View allAll Photos Tagged SandDunes
WHITE SANDS NATIONAL PARK - NEW MEXICO
ALKALI FLAT TRAIL
The morning sunlight and the thickening high cloud layer gave a surreal soft light to the stark white gypsum dunes.
Behind the scenes: youtu.be/4rILcmJ1W10
A few lost facts about episode 50: 1) we did shoot giant sunset, moonrise, sunrise and moonset, but we could have done light-painting at sunset too. We failed to do so because we focussed on something we've never done before: a giant moonset. It turned out to be much later than what we expected (we're not 100% competent with @photopills yet, but we know where we failed). That means that we would have plenty of time to do a light-painting session between the sunset and the moonrise (you can clearly see that from the youtube video). 2) we were at the same exact spot two days earlier, and our friend @kelleywjohnson was with us (episode 42). That night would have gave us a much better alignment and he knew it. I decided to keep with the original plan (light-painting) and so we did. But he's the one that made me think a lot and we ended up going there by ourselves after he left. (THANK YOU KELLEY!). 3) The desert at sunrise is the most quiet thing i've ever experimented. M-A-G-I-C-A-L. 4) This picture is created at sunrise. This is something we don't do often but there's something so special about it as we're never sure if we're doing a good framing, we're cold, and them boom, the whole scene starts to reveal itself as the sun goes up. Wow
Found this beach purely by chance, a place called Lancelin, sand dune heaven it was, they stretched for miles and miles and miles.......an exhilarating couple of hours, but damn my calf muscles dont half ache :o/
This image reminded me of the Indiana sand dunes at high tide. For more info, check out my short blog at www.digitalladysyd.com/?p=4937.
Image Re-edit of #255.
Windy day, ocean beach San Francisco. Digital IR Nikon D200 720nm conversion. No. 29 red and Nikkor 20-35mm.
From in front of the information centre. Rocky Mountains, Southern Colorado. View original! 10000X1043... www.flickr.com/photos/unripegreenbanana/7607766484/sizes/...
Finally getting around to posting this photo, it's taken me forever to finally get something that I really like with this photo. So many tries at editing it and yet I couldn't get anything I was pleased with, but the other night I finally got an edit that I wanted to share. Hope you all like it.
Useless Loop Set - Colour or Black and White?
There's no doubt this is an image full of colour. I like to think it is appropriate colour and many agree with me. However, I also know that others do not. My good friends Richard and Lyn Woldendorp and Lyn Whitfield-King attended the opening of our ND5 exhibition in Perth last week. All three have been involved in photography for a lifetime and they, like me, have been brought up on a diet of film and darkrooms.
However, unlike me, they (generally speaking) don't like the colour in photographs to be too bold. Richard's amazing book of aerial photographs, Out of the Blue (it would make a great Christmas present for yourself) shows the depth and artistry of his work. I greatly admire his photography and I love the way he composes his work, but perhaps not surprisingly, I think his colours could be a little stronger! So, we have different aesthetics.
At 80 years of age, Richard had the right to pull me aside at the exhibition and congratulate me, with a comment that too much colour can get in the way of the shape and structure of a photograph. He referenced the great black and white photos of the past and how we, as a society, think of these as great examples of our art. I hope I am paraphrasing Richard correctly.
He asked me, would my photographs be as good if they were reproduced in black and white? That, he suggested, is the mark of a strong photograph.
Well, being an arrogant, ego-fueled photographer, I thought my images would work okay in black and white. But I have also heard people say the best black and whites are often created once you have the colour right!
The image above of a Useless Loop sand dune, taken at sunset, certainly didn't start out with so much colour. In fact, the original file which has been lightly processed in Capture One has only a hint of the colours in the final edit. Yet, that hint is there and that hint is what I responded to.
So why does my raw file look so neutral in comparison to my blood red rendition? One answer is auto white balance. Our wonderful automatic cameras are constantly trying to bring our photographs back to a neutral position, one that they are programmed to produce by some faceless workers in white lab coats (whom I love dearly). So the auto white balance changes what is actually there with no regard to what you might want to capture. Certainly the camera didn't know that I was circling 500 feet above Shark Bay a few minutes before sunset, watching the most amazing pinks and yellows caress and enfold the shapely curves of a finely chiseled dune. It just automatically corrected all that problematic colour away!
So, back in my studio, working on my Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch, I've put the colour back because that's the way I like it.
And while I agree with Richard that many of the great photographs we look back on with great affection are black and white, I think that is also a reflection of history and the technology of the time. What photographs will people be looking back at in another 50 years time? I think colour will have a much stronger representation, but not necessarily on aesthetic grounds.
You can see the original file out of the raw process and the black and white rendition on the Better Photography website - www.betterphotography.com.
I think Richard is correct when he says a great colour photograph will also work well in black and white. Whether or not this is a great photograph is for you to decide, but I think it does hold up in monochrome quite nicely. Whether it works better in black and white than colour, hmmm, I'm not so sure! But I do enjoy the discussion!
Rope Art by Richie....Taught by Dai Toms...Round Matting...Ocean Plat...Monkey's Fist...and the Dragonfly.
Dunes of the Mojave Desert
If someone were to mention dunes in the Mojave Desert, Death Valley’s Mesquite Dunes at Stovepipe Wells would come mind first for some people. The Kelso Dunes might even come up. There are more dunes out there that in lie outside of the National Park and Monument boundaries, you just need to look a little further.
©This photograph is copyrighted and is not permitted for free use.