Posts in Category: Lightroom
8/3/2009
Morning Marsh Meadow
Low light. Heavy dew catching the light in tiny star points. Mist closing the distance. It is a mood…a distinctly morning mood, on the marsh, near the sea, where meadow grasses mix with the reeds, and heather, just coming into bloom, mixes its pinky-purple hue.
Sony DSC H50 at about 200mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Cropped and straightened in Lightroom. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Blackpoint to the right. Landscape sharpen. Graduated Filter effect from the top to reduce brightness and increase contrast slightly. Graduated filter effect from the bottom to increase brightness, Clarity, and Contrast.
And a close up: same position at 465mm equivalent. Cropped for effect.
Morning Marsh Meadow
7/24/2001
Jack
A small stand of Jack in the Pulpit at Coastal Maine Botanical Garden. Getting late in the afternoon. Plants in shadow but with sun on the ground and plants behind them. Not an easy shot. Also they were deep in a bed with a boarder, so I could not get very close.
This shot was taken right down on ground level with the LCD flipped out and at full zoom to frame the single bloom. This had the advantage of throwing the background well out of focus and creating some interesting bokeh. A shot like this is only possible hand held due to the H50s excellent image stabalization. It is not that the shutter speed was too slow for hand holding…it is that with the long zoom and bending low for the shot…I am just not that stable.
Sony DSC H50 at full zoom (465mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Clearly a shot like this with high dynamic range and the light behind the subject is going to take both careful exposure and some post processing. I have come to trust the H50’s auto exposure system to the extent that I rarely second guess it…and then too, I know what I can do in Lightroom. I used heavy Recovery for the highlights behind the flower, and added Fill Light to bring up color and detail in the bloom itself. Blackpoint to the right to bring out the intensity. I had already used the Punch preset which adds Clarity and Vibrance. Landscape sharpen preset.
The result is even better than I envisioned at the time. I think anyway.
7/16/2009
Maine Uber Chic
I got several comments on the digital photo groups to the effect that yesterday’s image was too busy and lacked a center of interest. Valid observation. What I see in the image is the riot of color and form, which I see as a subject in itself, but I know what the commenters are objecting too.
Short of physically going back and reshooting, this time maybe taking someone with me to stand in front of the roses, I wondered if overemphasizing the form and color aspect of the shot would improve it. I generally do not do this kind of manipulation, as I like my images to be an accurate reflection of what someone might see if confronted with the same scene, but there is room for pushing the limits of the process to make a point, or to create a vision that captures what you saw in the image, rather than the reality itself. This is, of course, what the whole To Blur or Not to Blur piece was about over on Point and Shoot Landscape.
So, in Lightroom I took the original image and applied a technique I have experimented with before on this kind of image. I slid the Clarity slider all the way to the left, applying what amounts to negative clarity. Because Clarity is essentially a local contrast enhancement, this is not the same as applying, for instance, a blur in photoshop. Negative Clarity produces a kind of soft glow. I then increased Saturation significantly, and boosted Contrast slightly. This all required a bit of added Brightness. Finally, I cropped the image more tightly to place the stair diagonal in a more powerful position in the frame.
The image now is certainly nothing you would see in reality (unless you where operating under the influence…some influence of some kind). Maybe it works better though to convey what I was seeing when I took the image. Maybe.
What do you think?
7/14/2009
Goat Island Light: Over Rose
Goat Island Light at Cape Porpoise ME is not as often photographed as Nubble Light or Portland Head, and, to be honest, it is not as photogenic. Still, it has its charms. For this shot, one of many taken on the first sunny day we had had in a month, I attempted to get the rose and the light equally sharp for an image with great depth. Program Shift put the aperture at F8 (smallest on the H50) and I used a bit of EV as well to keep as much detail in the white buildings as possible. I also backed off from the rose and used a moderate zoom setting (about 70mm equivalent). This put the rose in the zone of sharp focus while the light was still sharp as well. A few clouds in the sky would have made the perfect shot, but you can’t have everything (or I couldn’t on this day). To compensate I used a Graduated Filter effect in post processing to darken the sky and balance the image better.
Sony DSC H50 at about 70mm equivalent. F8.0 @ 1/320th @ ISO 100. Programed auto with -.3 EV exposure compensation.
In Lightroom, Recovery for the sky and white buildings, Fill Light to open the shadows, added Clarity and Vibrance and Landscape sharpen preset. As above, use a Graduated Filter effect from the top to darken the sky and balance the image better, and one from the bottom (while I had the dialog open) to add maximum snap to the foreground.
From Around Home, Kennebunk ME.
And as a bonus, the light up close. Taken from about the same spot, but at full telephoto.
Goat Head Light
7/13/2009
Song Frozen in Time
Continuing the theme from yesterday, here is no apology water frozen by the shutter image. I am always amazed at what gravity, rocks, and light can do with this peaty water. You could take a thousand pics, and no two would catch the same forms, the same play of light, the same energy. This, to me, is a high energy shot.
The trick with a shot like this, where you have such a wide range of light values, is, of course, to get the exposure right. I used heavy Exposure Compensation and underexposed to save the highlights, and then brought the shadow back up in Lightroom when I post-processed. The net effect is very like what I saw, and what I visualized in the field.
Sony DSC H50 at about 80mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 100. Programed auto with -1.7 EV exposure compensation.
In Lightroom, heavy Recovery for the highlights. Fairly heavy Fill Light for the shadows. Added Clarity and Vibrance and Landscape sharpen preset.
7/8/2009
Reflect on This
I am always struck by this stand of trees, and on a day like this, when the reflection is at least as interesting as the trees themselves, it makes a powerful, but peaceful image.
Sony DSC H50 at about 60mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/500 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
Cropped heavily from the bottom and, mostly, top in Lightroom for composition. Recovery for the sky. Much Fill Light to bring up detail in the shadows of the trees. Blackpoint to the right more than usual. Added Clarity and Vibrance and Landscape sharpen preset.
7/2/2009
Sky and Trees Paint Tea-Brown Water
If nothing else this latestes series of Pics should illustrate my often repeated principal of shoot all around the subject. (Why take just one… and Lupine Lessons from Point and Shoot Landscape). All of these shots were taken from one spot. I did not move, but the camera did, and so did the zoom (for framing).
In this shot, what caught my eye was the strong reflections of the trees against the sky in the water…as well what the sun was doing with the water color and the sand on the bottom of the brook.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide. F4.0 @ 1/20th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto with program shift (to slow the shutter speed for the best reflection effect).
In Lightroom, heavy recovery for the highlights on the foliage and to cut some of the glare from the water. Added Clarity and Vibrance and the blackpoint moved just slightly to the right. Landscape sharpen preset. I also used the Local Adjustment brush to tone down the brightest highlights on the ferns and skunkcabbage leaves along the stream.
6/23/2009
The Bubbles
I think I must have a hundred images of the Bubbles across Jordan Pond taken over the years. The fact is, they are never the same any two days, any two years…and on a good day, with weather making or actually happening…any two moments. The shift and angle of light, the sky and cloud background, and, of course, the season all change the view dramatically. Point of View variations are all but infinite…though all my images are captured from one of 4 vantages where you can get down close to the water.
Then too, the lake itself changes. The shoreline is never the same twice as levels rise and fall, and the water depends on the wind and wind direction for its texture.
All in all, the ideal subject. Which is, of course, why I keep going back to it.
This shot is taken fairly low to the water using the flip out LCD, and the clouds are as interesting as the mountains themselves, which is why I zoomed out for tighter framing.
Sony DSC H50 at about 65mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
In Lightroom, heavy Recovery for the sky and clouds. Recovery, again, attempts to recapture dynamic range by pulling back the highlights, but it does it in such a way that differences in high grays and whites are also emphasized. It is ideal for this kind of complex cloud detail, and allows me to expose for the foreground, using standard Programed auto, without worrying about the sky too much. Without Recovery in my post processing toolbox I would have to work the exposure much differently for a shot like this, and then do some levels and curves work in post. Recovery is one of the most powerful of Lightroom’s tools, at least for my style of shooting.
I also added Clarity and Vibrance, moved the blackpoint slightly to the right, and used the Landscape sharpen preset. Total post processing time under 2 minutes.
6/22/2009
Jordan Saddle
Going even a bit deeper into the view, still from the same location as the Pic of the Days from the 18th and 19th, I found the cloud on cloud effect over the saddle to the southeast of the Bubble very interesting, and experimented with various framings to bring it out. This, cropped in Lightroom for better composition, is the most successful.
The various shades of white to gray in the cloud on cloud layers was not easy to render. In Lightroom I used a graduated filter from the top, reducing exposure just slightly and increasing contrast. The whole image received a boost in Vibrance and Clarity, and a bit of extra contrast (the shoreline in the image is at least a mile away and there is a lot of air between me and it). I used the Landscape sharpen preset.
Sony DSC H50 at about 300mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
6/11/2009
Prairie Lake with Storm
The North Dakota Prairie sometimes seems as much water as land. There are potholes, ponds, marshes, and fair sized lakes dotting the landscape wherever you look. This small lake is on the edge of Chase Lake NWR, again, on a day full of intermittent rain and glowering skies.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide. F5.6 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
Dual graduated filters in Lightroom. From the top to darken the sky to its natural tone, and from the bottom to increase brightness and contrast. General Vibrance and Clarity and Landscape sharpen preset.