I might as well add to the recent theme of Utah pics. The flowers in Arches wer the best that I've seen. And the cacti were only just beginning to bloom, so those should be hitting their peak soon. The above photo is a double-processed raw combined in Photoshop. More photos from Arches and Mesa Verde can be seen at the link below. I haven't really cleaned these up or eliminated dust spots...just hit the magic web page button in Lightroom.
Great collection, Grant! By my simple eye it looks like you did some nice exposure blends (?) to create some difficult lighting scenes like the kiva light. The start shot is really neat. Not only does it look like a good season for flowers, but I enjoyed the flower shots, too.
Thanks for the feedback. Roger, I'm lazy, so most of these have had minimal work (though the star shots need some more work). The first one is a blend and I tried a blend for the second one. But I got better results with the recovery and fill light sliders. I've found those work well for a lot of shots with high, but not extreme, dynamic range. For the Kiva shots, I just let the spot where the light beam hit be overexposed (don't want detail there anyway) and exposured for the rest of the kiva. The only thing I did there was throw sand up to bring out the light beam. That has a two-fold benefit. When people would come down, they'd say "Man, it's dusty down here." They then weren't inclined to linger as long and I'd quickly have the place to myself again .
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