The Wandering Photographer

Grand Teton National Park

Here is another of my favorite landscape images. In September of 2007 we took a trip out west. It included a week in Jackson, Wy, home to Grand Teton National Park. We didn't always have the best weather, but sometimes a dark and cloudy day can be useful.

I find this shot brooding but hopeful. The mountain rising into the light in the sky gives hope to the dark and dried out meadow in the foreground.

This is just one of many great images I captured in Grand Teton and Yellowstone that trip.

Shooting Info

• Nikon D200
• Nikkor 18-70mm
• Lens at 38mm (effectively 57mm)
• ISO 100
• 1/80 sec at f/8

Prints of this and others of my images are available for purchase from my SmugMug Portfolio at www.photowanderer.sugmug.com or you can click on the "Buy Prints" link at the top of the page.

© 2012 Tim Marks all rights reserved

Evolution of a Photograph

Today I thought I would go through the evolution of a photograph from what it looked like as captured to something that I was at least happy to post to my Flickr Stream. 

When we arrived in Jackson Hole, WY the weather was not exactly ideal.  It was cloudy, chilly and there was a haze that was contributed to by the ongoing forest fires to the North in Montana.  A grey cloud cover hung over the mountains but I went out to shoot anyway.  In the end I’m glad I did.

Nikon D200,  Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5,  ISO 100,  1/180 @ f/8

Here is the shot as downloaded to Lightroom.  It seemed grey, muddy and the greenish/grey/brown foreground added little to the view as far as I was concerned.  It certainly needed some exposure and contrast work but first I needed to crop it more to my liking.  So the first thing I did was create a virtual copy in Lightroom.

In the develop module I used the crop tool to create a semi-panoramic.  I think this crop improved the composition considerably.  Now the mountain was emphasized and the grass field no longer intrudes.  Still needs work though.

I played around with the Basic adjustments in the develop module until I came up with what you see above.  Now I think the exposure is better, you can see some detail in the trees and the mountains and the sky are much more acceptable.  What follows are the settings I ended up with.

Temp  5350

Exposure  +1.05

Recovery  21

Fill Light  13

Blacks  8

Brightness  27

Contrast  27

Vibrance  +26

Ends up as a much better shot in my humble opinion.

Then I decided I wanted a black and white version.  I created another virtual copy from the cropped version and went to the grayscale adjustments and began playing around with the sliders.  I first clicked “auto” and then just experimented.  The image above is the result.  I went heavily negative on blue and aqua and slightly negative on the reds (red, orange and yellow. 

The results are far from perfect but I’m generally happy.  I think both the final color version and the black and white version are distinct improvements over the original.  Feel free to let me know what you think.

© Tim Marks 2009