Old Cemetery

WernerG

There is a tiny cemetery in our town that has been closed for new business for well over a hundred years. It is maintained enough to keep the trees from encroaching on the grave sites and there are even a few lilies that come up near the entrance path despite the deep shade. It is tucked into the woods far enough that you could drive by it a hundred times and not notice it. As with many older cemeteries, many headstones are for babies and young children, like this one.



Thanks for looking,

NewEnglandMoments

outstanding capture!! Beautiful Light ... Patent Pending B+W !!

WernerG

NewEnglandMoments wrote: »

outstanding capture!! Beautiful Light ... Patent Pending B+W !!

Thank you for the comments. And thank you for explaining your flower set up. You have turned flower photography into a unique art form. I am going to have to take flower photography a bit more seriously now. Just jamming the camera into a bunch of flowers doesn't cut it anymore.

rwells

I along with a few others around here, really enjoy cemetery images, and this is a fine one!

I'm diggin' the processing

Angelo

really wonderful shot. what post treatment did you apply? where is this?

billseye

Add me to the list of cemetery photo appreciators. This is very nice... the dappled light on the head stone is quite effective.

WernerG

Angelo wrote: »

really wonderful shot. what post treatment did you apply? where is this?

Hi Angelo, I'm in Vermont and I'm using our "stick season" up here to experiment with B&W variations. There are a lot of things going on at once, probably too many. I have been trying to recreate a digital version of what I used to do with home printing in the film days; print on hard paper but dodge and burn like crazy to get some overall contrast back while maintaining detail. I used 3 exposures and tonemapped in Photomatix but as usual I didn't like what it does to the colors. But when I de-saturated the tonemapped HDR I saw a familiar looking hard paper B&W with enhanced detail. I then post-processed with a tone curve to redistribute for more natural overall balance but retaining as much of the detail as possible. I also colored the B&W with a home-brewed brown that I like better then sepia. Sepia looks too red in the shadows for me. Several of the "Stick Season" B&W shots that I posted here recently were processed this way. The exaggerated detail caused by the tone mapping seems to work well in B&W images of forests with bare trees and yet it avoids the "HDR look", I think.

This shot was taken near the end of foliage season but it didn't look right in color. I used the tonemapped B&W process but with this image the bright light bleeding in behind the trees didn't look right in that very sharp detail so I used an Orton process (as close as I can get to Orton in Capture NX2) to soften everything except the headstone. Since it had lettering on it I thought it should still look crisp.

I realized after looking at the small image that I posted that I should have dodged the upper part of the headstone more. It doesn't look that dark at full screen size. I think the other "Stick Season" B&Ws that I have posted recently show the process better. Adding the Orton process at the end of this one negates quite a bit of the process.

Thanks again,