Trotternish Ridge - in the raw

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Julian Elliott

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Julian Elliott
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So the initial pano at 1st light struck many chords with people on here. Some liked it and some didn't.

This version was taken around 15 minutes later when the light has really hit the landscape and drawn the long shadows of daybreak.

What's been done to it? It's been cropped from six vertical images. Daylight white balance applied. Capture sharpening applied. That's it! Not sure on the finished crop but thought I'd show an, for all intents and purposes, RAW photo.

30876631594_21474de354_b.jpg
 
Well this is the recut version which is more akin to the first posting.

It has been worked on a little because of flare. This was removed in Photoshop as best I could using the Frequency Separation method. I've seen a couple of ways to remove flare but this one is very good indeed. Here's a typical example on Youtube:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0oL9E08asA
. There is a tiny bit left on the horizon but I thought I'd just leave it. Overall, the flare looks significantly better than it did.

Curves were set using the Threshold method to clearly identify the blacks; whites and mid-tones. The blacks adjustment made the most significant change as it knocked off some of the overall exposure by a good half stop.

31623204431_cafef6b2f6_b.jpg
 
SFTPhotography said:
I like the second rendition but I tend to do it by eye on a calibrated screen in a suite like Aperture, LR or CO.

The contrast just looks a bit heavy.
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Have you tried the method I described? It's one of the many ways to do it within Photoshop and is far more accurate than using the curves in Lightroom. I do know what you mean though. Blacks could do with a touch of lifting.
 
SFTPhotography said:
I've never tried it, I tend to go with my eye.

Here's my shot from here.
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Steve, one sees a lot of images taken from roughly this spot looking in the same direction at dawn. I must say I prefer yours to most of the others I've seen. The reason is quite simple - at dawn the whole landscape is flooded with yellow or orange light which swamps the natural colours of the vegetation. You have waited a little (or maybe you got up late.....?) till the light is less warm and as a result some of the greens and is that even the purple of heather are apparent. And those a real shadows behind those rocky hillocks and peaks. This is a general comment really about landscape photography but it refers specifically to the OP here as well. To make the tree stand out against the background you'd need to be really lucky or spend hours/days waiting for it to be lit up while the background was in shadow. That for me would be perfect. I wonder if anyone has ever done it?
 
Jeremy. Can you not accept that some of us have a particular way of working? And that for some of us that particular way is our work that pays the bills?

For me, the fact that my work has been sold in 40 countries and counting says enough for me to know that how I carry out my work and how I capture images works.
 
No problem! I know my opinions are not always welcome and I expect I'm on quite a few people's ignore list.

As far as yellow/orange light is concerned I just don't get it. But it's been popular for just about as long as I've been into photography. Many years ago it was often created with a yellow or warming filter but now at least people usually do actually use natural light.
 
Well, I won't be putting you on an ignore list! The one problem with forums is that it's very easily to mis-read stuff.

Don't think I've ever used a warming filter in my work. Not even within Lightroom. Much prefer to wait for it to be there with Mother Nature.

You also have to see it from my side as a commercial travel photographer. I need to create images that are appealing and when the general non-photographic public see them the reaction is "wow, I want to go there!"

When was the last time you saw a Lonely Planet travel guide have a washed out landscape on the front? But that doesn't mean mood doesn't sell as it does. Had a sale a couple of years back that I wish was a direct Getty sale instead of a distributor. It worked out to be a sale of around $14000 gross!!! Although this year I've had two BIG sales for nearly $10K gross but they were nice sunny images.
 
Interesting reading this. For many of us there's a tension between producing images that will be popular among non-photographers and images that look more natural to us. I tend to view it as preparing an image for a particular target market, knowing what people will prefer & adjusting accordingly. There was a website called Lightbox.com that eventually sold up to Facebook, where they were one of the first to continuously feed new images onto a page and people would rate them as the dropped past with faves going back to the top. The best way to get an image to stay up was to make it really striking to catch the eye as it dropped past. It wasn't tasteful, but it was an education for me.
 
jerry12953 said:
Steve, one sees a lot of images taken from roughly this spot looking in the same direction at dawn. I must say I prefer yours to most of the others I've seen. The reason is quite simple - at dawn the whole landscape is flooded with yellow or orange light which swamps the natural colours of the vegetation. You have waited a little (or maybe you got up late.....?) till the light is less warm and as a result some of the greens and is that even the purple of heather are apparent. And those a real shadows behind those rocky hillocks and peaks. This is a general comment really about landscape photography but it refers specifically to the OP here as well. To make the tree stand out against the background you'd need to be really lucky or spend hours/days waiting for it to be lit up while the background was in shadow. That for me would be perfect. I wonder if anyone has ever done it?
Click to expand...

I got up early. Sleeping in a car isn't ideal.

Was there before sunrise but you're right. It is was actually the last picture I took and it's the best. It was about 30mins after sunrise. The sun was high enough to clear some low lying clouds out behind

The trick to this shot of mine, and a lot from here that I've seen after taking this, falls down in the composition. Don't stick the tree in the water or too high in the frame and don't cut the lakes off the lhs.
 
Indeed it is difficult. I have to produce work that people are going to buy. It's an interesting and odd job as you are producing material that you have no idea if someone actually does want it or not. But that is stock photography!

Out of all the too'ing and fr'oing I did find that video on getting rid of flare so at times you need people to push you. Working on your own it is the one thing that, at times is hard, as you have no colleagues to bounce ideas off. However I would never go back to a normal job again. I have definitely become unemployable ;)
 
I had no idea there was such a thing as stock photography any more, especially involving the sorts of sums you are talking about, Julian. Obviously I'm envious that your images sell for that kind of money, even if only recieve a fraction of it.

But to get back to the photography, if I say much more I'm sure to make myself very unpopular....
 
jerry12953 said:
I had no idea there was such a thing as stock photography any more, especially involving the sorts of sums you are talking about, Julian. Obviously I'm envious that your images sell for that kind of money, even if only recieve a fraction of it.

But to get back to the photography, if I say much more I'm sure to make myself very unpopular....
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You do have a very particular take on how images should be though.
 
jerry12953 said:
But to get back to the photography, if I say much more I'm sure to make myself very unpopular....
Click to expand...

I always like trouble makers. Much more interesting as people ;)

Stock photography still exists in both traditional Macrostock such as Getty where you can and, less often, get decent prices. But at the other end you have Microstock with places like Shutterstock.

There are various arguments as to which is better but the words you will hear a lot in this industry are "race to the bottom" in terms of prices.

Suffice to say that actually earning anything approaching a wage from stock can be hit and miss. It's very much like the lottery. Sometimes you win and sometimes it's, well, meh. The numbers game, another phrase you will hear, comes into it. But it is not purely having 1000s of images and hoping for the best. You have to have a lot PLUS the quality to match.
 
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