Posts in Category: weather
3/17/2009
Dawn: Hebrides
Back to Scotland for a time. Dawn from the yard at the our B&B on North Uist in the Hebrides.
The sky dominated the landscape, but the landscape itself holds interest, with the lochs in the midground and the tiny flowers in the grass in the foreground.
Exposure was particularly difficult as all the light was in the sky, and exposing for the sky left the foreground very dark. This is a shot that requires previsualization of the what can be done in postprocessing (and what can not). Only recently, months after my first attempts, have I leaned the tricks in Lightroom that get me close to what I saw while standing there.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/60th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom I used three graduated filters. One down from the top to darken and intesify the sky. One up from the bottom to lighten the foreground and increase both global and local contrast. One in the center to intensify the dawn colors. Plus some Fill light to bring the foreground up even more and global adjustments for Vibrance and Clarity. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Scotland.
3/16/2009
On Deck
You can always see larger versions of the image by clicking anywhere in it to go to the Smugmug page.
On the waterfront in downtown San Diego at sunset. Planes on the deck of the Midway in the foreground, the SD skyline in the back. The light is, of course, the subject here as much as the buildings, but it is also about the shapes and the way they fill the frame. This is where the long zoom range of the Super-zoom cameras shows its real worth. From where I stood at the end of the Fish Market point, near the bow of the Midway, I had an all but infinite range of perspectives to choose for the shot, just by pressing the zoom button.
This shot (Sony DSC H50) was taken at just about 100mm equivalent, to catch some of the color of the planes on deck and put the buildings up fairly large against the sky. F4.0 @ 1/400 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom I applied a little Recovery for the sky, some Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel, and the Landscape sharpen preset. I also added some Fill Light to show detail in the shadows under the deck.
I considered cropping it tighter, removing the all but the top of what appears to be a parking garage and the hull of the boat below the deck, but, I decided that when viewed large, the delicate tracings of the tree against the building in the lower left are worth keeping.
From San Diego 2009.
3/2/2009
Glencoe (Glenshiel) Scotland: click for other sizes on SmugMug
As promised, more brooding Scottish scenery.
One of the most famous views in Scotland, maybe in the world. The pass at Glencoe, with the view of the Seven Sisters (weather permitting), looking out over Fort William. Site of one of the most infamous battles in the world, the massacre of the McDonnalds by the Campbells in 1692, apparently at the order of the King of England.
Take a long look at the image before reading any further please.
The trouble with flying visits, most visits to anywhere really interesting for that matter, is that you only get one chance, one day, often one moment, to capture something that, in reality, you would prefer to spend a lot of time with, over days and weeks, to get a really satisfying image. Maybe even that “you would need to spend a lot of time with” etc.
We did stop here for about 10 minutes, and I was able to get out away from the car, up a little trail through the heather to grab this shot. But the ferry from Skye was waiting, and we had a schedule to keep.
It a case like this you take the light and the weather you get. End of story.
This was not an easy shot. The range of light in the sky was too great and exposing for the highlights left the foreground way too dark. Believe me, I tried it. Then too, the camera was not working at its best aperture and I knew there was danger of Chromatic Aberration and Purple Fringing on the exposed edge of the mountain on the left. (One of the limitations of any long zoom and most Point and Shoot sensors.) Still… got to try.
The result took a lot of work in post. Ligthtroom dealt with the CA and PF fairly well, and I could bring up the foreground with Fill Light and curve adjustments, but I had a large area of over saturated sky that I did not like. I exported the file as a Photoshop document and opened it in Photoshop Elements 7.0 (simple as choosing Edit in External Program from the Picture menu). There I used the clone stamp, set at 10% transparency, to paint some clouds over the burned out section of the sky. I don’t like to do this, but needs must. I will very likely never get back to Glencoe again. I saved the file, again, as a Photoshop document to preserve all the detail, and finished editing in Lightroom, adding some Clarity and Vibrance and using the Sharpen Landscape preset, pulling up the luminance of the purples and greens a bit in the HSL panel.
The final image is a close approximation of what I really saw, and what I wanted to capture in the fleeting moments I had there. Best I could do.
It is shots like this that make me think long and hard about whether I should be carrying a DSLR on these trips. ???
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/125 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
From the Scotland gallery.
2/28/2009
Scots Weather along the A82
One of the hardest things to photograph is weather. Atmospheric effects. Fog. You see things with the eye in weather that you just can’t capture in an image.
But you can try.
This valley along the A82 in the Highlands somewhere between Glasgow and Skye was filled with the coming storm, or passing storm on that day, and I was after the veiling effect of the cloud against the mountains on the far side, and that little bit of sun (almost…well at least a lightening in the atmosphere) creeping up the valley ahead of the cloud.
With a shot like this, you do your best in camera but you know that most of the work will be done in post. I counted on the Recovery slider in Lightroom to let me pull detail from the veiling cloud and shot on Programed Auto. As it was, the image required both Recovery, and some fill light, as well as a bit of adjustment of the curve at the high end to balance the light for this effect. I also moved the black point slightly to the right to add intensity. Some Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel, and a touch of added saturation for the yellows in the HSL panel. Landscape sharpen preset.
I also applied a slight crop at the left and top…left to eliminate a bit of road and two cars, and then top to balance the composition. This had the advantage of shifting the little grove of trees in the mid-ground off center, which I like.
With all that I got close to what I was after. Close enough. With weather, that is about as close as you get. If I stand back from the memory and just look at the image, I like it!
From Scotland.
PS.
After some comments, especially concerning hot white area at the upper left (fully saturated) I decided to take another crack at post-processing this image in LightZone. If you don’t know LightZone, it is wonderful tone mapping program, with some very unique features and abilities, not to mention a powerful set of styles: presets which make major effects possible in a single click of the mouse. Though it is designed, like Lightroom for that matter, to work primarily with RAW files, it does wonders for jpegs, if there is enough data in the file. In addition to dealing very effectively with a wide range of light values, it provides local contrast enhancement which can bring out a startling amount of detail in a landscape, pumping up the molding or modeling of even small details until they look much more 3 dimensional.
Take a look at the image below and compare it to the Lightroom version above. In a single click of the “relight” button, LightZone shifted the tone values to bring the burned out white area in the upper left back, but there was evidently enough information even in the burn to provide shading, so that the area was not filled with solid gray. The light now flows naturally from dense cloud cover in the right to misty cloud on the left. I used LightZones sharpen and color tools (adding some luminance and saturation), and finally applied a second relight to pull up shadow values and deepen the molding of details. The result is impressive. Not necessarily more true to life, but certainly striking.
LightZone Version
For a larger view, click the image.
S. Ingraham
2/26a/2009
Loch Lochy Improved?
After a few comments on today’s Pic of the Day, please see Loch Lochy, I decided to edit out the gravel heap and tree in the center, just to see how it looked? I used the clone tool in Photoshop Elements 7.0 and carefully painted out the both the pile and the tree.
What do you think?
It is certainly a different image. I am not sure which I like best.
See it larger here. Loch Lochy Improved.
And for a really extreme tweak, take a look at this.
2/26/2009
Loch Lochy
I thought we might dip back into my images from Scotland for a few days here, while I am at home working. My trip to Scotland for 4 days in late August last summer was one of the most amazing and photographically rewarding intervals in my life so far. 1400 miles in 4 days, with a full day on the Hebrides.
This is Loch Lochy, near as I can tell from the map, one of the highland lochs along the road from Glasgow to Skye on what might, at least by my experience, be a typical Scottish summer day. We stopped just long enough for me to pop out of the passenger seat and grab a few shots, as we had a ferry to catch at the end of the day. Still, I could not pass this view up. The brooding sky, the wind ruffled water, the intense green of the foreground and the misty blues of the mountains in the back, all under folded gray…it has a lot of atmosphere. Even the heap of gravel on the shoreline can not diminish the grandeur.
Shooting in Scotland, the most difficult challenge is balancing sky and land, both in a composition sense and in an exposure sense. You don’t want to lose the amazing drama of the sky, but you need to get enough light on the landscape to capture the greatness there too. Lightroom helps, in that I can shoot higher exposures for the land values, and pull back the sky using the Recovery tool. I am always amazed at how much detail there is in the light areas of a digital file if adjusted correctly. And I am working with jpegs. I am sure there is even more in a RAW file.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide angle (31mm equivalent). F4.5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
It is from the Scotland gallery.