Creating Photography
Posted in Photography on January 12th, 2010 by ray
Photography is not a perfect world, unless it is your business and livelihood. Even then, it’s not much different than rolling the dice, hoping for idea conditions. When I head down to the lake for my (almost nightly) shots, it is up to the heavens what the sky will paint, what the lake will do (be calm, ripple, white-caps, ice…). I am just a pawn in those situations, using my gear to try my best to capture what is set out before me. Is it all luck? No.
As a landscape photographer, you have to know your environment. Weather report at a minimum so you know to dress right for the conditions. But then you need to start thinking about humidity, fog, cloud formations, winds – these all play a roll in how your photo will turn out before you jam it into an editor.
I was talking with Dan tonight about predicting fog. He has some amazing shots in Alberta that he took in the fog. I thought he got that condition all the time and was able to shoot many locations at will. But no, like everywhere else, it’s an unpredictable beast. To make the best of it, Dan goes out when the conditions are right and shoots as many locations as he can enabling him to best capture the weather as it happens. This is taking advantage of the situation!
So why the photo I have up today, if I am talking about lakes and fog? Because I want to talk about making the best with what you have. I don’t have the best equipment by any stretch. I have a few decent lenses on an OK body. In a perfect world (where I am the Walrus) I would own a D3x and some seriously fast glass.
For the shot above, I had no professional lighting available to me. Not even spots or flash. I had no room in the house to a good self portrait, so I locked myself in the bathroom, clicked on the ceiling light and snapped this shot at f/2.8 & ISO 500 – in the mirror. Yes, the only light was provided from the lamp you can see reflected in the lens.
It was up to Photoshop to save the day.
So, I gave it a more interesting crop, reversed the image (so the letters would look right) slapped up the contrast a bit, threw it into black and white and added a sharpening mask. The color photo was ho-hum, but I feel the tools in CS4 really helped to bring this to life.
Original - unedited
As you can see, there is quite the drastic change from the RAW image to the modified B&W. Hey, when the world gives you lemons (ok, my camera and lenses are not lemons, but they aren’t whatever fruit is the opposite) – ya do what you can.