Monochrome | Andrew Kelley Photography

Found in the Garden

I was looking for a perch for a songbird setup a la Alan Murphy. Never had much luck with the birds, but this is a pretty good consolation prize. This is a tiny bud from one of our bushes (maybe 1/4″ across). In order to get the whole thing sharp I stacked a number of images using Helicon Focus. I converted to monochrome and toned the image using Photoshop and a custom tone curve.

Trees in Morning Fog

I got up very early on Christmas Eve to shoot at my favorite spot. It was so cold that I couldn’t find many animals to photograph, but the sun playing through the mist from Clear Creek more than made up for the lack of animate subjects. The first image is a straight-from-the camera image. The second is a monochrome image that I toned using a custom tone curve.

I tent to prefer the first image, mostly because I think the composition is stronger, though (obviously) I liked the second enough to post it. Please post a comment and let me know which you prefer.

Rework

I took another look at the bull elk from this post and saw a monochrome image lurking in the original color file. After converting to monochrome I added a slight cold tone and cropped a bit from the bottom. I think this image is more effective than the first. Agree?

Variations on a Theme II

Admittedly, I have spent too much time lately playing with Lightroom presets, as evidenced by this post and my earlier post of an abandoned building in Crystal, Colorado. I find that using presets is a great way of discovering a hidden side to some images, including this image of a plant from Alcatraz Island, California. The image above is my favorite interpretation, though I like the alternate interpretation and original images below as well.

Here is the original image:

Abandoned Shack

This is the final image from my trip to Marble Colorado earlier this summer. This is the door to a shack at the now-abandoned marble processing facility in Marble, Colorado. Lots of great textures here. This image depends heavily on the placement of the various tones in the image; it may not look very good if your monitor is set too bright.

Variations on a Theme

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:

Cottonwoods in Fog

It was a rare foggy morning in Denver this morning. I couldn’t resist taking a photographic detour through city park on my way to the office.

Rocky Mountain National Park Landscapes

These are three very different landscape images that I shot in Rocky Mountain National Park this summer. The image above is a tight shot of a lodge-pole pine stand. This image is a bit serendipitous. I was standing around with my supertelephoto waiting for a pica to come out from under a rock when I noticed the cool-looking light playing on the trees across the valley. A few moments to find a pleasing arrangement of trees and light (and a little work on the black and white conversion in Photoshop) and voila. Though it’s not readily apparent in this images, several of the trees in this photo were killed by pine beetles. It will be a very different park in a few years without the lodge poles . As always click for a larger version/slide show.

This is a blended exposure of a sunrise near the Gore Range Overlook. I like the stacked ridges in this image.

This is the Gore Range from the Gore Range Overlook. Pretty, but I’m am ambivalent about the composition.

Shooting Cliches (and sometimes avoiding them) in Arches National Park

Shooting in Arches is a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because the Park has some of the most spectacular (and photogenic) landscapes around. A curse, because lots and lots of photographers have made images of said spectacular landscapes. It’s easy to make images of beautiful scenery, but hard to make something original. The image above is illustrates both points. Delicate Arch is beautiful and iconic. But when I shot this image, I had to wedge myself into a firing squad of other photographers — all making more or less the same image as here.

The second image, above, is an attempt to break out of the photographic cliches of making “straight” photos in the Park. This is balanced rock — another icon of the park. I used the hazy clouds to make silhouette. Not spectacular, but at least it’s not a cliche.

This is another attempt to break away from cliche. The departure here has more to do with the quality of the light (hard, mid-day light) rather than the composition or subject. This is in Courthouse Wash (a great, spectacular, and kid-friendly hike). Instead of shooting this in the sweet light early or late in the date, I tried capturing an image in mid-day light. It says at least a little bit about the heat and hash light of the desert. (It also says that my kids won’t get up before dawn to hike so that I can shoot the sweet light, but that’s another story).

This image (of Turret Arch looking through the north window) is even more of a cliche than Delicate Arch. All of the calendar shots you’ve seen of this image were all made from the same six-foot by eight-food ledge opposite the North Window. Every one. Most have better morning light than this one (as you can see, the sky was heavily overcast, and I never got the sweet light I was waiting for) but I like this image because the light is a little different than usual.

Full cliche warning here (Balanced Rock) but at least the clouds are interesting.

Dead Horse Point, Utah

These images are from an evening side trip to Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah made while I was camping at Arches with my family in late spring. When I captured these image, I was a little disappointed with the light. I hoped for a spectacular sunset, but a late-day storm largely blocked the setting sun. After reviewing these images, though, I realize that the storm light was a blessing in disguise — I like how these images capture the feeling of the misty storm light.

Incidentally, I did not have time at Dead Horse Point to really do it justice. (One of the hazards of combining a family and photo trip). This is a spectacular park, perched on the edge of a cliff 2000 feed above the Colorado River. I could easily spend several days photographing there. Highly recommended if you’re in Moab.

These is a multi-image panorama of the Monitor and Merrimack buttes, located just outside Dead Horse Point. (By mult-image panorama, I mean that the image is stitched together from several frames in Phtosohop. This image would print 26″ wide at a reasonable resolution). Frankly, the thing I like best about this image is that the subject matter is not a cliche. So many talented photographers have worked the area around Moab that it’s hard to make an image that one hasn’t already seen a million times before. Compositionally, this image is nothing spectacular, but at least the subject matter is fresh.

Dead Horse Point after Storm (horizontal)

This is a horizontal view of the same scene as the opening image above. I can’t quite decide if I like this better or if I prefer the monochrome image below.

Dead Horse Point after Storm (monochrome)

This is a wider horizontal view of the same scene. I converted it to monochrome and toned it in Photoshop. By zooming out, I changed the focus from the ridge running into the distance to the wash beside the ridge. The image seems a tad bit busy or “unfocused” to me, I still like it.

Abstracts From the Playground

I took my children to the playground while my wife was away. I had my trusty G9 along, and in between pushing my kids on the swing and watching them on the monkey bars, I found some abstract images that I really like. If you like these images (or not!) please leave a comment.

I wish that the shadow in this image was shifted ever-so-slightly toward the upper right. But I still like this a lot. Very simple.

I like the clash of shape and line on this image — the grid and the helix.

This is an image of the roof of one of the playground structures.

Washington D.C.

My grand plan of catching up my my backlog of work is not going quite as planned due to the press of “real” work. I did take a few minutes away from a business trip this week to shoot in Washington, D.C. Not quite my core genera of nature photography, but I like how a couple of these images turned out.

This started as a so-so color photo of the Washington Monument at sunset. But with the interesting pattern of clouds and the lines of dark trees on both sides of the image, it works much better in monochrome.

More images after the jump
Continue reading Washington D.C.

Tonehacker and Toning Photographs in Photoshop

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 monocrome 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.

Elk

It is something of a personal embarrassment that I live in close proximity to Colorado’s hordes of (largely tame) elk but don’t have many (read: any) great elk photos in my portfolio. Part of the problem is that elk are so common and are photographed so often that it’s difficult to make an original, captivating image of them. Just think of how many captivating pigeon images you’ve seen. Exactly.

Anyway, with my elk shortage in mind I made a quick trip to Rocky Mountain National Park on Sunday to make some elk images. The weather was awful — howling winds, and, eventually, heavy snow –and the light wasn’t that great either. Fortunately, I found a group of bulls that alternated between grazing and sparring. (I’m told this is the product of a second “false” elk rut?) In any event, I made at least one image that I’m happy to add to my portfolio:

Tree with Street Lamp

This is a favorite recent image. I saw the juxtaposition of the tree and street lamp as I was driving home from work and realized that it would make a great image. I’m a little torn about whether it looks better in black and white (as I have it here, or whether it looks better in the original color version.

Color version after the jump

Continue reading Tree with Street Lamp