A common problem in outdoor photography : unwanted obstacles. Digitally removing the object can be easy or very difficult.
If the object obscures a plain background such as blue sky or beach sand, then computer software can easily fill-in any space that is vacant when deleting the unwanted object. If the object obscures something more complex such as a person’s face, there is no way to recreate what the camera never captured. While this is surely changing with today’s advances in generative AI, there will always be limitations.
In this image of the Groveton covered bridge, removing the yellow marker post would not be difficlut. The real problem is a telephone/utility pole that stands near the front of the bridge; see the unmodified photo below.
The technique that solves this problem is to capture two images. After taking the first photo, take a few steps to one side and make the second photo. That second capture reveals what was hidden behind the pole in the first capture. In post-processing, I removed the pole and then used pieces of the second image to fill in the blank.
Original photo – Before editing
Of course there are still many wires and shadows of wires across the image. Removing those can be easy against a clear blue sky but becomes more difficult across varying clouds, trees, and the shingle roof. I expect generative AI can make this task much easier … and better. If you look closely at the edited image, you may find a few breaks in cable shadows that I have not yet remedied. AI could potentially figure out the pattern of the roof shingles and extend the pattern, completely fixing the shadow breaks.
I love the season of flowering trees; sadly, in the northeast, the season only lasts maybe six weeks.
Ornamental flowering trees are commonly planted in many different spaces ranging from residential gardens to corporate office parks. One category that commonly hosts plantings of beautiful trees is cemeteries. While it may seem odd to some people, I’ve seen people of all sorts and ages strolling through cemeteries, even having a picnic. Last weekend, I visited a cemetery in Wakefield. Although the crabapple trees had all dropped their colorful petals, I counted more than two dozen dogwood trees in bloom.
From that short excursion, I wanted to share a comparison of two images of the same tree but photographed with wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens. There are a few reasons why you might choose to use one or the other. When in doubt, shoot them both.
The first reason you might choose a telephoto lens is because you can’t get close enough to your subject. I personally encountered that scenario a couple weeks ago, stopping to photograph cherry trees in bloom at a cemetery where the gates were locked. I photographed from outside the fence using a 100mm lens.
The second reason you might choose to use a telephoto lens is to control the background. The narrow field of view may enable you to exclude elements from the background. And a wide-angle lens can include more background, for more environmental context. In the two photos I’ve shared here, both the telephoto and the wide-angle image do show the environment context, but a telephoto also allowed me to exclude the tombstones entirely.
A third reason to choose either telephoto or wide-angle is depth perception. Wide-angle lenses commonly exaggerate distance; multiple subjects in the photograph appear to be farther apart, compared to using a longer/telephoto focal length. Conversely, telephoto lenses tend to compress distance, making multiple subjects (at different distances from the camera) appear closer together.
Lastly, when you have multiple subjects at very different distances, a telephoto lens combined with a small aperture may allow blurring the background – if that’s the effect you’re seeking to create. Both the images here employ an aperture about f\4.5.
A camera’s image sensor has one job – to record light. However, sensors generally can only capture a limited range of light from shadows to highlights. When the actual range exceeds the sensor’s ability, that’s “high dynamic range” or HDR.
Here are two recent examples where the range of light exceeded my camera sensor’s ability. The first is a sunset. No surprise – the highlights are super bright. The second example is less obvious – the surface of a lake reflects blue sky in some areas and elsewhere the light simply falls off to black.
The solution is the same. Capture multiple exposures and then combine them together as a matter of post-processing. Many cameras have this post-processing and a built-in option. Even my smartphone camera includes that feature. The results may be disappointing. My own experience with camera built-in HDR processing is 50/50 at best. The end result is so commonly disappointing that I routinely don’t trust the camera to do it. Instead, I do HDR post-processing using software in a desktop computer.
This technique generally requires that the camera doesn’t move when capturing the separate exposures. The composition of the two captures is exactly the same. If the camera moves slightly, that is commonly not a problem because the two can be aligned during post.
This technique doesn’t work with video. When shooting video, the camera angle usually changes during the shoot; to shoot the scene a second time will result in a different video composition. Two captures will never align. For video, the solution to HDR is different – capture the shot just once but use a special camera mode that is very low-contrast, often referred to as DLog. Straight out of the camera, that shot looks truly awful. It must be post-processed, expanding the contrast range to something that appears correct.
This photo was carefully planned, for the time of year (trees are in bloom), the location, and a somewhat unusual downward angle. The human experience here (Boston Public Garden) includes sky and nearby skyscrapers. I chose to eliminate the sky and skyscrapers through use of a high camera position looking down. However, elevating the camera can be a difficult problem if there is nothing to stand upon.
One of my favorite photographic tools is a telescoping pole with a camera mount at the top. Combined with a camera equipped with wi-fi, the camera can be raised up to 20 feet and operated from a mobile app on a smartphone.
A telescoping pole is often the best choice for a camera height of ten to twenty feet. To photograph from a height of forty feet or two hundred feet, I can use a small aerial drone. While a drone can be used at altitudes of fifteen or twenty feet, that could readily be a distraction and a nuisance to people who are trying to enjoy the park.
On multiple occasions my photographic intentions have been thwarted by the presence of utility wires strung upon poles. While I could have flown an aerial drone above the wires, I instead chose to use a telescopic pole and place the camera twelve to eighteen inches below the wires. Personally, I don’t want to fly a drone that close to wires. Unlike a drone camera, a pole-mounted camera can’t move suddenly and potentially collide with wires.
For comparison’s sake, I shot the same scene with the camera at eye-level. The location I chose for my photo was occupied by a nine-foot-tall shrub. The pole-mounted camera enabled shooting over the top of this shrub in the foreground.
Recently I have been working through my photography catalog for the purposes of overhauling my website. At the same time, I’ve been recognizing that some images can be repurposed for graphic t-shirts and coffee mugs. My latest design is shown here; the left version is intended to be printed on light backgrounds and the right version is intended to be printed on dark backgrounds.
For this particular work, I used Adobe Photoshop and multiple plugins by Topaz Labs. To adjust the color palette and to enhance the details, I commonly use Topaz Adjust and Topaz Detail.
Here’s the original digital photo from ten years ago. This was probably the first time I had ever taken a digital SLR on a backpacking trip. Because I had not yet learned the features of this camera, I neglected one of the most remarkable features of the Canon 5D mark II … the first DSLR camera capable of 1080p high-def video. To this day, I regret that I did not capture any video in this remote unique landscape.
If you look closely (click on the image to see a larger view) toward the top right of the image, you will see blue blazes painted on the rocks; these blazes mark the hiking trail … a very narrow trail with a potentially nasty drop-off.
Rumney Marsh photographed with an aerial drone (sUAS)
I first visited Rumney Marsh in the month of May. Although I discovered some great photo compositions, the marsh was mostly brown. Presuming that the grasses would fully transform the landscape into a greener palate, I vaguely planned to return some weeks later. Shown here below is my first image from the May visit:
Rumney Marsh in the month of May
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This year, spring in New England has featured more rain than normal. Dry days are a bit like currency – have to spend them judiciously. Five or six weeks later I returned to the marsh on a dry day and found the green grasses covered the land, as expected. Unexpectedly, coastal clouds were lingering and the water reflected white sky (not blue sky).
Rumney Marsh (June) under cloudy skies
While that is a nice image, … I had imagined the water reflecting a blue sky. So, I returned later that same day after the clouds cleared away. That final image is shown at the top of this article.
In all three instances, the image required post-processing for HDR, particularly because the buildings on the horizon were too bright. So each of these three instances is a combination of multiple exposures, simply to control the dynamic range of light.
In this particular case, standing on a tall bridge (with pedestrian walkway) provided a spectacular view.
Where to stand? I do ponder this question in advance whenever possible. But sometimes I don’t have detailed information in advance. If I recall correctly, on the day of this parade of sail, I did not know precisely where the ships would be sailing and realized the potential of the bridge only that morning when I arrived at the waterfront.
The question of where to stand sometimes involves the location of the sun. In the morning, sunlight will be coming from the east or southeast. Later in the day, it comes from west or southwest. That can be extremely important if my photographic expectations are front-light, back-light, or side-light.
A staged event, such as a parade of sail, will generally have a fixed start time that is outside of my control. In that case, perhaps the biggest question is whether to stand on the left bank or the right bank. For a recent Sail Boston event, I knew that the ships would be sailing into Boston Harbor through a channel between East Boston and South Boston; I had to choose one location, as travelling between the different locations was impractical.
I first began photographing tall ships during SailBoston 2000. Since then, I have photographed tall ships many times from Philadelphia PA to Camden ME. SailBoston 2017 was not to be missed, being the largest gathering of tall ships in the northeast since 1976.
As the weather for the grand parade of sail was a big foggy, the resulting images were low contrast. If your camera is capturing JPEG images, then you might change the camera settings to increase the contrast. But for those of us who are sticklers for image quality and therefore capture RAW images, the camera setting for contrast doesn’t actually do anything. Here’s how I post-processed RAW images using Adobe Lightroom.
Original low-contrast image before post
(click on the image to see the full-resolution image.)
When lighting is low contrast, you have a choice of keeping that or compensating for it. If you choose to compensate, the most important step is usually to lower the black point. Essentially, low contrast implies that the darkest parts of the image render as a lighter tone and the brightest parts of the image render as less bright. Dark isn’t particularly dark and bright isn’t particularly bright.
With the original settings shown on the left, notice that the histogram at the top shows none of the image information extends to the far left. None of the image falls into the leftmost one third, the region of darkest possible tones. To pull the dark tones to the left, use the black clipping slider control. The settings on the right show the modified histogram.
Adjustments in Adobe Lightroom
Lightroom divides tonality into five regions, black, shadow, midtone, hightlight, and white. If you hover your computer cursor over any of the five relevant slider controls, the corresponding region will be highlighted in the histogram.
Dragging the black point to -60 is relatively heavy-handed and tends to drag the shadow areas down. Although I have raised the shadow brightness here, that is primarily to hold the shadows closer to the original brightness, compensating for the drag of the -60 black point.
Further increasing the overall contrast, I have raised the overall exposure brightness and the highlights. And I have made minor adjustments in color, to compensate for a slight green cast and slight yellow cast.
In addition to the overall image adjustments, I have made a few local adjustments. The hull of the Eagle was bit dark, due to the angle of the sun; so I brightened the hull slightly. The sails of schooner Adventure picked up a slight blue cast from the environment; so I moved that color slightly toward yellow. The white stripes of the American flag also picked up a bluish cast; so I moved that color slightly toward yellow, reduced the color saturation, and added a touch of brightness.
Finally, the foreground water appeared to be less bright, perhaps due to shallow depth. I applied a gradient filter to the foreground and bumped up the brightness to match the rest of the image.
Maybe these adjustments seem like a lot of work. But the overall image adjustments can be quickly and easily copied to other images. If the natural light of the day hasn’t changed, these adjustments are appropriate for many images, not just the one. Wherever the light did change, I have to make small adjustments and then apply that set of adjustments to a group of images.
With more than fifty ships in the parade of sail, I shot 250 images. I don’t give detailed attention to every single image. Duplicating adjustments to a group of images is a necessary time saver. And, of course, I will give the most attention to my favorite images, those that might be submitted to publishers or printed for wall decoration.
If you are in the Boston area during August 2017, stop by Boston City Hall and check out my exhibit of tall ship photography at the Mayor’s Neighborhood Gallery (2nd floor).
The tulips at Boston Public Garden. are an annual rite of spring. They are fun to photograph and I wanted to share some techniques with you.
This first image was shot at 7am on a Saturday morning. Early morning may be the only time when the garden isn’t swarming with people. To visually compress the distance, I used a 200mm lens.
This next image is different for several reasons. Of course, this is a closer view. Using a 100mm macro lens at an aperture of f/7, the depth of field is shallow. I chose to fill the frame with flowers and exclude the surrounding environment. Also note that the light is very different. I shot this image after 6pm with the evening sun directly shining on the flowers from the side.
Getting even closer, the image becomes more abstract. The image is about color and texture; the concept of “tulip” begins to disappear. I specifically chose to use an evergreen shrub for the background, knowing it would fall away to black because this side of the shrub is in shadow. (You can dimly see a green tulip stem rising along the left side of the image.)
Taking a step back, not as close as the previous image, this is more obviously a tulip. Still working with the dark background, I’ve repositioned myself to achieve back-lighting from the setting sun.
Additionally, I chose to break a couple photography “rules”. Intentionally photographing through a foreground tulip creates a highlight in the bottom left. It was a gamble that I think paid off quite well. A viewer will naturally be drawn to the lower highlight and the upper highlight. After bouncing back and forth a few times, you eventually find the beautiful color and texture in between. I find that my mind dwells on this image longer than the others.
A combination of backlighting, dark background, and close-up abstract shape.
Upon thinking “how can I look at this subject with a different perspective?” I finished up the evening by looking down on the flowers from a steep angle, as the sun was soon to fall behind the buildings of Boston. I chose a more narrow aperture here, f 16, because I wanted to hold some depth of focus from foreground to background. And because a smaller aperture means less light entering the camera, I increased the ISO. Aperture priority, f/16, 1/160 sec, ISO 800, 100mm macro lens.
One of the most important aspects of wildflower photography is controlling the background. Finding a clean background, that is not distracting, can be challenging.
Controlling the background can sometimes be easy and sometimes difficult. Thinking about it just now, here are some considerations just off the top of my head.
Inspect around the flower to understand what will appear behind the flower
Choose if you want additional flowers in background or foreground
Watch out for distracting twigs or blades of grass; you can push them out of the frame
If the flowers are on long stems, you may be able to nudge the stem, either to achieve a better background or to place the flower in a more flattering light.
To fix a problematic background, consider placing some object behind the flower.
Consider placing the camera near the ground and shoot upwards at the flower
Consider filling the entire frame with the flower – no background
If you can’t achieve a good background, look for a different flower nearby
Canada Mayflower
Canada Mayflower
One more thing … In your zeal, try not to trample the flowers. Leave them for someone else to enjoy.
