Old Analog

It's my last week here in Bozeman, and tonight I was feeling like I had nothing new to shoot. I've done a bunch of different kinds of photography in my room, and I am getting kinda bored of setting up the same stuff over and over. Might just be a mood tonight, but I wanted to do something different than I've done so far.

My solution was to photograph one of my photographs!

Last fall, I went on this really cool bike ride way up in the Crazy Mountains. We rode up a valley and the trail was the rockiest trail I've almost ever been on. It was crazy. Pardon my pun. There's a helmet cam video of the day here.

I brought my 35mm camera along for the ride, hoping to get a few cool riding shots. The I ended up taking only 3 pictures the whole ride, and only one that I really like. It was the first shot of the day, everyone had stopped to rest about half way up the trail and was looking at the huge scree covered mountain off the right. I pulled out my camera and backed off the trail a bit and snapped a picture.

It was a bright, sunny, completely clear day, so there was massive amounts of contrast and the sky was all one color. Technically, the photo isn't that great. When I printed it, I went with a 11x14 sheet of paper, so there was lots of detail. But still I couldn't get the contrast curve quite right. Maybe if I'd split filtered a bit it would have helped. But oh well, I'm still happy with how the print turned out. It really captures the day in stark contrast.

So to photo my photo, I set up two strobes on either side of the print, which I put on the ground. The strobes were set to 1/16 power, and I was shooting at f10. This ensured a sharp, clear, bright image.

It was pretty simple to photo, so I'll leave it at that.

In Lr, I raised the shadows a bit and most importantly applied lens correction. Most of the stuff I do I don't really worry about lens distortions. I like how cameras distort the world, so most of the time I leave it. However, for this application tonight, I needed the photo to be square and realistic.

I then moved the photo over to Ps and did the following.

1. Curves adjustment.

2. High Pass Sharpening

3. Added some clouds

I did this with my custom cloud brush, then applied a layer mask from a selection I made of the ridge line.

4. Make bigger clouds to add depth

I'm not sure if they look completely realistic? Maybe? I just thought they added some depth to the image.

So there you have it, an analog photo photographed digitally and then edited.

See you tomorrow!