Solitude.

And now...something completely different.

Earlier this week I posted another image shot on the same morning that Ákos suggested would do well as a B&W conversion. To my thinking the previous image (Misty Morning Cruise) had enough colour in it to justify leaving it as is. But this one...well...Ákos...this one is for you! Hope you like it...

The original capture that lead to this image took a lot of patience to capture. When first I saw this fantastic fog "bubble" over a small island in Blackfish Sound I knew I had to find a way to work with it. We had a number of Orcas around our boat and I hoped that in time on or more of them would swim into position to give me the shot I wanted. So, for about an hour or so I kept my eye on the "bubble" while shooting images of the Orcas in various other places and scenes. Eventually I saw an Orca swimming toward the bubble - but by this time we were a long ways off. Fortunately I had a 600mm lens and camera mounted on a tripod ready to go (which also nicely illustrates why I like shooting with two setups when possible), so I quickly composed the scene I wanted to capture (dividing the frame into 3 nearly equal portions of water, land, and sky) and waited. Fortunately for me the whale continued on its path and swam into the exact position I wanted it to. So then it was simply "snap" (or more accurately, "click, click, click, click").

When I later looked at the raw files I saw that the 600mm lens had done it's job and compressed the distances between the whale, island, and background the way I hoped. But I also saw an image which had virtually NO colour in it and which was almost impossibly flat (i.e., completely monotone with almost no depth or tonal range to it). I "played" with the colour version for awhile but there was no way I could do justice to the scene in colour.

So I moved to Plan B: a B&W conversion. To make a long story short, retrieving enough contrast to the scene to provide depth and sufficient grey-on-grey detail to show details in the clouds and distant ranges required a LOT of aggressive pixel-pushing (details given on my website - link below). Even though the image was shot at a relatively low ISO (for a Nikon D3s), this much contrast enhancement introduced a lot of digital noise to the image. While removing noise from an image has become relatively easy in recent years, I actually liked the "film-like" (or, as some call it, the "organic") look provided by the noise/grain - to me it reminded me of an "old-time" image, so I went very light on the noise reduction and intentionally left some in (when I removed more noise the image looked somehow "artificial" to me). And, I think the grain/noise adds to the ethereal feel of the image...

Subject: Solo Killer Whale (Orcinus orca)
Location: Blackfish Sound region (northern Vancouver Island), BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: Nikkor 600 mm f/4 VRII lens supported on Gitzo 1348 tripod with Wimberley head. VR on and set to "Normal" mode.
Exposure: 1/1250s at f5.6 ISO 720. No compensation from matrix metered exposure.
Crop: None - this is full frame (aside from a few pixels lost in 0.46˚ CW rotation)

All the contextual information surrounding this shot (field notes, all camera settings and processing details, conservation, etc.) can be found at:

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/latest/.

Comments and feedback greatly appreciated...probably better to view larger version prior to doing so...

Cheers...

Brad

PS: I intend to begin offering an 8-day Instructional Photo Tours to this fantastic region in August of 2011. If anyone is curious about the tour, feel free to email me or check out the tour entitled "Orcas, Humpbacks and More: Aquatic Mammals of the Central Pacific Coast" on the Photo Tour page of my website...