I got up very early on Saturday for Burrowing Owls and again on Sunday for a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. (Owls were great. RMNP, not so much: animal total was 1 moose, a half-dozen mangy deer, and not a single elk. Too windy to look for Pika and Marmots on top). I’m way too tired for serious photo editing, so instead of working through my backlog of photos, I’ve been puttering around in my catalog of older images.
In the course of said puttering, I ran across this fairly-old image of Leafy Aster. I’ve always liked the texture of the center of the flower, but the flower petals are tad too worn to make for a really great image. On a lark, I converted the image to monochrome. Add a little dodging and burning, lots of contrast, a slight color tone, and voila. The worn flower works much better in monochrome.
I captured this image on a business trip to Philly. I was drawn to the great texture in the ivy, and captured a quick shot with my trust G9 (a fancy point-and-shoot). In retrospect, I wish that I’d had my “big” camera with the tripod to as to avoid some technical shortcomings from shooting with my hand-held G9, but better an imperfect image than nothing. I’m not sure whether I prefer the monochrome image above or the color image below. Please let me know what you think in the comments.
Edit Aug. 16, 2010 to fix my previous failure to crop the images after performing a perspective correction in Lightroom.
For some reason I rarely make monochrome images deliberately, but I often stumble across a good monochrome candidate image while I’m doing something else. Certainly true in this case. This image is a doubly good candidate for monochrome – the fox pops from the background, and there’s a great range of tones in his face. Equally importantly, there are lots of funky colors in the background, which are slightly distracting when the image is in color. Converted to monochrome, those problems vanish.
I captured this image of an aspen leaf on a recent trip to Lake City, Colorado. I was struck by the way that the back lighting highlights the veins and other detail in the leaf. A quick monochrome conversion in Lightroom, a bit of subtle platinum toning in Photoshop, and voila.
Inspiration is a funny thing. I have been spending way, way to much time editing (and, frankly, puttering with) a large group of pelican and shorebird images from La Jolla;literally dozens of hours selecting, deleting, and optimizing. During that time I never noticed this image. But on my last pass through the files, I realized that the great range of tones and strong lines might make a good monochrome abstract. After a couple of attempts to find just the right crop, careful dodging and burning, and a platinum tone curve, I now have one of my favorite images from the trip.
Important note: this image depends on a precise range of tones. If your monitor is too bright, this might not look quite as I intended.
I shot these leaves in a shady spot in La Jolla. I like the range of tones and sense of depth. I keep thinking that the images needs a little more (maybe cleanup at lower left?) but I like it nonetheless.
I “found” this image of a mother and pup Pacific Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina) last night while editing images. Its just so-so in color (probably a little too contrasty). IMHO, it really works as a monochrome image though. More images from my San Diego/La Jolla trip soon.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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