G Dan Mitchell | Photography

Trees and Clouds, Mono Lake. Mono Lake, California. April 4, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)

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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.30.2007 :: Photographs: Mono Lake :: Comments Off

A reader sent a nice message today which included the following:

I am always amazed by the detail of your photographs, the sharpness (I sometimes wish you’d elaborate a bit more on your settings of the shot ).

Thanks for the nice comment about detail and sharpness. Let me give a little overview of some of what I do. (Of course, to really see this you would have to look at a print. :-)

• Almost all of the photopraphs were made with either an 8 megapixel Canon 350D/XT or more recently with a 12 megapixel Canon 5D.
• I use high end Canon lenses - 17-40mm f/4 L, 24-105mm f/4 IS L, 70-200mm f/4 L, 50mm f/1.4.
• I tend to shoot at smaller apertures unless the depth of field requirements of the shot (or limited light and moving subjects) require larger apertures. For sharpness across the frame, I generally shoot at f/8 on the crop sensor 350D and at f/11 or f/16 of the full frame 5D.
• In most cases I shoot from a tripod and use a remote release and mirror lockup.
• I post-process photographs and appropriately “work” the images using methods comparable to those used by traditional film photographers (dodging, burning, contrast selections, etc.) and some that are available in Photoshop (localized levels, saturation, color balance, and others).
• I apply two stages of sharpening to the full size images. First I apply “smart sharpening” to produce the greatest micro detail, while being careful to avoid unnatural sharpening artifacts. Then I apply some unsharp masking to provide “local contrast enhancement.”
• After downsizing the images for posting here, I do one more subtle unsharp mask operation to slightly increase detail in the smaller .jpg versions posted on the web.

Whew!

And that’s only a general summary. Individual images require different processing and different techniques. For example, it would not have been appropriate to do a lot of sharpening in my recently-posted photograph of evening rain in Yosemite Valley. On the other hand, in order to produce the best image it is sometimes necessary to use even more extensive post-processing techniques, such as in recent photos of early morning on the floor of Yosemite Valley, where the scene had an extremely wide dynamic range.

I’m usually happy to explain more about a particular image if you are interested, so just ask! :-)
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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.29.2007 :: Technique :: Comments Off

I am considering displaying the daily photos in somewhat smaller versions, as seen below:

Good thing? Bad thing? Either way is fine?

Thanks,

Dan

Reply via email or click the discuss link to post at the web site. (The latter requires site membership.)
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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.29.2007 :: Site News :: Comments Off

I’m beginning an experiment this week that may provide some benefits for this site and for site visitors. I’m going to try moving new photos to my Flickr account and serving the image content of this site from there.

Besides allowing me to more fully integrate the content of my several web sites (including dan’s outside), I’m hopeful that this may relieve the server performance bottleneck that affects the display of photos on my sites.

Don’t be surprised if there a few rough spots as I try to make this transition.

- Dan
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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.29.2007 :: Site News :: Comments Off

Yosemite Valley Grove at First Light. Yosemite National Park, California. April 21, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)

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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.29.2007 :: Photographs: Yosemite :: Comments Off

Dogwood Blossoms. Yosemite National Park, California. April 21, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)

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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.28.2007 :: Photographs: Nature :: Comments Off

Four Oaks, Yosemite Valley. Yosemite National Park, California. April 21, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)

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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.27.2007 :: Photographs: Yosemite :: Comments Off

Yosemite Valley View, Above Wawona Tunnel. Yosemite National Park, California. April 21, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)

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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.26.2007 :: Photographs: Yosemite :: Comments Off

This morning I posted a photograph from last weekend’s trip to Yosemite Valley, “Evening Rain, Yosemite Valley.” This is a tough image for me to work with. It is hard to resist the temptation to pump up the contrast and overdo the dodging and burning in order to get a more dynamic image - but that wouldn’t be very faithful to the very quiet and misty atmosphere of that evening.

I think there is still more work to be done on this one.
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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.25.2007 :: Commentary :: Comments Off

Evening Rain, Yosemite Valley. Yosemite National Park, California. April 21, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)

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G Dan Mitchell :: Apr.25.2007 :: Photographs: Yosemite :: Comments Off