A More Traditional Ferris-Wheel Photo

Before discussing today’s photograph, I want to put something on the table that bothers me about how photographers talk about “blown-out” highlights. I often hear photographers and critics of photos say something like this: “Good photograph, but I am troubled by the blown-out highlights” when they mean the lack of details in something that the naked eye could not discern any details in it. To me a blown-out highlight is a highlight that the naked eye could see detail however the photograph shows no detail (total white in the area). I do not consider showing pure white area for lights or specular highlights to be “blown-out” highlights. Wikipedia defines specular as: “light is perfectly reflected (100%) in a mirror-like way from the light source to the viewer” thus it is as if you were looking directly at the light (which has no details).

I do agree that showing lights or specular highlights within a photo can be distracting; however, I also believe that these elements can also set the tone of the image or add-to the overall image. Think about the “catch light” in eyes or the catch of light on drop of water. Both are generally a totally white area—a specular highlight without detail. Yet, if not included, the eyes or the water drop look flat, uninteresting and not life-like.

That’s just my thoughts on the matter.

Today’s photo is a more traditional look at a ferris wheel. The only real twist to this photograph is that I wanted to include some detail of the people in the foreground. At first, I thought about using HDR however, I soon realized that would not work because the people and the ferris wheel were moving. I thought that I need at least +2 EV to get the light that I wanted on the lower half of the photo—show some details but still keep most of the scene in shadows. I set the auto-bracketing on my camera (in aperture priority mode) to take three photos at shutters speeds of 1/180^th (for the ferris wheel), 1/90^th (not used) and 1/45^th (for the foreground). I then blended the two photos to get the exposure I wanted.

By blending the two photos, I was better able to control the overall exposure of the lights on the ferris wheel, as you can see by the screen grab of the photo that I used of the ferris wheel.

Enjoy.

Camera settings: Nikon D3, Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 at 35mm shot at ISO 200, f/4 and 1/180^th and 1/45^th of a second.

Post Processing:

Lightroom—Set black and white points on both images used.

Photoshop—used Topaz Adjust Photo Pop preset on combined image.