To Tone Or Not To Tone, That Is The Question.

It has been a month and a half since I posted anything, it is snowing and blowing, I'm bored and playing with old images. This one is from 2006, an early morning shot of mist rising off the Saranac River above Franklin Falls. I have always printed this one in BW because there really wasn't much color and it was shot with a Canon 10D which didn't handle the noise at all well in this situation. Any attempt to augment the color turned to confetti. I was clever enough at that point to be shooting RAW (my earliest images with the 10D were JPG to my later regret) so there was some dynamic range to play with and I needed all I could get.

Since my original editing in Photoshop, I have gone to doing most of my editing in Lightroom and only use PS when I need layers to achieve my aims. I wanted to revisit this image because I wondered if the Dehaze slider would help reveal the tree that is roughly center and was virtually invisible in the mist in my original edit. The above required a combination of darkening highlights (I always do that ahead of Dehaze), then a modest amount of Dehaze, offsetting the prior two with some overall exposure increase, a slight curves modification, and a bit of dodging just left of center in the sky. I also made a toned version (below) because I wanted to see how a bit of warmth would work.

The toning is only in the shadow areas. I used the LR split toning function and left the highlight areas at "0" because I dislike toned highlights. It kills the whites IMO. It is a matter of taste that goes back to my darkroom days when we toned the silver parts of the image but the paper remained white. The shadow areas above were toned Hue 35 and Saturation 10. I sometimes go as high as 15 on the saturation or as low as 9. My aim is for a slight brownish/black cast, not sepia and the saturation varies depending on the image.

I am not entirely sure that the toning adds to this image. I think I like it but I have become accustomed to the BW version, a print of which I have had on my studio wall for many years after entering it in a juried show. Maybe I need time to 'warm up' to the toned version. ;-)
Click on the images for a larger version (1000 pixels wide) and comment which you prefer, B&W or toned. You can use the right/left arrow keys to flip between the enlarged versions.

Converting to Toned B&W in Lightroom

Reflections in a Vernal Pool - Ampersand Mt.

I am playing with some photos from last year. This one is from a climb up Ampersand Mt. "Reflections in a Vernal Pond". I converted it to black & white and added sepia toning. I don't care for Lightroom's sepia preset. It is too heavy-handed for my taste. The hue is fine but I set the shadow tone saturation back by a third (from 15 down to 10) and turned the highlight saturation off entirely. Toning the highlights only serves to kill them and reduce overall contrast. The whites should be white IMO.

The Cleft on Ampersand Mt. 

Ampersand Mt. Summit

As always prints are available. Email me for details. I can print up to 12x18 inches myself and have larger prints made if need be. If you wish to share with others, please give them the URL for this page, do not repost without my permission. Doing so violates my copyright.

The Stones of Stone Valley

Two or three times a week (occasionally more) in good weather I walk about 4½ miles on the nearby Stone Valley trail system https://adklaurentian.org/?page=stone_valley_trail.html. I usually carry my camera and photograph whatever catches my eye and brightens my day. Here are three from yesterday.

The two above are actually the same rock from different angles. On the top photo, I was taken by the crosshatched lines with the vertical lines being indented cracks and the horizontal ones being raised ridges. If you click on the images you will get a larger version that shows it better. I also liked the interplay of the fallen logs, the pine needles and the cones on the ground. I converted the photos to B&W and applied a slight tone to only the shadow areas in Lightroom (37 hue / 7 saturation) for a touch of warmth to the images.

Feel free to share by directing people to this page. Do not repost anything from this site elsewhere without my express permission, a matter of both copyright and common courtesy.

Just playing in Lightroom

While going through my photos from the last 12 months to decide what to enter in SLCAC member show I got sidetracked playing with this one I shot while climbing the Saranac Six. I converted it to B&W with a modified version of infrared filtration.

Winter and My Discontent

I have been taking a course in Mindfulness (the one by Kain Ramsey) through Udemy. In the past I have read several books on mindfulness and Buddhism, all of which recommend the practice of sitting in a certain position for a period each day and "following your breath", that is focusing your attention on each breath in and each exhalation as a way to develop mindfulness. None of the books I read really explained how that leads to mindfulness or even what mindfulness is. Kain's approach is much more pragmatic.

As a bit of background, I have several times had it suggested to me that my belief system was primarily Buddhist in nature. A couple of online quizzes placed me at 95+% Buddhist but I have always had a couple of major objections to what I read of Buddhist belief, the major one being the notion that "all of life is suffering."

Now I'm not exactly a happy go lucky bubbling with joy type of guy but "life is suffering"? Come on now. There is a lot about life, the majority by a long shot, that I really dig, and if that is suffering I say "bring it on!" As Kain explained though, 'suffering' is probably not the best translation of dukkah, the word that the Buddha used. A better translation would be dissatisfaction or discontent. Okay, I can see that.  Nothing in life is perfect and we are always looking to make things better. I'm reminded of the cooking shows Diane likes to watch where the judge says how delicious the pastry is but... the crust should be a bit crispier. I see it in the photos I make after I get home and look at them on the computer I often think "I should have framed that better." We humans are never quite content or happy no matter what, but I don't feel like I am "suffering" because of it." It's just life, just the way it is.

Longtime followers of this blog have probably noted that I do relatively less winter photography than other seasons. Winter is, for the most part, something I endure. We have had a rough week here in the far North of New York, frozen plumbing, vehicles that won't start, heavy snow to remove, etc. Lots of dukkah, things to make me think about warmer climates. But then I think about hurricanes, alligators, bugs, and sinkholes down South and decide I'll continue to put up with this. The frost patterns, like the one above on our garage door window are interesting and a diversion from the dukkah. I would never see them in a warmer clime.

To close I will throw in a winter photo processing tip for Lightroom users. Lightroom has had a "Dehaze" slider in the "Effects" section for a while now. It acts sort of like a polarizing filter on skies, separating close tones into more discreet ones by stretching lower end of the brightest tones downward. Because that also compresses the middle tones below them and that may be undesirable, the same slider is available in selection tools like the graduated filter, the radial filter, and the adjustment brush. That allows you to apply the Dehaze to only the portion that you choose.

Here's the 'winter' photo tip. Dehaze works on snow too. Too often, snow renders nearly monotone on the linear curve that is characteristic of RAW digital images, especially if you are of the "shoot to the right" school and you lose the subtle ripples and undulations of snow drifts. I tend to deliberately expose in the center of the histogram with snow scenes so that I have room on the right to pull the whites up and the highlight tones down but you can also do it with the Dehaze slider as I did in the shot below.

Happy new year by the way.