Friday, April 21, 2023
That is a question that I am going to pose along with this blog entry. The reason I am posing that question is because I don’t want to be secretive about what has happened here, but in the same vein, I believe that I have been true to my artistic vision of the scene. I know that I might be getting ahead of myself here, so I will step back for a moment and introduce this entry a little better. My typical blog reads much like a narrative of what has happened during the day and how I came about getting the photos. If I stuck with that idea, it would be a very short and uneventful blog as even though I shot a total of 74 frames during the evening, I only got one photograph. Granted it was made up from ten of those frames, but the end result is a single photograph. Instead of walking you through the process where I just stood and waited, I thought that this would be a good time to do a little tips and tricks entry to keep it interesting. I did this not too long ago when I talked about the difference between blending multiple images and the use of grad filters. I liked how that one turned out, and I think that this one offers a similar benefit to those that are interested in photography and for those that just enjoy the photos that result. We’ll get back to the question at hand momentarily, but let’s give a quick background on this trek.
As you know, I have been focusing more and more on landscape photography this month. It has been the first time I’ve really been free during the Spring months to get out there and enjoy the change of seasons. It all started on a whim at the beginning of the month and has turned into a lot of treks at the bookends of the day. Just the day before this trek, I had gone out for a sunrise at Rough Ridge so that I could start using the new features in Lightroom that I have been so excited about being added. Even though I have my reservations about being able to stand out in landscape photography, I can’t argue with the internal drive to get out and capture the landscape once again. It feels good to get out in nature without worrying about being on somebody’s personal property or trying to figure out a way to eliminate visual distractions around a junked car. There is something simple and honest about it all.
Yes, I put that last sentence in on purpose. You see, I had started looking at the weather Thursday evening and saw that there were going to be very minimal clouds in the sky during the morning hours, but they were going to start coming in by early afternoon. The clouds were of the high-altitude variety, and they were looking to be at nearly 100% coverage according to my app. This could mean a flat and featureless sky, or it could mean a very thin layer of clouds well into the atmosphere. There was no real way to determine, but it was looking like potentially a good sunset if the clouds looked right. I would just have to go out and look during the afternoon to see if they were going to develop as hoped.
For most of the day on Friday, I contemplated where I wanted to go. The clouds were pretty much going to be the same from Linville up to Laurel Springs which was my immediate area of operations. I kind of landed on Beacon Heights, The Lump Overlook, and Jumpin’ Off Rocks (the overlook, I’m not wanting to die). Each one had their positives and negatives when it came to compositional possibilities and I knew that in each case, the sky would be the most important part of the composition. The problem that I was running into was that the longer the day went, the less motivated I became to go out and capture any photos. I’ve mentioned several times before that I like starting early while I am still fresh. The longer I sit and wait, the more likely I’ll talk myself out of going. Honestly, it was rougher for me to decide to leave for this trek than when I woke up at 4am the day before. The strange thing is, I’m not a morning person at all.
Anyway, I had a photo in my mind that I wanted to capture but hadn’t decided on the location that would provide the setting for me. I kept looking at the weather and eventually was able to go outside and look at the actual sky which could go either way for an interesting evening sky. I started to mark each of my options off of the list because I would be pretty much stuck with a direction to shoot in. This limitation was important because with each of these locations, I was going to be shooting opposite of the sun and if the sky didn’t come to life, I would be stuck with a very bland color palette. The only exception was Beacon Heights, which would a more Southern orientation of the camera. I looked at the large canvas on my wall of that location and didn’t see how this sky was going to offer anything better than what I had captured there years ago. There was also just the one composition that I really loved there which was a long series panorama. This wasn’t a problem, but I wanted options in case the sky didn’t play nice.
I was about to give up on going because it is easy to talk myself out of late day treks. I almost did, until I had the thought of Doughton Park, specifically the lodge. I remembered a potential composition shot from the back porch of the lodge that might work for the sky I was hoping for. If that didn’t work, I had plenty of other options all within about a 10-minute hike. It was the options that I found most appealing for this trek since the sky was going to be a complete wildcard. It was decided, I was going back to Doughton again, and that was only a 40-minute drive from home which was nice.
I left the house shortly after 6pm so I would have at least an hour before sunset to get set up and start shooting. It is pretty much how I do my sunrise photos, only I get to arrive in the daylight. It is very important to give yourself the time beforehand so that you can find your composition and get things all set up for when the light starts to change. I still needed to decide on the exact composition that I wanted to work on which would burn some of that extra time.
I arrived at the park a little before 7pm and found the sky to be slightly interesting with some good textures to it. I was actually hopeful that when the sun dropped in the sky, I would start to see some awesome colors develop. The clouds were thin enough that the light was still shining through to give some nice highlights on the landscape. I grabbed my camera and started looking behind the lodge where I had thought my composition would be. It wasn’t there. I don’t know what I was recalling from the past, but there was just no flow to the landscape at all and I saw nothing that would work in these conditions. I made the quick walk over to the intersection where the entrance is to look at that location which has always been a fun spot for me to work. It was kind of flat, but I had never shot this at sunset before and was kind of excited about the possibilities with the sky. I could have walked out into the meadow to work with a number of other compositions, but the wind was a little strong to be dealing with trees as a dominant feature in the composition. It seemed that the scene that excited me the most was the one here at the fence which gave me many different opportunities to capture various compositions.
I started to examine the area to determine what compositions spoke to me. I ended up with three in mind taking into account different looks to the sky. I was still holding out hope that the sky was going to capture a lot of color when the sun reached the horizon, so that was what I set up for. Since the sky was going to be my main focus here, I wanted to include a lot of it. The best way to do that was to capture the scene as a panorama which I have done from time to time. With that in mind, I pulled out the camera with the 70-200mm lens attached and put it on the leveled tripod. I made sure that I could make a full sweep of the scene with the camera remaining perfectly level to avoid any issues with stepping the individual frames. I added the filter holder in case I was to need any filters added as the light started to change. It turns out that I didn’t need any filters at all, which was nice. With a few slight adjustments of the camera position, and a good bit of elevation to get the fence and gate where I wanted them, I was set. I made a dry run through the scene and set the focus and exposure before starting my first series. That allowed me to see how the images matched up, and to kind of check my composition. If you move through the image review quick enough, it is like scanning the entire pano.
I was all set, and now I just had to wait for the sky to do something interesting. I shot this quick cell phone photo to send to Toni to let her know that things were not really looking great, but I was hoping. At this point, the light was almost too flat with the overcast skies. The fence was picking up a nice bit of light which helped to give the scene dimension, but that was about it. I just kept imagining the sky going wild as I had been previsualizing all day. I had the right scene, the right textures in the sky, and I was ready to capture it. As the sun came down, it started to shine a bit brighter through some thinner parts of the clouds and the fence started to light up even more. I began making some exposures not knowing when the best light would hit. The sky was interesting in a soft and subtle way, but it wasn’t colorful enough to make me happy. I thought about the possibilities of doing this as a black and white image, but that would kind of ruin the whole purpose for coming out here in the evening. My mind was set, I needed there to be color in the sky. There was still time as the sun would still be above the horizon for about 30 more minutes.
I was getting good at running through the 7-11 frames needed to make the panorama. I started out omitting the trees to the right since one of them had broken in the last few weeks from high winds, but I eventually started to see the sky as being very interesting behind the trees and possibly a source of color. I just had to be careful about how I framed the shots by the tree to keep overlap to a minimum as it was moving noticeably in the wind. By the third series, I was capturing the entire scene.
The sky was still very soft, but I could see different colors starting to develop. I could also see that the sun was about to dip behind a thicker line of clouds which would very likely kill all the light and the potential for color. The light on the fence was starting to fade, and I was thinking that this was going to be my last chance for color across the scene. One other aspect had changed and that was a couple of mid-level clouds which had entered the scene right above the meadow. They didn’t have any color, but they would be very helpful to close the scene in at the top since they were darker clouds than the others around them. I made two more quick series of shots as the colors in the sky increased, but the fence highlights decreased. I felt that these were probably my best options out of the different runs I had done. They made for the eighth and nineth panoramas I had shot of the same scene.
I took a break after that and watched the light. A minute or two later, the fence went dull, and the sky held what little color it had. I estimated that there were about 10 more minutes left before the sun dipped behind the denser clouds and the light would be lost. Nothing really changed in that 10 minutes, and then just like that the scene went blue. I decided to wait for another 10 minutes to see if I would get lucky enough to have the sun find a hole in the clouds, but the longer I waited, the bluer things became. It was apparent that the light was over, and my evening was finished. I packed things up and walked back to the truck to head home.
It wasn’t really too late for me to import the photos and see what I had that night, but I wasn’t convinced that I was going to have anything worth working on. I needed to mentally separate myself from my previsualization and the actuality of the evening. I wanted to start on the edits Saturday morning with a fresh outlook. This is the part where I am wanting you to decide if you think that I am lying with the final image, or is it art in the truest sense? I’m not looking for approval here because I am very happy with what I have created, but I do feel like I owe it to you to be straight up with what I’ve done.
I started off by going through the 74 frames that I created and broke them up into the individual panoramas that I had shot. I then started to look at the pieces to see where my best color was going to come from. I ended up with three images that I felt were worth working on so I merged the files into the three panoramas. These were between 7-10 frames each and took about three minutes for the computer to stitch each of them together. From there, I looked at the three entire panoramas and determined that the last one that I had shot of the day had the best chance for color and highlights on the fence. That RAW file is shown here.
Now, obviously, this falls very short of what I had been hoping to see. It was what was actually there as seen in the cell phone shot above, but it didn’t capture the feeling that I had at the time. It also wasn’t feeling much like a sunset to me. All I really had was a bit of brightness in the sky to the right which was getting close to where the sun was in the sky. There were bands of pastel colors layering the sky, but they were faint. This was the only one out of the three that I had chosen that had the dark clouds which added that important element that closed the scene in at the top. They also made a triangle of elements with the clouds, trees, and distant meadow. The composition worked, but the colors were lackluster at best.
I could have done this as a black and white, but there wasn’t enough light on the landscape to really make that work, and to bring balance, I would have had to darken the sky in places so much that it would overwhelm the foreground. I still wanted this to be in color, but I wasn’t sure how much color was actually there to work with. I hear you saying that I could do sky replacement, or some other AI generated alteration, and yes, I could have. I’m sure that there is a great sunset sky I could add which would make this photo work, but since the sky was the story here, that presented the problem. If I used another sky here, my composition would be there to support a sky that somebody else had captured, and Adobe had licensed. The main character of my image would be work which wasn’t my own. I couldn’t live with that fact if this photo was ever placed in my portfolio or hung on my wall. Nope, sky replacement was never an option, not even if I had captured the sky at a different time. For me to feel comfortable with this photo, I was going to need to see what I could do with the information provided by the scene.
You might be thinking that I am putting too much thought into my photos, and I probably am. It would be simple to just change out the sky, but it wouldn’t be my work. I could just delete the files from the disk and pretend that the trek never happened. I was only there for about an hour, so not much loss if I did that. I could put my Lightroom skills to work and try to pull some more color out of the sky which I have done in the past. If nothing else, I was going to have a great opportunity to play with the curves feature within the masks again which I had high hopes for with this photo. You see, within the curves, I can also affect the different color channels through curves that gives me even more control over the overall colors. By limiting the effect to the area I’ve masked, I could do all kinds of things to the sky while leaving the ground alone. It was worth a try if for nothing else to learn more about how to use curves within local adjustments.
I did my normal workflow on the image to get started. I pulled the highlights down a good bit, boosted the shadows, warmed the entire scene, and tweaked the colors to get as much contrast as I could. When I was happy with the basic edit, I started to move into the local adjustments. The first thing that I went for was the sky since that was going to be the true test of whether or not this was going to be a photo worth keeping. The sky was masked, and I went right to the curves which created all the right contrasts needed to make the clouds pop. With contrast comes saturation, so the colors that were present started to be much more visible. From there, I went into the RGB curves and added some reds and yellows until the colors worked with the scene. Another couple of masks to finish closing the sky in, and one to add a bit more contrast was added before I set to work on the landscape.
As with the sky, I adjusted the ground using curves, but in a completely different way. I was boosting the shadows, adding to the highlights of the fence, and creating some local contrast. A few more linear and radial filters were added to give some more visual interest and I was looking at an entirely new photo. With the help of a bit of color grading in the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows, I was able to see all the right colors developing in the scene. In about 30 minutes, I had a workable base edit done on this massive 1.33GB file. I took a break from it and came back for a secondary edit and cleaning. I tweaked the colors a bit more, but nothing at all drastic. In fact, I only moved a handful of sliders in the Hue/Saturation/Luminance panel, and most of that was to work with the blue in the sky and the green of the grass. The colors had all come from the curves and color grading.
The cleanup took probably the longest of all the steps. That was where I went into 100% and removed things like sensor spots, and bugs that streaked across the frame. It was a very long process to move through the image like this, but my goal is to always have a print ready file when I upload it to the website. This was becoming an amazing image and one that I was already starting to see up on the wall. I kept doing little adjustments here and there until I was satisfied with it all. I think that the edit took a total of an hour and fifteen minutes which was longer that I was at Doughton Park. Yes, it was a much longer edit that I was used to, but I was thrilled with the outcome.
I did my customary flip-flop between the before and after versions of the photo and realized just how much I had changed the photo through the editing process. I started to ask myself if I had gone too far? That is a question with a bar that seems to change with each edit I do. When I started with photography, I didn’t want any part of editing because I felt that it wasn’t true to the photographic aspect of the art. Over time, I realized how important the darkroom process was to film, and how important the editing process is to digital captures. I’m still not a fan of image manipulation, but my current view is that it is OK to use the tools at your disposal as long as the final result is true to the scene that you saw with your heart.
Here I was looking at the scene that I had been imagining through the entire day. It was the scene that I was hoping for when I set the camera up. I had achieved this final image not by replacing the sky or doing major trickery through Photoshop. I had stayed in Lightroom for the entire process using the basic tools that are available there to pull out every bit of the color in the scene. Is it a lie? I would argue that it is not. Everything in this photo was there in reality at the time of the capture. Yes, there were ten images merged together, but it was not a composite photo by any stretch. To make it even more legitimate, there were no filters used during the capture, just a camera and a lens. As an artist, this is the scene that I envisioned, using ingredients that were there in reality.
What are your thoughts on this photo? Would this be something that you would want hanging on your wall? Do you look at it and only see the work in Lightroom, or are you able to accept it as a creative vision from an artist? Would AI have done a better job at creating the scene that I had in mind? I’m interested in your answers, but I’m very much satisfied with how this photo turned out. This was the scene that I felt, not necessarily saw, and that is a very valid reaction to art in my opinion.
Thank you for joining me on this short trek. I do hope you enjoyed it, and benefited from my explanation of the process by which this photo came to be. If you are as struck by this scene as I am, and would like a print, I would love to talk with you about making that happen. As it is a panorama, I would not suggest having it printed in any of my stock sizes. This deserves to be a large canvas or even metal print much larger than I can print in the studio. All it takes is a quick call or email to get your order started.
If you would like to learn how to create images like this, consider one of my mentorship programs. I can custom build a program for you and your needs. We can work in the field together to capture the image with your camera, and then we can come into the digital darkroom and learn how to get the most out of your images. I do my best to teach you the way that works best with your own artistic vision. Teaching is a very fulfilling part of what I do with photography, and I would love to work with you.
Until next time….
