Wonderful body of work, Luka! What especially speaks to me is your uncanny ability to create new views from places we have all seen many times. Such as Monument Valley (I LOVE that shot!), Grand Canyon, and others. Well done!!!
Love them and look forward to seeing more - but can we find a way (number/letter/etc) to label each so we can more easily/reliability identify the one someone is discussing - for example G1-P5 (Group 1 - 5th Photo) - with more groups it is going to get difficult when someone wants to refer to an earlier picture. Just a thought...
Nice shots but a lot of them are taken at very common spots and at non golden times of day.
But that is all you can do on these type of trips where you try to see so many places.
The Death valley shot is Zabriski point, a heavily photgraphed shot due to its easily accessible road side spot.
The magic of these places like Dead Horse are at sunrise or sunset only except the slot canyons like Antelope.
Glad you had a great trip and got to see a lot.
Thanks for all the kind words guys! It's really interesting to see what photos different people like - the ones I like best myself from the series are the two 28 Cron shots.
I have nothing new to post yet. I might manage to post some Grand Teton & Yellowstone shots later today if I wake up (I'm writing this post still half asleep as I'm on some kind of mix of Califorina and Sweden time).
mco_970 wrote:
What a treat! More please!! I am suing you for a Zeiss 18, BTW. Can't live without it now, it's all your fault.
Hehe. I'm actually thinking about getting rid of mine and the Zeiss 25/2.8 Biogon. They're great lenses but I hate using external viewfinders. So I'm considering getting the new Leica 21 super elmar instead. It also requires and external viewfinder but it would be one instead of two. I'm also more comfortable with the 21mm focal length. Having said that, the ZM 18 performed quite well on this trip and it was one of my most used lenses.
Jim Schemel wrote:
Great set and thanks for sharing.
The two monochrome shots are my favorite.especially Monument Valley TP.What were you using to convert them?
Thanks Jim. I used Photoshop's convert to B/W function and used the blue filter preset on the MV shot and the high contrast red filter on the Yosemite shot IIRC. Usually I would have used NIX Silver Efex Pro 2, but I've disabled the plugin as it interferes with clipboard operations.
Delatant wrote:
Love them and look forward to seeing more - but can we find a way (number/letter/etc) to label each so we can more easily/reliability identify the one someone is discussing - for example G1-P5 (Group 1 - 5th Photo) - with more groups it is going to get difficult when someone wants to refer to an earlier picture. Just a thought...
Thanks and good idea. I'll do it in the future series of posts.
wayne seltzer wrote:
Nice shots but a lot of them are taken at very common spots and at non golden times of day.
But that is all you can do on these type of trips where you try to see so many places.
Yep, and we spent usually at most a couple of hours at each place and it was usually mid day as we started off from somewhere in the morning and had to be somewhere else by evening. There was no time for prolonged hikes to alternative spots so it was the standard spots. I did not look at any photographs of the places beforehand in order not to get influenced by what others had done. It's a two edges sword however - in many places there are really obvious compositions that have been used a lot and you inevitable end up taking the same shot.
Still, it's an interesting challenge with those restrictions - i.e how to get something that looks good and is original when in each of those places you have local photographers that hang around all year waiting for the perfect combination of light and weather at some original spot. Death Valley was for instance very problematic as the temperature was 115 degrees (damnit, I'm still thinking in Fahrenheits - that's 46 degrees Celsius) and you could not stay outside the car for long.
My mission to photograph the Mesquite dunes in Death Valley was a complete fiasco. It was simply too hot to do the hike to the larger ones and I got some shots of a couple of smallish piles of sands. Grand Canyon didn't work out as planned either. I had actually the evening and the morning there but the weather wasn't cooperating - cloud cover and haze. Yosemite was another type of challenge as we arrived on a Saturday and the crowds were insanely large.
In that type of light, with no clouds, with those kind of crowds and the very fixed position of the view point there's really no point in even bothering taking a shot. I did take one snapshot but there wasn't much point.
Still, I can't complain given the diversity of the nature that I saw and all things considered I'm pretty happy with the whole thing in terms of photography
My favorite shots are by far the Canyonlands, Death Valley, Glen Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite shots, from the first post. The others are great, but for me far below these. Of these, the Yellowstone shot would be my least favorite.
The Glen Canyon shot is a great colour remake of Ansel Adams' shot. I have seen poor versions so often, with cut off river banks, a non-straight horizon, terrible exposure, terrible processing, and on and on, and this is the first really good one I have seen. The Death Valley shot is also modelled on a classic shot, right? Something tickles my brain there. Anyway, great work. I guess it is hard to walk in the footsteps of giants, but the shots look fantastic.
How did you bring all that gear from EU to USA? Did you manage to put all of it in a carryon?
I face this problem every time I fly, and I have lot less gear than you (5D, couple L zoom and couple TS-E's). But when you add a laptop and chargers it becomes a pain to carry it all.
