Serpentine Stream
by Mike Putnam
During late July of last year, I was lucky enough to go on a backpacking trip with several college buddies in my backyard. OK, it was actually in the Three Sisters Wilderness Area which is very near my hometown of Bend, Oregon. Our plan was to Hike along the PCT and climb over a mountain pass before exiting the Three Sisters Wilderness Area along the Cascade Lake Highway. Because there were several shots I thought I could get, I hauled my 4x5 camera, several lenses, my tripod and the rest of my large format camera gear. My friends( they are not photographers) thought I had a screw loose, especially when we realized that the PCT was 95 % covered in snow. Yikes. We unintentionally snow camped the first night and the second night we blazed a trail to lower ground where we were rewarded with Green meadows, flowing streams and wildflowers. While I didn't get any of the images I was after on this trip, I did manage to capture the scene you see here, which made the extra effort worth while. I love how this meandering stream draws me in to the glacier covered mountain in the background. On a side note, this is my second post ever on this site. My previous image was something of a sizing disaster, cause my incompetence with photoshop. Many kind fellow photographers chimed in and offered helpful advice on how to appropriately size my images the next time around. I'd like to extend a special thanks to Peter, Verdon, and Paul for going out of their way to help me out. Thanks Guys!
Mike Putnam
Comments
11 commentsWhat type film? Seems a bit blue on my monitor.
Keep on shooting
It seems a bit too blue on my monitor too. It was Velvia, but it wasn't this blue in real life.
MIke
What type film? Seems a bit blue on my monitor.
Keep on shooting
This is a beautiful mountain landscape. That serpentine little stream through the meadow is awesome! Nicely composed. Moon adds a nice touch.
Yeah, color is a little overboard here. I checked the large version and see you don't have the sRGB profile embedded. When saving for the web make sure to convert to sRGB. You did on your first image, so I suspect you just overlooked that when saving.
I was going to comment again in your previous post, but I'll comment here regarding sizing. Of course you got the size right here, but many of us find it hard to get the file size, image quality and dimensions to be best. More often than not, one or two of those are going to suffer just keeping the bigger file under 500k. What I ultimately did was choose a larger view size of only 1050 (arbitrary, but certainly larger than the 700px or so I post.) Rather than going down to very small viewing sizes, I simply use the jpg quality setting slider and make it the max setting that still keeps the file size under 500. And with the 4x5 scans, often times that means a quality of 6; I've gone as low as 5 and depending on the image, 8 is what I shoot for. Getting down to a 6, you lose quality of course, but if properly processed and sharpened for the web, they can still look pretty good.
Lon
Jim Lockhart
Deep River, CT
I really like the composition and the perspective of the scene. I cannot comment too much on the color, or much of anything else as I'm on a loaner PC that is not calibrated at all. I see where Lon has commented on sRGB issue and that's probably the reason the color looks a bit off on this PC too.
Anyway, we look forward to seeing more of your work and if you have ANY posting questions at all, email me or others and we're more then glad to help out. Additionally, under the Forum drop down menu is Digital Imaging and it has a host of ideas for post processing and web image finalizing.
Hat's off to you for hauling a 4x5 into this area; your pack was anything but light I'm sure. Always great to have another LF'er join the NPN ranks. You have some incredible images on your website.
aF