Ruby Beach Gallery
Thursday, May 3, 2007 at 10:11AM
Dan Colvin in Photography

Since I've been talking about Ruby Beach, I've added a gallery of images I've taken there. You'll find mostly photography in this gallery. In honor of the new gallery I decided to work further on more recent project, which is pictured here, Ruby Beach Creek.

 rubycreekbeach.jpg

This has been a problem print for me and I continue to hammer on it. I'm half satisfied with the version you see here. It is a stitch up of three images taken from the south side of the lagoon behind the beach. Usually I try and stitch up from a standard format lens, because the distortions are not as difficult to match, but in this case I used my 40mm Hasselblad lens which is quite wide, maybe the equivalent of an  18 or 20 in 35mm format. The weather was gray this day and there is a very high dynamic range between the sky and the shadows under the drift wood logs. (click on the image and then click on it again to get a larger view. On this website you can usually go two layers deep with clicks to give you larger images) 

I've found a way to trick my scanner by scanning my negatives as positives. For some reason this enables me to get a histogram where all the tones are represented with out any clipping. I then invert the scanned image in Photoshop. Since I always scan to 16bit files I have a lot of data to play with in resolving the tones. But the initial look is not what you would expect to see in a black and white print. I personally find it difficult to conceptualize my way back to the proper gamma curve for a good print.

Article originally appeared on Daniel Colvin Fine Art (http://dancolvin.squarespace.com/).
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