All About the Light

Without a doubt, the subject matter is messy—too many destracting details and probably not a clear subject matter.  But, this scene it not about the specifics—it’s about the light.  I saw the golden light on the shrimp boat and the blues of the water and sky.  Two great complementary colors is what I saw and what I tried to convey in the image.

Enjoy.

Camera settings:  Nikon D3, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 shot at 135mm, ISO 200, f/11 and 1/80^th of a second.

Post Processing:  

Lightroom—Set black and white points, added clarity and increased contrast.

Photoshop—used spot healing to clean-up various ugly spots and added saturation to blue and orange.

Enough Interest?

When I saw this scene I really liked the textures of the foreground versus the foggy, blown-out background. I started to shoot the image in HDR but then decided that I would normalize the overall scene and the contrast would be eliminated. I decided to properly expose the foreground so I used a spot meter on the net area and expose accordingly.

The basic question I have about this image is simple: Does the subject of the boat and the contrast with the background create a photograph that has impact?

Enjoy.

Camera settings: Nikon D3, Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 at 50mm shot at ISO 200, f/13 and 1/60^th of a second.

Post Processing:

Lightroom—Set white and black points, added mid-tone contrast, added clarity.

Photoshop—used nik Color Efex Pro tonal contrast to add contrast to highlights, mid-tones and shadows of the boat and dock.

The Wonders of Fog

Since 2009 was a much busier year for my photographic business than I expected, I decided to take the last two weeks of the year off. It was a great break. I delivered all the portraits that I had taken before Christmas and so between Christmas and the New Year, I was official on “vacation.”

I had some blog posting prepared for that week, but, forgot to post. Oh, well, it looks like everyone out there in cyber land got lucky!

I was going to try some new lighting techniques with my buddy Steve, but the weather got to us and we were not able to shoot, so instead, I just went out and roamed the countryside looking for something that might resemble a decent photo.

What photographer does not like fog? It adds instant mystery and mood to any photo. Add some water and a few boats, and it is hard not to make a good photo.

As I looked at this scene before me, I wanted emphasize the contrast between the details in the dock and boats and the total lack of details in the foggy foreground and background. I decided to frame the detailed portion of the photo in the upper right quadrant and leave the reaming portions of the photo as negative space to help emphasize the details. I tried various crops of negative space and finally settled on the photo as shot. A lot of people might think the amount of negative space is excessive, but I felt that I needed that much space to balance and contrast with the details of the dock and boats.

Enjoy.

Camera settings: Nikon D3, Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 at 56mm shot at ISO 200, f/13 and 1/90^th of a second.

Post Processing:

Lightroom—Set white point.

Photoshop—used nik Color Efex Pro tonal contrast to add highlight, mid-tones and shadows of the dock and boats and then sharpened that are using a high pass filter in the soft light mode.