Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

[Iguanamom]

Here are a few more. The weather was volatile during this hike. Clouds came in and went out again pretty quickly and the light was constantly changing. We got sprinkled on during the hike back. Basically you go up a few switchbacks until you come to a big plateau (the first couple are from this area), this you cross for about 1 1/2 miles, then you head up (towards the big rock) and beyond to the Fremont Gorge Overlook. It's an out and back trail totalling about 5 miles and 1000 feet above the river itself.

Taken with the OM-3, 35mm and 90mm lenses with Provia or possibly Agfa 100 (that's what was in the camera when I got there and then I used Provia 100). Handheld except for the middle one; used a tripod to get the maximum DOF I could. I'm a bit disappointed in the flat lighting - I wish they had more punch. Tweaked in PS just to get an approximation of the slide image.

Let me know what you think and how these could be improved. Some of you are awesome landscape photographers - as I someday hope to be.

[dadas115]

You got some nice shots of a very beautiful place. I like the composition of the first one with the path leading in from the corner of the picture and also the fact that there are some clouds in the nice blue sky. In the second one it looks like you had a tough sky to deal with. I like how you composed it with very little sky visible to not let this bring your photo down. I also really like the interaction of the yellow flowers with the green bushes. The last one is also nice with the path leading my eye up to the interesting rock formation. The only suggestion I have is to go back and boost the color and contrast. On my screen the pictures look very washed out. I went into PS on the second one and after a few seconds of manipulation got a lot more punch out of the shot.

Thanks for sharing such nice shots.

Greg

[Iguanamom]

Ok...I played with the levels in Photoshop (I'm such a newbie with it) and came up with these:

Any better?

[Steph_B]

Ok...I played with the levels in Photoshop (I'm such a newbie with it) and came up with these:

Any better?

I think the question is do YOU like it better this way?

Personally I do! However, when boosting colors in PS, one must always be carefull not to end up with false colors such as a cyan or magenta cast (you first pic has a slight cyan cast in the sky - it might be due to my screen though). A good idea is to increase saturation only in some color channels such as yellow/red or green or blue. Usually, I desaturate the magenta and cyan channels in landscapes. Flower photo. sometime require to increase the magenta channel though! That's the way I'm playing with PS, but more advance users will use principally the Curve tool.

Unfortunately, this does not help much with the burnt white clouds.... If the weather conditions are not good, landscape photography benefits from filters such as the polarizer and split NDs... in this case, they would have made wonders... mostly the split ND!

If you want to learn more about filters, check out the Singh Ray website. They have nice tutorials and examples. And they stick to landscape filters and don't bother you with other types which are useless fro this type of application.

Cheers,

Steph.