The Watchman [+info]

Wow, John. Nothing wrong with shooting icons when you can get something this spectacular. I like the composition and the way that the "S" curve follows its way from the creek up through the trees and then back to the highlights in the sky. More like a "Z" curve really. The light is what really makes this image stand out. Excellent work!!

Thats some incredible clarity, John, and the color is just amazing. Your web sharpening is fantastic. I love the orange and pink combo in the sky and the bleed. All around awesome image.

Now THAT is a great photo!!! Dreamy. I love it!

Perfect comp, and color but just a tad too much applied Guas Blur for my eye. You witnessed a very colorful (rare) scene from the bridge and you "creamed" it up. If it were me, I would enhance/Curve darker those rare and amazing clouds which would add some much needed drama to the scene. As is, just looks like a beautiful scene. Which works on many levels.

Beautiful scenes will come and go....Adding a little drama might make us "connect." Connecting is forever, pretty scenes can fade away. There's too much competition out there these days to not take advantage of Bare Bones of what you have here.

I'm not sure if I caught all of that Kane, but do you mean something like this? Even more?

The darker re post looks pretty darn good John. I'll be greedy asking for a notch of Curves highlights though.... However I think this version ups the drama of your first and to me works as is.

The comp and light is really nice.
I might lighten up the bottom just a tad.

Killer John! Even better on the repost with Kane's suggestions. Great light and image!

wonderful comp, light and colours, original post works well for me, but yes the repost has more impact

Definitely a very nice image. To me, a 'painting' look, which I like. The landscape is so nice and you captured it well. I really like the portrait crop and composition here. The strong magenta hue is from the dawn light, right? Interesting. I might dial that down a bit, might. The greens are great. I like the dark grey clouds and rusty color of that Utah soil. I might mess with the contrast of the peak to make it stand out just a bit more.
Overall, really nice. I'm not sure any adjustments would make it better, only different.

What a pretty scene John, I would be happy with either one. Beautifully seen and presented.
John

ohn,

This is one of your best. The subdued color looks magical.

Fantastic! Love the repost especially.

Alright, I'm retiring. Don't think I can top this. Seriously, John, you've outdone yourself! I prefer the repost too

Wow John, This is a wonderful scene captured in fantastic conditions. Really like the overall feel and mood this has. Both versions are very nice but I think the repost works best.

Nick Bristol
Lone Rock, WI

Being out of action for the last 6 weeks I can understand shooting the 'easy stuff'. I feel that this presentation is a departure from your usual style. Even though there's a painterly quality to this, it seems more in line with the dreamy warm look that has been very popular lately. The colours and hues seem less natural to me for example, the vivd greens should not look this way under the glow of such a coloured sky. Anyway these are just observations and have nothing to do with my overall impression - I like the result very much.

Beautiful take on Zion and the Watchman, John. Not much I can add to the discussion, except the fact that this is a wonderful image made better by Kane's suggestion. I also agree with Alan that I would back off the magenta particularly in the cliff band below the Watchman. Great work as usual.

gorgeous John. I like the slightly moodier repost.

Kane, you greedy... After playing with your suggestion, you're right (grumble grumble ). If I'm going to take a photo in the direction you suggest, I might as well go the full distance.

As I noted in the original post above, I was curious to see what you thought of the image as presented. Now I'll post several more stages below, and I'd be curious to hear what you think after seeing them.

As digital photography has matured, processing has become a bigger and bigger part of our art. Here on NPN we normally critique the final image, but I wonder if it would be helpful if we occasionally posted examples of what we started processing with. How much should an image's starting point effect photo critique. A lot? Not at all?

Although I'm not a big fan of cotton candy images (where the sky is pushed so hard you get unnatural pinks and blues), I'm pretty liberal when it comes to image processing. As one NPNer said “It's all guise guys.” (I wish I could remember who it was that said that. Anybody remember?) I was recently reading a book about Ansel Adams, and was fascinated that later in his career he spent much less time in the field, and much more time in the darkroom.

In Kah's (BTW, my apologies for being so ignorant, but is it Kah's or Kah Kit's or Yoong's?) comment he noted “...it seems more in line with the dreamy warm look that has been very popular lately.” I find the popular trend he refers to in processing to be very appealing in others' work, but struggle with how far to take an image in that direction in my own work. Kane's comments also address this. This image was different for me from the beginning (the first time I've sat in a comfortable chair drinking coffee while taking a landscape photo), and I thought it would be fun to throw out those internal thoughts for a change and specifically process towards that popular look.

The end result, as Kah noted, is that this image is farther from what my eye saw then my typical images, and that's what got me thinking about whether it would be a good trend to post “before” in addition to “after” versions of our images occasionally.

NPN has been the biggest influence in my photography since I started playing with landscapes 10 years, or so, ago. I've learned so much from receiving and (especially) giving critiques and comments. To be very clear, I'm not interested in rehashing the never-ending argument of the right or wrong of processing to reality vs. vision. Rather I'm wondering if it would add to our learning process here on NPN if we posted more of our “beginnings” in addition to our “ends,” especially with images that receive a lot of processing?

Thoughts?

John, this is simply breathtaking. Great image. I love it

Here's the jpg the camera recorded along with the raw. (Unless you choose an appropriate "canned" setting, camera's often struggle with early or late light.)

What I pulled from raw.

A rough draft, more along the lines of how I would normally process the image.

(It would seem the best way to get a lot of comments on an image is to post a gazillion times yourself !)

You've really caught some beautiful light here, and made the most of it. Keeping the foreground naturally dark really emphasizes the background glow. Well done.

An interesting study of images john. I agree with you that sharing some of the interim steps would help folks immensely in visualizing their own final product. Also, could help the sharer by getting comments through the processing workflow. Perhaps some will be hesitant to share if they feel others will copy the style. My 2c is that if this style appeals to you (and it certainly does to me), one should try to learn how to execute it. Then hopefully that person will take some creative liberties here and there to put his or her mark on it so to speak. To the end of learning this style, I took a skype class from Ryan Dyar late last year to get a handle on the light bleeding that continues to catch fire on the net. So far I haven't executed it much, because of a reason somewhere between I don't want to mimic exactly and I still can't do it that well

I really like your composition. As always with you, you very carefully craft your images. As for processing, I think the upper half looks great but I find the lower half kind of melds into one big pot; i.e. not much separation of subjects. I think with a little selective burning and dodging or blending that can be easily solved.

OOPS, I just noticed you have edited this before. I was commenting on the original.

Thanks for posting your sequence and the out of camera photo.
It does make for some good discussion. That said, I like the last repost best. Your original post
has the mood you obviously were trying to portray, but while good, it is a bit dark and muddy for me.
I find the sky and the FG more to my liking.

A classic from Zion, John. You really had the sky conditions in your favor. I'll be there tomorrow and likely will shoot on your tripod holes. I'm on my laptop while traveling so cannot make an assessment, but the comp looks quite good. Only possible nit I see is the location of the bare tree with the Watchman - possibly moving left a bit would change that.

It's very interesting to see this image unfold, John. I would never have expected the final result if I had only seen the RAW file (of course knowing that the RAW file is a low saturation and low contrast version of the image). I find it very helpful to see how you brought this one to life.

I am interested in knowing which image is closest to what you actually saw - not from the perspective of arguing about processing vs. reality, but more from the perspective of better visualizing the end result in my own images.

The final one for sure Brian, with touches of the jpg in the sky drama and a bit of the heavier shadows of the raw version (and of course, no vignetting).

I typically pull images out of raw fairly flat. (I like to reach end points in Photoshop.) There was a nice touch of magenta, mostly left of the mountain, but it was fairly subdued. The jpg version totally misses that. The clouds were quite dramatic (a little less than they are in that final version, but still heavy with contrast); Kane's suggestions actually moved the original post back toward what I was seeing. There was a lot of contrast between the earth and the sky, much like the jpg shows, but the eye adjusts so well that the final version is more like what I was seeing.

Thanks, John. I appreciate the reply and I always enjoy seeing your work posted here.

NPN should have a forum dedicated to people showing what they've done - as you have done, john! it'd be a great learning forum for people.

John, thank you so much for posting your raw file and workflow, I'm sure we all would learn more by doing so if we can get past the fear. Posting a raw file next to a finished product feels a bit like posting a nude photo of oneself in a strange way, but I'm all for a forum dedicated to it. Regarding the image, the processing takes it much too far from reality for me, though I wouldn't have known that without seeing the raw file.

Awesome set of colors here, John. I may need to sprain my ankle, if this is the result. I would burn the brightest section of the sky (left side, ~1/3 down) and possibly tone down the green saturation in the trees on the right, but those would be subtle adjustments to a lovely image.

Interesting post, John. The final result is Bierstadt-ish. I like it, but it doesn't quite feel like you, whatever that means, coming from an acquaintance
;-). I like the idea ofp a Before and After forum...start with raw, have a "finished version" and then get feedback on going further or retracing steps. It would be very illuminating, I think.

This has been very interesting to watch evolve. I think the version after Kane's comment is the best. Personally I think this falls into the photo art category with the degree of liberties taken with colour and white balance, although more and more I see this being the norm with warmth and magenta added to scenes. I'm not saying that such an approach is right or wrong.

A little late in commenting, John, but this is incredible. I especially like your second repost. And thank you for adding the images of the RAW file, etc. Superb work in accomplishing your final visualization. I'm always reminded what Ansel Adams said about the negative being the score and the final image or print the performance; it's all up to you, the artist.

Beautiful shot!