Category: Landscape

Navajo Highway

Posted on by Nick Roberts

This image is from Arizona along the road out of Flagstaf heading east. I was taken by the alien looking landscape and decided to stop and shoot a few frames before heading east. I climbed up on one of the mounds of clay to get a better composition and to get a sense of the place.

This image is almost straight from the camera. I used a polarizer to cut down on reflected glare. The composition uses the rule of thirds as well as letting the highway become a leading line. All processing for this photo was done in Aperture 3.

Self Portrait with the Devilhog

Posted on by Nick Roberts

This self portrait was taken a couple of years ago at the entrance to the Bonneville Salt Flats International Speedway. I used Topaz Adjust bring out the details and colors in the scene.

I’m still feeling my way through this startup of the Speeddemon2 blog and trying to wrap my head around the WordPress analytics that show how many visitors the blog gets each day. There have been days where over 200 people viewed the blog and there have been days when as few as 30 people have stopped by. I’m trying to correlate those numbers with the posts from those days to better understand how I can deliver photos and information that will lead people to return each day or each week. I truly want to be a resource for photographers and ordinary folks to learn more about the work I produce and to find help, or inspiration, to further their artistic vision.

I would really appreciate hearing from you, the visitors, about what worked over the past few weeks and what didn’t. I studied fine art in a school that valued critiques as a way to grow and expand an artist’s thinking and inform his or her work. I’m asking anyone who has something constructive to say to post it in the comment section. I’m sitting here writing these word though and I’m wondering how I’ll deal with the possibility that no one will say anything. Oh well I can’t control the universe so I’ll take my chances with this post.

Louisville Waterfront at Night

Posted on by Nick Roberts

One of the difficulties inherent in shooting night scenes is the large dynamic range needed to capture the scene. The artificial light in the image is usually much brighter than the surrounding areas. When this occurs the highlights are blown out which is almost always in the street lights. This image is one such situation. I shot this image using a five shot bracket series from +2 through -2 stops. Even at that range the centers of the lights are blown out in this image.

My studies of my images at night have led me to adopt a wider range of exposures to offset this undesired effect. My current practice is to go as many as five stops underexposed if I encounter scenes that have large ares of manmade lighting such as this one. I watch my histogram very closely and underexpose until I see the right hand side move completely away from the end of the histogram. I have discovered that by doing that I can subdue the blow outs that occur in the lights themselves.

I merged the five exposures in NIK HDR Efex Pro and then used the default setting as my base to tone map it. I then tweaked the sliders until it was where I liked it and finally returned it to Photoshop CS5 to sharpen it using the unsharp mask tool.

Compositionally I framed the shot with the sunset in the right hand third of the frame in order to balance it with the waterfront on the left. The sky counterbalances the architecture and the complimentary colors of the deep blue sky and the orange waterfront create a harmonious whole.

My point in sharing this image is to show you that the conventional practice of using an automatic bracket set to shoot the scene is not always going to give you control of the entire dynamic range. By using the histogram as a tool to analyze the images in your HDR shoots you can take control and prevent blown highlights such as the street lights in this image.

 

Great Basin Vista

Posted on by Nick Roberts

Today’s image is once again from the Great Basin along US 50. In this image I was trying to capture the vastness of the Great Basin as well as the clouds that had been gathering all day. As I rode along US 50 this particular day I was treated to seeing a thunderstorm develop. During the day I watched as a large mass of clouds in the southern sky coalesced  into a thunderstorm. As the day went on I noticed how every cloud in the sky moved over to become part of the storm. It was fascinating to see that even small clouds that were miles away from the main body would quickly move toward the growing mass until by the end of the day the entire sky had become part of the storm.

Compositionally I used the large boulder in the foreground as a way to bring the viewer into the scene. The triangles formed by the foreground element and the sloping terrain on the left side help to direct the viewer’s eyes down the highway and into the Great Basin while the clouds themselves frame the distant horizon. I used Topaz Adjust to process this image before applying some final tweaks in Aperture 3.

Using Diagonal Lines as Compositional Elements

Posted on by Nick Roberts

This is another photo incorporating the highway as a major compositional element. I can’t recall where I took this photo but I really like the way the highway sweeps across the frame from right to left forming several triangles that converge at the horizon. Even the clouds are forming triangular patterns and reinforcing the diagonal slopes of the distant mountains.

It is also pretty obvious that this photo was taken at midday yet it still has enough contrast and detail to remain interesting. I processed this image with Topaz Adjust before final sharpening was done in Aperture 3.