Working on my guide book this week, I sent to the layout editor last night the chapter for Joshua Tree National Park.
Here's the rest of my Joshua Tree album on G+: https://plus.google.com/photos/+JeffreySullivan/albums/5703478156779716817
www.MyPhotoGuides.com
#joshuatree #landscapephotography #joshuatreenationalpark
Joshua Trees in Hidden Valley – Joshua Tree National Park, California.
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Love these gorgeous trees!! Beautiful! Thanks for sharing with the #LandscapePhotography theme!!
i love this
LOVELY…
One of my favorite spots..
Nice
+Jeff Sullivan What pops out in focus the most are the spiny round needle pluffs at the end of the Joshua tree branches. Loveyly share Jeff. Look forward to viewing the album.
Thanks for sharing this very beautiful post…you have but it sad for the grasess its dry
Wow!
Nice!
+Jeff Sullivan but if these aren't computer generated trees, then what's wrong with photography these days?
I remember the days that I refused these CGI images as they didn't look right. What happened?
What a tree!
Amazing capture !!
Beautiful!
Love to see these trees
Amazing
I live near Joshua Tree National Park! I will say that although the desert and this park has it's own unique beauty and is a great location for photography to include the sky at night, I can't WAIT…to move out of this place!!! It is a very beautiful place, just not a place to live.
What a beautiful place!
superbe galerie.
Fabulous.
+Max Huijgen The short answer is that film photography effectively went away before digital camera representations could adequately reproduce the same range of light and color. Today the poorest and most objectionable CGI rendering is often a straight-out-of-camera result. That was particularly true when this was taken in January 2009, as discussed in my new blog post today: http://activesole.blogspot.com/2014/09/redemption-of-high-dynamic-range-HDR.html
A longer answer would include the consideration that photography does not exclude artistic interpretations any more than painting excludes the work of Picasso or Dali. You may not care for the result, just as Goya is not everyone's up of tea. As an example, Ansel Adams' prints were not even close to accurate representations of what he saw or what his camera recorded, nor were they intended to be. In the same spirit, this photo is not intended as photojournalism.
An even longer answer would acknowledge that even organizations like National Geographic which originally insisted upon single exposures has started accepting HDR-processed images. Digital photography is an entirely different animal from film photography. Sometimes more involved techniques than a single exposure are required. Most recently, Instagram happened. As filters make photography more inclusive by masking poor quality results from mobile phones, their popularity may also reduce the stigma previously associated with unreal images produced by other methods. Even marketers now want to license weird-looking images to put on Instagram. Organizations and photographers can either jump on the bandwagon or risk getting left in a shrinking niche if the popularity of low fidelity photography continues as a longer term trend.
I processed this old image two different ways: a single exposure in Lightroom, and 3 exposures combined in HDR software, and the HDR result had far more detail in the highlights and shadows. It's noticeably "processed", but given the limitations of the previously-rejected single exposure, it still struck me as an improvement.
We're at risk of an identical discussion under two posts of you +Jeff Sullivan Will I respond here or do you copy this comment to your later post?
+Max Huijgen Here would be fine.
I have no problem at all with the concept of HDR. The human eye is extremely flexible and photos don't do it justice when the contrasts are high.
Exposure fusion is fine with me: either by doing it selectively in photoshop or by straight merging of multiple images. I prefer the former as it can look better, but nothing principally wrong with the automated version.
I do not like tone mapping. It's a filter creating artefacts. Again nothing wrong with it in theory, but I don't happen to like it even it we can get rid of the halo's.
It's unclear to me why exposure fusion (HDR) and tonemapping are confused by photographers and programmers.
Now getting back to this specific image +Jeff Sullivan I said I would have rejected it as an CGI submission. Now I have more than a decade of experience in judging CGI from a photo realism point of view and this specific Yoshua Tree image struck me as 'too dead' (in other words, too old fashioned, limited tech CGI).
There are all kinds of technical reasons why this can happen with an originally real photograph, but you can summarize them by loss of detail. Not only spatial, but also in lighting, coloring, etc.
It leads to images which look like they are oversharpened as that is a similar method to lose detail in exchange for local contrast.
However, apart from the technical critique, my main concern is just that it looks like a sterile (hence the CGI remark) image.
Nowadays even CGI can do better, let's make sure photos can still at least stand up against CGI!
+Max Huijgen The original photo was too soft, so techniques analogous to sharpening were necessary. Not only is the image not an art print, its sole use will be as a 3" 175 DPI image in a book to illustrate the location. So the image will look similar in size to what you might see in a G+ column on a 24" monitor…relatively small. For that use I think it's adequate… certainly better than another trip requiring $1000+ in travel expenses to replace the photo or whatever it would take to create the image in CGI, wouldn't you think?
Sometimes in the real world there are practical consideration other than whether it's the best possible or most artistic image. In fact, although I slip a few really nice photos in the guide book, I was instructed by the publisher to use images which illustrate what someone might find when they arrive. So there are a few last minute substitutions like this which serve little purpose other than to show the terrain in a certain portion of the park and what a Joshua tree looks like in daylight. I'm not sure that the considerations you mention will be visible in the end use.
As for its appearance on G+, it was a split second decision on my way out the door, so my last post before leaving to work over the weekend would not be the weak trail post initiated from 500px which apparently displays small on mobile devices and had very few views / shares / +1s.
With Google subtracting hundreds of thousands of users form my circles (even creating a drop when my posts in the top 50 of all G+ during a week according to +CircleCount), it's not clear how important my activity on G+ is anymore. If my account is being targeted to be undermined (like a reverse SUL), other features related to authorship and Google Search may be affected as well. What picture I post seems to be the least of my concerns.
nice
I was just commenting on this specific image and the 'plastic' look +Jeff Sullivan I have no problem at all with whatever you decide to use. With almost 600 plusones, I'm alone anyway 🙂
+Max Huijgen No worries, your observations were fair enough. I had decided that it wan't necessarily a bad thing to throw in an image or two that HDR photographers could identify with, if they better represented the location.
When I was first learning photography I would look at the work of photographers I admired, and marvel at the moments they had captured. Decades later I can look at their books and say things like, "We can do better than that with digital today", and "Wow, these books sure contain a lot of filler material, not particularly compelling." As I work on a book myself, I can appreciate the trade-off between aiming for perfection and getting the project out the door. At some point it just has to be done so you can move on. Perspective provides an interesting filter on our perception of things we see.
+Jeff Sullivan Digital will take years to develop into what a fine grain film can do in a
large format camera ,Sure it is expensive to use and you have to have a darkroom.
But I do not think that digital is better than film Still use my 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 view cameras a lot
Beatiful
Woow!