View allAll Photos Tagged SandDunes
From in front of the information centre. Rocky Mountains, Southern Colorado. View original! 10000X1043... www.flickr.com/photos/unripegreenbanana/7607766484/sizes/...
The wild, rugged and sandy coastline of the Pacific Northwest is chock full of interesting factoids, history, legend and natural beauty. One can spend a good chunk of their lifetime exploring the endless miles of shoreline, and the communities that have made their home here.
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!
This beautiful flower blew me away as it strived for existance in the sand and jostled for light amonst the grasses and seed heads growing in the sand dunes.
Sea Lily or Pancratium maritimum=sea daffodil AKA Sand daffodil, Sand lily, and Lily of St Nicholas. The plant is pollinated by a hawk-moth named Agrius convolvuli. These insects visits the flower when the speed of the wind is under 2 metres per second (6.6 ft/s). When it's higher than that the moths does not visit the Pancratiumplant. Even if the species is pollinated in an artificial way during windy weather the pollination is not effective. Another specific of the sand lily is that it is not receptive to its own pollen and the plant can recognize it. This flower can be only cross-pollinated.
Rope Art by Richie....Taught by Dai Toms...Round Matting...Ocean Plat...Monkey's Fist...and the Dragonfly.
The dune we call Little Dune marks the end of the first part of our hike.
Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
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.