Diane -- You are not alone!!!

[BoyNhisDog]

I think Ambika is a fine photographer and I have enjoyed her work however I prefer IGO's waterfall work. Using a long shutter speed is not doctoring an image. I do agree that too many landscape photographers are pumping their colors way too high these days. Three years ago that would have wowed me with the Zabriski work but it really puts me off now.

Sometimes I blur the water, sometimes I freeze it but most of the time I find something in between is best for a certain image. I like them all if the light and composition are good.
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Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys
- Andre Gide

[Matt Hoffman]

[threedogz]

we are in a society where natural beauty is not good enough anymore...

from photography to botox and plastic surgery, we are surrounded by imitations and fabrications...
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You can never eat too much candy...

[desertgirl]

I like both -- Fuzz shows tranqulity and gives the image a sense of calm but I also like the non fuzzy -- or more a partially fuzzy image that shows the dynamism of a crashing waterfall .....

Just depends I think the human eye has a huge capaity to filter and selectively edit out clutter that it does not want to see ...Many a times I will review my pictures and feel the whole scene was quite cluttered but when I check back to my emotional response to the time -- I find it based on few highlights of the image with the rest fading away ...

Matt -- Very cool to hear you may be published Do let us know
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Life is but a dream ...there is no end to what you can dream!

[dabreeze]

Love the subject and that people are talking so thoughtfully about photography. As someone professionally invested in photography (fine art sales, publishing, and teaching), I figured I'd weigh in with a couple of points relevant to the discussion.

Long exposure water shots began as a technical necessity not as an artistic choice and still remain such for many of the Arizona Highways photographers we're discussing here.

Remember, the early landscape photographers (Ansel Adams, Elliot Porter, et al) mostly used large format view cameras (before 35mm) and these cameras require small apertures (thus long exposures) to achieve sharp focus throughout an image. Their wide angle lenses are much longer than what we smaller format shooters are used to. As a result of using lenses with much greater focal lengths (e.g. 20mm for 35mm SLRs=80mm for 4"x5" film=160mm for 8"x10"), depth of field is extremely limited and small apertures (f/32-f/64; some even go as small as f/128!) and tilt movements in the camera are a technical requirement to achieve focus thru an image.

As well, large format film (4"x5"; 8"x10") requires considerably longer exposure time b/c of its size.

Another consideration: to achieve the highest quality exposures for print, photographers and film companies have found that slower film speeds (and their equivalent these days in digital) of 100 ISO or even 50 ISO give them the smoothest, least grainy results.

Again, though, slow film=longer exposures.

So, large format + slow film + longer lenses + limited depth of field + very small apertures = longer shutter speeds. With SLRs and digicams we think in terms of fractional seconds; large format shooters think in seconds and in some cases, even minutes!!

One final point about longer exposures, consider too the predominant light used by the landscape photographers we love: either very muted dawn or dusk, or reflected light only. Analyze your coffee table books and copies of Az Hwys and see how few use any form of direct light at all, especially in canyons and creeks. Using reflected sky light, overcast or muted light gives even balanced light, limits the dynamic range to closer to what our cameras can capture and allows the true colors of the landscape to come thru.

But, again, these types of light require longer exposures.

I'm not saying that photographers don't cheat in certain circumstances thru the use of neutral density and polarizing filters to reduce brighter light situations and achieve blurry/smokey water.

They do!

Or that the market and viewers in general don't influence decisions on how to shoot water.

They do.

But consider this too: if we don't 'see' water as blurred in reality, neither do we 'see' water as frozen. One of the beauties of flowing water is its constant motion. In truth, the most 'real' photograph of water achievable (technical limitations aside) would probably be somewhere b/w totally frozen and artistically blurred.

But some are simply impossible without longer exposures. Here's an example of an image achieved with an eight second exposure by a DSLR:
http://www.pbase.com/sedonamemories/image/43744284
A long grotto in Secret Canyon compressed with mild telephoto (70mm), reflected light only, at dusk, water barely trickling. Could I have used 400 ISO, sacrificed depth of field by shooting more wide open to achieve frozen water? Sure. Would it have lost its sense of three dimensionality that results from sharp focus throughout? Probably. Would the image be as beautiful, as reminiscent of the amazing sense of peace and tranquility I felt, alone in that gorgeous little cavern? Not remotely.

So, the decision of 'to blur or not to blur' can be a technical one, a market-driven one, and an artistic one. More often than not, for AZ Hwys large format shooters, technical concerns are going to override the others.

And the debate will continue.

As for the artistic interpretations of some photographers these days regarding color (i.e. Zabriske Point!), don't get me started. I have to answer almost daily for such artistic license!!

But even here, there's more to it than meets the eye, pun intended. The use over the last 20 yrs by landscape photographers of highly saturated, narrow color gamut films like Velvia has become almost universal. It looks great in magazines, overcomes some of the limitations of offset CMYK printing processes used for magazines (dulls images), and it sells.

As a result, we viewers have become accustomed to a velvia-like intensity and saturation. One of the eye-openers for me last year was seeing Elliot Porter's work from the 1940s-1970s (pre-Velvia) at an exhibition in LA. Beautiful as they were, muted and more capable of expressing nature's inherantly larger range of colors, they seemed a little dull. I know they were a better depiction of the reality 'seen' by Porter but to an eye trained to see in Velvia . . . what can i say?

Are some photographers using digital excessively these days? most certainly!! In today's 'digital darkroom', with publishing and print sale concerns, digital photographers struggle endlessly with the velvia factor. Shooting in RAW, with adjustable/correctable white balance, without film's chemically-enforced saturation levels and color gamuts, digital photographers are far more capable of capturing the 'documentary' 'reality' of nature's beautiful bounty.

But with a public trained to expect impact, intensity, and saturation, such nuanced subtlety could be a death knell in terms of print sales, and magazine publishing.

The world is changing and I think people are beginning to see differently, undoubtedly influenced by their personal experiences with a far more readily available digital reality. When the viewing public begins to more fully realize the effects of years of pleasurably viewing artificially color-rich Velvia-type film stock, then maybe some of the overuse of Photoshop's many powerful editing tools will cease to be such an issue.

[azhiker96]

Personally, I celebrate the diversity we have in photos. I enjoy both Ambica's and IGO's pictures. If I want absolute reality, I take a hike.

As suggested before, mankind does like to tweak things whether it's with botox or Mabeline, Photoshop or filters. I guess it's part of human nature.
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It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. -- Carl Sagan

[Davis2001R6]

That explains a lot of things for me. Thanks for taking the time to write that! Very well written and informative.

[desertgirl]

[BoyNhisDog]

[Davis2001R6]

I just want to "doctor" my photo's to get rid of this nuclear green glow that my new camera keeps disappointing me with. Any tips there photoshop guru's?

[desertgirl]

Hmmm....How about playing with cyan/blue saturation ( Selective Color Layer) and mask the effect's results from rest of the image - so that you can maintain the general feel of the image

Will post a quick tweak adjusting blue levels -- Just used Picasa since i have it handy ...



May you like it -- may be not ....

Do you have this problem with all your pictures ? Is your white balance set right ? Auto White Balance on the smaller cameras seem to do good for the most part
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Photos: http://www.pbase.com/desertgirl/galleries
Life is but a dream ...there is no end to what you can dream!

[BoyNhisDog]

Tim, did you post process that image at all? I have seen this mostly with the small sensor point & shoot cameras when the image was underexposed and they brought up with a levels adjustment. The camera sometimes severely processes the image in an "auto" sort of way as well and it can happen then as well.

If you started with good color and this happened when you adjusted the Levels, you can do a "fade to luminosity" and it might take that new color right back out. That is a valuable move in post processing. At times a Levels or Curves adjustment will mess with the colors. Even a sharpening can mess with them. I do a lot of Fade to Luminosities to avoid that. I made it an action and assigned it a F key.
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Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys
- Andre Gide

[Davis2001R6]

Don't want to completely hijack this thread so I will continue it elsewhere.

[dabreeze]

Did you use a polarizer on this, Tim? The reason I ask is that the color change across the sky is similar to what happens when a polarizer is used with too wide an angle and parts of the sky are highly polarized (90 degree angle to the sun) while other parts are less so. If you were using a polarizer, this is when you have to be very careful using it.

in any case, in PS, the gradient tool will give you the uniform sky you want. First, you have to make a careful selection of the sky you want to correct. in this case, using the gradient tool for correction, you'll need to select the entire sky.

Then, using the color sampler/eyedropper tool, choose a color from the top of the portion of the sky color you like and make this your foreground color. Then choose a blue from the bottom of the sky and make this your background color. The two accurate sky colors will be the beginning and end points of the gradient you're going to use to replace the unwanted colors.

choose a linear foreground-to-background gradient from the menu for the gradient tool. the colors you've chosen for background/foreground should show in the gradient tool menu when you open it. then, just drag the gradient tool top to bottom across the sky selection. with careful selection you can probably even save little mr. cloud in the nuclear portion of the program!! good luck.

Down n' dirty looks like this:




more detailed instructions can probably be found with a google search of photoshop+gradient tool. amazing how much you can get from the internet these days.[/img]

[desertgirl]

Now back to them water doplets ... and smoky water.
_________________
Photos: http://www.pbase.com/desertgirl/galleries
Life is but a dream ...there is no end to what you can dream!