Welcome
This site is dedicated to my long-time hobby, nature photography. For many years, I've been enjoying outdoor adventures throughout the southwestern United States, particularly in Arizona, Utah, California, and New Mexico.
Over the time, I keep adding links to other web sites that discuss tools and techniques used to capture and process digital images as well as tools and methods for generating graphical or display outputs.
Finally, links on the left lead to a variety of album images created over a decade of pleasurable work. They are organized loosely by location and topics.
For details on technical aspects of digital color imaging, visit my Digital Photography site at www.marcelpatek.com
About Some Pictures Above
The darkest image in the series was shot on a bright sunny day around noon. It is a digitally processed image of well-known plant Datura, found in the southwest and blooming during the
late summer. Datura is also known as Devil's trumpet or Jimson weed.
With a simple use of "Midnight blue" stylizing filter from the Nik Color Efex Pro series, a nice glowing effect is achieved. By pointing mouse over the picture on right, original and final shots can be toggled. Larger view can be seen in the "Wildlife" section.
The image on the left was shot in Antelope Canyon, Arizona. It comes from a bracketed sequence of RAW exposures that were merged together to provide 32-bit High Dynamic Range image. This composite was then tone-mapped to 16 bit per channel format
that can be properly displayed on standard monitors and processed by common printer drivers. I played with several tools to get results that I liked most. These include the Photoshop "Merge to HDR" functionality, Fred Miranda's DRI Pro plugin, Bracket script from Farrar Focus series, and Photomatix stand-alone software. This particular image was processed with Photomatix and again, two versions (the most underexposed and the most overexposed) can be toggled by pointing mouse over them. For more detailed view, see the Antelope Canyon album in the "Places" gallery.
About Monitor Adjustment :
All presented images are coming from color-managed workflow and have been converted to sRGB color space. Gamut of the sRGB color space is very close to the native CRT or typical LCD color space. Since this site uses Adobe Flash for image presentation, the best quality of images is achieved with Adobe Flash Player 10 (or later) installed. For the best view, your display should be calibrated to assure the best color fidelity. For quite a fair view, simple monitor adjustment will suffice.
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Using monitor setup menu, set screen contrast and brightness so that you can see all 20 rectangles - click here for more accurate chart.