At the moment the prevailing weather pattern in Carinthia is high fog, covered by even higher clouds.
Yesterday I was unable to locate any sunny destination that could have been reached within less than two hours. I tried my luck in Gailtal, in the valley along the southern border between Carinthia and Italy. They had the most snow this winter, and I hoped to find a freshly fallen cover, alas to no avail. Everything had this typical, dirty look of old snow. Without much enthusiasm I tried some landscapes, and this B&W conversion is the only one that I even bother to show.
It’s not a great image, but at I guess it’s quite OK from a technical POV, and it illustrates the most important thing when shooting snowy winter landscapes: not to let the snow burn out. Exposure is very critical in snow. Why? Because you want to strongly accentuate local contrast, and this would make burnt-out highlights much more obvious.
The image is a sandwich of two different conversions made with DxO, one darker for snow and sky, and one lighter for trees and distant mountains. Then I have run PhotoLift on a “copy merged” layer and set the result to “Multiply” blending mode, applying it with reduced opacity and a mask to the snow areas and the sky. I frequently try a B&W conversion to my images, and here it looked very well, because it took the occasional dirt color out of the snow. I think the result looks not too unnatural, even though the local contrasts are borderline high, and in color I would have had to tone them back.
The snow image is much better than reality, and in reality I was so disgusted with the conditions, that I decided to turn around and drive back home. I could do so, because I already had an image, taken in the small gothic church of Saint Peter, to fall back.
The Image of the Day was converted in DxO like almost all my recent images. I took it with the Sigma 20/1.8 (like all my recent images, I’d like to say), and that lens is certainly not free of distortions. DxO does not support it yet (and likely never will, it’s simply too exotic), but of course PTLens does, and this is what I used to remove the distortions and to slightly correct perspective.
The Song of the Day is (Surprise!!) by David Byrne. It’s a somewhat bizarre version of “Au Fond du Temple Saint“, the duet from Georges Bizet’s “Les pêcheurs de perles”, with David Byrne interpreting it together with Rufus Wainwright (some might say it’s the other way round). An interesting idea, demanding more than a price for courageous folly 
You find it on David’s outstanding 2004 album “Grown Backwards”. Deezer has the album, and YouTube has a more orthodox version sung by Robert Merrill and Jussi Björling, recorded in 1950.
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Well, I shouldn’t promise things that I can’t deliver. These are images of yesterday afternoon, and when I posted the lens index, I had all of them already taken but none post-processed. Doing so took me until mid-afternoon today, but I guess it was worth not rushing things, and there are even lessons to be learned.
Weather in Carinthia is crazy at the moment. Villach has about a foot of snow, Klagenfurt has none. They are 40km apart with a height difference of 50 meters. There is only a lake in between, no mountain range, no nothing. For all practical reasons they should have the same weather. It’s only they don’t. This was the third weekend in a row, that I arrived in Villach during snowfall. The only reason that the snow does not pile up higher, is that we are too low. Half of the snow does not make it down to us and ends up as rain.
Unfortunately rain makes the snow quickly fall down from the trees, and somehow this looks bleak and sad. I wanted to have real snow, freshly fallen or at least looking like that, and so I took the car and drove the street up Mount Dobratsch. You know it by now, it’s that mountain that broke apart during an earthquake in 1348, the year when the Great Plague arrived in Europe. As if the plague wouldn’t have been fun enough.
From 700 meters on the road was solid snow, but I had no problem driving all the way up to 1750 meters. From there I could have gone up to the summit, but as I had entered dense fog at 1600 meters, I was not sure if it would be a good idea to go any higher. I took some images up there, made some wrong steps and was suddenly in deep snow up to my chest, in short: it did not look promising. Not winter wonderland, only winter, fog and no view. And here comes one of the lessons:
Every now and then someone posts about how RAW is inconvenient, how they don’t see a difference, how much less hassle JPEG is, while it provides superior or at least comparable image quality, and so on and so forth. Ken Rockwell is famous for it (and for all other sorts of interesting viewpoints, some remarkably lucid and some simply ridiculous), but even David Ziser did it for some length of time (Lightroom had him converted), and my friend Paul Lester does it still.
Actually there is nothing wrong with that, as long as it works for you. It certainly did for David as a highly successful wedding pro, and it obviously does for Paul. For me it does not.
JPEG is much too restrictive for me. I like to do extensive post-processing, enjoying the work in Photoshop almost as much as the actual shooting, but that is not my point today. The point is that without a RAW file, a good RAW converter and an arsenal of tricks in Photoshop, some images would not be possible at all. This is one of those images.
Take your time, click on the two versions, the second, the pale one being what the camera saw (and I as well, to be honest), and the first one what I did in DxO and Photoshop. Can you do that with a JPEG? No, you can’t. You would have to stretch the image so far beyond its capacity, that half of it would suffice to render it a mess.
Look at the JPEG from the camera: there is no contrast at all, no texture in the snow, and from that image alone, you’d get no idea of what it looks like up there. Sure, sure, I said I didn’t see much more than the camera, so why would I want to make an image that would not be true to reality? But that is the wrong question.
If I only had the JPEG, I wouldn’t need to bother showing it at all. This gray mess, what it is about? Well, not much more than bland grayness. You can’t really tell how the snow covers these barns, you can’t see how it smoothes out any jagged form, the picture is a complete waste of storage. As a JPEG shooter you’d have to throw it away.
So, obviously there is a reality of soft, ondulating forms up there on the mountain, and shooting JPEG, the true-to-reality plain JPEG, you can’t show it. Well, in RAW you can.
When I work on such an image, I always try to get the best RAW conversion possible. I know I’ll have to stretch the image contrast beyond believe, and I know that all flaws in the RAW conversion software, all flaws in my own technique will be amplified and thus revealed. Knowing that, I always begin as solid as possible, and since almost two months this means to convert the RAW in DxO Optics Pro. I have already written a lot about that program, I am still satisfied with it, and at the moment I use it for all high ISO and for all snow images.
Why for snow, you ask? Well, the reason is, that I need to stretch contrast, and often also to dramatically increase saturation. RAW conversion artifacts and lens flaws like chromatic aberrations would become dominant in such an image. I have experienced that once with a conversion done in Adobe Camera RAW (I believe it was this image), and when I then tried the same process based on a conversion by DxO, it was dramatically better.
DxO reaches that level of precision by doing much of its work before de-mosaicing. One good example is noise. In all these images I begin with a straight conversion in DxO, using one of the presets. I use the Photoshop import plugin to pull it as base layer into Photoshop. Then I duplicate that layer, push local contrast using Photo Lift, multiply this layer with reduced opacity and normally also a mask, often apply a photo filter adjustment layer to fine-tune colors, strongly saturate with “Hue/Saturation” layers in various blending modes, apply levels and a contrast curve globally, may add further local contrast with a masked curves layer, and finally apply a vignette.
All that of course increases noise, even if the original image was taken at base ISO (which is true for all these images), and in case of the barns covered in snow, I even had to apply a surface blur to the Photo Lift layer, but still, when you amplify so much, some noise is inevitable, and then it is of utmost importa
nce how this noise looks like. The noise that remains in images converted by DxO looks … crystalline. Not like digital noise at all. It does not harm any image, but it actually enhances snow images.
Most of these images were made using the Sigma 10-20, a fine ultra-wide lens for DX format sensors, the one exception is the barn image, for that I used the Nikon 18-200 VR. Have you ever changed lenses standing up to your chest in snow and not knowing how to best get out of it? Funny, I can tell you
The Image of the Day was taken on the way up, at a height of about 1100 meters, at the same place where I shot the last of the series, on my way down, like all other images.
There is another lesson though. Just look one more time at these images. They all look slightly different, don’t they? Just rightly so, I’d say, given that they were taken in different places and over the time of about two hours. And still, they make no proper series. Remember my SoFoBoMo book? There I had shot all images in an afternoon, but it has taken me weeks to post-process them in a way that they had the same look.
All the images on this page look fine individually, but were I to make them a true series, for example a book, I would have to invest much more in visual coherence, probably giving up individual “truth” for the flow of the series.
The Song of the Day is “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” from the 1992 Manhattan Transfer “Christmas Album”. Hear it on YouTube.
When I posted “771 – And Winter Came” a week ago, I was met with mild mockery. I admit, there was not much snow to be seen
These two images are from Saturday, the first one from the morning. It had snowed from Friday afternoon all through the night, and when I went fetching breakfast in the morning, I made this shot, using the Nikon 70-300 VR at 300mm. 
The image out of the camera had almost no contrast and definition at all. It was shot at ISO 200, the Nikon D300′s normal ISO, and it was exposed more or less “to the right”, thus I saw no reason to favor the precision of DxO Optics Pro over the convenience of Adobe Camera RAW, especially as I wanted to take the image to Photoshop anyway, but this turned out to be an error.
Mind you, this is a color image, but of course there was no color at all. Trying to push local and global contrast, I quickly found out that Adobe Camera RAW had introduced all sorts of tiny color artifacts, and pushing contrast greatly amplified them. Of course simply working with layers in “Luminance” mode would have hidden that, but wanting to fix it at the root, I re-developed the image in DxO Optics Pro, and, boy, did that make a difference. This is one of those areas where DxO shines: precision. There was a lot of fuzziness, that is to be expected when one looks through 500 meters of dense snowfall with an effective focal length of 450mm, but there were no color artifacts at all. Impressive. Read more about DxO in my ongoing series of posts that document my experiences with it.
The second image, the Image of the Day, was shot in the afternoon when something almost like the sun began to shine through the clouds.
This image is a rule-breaker. One of the things that Craig Tanner constantly preaches, is that in photography, two is an odd number, and that so often when one has the choice to use one, two or three of a kind of subjects, either one or three are preferable to two. The reason is, that two subjects of the same kind tend to look boring and symmetric, redundant in a way.
Well, here it works. We have two trees, symmetrically arranged, but everything else is asymmetric on multiple layers.
The other thing normally not to do is to have a fence or something like that in the foreground, running across the frame. It makes the image inaccessible, keeps the viewer out. Here we have something similar, in fact the edge of a pond, and although it works like a wall in front of us, the two trees provide a mighty and powerful door frame, leading the eye through and into the winter wonderland behind.
I took this image to DxO as well, trying different presets until I found one that would work as a good start. Then, in Photoshop, I copied the layer, applied Photolift (more about this useful plugin here) for a strong push in local contrast and put the result in “Multiply” mode with reduced opacity, added some curves layers with masks for local contrast adjustments, and strongly pushed saturation. A levels adjustment, a curves layer for global contrast, some vignetting, some sharpening, and that’s it. With the exception of saturation adjustments, this was a similar procedure to the one used on the snowfall image, only more subtle in the contrasts.
Update – Monday: I don’t do this normally, but last night I have processed another image of this series. I would have normally displayed it together with today’s post, but it really belongs here, to the other images of one marvelous winter day in Carinthia. Here it is.
The Song of the Day, “My! My! Time Flies!“, is another one from Enya’s new winter album “And Winter Came”. See a video on metacafe.
Welcome to the third installment of “Fine Art Explained“. This is a very irregular series of posts, in fact I do one when I feel I have to tell you something interesting and at least fairly original. I hope this is the case today, as I cover two techniques that I have used on quite some images recently, but not yet demonstrated. This is a Photoshop tutorial, thus if you don’t use Photoshop, you may probably lose interest about here
Today’s image has been shot on Tuesday evening in Salzburg. I was there for “Irmingard“, an opera (well, more of a parody) by the Austrian Brass group Mnozil Brass. Suffice to say it was excellent and very funny
The show took place at the Republic, a club in central Salzburg, a former cinema with a big hall in the back. I knew the Republic from some years ago, but neither had I known about its past, nor could I remember exactly how it looked like. I had a vague idea though.
I knew that I would not have much chance for photographing that day, thus I decided to try a wide-angle shot of the entrance area and, this being what came out of the camera originally, it turned out just like I had expected. It was already evening, the sky was still blue, lights were on inside and there were tons of people. The crane was a nice addition.
Right out of the camera the image was unusable. The sky was still very bright, everything else much too dark, and that being a wide angle image, I would have needed a truckload of strobes to light it properly. I decided to rely on my D300′s latitude instead.
What I imagined was much more color, especially more color variation, something that would really pop, and along with that a comic-like look, something vibrating.
The camera had been on automatic white balance. At least in the sky the color was not altogether wrong, but everything else had a bad bluish cast. In such cases I normally combine two versions from the same RAW, with different color balances and probably exposures. The first one was very similar to what came out of the camera.
The second was much warmer. I can’t remember by how much, but I guess at least 2000K, and I developed it much lighter as well.
I then layered the two and used a mask to keep the sky and the area near the edges cool. On top I put a layer “clean”, where I cloned out a piece of roof that stood in from the right edge. In general it is a good idea to put such a cleanup layer atop of all pixel bearing layers. Otherwise you would have to clone on all of them.
So far we have still a flat and dull image, but there is already much more color variation. Now let’s push color.
What do you do when you want to increase saturation? Well, chances are, that you do like I did until maybe a month ago, you use a “Hue / Saturation” layer and increase saturation. Here I have done something different, something that is much more akin to the effect that you get from the new “Vibrance” slider in Camera Raw.
I read about this in one of the two photography magazines that I still buy more or less regularly, Photographie and DOCMA, the latter being a very Photoshop centric magazine about digital image processing, and actually by far the best that I know of. It’s German only though.
I did use a “Hue / Saturation” layer here, but I used it in “Soft Light” blending mode. Try that on an image, and really, saturation goes up even with the saturation slider on zero, but so does contrast. That’s simply what “Soft Light” does, and so far you could have used an unmodified curves layer as well. Now, to mostly cancel the contrast changes, increase the lower slider labeled “Lightness”. What I used was “Lightness +30″, “Saturation +40″, and because I didn’t like what this did to the highlights, I went into the blending options, split the white “Blend If” slider (by holding “Alt”) and dragged it all the way to the left. Basically this fully blends in the “Soft Light” layer in the shadows and not at all in the extreme white. The result is some lightening and an increase of saturation in the mid-tones. You see this best in the reds.
When you’ve done that on an image, check also what this does to your histogram. If it was intact before, it should still be intact, but a little bit pushed to the right. Why do I do this? Well, as I said, you could do something similar while already in the RAW converter, but doing it this way gives you much more control and flexibility. There is a case for opening the RAW file as a smart object, and while this gives similar flexibility, you have one drawback: changes in the smart object interfere with cloning.
The next two layers simply apply darkening curves. Both are masked, in order to restrict the darkening to certain parts of the image. The first is kind of a vignetting, …
… the second darkens everything but the people. Combined, they give depth and contrast, and they keep the eye where the action is. Now this already begins to sing.
To get still more vibrance to the people area, we add another “Hue / Saturation” layer in “Soft Light” mode, “Saturation +20″, “Lightness +50″ this time, but now without messing with the “Blend If” sli
ders.
You may have seen the next effect that I have used in “629 – Electric Ladyland V” for the first time, and then in variations a couple of times since.
First we need a merged copy of the layers so far. Use “Select All” and “Edit / Copy Merged”. Use “Edit / Paste” to make the result a new layer atop. On that layer apply “Filter / Stylize / Find Edges” and desaturate the result. Now you have a white layer with black edges. I frequently multiply such a layer, and this works extremely well in very noisy images (see “448 – Down In The Hole” for a tutorial about that and “458 – The Long And Winding Road” for another example), but here I wanted those edges distorted in multiple ways. I duplicated this layer twice, and then I began to distort each of the three layers differently. One way to do that would be “Filter / Liquify …” with a big brush, and sometimes I do that as well, but normally I do the base job with “Edit / Free Transform” and by simply tugging from the corners, trying to keep the center mostly in place. Here the important point to keep intact is where the crane and the cable join with the roof. Finally I have put each of the three layers in “Multiply” mode, grouped them together and reduced the opacity of the group to 60%.
Please note that you may get a serious problem with your lights now. And really, some of the hardest edges are those around the lights on the building. Now that we have distorted the edge layers, those are even mis-aligned, and the result is, that the lights are hidden by a mess of dark lines. To salvage that, we simply apply a mask to the group of edge layers and hide the edges where we want the lights to shine. In this case I have also hidden the lines on the two main characters left of the center, this way setting another accent.
I could have left it at that, but decided to go for a more painterly look. For that I needed another copy/merged layer, but without the edges. I temporarily made the edge group invisible, did “Select All” and “Edit / Copy Merged” again, but instead of pasting into this image, I created a new image, pasted there and changed the result to 8 bit. I did that, because in the 16 bit mode that I normally use, I don’t have access to all “artistic” filters. I applied quite rough “Angled Strokes” and copied the result back atop the edge group. Here you see a 100% crop from that layer at 100% opacity. Then I dialled this layers opacity back to 60%.
Did I get any artifacts by going through this 8 bit intermezzo? Not really. First it could be said that the whole layer is an artifact and, more important, there is nothing wrong with 8 bit layers per se. After all, the final image will be an 8 bit JPEG as well. It is only that applying steep curves and other extreme manipulations to 8 bit images is dangerous and prone to produce banding. No problem here, and even less so, because by reducing opacity I have re-introduced the nuances from below.
At this stage I thought I was done and applied a sharpening layer (another copy/merged layer with luminance sharpened in Lab color more and an edge mask applied), but afterwards I found that I wanted even more color and light in the entrance area and on the people, thus I added another “Hue / Saturation” layer in “Soft Light” mode, and that is it.
There is no Song of the Day today, but I leave you with a trailer to Mnozil Brass’ 2006 operetta “Das Trojanische Boot” (“The Trojan Boat”). It starts weird but … well, it’s Mnozil Brass after all
With only three more days to go for SoFoBoMo and no book yet produced, God knows I should do anything but write about other people’s posts on other people’s blogs, but as things are, you have to either voice your opinion when the topic is hot, or nobody will listen.
Today, on Craig Tanner’s Light Diary, I ran into a reference to a post by Joe Reifer titled “Going deeper may require more abstract excursions“. Joe basically utters his frustration about the state of photography related blogs and the fact that most of them in his opinion produce junk.
He challenges us, to not ramble about questions in art theory that have long been decided, to not write endlessly about photography business as if photography taken online were a business, to not dwell on technical matters of how we shot a certain image, and to not write the seven thousandth tutorial about making sundowns more colorful in Photoshop. He challenges us to take our passion to extremes, to delve for the deep and the pure, and he supposes that
Your normal sources are not going to cut it. The internet is not going to cut it. This may take wandering around the middle of the desert for a few days to figure out. Maybe a few weeks. Probably longer.
There you have it. As someone guilty of most of that, am I offended? Not at all.
Do I feel the need to defend my position? Not really. I find the notion interesting. It resonates with my own doubts about what I do. Don’t get me wrong, I am not particularly prone to doubt, but from time to time …
Whenever I have written a really lousy post, whenever an Image of the Day is only some image of the day, whenever I have posted another Photoshop tutorial (did you know that about 95% of my visitors come for maybe 5% of my posts, and would you have expected, that all of them happen to be either Photoshop tutorials or posts about my Nikon D300?), always in these situations I ask myself, “Was this necessary? Did the world need that?”.
It didn’t, and yes, probably it was necessary. Jay Watson already pointed it out on his blog, that much of what we do in blogging is about exposure and fulfilling expectations. We post to get seen, and in a world of blind but literate search engines, we get found much easier when we write. That’s one of the reasons why I always select a Song of the Day and mostly title my image after it. It’s incredible how many people arrive from Google searches for song titles.
It’s similar with my images. I know that some of them are quite good, and I know equally well that many are not. Do I care? Yes, I do, but I post them anyway. This is a daily photoblog, and the expectation is, that there will be a new photo every day.
Most of my visitors don’t comment (which is a pity), but from the comments that I do get, I understand that nobody expects me to post earth-shattering images every day. I do what I can, and people seem to accept it.
And then: I can’t remember having seen much earth-shattering art in my life at all. Most art does not shatter. It comments.
It comments on concepts, sometimes in a very precise way (much of what Ted Byrne does is of that type), sometimes rather vaguely, like commenting on beauty. And if it does not comment on concepts, then it may comment on feelings, reflecting the outlook of its creator.
Joe Reifer pointed to Roger Ballen as an example of a photographer whose art “blew his mind”. I didn’t know Roger Ballen, but I absolutely understand the notion. This is high-class Art with a big capital A. No doubt about that, and I am thankful for the link. I find Ballen’s images disturbing, surreal, absolutely classic in their formal structure, even beautiful in their negation of traditional beauty … and I can’t imagine why he does so many of them and nothing else.
These images fascinate me, they hold me for quite some time, they are even one of the reasons why this whole topic drew me into writing another lengthy post, and producing them would be an interesting project, but producing nothing but them, would bore me to death.
I am not a big fan of big projects. I enjoy doing some of this, some of that, from time to time circling around one subject (bicycles are one of them), without forcing myself, always trying to keep this a passion, not a job.
My own Art is what happens in that process, what gets fueled by my joy. I produce it because I feel an urge. I offer it to everybody who will care to look, but if only a very few did, like it was for a long time in the beginning, I probably still would do it. I do not rely on my Art economically, and that frees me of having to make compromises, gives me the opportunity to explore dead ends, the opportunity to try and to fail. I wouldn’t want it otherwise, and that is a kind of purity that I miss with much of what many “names” in the Art scene produce, all those luminaries who have “found their style”, as the euphemism goes for “have found something that sells, and stick to it”.
Purity and depth cannot be forced. They must be found, and I fully agree with Joe that deserts may help in this regard
I further agree that risks must be taken. I am not so sure about his examples though. Yes, Ballen is a photographer who wanders the disturbing realms of dreams, but this is not risk, this is mainstream since almost 90 years. He does so in a very convincing way, and had he one book in that style, I would be amazed. Seeing that all his work repeats that same recipe, I can’t see the depth any more. The repetition uses the effect up, the work freezes into an empty pose.
I firmly believe that passion is the key, and that in order to find the purity and the depth, we have to wade through shallow murk at times. There is no way around it, neither for the artist nor for the visitor. Nobody can produce a masterpiece every day, but if you don’t try, if you are not productive, it won’t ever happen.
This image is funny. Somebody had written “KILL”, and someone else had corrected it to “KISS” later. Doesn’t it bring in an interesting aspect if I tell you that the whole original text said “KILL ALL RACISTS”? Sure, killing is not my thing, but kissing?? Ambivalence is everywhere and art is always a comment.
The Song of the Day is “A Thousand Kisses Deep” from Leonard Cohen’s 2001 album “Ten New Songs“. Hear it on YouTube.
Oh my, and I had hoped to get rid of my backlog! This is the image of Monday, and I’m still two days behind.
Today’s excuse? Well, I have published my three entries labeled “Photoshop Tutorial” to good-tutorials, and all three made it to the front page, netting me the biggest rush on my blog so far.
One of the readers asked me for a Photoshop file for the “creating details” tutorial, and then the problem began: I could easily crop the image to 200×200 pixels, enough to reveal the layer structure and still keep the file at only 1.2 MB (compared to the 330 MB of the original), but I found out that SmugMug would not host PSD files! Hmm … that’s unfortunate: you pay for a pro account with unlimited bandwidth, but they don’t let you upload files of the world’s most popular image manipulation program. The challenge was now, to find a free hoster with a high bandwidth limit.
After some research I settled with box.net and their free “lite” account. It’s 10 GB per month limit will suffice for about 7000 downloads per month, and I hope that is enough. If not, I’ll probably have to upgrade. We’ll see.
This image was shot Monday evening on Vienna’s most busy shopping street Mariahilfer Straße, and I used the Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8 and 1/160s.
The Song of the Day is XTC’s “Respectable Street“. I have a live version on the 4 CD box “Transistor Blast: The Best of the BBC Sessions“. See the video on YouTube.
