I captured this image of the Crystal Club in Crystal City, Colorado, earlier this summer. Crystal City is a effectively a ghost town (the “residents” occupy a handful of cabins during the summer). Though the road to Crystal City is a bit rough (read: do not attempt to visit in your two-wheel drive) it’s worth the drive. The scenery is spectacular, and the townspeople friendly. (My favorite detail: if you purchases a soda in from the general store, you must walk across the street and retrieve it from the creek). One word of advice if you visit Crystal: a few doors down from the now-abandoned Crystal club is the Crystal bookstore. Since the bookstore is one of only two businesses in the town, you’ll doubtless go in. Resist the urge to buy “Crystal . . . What Really Happened” from the store. Though the idea of buying a book about the history of Crystal, from a Crystal Resident, in Crystal, might sound appealing, save your money. I like badly-written history books more than most, but the quality of the writing is astonishingly bad and the content mostly dull minutia. (The blurb on the linked website will give you an idea of the quality of the prose.) Pass.
Probably because of the many different, saturated colors and the broad range of tones, this image lends itself to a variety of different interpretations. Here are are some of the variations that I tried before settling on the image above. Click on a thumbnail for a larger version:
 
A few months ago I was killing some time between the sweet morning and evening light browsing the Monte Vista Crane Festival. (The festival is really a big fair/craft show/small town event — both charming and odd at the same time). I stumbled across “Between Light and Shadow” by John Weller as I was leafing through books at the Great Sand Dunes National Park table. It stopped me in my tracks.
I can sum up this book by saying that it is easily the best book of outdoor photography that I’ve seen in the last five years. (And I’ve read, and purchased, many such photography in that time). Weller’s book has three virtues that set it apart from most of the outdoor photography books in my collection. First, he has a unique style. Rather than employing the contrasty and highly saturated only-in-sweet-light style that dominates landscape and wildlife photography, his photos are under-saturated, low contrast, even a little dark. He doesn’t rely on the “sweet light” but uses all sorts of different lighting — including, in particular, storm lighting — to great effect. Second, he lived in the dunes for several months over the space of a year. This manifests itself both in the quality of the images (you don’t get very many images this good on a week-long trip) and more importantly on Waller’s eye for the place. Finally unlike the prose in many photography books, Weller’s prose is engaging and well written.
If you like landscape photography even a little, and you don’t have this book in your library, you’re missing out.
I really like the look of a good split-tone (or even better, quad-tone photograph). The only problem is that the traditional way of making duotones/tritones/quadtones in Photosohp (using the Mode > Dutone command) is fiddly, not very interactive, and destructive. (It requires converting your image to eight bit monochrome first.)
Lately, following the suggestions of Paul Butzi, I’ve started using curves to tone my images rather than Photoshop quadtones. Paul has a great tutorial, so I won’t repeat the steps here. Be sure to grab his sample curves files if you try this technique.
But here’s the important thing that Paul doesn’t mention: you can use Photoshop tone curves to duplicate the toning applied by any scheme, be it Photoshop quad tones, your favorite proprietary toning software, fill layers, etc. That would be a huge pain to do manually. Fortunately, Guillermo Luijk has written a free utility to “extract” a tone curve from an image and save it in a tone curve file that can be imported into Photoshop. See some toned photos you like? Fire up Tonehacker and you can extract the curve from the photos and appy it to your own images. You can also use the technique to duplicate your favorite Photoshop dutotones/tritones/quadtones. You can download the utility at Guillermo’s website, just look for the “Descargar Tone Hacker 1.2″ link (much of the website is in Spanish). More info about using the software at the Luminious Landscape Forums.
Hat tip to Guillermo for a WONDERFUL program.
Every once in a while, even Microsoft can surprise you. I’ve just started using Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 to geotag my photographs. The program has three surprising attributes: its free, its standards compliant, and it does one thing (geocoding) and does it quite well.
Free. In the fairly recent past I paid something like $100 for geotagging software (which shall remain nameless). It was slow, a little buggy, and insisted on writing GPS information into the raw file itself, rather than into the sidecar .xmp file where it belongs (more on that below). I abandoned the software when Downloader Pro added basic geotagging support. Downloader Pro is a fantastic program, but it does not (and is not intended) to match the features of a stand-alone geotagging program. Color me surprised* that Microsoft has a more capable program than my $100 misinvestment. And they’re giving it away.
Standards Complaint. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pro Photo Tools writes to the open-standards .xmp sidecar files, rather than to my raw files themselves. (Surprised given Microsoft’s seeming aversion to open standards). If you shoot raw files (and if you’re serious about photography you should), then you probably know that its a bad idea to write to the proprietary raw files created by your camera. (.NEF, .CR2, etc.) There is a risk that the file will be corrupted, the internal structure of these files is not formally documented, etc. etc. Surprisingly, Pro Photo Tools even works with Adobe’s DNG format, though the DNG add-on (codec) costs $30.
Does One Thing Well. I appreciate that the software does not try to replace my entire workflow, but instead focuses on one task — geotagging — and does it well. Pro Photo Tools permits the user to geotag photos from a GPS tracklog file, and also by dragging and dropping them onto a map. The map feature works quite well. Its easy to search, zoom, and move around on the map, and the map is very responsive. One surprising bonus is that the software will look up place names (including city, town, and street address) based on the GPS coordinates of the file. Very handy.
One note: in addition to downloading the program itself, you’ll probably need to download the raw codec for your particuar camera. The Canon codec download pages says that the codec is for Windows Vista, but it has worked fine for me so far on Windows XP. Get the codecs here.
* In fairness to Microsoft, I should note that they also give away the excellent Synch Toy, which I have used for several years.
It sounds a little like the subject line of a religious spam, but it’s not. Instead, Heavenly-Opportunity is software that solves two common photographic problems: (1) figuring out when the sun and moon will rise and set; and (2) figuring out when the sun or moon will rise or set at a particular spot on the horizon (or, for really sophisticated uses, like shooting through a window or natural arch, when they will be at a certain elevation above the horizon).
The first problem is merely figuring out when the sun (or moon) will rise and set so that one can shoot during the sweet light. Pretty mundane, since rise/set information is available from many sources. Still, its nice to be able to generate this information with a couple of mouse clicks.
The second problem is more interesting. Take this image for example: I would love to capture this scene (of Longs Peak, north of Denver) with the sun or moon setting directly behind the twin peaks at the left of this frame:
It’s moderately more difficult to figure out the right time of year to show up for that image. But the real challenge is capturing the full moon in the same place, since that involves two variables: the phase of the moon and the azimuth (place on the horizon) where it sets. That is the killer feature of Heavenly-Opportunity. Input a location, tell the software what variables you would like to search for, e.g. 3/4 or greater moon phase, setting within 1/2 hour of sunrise (so the sky will have some color) between an azimuth of 180 degrees and 190 degrees. Voila:
Heavenly-Opportunity (V3.3.0) search performed on 11/28/2008 for:
Selected place name = CO Longmont
Latitude = 40.16666
Longitude = -105.1
Time Zone = Mountain (-105°)
Height above horizon = 4941 ft.
Azimuth adjusted for a Magnetic Declination of 9.8°
Search Criteria:
Dates between 11/28/2008 to 11/28/2009
Moonset between 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after sunrise
-------------Moon---------------
Day Date Rise Az° Set Az° Phase%
--- -------- ------ --- ------ --- ------
Fri 12/12/08 04:31p 44 07:27a 296 100.0
Sat 01/10/09 04:33p 48 07:08a 294 99.8
Sun 02/08/09 04:43p 58 06:24a 285 99.1
Mon 02/09/09 06:00p 66 06:58a 278 100.0
Tue 03/10/09 07:02p 79 06:51a 265 99.9
Wed 03/11/09 08:12p 88 07:17a 257 99.4
Thu 04/09/09 08:09p 100 06:08a 245 100.0
Fri 04/10/09 09:16p 106 06:36a 238 98.5
Sat 05/09/09 09:11p 113 05:41a 229 99.6
Sun 06/07/09 08:57p 116 05:03a 225 100.0
Tue 07/07/09 09:01p 109 05:42a 228 99.9
Wed 08/05/09 08:03p 101 05:37a 236 99.9
Fri 09/04/09 07:18p 82 06:32a 254 100.0
Sat 10/03/09 06:07p 70 06:25a 266 99.8
Mon 11/02/09 04:36p 53 06:30a 285 100.0
15 days match all search criteria.
As an added bonus, the software automatically adjusts for local magnetic declination, which means that you don’t need to adjust your compass to use the software. Fantastic!
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