Study Group 26

Ron Hagedorn

July Title - Arches-Canyonlands Test

Photographer's Notes -The result of a very busy month doing a major landscape project is the excuse that my meager contribution this month is a quick and dirty test of a black and white technique described in the current edition (Aug, p52) of "Outdoor Photographer".
The technique described seems a pretty involved process requiring several steps in Photoshop. I'm not certain whether Elements could work with all steps.
I deliberately picked a very poor candidate to test. (too small, quite flat, been briefly worked over previously, etc) just to see what would happen.
I must say that  to me, the results of one quick test seem promising. The BW sky shows banding resulting from the very small highly pixellated original, there are haloes around a couple of the features resulting from my heavy handed tweaking, But all things considered, there does seem to be a lot of room to control things. I tried several other BW conversions with standard programs to compare and never quite got comparable results.

COMMENTS:
 

Bob Benson	I can see this technique may hold promise, and I will have to get around to reading the August issue.
Steve Serpa	Even though you had a poor image to work with you have accomplished a fairly good results. I can see that the image held details in BW whereas they are harder to see in the color version on my screen. I think you may be on to something here and would suggest that you experiment more with this process. Maybe next month's image with a summary of the conversion steps involved.
Youmans Hsiong	Your b&w portion really improves your hand processing, compared with old color, which had had poor contrast and haloes.   I have studied your image, as you said, the normal different modes does not get the same result as you did on above b&w image.  Now I understand what you are demonstrating here.
Brian Duchin
Ron Hagedorn
Jose Maria Cartas	In spite of the shortcomings you mentioned (banding in the sky, halos), you applied a very interesting technique and managed to get a good image out of nothing. The contrast is in general very good, although it could be improved in the vegetation on the bottom. I think that you can even get rid of the lower part (around one eight), and improve the composition.
Laurette Beliveau

Member Bio

Ron Hagedorn- Biography Now retired, trying to improve on a lifetime of hobby photography, as well as trying to get some of the youngsters interested. Attached bio photo courtesy of eleven year old granddaughter on her first attempts with Christmas camera. As a third generation amateur, I've been exposed to a great variety of equipment, techniques, and technology, but am truly amazed to see what a dramatic revolution digital has brought about for the hobby photographer. Regarding background, in a word, varied.  Military, design engineer, heavy construction, graphic designer. I enjoy experimenting with almost any aspect of photography, and have only very recently joined my first camera club and started sharing and learning.

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