Spring Morning

Posted by Don Smith (California, United States) on 27 March 2010 in Landscape & Rural.

UPCOMING 2010 WORKSHOPS:

Spring Big Sur Photo Workshop - March 29 - April 1, 2010 (Sold Out - Waiting List Only)
Northern Arizona: Grand Canyon, Upper Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, and Sedona Photo Workshop - May 3-7, 2010 (Sold Out - Waiting List Only)
Redwoods and Mendocino Coast Photo Workshop - June 15-18, 2010 (space available)
Kauai, Hawaii Photo Workshop - July 12-16, 2010 (space available)
Summer Big Sur Photo Workshop - August, 17-20, 2010 JUST ADDED! (space available)
Arches/Canyonlands Photo Workshop - November 3-7, 2010 (space available)
Winter Big Sur Photo Workshop - Magic Light and The Pfeiffer Beach Arch - January 11-14, 2011 JUST ADDED (space available)
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Refined Vision: 50 Lessons Designed to Improve Your Digital Landscape Photography (e-book and printed versions - 160 pages)
The Photographer's Guide to the Big Sur Coast (e-book version - 102 pages)
On the Edge (printed version - softcover and hardcover - 120 pages)
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When it comes to the final presentation of our images, I am a firm believer in cropping to make the image "feel" correct. True it should be done as best as one can in-camera, but some scenes don't always appear their best shot to 35mm aspect ratio. While on a recent shoot in Fresno County for spring wildflowers, I was having trouble finding a focal point for the beautifully flower-carpeted hills. As the sun began to rise, the play of light and shadow transformed the rather flat looking hillsides into a 3-dimensional scene. The highlight suddenly revealed what appeared to be old-tire tracks, and that became a focal point (a place for the eye to jump on and off while exploring the scene). It was just a matter for me to decide how much (or how little) I wanted to include in the final image.

I started photographing this scene and soon realized I was trying to include too much information - my intended visual message of highlight, shadow, flowers, and color, was going to be weakened by including too much of the scene. I visualized in my mind how the finished scene should look, and I decided a panoramic crop would work best. Even though I work with a 21-megapixel camera, which yields 60-meg (8-bit) files, I knew a single frame, cropped to a pano, would hold too little information. Thus, I decided to shoot four horizontal frames and stitch them together in Photoshop CS4. Photoshop's Photomerge tool really became usable with the release of CS3 (wish I could say the same about their HDR and Focus Blend tools). I have a "how-to" article on my website as a free PDF download, which will walk you through the procedure. Click here Writings/Articles and scroll down to the January 2009 article: Fixing Problem Panoramas with Photoshop CS4 Photomerge.

The resulting image was saved as a TIFF, then I reopened it through Bridge into Adobe Camera RAW and began my usual workflow of global correcting, then I opened the image into Photoshop to work on localized corrections. I actually used Nik Viveza 2 to balance the contrast between the lefthand-side shadow and the sunlit highlight. I also warmed the scene slightly and used a bit of the Structure command to give the image some "pop."

By stitching the four images, I ended-up with a 160-meg file (of which I cut down to 52-megs for Getty). In retrospect, I would have been better served by combining multiple vertical images as it would have allowed me more room to crop from top-to-bottom. Nonetheless, this is just about how I envisioned the final image in my mind's eye.

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www.donsmithphotography.com

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