The Making of a Photograph: White Sands National Park

[t00l1024]

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Attempting to try something a little different, with hopes that others may learn and follow suit. This may be appropriate for the Monochrom forum or Digital post processing forum. My intent is to describe my thought process when seeking out a photograph, and the process of making it.

This is the raw output from a M10M + APO Summicron-M 50mm, taken October 27, 2023 around 3:45pm at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. It was a cool day with clear skies, and VERY bright. The sand dunes are nearly white, with harsh, contrast shadows. Having plenty of experience shooting here, I wanted to add little additional contrast and used a yellow filter on the Summicron.

What I was looking to capture while hiking around: Gradients! Tonal ranges. Negative space. Ovals and other shapes.

The days preceding my visit there appeared to have been rain, leaving the sand to have a “coarse” texture to it. I didn’t care for the way it left the surface of the sand but it ended up making for some different photographs.

So…..While hiking back to my car, the sun cast a shadow across this dune, leaving a beautiful arc. I wanted to capture the long, flowing lines, gradients and eclipses. Image was captured at ISO 160 and f/16 (super blight out) and underexposed 1 stop (ETTL) equated to 1/125th of a second. Pretty much right on cue for the Sunny 16 rule. Nothing really special done for exposure and composition.

I’m a Lightroom Classic guy, so the following is my process… (broken up into separate posts)

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First thing for me is to delete the custom point curve from the Tone Curve. Reasoning will become apparent later. You can see how flat the image is with very little contrast and a compressed tonal range. In my mind, I think this is completely expected. The Monochrome DNGs have sooo much potential and know the data is there. It just needs a little help.

There are 4 edits I’ll describe:
1. Draw some attention to the texture on the sand in the foreground (bottom right)
2. Darken the sky and get the light on the top of the dune to “pop”
3. Fade the bottom left corner to get an overall egg or oval shape of light
4. Fix the compressed tonal range

Step 1: I wanted to draw attention to the texture in the foreground, so the first step was to create a large, radial gradient mask and placed the center at the corner of the image.
- Increased Dehaze to 20
- Increased Texture by 25

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Step 2: The best way to select the sky and “ridge” of the dune is to use Lightroom’s Create New Mask -> Select Sky. Goal is to get the tone of the ridge as close to white, and darken the sky. The goal here is to”DRAMA!”
- Increased Contrast to 25
- Increased Dehaze to 50

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Step 3: Egg shape. For this step, I created a large radial gradient mask, keeping note of the where the gradient “falls off” into the lower left corner. It’s OK that I cannot fully cover the upper right corner, as that will work in our favor.

Then, invert the mask and apply some adjustments.
- Increased Contrast by 15
- Increased Dehaze by 20

 

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Results from Step 3

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Step 4: You can see from the histogram that we now have a wider tonal range than from the original. This last step is to stretch that further by using the Tone Curve that was set to linear at the beginning.

Using the top right point, and separately the bottom right points, adjust the output value to stretch out the overall tonal range. I had to be cautious about the upper portion of the dune, as not to blow it out.

 

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Done! It’s not some magical masterpiece. However, it’s not too bad considering this capture was on my way back to the car. 🙂

I hope you found this useful. If you did, maybe try submitting a similar post with your digital post processing method.

Cheers!

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[fotografr]

I think the result is a superb image, but with just one exception. When you created the gradient mask in step 1 it looks to me like you were a bit heavy with the texture increase. The line between the two areas is too obvious so I would have dialed the increase down to perhaps 15.

I hope there's appreciation here for your detailed explanation because there's a lot to be learned. Thanks for doing it. 

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8 hours ago, fotografr said:

I think the result is a superb image, but with just one exception. When you created the gradient mask in step 1 it looks to me like you were a bit heavy with the texture increase. The line between the two areas is too obvious so I would have dialed the increase down to perhaps 15.

I hope there's appreciation here for your detailed explanation because there's a lot to be learned. Thanks for doing it. 

OMG. I completely missed submitting a original, unedited photo to do a compare/contrast with. My apologies! Since I cannot edit the original post, I'll attach it here. This image is supposed to go after the first paragraph in post #2.

I was hoping to draw the reader's attention to the histogram, and changing the point curve.

Addressing your comment: I was 50/50 on how much to edit (if, at all) the foreground texture. You can see from the original there's already a natural texture and inconsistent sand that draws you to look at the bottom of the photo. Yes, perhaps it didn't need much editing at all and I was a little heavy. Might have been better leaving it as-is,

Appreciate the comments!

-tim

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[fotografr]

Remarkable improvement. Seeing the original file makes a big difference, particularly since we can now see that the inconsistency in the sand texture was clearly there to begin with. Terrific job. 

[gmvtex]

Tim,

Excellent work and how wonderful for you to have explained both your thought process and the techniques you used to implement your desired enhancements.   B&W holds so much promise, but can be deceptively difficult to get the most out of it!

Cheers,

Greg