Histogram curve and photoshop

thebriansmith

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I've been doing digital photography for some time, and though I've done mostly portraiture and macro shots, I'm starting to get into landscape and nature photography.
My question is this: I've just run across a photographer I quite like whose images have a very unique feel to them. His web site is Light Travelling - Photography by Joel Koop . I copied a couple of his images into photoshop and was examining them and have discovered that, almost universally, his histograms have a particular shape--essentially a smooth convex slope starting high on the dark end and ending off on the high end. I am wondering how this might be accomplished? Is it a particular shooting technique, or some curves processing afterwards (or something between). I've never had curves look quite this way.
Anyhow, I'm looking for some explanation of his technique.
 
The histogram is merely a tool which shows how the brightness of an image is distributed. It shows how much of the image is dedicated to each brightness value. If the photographer's style is dark the histograms will reflect this.

His shots are almost universally under exposed and of low contrast giving the smooth effect and wonderfully soothing style. This looks like it's achieved by controlled lighting (i.e. most of his photos lack sun and were shot with cloud lighting), filters (ND Grad filters to darken the skies, polarisers to reduce glare on plants), controlling the exposure ensuring no highlights are clipped, and then post processing to adjust the brightness and contrast.
 
This guy gets out and about for sure.

I see some vignetted images.

To my eye most of his images are exposed near perfectly if you consider what he was trying to emphisize in that particular image. I think I see some evidence of a bit of dodge and burn in a couple but am willing to bet that most of his images require little PP.

NDG's and Polarizers are standard landscape photographer tools.
 

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