Challenge: Free Study 2010-06 (Advanced Editing VII)
Collection: Portfolio
Camera: Canon PowerShot S3 IS
Location: Butte Valley, California, USA
Date: Jun 15, 2010
Aperture: 3.19
ISO: 80
Shutter: 1/318
Galleries: Landscape, Nature
Date Uploaded: Jun 28, 2010
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Snow-covered peaks shot from the northbound train a bit north of Mount Shasta ...
-Handheld, manual mode
-Manual focus, FL = 71mm (35mm equivalent)
-Noise-reduction with PictureCooler
-Mask for sky
-Graduated masks to even out exposure
-RGB and Blue Curves through masks
-Resize
-USM at 8&/48 dia/TH = 0
-USM at 66%/0.6 dia/TH = 5 (applied twice)
-Enlarge Canvas to create borders
-SaveAs JPEG at quality 9/10 = 257KB
Resized original: 
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For the past several years,  Isaac and I have traveled up to Washington to visit my dad and his companion, Ann.
My dad died this January, so this year our trip had a somewhat different purpose and mood ... we had to go through his accumulated stuff and figure out what to do with it. My whole family is afflicted with pack-rat-itis, so there was tons of "really good stuff" to check out, along with lots of junk. (Un)fortunately, AMTRAK's exceedingly liberal baggage policy allowed me to bring back quite a bit of it.
 (more pictures here)
On three of these trips north we have taken the train (see link above), for the fun and adventure of it, and to avoid the airport and the TSA, and right now I was not physically up to driving the entire way myself.
One of the other main reasons for taking the train is it often travels through areas relatively immune to tourist auto traffic, affording some good views of mountains and other scenery from a less commonly seen perspective.
However, shooting from the train also has several disadvantages: uncertain and rapidly changing light conditions, dirty windows and reflections, motion in several directions, trees and buildings blocking the view, and, most of all, usually having only a few seconds at best to compose and take the photo.
It is a "challenge" to try and look ahead and figure out when the opportunity to shoot will come along, and to have the zoom, exposure, and focus all pre-set so that it's possible to snap the shutter at the critical moment.
To get any kind of decent sharpness on this shot (taken in the early morning -- see link to re-sized original) from the moving train I had to underexpose quite a bit, requiring somewhat excessive post-processing to create a tonal range into which I thought the DPC voter would expect a "snow picture" to fall -- in the end, I was pleasantly surprised at the score it got. |
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