Saturday 18 February 2012

From Weppener to Bethulie...

At 671, 738, 769 & 783km's...

We left Weppener after a picnic on the lawn of the Dutch Reformed Church and looked forward to the last leg of our journey to Bethulie. The areas we drove through were quite remote with few things to see except windmills dotted all over the landscape.

click on images to enlarge...












Just before Bethulie we crossed the Slyk river and in the distance we could just see the tip of the symmetrical hill that was the 'star' of my previous post. It was also one of the few 'green' areas that we had seen with the landscape up to now  mostly just yellow grass fields...

I hope these images give a bit of the feeling of desolation and the heat of a hot summers day. To achieve this  'feel' I desaturated the images more than usual, increased the blacks and removed some blue from the sky. I used mostly Adobe Lightroom 3 for these actions with a few minor tweaks in Photoshop...

regards, Ivan...

3 comments:

Guy Platt said...

You have a good eye. Thanks for describing your pp, it makes for a very nice feel to your images. A bit in the style that Yanidel (yanidel.net) used to do. It is something which I keep meaning to explore .. at the moment other than straightening, exposure and perhaps some fill, I do very little to my images, but his desaturated look is great.

Guy Platt said...

What level desaturation are you doing (looks like somewhere around -40 but I don't know what the scenes looked like before you started)?

Unknown said...

Thanks Guy,

I have not gone back to look what my actual settings are but...Usually I do it on an individual basis and stop when it 'feels' right. In Lightroom I would decrease the saturation between 10 and 40 and increase the vibrancy to about 10. Increase Blacks to where it looks right. Structure slider to where there are no artifacts seen, like dark shadows around the clouds etc(usually between 15 and 100) and then sometimes decrease the blue saturation to make the clouds less intense. I also push the exposure-make it lighter - to where there is still some detail/texture in the highlights....I will try and do a step by step 'how to' sometime on my blog if I can figure out how to do it, I am a bit technologically challenged....