"Valley Oaks, Cheseboro Canyon"

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), January 14, 1999

Answers

I wish I -could- critique this, Frank. I'm not a huge B&W fan, but that could change after looking at this.

Keith

-- Keith Clark (ClarkPhotography@spiritone.com), January 14, 1999.

Very nice trees - I can never get enough of looking at the different patterns formed by branches and twigs. For that reason I'd have preferred the image taken from a different position and cropped closer in order to minimize the boring lawn in the foreground.

Due to the tilted horizon I also don't think the photo has the peace and rest the two trees deserve.

-- Ralf Hafner (hafner@physics.ox.ac.uk), January 14, 1999.

Very nice!!

Personally, the only thing that doesn't get me personally is the intensity of the sky through the trees. Some people like this look, some don't. I don't have a personal preference, but I don't like it in this case. But maybe it wasn't controllable if you were shooting into the sun....

-- Jason Fobart (jason@fobart.net), January 14, 1999.

Ralf,

There isn't a horizon in this image, what you are seeing is a gentle hillside that tilts away and to the right. Also the ground is covered with oak leaves not lawn. The area is of interest to me because it is a remnant of habitat that has only been disturbed by grazing and park development rather than housing and pavement like the rest of this part of California.

Jason,

The sky is intensly bright with intermittant puffy clouds, but the real culprit for the severely washed-out look is the two generations of low-quality reproduction this image has gone through to get here, the original print isn't nearly as bad.

To all who are interested in technical details: this image is a double exposure. The day was very bright California sunshine regularly punctuated with big white clouds (god's softboxs). In full sun the shadows were so dark that contrast was horrible, but under the clouds there were no shadows at all. Neither situation was to my liking although I did some exposures in full shade and some of the images are acceptable. To get some sense of the dappled shade I made one exposure for the cloud condition and another for the sun with each one contributing about half the exposure. Thus the print looks like full sun, but with details in the shadows and no great amount of darkroom manipulation was needed.

Film is 120 size T-Max 100, exposed at ISO 50, my standard esposure for it, with a Horseman 980 camera, Rodenstock Sironar N 135f/5.6 at about f/32 and 1 sec total exposure, +/-; I'm not into recording the grim details.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), January 14, 1999.

Frank, lovely picture, interesting job on the exposure. Before reading your comments, I wondered how you'd gotten an essentially shadow-free image: the ground looks like grass with lighter areas, perhaps dried grass, sand, etc. As shadows, the ground looks too bright relative to the undersides of the tree.

Anyways, either way, I like it as an image, although I'd crop about 15% of the foreground myself. Really nice job!

-- Andrew Y. Kim (andy_roo@mit.edu), January 15, 1999.

Ansel Adams did a similar scene with full scale rendition. His image had open shadows and no blocked highlights. He increased the exposure one stop to give full detail in the shadows and compensating development to control the highlights.

-- Dell Elzey (potog@mindspring.com), January 15, 1999.

I really like the image and the way the light feels and penetrates through the trees, branches, and leaves. I am sure the original B&W print is even more impressive. Thanks for sharing.

-- Bahman Farzad (cpgbooks@mindspring.com), January 15, 1999.

Cool exposure tool. I'll keep that one in mind. I hope the trees didn't move. Nice shot.

-- Larry Korhnak (lvk@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu), January 15, 1999.

Dell,

Adams's is the traditional way of managing excessive brightness in a scene. Since I don't do any darkroom work and I am primarily a transparency shooter, I expect to get perfect negatives *in the camera* for my lab to work with. So I look for other means of correcting for the film's deficiencies. Also, this is from roll film and making exposure/development corrections for each image becomes difficult.

I can't say I recommend this method. For instance, if I wanted to do it this year, I'd still be waiting for the right conditions - we've had almost nothing but blue skies throughout this "rainy" season and normally I wouldn't be caught dead out for photography in the middle of the day. I might have to wait for next November to re-shoot this image or something similar.

Thanks to all for your many comments.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), January 15, 1999.

Very nice picture Frank. I just wish we could see more detail, but then again, I know the limitations of the digital medium, and there being only 50K that you can post, I think that it's all you can really fit in the image posted.

Would LOVE to see the real thing...meaning real print of it.

Good work.

-- Scott Gant (sgant@interaccess.com), January 16, 1999.

I don't think I can add to the superlatives already expressed but I can certainly enjoy just soaking in the wonderful patterns of the trunks, branches and twigs. Great work!

-- Garry Schaefer (schaefer@pangea.ca), January 16, 1999.