Hoodoo at Mt Valley

[Dave Mills]

Shot this a few years back.
Nikon D200 24-120mm
F22 1/500 iso 200
tripod mounted 0 comp

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Dave,
I really like the Kiva and the strong shadow play. The strong diagonal line is too overpowering for my tastes as it cuts through the structure.......you know how much I like getting low........so laying down may have helped minimize that. Not what your normal photo.......so nicely seen!

[Robert Amoruso]

Dave,

Compositionally, I like it except for cutting the bottom left of the Kiva.

The deep shadows are a tough call. Just about everyone of my slides from out there would have deep shadows like this. Now I would work to get more detail into them. With my B&W I would use the zone system to do that. Now HDR. THe dark shadow running over the middle is very distracting and getting lower would have lessened/eliminated that.

The image looks soft so I downloaded it and sharpened it (USM on BG Copy 175/0.3/0 then two runs at 125/0.0/0). I ran a reverse s-curve on it to reduce contrast and then did an s-curve using the Linear Contrast preset in PSCS. This is a very mild s-curve to offset the flattening of the revere s-curve. Probably with more tweaking of the reverse s-curve you would get the same result, but I have it in an action and just used that.

I then used slective color and added 4 points of black tot he black and neutral channels. Adds a bit of pop back. Before the curves, I did a shadows/highlights adjustment for shadows.


Get more info here.

1) JPGS

Go to http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5598 and look under the first posting by Artie. He goes over his workflow for a small JPG for posting under "Free Excerpt: Creating an Action for your BPN J-PEGS". This should get you going.


2) From Artie's suggestion above for sharpening strength, I use the following.

USM in PSCS3 one round at 175/0.3/0 and three rounds at 125/0.2/0. I then use the History States and back up on the sharpening until I like the results.


3) Go to http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=20434

For Reverse S-Curve, Shadows/Highlights and Selective Color.

[Dave Mills]

Robert...thanks a bunch for the in depth analysis.Appreciate the time spent. I've been posting some images where I do have questions and you either reassured me that I was correct or brought to light other issues. I made a note of the sharpening settings.

[Dennis "Curly" Buchner]

Nice composition Dave, good eye

[Paul Marcellini]

Not too much to add. I like the comp, just try for better light and pray to the cloud gods. =)