Scenes from the Salmon River Trail

The gallery:
http://www.pbase.com/fjp/sr_2005_06_jun_22

These photos are along the Salmon River Trail in the Salmon Huckleberry Wilderness, which is just south of the Mt. Hood Wilderness, 60 miles east of Portland, OR., U.S.A. It is an easy, very popular trail that goes through the best low elevation old growth in the neighborhood of Mt. Hood.

I enjoy taking specimin photos. Some trees are just interesting to me in their own right and the photos I take of them are not part of a general composition.

Samples from the gallery:

NIKON D2X    ---    31mm    f/11.0    1/3s    ISO 400

NIKON D2X    ---    34mm    f/16.0    1/2s    ISO 400

NIKON D2X    ---    40mm    f/11.0    1/15s    ISO 400

NIKON D2X    ---    18mm    f/11.0    1/3s    ISO 400

NIKON D2X    ---    31mm    f/16.0    1/30s    ISO 400

NIKON D2X    ---    24mm    f/11.0    1/4s    ISO 400

NIKON D2X    ---    27mm    f/11.0    1/6s    ISO 400

 

Let's hope you have good weather. Been rather spotty lately. As for the saturated colors, straight out of the camera (D2x) is like, too much. Photographing in the rain forest I have to process every image. It's not just a matter of white balance, either. There's so much greenery that the ambient light itself is green! Of course, your eye accommodates this when your immersed in it. The sensor knows nothing about it! So to recover what you actually saw requires (for me anyhow) fiddling with Levels (all three colors) in Photoshop. The blue histogram is slammed to the left and 3/4 to the right is just a flat-line. So I move the highlights slider to as low as 215 on some images. For red and green, I move the mid-tone sliders anywhere from 98 to 90. I also frequently make recordings of these settings so I can post-process quicker. Different parts of the forest require different tweaking, depending on the depth of the forest and the depth of the cloud cover. Things really get dicey when there are breaks in the cloud cover and photography becomes not worth the effort when the sun peeks out.

 

I mean for red and greeen.

 

They're nearly impossible right out of the camera. I've come to expect and accept that. But they're eminently fixable in Photoshop. It took me a while to accept the fact that I had to do what seemed at the time to be almost shocking alterations from what came out of the camera to achieve what you actually see in the forest. Now it's just routine. I know what to do, understand why I have to do it, and do it without a moment's hesitation or regret. It sounds like you've reached the same understanding.