Available Light

One thing I look for in indoor situations is available light sources. I try and steer subjects toward the brightest areas of the room, especially windows. Overhead lighting is OK, but you get strange shadows that way. You are better off just using a flash in most lamp lit situations.

I waited a good little while at a family gathering yesterday before someone got close enough to the windows to get a shot. A nice bright picture of my mother in law as she checks for rain outside. I didn't need to do a lot of editing on this, thankfully, because the ISO was pretty high and it would have been difficult to fix up.

Indoor Photography

Today we went to my sister in laws place to help with a fundraising BBQ that my nephew was doing. Of course it was overcast and threatening rain throughout the late afternoon. And that meant everybody was hanging out inside, giving me a good opportunity to work with indoor low light situations. The next few posts will feature some of these shots.

This image is a candid capture of my sister in law. There was a window about seven feet to her left providing some light. This was taken with the ISO cranked to 1600 and a 1/20 of a second exposure, ƒ 5.6. A little grainy because of the ISO, but not bad for indoor.

Warm Sunset

Here is a nice shot of the sunset on Thursday, August 11th. It took me a few days to do the edit on it. Mostly just a crop to center things and darken the exposure to bring the sky alive. Taken with the stock lens and a polarizing filter.

I know the leaves in the top corner should have been cropped out, but I like them for framing and anchoring the top half of the picture.

Rising Moon

I recently read an article about placing small objects in the background close to large objects in the foreground to give them a more substance and size just by using the perspective. Tonight is the night before the full moon, but the skies were very clear and it would be vibrant enough at moon rise to let me experiment.

I got down to the waterfront too early and waited around for the moon to come up, not realizing it was doing so behind one of the high rises on Nun's Island. I took some shots with the 18 - 55mm lens then switched to the telephoto. Here is the original image.



Then in editing, I cropped out the lamp and a decided to try a portrait centered shot and adjusted the angle a bit to straighten the building. I then did my regular Recovery and Clarity corrections and added some Vibrance and a little more Saturation than I usually do to bring the yellow into the moon and some blue back into the sky.

Evening Contrails

Here is a little example of the small things you can do to an image in Lightroom that only take one minute and have a big effect on the finished photo. This is an evening shot from the other night.



The first action in Lightroom was to straighten the picture a bit by adjusting the angle of the crop. What I try and do with buildings is pick the longest horizontal or vertical line and get it as close to level without pulling the other parallel lines out of whack.

Next comes Recovery. I used about +70 on this edit to really make the windows pop. After that I added 50 Clarity. Then a small(+30) tweak on the Vibrance and +20 Saturation to bring a deeper blue into the evening sky. Lastly I gave the corners a bit of definition with some Lens Vignetting. I don't usually go negative and darken any corners, but it does seem to work on this image. Here is the end result.

Red Leaves

I went out on a beautiful evening (what's that? no storm warnings!?) for a little safari looking at things in a different light than I usually do. Down by the waterfront there are a few trees that are planted in a dividing formation. Lines like this are spattered throughout the park every half kilometer or so to give the dogs somewhere to bee line to when they have to pee instead of killing all the nice grass. This particular stand have burgundy leaves that took on a more orange/ red hue under the setting sun's rays.

No crop here, just some Recovery, bumped up the Contrast and Saturation a bit. Also went +40 on the Lens Correction to brighten the corners some. Last night was the first time in a while I went out vowing not to use the telephoto and stick to the stock lens. I like the results.



As a follow up note, I found out that these small trees are purple leaf Sandcherry bushes and fill the spring air with beautiful white and pink fragrant blossoms.

More Storm Clouds

It has been a rough start to August with storms every couple of days here in Montreal. I walked out into sunshine yesterday and within five minutes the sky had turned menacing and had to turn Nalin for home. This picture was taken exactly five minutes after the blue sky cloud picture in the post four days ago. Rain followed shortly.