100% Pure Candlelight. Mesa Verde National Park kicked off it's 100 year celebration with a special Holiday Ruin viewing. The trail to Spruce Tree House Cliff Dwelling was lined with Luminaria. Luminaria are candles inside paper bags, a southwestern holiday tradition. (sometimes called Farolitos)
30 Second exposure @ f5.0 ISO 400
Quite a bit of work here:
Converted from RAW to TIFF with some small adjustments to shadows, contrast color & touch of sharpening during conversion.
Levels & Saturation
created layer: top layer, gaussian blur in overlay mode Bottom layer, lightened, levels Saturation Flattened
Created new layer: Bottom, Levels for sky color and erased through top layer to see adjusted sky Flattened
Created new layer; Bottom, levels to "green up" tree and erased through top layer to show that adjusment Flattened
Cloned out hot pixels
converted to 8 bits
110% several times to enlarge
Image size to 360dpi, no resample, save
Image size again to 8x12 at 360dpi, save as
Image size again to 4x6 at 150dpi save as jpg
Image size again to 427x640 at 150 dpi
save for web
Whew! Hope you all like it!! It was very cold!
Statistics
Place: 10 out of 160 Avg (all users): 6.3029 Avg (commenters): 7.7857 Avg (participants): 6.1591 Avg (non-participants): 6.4083 Views since voting: 3416 Views during voting: 349 Votes: 208 Comments: 16 Favorites: 3 (view)
Loved this one! The eye naturally follows the path, and the colors are wonderful, they also highlight the differing textures, which to me is a big plus.
What a beautiful shot! I love the way you have the candle lines leading the eye into the shot and the dark of the hillside balancing the brightness of the path.
6 - Met the Challenge quite well in my opinion - "Use candlelight to create the impact of your photo.". Criticism; difficult, perhaps a tighter/more selective crop at the top and more 'enhancing' of the 'lights', somehow (camera dependent perhaps), may have made this better in my opinion.
This is beautiful. What an eerie little path. It would be nice to see a little more sky in this shot, but I don't know if that would be possible without a wider angle lens.
This winding magical pathway is illuminated with the soft glow of the candles that adorn the path. It really creates an invitation to the viewer to come follow the path around the bend as our eyes follow the trail of lights that curve off into the distance around the bend. Wonderful capture.
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