Image of the Week: Mountain Palm Springs, Anza-Borrego Desert, California

This was a difficult scene to capture.

Early morning light can be tough, especially in the desert. The exposure range from deep shadows to sunlit highlights can be extreme, enough to overwhelm the ability of most digital and film cameras to attractively record the scene. Using a large format camera and black-and-white negative film, the standard approach is "expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights". In other words, you "pull your film" by overexposing it in the field and underdeveloping it in the darkroom. The resulting negative has lower contrast and greater shadow detail with controlled highlights. Then it's simply a matter of spending some time in the wet darkroom to extract a print that matches your vision of the scene, and that's often easier said than done.

I prefer a hybrid approach. A marriage of analog and digital: a traditional B+W negative, scanned, processed in Photoshop, and output to archival pigment inkjet printer.

I scan my film using Vuescan, a simple yet powerful scanning application. Not only is Vuescan compatible with virtually every modern scanner on the market (as well as a countless number of long-discontinued and manufacturer-abandoned models), it's also able to produce RAW scans of your transparencies and negatives, meaning you get a scan-once, process-many solution. After saving the scan in Adobe's Digital Negative format (DNG), I can import the file as many times as I'd like using Photoshop's Camera RAW interface and optimize the digital development settings for different areas of the image. Once inside Photoshop, I layer the multiple imports and create a series of masks that display only the optimized areas of the image.

This means I can produce a large format image with beautiful highlights, detailed shadows, and arrestingly-textured midtones without spending hours and hours in the darkroom doing all sorts of dodge-and-burn gymnastics. I get a better result that more closely matches what my eyes saw at the time of capture.

Mountain Palm Springs is one of my favorite spots in the Anza-Borrego, and I love getting there long before sunrise to watch the stars fade away and the morning sun climb over the horizon. On the morning I shot this image, the sun was brilliantly illuminating the hillside in the background while the soft, shadowed light reflected by the arroyo wall behind me warmly lit the palms. A straight exposure would not have successfully depicted the range of tones visible to your eye.

Have questions or comments? Send me an email.

Technical Data

I photographed Mountain Palm Springs, Anza-Borrego Desert, California with a Tachihara 4x5 Field Camera and a Schneider 210mm ƒ/5.6 Symmar-S lens on Kodak TMax 400 (TMY-2), exposed at EI 200 to pull one stop and lower the overall contrast. The exposure was 4 seconds at ƒ/22. I processed the film in XTol diluted 1:1 for 8 minutes at 20° C.

Other Images of the Week