Elkhorn Ranch Digital Photography Workshop

From January 22-29, 2012, I will be teaching a digital photography workshop at the Elkhorn Ranch southwest of Tucson, AZ. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the workings of your digital camera, ideas on composition, how to keep track of all those wonderful images, and what to do with them besides residing on your computer's hard drive.

Plus the Elkhorn Ranch is a delightful place to spend a week. Most guests come primarily to ride so the workshop has been designed to accommodate this aspect. As a matter of fact, the horseback rides become part of the photographic experience.

This is a workshop for photographers of all abilities but especially for those new to digital cameras including point and shoots. These so-called simple cameras have amazing capabilities and most pros carry at least one with them to capture those unexpected photogenic opportunities.

I hope to see you at the Elkhorn. If you have any photography questions beforehand please zip me an email at swa@infomagic.net. For ranch questions and to make a reservation, contact office@elkhornranch.com or call (520) 822-1040. By the way, click on the above image for a better view. Thanks.

Another Sky Correction

At the American Cemetery in Normandy, France was this lovely statue. I tried to shoot it so the sun would be in its hand. But as you can see that gave me a backlit image. Here is another approach to correcting a dark foreground with a bright background. In Adobe Lightroom, I increased Recovery to 100% to tame down the sun and sky. Then to open up the foreground, I dragged the Fill Light slider. This however makes the overall image a little washed out. To correct this, use the Black slider. To add "pop" to the image, I also used the Clarity and Vibrance sliders. I thought the sky still needed some work, so I used the digital Neutral Density Filter to darken the blue. What do you think? Better?

Lights and Darks

Another photographic challenge while in Europe was getting a good exposure when shooting dark buildings against bright, washed-out skies. Remember that the human eye can see a range of about 11 F-stops whereas the camera sensor can only "see" about 5. This presents a dilemma when attempting to capture a scene with very bright highlights and dark areas. A general rule of thumb is to expose for the highlights and let the darks go darker, just like in the film days.

There are a couple of tools that can improve photographing these situations. One is to use a graduated neutral density filter. This is a rectangular piece of glass that is dark at one end and gradually becomes clear at the other end. The filter is held in front of the camera lens with the dark end covering the bright part of the scene. This may help reduce the range of brightness and allow the camera to record all parts of the scene better.

A second option is using digital neutral density filters, such as found in Adobe Lightroom and some other photo editing software. The image is brought into the program and the digital filter placed over it and sliders are used to brighten or darken areas as needed. Keep in mind though that if there are overexposed areas in the original capture, there is probably no data for the software to work with. Always check your histogram and "blinkies" in the field to make sure that no important elements in your image are totally blown out.

A third option is to use High Dynamic Range software. HDR allows you to combine several images, each taken with different exposure settings, and combine them into one perfect picture. A few cameras, such as the Canon G12, have this feature built in. You push the shutter button, the camera takes 3 exposures in rapid succession and automatically combines them in the camera. This feature is still rudimentary but I believe it will become better and standard in future camera models. Probably not too far down the road, these new technologies will equal the seeing ability of the human eye and worrying about the range of light in an image will become less of an issue.

In the top image, the sky was very bright, but I was able to tone it down using a digital neutral density filter. In the second image, again the sky was a little too bright, but I brought out some detail with the filter. I also used the filter tool on the foreground flowers and then vignetted the corners to bring the viewer's eye more to the center.

Removing the Present

I am back home in Flagstaff after visiting 15 countries over the last six weeks aboard the National Geographic Explorer. One photography challenge was capturing interesting images of historic features while excluding contemporary objects. One example was this replica of the type of sailing vessels used by the Hanseatic League during the Middle Ages. Unfortunately it was moored in the industrial part of the Lubeck, Germany harbor with cranes and other modern machinery near and behind it.

I made the image and then in Adobe Lightroom cropped out what I could and vignetted the corners to further hide unwanted features. You can also see that I changed it from color to sepia to give the image a vintage look. I may go back and do additional work on this image such as cloning out the building and crane that are still visible.