Data: Canon 1DS Mk II, EF 100-400/4.5-5.6L, 1/640 @ f5.0, ISO 100

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to
see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object
enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of
Heaven reflected in the shadows.
::: Claude Monet :::

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the
artist, not of the sitter.
::: Oscar Wilde :::

It has taken me 2 years to get back to this image, to finally understand the feelings I had at the time I made it, to realise what was in my heart at the time and bring it out into the light. My photographs are like that, which is probably why I have so many in my catalogue (>120 000) and why I only ever delete the duds. I never know when an image that has been sitting back there in the shadows, patiently (or impatiently awaiting its time, will stir restlessly out there on the corner of my vision, will shuffle grumpily in the darkness, raising a small cloud of dust and attracting my attention.

I made this image last August (2007) from the top of the Mt. Buster Road or, as the locals refer to it, for reasons I have yet to learn, the Pig and Whistle Road. We stopped because the light was on the move, and interesting things happen, interesting things pop into view at times like this. Pools of light were drifting across the fore – and mid-ground while the blue drama of the Hawkdun Mountains behind made me feel for the entire world as if I was in some Wagnerian opera. Of course I didn’t feel that way at the time; I was in my subconscious, reacting to what I saw. The intellectualising would come later. I made perhaps 50 exposures (remarkably restrained for me!) and then we moved on.

Later, editing the day’s shoot, I passed over these and almost deleted them. But I didn’t. Something I didn’t recognise at the time, a hint, a half-perceived feeling held my hand from the delete key. I acknowledged the files and moved on to more obvious ones. Truth to tell, I never thought I would return, a bit like having a drink in a pub in the middle of nowhere to say  you have done it. The experience is not particularly memorable, the decor average, the beer warm, but you have ticked a box. You drive away and don’t look back.

It has taken a year, but now this image’s time has come. My friend Evelyn, when I offered her a print by way of thanks, chose this one. Frankly I couldn’t understand why. It didn’t look that special to me. But I had made a promise and it was time to deliver. So opened it and made friends with it. For a time I studied it. I took myself back to that place and time and recalled my feelings. I remembered the time (early afternoon, not a time when I tend to make photographs) and the weather. It was cold and bleak across the valley, but we were standing in a patch of sunshine, and it was warm. There was a lot of laughter and camaraderie among the group and it contrasted with what was in front of us. And there was my entry point; there was the key to my approach; there was the thing that had been patiently waiting a year to be said. My friend Freeman Patterson says that our subconscious is always 3 to 4 years ahead of us, and finally it has surfaced. I love the wild, high places with a passion. I crave the almost-monochrome solitude of the landscape and being alone, focused on making work, lost to the moment. I feel truly alive. But I love the warmth of human company, the company of friends, laughter and wine and sharing, which is why I love teaching. The landscape before me was a metaphor for what drives me. Of course I didn’t see it at the time. It has taken a year to bring it to the surface, to a place where my conscious can participate.

But how to work it? Somehow I knew this was a job for PhotoShop. Lightroom is fantastic, but I needed a finer scalpel (LR can be a chainsaw at times), more advanced tools to make the statement. And the right one had just popped into view. How coincidental. Not.

I have admired Nik Software’s PhotoShop plugins for some time, but never really taken the time to cross the room and introduce myself.  A month or so ago, I glanced up and Nik was looking flirtatiously at me.

I recently downloaded evaluation copies of Viveza, Color Efex and Silver Efex (the new black-and white conversion software) and started using them. Nice. All three are plugins, that is, they work inside PhotoShop rather than being stand-alone. You open up CS3-4 and they are there in a floating palette, ready when you are. You can work globally (ie on the whole image), or locally, using what they call control points to affect specific parts of the image, and you can add them cumulatively. Once you are done, you press Ok and It goes away and applies the edits you have selected. What is way cool is that it then creates a duplicate layer in CS. This allows you to further control the effect by masking, brushing, and using blending modes.

For this image I used a combination. I opened the image in Camera Raw and used a curves adjustment layer to render the tonalities. Had I opened it as smart object, I could then have gone back and adjusted the development in ACR later in the process.

I then applied a Saturation layer in Color Efex. The control here is infinitely superior and more flexible to using a standard CS3 Adjustment layer. Since this applied it globally, I used a soft brush and a medium opacity (50%) to bring down the saturation on the mountains, while allowing the warmth of the foreground to remain.

But I needed something else. I was looking at that moment through the mist of my own memory (a dubious creature at best) and I wanted to recall the warmth of the moment

I opened Color Efex again and this time applied a layer using the Classical Soft Focus filter. I tuned it back to be present without being in-your-face. The final touch was to go through, opening up the pools of light with my Wacom, using the dodge tool. I also took the road up the hill down about 20%. I contemplated using an adjustment layer to sharpen the mountains in the background (ie reduce the soft focus), but they were sharp enough. Too much sharpness would have been visually and psychologically odd.

So what’s not-to-like about Nik Software?

Short answer: the price. At $US199.95 for Silver Efex and $US299.95 for Color Efex Pro Complete, you aren’t far off the price of a CS4 upgrade. CS4 will do most of this, but it is a long and at times involved process. The Nik plugins are quick, intuitive and make it WAY easier to maintain your creative flow.

And enabled my subconscious to surface and make its feelings known.