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Friday Slide Show: Glen Canyon
22 January 2021
When we left the house yesterday, we had no idea where we were going. We just needed some exercise. A good hour-long hike would do. So we brought along the Olympus E-PL1 to make sure we didn't come home too soon.
That strategy forces us to walk around until we find something interesting to photograph. Preferably on public property because we're always a little skittish about pointing the camera at someone's home. They may not take it as the compliment it is intended to be.
So we walked by a couple hundred homes and a few businesses before we found ourselves looking over a cliff at the high school football field and track. With school out, we saw a lot of older people walking laps around the field on the track.
We ought to get down there, we thought. So we dodged a FedEx truck and circled around the neighborhood until we got to O'Shaughnessy and crossed that wide road between waves of traffic.
We thought we might make something of these compositions as monochromes.
But once we got to the other side, we saw the rock formations of Glen Canyon staring back at us and we thought, Why not? So we uncapped the 14-42mm II R kit lens and took a shot.
The colors were pretty flat. Plenty of green but the grasslands and trees didn't much stand out from each other.
But with a sky full of clouds, the tonalities were intriguing. We thought we might make something of these compositions as monochromes.
You can compare these black-and-whites to our slide show of the canyon in color from 2015 to see how far we've pushed things.
And push we did. We paid a lot of attention to the histogram as we cranked up the contrast. No slider was spared. We brought back highlights, opened the shadows and reset the black and white points. Sometimes we had to shift the entire exposure.
And when we had turned the flat image into something with some dimension, we started changing the luminance of the underlying hues. The yellows and oranges went one way, the greens and blues another.
We think we got there.
We got to the canyon first of all. And we got home next. But it wasn't until we went a couple of rounds with the images in Lightroom that we got there.
