Skies

It's been a busy few weeks.   I haven't blogged in weeks and have barely done anything with my fall photographs and we had our first snow flakes today! Time is passing by quickly but June and I have found time to get out and enjoy God's creation in gold, yellow, and red before the leaves are all gone.

We took one day and drove up to Burke's Garden, Virginia.  It's a favorite place for landscape photographers but we had never been.  Burke's Garden is a bowl valley completely surrounded by Clinch Mountain.  The valley is reported to be the highest in Virginia at around 3,000 feet above sea level.  This elevation brings fall to Burke's Garden before many other places in our area.  

The day we picked turned out the be cloudy and overcast.  When we got into the valley the clouds had come down far enough to cover the surrounding mountains and even creep into the valley.   Overcast days can be great for some photographs but challenging for others.  One of the most valuable lessons for an outdoor photographer is to know what to shoot under different lighting conditions.   A cloudy overcast day produces fantastic soft light, obscuring shadows and eliminating bright spots.  It can also make colors more vibrant. 

In this first shot you can see how the clouds were hanging very low over the mountains.  The clouds thinned a little allowing just enough sunlight through to highlight the trees in this shot.  Including the sky in this shot puts it in perspective and tells more about the place and conditions.

In this shot of a road lined by beautiful trees in fall spender you can see how the soft indirect light allows the color to pop without being washed out by bright light.  The sky does not add to this photo but there was no way to get this shot without including some of the sky.

Most of the time you want to avoid including the sky in the composition if it is bland and uninteresting.  Below is the same shot with different crops.

In the second version I cropped out that bland sky.  I also cropped out the grassy foreground because I didn't think it added anything to the image.  If something doesn't add to the image then think about cropping it out.

The next weekend we took a side trip to Cataloochee Valley on the way to meet friends for the weekend.  At times we had the same overcast conditions but later in the day the clouds started to break up and create some different conditions.

With some interesting clouds in the sky I had some different compositional opportunities.  In this photo of an old barn the blue sky and clouds added to the photo.  The clouds are cool and the blue is a nice contrast with the fall colors.   To make this shot I had to use a graduated neutral density filter to compensate for the sky being much brighter than the rest of the image.   I don't use these filters on every trip but when I need them they make the difference between an impossible shot and something worth sharing.

Of course these bright conditions made other photographs very challenging.  I had to wait a while for the sun to go behind a cloud before I could get a picture of leaves in that little stream.  

The secret to getting good photos outdoors is to understand your light conditions.  Unlike the studio, you take what God gives you and make the best of it.

The Crop

Do you crop your photos or leave them as they came out of the camera?  If you crop, do you use the standard crop sizes such as 8x10, 5x7 or 11x17?

Photos out of my camera come out with a 2x3 ratio, meaning the photos are 1 1/2 times as wide as they are tall.  They can be printed uncropped 2x3, 4x6, 8x12, 20x30, etc.  Often they look fine just the way they were composed and don't need to be cropped.  But other times, they could be improved with a little creative cropping.

Here's one I took this weekend when hiking up the balds of the Roan Highlands from Carver's Gap.

This is uncropped just as it was composed and shot.  It is in a landscape orientation, but is that the best way to present it?   The trees dominate the image giving it a vertical feel.  The trees sticking out of the snow in the back hint at a horizontal line tilting down on the right side.  I think there are multiple options here to explore.

What if it was in a portrait format?  This first 8x10 crop simplifies the image by removing many of the trees and focuses the viewer on the clear area leading to the lighter section in the center of the top half.  Including the snow at the bottom makes it feel like the trees are further away.  This crop emphasizes the vertical trees.  Vertical lines in a composition symbolize strength and stability.

You don't see square crops very often because they can tend to feel static and uninteresting.  However, in the second version of the same image, the square crop has been used to remove distracting elements and focus attention to the lighter point in the back of the trees.  Removing the snow at the bottom and the tree on the right makes the viewer feel like they are in the scene and gives it depth.  Almost feels like I can touch that tree on the right.

The third option is a wide crop using a 1x2 aspect ratio, meaning it is twice as wide as tall.  A horizontal image is more like what we naturally see with our eyes. In this version you see more of the horizontal line across the background made by the trees and snow.   Horizontal lines are peaceful and tranquil, which seems to be appropriate for this peaceful snowy scene.

Composing a horizontal or landscape image with repeating vertical lines can give a sense that the scene can't be contained and the repeating lines continue to the left and right.   In the image below I framed the image with a tree trunk on either side, which contains it and the composition loses that infinite feel, but they do give a sense of depth to the image.  A good title for this one might be "Lost in The Woods" because it feels like trees are all around.  There is no one element in the image that jumps out and says "look at me", but my eyes want to explore the path through the trees on the left side.

Should you crop using the standard ratios found in Lightroom and other photo editing tools?   It might be easier to get a standard size printed and it will be easier to find a ready made frame for a standard size print.  However, I have come to realize it's more important to crop right than to fit within a limited number of print sizes.  There are companies out there that will print in almost any dimension.   Places like American Frame will custom build a frame for you at a reasonable price.  If you only going to display the image on a website, then there is no reason to restrict the crop at all.  Crop to any ratio you think makes a better composition.

I like some of these better than others.  You may not agree with what I like or may not like any of them.  There is really no right way to compose an image.  Don't let others opinions limit your creativity.

One last point about cropping is you should always try to get the composition as close to what you want when you take it and not rely on cropping later.  You may find you don't have sufficient resolution to crop a horizontal image into a vertical.

Both of the images used here were taken while hiking up the balds of the Roan Highlands from Carver's Gap on Saturday.  It was snowing and I was in the clouds all morning.  Not great conditions for the grand landscape vista shots (I couldn't tell the mountains from the sky) but the low contrast conditions were great for these in the woods shots.

Rediscovered, Revisited and Revised

Back in November 2009, June, her brother Jerry, and I went to Fall Creek Falls for a couple days.   We weren't there for photography but of course I had my camera and went out early one morning for sunrise over the lake.  There weren't many clouds in the sky that day but there was a nice fog around the lake which made for some nice soft scenes.  It took several photos, edited some when we got home, then didn't do any more with them.   They were forgotten until I was looking for something else and rediscovered these photos.

There was one photo I decided to see what I could do with over two years later.   Would it be better?  Worse?  Would it come out the same?   My experience tells me any of these outcomes were possible.  I've decided to share what I did and let you decide.

Here's the original "as shot" image, straight out of the camera.

You can click on any of these photos to get a larger view.

The sky was over exposed on the right side.  The cloudy white balance gave it a nice warm feel but the blues in the sky were almost unnoticeable.  The camera was slightly tilted to the right.  Other than that, not a bad shot.

Here's what I did back in 2009.

1. Changed the white balance to daylight, giving it a more bluish tint.
2. Dialed in +31 on the recovery slider, bringing back the blown out highlights on the right side.
3. Turned the brightness down from the default +50 to +18, darkening the photo.
4. Increased the clarity (+14) and vibrance (+12) making the orange clouds stand out a bit more against the blue sky.
5. Increased the contrast using the Tone Curve

This is a much more interesting photo than what came out of the camera.   That's where I left it back in 2009.

This time I decided to start back with the raw image as before and use some of the Nik software filters in addition to Lightroom.

I decided the right side was not the most interesting area of the photo and cropped it to a vertical format, removing most of the right side.  In addition to the tree there is an interesting curving path along the lake shore that you just don't see in the version above.  I want to bring that out to add the s-curve to the composition.   I could use the Lightroom tone curve or fill light slider to lighten the dark areas, but I've found the Detail Enhancer filter in Nik Color Efex pro to do a great job bringing the details out of dark areas.

Before editing in Color Efex 4, I first ran the image through the Nik Define 2.0 to remove any noise.  It's always a good idea to do this first because many adjustments can magnify noise (static) in a digital photo.  Here's the cropped photo after removing noise.

I then opened the photo in Nik Color Efex 4.   Applying the Detail Enhancer filter to the entire image really messed with the soft fog, water and skies.   I used control points (which is the coolest part of the Nik software) to only pull out the details in the shoreline and a little in the trees.   The Brilliance/Warmth filter and the Skylight filter added a little saturation to the orange clouds and blue sky bringing back the colors of sunrise that were lost in the original as-shot photo.

Another cool artistic Nik filter is Glamor Glow.  Sounds like something designed for portraits, but it can  be very effective at creating a moody feel in a landscape photo like this one to emphasize the fog on the lake.  Again I used some control points to not add glow to the shore line or the tree in the upper left so I wouldn't lose those details.

Finally, I used the Darken/Lighten Center to add a nice vignette around the outside, drawing the viewers attention to the tree in the center.  One thing this filter allows me to do that I can't do in Lightroom is place the center of that vignette.  By placing the center to the left side I was able to emphasize the shore line, leading the viewers eyes up to the tree.  Here's a side by side view of the photo before editing in Color Efex and after.

   When I brought the photo back in Lightroom I noticed a few dust spots in the sky that needed to be cloned out and some weeds at the bottom of the photo that were a little distracting.  I used Photoshop Elements to close out the dust spots and weeds.

Here's the final Rediscovered, Revisited and Revised Photo

 

 

Is this version better than what I did in 2009 or just different?  You'll have to decide for yourself.  I kind of like it.  In fact, I may print it to hang at home or at work.  This photo is available for purchase online here.

If you're not a photographer you may not find any of this of interest.  I hope you at least enjoy the photos.  If you found this of interest and want to learn more about Lightroom or Nik software let me know.

Thinking Outside The Frame

We're told "thinking outside the box" is a good thing.  It opens our mind to consider new ideas beyond the way it's always been done.  What about when we edit our digital photos?   What's the box that might constrain our thinking when we are using Photoshop, Lightroom, or Picasa?   The cropping feature that is built into these tools can tend to keep us within the standards for picture frames.

If you go to any store that sells ready made frames you'll find they are sized to hold 4x6, 5x7, 8x10 prints.   The crop tool in our editing packages often defaults to these standard sizes.   That's fine if you plan on printing your photo and using a standard frame.   Most of us don't print many of our photos any more.  They end up on a website somewhere.   Yet, we tend to use the standard crop sizes.   If the photos are going on a website they can be cropped to any width and height that works best for the photo.

Here's an example.   The first photo is not cropped at all.  This is the way I took it.

Uncropped

The next two are cropped to 8x10 and 5x7

8x10

5x7

None of these really work for me.   There is too much wasted space at the bottom and top of the photo.  This does not add anything to the photo and a good rule of thumb is to eliminate anything that doesn't add to the composition.

Here's the crop I like best.



Unconstrained Crop

 I turned off the crop lock in Lightroom and cropped according to what I thought looked best, without considering the dimensions.

If I was to print this I would have to go back and find a crop that either fits a standard size print/frame or go for a custom photo mat and/or frame.   In this case it's pretty close to a 10x20, which is a size that I can get printed.   If you're looking for a frame for a 10x20 print you may have to go somewhere besides Walmart and Hobby Lobby.   Better yet, forget the frame and print as a canvas wrap.   I've done three of those now and love them.

This photo is available for purchase online.  It's ready to print at 4x8, 5x10, 8x16, 10x20, or 12x24.   Many of these sizes are available as metal or canvas prints.