Wagon wheels layers - a photo on Flickriver

            Rolled hard and put way wet seems to describe these old wagon wheels. Perhaps if they had been kept up, the old wheels might not have fallen apart. 

This old barn with its pens is near the banks of the St.Vrain River, left of this shot, and on the plains draining from the Rockies. The river valley falls off from the sandstone cliff on our right. This modest barn must have been under some flood waters infrequently in the past. It is truly amazing that photos can be shot here without a lot of clap-trap. I attended a Black Powder Cub Mountain Man Rendezvous here quite a few years ago. The original home was in a higher location off to the right and was cut from stone directly from the sandstone quarry we passed. Farm implements found a display home over to the right of the barn. Longmont's preservation saved this heritage in our Valley. 

This production probably requires explanation. This scene would probably be better captured earlier in the morning but than my shadow might have been in the shot so the sun would be higher. In any case, the shadow was objectionable and deep because of the day's harsh lighting. I knew right away this was a candidate for a second RAW layer to control the oblique shadows. 

The original shot was taken as a normal exposure and convert to a .TIFF slice in Lightroom. A second layer was needed. The f:/stop was boosted 1 1/3 stop in Lightroom and saved as a second slice. Both were adjusted for white balance in Lightroom. My Nikon imparts a cool balance. I dropped both into Photoshop with the lighter image dropped as a second layer over the base exposure. Both layers should be fine tuned at that point using Brightness/Contrast or Levels. The light layer was used to create a new Alpha Channel. Simply Ctrl-clicking on the Channel icon selects just the darker elements. I always do a slight feather that suits the detail. At that point I leave the selection but delete the Alpha Channel. I return to the Layers view and copy the lighter layer to the clipboard, using the Alpha Channel selection. Then I shut off the lighter layer view and pasted the transparent view of the lighter layer atop the stack. The densest tones present the most correction to the base exposure. I often readjust the shadow levels to maximize correction of the defective shadow. Saturations may also need adjusting. I also often Erase problem casts on the transparent layer. Don't worry, it is a transparency and usually editing can be blazingly fast and not particularly careful. Once an ideal, balanced image that has tonal defects corrected, a single layer .TIFF can be saved. Done. Note a single second layer is chump change and can be quick. I have gone to four layers to reconstruct nasty originals like my mine shaft with outside and inside tones controlled.

But in this case, I decided for extra-curricular butchery might go so I decolorized the shot, filtered it and tried to present it as a badly aged tin type. The finished two-layer original is in the Stream for comparison.

Taken in: United States / Colorado / Jessum (show map)

Taken on: March 10, 2011

Tags:

Wagon

Wheels

Transparent

Layers

Simulated

Tin

Type

Morse

Coffin

Homestead

Barn

Sandstone

Park

Farm

Agricultural

Early

March

St.Vrain

Creek

Flood

Plane

Longmont

Boulder

County

Colorado

Foothills

RockyPix

Michel

Kiteley

f/22

1/60th/sec

60mm

24-70mm f/2.8G

Nikkor

Normal

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Sets appears in: • Barns & Ignoble • Farms, Coffin more » • Farms, the St.Vrain « less

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