Waterfall Solitude+repost
by Scott Miller
When my wife is out of town I tend to walk a fine line between loneliness and solitude. I work at home, so I can lead a fairly shut in life style M-F. So at the end of a day working without seeing another person, dinner time rolls around and I often feel lonely. I try and make sure I have dinner plans with friends and such but this time my wife is gone for a month, so there are some lonely times.
However, as a great contradiction, I really love hiking and taking pictures alone. This past Saturday I went out to the Columbia River Gorge and ended up hitting 4 different spots throughout the day and rarely saw another person. This shot was taken as the last rays of sun made it over the canyon wall to this little falls. I had to sit here for about an hour to wait for the light to move off of the water so the highlights could be controlled. All told I was in this little canyon alone for about 3 hours just eating a late lunch and enjoying the scene with no one else around. I followed this up with my first trip in to the Oneonta gorge which is awesome and inspiring. When I ran in to a fellow hiker at 4PM and started up a conversation I realized I hadn't spoken yet that day. However, thanks to the great outdoors, loneliness never crept in. It was just a calm, wonderful day.
As for the image, this is actually a composite of two images blended for DOF. I only used two because I was scared of the ability to account for wind motion since the image is very vegetation heavy. So one exposure was for the very closest leaves / flowers and another for everything else. both shots were at f/16 and 1/4 of a second.
Hope you enjoy!
Comments
32 commentsPeter
Lovely greens and the flowers add such a delightful burst of colour to it.
Superb.
Nick Bristol
Lone Rock, WI
Regarding this photo, you did really good job in blending the two images. Overall, the photo is outstanding. The only thing that I don't like is that my eye sty on the left lower corner and don't want to leave. I would love if you could dodge/burn a little so my eye can go from the FG to the BG.
Harry: bugs aren't usually a big problem in the gorge, definitely nothing like they are on the east coast. The only time I can remember being really annoyed by them in Oregon in the last 3 years is on an alpine meadow hike near Mt Hood. The field was very muddy / wet and there were a bunch of flowers and therefore lots of bugs. But other than that, I never walk around swatting things out of my face like I do in many places back east.
Stuart and Abdullah: I had definitely tried different things to make the BG a little more prominent in the image, and Stuart is right, slicing off some of the left definitely helps. In fact I almost posted this version first, but since you mentioned it, here it is. Let me know which you prefer.
This outing sounds a lot like many of mine. The scene expresses a sense of solitude and serenity that I find very appealing. Well done.
Anyway, this is an excellently crafted composition. Colors and light also work great.
Chris
Nobody else has said this so I'm a bit reluctant to suggest it myself, but it's struck me each time in viewing the image that the greens seem a little "warm" on the LHS of the image (not necessarily the sunlit part, but the rest of it). If it were mine, I'd play with the selective color adjustment in photoshop and perhaps add some cyan to the green to cool it down, perhaps making for more of a color contrast with the yellow sunlit areas. Pretty subjective, perhaps, but thought I'd offer it for consideration.
1. Make raw adjustments in lightroom
2. Make adjustments as needed in PS using the ProPhoto color space
3. Duplicate image, flatten layers, size for web, and perform output sharpening (done with an action I created that follows some standard processes from the web)
4. Save for web, converting to srgb and removing the icc profile from the file so it will be consistent from browser to browser
This last step causes color shifts that vary in strength from image to image. In comparing this one to my original, a slight warmth was added due to a shift in the red channel. I did counteract it by reducing saturation in the web file both overall and in the red channel. However, it did not get perfect. I have only really been trying to improve my PS skills for about 2 months now, and this has been a constant headache for me. So if anyone has a good method for converting profiles for the web and consistently counteracting this color shift I would appreciate it. It is honestly insanely annoying to get an image just how you like it, save for web and then have it look completely different.
Your workflow sounds generally similar to mine though, perhaps with the exception of when you convert to sRGB/8 bit. I do that after sharpening but before I go into the "save for the web" dialog box (using Edit/convert to profile for the sRGB conversion, then the Image (?) tab/Mode for the 8 bit conversion). Are you doing it through the "save for the web" dialog? I've never tried that and don't know if it's even possible (I vaguely recall that it is), but potentially it handles the conversion in some odd way that leads to a different result than if you do the conversion manually before jumping into that dialog.
Dietrich: While I like solitude while hiking, I don't think I could take a week alone. That is definitely too much for me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Chris: This isn't remote at all, it just isn't in the main section by Multnomah falls that everyone drives through, therefore you see less of it. The hike to it is actually very short, maybe 1/2 a mile or so.
As for the color shifting, it is very important to embed sRGB ICC in your picture. Without the ICC, some browsers (such as Safari) simply do not color-manage the image, causing massive color-shifting on wide-gamut monitors.