Despite a couple of very sore calfs from an 18.5 mile cross-country running race, I went out to photograph the magnificent autumn colors last Sunday. I had a great time walking around in Uppsala and as I approached our 16th century castle, this old Chevrolet drove by me. I barely managed to get this snapshot before it had passed me. The post-processing was straight-forward and serves as a good exemple that you don’t always need to apply all of those fancy techniques. First, I increased the clarity and saturation quite a bit. I also boosted the contrast using both the tone curve and the blacks slider. To lighten up the wall, I had to add some fill light and increased the illumination of the red and orange tones. Because the back of the car was a bit overexposed, I had to use the recovery slider. As a final touch, I made the blue tones a bit darker.
Royal Arch Cascade is one of the lesser known waterfalls in Yosemite Valley, despite its impressive 1250 ft drop. The water volumes are quite low and the fall is usually dry by June. The fall is not that easy to spot - the low flow makes it hard to see the fall from a distance and it’s often shielded by trees when you get a bit closer. This also makes it hard to get a good shot of the fall. From far away, the fall will be small and hard to spot in the photo. If you venture closer, the trees makes it nearly impossible to get a good composition. When you go all the way to the bottom of the fall, the lighting conditions are very bad. The bottom is usually in deep shadows while the upper part is in full sun light.
This is a hand held shot of the base of the fall. I used a shutter speed of 1/10s to get the water to blur a bit. The composition turned out nicely, and I didn’t find any crop that I think can enhance the shot. The upper left of the shot was a bit to dark, and I used the new adjustment brush in Lightroom 2 to locally increase the exposure. As I usual, I increased the contrast with the tone curve. I also had to add a bit of fill light to get the lighting I wanted. Finally, I’d liked the photo to have a warmer feel. I made some changes to the hue for the yellow and orange tone. The stone now had the color I wanted, but the water felt cold and had a slightly blue tone that didn’t fit into the general feeling of the photo. To remedy this, I applied the same yellow/orange tone to the highlights as I use for my sunsets shots. After the change to the highlights, the color tones of the water matched the tones of the stone.
This is a macro of saw blade. I tried several different compositions and angles and this photo turned out to be one of the best.
As I’ve written before, I use Lightroom as my main tool for processing and organizing photos. One of the features that I initially found to be hard to use was the split toning functionality. Using split toning, you can add separate color tones to the highlights and the shadows. The implementation in Lightroom 1.x was quite bad, but I major improvement was made for Lightrom 2. Instead of using sliders to select the color tone, you now pick it from a color map. This makes it much easier to use split toning and to select the exact color tone that you want to apply.
For this shot, I added a combination of red and yellow to both the highlights and the shadows. The tone applied to the highlights are slightly redder and a bit more saturated than the tone for the shadows. I also increased the contrast and made some changes to the hue. As you can, I also cropped and tilted the photo.
A great spot to photograph San Francisco, Berkeley and the Bay Area is Grizzly Peak Road. The road follows the ridge above Berkeley and it’s quite easy to find. Along the road, you can stop at several turn-outs that offer slightly different views of the Bay. The view of the San Francisco skyline at night is fabulous. However, you’ll probably want a telephoto lens if you only aim for shots of SF.
For this occasion, in May 2007, we arrived some time before the sunset. I made some shots with my Pentax DA 18-55mm zoom lens before switching to the Sigma 75-300mm. With the telephoto lens, I managed to get some decent photos of the SF skyline as the sun was setting. Unfortunately, the wind picked up and it was really hard to get sharp photos as the light started to fade, using a tripod and image stabilization didn’t help much. In the end, I only got a single night shot that you might call decent.
Fast forward to the present day. I decided to play a bit with one of the initial wide-angel shot that I made just before the sunset. First, I slightly underexposed the photo. I then added some more black and used the tone curve to make the sky darker (by decreasing the light tones). By now, the foreground was way too dark and I was forced to add some fill light. Next, I changed the hue for both Orange and yellow to make the sky more appealing. As the final step, I used split toning to make the highlights really glow by adding a blend of yellow and orange. The result: a fake sunset that looks pretty real - as long as you don’t study it too carefully.
