Desert Solitaire

[mseawell]

The Moab and the beauty of the surrounding areas is like no other place on earth. Dead Horse Point State park is treasure, wild and magnificent and in the early morning light, covered in mist it takes on an other worldly aspect. I love these places, they renew my spiritual well and lift me up....desert solitaire

[luxborealis]

Gorgeous - it could be verdant rainforest with all the mist there!

Could it be just a tad brighter? i.e. have you raised the highlights to at least one small area being "paper white" )to use a darkroom term)?

I'm curious. Mark: When you processed this, is the background (the margin around the image when you look at it on-screen) set to white, grey or black?

[mseawell]

Here is the thing: I just got a new monitor! Asus PA248Q which comes highly recommended and replaces my 10 year old monitor that died. I am literally trying to calibrate this baby. So, now I was going to my laptop to see if what I'm seeing on this monitor is really what it looks like!

[drmike]

Phew that's some view.

[luxborealis]

Here is the thing: I just got a new monitor! Asus PA248Q which comes highly recommended and replaces my 10 year old monitor that died. I am literally trying to calibrate this baby. So, now I was going to my laptop to see if what I'm seeing on this monitor is really what it looks like!

Monitor and calibration aside (as we all have different monitors, some calibrated, many not), I'm curious whether you used a white, grey or black background when processing?

[mseawell]

Dark Grey

[luxborealis]

Dark Grey

That's what I figured and it could well be why the highlights are not as brilliant as they could be. Switch to a white background. Your eye will re-calibrate to it and you will start to boost the highlights slightly. It's an old darkroom printing tip (right out of The Print by AA): always compare the highlights to "paper white". In your B&W photos, you want a small bit of "paper white" (pure white) to help calibrate the eye of the viewer. Then, you can check for a gradual drop towards light grey - the highlights you want to keep detail in.

Surprisingly, the same thing applies to computer monitors and screen processing. Monitor calibration works to an extent, but can't entirely replace proper "eye calibration".

[mseawell]

Thank you Terry! Very kind and I've made the switch.

Mark

[sdwilsonsct]

Great image. Mark.

Great tip, Terry.

[Paulo Bizarro]

Wonderful.

[francois]

Perfect title for this photo. It would perfect to illustrate Edward Abbey's book!

[maddogmurph]

That's really cool.

[MattBurt]

Super image and a place that is also close to my heart! It's magical there and you captured a little of that magic.

Your title brings me back to a school honors program trip I did in college where we slept on the beach in Baja, studied ecology/biology, and read Desert Solitaire as well as Hemingway's Log from the Sea of Cortez. I was the artist on that trip, illustrating biology studies and and doing watercolor or pastel landscapes. My girlfriend and I decided we wanted to spend our lives together during that period too and now we have been married 20 years.  It was a fantastic time in my life.

Thanks for jogging those memories. I hadn't thought of them in a long time.

[mseawell]

Thanks for sharing! I like to hear stories like that and glad the title and image jogged the memory!

Mark