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 Old-growth aspen This was a gorgeous forest stand to work and photograph in, and, unfortunately, a bit of an oddity to find such large, old aspens left out on the landscape. My goal printing this image was to preserve the subtlety of tone and light & shadow, but still capture some of the brilliance of this stand in the early morning light. 
 Great grey owl hunting from thin aspen sapling I’ve written about this image before, and I wanted to print it today, as it’s got a very distinct separation between the sharp, in-focus owl and the completely blank sky where any grain or texture is purely an artifact of sensor noise and sharpening in post-processing. As I mentioned yesterday I tried the strategy of pushing the clarity and sharpening as far as I think looked good on my monitor, before backing off a bit. Yesterday the print came out looking really good (although it had a slight greenish cast that I hadn’t noticed on-screen), so I figured I’d try it on a much less forgiving photo today. We’ll see how it turns out…
 Colourful mixedwood trunks I’m writing this post as my printer churns away on this one, and I’m really interested to see how it turns out. I’ve often heard it recommended to push a given processing technique a little too far, and then ease back a little. By doing this, you discover the limit of the technique without crossing it. This sounds reasonable in practice, but I fear that you then have all your images at the edge of what’s acceptable, and perhaps sacrifice some subtlety. A certain subtley, is often harder to notice at the moment that you’re working on an image in Lightroom, but can easily be essential to making a good image a great image. I guess the goal is to be able to recognize when an image requires that subtlety, and to make sure that you’re not crossing that line. So with that in mind, I picked this photo (which, although I quite like it, I don’t think is very subtle at all) and pushed the clarity and sharpness to the limit of what I thought looked good on my screen. Once the print is finished, it’ll be interesting to see how well (or not) that translated on to paper.
 Tall dried grass I’m trying to print a wide range of photos as I start up on my Daily Print project to give myself a feel for what kinds of prints I’m fairly good at making already, and which areas I could use more practice. I’m also trying to use a range of tools and techniques that I haven’t used before, to try to add them to my regular workflow to be used as required. This image showed just a hint of “green fringing” chromatic abberation, so I tried out Lightroom 4.1’s new “Defringe” controls. I don’t know if the slight fringing would have been noticeable in a print originally, but it sure wasn’t after a little bit of extra tweaking. Cool.
 Boreal fern A good friend of mine, an old BC Parks naturalist, shared with me the following short verse that I am always reminded of when I come across ferns like the ones in this photo:
 Turbulent summer storm over Brazeau Resevoir We had a terrific thunderstorm this afternoon in Edmonton, and the past couple nights as well—it’s easily one of my favourite things about summer in Alberta. So, I thought for my print today I would choose an image of a wicked summer storm that I had the pleasure of experiencing (and photographing extensively) last summer. This storm rolled in relatively slowly, or at least, I could see it coming for quite a while over the open sky of the Brazeau Resevoir (just south of Drayton Valley, Alberta). The texture of the underside of the cloud was amazing, and each minute it was more beautiful and scary than the last… until the very last minute… I was photographing from the beach, and after the first few big drops I ran (RAN) back to my truck a few hundred meters away, and was thoroughly soaked by the time I got there. But it was all worth it, of course. It rained so hard it wasn’t possible to drive away, but it didn’t last long and by the time it tapered off, I felt like taking just a few more photos… Technically speaking, my favourite thing about how this print turned out is that I managed to hold the detail in the highlights in the upper-right corner of the cloud (yay!) If your monitor is reasonably accurate (most are not bad), and not set too bright (most are set way too high), you should be able to see faint wisps of cloud, even in the brightest parts.
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Copyright © 2009-2024 Jonathan Martin-DeMoor 
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