City - Death Valley State - CALIFORNIA Country - United States
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B&W conversion of an Infra-Red image taken using the Leica DigiLux 2 with an IR filter. Exposure was trial and error f5.6 at 8 seconds. Converted to B&W in PS. Scotty's Castle is a famous attraction in Death Valley California.
John, thanks for the in depth description and tutorial link. I don?t do auto anything either, well maybe initially I?ll do the grey scale conversion and autolevels just to get an idea of what things could look like, but go back and tweak everything manually. That tutorial is real similar to the Scott Kelby technique. Actually, I pretty much gave up on shooting raw since I discovered that you can adjust temperature and tint in elements 3.0, but I can?t in CS, go figure! Good call on getting rid of the fence, and you did a great job at it. I?m not familiar with microcontrast boost technique, but I?m going to look into it. Keep up the good work ~Mike
Mike - the technical reply. I don't do auto anything. It started in Photoshop CS with RAW conversion stratching contrast and boosting exposure. Next I cloned out fences around the "pool", ah er that hole on the RHS. Then I did a microcontrast boost (unsharp mask with 25% effect on a 56 pixel brush). Then it got resized, regular unsharp masked and converted to B&W ala Eric Goldwasser's tutorial at http://macrogod.com/BlackWhite/BW.htm. Thats all. Thanks for the kind words. - JB
Technical reply - No auto anything. This was shot in Leica's RAW mode. The Photochop CS RAW plug-in let me adjust the exposure (increased) first then contrast (increased). Then I cloned up some veryannoying chain fences around the "pool", that hole on the RHS. I then did a unhsarp mask to improve local micro contrast (25% at 56 pixel size), reduced size fore usefilm and then a regular unsharp mask. Next it was desaturated ala Eric Goldwasser's published technique to improve B&Ws. See his tutorial at: macrogod.com/BlackWhite/BW.htm /A>
Welcome to the world of infrared. I can?t wait to see your big landscape work with that filter (you?re the master of huge landscapes in my opinion). this is an excellent composition, nice dramatic sky, white foliage, that unique infrared quality to the castle. Great shot john, I love that infrared surrealistic feel, but I live in Michigan so, my filter is useless during winter. Technical question, did you just do a auto levels on this or did you go through complicated steps to get it to look this good in black and white? 7 (in my opinion, all the qualities of a good photo are represented here) I?d like to see what this looks like at full resolution, most likely astonishing, but I?m a infrared junkie.. ~Mike
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