Shenandoah never dissappoints

Marc Muench

Yes it was warm, in fact the temp in Shenandoah never dropped below 60 the entire week and that is at 3500 feet above sea level. Because of this warm weather the Fall colors did not reach their usual planned peak while we were there, rather they were just emerging. I understand what it is like to chase ideal landscape conditions, after all I have been doing it since I was born. What I have come to learn and appreciate is what is in front of me, and further more, how to look deeper when the images don't fall on my head. So with the ocean of foliage still green, we needed to find those somewhat more illusive spots of color where in the right light turn ones immediate world into Fall. In our pursuit of such color, we were bombarded with exceptional light, some fun wildlife and even more exciting several spectacular sunsets and sunrises, which make the Shenandoah Skyline Ridge one of the most unique locations I have been. Here are a few images displayed with Smugmugs new cool tool as I call it.

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During the day we were able to spread out in the conferance room and work on Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom while waiting for the right light so we could dash out and shoot. Here are some of the interesting topics that came up during the week.

Topic 1.

Point and shoot settings:
As some of you know, I like to use my Canon SD800 because of it's convience and 28mm lens. Well there are many settings of which I had not ever used. So with the Fall colors not so PEAK, I began exploring the settings burried in the "Scene" mode. What I stumbled into was a underwater setting and a foliage setting. Here are three images taken with the diff settings. I was so charmed with the underwater setting because of what it did to warm up the colors that I barely changed it for the entire trip.


Normal with no scene sellection



Foliage scene sellection



Underwater scene sellection

These was no post on these three examples. Just some cool warm colors in underwater mode :clap

Also to note regarding point and shoot settings, and this justifys the purchase of a Nikon point and shoot, what did I just type:scratch

John Dolan, the other participant is a avid Nikon shooter and sported a Nikon Coolpix P50. In hope of finding something to smear my Canon with, he discovered he could overide his apeture and stop the lens iris down to 7.5 just enough to create a "MUENCH STAR" I will bug him to post one of the stars here. I now may just have to get the Nikon to round out my arsenal.

Topic 2.

Leica VS Canon

John also came equipped with the new Leica M8 body and 28mm lens. This new camera is small, not too light but very sturdy. John and I decided to compare the new 10mp files with my Canon 1ds M2 files. Ok so there must be thousands of online info debates regarding such a comparison and all kinds of details I will not go into here, but to get to the point the Leica files were as good as the Canon at 160 iso. In fact the corners were sharper probably due to the larger image area of the lenses Leica uses. I processed these through Adobe Camera Raw with the very same settings.

Here they are:


Canon cropped to 10mp


Leica full frame


Topic 3

Much of the photoshop work we did was too indepth to show here but of particular importance was blending two exposures to include the high dynamic range of a scene. I will make a second post later to share some examples of the blends.


Also some illustrations of point and shoot techniques for the fun of it


John in a swirly


David and "STAR" the closest I could get to a Muenchstar with the Canon SD800


John waiting for the pink light


John searching for the correct split ND


David streached way out, notice right tripod leg attached to tree. "Old trick"


Another photographer disguised as a squirl trying to get in on our photoshop sessions:huh

Cheers
Marc

philiphutson

Marc Muench wrote:

Yes it was warm, in fact the temp in Shenandoah never dropped below 60 the entire week and that is at 3500 feet above sea level.

Marc

Great stuff Marc
I would have loved to have gone. Every time I go to Shenandoah I always love it. Most times I have a day or only a part of a day before the flight leaves.

-Philip

ian408

Nice slideshow!

Awais Yaqub

OMG Marc wonderful photos

schmoo

There is nothing in the world like Marc's sense of humor!:lol

The photos are nice (and so's the coding behind slideshow ) but the best part of this post was seeing that even mega pros still learn new things while having fun.

Does that squirrel have a Dgrin account? Maybe they're just a lurker.

I really wished I could have come to this workshop, as I have hiked through this part of the country many, many times but never had the chance to have your assistance seeing it in a new way. It would have been great to experience artistic revelation in a place that I always take for granted.

RogersDA

Nice post, Marc. It was a great time. Still looking outside for that 40D though.:D

Marc Muench

RogersDA wrote:

Nice post, Marc. It was a great time. Still looking outside for that 40D though.:D

Its in the mail



Phil, Schmoo, Ian, Awais,

Thank you all for your kind words.

Phyxius

What I can see is great! The slide show however is just a black square for me. :cry

wxwax

Phyxius wrote:

The slide show however is just a black square for me. :cry

Yeah, for me too.

I like the lesson about the white balance. I shall freer to warm things up in the future.

schmoo

wxwax wrote:

Yeah, for me too.

Same here, but it was showing up just fine for me yesterday and the day before.

dmmattix

Must have gotten it fixed. I see it fine. Firefox 2.0.0.8 on Vista.

Mike

DavidTO

I'm pretty sure that anyone that isn't seeing it doesn't have Flash installed, or javascript enabled, or something like that. It's been working fine since the beginning, AFAIK.

Phyxius

I have IE - macromedia flash version 9,0,28,0 installed

And, my firefox is defunct. It shows a quicktime Q.

cwphotos

Awesome pics as always Marc. The colors there are so amazing looking. Great Light !!

Aaron Jors

Great Shots Mark.

ehughes

Great stuff Marc

wxwax

DavidTO wrote:

I'm pretty sure that anyone that isn't seeing it doesn't have Flash installed, or javascript enabled, or something like that. It's been working fine since the beginning, AFAIK.

Didn't work before, does now.


Gorgeous slideshow. If that's scraping by on a bad day, what's a good day like?!

And I like the delicate use of flash. So much to learn!

zacker

Awesome Photos from an awesome place.... we had a blast when we wnet there August 06. the weather was great except it rained the last day so we left early.

GREAPER

Great pictures.

Love the slideshow.