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This photo was taken in "Monument Valley," located on the Navajo Reservation that spans the borders of Arizona and Utah.
The valley was the most popular setting for old John Wayne westerns, and remains a popular location today for commercials and music videos. This road
also served as a scene in the Movie Forest Gump, as the site where Forest stopped running.
I took this photo while hiking in the national parks out west. Over the next few weeks, I plan to add photos from my hikes to my
Photo Album.
Standing in the middle of a highway -- 20 seconds from an approaching car -- isn't conducive to taking the time required to perfect your camera settings.
Therefore, the initial image I took needed some work in order to reproduce the scene as I saw it.
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I saw such a dramatic improvement in the image, I included it here for you to compare. Here's what I did. I started by increasing the contrast, and lowering the brightness. This took a little bit of extra work on the hill in
the left foreground, to avoid rocks in the shaddow "going totally black." To avoid that, I used Photoshop's handy
"magic wand" to select and then adjust them seperately. I then turned the wand to the road, which also needed to be darkened
without loosing detail. From there, I adjusted the color saturation of the entire image in order to make it "pop."
The skies in the background were also a little "noisy" -- a common product of digital photography -- which required
some special work to clean up. I used the magic wand to select the sky and pull it into another layer. I then
performed a median cut (basically, blurred it) on that layer, and then reintegrated the layer back into the rest of the
image.
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Camera: Olympus E-10
Mode: Program
Metering: Center-weighted Spot
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec
Aperture: f4
ISO: 80
Focal Length: 22mm
Contrast and Sharpness were set to normal.
Original File Size: 2240 x 1680, 1766K at 1/4 Compression
The camera was fitted with a Hoya HMC UV(0) filter.
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