Dried Japanese Maple Leaf
Originally uploaded by doug_r

Taken and processed today.

I really rather like this image though the processing turned out to be quite a bit more involved than usual with several new techniques used to give what I think is a better workflow.

Taken with the used but new to me 28-70 f2.8L lens set at an aperture of 2.8 and underexposed several stops on black seamless with the usual low south light in the dining room. I like the sharpness of this lens. The 28-70 is supposed to be nominally sharper than the newer 24-70 f2.8L; I'm not sure about that having not seen side by sides, but this copy does seem to be blisteringly sharp when properly focused.

I wanted to try a new workflow here since I knew I was going to be converting to black and white using Nik Silver Efx and using their grain engine to introduce the look of real film. As a result, I began with a very mild smart sharpening pass before anything else just to clean up the image a little and so that I wouldn't be sharpening the grain later on.

I've also started using a threshold layer to find and correct the levels to true black and close to true white as an initial step. I find the threshold layer trick works pretty well to give B/W images greater image contrast though picking the white is occasionally somewhat difficult. I used an opacity of 80% on both the levels layer and on the subsequent slight "S" curve layer.

Next came the B/W conversion. This one was fairly involved: I began by fine tuning the filtering using a blue filter and then selecting an ISO 25 Kodak film to emulate. Then I tweaked the grain to make it as fine as possible and changed the saturation curve to move the black background set point further to the right.

After the B/W conversion came another pair of threshold / levels layers to reset the black and white points.

Next came a sort of creative trick I've been using to manipulate the dark background a bit more. I used the color selector to select out the blackish background and then feathered it by 15 pixels to make the selection nice and smooth. Then I used a levels layer to move the gamma setting to darken just the selected background. I then reselected the background and applied a "concave down" curves layer to also slightly darken the spectrum of background shadows evenly.

All this was followed by two subsequent platinum toning color gradient layers, each with a slightly different color cast (one greenish and the other more brownish) both at about 30% opacity. The two passes of toning really smoothed out the histogram nicely and gave a nice broad tonal width through the warm mid-greys.

A final, fairly gentle smart sharpening pass was made and then the image was saved and converted for web page jpeg display format.

I muddled around with cropping on this image for quite some time - I'm still not extremely happy that aspect of the photo but I like what I have for now. Overall I'm quite pleased with the sharpness, with the smoother tonal histogram, and with the very nice width in the shadowy blacks along the right edge of the leaf.

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Taking pictures of dried leaves is self-indulgent fun for me. They sit still, they are fun to process and they are common enough that it's easy to find dramatic specimens. More to come soon!

Grass

Grass
Originally uploaded by doug_r

This image was made in the late summer of 2006 at the Bellevue Botanical Garden in Bellvue, Washington. It was late afternoon and the light was quite harsh but this image still seemed to work because of the depth of shadows on the fine grained grass seemed to break up the glare of the light a bit.

I've been wanting to go back and play with this image ever since I took it. Yesterday I finally did, and this is the result.

The processing follows the usual steps:
1) Levels
2) Curves
3) Mild Sharpening
3) B/W conversion*
4) Levels
5) Toning
6) Mild Sharpening

* Note: the black and hhite conversion was done in Nik Silver Effects using a film grain simulator to give the image a very fine grain. Additionally, a very mild green filter was applied to improve the contrast on some of the grasses.

I like this image alot. The Mexican Needle Grass is so fine that it stirs in the slightest breeze. I thought it was interesting how even when still, it gives the slightly illusion of motion.

Autumn

Autumn
Originally uploaded by doug_r

Captured on 9 November 2008 at the Issaquah Fish Hatchery, Issaquah, Washington