Red River Pro
PAUL ROARK

The Photographer
The emotional and technical quality of Paul Roark's images have been compared to those of Ansel Adams and with good reason. His eye has been refined over the years to capture images whose subject matter
speaks to the soul and, coupled with the impeccable control he exerts over his digital output, viewers of his prints are left breathless. He works out of Solvang, California and conducts yearly workshops at
Golden Trout Camp in the High Sierras. He also designs custom black and white inks for use with Epson printers.

The Client
This image was done as a self-assignment as most of my fine arts images are.

© Paul Roark

The Assignment
The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, with its many angles and shapes, has always fascinated me and so I decided to see what I could come up with.

The Execution
"I used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a Canon 35mm f/2 lens set to f/11 (for depth of field) at 400 ISO. I had found in experiments that four times the reciprocal of the focal length was needed for sharpness
where no Image Stabilization was used so in this case I'd need a shutter speed of at least 1/140 sec. With f/11 set, the light was such that Aperture Priority automatic kept the speed high enough. So I fired
away, hand held, as soon as I exited the building onto the patio of the facility.

"This image –Disney #1– is, in fact, the very first one I took at this first outing with the camera, and at 16x20 it is tack sharp. As a result, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II became my main camera and replaced my
medium format equipment which I had previously used with Kodak Pro Technical Pan film."

Post Production
"One aspect of digital that allows it to meet my quality requirements is the extent to which it can be sharpened without significant artifacts. As such, I often find that using 300% with a radius of 0.7 pixels looks good. I also find the full RGB color information to be very useful even in B&W. In particular, blue skies end up a boring gray if they are not "filtered" as I did in this image by selecting the red channel for the sky.

"To convert from RGB to Grayscale, I split the RGB channels into three Grayscale images and clone information over to my final as needed. This allows me to use the red channel for the sky, but draw on the green channel where filtering is not necessary. The color information also makes it much easier to select by color range for adjusting tone. Together, these tools allow me to match the style that I have used for years in landscape shooting with film, polarizers and red filters."

The Output
"As an independent fine art photographer and workshop instructor, I usually select what I think makes the most sense for sales or demonstrating different workflows with the B&W inksets I have designed and used. Red River has a broad range of very competitively priced papers that print well with these inksets. I have used Ultra Gloss 2.0 for promotional brochures that feature my work and also Aurora Fine Art Natural to produce warm-toned, fine art prints."

Contact
Paul Roark's web site is at: www.paulroark.com.