Percolate

<—–Before

After—–>

[twentytwenty]
Landscape image by Photographer ed Fritz Percolate

Landscape Image by Ed Fritz Percolate
[/twentytwenty]

Percolate | Chenango River

The warm temperatures, sunny skies and watching the Chenango River percolate with swift moving snowmelt water was the inspiration to search for a unique location to capture some abstract images of the moment.

The Technical Layer

To read additional technical and location content please click on the tabs below.

nikon D5 setting for Percolate

I’ll travel with my D5 and the attached 70-200mm inside the ML1v2 Backpack in my front seat. In another compartment, I’ll have a quick kit pouch that I wear, and it includes Hoodman loop and four filters.  Knowing that I was going to make images of water, I attached my Maurimi filter to the 70-200m and began scouting out the area.  It was quick and easy because I was relying on Nikon Technology,  The VR stabilization on the 70-200mm and the focus speed of the D5 allows me to wander into situations that have modest light, and I can concentrate on the subject and story

While traveling on the interstate to attend the PPSNYS Executive Council meeting the following day, I was focused on locating a place to turn off and to make some water images.  I wanted to take advantage of an unusually warm spell of 55 degrees and sunny skies in mid-January.  I had noticed during the two-hour drive fast moving streams snow and swelling rivers due to ice and snow runoff.

I was also enjoying wearing my sunglasses for the first time since October and the feeling that spring light warmth on my face and hands. The sun was finally out from behind the gray clouds of the last few weeks.  As the day started to turn towards early evening, I knew I had to find a spot to make some images.   Just outside of Binghamton was the small city of Port Crane and a turn off to a fishing access site. Perfect.  No one was around and I started to scope out the area with the knowledge that the ensuing sunset could warm images up, so I was looking for eastward facing subject.

I walked around quite a while then I headed under a small bridge. It was counter-intuitive, the area under a bridge is dark and in shadows.  I soon visualized that under this bridge the river was in good location to have the setting sun throw some color and illumination while the bridge held back overexposures. This shooting location was unusual.  I waited for awhile until the sun began its descent and watched as the water surface began to glow.

FritzImage photograph of Fishing Area

I have a few tricks that I use when I start my post-processing. They are subtle tricks and I know they differentiate my workflow from almost everyone else. I try to tell people about it, but everyone is so caught up in LightRoom and Adobe ACR that they can not comprehend any benefit from actually owning your RAW content.  Most workflows go from DLSR RAW image info into LR or PS. Most people don’t realize that Adobe does not have the proprietary Nikon NEF raw info specifications, so Adobe adds their spices to simulate Nikon Raw when you use the Adobe Raw processor. Sometimes it does a good job, other times it is just awful.  After seven years, 1,000 article, extensive testing and researching, I find that Adobe brightens your Raw content, color definitions are often incorrect for certain blues/red hues and finally, they import the sharpening settings that you set in your DLSR for LCD viewing of jpg.

The Adobe raw converter in LR or PS is like any other 3rd party Raw converter; it tries to interpret the Nikon Raw file.

To get to the quality of the real Nikon Raw NEF converter…

  1. Open your original image using Nikon software, Capture NX-D or ViewNXi. Then close the app, using the red dot on the top left.
  2. Once you have done that, duplicate and copy the original image to a new folder, rename that image with -cc suffix.  (-cc means color corrected)
  3. Then open the duplicate image with Capture NX-D and strip out sharpening and clarity (these can create artifacts and halos later on in your post processing)
  4. Then convert the picture to a .tiff, rename image with -NXDcc suffix, then save that image in a new folder
  5. At this point, you have a ‘baked’ image using Nikon’s RAW proprietary secret sauce and image has no sharpening,
  6. You can now open in ACR make any adjustments and open as an object in Photoshop.