Don't delete the old stuff!

I went with my wife to Iceland in 2005 for a week's shooting. We lived in a 4X4 for a week booking into a hotel only once and driving some 20 hours a day. I had seen incredible stuff coming out of Icelands landscapes on the net and fancied a piece of the action! The trip was disappointing photographically to be honest though certainly an experience. I ended up with just 7 keepers out of the whole trip. I later realised that I wasn't a landscape photographer by nature, if I didn't have anything to say with my pictures then the pictures pretty much didn't say anything at all. I never deleted the RAW though and certain images which I had seen in my mind when I shot, just never happened due to my lack of ability using the current software to make those pictures happen. The camera was a Canon 1Ds which is still very hard to process for and the RAW programs were far more basic then.

Anyway today I was musing about just how incredible modern software is when playing with the new version of SNS HDR and I wondered if I could ever make those images work that I'd failed with 6 years ago.

Boy but it makes a difference having modern software. The 1Ds RAW files are still a pig to process but I now have the tools to do it and where once cloning out the 140 odd dust spots (no exaggeration) was hours of work, now I can do it in minutes, literally. These following pictures have perhaps 2 or 3 layers maximum each in PS, all the hard grunt work was done in ACR. I'm really happy with the first two, version of pictures that I'd processed to a similar result in the past but which looked horribly ugly at anything but web size due to noise, banding, artifacting, a very significant crop, etc. The 3rd is a picture that I just couldn' t have made in the past without an incredible amount of photoshop tweaking from a RAW file from which it would have been incredibly difficult to extract the available information in the first place.

Fantastic! We want more!

I wish, I was inspirationally dead on that trip.

Here are a couple that did make that first cut:

Here is another one I just ran through modern processing.

Boy but I didn't have any taste whatsoever in those days, nowadays you would have to hold me at gunpoint to make me shoot a sunset picture!



Jokulsaron Sunset.

Excellent Ben. Npthing wrong with the odd sunset - we can't resist you know

The first picture is lovely, but looks like it could prove difficult to print?

Mike

Why difficult Mike? A properly profiled printer should have any problem, especially with a paper that can handle it. Ensuring adequate lighting on the picture once printed might be more of a problem so that the blacks don't completely disappear. You don't delve too deeply into the deep shadows of a 1Ds, there be dragons lurking there!

I may be naive, but even good profiles can struggle in the dark areas, though a lot depnds on how you've managed the ink limits beforehand. There was an interesting piece on The Online Photographer recently that suggested that some of the issues arise from the number of sample points and the extreme non-linearity of the colour/dmax response at high ink loads. I have two sets of profiles for my two main papers with different ink loads in order to get better shadow separation in mono (works for colour too, but with lower max saturation in the colours).

Getting enough light on it reminds me of a print I did a few years ago. A night shot of Scarborough bBeach with the loveliest richest deep blues you could imagine. When I printed it (gloss paper) all the detail in the beach was lost and the blue seemed to sink towards black, until I found myself in a dark corridor and a shaft of direct sun caught the print, bringing it to wonderful life. Unfortunately that wasn't really a practical way to view it reliably, though someone did buy a sightly improved version later I really should have another go at it sometime.

Mike

I print on a Chromira Lightjet (at BPD Photech) so ink isn't an issue. I haven't noticed problems in deep blacks before, pretty much whatever you throw at it prints perfectly, I have a portfolio full of what are in essence very complicated B&W prints and they look more than georgous. They are the top 'landscape' photo lab in the country so the machines are very well profiled, the chemistry very fresh and Jon the tech really knows his stuff there.

There is an answer, an easy answer, in todays world to providing directional spot lighting on prints. Those halogen lamp things with 4 or 5 heads which you can move and swivel. Most people have them in their houses anyway, they're dirt cheap and I promise you, they make all the difference! Actually very good for lighting a room anyway as auxillary lighting, you can open up shadows in corners beautifully or accentuate areas to make a room look significantly bigger than with regular lighting. I have two strips in my main room, all accentuating both the room but with one light per picture. It really does make them glow, for all that I don't keep the halogens on permenantly due to heat and electricity costs.

Here's another I just rustled up, trying to keep the horrific colour noise out of that mountain while maintaining the colour is what made me give up on this one back in 2005. Now it's just a simple slider. Heaven!

Now this was a weird scene, a barn seemingly half swallowed up by a cliff.