Rangefinder Magazine
May 2005

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Making Passion Your Life’s Work by Nick Melidonis

Passion is a strong motivator. A few years ago I made a lifestyle choice to discontinue my career in management training and lecturing to pursue my love of landscape and travel photography on a professional basis. For the first two or three years, my goal was to improve my skills and develop my visual literacy by photographing locations around the world that held a special interest for me. Although I live in Australia, a location I found myself revisiting on numerous occasions was Death Valley in California.

Death Valley’s rich diversity of landscapes, from vast salt pans to colorful deserts and sand dunes, has some similarity to Australia’s outback but with a uniqueness I find exciting. I noticed some crescent-shaped formations on the desert floor during a sunset shoot and thought they would make an interesting image. The original photograph was captured on Fujifilm Velvia film using a Pentax 645 camera with a 45–90mm lens, set at f/22. Most of my images are scanned on my return to Perth in Western Australia and receive only minor manipulation in Photoshop before being printed for publishing or display.

The original color transparency.	The first attempt after stretching the image and reducing it to grayscale.	The final completed image; print enlargements of this image on watercolor paper have sold well at exhibitions.

Occasionally, I attempt to create a landscape as a piece of stand-alone art, and as such I’m not concerned about representing a location exactly as I see it. There has been a lot of discussion in recent times as to whether manipulated images such as this are “real photographs.” It is also a topic I’ve struck many times during presentations I make, so I would like to offer my thoughts to the debate.

I heard it once said that if we play a Beethoven Sonata, we play with the notes as written (the negative), but we can interpret them in our own way when we play (the print). The speaker also pointed out that we don’t add notes to the score just because we feel it needs them.

The image was flipped and the mountains were merged without any stretching.

I’m inclined to agree—for Beethoven. There are some of us who also like to play jazz and would like the artistic freedom to interpret the music and the notes. One approach is not better than the other, just a different outcome. In my opinion, it does not make any difference what label or school we put an image into, it either works for the viewer or it doesn’t—and isn’t that what photography is all about?

Having worked with Photoshop over a number of years at a rudimentary level and realizing its enormous potential, I often find myself pre-visualizing a final image in the field that I can progress to its conclusion at leisure later. The ability and freedom to pursue this personal work is one of the main reasons I took up photography seriously in the first place. I think this is becoming the aim of increasingly more hard-working imaging professionals as they rediscover the pure fun and passion of photography.

The original color image (Figure 1) was fine, but the space in between the crescent was bland and did not really contribute much to the composition. I decided to stretch the image vertically, burn in the areas surrounding the crescent and dodge the highlights of the desert feature. My intention was to let the feature lead the eye to a couple of sand dunes and a glow in the far horizon. I also felt the image would work better if it took the look of a split-toned black-and-white print, so I converted the color image to grayscale via the channel mixer in Photoshop. This allowed me to tweak the red, green and blue channels independently to obtain a better balance in the tonal grading.

	Clouds from the previous day were added on a separate layer ready to merge with the desert feature.

My first attempt is illustrated in Figure 2, and it appeared to be heading in the right direction. Although the vertical stretch seemed to improve the crescent, the surrounding hills started to look a little out of shape. I decided to scan the hills true to scale and merge this part of the image with the elongated crescent. This merger improved the image, but I found my eye following the crescent to the horizon and being led to a featureless sky.

I had photographed some interesting clouds in Death Valley the previous day at sunset. I chose one of those frames, scanned it, converted it to grayscale and replaced the original sky. Fortunately, the glow of the sun in the new clouds was naturally positioned to where the eye would rest after it followed the crescent to the horizon. This was certainly an improvement, and I now began the laborious job of making all those elements combine seamlessly.

A lot of dodging and burning was needed to produce a dark, broody landscape, with the new highlights as the main feature. This was a task I used to carry out in the darkroom with black-and-white images, but I found the instant feedback of Photoshop more convenient.

In Western culture, our eyes prefer to read and scan information from left to right. I tried flipping the image vertically, and it seemed to work better. The merging of the different images, curve adjustments, dodging, burning, etc. meant a complex stacking of layers in Photoshop.

Most of the processes were kept on separate layers for maximum flexibility, labeled WIP (work in progress) and saved as a PSD file.

To ensure all was working as Photoshop designed it to do; I sought an informed opinion from a friend and colleague, Brent Acie, to assist in this process. Brent enjoys the rare combination of being a Photoshop guru while having the perspective and head-space of both a visual artist and a photographer.

We decided to confine each part of the process to a separate layer for maximum flexibility, and this paid off in the end. After several hours of fine adjustment and tweaking, the image was achieving the look I had initially pre-visualized.

The last stage was the split toning effect, and we felt a warmer pink in the highlights with a colder blue in the shadows would work best with this image. This was achieved by using curves and adjustments on a separate layer.

Finally some sharpening was done, using the unsharp mask in lab mode, and the image was then printed on a textured photo paper using an Epson 1270 (Australian model).

	A second Death Valley image that also scored gold at the Australian Professional Photography

“Desert Feature, Death Valley” scored highly at the Australian Professional Photography Awards held in May 2003 (see the final image on page 21).

In 2001, another image from Death Valley, taken only about 50 meters from this one but in the opposite direction, scored a gold and was part of my winning portfolio for the 2001 Australian Landscape Photographer of the Year award. Both images were pre-visualized and received a similar approach and treatment.

Nick Melidonis is a master photographer and the AIPP 2000 and 2001 Australian Landscape Photographer of the Year. Contact Nick via email at: nickphoto@iinet.net.au.