Chapin Spectre

Image Critiques Weekly Challenge
1

Chapin-Spectre-DSC-4421-4423-EditA100-25.jpg
Chapin-Spectre-DSC-4421-4423-EditA100-25.jpg2001×1340 1.11 MB

Critique Style Requested: Standard

The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.

Description

This image brings back so many fond memories of my first winter trip to RMNP in December 2006. I don’t really recall what brought me to Colorado. Perhaps a medical conference in Denver but I really only remember going to the 2014 conference. Oh well, I tell everyone that my gray hairs are memory cells that have escaped.
This was taken with my first DSLR. I was a Minolta film shooter and loved the Minolta M7 which was far and away the best film camera I ever owned. Those of you who may recall the history of DSLRs will remember that Minolta was very late getting into the digital age. The company that had produced the first effective auto focus system was at that time so far behind Canon and Nikon that they couldn’t even see their taillights. Minolta finally came out with a DSLR but the company was in trouble and I held off, contemplating a switch to Canon or Nikon. At the time I had a small fortune invested in good quality Minolta glass so selling it and starting over was something I dreaded. And then Sony came to the rescue. They had a full lineup of digital P&S cameras but had not branched out in the DSLR game. They bought Minolta and the A-mount so that all of my lenses were compatible so I bought the A100, hoping that Sony would get into the DSLR market and stay there. In many ways the A100 was an inferior camera to the M7 but it had a digital sensor and that’s what I craved.
Another amusing side story was the difficulty I had setting this shot up. I went up Trail Ridge Road to the overlook of Chapin Pass. I had looked up the sunset direction well ahead of the trip and figured the light would be pretty good on the pass. When I got to the overlook and took out my compass it was all over the place. I couldn’t tell north from south or anything in between. All of a sudden I realized that the culprit was my mittens which could be peeled back to let my fingers operate the camera and had two little magnets to keep the flap from flopping around. My compass nailed them every time. With the mittens stashed out of the way true north appeared and I got to concentrate on the light and this shot. >=))>

Specific Feedback

Even at ISO 100 this is a little noisy. This was a stone age sensor compared to my A7rIII. Lucky for me Sony did stay the course and look where they are now!

Technical Details

Sony A100
Minolta 24-85 @ 35mm
ISO 100, 1/5 @ f8

Critique Template

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1 Like
2

LOL! Great story about the magnets in your mittens thwarting your compass!
This is another very engrossing image. The colours and clouds are just spectacular, set off perfectly by the dusting of snow.
Not the tiniest nit from here.

3

Bill, this is a lovely wave cloud lit from below by the sun. The snowy mountains also look great. Have you tried running this through LR’s AI noise reduction? This would make a fine print with NR (and removal of the slight dust spot near the right center).

4

Mark: Great idea and I wish I could. I’ve had a lot of trouble getting the AI noise reduction to work and when I was working this file there was a message that AI noise reduction wasn’t available for this file type. I have Luminar Neo so I may try there.

5

Sad, but not surprising that LR’s AI Denoise doesn’t work on older camera models or on DNG files (I just tried), maybe in future releases…

6

That’s a cool cloud! I really like this! The color contrast between the blue and the cloud is striking. You’ve included enough of the landscape to give this nice depth while still making the sky the key player.

Re Noise reduction: I’ve been using Neat Image for a long time. It is currently on v9 which supports PS CC 2025 and previous versions. Windows or Mac.

One thing I noticed in your large version is there appears to halo along the edge between the mountain and the sky. Other than that small thing, this is a really fine image!
-P

7

I use Topaz Denoise and have run a lot of older images through it and never had it fail. I do it first thing in PS. Amazingly, it also deals with Fuji pepper grain on old film scans.

8

Hi Bill,
I am loving the sinewy nature of that cloud and the warm kiss of light illuminating it as it hovers over those snow capped mountains. You do not notice it so much in the smaller version, but when you open up the large one the viewer is treated to some wonderful warm areas of light along the taller sections of the mountains. That completes the image for me. I had to chuckle after reading about the magnets on the mittens. Very nicely done; no suggestions from me.