Treman Gorge Trail from the Old Mill enters a narrow gallery looking here southeast along Enfield Creek, passing over a stone footbridge. I climbed down into the stream bed.

At the gallery entrance a flat limestone flagstone emerges a few inches from the flowing water. It is here I placed the tripod, different than the previous day’s exposures in that the tripod is lowered, closer to the water and path on right is not visible. The photographs here represent three exposures and two approaches to developing the image.

The first is a combination of two exposures. Both were f-stop 22 (the lens max) in Aperture Priority. One focused on the brighter portion of the stream, resulting in overexposure of the background; the second was on the bright background, resulting in underexposure of the interior of the gallery. In Photoshop the two were combined, using the exposure with the blown out background as the base. Elements of the stream were still too bright, so I stepped up blue saturation. The process took over an hour and the resulting TIFF file is 145 megabytes.

The next exposure sought to balance the bright background and darkness of the left side of gallery. In Photoshop I used the raw image dialog (presented on opening) to tone down the bright, bring out the dark and use blue saturation to tone down the bright water. This took 5 minutes. I was wrong in the previous post in that it IS possible to save these decisions….Photoshop writes an “xmp” extension file with the raw filename. If this xmp file is in the same directory as the raw file when opened by Photoshop, the previous raw dialog box settings are retained as defaults. Even better, the raw file is 24 megabytes compared to the 145 megabyte TIFF file.

Treman Gorge Trail from the Old Mill enters a narrow gallery looking here southeast along Enfield Creek, passing over a stone footbridge.

It is 8:30 am on a Memorial Day morning Robert H. Treman Park, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York. From the Canon ES-1Ds Mark III mounted with a Canon 24 mm f/1.4L II USM lens, on a Manfrotto studio tripod and hydrostatic ball head. I chose to save results to a TIFF file as it is not possible to save settings to the raw format.

Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills