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Friday Slide Show: Twin Peaks Monochromes
7 December 2018
When we took these shots in October we strongly advised ourselves to remember them. We were on Twin Peaks to shoot the Blue Angels and we were worried we'd forget about this set and just what we wanted to do with them.
To reinforce that we wrote a feature about one of the images. But we played the edit straight and focused, for that piece, on the composition.
What we wanted to do when we shot these (which we've shot a few times on our hikes up Twin Peaks) was to turn them into monochrome images with some drama.
We edited these a bit differently than we usually do, although we still relied on Lightroom Classic. But we started with a preset: B&W 05 (you can't be too proud to try presets once in a while).
And we made our usual tonal adjustments (Clarity, Shadows, Highlights, Contrast -- and in that order) before we found the secret to enhancing the drama.
These images got as much as +25 units of Dehaze, which is a lot.
It was Dehaze.
These images got as much as +25 units of Dehaze, which is a lot. But, with Clarity at 40, it brought them to life.
They were all shot with the Nikon D300 and the 18-200mm Nikkor with a circular polarizer at ISO 400, usually at f8 or so and a shutter speed no lower than 1/30 second.
Twin Peaks is, itself, not much of an attraction. The attraction is the panoramic view of the Bay area and the Pacific Ocean. That's why people drive up there at all hours of the day.
But when you hike the hill, you get to know it. It may not be quite the same thing as a weekend in Yosemite but for the few hours it takes to get up and back down, you get to know the place.
Barren, perhaps, but full of compositional challenges.
We're not happy with about half of these images, frankly. We think we're on the right track but the secret hasn't been revealed to us yet. We could, we think, do better next time.
And we aren't just talking about exposure or composition. We edited these twice, making a slight improvement (or they wouldn't be the slide show today), if not completely satisfying ourselves.
But this is a start. And we're happy with a start. We can return to the hill knowing what fell short and try a slightly different approach to, well, get to the summit.
