Monthly Archives: March 2009
3/11/2009
California Poppy (click image for larger views)
Still at Sunset Cliffs Park on Point Loma in San Diego California. The poppies were in full glory along the rough trails of the park, along with a variety of other wild and semi-wild flowers.
For this shot I used about a 200mm equivalent to isolate a small patch of particularly well lit poppies. The strong side, almost back light, made the flowers appear to glow with a light of their own against the dark green backdrop. Then in Lightroom, I cropped in even tighter, to emphasize the diagonal of the flowers, and to eliminate deep shadows on the left and right. This kind of shot is difficult because there is no one center of interest, but I feel that here, the rough line of flowers across the diagonal pulls the image together.
Sony DCS H50 at 200mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/400 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, besides the cropping, I used a little recovery to pull the orange highlights back, and my usual bit of Clarity and less Vibrance than normal in the Presence panel. Vibrance favors yellows and oranges, and too much would have burned out the orange highlights. Portrait sharpen preset.
From San Diego 2009.
And as a bonas: a few more wild and semi-wild flowers from Sunset Cliffs.
3/10/2009
Sunset Cliffs, San Diego CA (click for SmugMug views)
Another recent shot from San Diego. There is a tiny city park along the cliffs behind the Nazarene College on Point Loma, overlooking the Pacific. I found my way there while waiting for the military gate on the road to Cabrillo National Monument to open. The cliffs are heavily eroded, relatively unstable earth, carved by water into intricate shapes that always remind me of Stalagmites, and the flowing formations of calcite found in caves. In this shot the formations form a strong foreground for the open ocean ocean and low clouds, with the deeply shadowed side of the jutting headland taking the midground.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F5.6 @ 1/500 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, I pulled back the sky with some Recovery, added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel, and use the Sharpen landscape preset. A good deal of Fill Light was needed to bring up detail in the shadowed headland. Since the sky was still too light, I applied a very selective Graduated Filter effect reaching down just beyond the horizon, and set to about -.6 EV (exposure). This darkened the blue of the sky and made the clouds right on the horizon stand out more.
From San Diego 2009.
PS.
This image was selected for Flickr’s Explore when I posted it to my stream there.
3/8/2009
Mission Bay Marina, San Diego CA (click image for Smugmug views)
We will get back to Scotland, but I thought I would post some fresh work for the next few days while I process images from San Diego (where I am a the moment).
The conference is at the Mission Bay Marina Village Center, just behind the seawall and beyond the flood control channel for the San Diego River. This shot was taken through the wall of windows which is directly behind my booth, sort of between customers.
From past experience it is a pretty typical San Diego sunset. I used my tip the camera up and let the meter read the sky, lock exposure, and reframe trick to bias the exposure for the sunset at the expense of the foreground.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/80th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto, manually biased for the sky.
In Lightroom I used some Recovery for the sky (even with the bias it was still too light). My usual Presence settings: Added Clarity and Vibrance, and Landscape sharpen preset. I also cropped off some at the bottom to eliminate some distracting foreground detail.
The sky was still too light and the foreground too dark, so I applied Lightroom’s graduated filter effect. This is my first experiment with it, and it is indeed a powerful tool. I drew the filter over the image from the top and adjusted the level of the effect to get the sky to where I wanted it. That still left the foreground too dark, so I added Fill Light in the Exposure panel. The result is an image that is a very close approximation of what I actually saw out the window. I will be using the graduated filter effect a lot more now that I have some experience with it.
By the way, exposure is only one of the parameters you can change with the graduated filter effect. You can also change the brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, or sharpness. Powerful tool indeed.
The image is from the new San Diego 2009 gallery.
3/7/2009
The Temple: Carinish, N. Uist, Scotland
Actually the ruins of a medieval monastery, one of several on the coast and islands of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, where learning was preserved during the dark ages. Monks went out from here to reeducated Europe at the beginning of the renaissance. (Though the whole dark ages thing is coming into question these days, no one disagrees with the role the monasteries like the one at Carninish played in keeping scholarship alive.)
There is a public foot path from down-town Carninish to the ruins, including some boardwalks over marshy spots, but little evidence the site is much visited. I spent an hour or more there, walking around the ruin all alone and photographing it from a variety of angles. I have to say I was more than a little distracted by the view. The monastery was placed on a height with a commanding view of the outer islands of the Hebrides and the sea beyond. You have to suspect that the outlying walls once enclosed gardens as well. Those walls, circular as they are, lead to the alternative name of the place which is, not surprisingly, the Carninish stone circle. It must have been a pleasant place to study…in the brief Hebridean summer. In the long winter it must have been grim.
I like this angle, as it catches both the ragged shape of the ruin and the circle. The texture of the stone against the green of the Scottish turf, and the sky behind, the high horizon, and the way the shapes of the structures lead your eye.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide angle (31mm equivalent). F5.6 @ 1/320 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the sky. Added Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel. Landscape sharpen preset. I also cropped out a bit of sky to improve the placement of the horizon.
From Scotland.
Distracting view...
3/6/2009
Downtown Carinish
Just down the road from the Bed and Breakfast where we stayed on North Uist in the Hebrides. Could not resist. Something more than a snapshot, but snapshotish certainly. Still makes me smile.
It is an awkward composition, a bit. I normally would not have placed the phone booth that close to the frame, or the sheep either…but I wanted to emphasize the juxtaposition. I think it works.
Sony DSC H50 zoomed in to about 85mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/400 @ ISO 100. Programmed Auto.
In Lightroom, Recovery for the sky, some added Presence, via Clarity and Vibrance sliders. Landscape sharpen preset.
From Scotland.
PS.
A bit more Lighroom Work
Okay. So I was always bothered by the burned out white on the sheep’s back, and some found the sky to bright. Recently I have begun experimenting with Lightroom’s graduated filter effect, so I had to try that on the sky. And I also applied Lightroom’s Adjustment brush to reduce the brightness of the burned out area on the sheep’s back. And so…
3/5/2009
Heather Road
Most roads on the Hebrides (at least on the Uists, and Benbecula where we spent out time) are one-lane, with pull outs every 1/4 mile or so for meeting cars. It works surprisingly well. This is a local road that runs down the middle of North Uist, and it very definitely off the beaten path. We drove the length of it and did not meet more than one or two cars.
And, of course, Heather is Scotland. And so too are the plantations. We saw them all through the highlands, and here they from the green triangle on the right horizon.
I love the play of the light across the landscape in this shot, taken about 10 AM, when the Hebrides summer sun was still about as low as we get it in Maine at 6 AM.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, I applied quite a bit of Recovery for the sky, added some Fill Light for the foreground, as well as Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel. I also boosted the luminance of the magenta, purple, and green channels to make the landscape and the heather, in particular, more vibrant.
From the Scotland gallery.
Close up
3/4/2009
Highlander
Okay, you can’t visit Scotland without bringing back one of these. Actually, if you use Google Earth and look at the spot where I took this, there is already an image of what is probably this very beast looking over this very fence there.
Sony DSC H50 at about 250mm equivalent. F4.5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, some recovery for the sky, and a little local burning of the highlights. Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Landscape sharpen preset.
From the Scotland gallery.
3/3/2009
Hebrides Sunset Loch: click image for larger views at SmugMug
We arrived on North Uist in the Hebrides, via the ferry from Skye, in the long long sunset. That far north it seems the sun hangs on the horizon for about 3 hours. As we drove down the island toward our B&B, we were just about pulled off the road by scenes like this. Just a little unnamed loch, with a fishing pier.
The light of the sun from behind the low clouds was clearly the subject, and always a challenging one. I exposed a variety of shots, metering on the foreground, the sky, the horizon, etc. To change the metering, my quick and dirty approach is to center the area of interest and use the exposure lock (half press the shutter release), then to reframe for composition. By including more or less sky in the metered position you and dramatically bias exposure, and you can immediately see the approximate effect on the LCD. This version was exposed primarily for the sky and the foreground was brought up in post-processing: though I have others were the sky is even more dominant.
I also cropped out a significant section of dark sky to aid the composition.
[I should mention that this is a Hebrides sunset. The sun was 30 minutes to an hour above the horizon and the color is from the low clouds. In the Hebrides, the sun hands at and just below the horizon for what seems like hours. It did not get dark for at least 3 hours after this shot, so the challenge of bringing the foreground up to natural levels was particular to the scene. Even this does not show the foreground as bright as it was in reality.]
Sony DSC H50 at about 800mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
Besides the Fill Light and Curves necessary to bring up the foreground, I applied some Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel. Because the foreground and high clouds (away from the sun) was dark in the original, I had quite a bit of noise once the curves were set, so I used Lightroom’s noise reduction sliders to smooth out the color.
See more of Scotland in the Scotland gallery.
PS.
After some discussion on one of the digital photo groups, I decided to go back and do some dodge and burn on the image using Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush. I selectively darkened the sky half a stop, and brought up the midground hills about the same, while bringing up the foreground rocks almost a full stop. I also increased the contrast of the foreground rocks, and the saturation of the midground hills on the right. This was a quick and dirty experiment. I would work much more carefully for a keeper.
Lightroom dodge and burn
And here it is using Lightroom’s Graduated Filter effect.
Graduated Filter effect.
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.
3/01/2009
Waiting for the Hebrides Ferry
Click the image for a larger gallery view on Smugmug.
I am working on more brooding Scottish landscapes but just to lighten things up, here is a snapshot taken while waiting for the ferry from Skye to Uist (in the Hebrides).
It is just a moment caught. The unstudied pose, the natural setting, the young man so caught up in his music as to be unaware of the public nature of his exposure. I zoomed in and then cropped the image slightly for better composition.
Sony DSC H50 at about 110mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/320 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
From Scotland.