Sentinel

As augured, the weather progressively got worse as we headed out of Muir Woods, so much so that by the time we reached Point Benito it was blowing hard and starting to rain.

For those of you who have never been there, access to the lighthouse is via a tunnel that can be closed, followed by a wooden suspension bridge of such age that no more than two people are allowed on it at any one time (NB: it's due for replacement in the next 12 months but that means access is likely to go away for a while during construction).

Fortunately, there weren't too many visitors when we were there, although having said that it had become much more crowded by the time we left in the early afternoon.

I still find photographing these kinds of landscapey things to be tough going, especially when the light is nothing special. This means you are forced back to find different takes to take, other ways of doing something unique. The other thing I find is that now I've been there once then next time around I'd have a much better idea of what I wanted to shoot. Alas, I cant' quite yet figure out how to make that happen while I am there!

Achievement

While in the same location as the shot in the previous post, I saw a walker in the far distance on top of a dune and grabbed the above shot before he moved on. Not sure I quite have the balance quite right yet on this one so will have to work on it some more, but it has promise.

As you can see, the Mesquite Dunes rise to quite a reasonable height, for sand piles at least!

B&W Technique for High Key

There's a great web site from Diane Varner that has some very interesting examples of toned shots she has done in CS3. Try as I might, I can never quite get this to work well for me, but will nevertheless keep struggling. I like to blame this on being colour-blind ... but that's not really quite fair! Being vision-challenged, yes, but not in that way.

Anyway, I was reading through her post there on post-processing technique and saw that she'd used a different B&W conversion approach that I hadn't seen before: the Gradient Map.

The advantage of this approach is that you can control the mapping between brightness levels in the original and the resulting grey-scale image. Furthermore, you can do very interesting things like such as black/white/black conversions, with the highest levels going back to black instead of blowing out.

The original (this one is close enough) was useful because it had a fairly constant blue background that could be reliably mapped into white in order to reset the feel of the shot, also allowing some leeway in transforming the real highlights to help add definition and delivering more of a high-key feel.

Detailed instructions? Alas, I can't give the full recipe for this one because I did it late at night and forgot to save the full layer set before flattening - doh! I think I first boosted contrast with USM at a high-radius/low percentage level before doing the gradient map. When converting, I used the "metal" preset because that had a good starting point for the black-white-black approach. And curves, I'm sure there was a curve in there to do some global contrast adjustment. Somewhere.

Anyway, give it a go, and if I can dial-things in a bit more accurately I'll post on this topic again. Please though let me know if you can craft a more reliable recipe and I'll repost it to everyone.