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.

Safe Harbour

Bald Eagle, Sitka Harbour, AK

Finally, some good environmental news. The NY Times just reported that the bald eagle is no longer on the endangered species list, their numbers having risen dramatically since the 60s when the total population hit an all time low.

They are a magnificent bird, quite unlike any other raptor I've ever seen either here or in Europe. Although we saw many of them in Alaska a couple of months back, I never tired of watching them standing guard over their hunting grounds, flying lazy circles in the sky or out actively hunting.


Happy 4th July!

Day 2: Tracy Arm

Bald Eagle, Tracy Arm, Alaska

Both got woken at 4 am by the motion of the boat changing and ominous scraping noises along the side of the hull. We were entering the Tracy Arm area, due south of Juneau, where ice break-off from the glaciers was starting to appear in the channel.

Early in the morning, we caught the sight of a bald eagle sitting on a big chunk of ice just watching the world go by. Fantastic stuff, but it left me wishing a) I’d brought my longer fixed lens and b) hadn’t forgotten to reset the ISO from 800 where I had it the evening before to catch a shot of a passing whale. Bummer. I cursed Canon – and not for the first time - for not putting ISO indication in the viewfinder.

Spend the morning zig-zagging our way up the Fjord to the Sawyer glacier, which revealed itself as a spectacular wall of blue and white ice rising ahead of us.

We were fortunate also to see a couple of large calving events where big chunks of ice fell away from the main flow into the water.

The ship then turned round and headed back towards Fredrick Sound, pausing only for an hour spent boating around in an inflatable, or at least, that was the plan ….

The first set of three boats went out, taking a block of 30 passengers out towards waterfalls and the rock face. Right at that point, a small rock fall occurred and one elderly lady was hit by a chunk of granite sustaining some kind of painful – albeit relatively minor – injury...

Change of plan: the ship now returned to Juneau, docking in the evening, so the passenger could get proper treatment. We put to sea again around 3:30 am, heading back to where we were originally scheduled to be the next day. Everyone took the change in schedule well and fortunately we weren’t that far from our original starting point.