Summer Day

I find that this image carries a certain peacefulness and calm. I was immediately attracted to it as I was driving down the highway last summer on the way to Drumheller in Alberta. Horizontal lines in an image usually give the sense of calm, and this artistic tool is used by artists to create a quiet mood. I toned down the colour somewhat, something I have been doing with my photos recently. A more saturated colour image would create an uncomfortable feeling that would take away from the mood I wanted to project. Two horizontal lines dominate the image, those being the horizon, and the lower edge at the water. The horizontals are not quite horizontal, with the bottom line curving up, while the horizon curves down. If both lines curved upward, the mood created would be perhaps a bit more joyful, like a big smile. The downward curvature of the horizon sort of opposes the feeling projected by the lower line. A downward sloping line in art can convey a feeling of sadness, but having them both present in the same image creates a contradictory feeling.

Battle River Valley

The Battle River valley is a very picturesque area just west of Wainwright Alberta. This image was taken with my Hasselblad H3D, using a 50 mm lens. The 35 mm equivalent to the medium format 50 mm is about a 35 mm lens. Presently I own 2 lenses that are compatible with the H3D: the 50 mm and the 24 mm lens. I like both lenses for the wide angle perspective that these lenses provide. The majority of my photos are taken with wide angle lenses. I also own a Leica M9 rangefinder which is also a great camera, and I have begun to use the two cameras for different purposes. The Leica is a great camera for photojournalism. The Hasselblad is well known for professional photography in fashion, commercial, and architectural photography. Both cameras have a beautiful colour pallette, and I find the Hasselblad  gives a warmer tone than the Leica. This scene has a painterly feel to it which I like very much. The H3D is a heavy camera, and usually requires a tripod. It weighs as much as a large format camera. It is a sophisticated digital camera with a 31 megapixel back, but quite often I will shoot in manual mode, after having taken a light reading with a hand held light meter. This way I rarely have to repeat the shot at a different setting.

Cloud Study

This was one of the first shots that I took with my new Hasselblad H3DII, with the 24 mm wide angle lens. It may not be readily apparent in the small jpeg uploaded for this blog, but it's quite amazing how three dimensional this image appears. The camera is 31 megapixels, which is not really that high a resolution compared to the higher end H5D for instance, which can go as high as 50 to 120 megapixels. But the detail is quite apparent, which is not always a goal of mine anyway. The H3D has a much wider tonal range than other cameras I have owned, although my Leica still competes very well. The strong element of the Leica is always the lens. They simply cannot be beat. The Hasselblad HCD lenses are very good as well. But the digital back on the H3D has sophisticated software that does a lot of correction for the lenses. I like the Hasselblad for landscapes and my Leica more for people shots. I will be doing more portrait shots in the near future with the Hasselblad.

First Hasselblad Image

This is my first post in few months, and I have some new images to present. I recently bought a new camera, well, actually used, but like new. My new camera is a Hasselblad H3DII with a 31 megapixel digital back. With the camera I also picked up 2 lenses, a new 28 mm HC and a used 50 mm HC lens. Both are wide angle lenses, the camera being a medium format. The 28 mm is equivalent to a 18 mm and the 50 mm is equivalent to about a 35 mm in the 35 mm camera lines. The camera produces beautiful images with very nice colour. It definitely is a different colour than what my Leica produces. I'm not sure which I prefer, but I love them both.

This image was taken with the 28 mm, inside an old run down garage a few miles from my home. I was a bit surprised at the colour that I was able to extract from the raw image. It was quite dark inside the building with a bright sky coming through the roof. At first I thought I would try HDR to get the full tonal range in the image, and I did try to use Photomatrix Pro HDR software to produce an image, but I was not very successful at getting a nice image. So I simply used Photoshop to work  up the image. The detail in the images that this camera produces is amazing. A jpeg cannot do it justice.

Grand Canyon Misty Mountains

I recently was studying how to paint the typical misty mountain painting, as done by many masterful Chinese artists of the past and present. I have to give credit to Henri Li who teaches chinese painting on line, for the inspiration of this painting. He himself, has spent a lot of time painting the southwest of the US, and I share his passion for that part of the country. Henri has created many beautiful paintings of the Grand Canyon, and the desert of Arizona. That area of the world is my favourite place to visit for photography and painting because of the beautiful colour palette that is found there.

Chinese painting is not easy to master, and I am slowly developing my skills. The stages of making a painting involve several steps. Initially, the darks are introduced with black ink, until the brush is exhausted of ink. Then successive layers of gray are laid down by adding water to the brush, each successive layer being lighter than the previous. Colour is introduced in the same manner, from heavier washes down to light washes. One aspect that is hard to master is to be able to visualize the intensity of the colour that results after the paper has dried. The water washes of colour always fade to a lighter tone. The nice thing about that is that successive washes of transparent colour can always be added after the initial washes have dried.

The goal of this painting is to create the effect of a mist in the lower area of the canyon as well as in the far distance. I think I have succeeded in doing that.

Death Valley

This is an image that I took while entering Death Valley from the west entrance, driving back from Lone Pine California. The photo was given a sepia tone colouring, which helps to  portray the feeling I had as I drove down the mountain side into the valley. The temperature was 109 degrees, and I could imagine how the old miners and fortune seekers felt when they were exposed to the searing heat of the sun at 100 feet below sea level, on the salt flats. Death Valley can be a scary place to be in, especially when you are alone, far from any gas station.

I like this image as it draws you in visually from the lower left corner, into the mid distance, where interest is maintained. The flat plateau continues to draw the eye in further, creating a bit of mystery about what's around the bend.

Silver Efex Pro 2

Today I decided to try a demo version of Silver Efex Pro2. I haven't really studied yet how to use it in detail, but a trial image editing of a black and white photo I took in the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, California has me very interested in this software. First the original image, that I edited in Lightroom:

Then the  image I edited in Silver Efex Pro:

I like this image very much. It's a bit hard to see the image as it looks in Photoshop or Lightroom, since it has to be uploaded as a jpeg, but its quite nice. There are many options as to how one would like the final image to look, and it can be adjusted manually as well. In Lightroom it looks fantastic. I plan to use this software more often in the future.