THE THINGS I DO…

Sometimes, shooting from a different angle will open your eyes to a new composition you had never thought of before. During a recent vacation to the Asheville, NC area, I was chasing some spectacular cloud formations across the sky, trying to find an interesting foreground to use to frame my shot. While clouds can sometimes make great photos by themselves, I was looking for something to remember my vacation by and was in search of something interesting to put in the foreground. We found this little historical park at the site of the old Zeb Vance homestead and seeing this combination of old log homes and rustic fences caused me to swerve into their parking lot.

I was using my circular polarizer to give me a spectacular blue backdrop for the clouds (and to add more saturation to the greens), but I still wasn’t happy with the shot…that is, until I bent down to get a different lens from my bag. Looking up from that low angle, I saw this mirrored composition of the spit-rail fencing against the mountains in the distance and immediately had an “aha!” moment. I swapped lenses (I used a 24-70mm zoom for this) and got down to ground level. I mean all the way down! Lying on my side, I fired off 10 or 15 shots. In a few minutes, the clouds moved on and so did I…happy that I took the “low road” to get this photograph.

A gorgeous cloud-filled sky gave me a reason to get outdoors and play around with over-saturating landscapes.

To get this particular effect, I used my circular polarizer to make the sky as blue as possible and then underexposed a stop-and-a-half to make sure I would have enough detail in the clouds. I shot this as a raw file, to make sure I would have a lot of flexibility in toning the clouds and to make the next part of the process easier. I opened this image in Lightroom 2 (have I ever told you how fantastic this program is?) and, after doing basic toning to bring out the maximum detail in the clouds, I bumped up the saturation of the blues and greens…a lot.

Once I had adjusted the color to match reality, I took the settings an additional 20 points to the right on the Lightroom saturation slider for these two colors to over-saturate things even more. The resulting over-saturated image is much more eye-catching than had I not used a polarizer and a little software “help” after the fact.

Go try it for yourself the next time you have a cloud-filled, beautiful sky. Don’t worry if you don’t have Lightroom 2, you can accomplish the same color tweaks using the Adobe Raw plug-in and Photoshop. Make your adjustments within Adobe Raw using the controls under the “HSL/grayscale” tab. Have fun learning this new technique!

I’ve found that having a written or  ”shot list” for events is counter-productive to my creativity. That’s right, instead of being a helpful reference, I find it becomes a subconscious shopping list that hinders my creativity. For example, during a recent wedding I photographed, I had already made the “usual” pre-wedding shot of the couple’s rings. It was the standard stuff, sharp, cake in background, nicely composed…but boring. Had I been satisfied with this photo and checked it off my mental shot list, I wouldn’t have been looking for something better that presented itself later, during the reception.

By not checking this shot off that list, I kept looking for a way to improve upon it when the situation above presented itself for a few scant moments. I quickly moved in and snapped the photo above.  I think it’s much more creative and “different” for my clients. I liked it so much that I never showed them the earlier photos. So, be careful when using a shot list. Don’t let it become a checklist that squelches your creative process.

Having just finished a day-long wedding shoot, I plan to share some tips of the trade with you in the next few blog posts. Today’s tip is to shoot in RAW format. I’ve extolled on the virtues of this format here many times before and can’t emphasize enough the importance of shooting events in RAW.

Having shot my share of events on film, I’ve gotta tell you my stress level’s a lot lower since I switched to digital. No more agonizing over whether I successfully captured a tricky lighting situation or not. With digital, I will know immediately whether or not the shot is a keeper.  Plus, shooting in RAW gives me even more confidence to try making photos I wouldn’t have considered shooting on film. The photo posted here was taken at the end of the reception as things were winding down. I wanted to shoot something that captured the dance floor a bit more artistically than the flash-blur photos I had been shooting all evening.  I figured I had nothing to lose but a few pixels, so I experimented a bit.

The venue lighting was tricky and called for a long exposure (1 second) to bring out the details of the tent and the dancers. I also wanted to move the camera a bit while popping a flash from the far left side to partially freeze the dancers and add some motion to the dance lights. Did I mention that this was shot during the last dance of the evening? That’s where RAW saved me time and allowed me to shoot fast with enough time to concentrate on my photography and make the shot when the dancers were in the right place. The wider exposure latitude provided by RAW allowed me to fix a lot of the problems in post-processing that I wouldn’t have been able to save had I shot this on JPEG format. For example, I bumped up the color saturation of the dance lights increased the clarity and brought back some of the detail in the blown-out highlights during post-processing.

Now that RAW has become the only format I use, I find I experiment much more than I used to and those experiments, as you see, sometimes turn out pretty well.

Many digital photographers have fallen in love with the tones and “retro” feel of black-and-white photographs. Wedding photographers often charge extra for the “’60s B&W look” and photojournalists frequently enter B&W versions of their work to help focus a judge’s attention on the “moment” captured.

Regardless of why you choose to make B&W photos, be sure to do the conversion AFTER you shoot. Do it in your computer with Photoshop and not in camera. Many cameras offer the option to capture in B&W. You should resist that temptation. Why? Because you’ll gain a lot more control over the conversion process.  

You see, the camera’s conversion follows a set formula. Conversions of trees will have the same algorithm applied to them as a wedding portrait and I hope you see why that’s not a good thing.  So, choose the process that relies on input from a human eye, not an inhuman table of numbers, to be successful. It’s all about control and you want to control as much of the photographic process as possible.