Desert Oak, Curtin Springs Station

March 1, 2013 by 1 Comment

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It’s off on an adventure, down an unmarked dirt road through the Kings Creek Station and into Curtin Springs Station. It’s hundreds of square kilometres of remote outback Australia and only a handful of people have access to the track, so we see no one else for the next day until we reach the Lasseter Highway several hundred kilometres south.

Our vehicle is purpose designed for this sort of travel, yet even so we find ourselves bogged at the top of a particularly soft sand dune. No trouble! We bundle off the vehicle, grab the metal boards from the trailer and dig them under the wheels. It doesn’t take us too long to sort it out, but we do unload a few suitcases to make the vehicle lighter. Was that a good idea? Possibly not as we found ourselves carrying our suitcases along the sandy track to the rescued vehicle – it certainly made a comical picture.

Photo2_CR_sharpenedFuture sand dunes were approached at higher speed and we only had one more situation to deal with. It certainly made it exciting for a bunch of people used to life in the city, although I dare say our driver Dave was a little unhappy with himself getting bogged the second time!

It’s amazing how much the landscape changes and we soon found ourselves in some beautiful parklands. We sheltered in the shade of desert oaks and set up camp well before sunset, giving us time to prepare our meals and take photographs as the light improved. We all went our separate ways, investigating the surroundings and struggling a little with the complex landscape.

However, once the sun was gone and the stars were out, we discovered a fantasy land right next to our campsite. The red embers from the fire were throwing a warm light on the surrounding trees, contrasting beautifully with the Milky Way above. We tried different exposures from 10 seconds to a couple of minutes, hoping there was not too much breeze moving the delicate leaves.

Screenshot1_630x420_sharpenedPost-Production

Between the shoot and preparing this blog post, Capture One Pro 7 has been released and it was an interesting insight to see just how much better the new version is. Look at the comparison pics below.

Comparison_CR_sharpenedI have done my best to ensure the settings in Capture One for both versions were identical so we have a fair comparison. However, there is some folly in this argument because maybe Capture One 6 (on the left) needs different settings to look its best. Even so, to my eye there was a clear improvement the moment I pressed the ‘Upgrade’ button to change to the new processing engine.

The noise reduction has been handled automatically – I haven’t knowingly tweaked the settings. I mean, this is a pretty tough image to process. Taken on an EOS 60D, I think even Canon would agree that ISO 3200 is towards the limits of the camera’s capability (technically, it can be pushed to ISO 12,800). Give your subject lots of light and the camera will perform miracles, but here the foreground and the tree are either in darkness or lit by the dying embers in a fire some 50 metres away.

Can you see noise and grain? Yep! Do I like it? Yep – I think the image has a really great painterly feeling to it. Is it technically perfect? Who cares! In terms of communicating the amazing stars you see in Australia’s Red Centre, and the enjoyment of camping out in a swag, I think the resulting image does an admirable job. So I’m happy!

Step1_CR_sharpenedThere was a colour difference between the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree (see photo above), so I added in a Local Adjustment and adjusted the colour of the top of the tree to match the bottom. Not exactly sure why there was a colour difference in the first place (possibly tall grasses filtering the light from the fire), but it was easy to fix.

Step2_CR_sharpenedNext, I added a second Local Adjustment to lighten the foreground, putting in some detail that doesn’t deserve to be there. It was a 76 second exposure, so the grasses have moved in the evening breeze, but as a descriptive image, I am happy with this.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine editor based in Sydney, Australia. If you would like to accompany Peter and Tony Hewitt on a seven day Central Australia ‘Adventures in Oz’ workshop in August 2013, click here for more information.

And if you’d like to see a short movie explaining in more detail how Peter processed this file in Capture One, click here.

To see more of Peter’s photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. It contains articles and videos, outlining his camera and post-production techniques. Details can be found at www.betterphotography.com.

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Powerful Gradient Masks with the Local Adjustments Tool

January 17, 2013 by 9 Comments

Gradient Masks 1

Capture One has had a Local Adjustments Tool since version 6, and in Capture One Pro 7, a number of improvements and new features have been added to make it even better.

One of these improvements is the new Gradient Mask cursor tool. By using this tool, you can easily create a Gradient Mask in an adjustment layer.

To create a Gradient Mask, you simply click in the image and drag the cursor in the direction of the desired mask:
-          The mask is at full intensity where you start
-          The mask is a 0 intensity where you let go

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The image to the left is straight out of the camera. It has been exposed to preserve detail in the sky, which has resulted in a very dark foreground. The image is a typical example of a shot where we, traditionally, would have used an optical gradient filter to create a better balance between the bright sky and the foreground.

If you shoot with a low noise camera, you can actually achieve even better results by using a Gradient Mask in a Local Adjustments layer. The image to the right shows the effect of correcting the image with the Local Adjustments tool by using the new Gradient Mask option.

I have created two adjustment layers for the image in this example. One for the foreground and one for the sky.

Choose-gradient

In the Local Adjustment tool tab and in the Local Adjustments layers tool you find the selector for the options: Draw Mask, Erase Mask but also the new Gradient Mask cursor tool.

Start by adding a new Adjustments layer by pressing the “+” button and choosing the Gradient Mask option in the selection drop down menu.

Drawing the foreground Gradient Mask

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For the foreground mask I want a short gradient across the horizon.  This creates a mask that selects the foreground and smoothly fades out into the sky.  I draw the gradient mask by clicking with the mouse at the point in the image where I want the mask to be at full intensity. I then draw the mask with the mouse button kept down and let go at the point in the image where I want the mask to be at 0 intensity. Above in the image to the left, you can see the starting point and the end point for the foreground gradient mask. You can see the final foreground mask on the image to the right.

Applying corrections to the foreground mask

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I now open up the dark foreground by adding exposure compensation to the mask.

Drawing the mask for the sky:

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For the sky I want a gradient mask that creates a long smooth gradient all the way from the top of the sky down to the foreground. First, I add another Adjustments Layer named “Sky”. With the Gradient Mask hand tool I then draw the mask from the top of the image to a point a little below the horizon.

Applying adjustments to the mask for the sky

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I want to bring back detail and create a bit of drama in the sky. To accomplish that, I simply apply negative exposure compensation to the mask.

Just by using two simple masks with the new Gradient Mask tool, I was able to bring back a good balance between the sky and the foreground – thereby creating a much more interesting image. To add the finishing touches, I also added some minor adjustments to the basic layer of the image with the Exposure tool and the Clarity tool.

I hope this post has inspired you to play around with the new Gradient Mask tool.

All the best,

Niels

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The shot I almost didn’t take, Elgol, Scotland

October 4, 2012 by 6 Comments

Persistence pays.

Travelling with fellow photographer David Oliver, he wanted to find a stretch of stony beach at Elgol because the surrounding cliffs looked pretty interesting. I was working on a calendar project, so I was also keen, but I wasn’t convinced the weather would be dramatic enough for what I had in mind.

As it turns out, the shot I had in mind wasn’t the photo that I loved. Even more remarkable, I almost didn’t take it!

Elgol is on the Isle of Skye and, being mid-winter, there were very few people around – just the locals and some road workers. As we came into tiny Elgol, the road down to the beach and harbour was blocked by a couple of large trucks effecting maintenance works. There was no way to get around the truck and the workers didn’t seem to be moving anytime soon.

We did what all experienced photographers do and retired to a local café a few hundred metres up the hill. I can remember the wonderful pumpkin soup and the steaming scones and jam, polished off with a cup of tea. It was hard to move back out into the Scottish cold and the weather looked like it was closing in. We wondered if we would even bother going down to the beach.

But something inside us said we should, just in case. After all, we’d come all this way, the food was good, so who knows what we might find!

The photo we had in mind was good, but the breakwater creating a tiny harbour looked more interesting. Walking out to the end of it, I had a great view looking back onto the beach with its small school (it’s not visible in my image). What a great place to be educated!

The breakwater also revealed some grassy fields above the cliffs and movement in the distant clouds was creating some interesting light. This seemed to be the better photograph!

To get the milky water, I used a 4.0 Neutral Density with the 28mm Phase One lens, allowing a 30 second exposure. The 28mm has a very large front element, so it’s not easy to put a filter in front. Instead, there’s a small holder in the back of the lens which takes gelatine filters. Now, gelatine filters are okay, but the 4.0 ND has a slight colour cast to it as you can see in the original file.

I took the file into Capture One and with a couple of clicks using the White Balance picker tool, I had the colour looking pretty natural. I also cropped the image down and lightened it a little.

From here I used the Local Adjustment layers – I love this aspect of Capture One. The first step was to darken down the sky because it is a little bright in the original. Our eyes tend to go to the light parts of the image first, but I didn’t want them to go straight to the sky. Solution: darken it down a tad.

Next I added another Local Adjustment and this time used the Advanced Color Editor to add some blue into the sea. Never mind the sky is still grey, I wanted a blue sea. I know this doesn’t look completely real and I am happy with that.

To take the eye towards the cliffs, I used another Local Adjustment and, again using the Advanced Color Editor, tweaked the grasses. I gave them additional color saturation and contrast. Now the photo looks a little closer to the holiday brochures we had seen!

And for the final image (shown at the beginning of the blog), I added a fourth Local Adjustment, and with a quite large brush dragged it through the middle of the image and lightened this area. It gives the image a little more life by lightening up the middle – where I want the eye to travel.

So, for someone who had eaten too much for lunch, it turned out to be a productive afternoon. No, the photo didn’t run in the calendar, but it was one provided to the client for their short list. No accounting for taste, of course!

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine editor based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at http://www.betterphotography.com.

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Highlights and shadows at Loch Harport

August 30, 2012 by 2 Comments

I am not sure if I have the correct workflow, but it seems to work well for me. My approach is to expose for the highlights and let Capture One bring out the shadows.

Now, up front I have to emphasise that there is a problem with this technique, and that problem lies in the shadow areas. If I am underexposing my image to ensure the sky doesn’t clip (isn’t overexposed), then darker areas in the image might be receiving very little exposure. This isn’t necessarily a problem if I want to leave these areas dark in the final rendition, but if I want to lighten them, then the really dark areas may lack the quality I desire if I lighten them too much.

However, when using a medium format digital back with a wide dynamic range, I find that I can comfortably lighten up the shadows without too many problems, most of the time.

This would not necessarily be the case with a DSLR camera which has a narrower dynamic range. If using a DSLR, I would be better off bracketing my exposures and using a better exposure to lighten up the dark areas. I also bracket with my medium format back as well, as insurance, but I find I don’t need the lighter file very often.

This photograph of a dingy in Loch Harport on the Isle of Skye is a case in point. The original exposure is very dark in the foreground, but the sky is just about right. The camera wanted to give the image a little more exposure, but I used the exposure override to keep the histogram under control. I am always looking at my histogram for this type of work.

Using a Local Adjustment, I brushed in the foreground and lightened it. At this size and looking at a low resolution file, it shouldn’t look too bad. There’s lots of detail to be found and, as I still want to keep some blacks in this area, I’m comfortable with the result. However, as noted above, I could possibly improve the quality of this area by using another exposure which better accommodated the shadow areas, and stripping it in. But that’s a lot of work unless I plan to turn the image into an exhibition print. For book reproduction (where this image was used), the current workflow approach is more than adequate.

The late afternoon light was relatively colourless, so I added in a second Local Adjustment and helped the dingy out with a little more colour. I generally don’t change the colours that are already there, finding that an increase in colour saturation is often enough, but for the dingy I preferred the result when I also warmed up the hue. Bringing out the yellows and reds helps.

Warm colours come forward, cool colours recede, so I added in a third Local Adjustment and made the water and clouds a little blue. This adds to the mood a little and removes a little bit of the murkiness, plus creates more of a separation between the dingy and its background.

And the final step, as shown in the opening photo, was to add one more Local Adjustment and lighten up the dingy itself, giving it a subtle ‘spot light’.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine editor based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. It contains articles and videos, outlining his camera and post-production techniques. Details can be found at http://www.betterphotography.com.

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Murky weather at the Isle of Skye

August 16, 2012 by 12 Comments

I love murky weather!

In many ways, it is so much more photographic than the beautiful blue sky with strong overhead sunshine. I much prefer the mood and atmosphere of low cloud or a storm, but a drab grey sky with light drizzle is certainly challenging.

This is exactly the weather I was presented with one morning on the Isle of Skye. Travelling with friend and photographer David Oliver, we had established our base at Saucy Mary’s Lodge which, despite its name, was very comfortable and the food simply excellent. In fact, the lodgings were so good we didn’t mind getting up late and returning early.

Not that we had much choice since it was mid-winter and the days were very short. We weren’t exactly sure where we wanted to go, but David had found this road on Google Maps and felt it showed promise, in spite of the weather.

When we passed these reeds and I asked David if we could stop to take a few frames, he was less than enthusiastic. I guess I can understand why because looking at the raw file, the image is very flat and quite colourless. However, a lack of colour isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re processing your files in Capture One.

In Capture One Pro, the Advanced Color Editor allows you to pick colours and adjust their hue, saturation and lightness. And combined with Local Adjustments, you have a lot of control over how your image looks. Let’s take a look at how Capture One transformed this scene and, before you write your objections about the strong colour, I agree this particular rendition is a little over cooked.

Using the Color Editor’s ‘Pick Basic Color Correction’ tool (you’ll find it in the Color Tool Tab, under Color Editor and its Advanced tab), I selected the pale yellow of the reeds. This selected a range of yellows. I used the Smoothness slider to widen the selection of colours, then tweaked the saturation to make the colour much stronger. I repeated this on another section of the reeds with a slightly different yellow hue, and increased this as well. Often I find you need to make two or more adjustments to get the effect you want. Notice also that by increasing the yellow in the reeds, the greens have also improved.

I then used the same Pick Basic Color Correction tool to select the blue of the water and ramped up the saturation again and suddenly my drab overcast day doesn’t look so drab anymore.

Note, these adjustments could be made without using Local Adjustments because it is a simple composition with discrete areas of colour. If there were some yellow rocks in the hills behind, they would also increase in colour saturation when I adjusted the reeds. This is because the Color Editor adjusts all the areas in an image containing the selected color, so if you only want to adjust a particular area, you may need to combine this tool with a Local Adjustment.

Local adjustments were then used to darken down the hills in the background. Using the Local Adjustments tool tab, I clicked on the ‘+’ icon to add an adjustment layer, then used the Draw Local Adjustment brush to select the hills. The image was then darkened using the Exposure slider.

I darkened the hills in two steps, allowing me to darken the higher hills a little more than the hillside lower down. Once again, several small steps work better than one single adjustment.

A third Local Adjustment was added and this time the trees were lightened and given a touch more contrast, brightening the middle of the composition and drawing the eye in. However, I noticed that the area of reeds just below the trees was a little light and lacking in colour.

A fourth and final Local Adjustment layer was added and I carefully used a small Draw Local Adjustment brush to select the reeds just below the trees. This area was then darkened and the contrast increased so it better matched the reeds in the foreground. The result is the opening photo at the beginning of this blog.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine editor based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. It contains articles and videos, outlining his camera and post-production techniques. Details can be found at www.betterphotography.com.

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Photography Travelogues – Finding the right balance

June 28, 2012 by 5 Comments

Young Street Merchants in Hosap, Eastern Turkey

Our bus stopped at the top of the hill at the entrance to the Hosap castle, so it didn’t take the residents in the town below too long to work out that potential customers were about! However, to sell to us, we also had a price: they had to pose for a photograph!

Does the colour look approximately correct in the photograph above?

We can see it is late in the day with yellow sunlight kissing the tops of the background hills, leaving the shadows cooler and almost blue. It’s an emotive response to colour, but is it accurate? And should it be accurate?

Often, the colours we use in our photographs are technically incorrect (depending on the colour model we’re using as a reference), but they still look pretty good!

For instance, your camera uses its white balance system to set a ‘correct’ colour balance, but since the camera doesn’t know what the light is like, it can only adjust the white balance to a theoretical ‘zero’ or ‘correct’ position.

Speaking non-technically, white balance is the term used for getting the colour cast correct at the point of capture, or when processing the raw file. It uses a temperature (yellow/blue) and tint (magenta/green) colour model to make colour adjustments. Colour balance is when we change the colour cast, usually during editing the file. The colour balance dialog uses the three red/cyan, green/magenta and blue/yellow channels. Both approaches to controlling the colour cast in a photograph can achieve similar results and  are sometimes referred to interchangeably.

This is the image with the white balance suggested by the camera. The camera has seen the warmth in the light and neutralised it, but perhaps cooling the colour a little bit too much.

If you’re not  happy with the colour balance, you can use the white balance tool in Capture One to change it. Using the white balance picker, click on objects that are white or neutral in colour, or that  should be or could be neutral.

In this image, I have clicked the white balance picker on the girl’s white handkerchief, but I think it has too many optical brighteners in it because the result is much too blue.

In this third example, I have clicked on the grey roadway on the right of the image. Whether the road should be neutral grey or not isn’t really the point, because the rest of the image looks just right. I find using the white balance picker on various areas in the image while processing in Capture One is a useful way for determining the best colour balance, even if the white balance setting isn’t ‘accurate’ or ‘correct’!

You also have to be aware of how your viewers feel about certain colours. For instance, technically speaking, snow at high altitudes in the shadows is blue, but if it looks too blue in a photograph, it can look unnatural to many people. For this reason, snow photos can benefit from a slightly warmer colour balance, even though this may be technically incorrect.

So, if a technically correct colour balance isn’t necessarily the best, why do our cameras try to set it?

Whether we end up using a technically correct colour balance in our final edit is one matter; starting our photographic editing with a technically correct colour balance within our image file is another.

Many photographers find it very useful to start with a correctly colour balanced file. It helps ground their creative process and it also gives them a place to return if colours go awry.

So, unless you are sure about the colour balance you want in the final image, good camera practice dictates that we aim to produce image files which can produce a neutral or natural white balance. This is one of the reasons shooting raw files is so important because you can always reset the white balance within a raw file, something that can be much more difficult (if not impossible) to do with a JPEG file.

In the hero image at the top of the page, I have used two white balance settings. The girls in the foreground have a warm white balance setting, while the background has a cooler, bluer setting. Providing this subtle colour contrast also helps bring the subjects forward, emphasising them against the cooler background.

I hope you like it!

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Photography Travelogues: In The Shadow of Mount Ararat

June 21, 2012 by 4 Comments

Peter Eastway

Mount Ararat in Turkey is steeped in history and tradition. Just prior to this photo being taken, we were on a mountain opposite Ararat viewing what many believe are the remains of Noah’s Ark. If not Noah’s, it’s certainly in the shape of a huge ‘boat like’ structure, but how it came to be resting several thousand feet above the valley floor, no one could tell me!

These are Kurdish women and we assumed this was their village. The main road is behind us and we had stopped to admire the view of Mount Ararat. The air was so clear that even distant objects seemed very close.

However, just below the road, our guide Mehmet spotted these women having a chat. He walked down and started talking to them. They seemed to be friendly enough, enjoying a laugh, so I wandered down too. I sat off to the side, not able to understand a word that was said. Mehmet later explained that he didn’t understand much of their dialect either, and perhaps that was why they were all laughing so much.

Mehmet spent probably 10 minutes talking to the women before he asked if he could take a photograph (our guide is also a keen photographer).

More laughter followed and the matriarch acquiesced, but the point to take away is the process Mehmet went through.

Rather than just stumbling on these people and pulling out a camera straight away, Mehmet spent time talking to them. This is far less confrontational. Imagine if you were sitting in your front yard and some Kurdish tourists walked by and started photographing you? You mightn’t be so worried if you were in a public place like a market or a showground, but in your own home, you’d probably be a little concerned about who these people were.

By spending time talking to people, you can allay their fears. Once they knew we were a bunch of photographers from Australia, just having a holiday in Turkey, suddenly we’re no longer a threat. They know something about us.

This doesn’t necessarily mean they want us to take their photograph, of course. The woman in the background didn’t want the camera pointed at her, although she changed her mind when Mehmet offered them a small monetary thank you.

Note, we didn’t offer to pay them up front. All the photos were taken first and it was only when he was leaving that Mehmet offered the matriarch some money. He did this because he knew how tough life could be in this part of the world and he just wanted to show his appreciation.

I don’t have anything against paying to take a photograph. It’s true that it can change the nature of the relationship between the photographer and the subject, but for photographs like these, it’s not really that important. I’m not working as a documentary photographer or a photojournalist; rather I want to take an environmental portrait that shows how these women live.

However, there may be times when the subjects are used to being photographed (many people in cities and at popular tourist destinations are quite savvy) and ask for a small contribution. Personally, I think this is a fair exchange.

Peter EastwayThe original exposure as processed in Capture One.

Everything about this scene is as we found it, the only difference is that instead of the women focusing on themselves, they are looking up at Mehmet and another photographer who is standing camera-left out of frame.  Yet by having the matriarch conversing with Mehmet, and the other women reacting, the image begins to tell a story.

As there were 10 of us taking photographs (Mehmet was quite amazing in organising this), we only had time for a few frames each. However, shooting with a wide-angle lens, I was able to position myself to the side and allow the matriarch to focus on the others while I quietly clicked away.

A wide-angle lens is often considered taboo for portraiture. The reason is because a wide-angle lens stretches subjects towards the edge of the frame, making them look fatter and heavier than they really are. However, if you don’t place your subjects on the edges of the frame, then the stretching doesn’t happen (well, it doesn’t happen to them).

In defence of the wide-angle for environmental portraiture, the expansive angle-of-view provides context for the subjects, and when you’re in an exotic location like Eastern Turkey, it’s definitely sensible to make the most of the landscape.

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The Flow of Light

May 29, 2012 by 6 Comments

Although I am an advocate of the ‘get it right in camera’ school of photography, I strongly believe in the role that editing plays in our craft, just as the dark room did when printing from negatives in the past. The raw file is the negative, Capture One the darkroom. I continue to use graduated filters for balancing exposure in camera, but sometimes the light still needs a little help.

Before image editing, there is session editing. In this example I made five tripod-mounted exposures. In the original selection I chose CF008429, but a few months later on reflection I marginally prefer the way the rocks are slightly more concealed in CF008428, and that is the exposure I am processing here.

Very little of this image is truly sharp, it is really all about mood and the swirling motion of the water. But what should be sharp needs to be checked at 100%.

Having worked on the image I have saved a clone variant (F3), and then reset it using the reset adjustments button. Thus the ‘original’ is on the right, with the finished image on the left here. The unprocessed raw file looks OK, but I felt the magenta emphasis was too dominant so I have tweaked the white balance, reducing magenta considerably and yellow slightly.

A local adjustment is the digital equivalent of dark room dodge and burn, and I still feel these tools are the ones that best enable tonal balancing, a vital prerequisite of good printing. The first of my local adjustments (layer 1) selects the stones and some of the water, lightening and adding a little saturation. I have avoided the white water areas in the middle zone, which are already bright enough.

The light on the horizon is extremely strong, bright and somewhat ‘clipped’ so layer 2 calms this down. It is painted on using a soft edged brush, the adjustment parameter being Contrast -50. I applied these strokes quickly with an oversized brush to get a feel for the effect, and then I refined the selection back with the erase tool.

The brushes in Capture One are superbly configurable, and with zero hardness they give a wonderfully soft edge, allowing for extremely organic adjustments. I try to imagine I am painting with light.

Layer 3 simply increases the contrast in the sky, which is otherwise rather bland contrasting with the much busier coastal landscape. The contrast increase of 30 is balanced by a saturation reduction of the same value, as contrast would otherwise increase the saturation unnaturally.

The final layer lifts the stones and the ‘forewater’ by quite a bit, increasing contrast (and decreasing saturation accordingly) as well, to enhance their physical presence in the picture space.

In addition to the local adjustments, a small amount of vignetting has been applied on the background layer to ‘hold the corners’. The overall exposure has been reduced marginally (-0.2) and contrast and saturation have received small increases to give a more filmic rendering to the image. For sharpening I use the minimal ‘pre-sharpening 1’ in the sharpening presets. A few dustspots have been removed, and I have straightened the horizon with the straighten tool, resulting in some minor cropping. It’s hard to frame the camera completely perfectly when the light is changing this quickly!

The overall colour the IQ180 produces is usually very well balanced and while the white balance sometimes needs tweaking it is rarely necessary to do further changes to colour when seeking a natural result.

In the end all these changes are very personal, and in keeping with my current thinking, and desire to emphasise the physicality of nature, and ‘the flow of light’ in a print. I can imagine coming back to it in five years time and preferring the softer and more dreamy feel of the original raw file!

PS The “Dummy” title of the session indicates that I have not created a session for this shoot, but rather browsed from my computer hard drive to find the files. The Dummy is simply my default title of this type of session.

Joe Cornish is a professional landscape photographer, writer, printer and broadcaster based in North Yorkshire, England. Joe is a regular contributor to http://www.onlandscape.co.uk/, and his gallery website is http://www.joecornishgallery.co.uk/

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Photography Travelogues: At the outskirts of Monte Fitz Roy, Argentina

March 15, 2012 by 6 Comments

Alpine Stream under Monte Fitz Roy

Above El Chaltern and well before Monte Fitz Roy, deep in Patagonia, there’s a wonderful national park with some very photogenic walking  tracks. Even better, you can hire some of the young mountaineers in the area who will carry your gear from camp to camp, just for a bit of training (and a small amount of cash).

We’d spent a couple of nights at a camp above El Chaltern, waiting and watching the weather as it crossed the ranges in the distance, and now we were walking ten kilometres across to the base of Cerro Torre and a second camp. This stream was at one of our rest stops, but a rest from walking inevitably saw us wandering around with our cameras, looking for things to photograph.

I loved this oddly shaped rock, seemingly a towering mountain on a micro scale, surrounded by a flooding stream. Well, perhaps my imagination was getting away with me, but I thought it looked interesting enough to pull out my camera.

There are two techniques used for capturing this image.

The first is the use of a tilt-shift lens, a Canon TS-E 24mm on an EOS 1Ds Mark II. Canon has since upgraded both. Generally speaking, a tilt-shift lens is used to reduce distortion. When photographing buildings, rather than pointing your lens up to include the top of the building (and creating unwanted converging vertical lines), you shift the lens upwards while keeping the camera back parallel to the building. The result is a technically correct perspective.

However, if you shift the lens and tilt the camera the opposite way, you can distort the edges of the image, effectively stretching the scene. This works well with the distant mountains, stretching them so they look a little higher than they actually appeared through a wide-angle lens.

The photo below shows the straight photo without the lens shift. Note the height of the mountains in the background.

Compare this with the following image that includes a lens shift, and a re-framing of the image as well. The two compositions are very similar, but not identical, but the main difference is that the mountains loom larger and appear more impressive. I like this!

The second technique is the use of a neutral density filter. The ND filter allowed me to lengthen my shutter speed. This exposure is 60 seconds at f8 (it’s a 10x ND filter), during which time the water is recorded as a silvery smear and the clouds have also been beautifully blurred.

Compare the result with the same angle taken at a more conventional 1/250 second (see the previous photo). The clouds are more distinct and the water has much sharper reflections. In comparison, I like the ND filter effect because it takes the photographs one step away from reality.

In the days of film, we had to deal with reciprocity failure and colour shifts because the different layers in the film had different responses to light. I think some digital sensors are similarly affected with colour shifts at very long exposures and this shows up as a colour cast. This is the original exposure from the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II before editing in Capture One.

The magenta colour cast can be quite enchanting, but not for every photograph you take. Fortunately, it’s an easy matter to correct the colour balance – simply use the White Balance Picker in Capture One and the image’s natural colours immediately appear.

To process this image, I also had to make some strong adjustments to the Brightness and Saturation. I also added in three Local Adjustments, lightening up the middle ground and adding a little sharpening to the rock.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine editor based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com/. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at http://www.betterphotography.com/.

Filed under Photography Best Practice, Photography Travelogues Tagged with , , , , , ,

Photography Travelogues by Peter Eastway – Antarctica 3/3

September 1, 2011 by 2 Comments

Skontorp Cove, Paradise Bay, Antarctica

When you visit a location called ‘Paradise Bay’, you have certain expectations. We were having a barbeque outdoors on the lower deck of our ship that evening (something I still think quite strange for an Antarctica voyage), so hopes were high for a clear sky and a wonderful sunset, but it wasn’t to be. As we steamed into Paradise Bay, we could only guess what lay behind the low cloud that shrouded the entire Peninsula.

One of the challenges of transient travel is making the most of the lighting conditions you’re given. We jumped into the zodiacs for a ‘cruise’ around the foreshores and motored slowly into Skontorp Cove, one of the most picturesque locations in Paradise Bay. So I am told! However, while the cloud prevented us from seeing the spectacular mountains surrounding us, it created a very moody and appropriate atmosphere. Sheer cliffs of ice would suddenly collapse into the waters, breaking the absolute quiet, and occasionally we’d see glimpses of ridge lines high above.

And the reflections were marvellous. Not mirror smooth which has a charm of its own, but slightly mottled, like good quality marble. Keeping the camera low on the edge of the zodiac, it was a matter of asking everyone to be as still as possible so as not to create too many ripples on the water. As everyone was sitting in awe of our location, this was a lot easier than you’d expect!


Sometimes with low contrast photographs like these, it’s good to move away from the easy to use Exposure sliders in Capture one and experiment with the Levels and Curves dialogs. In Levels, I grabbed the black and white points and dragged them inwards to the edge of the histogram, and then moved the middle gamma slider to adjust the overall brightness. This improved the image, giving it more contrast, but not quite enough.

Moving down to the Curves dialog, I selected the ‘Mid-tones Darker’ preset which increased the contrast and improved the image even more. Using the Curves presets, you can just drag your mouse over them and watch the effect on the preview, so it’s easy to experiment.

As with most landscape photography, the sky is the brightest area in the scene, so I set the background exposure with this in mind, and then I used the Local Adjustment brush to lighten up the foreground. I clicked on the Local Adjustments tab, clicked the ‘+’ button to add a layer and then pressed ‘B’ to select the Adjustment Brush. After setting its size and softness, I painted in the foreground (shown as the red area in the screen grab above). You can set the red mask to appear only when you’re painting it in, and then it disappears so you can see what your adjustments will do. I lightened the foreground using the Exposure and Contrast sliders.

One trick I have found with snow and ice, especially on overcast days, is to edit the file with local contrast. In Capture One, this is the Clarity control. I added in another Local Adjustment layer, brushed over the ice wall and its reflection, and then dragged the Clarity slider to a setting of 80. This is higher than I am normally comfortable with, but it shows that so often the adjustments we use are dependent on our subject matter. I also used the Exposure slider to lighten up the ice wall.

To see more of Peter Eastway’s images on Antarctica, visit his website at http://www.petereastway.com/showpics.taf?portno=57&PortName=ROCKHOPPER%20EXHIBITION

Filed under Photography Travelogues Tagged with , , , ,

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