Bring your own sunlight

The perfect snow day for photographers has to be where the clouds are high and thin, making a huge softbox for the sun to evenly illuminate the ground.  I usually am looking for medium soft shadows where you can easily see details in them.  The clear blue sky typical of winter results in stark shadows cast by the untempered sun, with extreme contrasts between the snow in the sun and snow in the shade.  Alternatively, the other typical winter days of overcast result in no shadows at all, just an even grey cast over the whole landscape.  What’s a person to do when the itch to photograph a landscape turns up?

Well, on a cloudy day you can bring your own sunshine and make your own shadows.  Off-camera flash units are perfect for this sort of light manipulation.  You put them where you want light, attach a light modifier of some sort and adjust to give the amount of light you want.  These are fill lights only – you aren’t going to be able to illuminate acres of ground.  No, this is like big light painting – you put light where you want and use composition to create the total image.

Here’s a before and after of what I’m talking about:

ISO 100, 24mm, 1/20 sec., f/7.1 – no flash

ISO 100, 24mm, 1/20 sec., f/7.1 – flash applied

Sometimes you just need a little extra light to bring more interest to the image.  I used three flash units in the “after” image:  one between the first and second tree on the left, one between the second and third tree on the left and one behind the distant tree on the right.  The first two have a softbox and white reflector attached, respectively.  The third one is just a bare flash.  Each one is attached to a PocketWizard radio trigger so they all fire when the shutter is released.  I like the PocketWizard because the range is well over 1000′ so I can place the flash units where ever I want.  I do wish the Olympus system had a wireless flash adjustment, though, so I wouldn’t have to run around to all the units to adjust the power levels between shots.

Obviously this is more than the on-camera flash built into the camera body, and all those flash units and transmitters do cost extra.  I use mine for multiple purposes, including the rare portrait or group image, so I could justify the purchase.  I like taking the sun around with me for when I need it but it’s more gear to buy and haul around so it might not be for everyone.

Others were using the late evening light as well.  The local deer are able to reach grass under the snow now that it has melted a bit.  It’s amazing to think how an animal of this size finds enough food to stay alive in the cold.  There was still some green grass under the trees, however, and the last snow came down heavy enough to insulate it from the bitter cold of the last week.  Deer will paw away snow to find food and I caught this one in the act.

ISO 100, 100mm, 1/250 sec., f/4.5

They have put on a nice winter coat this year and don’t appear to be too thin.  Talking with one of the park supervisors I learned they get feed supplements as well, placed at various places around the park away from where people will disturb them.  Must be working for them otherwise I think they would hang out around the road begging for handouts.

ISO 100, 100mm, 1/80 sec., f/4.5

Today they were moving around in groups, some feeding and some just lying around.  I’ve read their winter coat is so well insulated they can lay down on the snow and not melt it.  Has to do with the hollow hairs of the outer layer of their coat.  Sometimes you can see them walking around with snow on their back that isn’t melting either.

ISO 100, 100mm, 1/100 sec., f/4.5

They see a lot of car traffic through the park, most of it looking for them.  As a result they usually ignore vehicles passing by but every once in a while something will catch their attention and then everyone has to look up and see what’s happening.

I could have used one of the flash units to put a small catch light in their eyes – I don’t think it would have bothered them.  My lens was resting on the window and I was about 50 feet away so I’m pretty sure my best flash would have reached.  Perhaps next time I’ll plan on that and have all the gear ready to go.  For today I was happy to bring some light to the trees and photograph the deer au naturale.

Ready for my close up

ISO 100, 54mm, 1/100 sec., f/3.5

Summer colors are starting to fade in the woods.  The dry weather is merely hastening the process and the recent, small amount of rain just isn’t going to revive the foliage.  We’re surrounded by a sea of green for months, so much that it disappears from our sight until suddenly it’s gone and we’re left wondering where the green went as the fall colors explode into our senses.

Light dappling through a forest is like your personal studio for close-ups of objects.  Pick the background you want, the highlight on the subject, the aperture for a short depth of field and you’ve created a natural portrait.

Just a dab of color makes an emotional difference

As I’ve been told in the past, it’s easy to be seduced by color in photography, to end up making images that are full of colors but not meaning.  Autumn is my nemesis – I see all the warm colors and go crazy pointing my camera here and there only to find so few images actually have any composition to them.  From what I read it’s the “fear” of color that drives fine art photographers to black and white.  And by fear I mean the lack of control, the mostly mysterious way color is processed into the developing of film or digital files.  Great color is awesome – slightly not-so-great color is a train wreak.

But does this mean a wholesale fleeing from color in photographs?  Not for me, in spite of my autumn insanity.  Actually a little color added to images can be a great way to alter the mood of an image or bring attention to an element that might other wise be ignored or relegated to secondary status by the viewer.

As an example, an ordinary still life image:

One flash to the left of the subject and a piece of white foamboard to the right to reflect some light back subject.  I altered the lighting ratio (the difference between the brightest and darkest part of the light reaching the subject) in order to give it as much dimensionality as possible.  Nothing fancy and pretty bland.

What could the addition of color do for this?

Same setup as the first image but here I draped a piece of red cloth over the foamboard on the right so the flash would reflect that color back onto the subject.  This image feels a little more mysterious – where could it be setting right now? – probably because this is a movie effect we’re used to seeing in horror flicks.

This is a simple effect to create once you realize the light from a flash will reflect the color of the surface it hits.   A lot of time portrait photographers doing outdoor shoots find this more of a problem than a help, as clothes, trees, or buildings near their subject will reflect the sunlight or flash back onto their subject’s face, giving it a color cast that can look unnatural.  Usually this is solved by merely moving the subject else where but sometimes a white reflector has to be inserted between the subject and the troublesome reflection to correct the problem.

Once you start playing around with this idea it’s fun to see just what colors will have what impact on a subject.  Here’s another simply still life:

Here I’ve added a second flash to the right instead of a white reflector so I could control the amount of light on that side.  The more powerful flash is still coming from the left and the shadows it’s casting on the surface of the fossil as well as on the table to the right really help bring out the dimensionality of the piece.  For this I experimented with different color gels put in front of the flash on the right, just to see what changing the color of the darker side of the piece would do for the overall tone of the image.  Here are some examples:

Some of these look artificial while some look pretty natural.  Warmer tones portray less ominous images than cooler tones, although that’s probably a personal perspective rather than a general one.  Each does, however, feel different from the ordinary first image of this subject.

One lesson the Impressionists taught is that shadows are not always black, nor should they be portrayed that way.  Look in the shade of their trees or the shadow of their subjects and you’ll find many colors all placed there to elicit a sense of that particular shadow.  They recognized how light reflects into shadows from other sources and how the color of those sources influences how the shadows appear.

Watch movies carefully and you’ll see many shadows have color in them.  This isn’t a mistake in post-processing – the lighting director puts gels in front of lights just as I have in order to create spots of color in the overall scene, even where you don’t expect color to exist.  One problem with playing around with photographic lighting is you start to pay more attention to details in the movies and not so much to the plot!

A great thing about this technique is you can apply it to macro images of tiny things up to portraits of people (you may need some help with bigger reflectors, especially on a windy day).  My first photography instructor showed how to warm up images of flowers by simply holding a gold surface reflector near them and letting the sun bounce off it onto the flowers.  Really brings out the saturation and helps them stand out from the background.

You don’t need fancy “professional” gear for this – grab some cloth or poster board in your favorite color and give it a try!

After the golden hour

ISO 100, 37mm, f/6.3, three image HDR + B&W conversion

There’s a lot to be said for the light available just before sunrise.  Muted, diffuse, saturated, etc. are all terms I’ve heard used to describe the light and the effect it has on subjects.  It’s a desirable light source when you want an even illumination over a large area.  What it is not is contrasty and sometimes you want a combination of the two.  Brightly lit areas in the photo combined with distinct shadows that still reveal plenty of detail help add dimensionality to an image.

The scene above was made about 5 minutes after the sun came over the horizon.  I picked this spot because the angle of the light would cut across the jagged rocks unevenly, illuminating some areas while casting irregular shadows in others.  In the pre-sunrise light the whole scene was very evenly lit with a low dynamic range.  As a result it looked pretty flat, even with the reflection.  By waiting just a few minutes I was able to pick the amount of highlight and shadow I wanted to deliver the best composition.  There was a slight breeze that morning so the water isn’t mirror smooth, but I like how the reflection is broken up into an abstract.  Its softer appearance balances the sharper edges of the rocks being reflected.

I like the repeating elements of how the rocks tilt down to the water and how the angle reveals the work of the water on the lower part of the rocks, washing away the softer portions to leave the sturdier parts slightly overhanging the water’s edge.

Being at a place at just the right time is more than where the hands on the clock lie.  At higher latitudes the sun swings not only from east to west but from south to north as well so in addition to knowing the time of desired light you also have to know the season.  It’s one frustration of the landscape photographer who can’t simply add more strobes to put light where it’s most needed.  Another frustration is scouting out great compositions only to realize you’re six months away from the best light.

Really great landscape photographs are usually the result of an ongoing relationship with a scene, an intimate awareness of the way light moves across it throughout the day and year to generate moods useful to telling a story about the place.  One advantage of being at a place continually is seeing how it changes, to learn how to predict when the scene delivers the look you want.  The internet can provide many resources to understand light’s direction and timing, but being there continues to be the best teacher.

Stand-ins

We live in a place where the wind indeed “…comes sweeping down the plain.”  It’s a rare day without wind here as we’re usually caught between high pressure to the north and low pressure to the south, giving us a parade of air moving by in gusts and streams.  What a challenge for a photographer – an invisible subject.  If only there was some proxy for the subject that instantly communicated the presence of the subject without contributing some message of its own.  Waving grass, swaying trees, waves on the lake – all of these either are mistaken for blur (bad technique or artistic interpretation) or contribute some story of their own that may have nothing to do with wind.  I need something that instantly indicates the wind but doesn’t mean anything else.

Science to the rescue.

What other purpose does this device serve other than to indicate the presence and characteristics of the wind?  This blur is essential to the picture, indicative without being confusing.  The strong, steady indicator pointing to the source of the subject.  The brace holding it all up and in the air to catch the wind’s presence and effect.  This is not a metaphor, allegory or simile – it is the wind made tangible to our visual system.  I see this and my mind interprets it as “wind” in reflex, before I have time to consider it.

What other invisible subjects do we pursue that have proxies we can use?

Well, light comes to mind.  The essential element of photography, the one factor we must always pay attention to and use to the maximum effect in our images.  The force never seen but enables sight.  A proxy for this is a greater challenge as all subjects get in our way, bringing stories of their own to our minds and blocking our appreciation of the light itself.

The Impressionist painters are lauded for how they captured light in their works but in reality they only portrayed the effect of light, not the light itself.  By using color instead of drawing to define their shapes and forms they certainly call our attention to the way light manifests its effect for us but did they capture the light itself?  Do we look at their work and instantly think of light?  Or of how light can make us feel depending on its character on certain subjects?

The great B&W photographers purge color in order to focus on light, using tones to craft an image of how they see light’s impact shaping a subject.  But they aren’t capturing light itself and their proxies still interfere with our perception of the actual light.

As with wind, we see the response to light but not the light itself.  Is there a proxy for light that cleanly steps out of the way, leading our brain to reflexively realize light itself?

And now a break from our winter programming

Really, I am learning to appreciate black and white as a way to improve composition skills and use tones to bring depth to an image.  Digital B&W processing is giving me so much more confidence in my film work, especially the large format versions.  Winter is a great time to practice all these skills…..

But my world is in COLOR!

I started out shooting slides, loving the look of those glorious colors on a light table.  There’s just nothing like that little 2×2″ piece of reality you’ve captured for memories and sharing.  I’ve looked at B&W slides – ain’t the same experience.  So, now as winter winds down for another season, I’m looking for color.

Sometimes you just have to make your own version of reality.

ISO 100, 19mm, 1/250 sec., f/5.6, two flash set up

I was strolling through one of those stores where people pick up all their supplies and training to make scrapebooks, unique cards, photo albums, etc. and saw all these brightly colored papers and it dawned on me – saturation.  So many of my images are ‘naturalistic’ yet I enjoy other people’s saturated visions of the world.  With these papers I have a great excuse to push my processing sliders way over to the right.

ISO 100, 147mm, 1/60 sec., f/16, two flash set-up

These papers are designed for various crafts where they are folded, cut and shaped so the colors are all the way through and very durable.  The first image is of paper strips made for quilling and these are what caught my eye initially.  I’m keeping them in the form you see but the playing around potential is enormous for these.  The second image is of card stock; playing the flash across the surface really brings out the texture of the paper.  I need to think a little more about how to play with these but I’m sure they will show up on the blog again.

Light show

I finally got around to some tabletop photography today, trying to improve my eye for what I call “item” photography.  Doing this helps me visualize what I want from a subject and then create some drama around that.  It’s not something I feel I’m very good at yet; right now takes far too much time to get organized and the results still aren’t satisfactory.  But, practice is how you get to the big leagues, right?

After playing around with some flowers I started experimenting on some glass objects that have internal elements – paperweights and such.  I wanted to see if I could illuminate the interior elements without getting glare off the outside of the glass, always a challenge with curved glass objects.  We practiced this in photo school but I never really felt I understood how to achieve it accurately.  And I wasn’t sure I could do it with the lighting equipment I have on hand.  Still, the flowers didn’t seem to be working for me and I knew the glass would be dramatic if done right.

I started with something pretty basic – clear glass around an interior design.  To eliminate the glare I found all I needed was a narrow slit of light off the flash, which I got by blocking the flash with a piece of black foamboard.

My first lesson from this is make sure the glass surface is perfect – little scratches or dings will show up as the light shines from inside out.  I can take most of these out in Photoshop but it’s better to start with clean materials.

This is direct side lighting – the heart is lying on a piece of black velvet and the flash is right at tabletop level with the black foamboard blocking all but a 1/2″ slit pointing at the heart.

I really liked the look of this.  The next piece sits up more vertical so I wanted to get the light coming from the bottom instead of the side.  Using a large round bowl that is tall enough to put my flash into and point upward I put a piece of black foamboard I’d cut a hole in on top and put the subject over the hole.  I hung another piece of black foamboard up to serve as a backdrop since I would be shooting sideways instead of downward.  All I wanted to show in the final image was the glass piece so I set my aperture where all the black background would have little or no detail.

I have no idea how glassblowers get these little elements inside the glass but they really work out well when lit up.  In addition to the flash under the subject I placed another flash to the right and turned it down to a low power just to give some definition to the edges of the larger fish.  It spilled over a little onto the backdrop (that brighter area up and to the left of the subject) but I found that helped give some dimension to the composition.

The up-from-below lighting was so dramatic I decided to photograph a subject directly from above, looking right down into the light.  I have a glass paperweight that is almost full of internal elements so I put it over the hole in the foamboard and set my camera directly above.  For this I turned the flash in the bowl up almost to 100% in order to get the brightness I wanted in the paperweight.

Not quite the Eye of Sauron but pretty haunting.  Looks like a red whirlpool or an image from one of those scopes they put down your arteries.

Well, with an image like this you can’t pass up some Photoshop opportunities.  So, a la Warhol, I made this.

Even though the dramatic flower photography didn’t turn out they way I wanted I’ve at least learned a little more about photographing glass subjects.  Light and glass always go together well!

Into the land of Mordor

The challenge I have with landscapes is rendering the three-dimensional details that gives the viewer a sense of being there.  The direction of the light is probably the most important aspect to achieve this, using the angled light to illuminate part of a scene while leaving other parts in varying degrees of shadow.  It is this play of light and shadow on elements in the scene that give a sense of dimension as the lighter parts of the picture appear to move toward the viewer and the darker parts appear to move away.  Painters have used this for a few hundred years as a way to create perspective and depth in their art and master photographers adopt and use the same techniques.  Black and white photographers, limiting their palette to an infinite range of greys, can create astounding dimensionality in their images.

Getting this sense of depth in high contrast scenes is something I’m only beginning to learn how to do.  Where there are sharp transitions from light to dark your eye sees the scene as flat and you can’t really tell the foreground from the background.  Not good in a landscape photograph.

So what to do about this landscape?  The lava flows making up Craters of the Moon National Monument portray a dark and disturbed land, a place where it feels impossible for life to exist.  The ground has the appearance of having been ground up, mixed and extruded in a series of rough chunks and fine pebbles, all mixed haphazardly across the surface.  The early morning sun just touches the highest parts of the ground, but most of the light is absorbed by the darkness of the rock, leaving the highlights not so different from the shadows.

Even showing the few colors that exist in the area doesn’t help portray the texture of the surface but it does show that life can endure in amazing places.  I’m not sure what would be the best lighting to use for an accurate rendering of this scene.  I do know one thing – it’s never going to be a pretty landscape regardless of how expertly the contrast is used to give it depth.

Still chasing shadows after all this time

While in photo school one of my projects turned out a series of images of shadows, an attempt to study the form of an object without actually showing the object.  It’s a Plato thing, what can I say.  Once I started looking around at shadows, though, they started taking on a new meaning.  And as a photographer I enjoy seeing things in a new light (or absence thereof).

Do you know why a tiger has stripes?  Camouflage in the jungle.  The pattern of light/dark cast by the limbs and leaves is a crosshatch of lines on the ground, or whatever the light hits.

Wonder how that evolved?  Did the tigers with more and better stripes get the most food and were able to procreate better?  Did the female tigers find more stripes to be sexier?

Trees give me the best shadows, with their random edges and long profiles.  You have to find the right time of day and perspective but the result is rewarding.  And it helps to have a surface with texture, like this grass which is casting little shadows of its own to give depth to the surface.

Sideways is not the only way to enjoy a shadow, and sometimes it adds to the composition to show the subject as well.

I keep my eye out for shadows a lot more now as I realize how useful they are for compositions and playing around with tones.  Look around you sometime – see what the sun is painting on the ground.

Brought up short by a rock

Even the best intended photo hike can surprise you.  On the way back from Avalanche Lake in Glacier NP, with a camera full of images to be later processed for HDR and panoramic scenes, this rock turned up.  At first glance there is nothing remarkable about it – we’d been dodging similar rocks for the past mile and a half – so normally it would merit a glance and move on.  What turned out special about this rock is where it’s located.

Directly above this rock is an opening in the trees, a rare find in this thickly packed stand of evergreens.  A straight shot right up to the sky.  And the sky this day was full of wandering clouds that occasionally let sunlight pass through.  The sun is setting on the horizon behind the rock and the rays are hitting these clouds, making them glow.  And all that nice glow is coming straight down like a spotlight, showcasing this moss-covered rock and the golden ring of fallen cedar needles surrounding it.

I stood there looking at it for several seconds, wondering where the spotlight was to give this marvelous scene in the forest.  Then the clouds moved and I realized it was the sun bouncing into the trees compliments of the clouds.  When it hit just right there was a perceptible glow around the rock as the warm colored needles lit up below the rock and the green moss took on an emerald shade, blanketing the contours of the cracked and weather beaten stone.

Here was a scene I must capture.  Not just something interesting or fun but rather a compelling scene I couldn’t walk past, regardless of how much I wanted to reach the car.  I put my camera on my monopod, braced against a tree, and fired off several series of images, knowing HDR would be the best way to show this scene.

The colors were delicate and subtle – I doubt this is an honest rendition of them.  Not even sure it conveys the emotional impact of the scene but here it is for you all to see and share in the moment.