Have not been hanging out much here on FM for some time so have missed your excellent work for a while - what a wonderful re-introduction this set of fantastically seen and captured images is. Lovely stuff - and too consistently good to allow me to possibly pick a favorite
Bocephus wrote:
the contrast between one side of the dune to another is CRAZY
First, thank you to you and another_mikey for looking and commenting.
There WAS lot of contrast there! :-) The dune surfaces facing to the right we in directly, low-angle morning light which a) was really bright on the light sand and b) created some very dark shadows to the left.
Post processing to handle those shadows included some steps to control the peak brightness of the sunlit dunes (using the new masking tools in ACR) and some work to bring up a bit of detail in the shadows. The latter isn't perhaps visible in the uploaded .jpg viewed on screens, but I think I kept just (barely) enough detail so that in a print that area won't be solid black.
Exposure was the familiar story with digital — exposed to retain highlight image data and avoid blowing that out, and planning to use the available DR in the image to bring out detail in some of the darkest areas in post.
Another challenge that probably isn't so obvious — though folks who photograph such things can probably predict it— was the difference in color between the very warm tones on sunlit sand and the very cool (blue) cast in the shadowed area.
