Thursday, July 13, 2023
Forgive me viewer, because it has been ten days since my last trek. Why you ask? It isn’t that I’ve been overly busy, although things have stepped up a bit around here. The weather hasn’t been all that great for photography, but there have been opportunities in the afternoons when the sky would look good. I guess it all comes down to me being a lump and not putting forth the effort to go out and get new photos. In a way, I have not been all that motivated, even though I have had a lot of activity with the photography business here of late. There are a lot of very positive things coming in the near future that I’m excited about. It is honestly time for something good to break after the most dismal quarter since I started this business officially. Looking ahead, I’ve been selected as the photographer for a project at UNC-Asheville coming up next month. I’m in talks with an investment company to shoot their corporate headshots. I’ve just come back from doing a presentation at the Capital City Camera Club which went very well, and might turn into an opportunity to conduct a workshop for the club. Additionally, just this evening I have talked to a client of mine from a couple of years ago who is wanting to discuss decorating a new office with my photography. Things are starting to turn around, and it is a very welcome change from how the year has been going thus far.
So, why did I pick today to go out and throw the dice on the weather? Well, I was getting tired of just sitting around and I wanted to get creative. The last two days were spent in a kind of creative manner since I was using those days to put together the next Behind the Camera which is due to be published on August 1st. The topic has turned out to be the difference between landscape photography and portrait photography. I hope that you join me to see what I have come up with. As creative as writing can be, I was not really communicating in my chosen language, which is photographic rather than linguistic. I was itching to get out with the camera, but really didn’t know what I wanted to work with.
Well, that wasn’t quite true, I was wanting to do some black and white architectural photography which it’s been far too long since I’ve done that. The problem with that idea was, I was wanting to get the futuristic architecture from the 50’s and 60’s with the swooping curves and UFO designs. I’m sure that there are plenty of examples of that across the world, but the truth of the matter is I live in Wilkes County. Our idea of futuristic architecture comes in the form of a barn that has been patched with stainless steel panels to cover the rotting wood beneath. There really isn’t much around us either where I would be able to find this type of architecture. I could sit and research where it might be and work on planning some form of a trip, or I could figure out something that I could realistically get to for a little bit of time out and about.
What I was looking to accomplish was to really break down a scene into some very simple parts. I didn’t want anything too complex, and the idea was simplicity and flow. I liked the idea of doing black and white, especially since I have just finished writing about why I choose black and white over color at times. One reason that I forgot to mention is that there are times like now when I am feeling overwhelmed with life and different things going on. Removing color is kind of a nice way of simplifying a scene and making it easier for me to digest when I’m feeling this way. Another way to go about that is to work with more minimalist scenes where there aren’t that many elements in place. While I didn’t have the simple and elegant lines of futuristic architecture, I did know of one place where minimalist images are a bit easier to come by in the landscape.
The Lump came to mind almost immediately. It is a location that I have dismissed for far too long in my photographic journey. The first dozen or so times that I went by there, I just couldn’t see any kind of composition at all. Essentially, there is a grassy hill with a single trail through it. It is on the other side of a split rail fence which is next to the parking area. There is an overlook on the side that looks over Wilkes County if I’m not mistaken. There really isn’t much to it, and for a photographer looking for a grand landscape, it will be rather disappointing. However, when that same photographer is looking to simplify the world that they are in, this becomes a much better option.
It has been roughly a year since I went there last, and I had pretty good luck that day. I had come up with some different ways of capturing the scene from what I normally have done. I recalled shooting most of the images in color that day and was feeling like a black and white visit would be a good idea. The ultimate decision was going to have to be based on the weather. It was supposed to be cloudy all day, but the clouds that were present were the high-altitude thin clouds which didn’t do much for the lighting, nor did they add any texture to the sky. Looking ahead towards the afternoon, there were some low and mid-level clouds supposed to be joining the thin overcast which might prove to be interesting. Those clouds were also coming along with some rain showers and storms. I was just going to have to wait and see what happened as the day moved on. It was looking like around 3pm it might start to get interesting.
I wrapped up my rough draft for the Behind the Camera entry and did a little bit of marketing before heading upstairs. Once I got up there, I was looking out the window for the next few hours watching the bright sunshine on the trees in the back yard. It wasn’t looking promising at all. I kept looking at the weather and found that the storms were starting to get pushed off and the clouds were thinning out from what they were supposed to be. In the area where The Lump was, I was seeing a brief period at 5pm where there would be clouds at all three levels in the sky. This was after a quick storm was supposed to pass through, and then after 6pm, the clouds were going to fade away revealing those lofty thin clouds that do me no good.
The storms that were supposed to roll through the area prior to 5, never materialized and the sun continued to shine. It was getting close to time when I was going to have to make a decision on whether or not to head North to the Blue Ridge Parkway. At around 4:15, I looked one last time at the weather. The clouds were still looking good for the block between 5 and 6pm, but it was still looking really bright out of the windows of the house. Keep in mind that The Lump is only a 15-minute drive from home, so what I was seeing was very likely what was happening up there. I started to think that the best thing to do was to stay home. I could go out another time and try for photos. But by doing that, I was admitting defeat without even trying. I do that enough and figured that I needed to at least give it a try and see what I could come up with.
It came down to this. I could stay home and be a lump, or I could go for a short drive to see The Lump and take some photos. I chose the latter option so that I was no longer a lump. I grabbed a quick bite to eat since I didn’t know exactly how long I would be out there and put my shoes on. The minute I opened the garage door I could see that I was probably going to need my sunglasses because the sun was quite bright. This is usually an indication that the light is too harsh for my kind of landscape photography, but I still had about 30 minutes before the clouds were supposed to come in. Be not a lump I said as I cranked the truck and put it into gear.
The ride up the mountain was relatively quick and I spent the whole time hoping that the clouds were on the way. I wasn’t even wanting specific clouds to catch the color of the setting sun. I just needed some interest in the sky. I didn’t think that was too much to ask. All I was seeing was a bright overcast which did absolutely nothing for a landscape photograph. When I arrived at The Lump, I was happy to see that the grasses had grown back. The last time I was past here, they had cut it all down and that left the trail kind of hard to see. The trail was very visible now which was awesome. The sky above was less awesome and lacked even a semblance of texture. I had wanted minimalism, and this was the pure definition of it. I would have a featureless sky with a simple trail going through the grasses of a hill. That might be a little too simplistic for what I was after.
I sat there in the parking area and contemplated my options. I had wanted to do try a panorama of the scene, but remembered the sign I had forgotten about which ruined that idea. I tried to figure out a way to recompose the pano to make it work by cropping out the sign, but the pavement was going to cause me problems with that idea. It was looking like I had just driven out here for nothing. I wasn’t seeing anything really worth my while, but at the same time, I was here, and the clouds were supposed to be getting good in the next 10 minutes or so. I figured the best thing to do was to turn the truck off and get outside to see what my options were. I left the gear in the back of the truck as I started to walk around to see the different angles.
In a few minutes, I had landed on the first composition which was a variation on one that I had shot plenty of times before. The difference was that this time, I had a tuft of lighter color grasses which I could place at the corner of the composition as a bit of a foreground leading to the trail. The clouds overhead were starting to show some definition and it was looking like the trail was leading the eyes right to that interesting sky.
With that in mind, I went to the truck and grabbed my bag and tripod. I wasn’t sure what all I was going to need, so I figured it was better to just have it all with me. In just a couple of minutes I was back at the location where I had spotted the composition. I set the tripod up and built the camera with a 24-70mm lens. I added a polarizer to give a little more punch to the sky, and then slid in a 3-stop soft ND Grad to allow for a better exposure on the ground. I tried to get the composition fine-tuned but didn’t really like how it was going. I decided to switch up my plans and go with a 16:9 crop and change the framing. Since I was already considering black and white, I just switched over to that picture style so that I could easier see the composition as I was hoping to achieve.
By switching to the black and white setting I was able to really see how the contrasts were looking across the scene. I purposely underexposed the image to make sure that I had plenty of detail in the clouds and found that the grad filter was really adding a lot of depth to the darker clouds. Things were starting to look really good already and I had just started to shoot. I moved the camera around slightly to get things organized a bit better, and played with the shutter speeds until I was confident that I had the motion of the grass controlled. At this point, things were starting to go kind of fast. The sky was changing up quickly and I was able to stay with a composition for about 5 minutes which allowed me time to get it set up and make two exposures. I felt that I needed the safety image since there were lots of bug flying around in front of the lens. I’ve had far too many photos ruined because of a black blur going across the lens that I couldn’t see in the image review. By shooting a safety frame, I stood a better chance of getting a clean image. Even if I got bugs in both, the chances were good that they would be in two different places, and I could blend the two images to create a clean one. As it turned out, I didn’t have a single problem with the bugs in any of the images, even though I shot safeties of all the compositions that I shot.
With some level of success already happening, I decided to go back to the original composition idea since I had moved the camera a good bit closer to the tuft of grass that I was hoping to make the foreground interest. It still wasn’t quite what I was hoping for because the balance was off, but once I switched over to a square crop, things felt much better in terms of the visual balance. I worked on this composition from a few different spots and shot my safety images with each one. As it turned out, a square crop wasn’t the ideal aspect ratio for this one. It worked but felt like it needed more room to breathe on the sides. Fortunately, I was shooting in RAW which kept the entire 3:2 frame that I had shot. I changed the crop to a 4:5 which is a typical medium format aspect ratio and found that had a much better visual balance.
So far, I had shot a 16:9 crop and a 4:5 crop which shows the power of changing the aspect ratio of an image. I think that this is a forgotten compositional tool because I see far too many photographers stick with their camera’s native aspect ratio no matter what they are shooting. I’ve found over the years that changing the aspect ratio is a great way of controlling the composition by changing the framework that the elements are in. For the most part, I am thinking about aspect ratio every time I am composing an image and will try to do the crop in camera if there is an option for what I am after at the time. It is not a problem to use these in-camera crops because if you are shooting RAW, you can still keep the original aspect ratio, but this is a great way to visualize what the final image will look like.
When I was pretty sure that the good clouds had moved on, I started looking for alternate compositions. I had thought about shooting off to the West but avoiding the fence which I normally include as a leading line. I looked at that view and found that it lacked a visual flow with the trees in the midground. Not wanting to force the composition, I abandoned that idea and directed my attention on a very dominant tree trunk that was next to the fence. I had shot this tree trunk years ago when the leaves had all fallen away. It was looking pretty good in the full Summer foliage. I started to look for compositions that might work. I had the defined tree and there was also the driveway leading back into the Blue Ridge Parkway. I could see through the trees down the road and up into the sky which was looking pretty nice. This was going to be a good option for another composition.
In order to capture what I was after, I was going to need a wider lens. I swapped in the 16-35mm lens and added the polarizer to it. There was no need for the grad filter here, or I guess I should say there was no way of using that filter because the trees were well into the top of the frame and they were important to the scene. When I had the composition dialed in, I could tell that the exposure latitude was too much for the camera to manage. I wasn’t going to be able to lift the shadows nearly enough to make the image that I had in mind. This left me with only one option if I was going to capture the scene. I was going to have to shoot an HDR series and blend them in post. I got the composition set and the focus locked. I then shot a four-image spread over four stops worth of exposure. I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out, but I knew that I was going to have all the information that I needed to get the detail in the shadows that I wanted.
As an aside, when I got the image home, I blended the four frames together and got a perfectly exposed image, with a minimal amount of ghosting. The issue was that the image was off balance and felt very odd. I played with the different aspect ratios and even tried cropping a bit in places, but nothing was really helping. The tree trunk that I had been interested in was turning into more of a distraction than a meaningful element. After working on the piece for about 10 minutes, I left it to work on another one. I eventually came back to it, and decided that the tree trunk had to go. I tried a square crop which effectively removed the trunk and focused on the line of the roadway which was more pleasing as well as more related to the sky which was indeed interesting.
I had started the image off as a black and white rendition but found that the road blended in too much with the grass. I wasn’t able to get it to stand out like I really wanted, so I almost abandoned the image once again. As a last ditch effort, I selected a color profile and started to edit the image in color. This seemed to do the trick. between the square crop and the color profile, I was able to direct the eyes where I wanted them to go within the frame. I had given up on this one twice, but finally had a workable edit on the concept. It was another vivid reminder about the power of aspect ratios and the use of color.
When I was done with that composition, I turned around to look at the other direction which I have shot many times since moving to Wilkes County. This view uses the Parkway as a strong leading line which takes your eyes out to the distant mountains. I love the soft patterns of the mountains and find that they make a great background, especially under an interesting sky. I still had my wide-angle lens attached which I usually don’t use for this composition. In fact, I am pretty sure that I normally will use the telephoto lens here, but this time I wanted more of the sky in the shot. The trees off to the left were also an important part of the puzzle to balance out the inclusion of the grove of trees to the right. I’m pretty sure that I haven’t shot this particular composition before and I was really liking it when I looked through the viewfinder.
In an odd twist, it was this image that turned into one of my favorites from the evening. I kept it in color because the blues and greens looked really nice with the yellow stripe going down the road. The colors provided a bit more balance to the scene, and changed the feeling of it from how it would be as a black and white image. I liked the calming effect that the color had here, and it just all seemed to work well as a photograph. As I was shooting this composition, I started to feel some raindrops on my arm. I used my hat to shield the filter as I got a few more variations on the composition before working my way back to the truck. I was pretty sure that I was done at this point.
When I got back to the truck, it seemed that the rain had stopped. More importantly, I saw the most amazing cloud over the trail leading up the lump. I had never seen anything quite like it before and I knew that I had to capture it. I quickly made my way back to that side of the overlook and found a place to set up. I was over a good bit further from where I had been to start the day off because I wanted to use the trail to link up with the clouds and needed this angle to make that happen. I did lose the minimalist approach to this scene because I started to incorporate the pine trees on the other side of the ridge. I was OK with that though because it was the clouds that I really wanted.
I also found that the wide-angle lens was overkill for this scene. I was including way too much of the hill in relation to the cloud. I made a quick switch back to the standard lens which would give me the reach I needed to frame this scene correctly. I added the polarizer to this lens as well, but realized that just as before, the sky was a bit bright in relation to the ground. I was well within a correct histogram though, and knew that I could pull the details out easy enough. However, I wanted to see a more final version of the scene in the camera to know how the composition was looking. In order to make that happen, added a grad filter to pull the sky down a bit, and then switched the camera over to the black and white profile once again. This gave me a very accurate view of what I was looking at, and this was very close to how I intended on editing it.
I think I made about five exposures of this as the clouds stretched across the sky changing their shapes. In the end, I just had to pick out the one that I liked the best. It was the first one with the grad filter that I had shot. Everything had just lined up perfectly in that frame. This was the one that I went forward with the edit on, and it was the first image that I edited from the evening. It also turned out to be my favorite from the trek. There was just something magical about the sky at that very moment. Had this been the only photo that I had shot from the day, it would have been worth the trip out there. The fact that I came back with four other images was just icing on the cake.
As I looked back on these images, I was struck by the fact that with five images, I was looking at five different aspect ratios. Only the last one here was left as the native 3:2 aspect ratio. The others represent a 4:5, 16:9, 16:10, and a square crop. Each photo demanded those particular aspect ratios to complete the composition. It really is a valuable tool being able to change up the aspect ratios like this. I’m very thankful that I have enough megapixels to do these changes without sacrificing print quality in the larger sizes.
For being at The Lump for only an hour, I feel that I did quite well shooting 45 frames with a total of five keepers. It was a quick trek, that was ultimately cut short by the rain that started falling shortly after I finished with the last composition. There is no denying that for that hour, I had some really nice conditions. I had fought going out earlier, but had I remained a lump in the recliner, I would have missed The Lump showing off and proving that it is indeed a beautiful overlook.
Thank you for joining me on this trek. I do hope that you enjoyed the story as well as the photography. I’m sure I don’t have to say it, but if you love any of these photos as much as I do and would like a print, I would be happy to make a top quality print for you. There really is no better way to enjoy a photograph. This concept was hammered home to me on Monday when I was doing my presentation. I had my images in a PowerPoint presentation which was being shown on a large television screen. The photos all came across overexposed and the gradients were nowhere near as smooth as they appeared on the laptop. The quality of the images was nowhere near what I knew the print quality would be. The same can easily be said about different computer screens or cell phone screens. There is just no way to ensure that these devices are calibrated the same way that my monitor is. It might seem a bit cocky to say it that way, but I know that how an image appears on my monitor is how it will appear in print whether I print at home or outsource it. The point is this, in order to really see the image in the way that it was edited, you almost have to have it in print form from a calibrated printer. That is the beauty of selecting a print of my work. You get to see the work as I designed it. Plus, you will be helping keep my business successful so I can continue producing photography like this.
If things go to plan, I will have a surprise in store for you after next weekend. There is a type of landscape photography that I haven’t been able to work with for quite some time now. I’m hoping to rectify that next weekend by going to a location that I have never been before. I’m thinking that the location will be epic, but the weather will determine if the photos are epic or not. Just stay tuned to see what happens and find out where I’m going.
Until next time….
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