Visual Art by Jacob Mann

Zabriskie Point

This is the picture of famous Zabriskie Point overlook in Death Valley, CA. I had spent 2 sunrises shooting this place. The first time I was shooting standing in the crowd of photographers. After I've loaded pictures on the laptop and reviewed them I've realized that  I need to come the second time. This time around I've found a different place for shooting and was there alone. But more importantly now I knew what was the biggest difficulty in shooting this view - too wide dynamic range. The contrast between parts lighted by the rising sun and shadowy foreground is too high for digital (and film) medium.

On the left you can see the picture from my first attempt, as you see the sky is overexposed, foreground is underexposed and both had lost their colors. I knew this will happen so I had my camera on the tripod and was bracketing every shot trying to get versions of each shot where different parts were normally exposed. So one shot was exposed for the sky, second for the middle part of the picture,  the third one for foreground.

Then it was back to Photoshop, a lot of selections, I've separated well exposed parts on different layers, then combined them, some levels and saturation adjustments and so on. Eventually I've got an image that is very close to what my eyes saw that morning.

And what about the lighted tip? I did it, I think that the tip should be the center of interest so it's consistent with the composition of the picture.