Can you see the Lady in the Wind, with her hair blowing back over the rocks?
Before I discuss this photo I wanted to mention what I mean by ”artograph”. I personally believe, and many of you may disagree, that photography is a form of art and that each photographer can take his own artistic path in each of the photos he produces. I do not believe that photography must be realism. After all, our camera sensor doesn’t have nearly the dynamic range of our eye and who can say if what our eye see’s is reality? Our camera attempts to capture things as it see’s, but it too makes decisions on what the scene is: it selects it’s own white balance, contrast/saturation levels, etc. We then tweak those in post-processing to do whatever we want to do with a photo.
Ok, now I’m rambling. Back to the point…. when I took these photos in Antelope Canyon I noticed that the white balance played an important role on the color in the photo. While playing with the White Balance on this photo I noticed that depending on what temperature I used I could either get purples, yellows, or oranges. The reason I call this an ”artograph” instead of a ”photograph” is because I exported this photo into Photoshop 3 times: each with different white balances, once to get purples, once to get yellows, and once to get oranges, and then blended them as I saw fit.
Processing:
– Exported 3 times with 3 different white balances (for purple, orange, and yellow colors)
– Masking layers to get the color in the spots I wanted
– Highlight adjustment (recover from clipping)
– Some slight dodge/burning
– Curves adjustment
– Note that I did not do any saturation increasing or anything else in Photoshop to alter the color other than using different white balances. I actually decreased the saturation in the purples because it was a little much.
– Sharpening using Nik Sharpener Pro 3.0
Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S:
25mm, f/8, 1/4 sec, ISO 200, Feisol Tripod
