567 - Time And Time Again



You have seen these mountains yesterday, and I’m afraid I’ll have to come back to them time and time again. This particular image is from yesterday late afternoon. I have used split ND filters, and while I liked what I saw on the camera’s LCD, I did not like what they did to the histogram. On the positive side, there is a lot of detail in the snow on the mountains, but this is outweighed by the negative effect on the top of the sky. I try using - and liking - them every once in a while, but compared to the elegance and flexibility of curves with gradient masks, they are a blunt instrument.

Or not so? I suspect that I expect too much. Maybe I need to use them more subtly, only going for part of the effect, using them as a means to get better material for the real work in Photoshop.

With this image I am quite satisfied. It has 13 layers, one group and seven distinct masks, and some of the layers are controlled by reduced opacity. The result is entirely artificial, I have completely re-modeled the tonalities, but it looks natural to me. Well, at least I have been guilty of worse atrocities to nature in the past 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Time And Time Again” from the 1993 Counting Crows album “August and Everything After”. See them live on YouTube.


There are 1 comments

Ted Byrne   (2008-05-03)

Yeoooow! I have not seen heavens like this since last enjoying the majestic paintings of the most "knock-em-dead" American artist Winslow Homer. He dealt in enormous epics... And this is his rival.

At the risk of insulting... this is astonishingly
American in its bold, audacious sense of self worth. You are yowling a pride and ambitious sense of optimism that simply makes me feel wonderful.

I've often thought about the margin where mountain tops meet the majesty of the universe... and how much they tell us... what a step they proclaim, yet they give up nothing in terms of grandeur to the immensity of sky, clouds, and the vastness beyond.

Each puts the other into perspective at the margin. At the point they meet... yet don't.

Yep... this is an epic. Congrats.

Ted

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