The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.
Feedback Focus: Artistic + Technical
About This Image
Natural Bridges National Monument is a seldom visited National Monument in Utah. There are three natural bridges in the park. This is one of them, Siupapu Bridge. From the viewpoints along Ring Road that surrounds the park, These are very difficult to find and visualize well. In order to do that, one needs to hike down and follow the streams and the bridges on the Canyon floor. This is an old Kodachrome and it was scanned to my slide scanner. I’ve done a fair amount of restoration work in order to hide the film grain and other distractions common scanned slides.
Feedback Requested
Anything that would help me as a photographer improve my skills.
An excellent example of a natural wonder, well photographed and presented. Nit: lower left corner a bit dark. Also I notice this is from a Kodachrome slide. What slide scanner do you use? My attempts at scanning Kodachrome slides are feeble at best.
Thanks for the comment. Yes there is some dark area that was quite shaded in the left lower quadrant. In fact, I was able to bring out a fair amount of detail in it, but that made the rest of the image a little unworkable. I could go back I suppose, and try another approach to lightning up the dark area. It actually looks a lot better before I posted it. I have found that sometimes there’s a loss of detail when I post to the website as opposed to how this image looks on my monitor.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to natural Bridges, but it is an amazing place.
I have a Nikon LS 4000 scanner..
I think the software I use has a algorithm for Kodachrome.
David: To my shame I have not explored Utah as much as I would like so you’re poking me a bit with this. Looks like a target rich environment for sure and well worth the effort to get into less accessible spots.
I’m curious which operating system you’re using with your scanner. I have the same one but Nikon stopped providing updates and I’ve not been able to get it up on my new machines. I have an old desktop running Windows XP (!) that will work but it’s a monumental hassle. I have file cabinets of old Velvia with some pretty good images that I would love to digitize but hate to buy a new scanner. Thanks for any insights you might have.>=))>
My LS 4000 stopped working and I sent it to this guy who fixed it and got it running. His name is Gleb Schtengel and he lives in Virginia. I had to send my scanner to him and he had it for about two weeks before he returned it. Cost me about 250 bucks to get it fixed, but since I use it all the time, it was worth it.
I use vue scan x64 for by software on my scanner.
The hammrick brothers update the software regularly.
They are very knowledgeable about scanners and they can probably give you Gleb address or email.
But I don’t know is if you run vue scan on your Windows 11 machine or Windows10 machine if that’s what you have, it’ll work, but you need to be sure that you have a fire wire card in your computer and that the machine recognizes the fire wire card.
A fire wire card is pretty easy to come by online. Of course it depends on whether your scanner has a fire wire card or fire wire interface as mine does.
That’s the way mine works. The software seems to recognize the scanner so it works. And it works pretty well.
Although you probably are aware that the results of scanning a 35 mm slide are not always great and that you need to do a lot of noise reduction and other measures to make a decent image for that nature photographers network.
I’m getting a lot better making the necessary adjustments to get it ready for the website.
David: Thanks so much for the quick reply. I do not have a fire wire card on my computer. It may be more economical for me to investigate a new scanner. I said many bad words when Nikon stopped supporting.
