CH59: "On The Rocks"

mr peas

Well after bugging a lot of people, asking many questions and doing much research, I've finally started conducting my own IR photographs. I'm a big fan of Andy's and Frank Lemire's photographs, after seeing what they've done, I'm ready to take my first real attempt into the IR world. Hopefully I'll keep getting better.

Anyways, heres the story (if a photo ever needed one). On the way home, I kept my eye open for anything worth shooting and found this small ravine right next to a park. Hopped out of my car and decided to get down and low, snap on the IR & ND filters, pull my baseball cap back and shot away. I got lucky with this shot. An overcast started to form right above me soon after I was finished. Now its super cloudy in the valley of southern Nevada. I was thinking the rocks and the small tree growing in it depicted a symbol of roughness, the way something can still grow even within somewhat unfertile soil (desert sand) has always intrigued me. Thats the Stratosphere in the background, just in case you're wondering. I used a Sony F828 to capture this image.

Tell me what you guys think.

Thusie

Rough landscape:): I like IR too, never have tried it. One niggle thing I see the tower in the back is canted to the left as you look at the picture. I also sit crooked in my chair sometimes too, but think that rotating the pic just a bit CCW would fix it right up.

mr peas

thanx for your thoughts hah, im not sure what you meant by rotating it though. can you give me a pt. of reference or something i can refer to?

Tessa HD

Hi Mr. Peas,
Coming from someone who is not a huge fan of IR, I do really like yours. It seems the IR was very complementary on those rough rocks! I agree with my predecessor that the horizon needs adjusted. It speaks 'rough' terrain to me! I wanted to say crop some off the sky, but you can't with the tree fitting so nicely in the photo.

tessa

mr peas

thanks Tessa. yeah its hard to crop the sky out with the tree there. it would eliminate the purpose of having it hah. but i think i can get away with darkening the sky a bit more so it looks like its naturally vignetting the shot.

oh and i finally noticed the tower, good looking out! ill fix that. thanks

juliejules

mr peas wrote:

thanx for your thoughts hah, im not sure what you meant by rotating it though. can you give me a pt. of reference or something i can refer to?

You can rotate the canvas in PS. Start with your largest uncropped image, because you're going to lose some. Using the measure tool (under the eyedropper), draw a straight line, either vertical or horizontal. In your case, draw the line on top of the tower, or exactly parallel to it, because you want the tower to be perfectly vertical. Then do Image->Rotate Canvas->Arbitrary.
It will compute the proper angle to rotate the image so that the line you drew is vertical. Then, obviously, you make it rectangular again by cropping.

mr peas

I didnt know you can do it that way. What I did was just place a window on top of PS's window, place it next to the tower and rotate it to a few decimal points using the rotate function after pressing CTRL + T. But I'll try that next time. Thanks!

mr peas

This is the one I will probably submit. Any other suggestions in improving it?:

queequeg

mr peas wrote:

This is the one I will probably submit. Any other suggestions in improving it?:

Oh no, you PS'd the little cloud out? I rather liked it... gave it a sort of ominous feeling.

Although I suppose this is better, aesthetically speaking. The sky looks darker and provides more contrast to the foreground. Crazy cool.

mr peas

queequeg wrote:

Oh no, you PS'd the little cloud out? I rather liked it... gave it a sort of ominous feeling.

Although I suppose this is better, aesthetically speaking. The sky looks darker and provides more contrast to the foreground. Crazy cool.

Hah, if there were more clouds I would have probably kept them. But a single spec just takes away from the rocks. Also, I actually picked a different photograph. This one is different from the first one. I had a at least 3 or 4 shots when I fired in burst mode, this one came out the sharpest. So I kept it. I think this one is stronger and sharper than its yellow predecessor. thanks for your input!

Thusie

Looks good Mr Peas