It’s too early for most of the mustard flowers, but we traveled to Napa this week to see how things were progressing. I wanted to make the best of a partly cloudy sky, so I took two frames for a spliced panorama. If the sky and the ground are in a single frame, the sky is usually overexposed and and the ground underexposed. With two images, the camera exposure adjusts separately for the sky and ground. The image breaks two rules of composition.
Photoshop™ has a number of built-in filters that attempt to convert photo images into artistic renditions. Previously I discussed posterization, sometimes followed by the palette knife filter, to punch up weak scenes. Recently I obtained some Photoshop filters from Topaz Labs, including the Topaz Simplify 2 filter set that includes a Painting option. My test cases were some photos of flowers that seemed to me to have potential, but needed punching up. I have come away a fan of the Topaz paint options.
Autumn is a time for visiting farm stands. There are pumpkins to be selected for Halloween, apples, and all manner of squash. So maybe not everyone thinks “panorama” at the farm stand, but, of course, I do. I like panoramic photos. Panoramas are well suited to scenes where there is a lot going on, as there was recently at Mike’s Truck Garden in Fulton, California.
Markleeville is the seat of Alpine County, a geographically large area having only about 1500 residents. The residents get to enjoy some of that eastern Sierra scenery. Markleeville is a small town (pop. 197) about 50 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. Route 89 continues south of the town, ultimately turning east through Monitor Pass.
Roughly six miles south of Markleeville, the road crosses over the Carson River, providing an accessible photogenic view. The 4 PM late September sun provided contrasty lighting, just the thing for my recently recovered interest in high dynamic range imagery (HDRI). I took three frames, bracketed 1 1/2 stops around the nominal exposure, then added some extreme contrast enhancement to the foreground.
We are fast approaching autumn, and with it many enjoyable walks in the woodlands with a camera at the ready. This past weekend we visited Pfieffer Big Sur State Park on the central California coast. It provided a warm up for autumn photography. One feature of forest scenes is the high range of light to dark tones. That prompted me to brush up on high dynamic range imagery (HDRI), a technique for combining multiple exposures into a single image.
Suppose that you were on safari when a rare white rhino appeared. How would you feel if you didn’t have a camera with you? I had that happen, but I was prepared. Well, I wasn’t on safari, I was walking the local park, and it wasn’t actually a rhinoceros, it was a flock of pelicans. But those are details. The important point is to have a camera for unexpected photo opportunities.
I did get a few photos at the aquarium, and they served to remind me of some of the problems at such a venue. Many people were taking pictures with the flash on. That’s going to get pictures of the white reflection off the glass, not the fish. It’s better to seek the well-lit exhibits. Getting up against the glass avoids reflections and steadies the camera, but don’t prevent the lens from adjusting to focus. Better to rest a forearm on the glass. That keeps off fingerprint smears as well. Some exhibits are dark with the sea creatures highlighted from above. These have to be underexposed by at least two stops below automatic to keep the background dark.
Point Reyes National Seashore is well known for scenery, wildflowers, and summer fog. The park is about an hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, either following California’s Highway 1 up the coast or winding through the hills west of the city of San Raphael. During a recent visit there were wildflowers, but not much sunshine. Hence the adjusted goal was to taken moody pictures of gumplant. I ended up merging four images into a wide angle view.
An elfscape is a natural scene on a small scale. They contain a number of miniature plants and usually a piece of wood or a tree trunk. While having an actual elf in the scene is desirable, it isn’t mandatory. However, the scene must appear to be compatible with the appearance of some such wee being. There are more elfscapes in the world than one might think. Look for them in forests and above the normal high tide mark on beaches.
The automatic exposure capability of modern cameras is a thing to be cherished. It usually produces excellent photos with nothing more than point-and-shoot. There are occasions, however, when it is best to override the automation to force a lower exposure. The built-in exposure automation assumes that the scene is reflecting 18% of the light falling upon it, and that nothing in the scene varies too much from the 18% average. There is trouble when one of those assumptions is wrong.
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