"Up From The Ashes": the How and Why

A while back, I entered a small landscape photography contest on a forum of which I am a member. My entry was entitled "Up From The Ashes", and is a photo of the area around Mt. St. Helens, an active volcano in Washington which devastated miles around during a blast in the 1980s.

Canon EOS 10D + 28-70/2.8L @ 28mm. ISO 200, f8, 1/60 sec.

Another forum member was interested in how I was able to capture the photo, and this blog post is a adaptation of my response to him. He said "I vote 'up from the ashes' for sure. The lighting in that photo is surreal. I'm convinced its layered or HDR, something along those lines. It is possible that GND's were used but I'm curious to know how the foreground got so well lit. If it is post processing its really well done post processing. That's an indirect question, Johan. How did you get this shot?"

This is a single shot, no HDR (High Dynamic Range, a software processing of multiple photos to make one with extensive tonal detail) or layering (similar to HDR, but not as advanced) was used. A GND (graduated neutral-nensity) filter would have helped in this particular capture, but, again, no filters were used.

The original RAW capture was dark and tonally flat. Cameras cannot capture scenes in the same way that our eyes do, so the photo needed some help from software to match the actual scene as it appeared before me. Thankfully, I shoot in RAW file format, which saves much more tonal information than other standard formats such as JPEG. Thus, I was able to recover a lot of the shadows. All of the information in this photo was there to begin with; no information was added. 

In Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, I upped the contrast and blacks to add definition to the clouds and sunlit landscape. Now the sky looked fantastic, but the foreground was totally dark with no visible detail. So I used the fill light at +48 to open detail in the foreground. After adding the fill light, the clouds were beginning to become too bright, so I used a large, soft brush to bring down the exposure and increase contrast in the cloud. Finishing touches were added by adjusting saturation levels with the brilliantly named "Targeted Adjustment Tool". The final settings in Lightroom are:


Fill Light: +48

Blacks: 13
Contrast: +59

Clarity +62

Vibrance +21

Targeted Saturation Adjustments: Red +38, Orange +30, Yellow +24, Green +32, Aqua 0, Blue +4, Purple +44, Magenta +2

Finally, how the photo looked straight out of the camera : 

Back in the Blogosphere

Over the past few months, this blog has been sorely neglected due in large part to some technical difficulties. Those difficulties have now been resolved and I hope to post much more consistently now. A few more reviews of equipment that I use are in the works, and I hope to also post occasionally about various non-photography-related topics that come across my mind at times.

Ethereal

The Lap of Luxury

Being nearly always in my pocket, I've started using the camera on my iPod more and more frequently. Using some of my favorite apps, Instagram and PhotoForge2, it is amazing what can be accomplished with that little camera.

To Avoid Cliché

 Although the type of fireworks photo pictured above is very beautiful, they are very common. This year, I decided to try to stretch beyond that, and after some experimentation, the photo below was the result.

In Remembrance