p.1 #1 · (More) Yosemite High Country... plus Mono Lake
A few days ago I posted a set of photographs that I made in early July in the Tuolumne Meadows area (broadly speaking) during a short visit to the high country. I have a few more photographs of that subject and a few others from a morning and Mono Lake.
This group of Yosemite photographs comes from end of a day on which it rained for hours in the afternoon and early evening, finally clearing enough to photograph shortly before sunset. The evolution of the light followed a familiar pattern in this area: the clouds cleared to the west, allowing the end-of-day light to strike meadows, forests and peaks, while the clouds over the crest and to the east remained, adding some drama.
I made the Mono Lake photographs on a brief early morning visit. My main goal was to use a long lens to make photographs that included distant features, including a few isolated tufa formations way out in the lake along with the desert mountains many miles away and across the water. I started photographing before sunrise, when the sky was colorful, and kept going until that dawn color had gone and left a glowing blue atmosphere.
p.1 #7 · (More) Yosemite High Country... plus Mono Lake
dakel wrote:
Very beautiful Dan. You had some nice conditions to work with can came away with some wonderful minimalistic images.
Thanks!
Indeed, I did get some special conditions — from the slight haze at Mono Lake to a good sized rainstorm... which brought beautiful post-storm sunset light and then morning fog and mists.
p.1 #9 · (More) Yosemite High Country... plus Mono Lake
keepclicking wrote:
Dan, very nice set. Love #2. Question, how to pick your WB?
Thanks.
I have various ways at arriving at the white balance in the photographs – which are post processed with printing in mind. The process is subjective, rather than trying to achieve some kind of supposed accuracy. A few approaches:
In general, I’m likely to warm the colors a bit…unless they are already quite warm, say with a sunrise/sunset shot. But sometimes I do leave the color color balance as is or even move toward the blue end of the spectrum if that fits the concept of the photogaph.
As I work on the files I tend to make adjustments and then live with them for some period of time before committing. I may decide that my initial idea was what I wanted, but sometimes I reconsider.
There are some other tricks I’ll occasionally use in unusual cases. For example, I might use the gray eyedropper tool in the curves window and look for something in the frame that I’d like to think of as neutral gray or close to it — then consider how that affects the rest of the image. In extreme cases I create an “average” layer in photoshop and use the same tool to set that to gray, then reveal the image again, and fine tune.
It also isn’t unusual for me to use different color balance in, say, sunny areas of the image and areas in deep shadow.
p.1 #11 · (More) Yosemite High Country... plus Mono Lake
Fred Amico wrote:
Beautiful set of images, Dan!
Thanks, Fred!
And now to load up the vehicle and head back up there for a short backpack trip into an area just east of the park boundary! Should be on the road within the hour.
