January, week two:
I went for a hike last weekend along the whiteoak canyon trail in Shenandoah National Park. At the end of the hike (4.6 miles out and back, approximately 1200 foot elevation change) there was an amazing 86 foot high waterfall, the second highest in the park. It was a great day for a hike, and on the way back I took this photo from a footbridge about 200 yards upstream of the main falls.
While I really liked a lot of my images of the falls, I think this one looks better in black and white than one of the entire falls. I feel this way because I like the texture of the rocks, water, and trees that this provides, and these characteristics would have been lost on a distant view of a tall falls.
My camera was on a tripod placed on the middle of a small footbridge crossing over the stream (which as stated is shortly before it makes it's big drop). I used a polarizing filter, mostly because I wanted to extend the exposure to get maximum blurring of the moving water... this was necessary since I was stopped down all the way (f/32) and don't have any neutral density filters.
As for the conversion, processing shots for my first submission (fractured limb) was the first time i played with "channel mixer" in photoshop as a method of black and white conversion. I love the flexibility it offers, but I am still learning. Nearly everything I had been converting started at something like 100% red, 40 to 50% green, -10 to 0% blue, and -25 to 0% constant, and i tweaked it from there. That worked ok, but then I learned a trick to start off by looking at each of the three channels at 100% with the others at 0% to see what that channel's information looked like. I had been frustrated with the 100/40/0/-10 settings and all subtle modifications, so it was eye-opening to do it this other way. It turned out that I liked the way the 100% blue and 0% everything else looked, so I went with it. I could probably tweak it some to improve it, but I wanted to go with it this way because it represents a new step in my digital black and white experience; last week I started using channel mixer, this week I started shaking things up... can't wait to see what comes next! Also, blue is my favorite color, so I liked being able to use just the blue channel. That is where the title of this blog entry comes from, "black and white in blue" (the original title i gave to the photo itself is "Whiteoak cascades")
Image details:
Date and location: 1/6/7 at 14:15 EST, Whiteoak Canyon Trail, Shenandoah NP, Virginia
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, circular polarizing filter
Settings: 56mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/32, 3.2 sec, shot in raw
Processing: raw to tiff in lightroom beta v4.1, b+w in PS7 (channel mixer 0,0,100,0%)
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure)
10 comments:
Nice job! The tones really pop with your channel mixer work. I like the silky smoothness of the water from the slow shutter speed.
Lovely capture... I'm glad you chose black and white.. it works very well in this image :)
Great work with the exposure on creating the silky effect but at the same time keeping the detail in the water.
Thanks for posting the background to the image and details of the Photoshop work.
Very nice photo
Lovely! I adore a good silky waterfall. There aren't any good falls around here to play with. So I'm a little jellous. Love the detail you add to your post about how you achieved your image. Keep up the good work.
Very good result with the long exposure. Often, in this kind of picture, the falls get over exposed but yours are perfect.
Very pretty - love the black and white!
I think your conversion is excellent. Great range of tones. I also like the look of the water. Good settings.
(BTW, I have used the following settings: red 76, green 24, blue 48, constant -12. Some of the conversions have worked well; others were a bit over the top.)
Nice job on the timed exposure to blur the water. I like how it is not overexposed (which I have done many times when shooting a long exposure of a waterfall).
Great shutter speed.
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