I sometimes do what I call “grab landscape” shooting. Usually riding a train, when I see something compelling, just swing the camera in position, compose, and shoot. Center-focus, highlight-weighted matrix metering.
The following image is from a recent trip to Antonito, Colorado, USA, to ride a charter train pulled by our city’s former park locomotive restored to operation, D&RG #168. The fall colors were just starting to turn, aspens were in their first stage, yellow. Here’s the batch-processed proof:
Nice landscape. Living in a flat country myself I’m always a bit jealous when I see rugged terrain like this.
Had a nice time with this image; Maybe slightly too colourful, but I think it fits and the yellows vs greens do need to stand out a bit in this one.
BTW: That Denver & Rio Grande is a really nice ten-wheeler. Nice to see it got restored and is up-and-running again. This is the kind of train I image when I think about the (partially romanticized) old wild west.
I grew up in the state of Louisiana, much flatness, where the horizon is usually chopped off by the next tree break. Longed for living in or near such scenes; the Air Force deposited me here for my last assignment, what nice people they are!
Indeed, the focal point of the image, followed by the shadowy Toltec Gorge in the background. I actually was most interested in how folk handled the sky with the nice dt tools; my post was the default Duiker Filmic curve which tends to desaturate them. I went back and replaced the filmic curve with loggamma, then added a control point curve to shape the tone spread to my whim. What I’ve found messing with this technique is that it’s not the levels in the curve that make the difference, it’s the slopes:
The sky is still not as nice as some have done, but now it’s there.
Oh, they’ve done such a nice job with it. The fellow who led the restoration had an eye for resilience; for instance, he used stainless steel for the boiler jacketing. Here’s a shot of it from my outing last Saturday:
I like your sky. Interesting what you got for the aspen leaves; they’d just started to turn and were quite yellow. If the trees weren’t too stressed during the summer, they’ll go from green to yellow, then to orange, then brown and fall from the tree. The fellow next to me was lamenting the lack of oranges, and you’ve given them to him!
I also had to move cross-country for my new job at the time. Only difference is: east to west border is +/- 250 Km (155 Mi). Not that much room to grow mountains…
We are a small country: 41,526 km2 (16,033 mi2) . Compare that to the state of Colorado: 269,837 km2 (104,094 mi2)
You are at a bit of a disadvantage here… Last time I used Rawproc it was not able to selectively tackle certain parts of an image. Time to introduce masking in all its glory into Rawproc
At one time I had a daily commute just a bit shorter than that… yes, the western US is just BIG.
Argh! Masking! It’s somewhat tempting, but it’d require a major re-org of some things. Frankly, for a next endeavor, I’d probably be more inclined to incorporate some of @anon41087856’s color work from dt. However, right now, I’ve put aside the software for a bit, my current project is attempting to scratchbuild a HOn3 model of #168 in brass. The main reason I rode the train last weekend was to measure the locomotive…
