Mammoth Sunrise

[frigidlight]

I took this shot yesterday morning at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. I was a little late for the sunrise due to a rancher and his old truck and belief that I shouldn't drive faster than 35, but I still got some good color. This shot is looking towards Mammoth, Fort Yellowstone, and the peaks of the Gallatin National Forest.

[dje]

Hi David and welcome

That's a lovely shot to start with. Timing looks fine to me as far as lighting is concerned. I like the colours and the general "mood" of the shot. Very tasteful.

Cheers Dave

[Colin Southern]

Hi David,

Welcome to CiC - great to have you with us

Nice shot!

I've got a couple of suggestions I'd like to show you though, if you're after C&C?

[GrahamH]

Great location. Great image. Love the blue shadows affected by the red sunrise making the purple effect, real nice.
I love hills and mountains.
Graham
(so why do I live in Toronto, it's soooooo flat)

[Bobobird]

Agree, an excellent image.

[FrankMi]

Hi David, with the exception of the watermark advertisement, I love the image! I can't wait to see what Colin's expertise comes up with for suggestions.

[frigidlight]

Thanks for all the comments! It was a beautiful, cold morning.

I've got a couple of suggestions I'd like to show you though, if you're after C&C?

Absolutely interested in C&C...is there a standard way of indicating that got this forum?

Hi David, with the exception of the watermark advertisement, I love the image! I can't wait to see what Colin's expertise comes up with for suggestions.

Thanks! What's your problem with watermarking like that?

[FrankMi]

Thanks! What's your problem with watermarking like that?

Hi David, I apologize if you are offended by my feelings on this subject.

The first thing your eye goes to in an image is text so instead of looking at the image, we tend to be reading the text instead.

It detracts from the beauty of your image. Sometimes folks put a very faint watermark and try to place it where it doesn't distract but in the end, a watermark is a advertisement and particularly when I am looking at beautiful art I just don't like the distraction.

If you'll pardon the analogy, it’s kind of like seeing a beautiful young girl with a Budweiser Beer tattoo. In short, watermarks are ugly.

[frigidlight]

Oh no worries I'm not offended. I have divided views on the watermarking subject. I don't put anything wider than 1000px online and I tend to assume that anything onlIne is gonna be copied...but a friend recently had an image at webers stolen and printed in an advertisement and his lawyer said that the lawsuit and damages are much easier of the image has a visible copyright like that. I'd love to not have them on there and I may ultimately switch to that but for now it's a matter of legal protection I think. It's an interesting conversation for sure.

[Colin Southern]

Hi David,

Some folks say "C&C OK", but other than that, nothing "official". I just didn't want to go to the trouble of doing an edit only to offend someone who only wanted to share a great image.

With regards to the image, here's a few thoughts ...

1. When you're shooting into an active light source like that, the sky portion normally appears brighter than the land - and yet in your image it's pretty even throughout which to my eye doesn't look quite right. So what I've done here is apply a graduated neutral density filter starting at the bottom so that the bottom is knocked back 1/2 a stop and the attenuation then decreases all the way to the top (where there is no atteuation). This also prevents the eye being drawn towards the distracting houses etc at the bottom (when it should primarily be on the sky).

2. Scenes lile this (with strong horizontal lines) take well to horizontal stretching, thus making the image more panoramic looking (which I feel is a good thing as it's a panoramic type image).

3. The image needed a little output sharpening, so I've applied an USM of 0.3 pixel @ 100%.

4. With regards to your watermark that Frank mentioned - I agree with Frank fully - get rid of the darned things. The ONLY thing they accomplish is yanking your eye towards them, and out of the normal flow of ones eye through an image. They totally ruin just about any image in my opinion.

So - with those points in mind - here's what I came up with ...

[FrankMi]

You might be interested in reading Trey Ratcliff's take on watermarks as he makes a good deal of income selling his images. Scroll down to the Thursday November 3, 2011, entry in his daily blog at http://www.stuckincustoms.com/.

If you are still interested, take a look at some of his best images, posted in original size, free to download, with no watermarks. This world-wide photographer has approximately 40,000 images that he hasn't yet had time to post process. http://stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/Po...our-favorites/

[Colin Southern]

Oh no worries I'm not offended. I have divided views on the watermarking subject. I don't put anything wider than 1000px online and I tend to assume that anything onlIne is gonna be copied...but a friend recently had an image at webers stolen and printed in an advertisement and his lawyer said that the lawsuit and damages are much easier of the image has a visible copyright like that. I'd love to not have them on there and I may ultimately switch to that but for now it's a matter of legal protection I think. It's an interesting conversation for sure.

Hi David,

At the risk of going over ground that's been trodden over so many times it's turned to mush ...

My thinking is "why deliberately ruin an image for a very high percentage of people in the (faint and unlilely) hope that it'll stop 0.000001% of people stealing it". If you have a good look around the net you'll find that very few of the top shooters do it. And even if an image does get used without permission (and yes, it's happened to me), is it really the end of the world? It's not like having a Rolex watch stolen (sore point, don't ask!) in that you still have your image - it's still yours - you still created it - it's still your baby. And it doesn't take any money out of your pocket (since they wouldn't have paid to use it anyway).

[frigidlight]

1. When you're shooting into an active light source like that, the sky portion normally appears brighter than the land - and yet in your image it's pretty even throughout which to my eye doesn't look quite right. So what I've done here is apply a graduated neutral density filter starting at the bottom so that the bottom is knocked back 1/2 a stop and the attenuation then decreases all the way to the top (where there is no atteuation). This also prevents the eye being drawn towards the distracting houses etc at the bottom (when it should primarily be on the sky).

2. Scenes lile this (with strong horizontal lines) take well to horizontal stretching, thus making the image more panoramic looking (which I feel is a good thing as it's a panoramic type image).
[/IMG]

Thanks for the comments, Colin. The weird thing is, this wasn't shooting into the light source. The sun was rising about 90 degrees to the right of this image. It does look a little more "normal" with the GND applied though. I'm not so sure how I feel about the horizontal stretching...it distorts the mountains and the buildings a fair amount. I might try a panorama crop of it though, keeping the original aspect perspective but still getting that wider view you mentioned.

As far as the watermark thing goes, I may consider taking them off my landscapes. I'm definitely going to keep them on my race photos as the value in those is people paying for downloads or prints and that would disappear if they stole the image. Also, the thing holding me up with the landscapes is that if someone does take the image and uses it in a commercial or for advertising or something, that IS lost value to me, just like with the race photos. That person is making a monetary gain off of your work without compensating you. I do like Trey Ratcliff's ideas on building "internet trust" however. I just can't get past the idea of uploading full size images to the web for free download.

[Colin Southern]

Hi David,

Even though it wasn't actually into the light (I thought you must have done a great job evening it out if it was!), if the viewer doesn't know it, there's still a little light that goes off that says "this doesn't look quite right" - IMHO anyway.

Your comments re: watermarking are pretty much the same ones everyone makes - but the reality is that in practice, it's just not a big real-world problem (in my experience it's not even a small real-world problem). I put all of my images in my galleries at 1000+ pixels - no water marks - and every morning the sun still rises in my part of the world If someone like one of my image so much that they use it as a wallpaper or makes a 9 x 6 print out of it then ... I'm glad I brought a little happiness to their day. If someone used an image of mine for profit then as much as I wouldn't like it, I've got better things to do with my time than go around suing them. To my eye having the water mark only ever does bad things to an image - it's a bit like buying a new super-car and then having a message that says "stealing this car may result in law enforcement action" painted in bold letters along the side; it doesn't change your legal position, but it does ruin the car. Let's be honest - are either of our images really THAT valuable that we're going to waste our precious few years on this earth worrying about someone stealing them? And if it was a big problem, then you'd think that folks like Joe McNally / Scott Kelby / Trey Ratcliffe would already be doing it. JMHO