Cropping becomes part of one's style - how tight do you go, how much to sacrifice to emphasize a few important elements, tell a story by including enough surround to inform, or eliminate all reference to scale, situation and circumstance.

In general, I crop very tightly, though it's only been in the last few years that I've gone beyond tight in to the realm of ruthless.

What do you think?

Industrial History

Turner Valley Gas Plant Cont.

The second and third images are focus blended.

Combine Chute

Ken and I visited Pioneer Acres, after stopping at an abandoned farm. The sky was cloudless and finding images that showed any subtlety was challenging. Why I bent over and peered into the opening of a chute of an old combine I can't explain, but in the shade was this lovely rust and patina composition.

I tried photographing it from a few feet away with the 120 on the Pentax 645Z but apart from having to shade the lens, the shape didn't work. I switched to the 35 mm. which fortunately has a close focus distance and put the camera almost into the chute opening. I stopped down to f22 and accepted that the edges would be out of focus.

In one way, the image is a big cheat. That funny red shape at the top of the image is in fact a flap valve, with grass and sunlight and red. I just wasn't happy with it. I tried blurring it but it just looked blurred - very fake.

Out of curiosity I wondered what Photoshop would make of it if I hugely enlarged the healing brush to the same diameter as the flap and a tad more, and the result was this very attractive shape and colour which I think works very well with the rest of the image which is pretty straight.

Should I have taken it this far - well, I'm really pleased with the result and let's face it, peering up chutes sounds like something for a proctologist, not a photographer - so if it's been altered a tad, well, who's to challenge me.

Construction

I headed out for my walk, but they're installing new storm drains and I popped across the road to check out the equipment. The larger front end loader had caked mud all over the bucket, but the smaller had a cleaner bucket with a nice rust pattern and as I approached a lovely glow from the polished metal.

It started raining and my efforts to record the image as a stitch were different as the rain initially added splotches and by the time I quit, an even sheen on the part of the bucket exposed to the vertical rain.

By the time I finished shooting, exposures were up to 30 seconds as darkness set in.

Buckets and Bumpers

Abstract In Rust

And here's what it looks like at 100%, after blending five images of the top, five of the bottom, then stitching together, cropping and editing.

The crop is about 24X magnification of the full image shown at top. This would print 12 feet across, though it wouldn't stand nose on inspection, still - 12 feet...

Iron

Egg

Half of a mold - in this case, the two parts are about a cubic foot of steel - and you thought the chicken had it hard...

Leather Aprons

I was photographing at a Smithy - and these are the leather aprons worn to protect from burns.

Black And White

So why convert this image to black and white? Well, I felt the image was a bit flat, but didn't want do drive the colour to unrealistic levels, and wanted to emphasize the form rather than colour (after all it only had one colour).

I converted the image with a B&W conversion layer, no special filtering, then added a curves layer and then a threshold layer to check for diving the image to pure white (or not). This I did by moving the top right corner of the graph to the left, giving me a straight line that was steeper. I then adjusted the curve of the line to an s bend to give the image more contrast.

I then added another curve with the top right moved leftwards and applied it to the light on the boiler below the saddle. Lastly I used my warm tone action, with the saturation turned down a bit.

I could have done all this with the colour image, but where in black and white it has some power,m in colour it would be over the top.

What do you think?

Tractor Seat

I'd noticed this seat on a steam tractor last time I visited and liked the shapes, but it was rather high off the ground. This visit, I tried harder, and found a trestle sitting on the other side of the lot. I brought it over, climbed aboard and raised my tripod to its maximum (no centre post but it's the four section legs RRS so it goes sig. above my eye height (5 foot 9 in my dotage).

I did have a short stool in my previous car - time to dust it off. Oddly, there's a lot of editing to this image. For a start, it's four vertical images stitched horizontally - just what worked while perched on my trestle - then there were a couple of areas of green in the background that needed to be toned back and a hint of magenta added. The sun started to peek through for the right sided images and the boiler in the background was too intense in colour - so a bit of desaturation and less yellow.

There was a cob web - so the healing brush, and a small amount of pigeon poop on the saddle - so a little bit more. I used Akvis Enhancer, toned back to 75% then entirely masked out, and only brought back on a very small section of the front of the saddle (where the focus is). There's no blur in this image - just shallow depth of field with my 120 macro at f5.6

I cropped a little off the left and right and bottom - the sides to reduce the amount of light area, and the bottom to bring the edge closer to the dropped part of the saddle.

I do wonder if a little field blur in the upper right corner might be appropriate. Might try it - soften that sharp edge between very dark and very light.