WildOats

What the heck are golden hours? Golden hours are the best times of the day to take pictures. Golden hours are the 1 hour time period before and after sunrise and 1 hour before and after sunset.

Well ok…..but why are these times so special. The reason is the quality of light at those times. At these times, the sun is low in the sky, and it’s a warmer color than the color of light you have at mid-day. Also the intensity of light at those times is a lot lower than the intensity at mid-day. The difference between the shadows and the highlights is much less. The brightest parts of light are less bright and the shadows are not as dark. This is a much lower dynamic range and it’s much easier for your camera to deal with.

So with this in mind I specifically took a shot at about sunset. It was a shot of part of the Vegas skyline. What really grabbed my attention was the sky. I liked the color of the blue, and also the clouds in the area.

Here’s the shot.

You can see the warm color of the setting sun in the clouds. They became a warm pinkish-orange, which I liked next to the cool blue sky. Since I liked the sky, I decided to shoot the picture in a portrait orientation to emphasize the sky.

The other thing is the even-ness of the light. As you can see, everything is pretty evenly illuminated. Everything from the very front of the picture clear to the mountains in the background. No major shadows, and the difference between the brightest parts and the darkest parts is not that great.

Overall I like how this shot turned out. But now that I’m looking at it on my screen, there is something that occurs to me. I probably should have waited a few more minutes. Why? Well I suppose had I waited a bit more, the lights of the buildings would have gotten brighter in relation to the ambient light. But then you run the risk of it getting too dark out. I guess it’s all about the timing as well as the light. Oh well….live and learn. It’ll give me something to shoot for next time.

The past few weeks I’ve been reading and learning how to use Photoshop Elements. I bought a few books and have been reading those. I’ve also been watching some tutorials online. Those are really cool. It’s great to watch someone who knows what they are doing show you how things are done. Hurray for the intra-webs!!!!!

I guess since I’ve been focusing on learning Elements I’ve kinda not been shooting much. Only so much time in a day. Plus on top of that it’s been rainy lately. So I haven’t been shooting much at all.

I figured that I’d just try and see how my photoshop skills are coming along. I went and found a picture that I wasn’t too impressed with. I took the shot in the desert and when I saw it on the camera screen, it looked nice. But once I uploaded it to my computer and saw it on a bigger screen…….I didn’t like it. It looked all washed out and I wasn’t happy with it. 

I figured I’d give Elements a shot and see if I could make the picture better. Ok so here’s the picture right out of the camera.

In real life  the colors were more intense. Here as you can see…..they’re not intense at all. They’re all washed out and bland. I don’t remember if it was hazy or not, but the sky is very pale here too. 

I opened the picture in Elements and had at it. I opened up my book, and followed along with the tutorials.  I added some contrast, added some clarity, punched up the colors, balanced out the dark areas and the bright areas, and finally I sharpened the thing up.

Here’s what I came up with.

It’s definitely an improvement. I like the sky a LOT more. I darkened that up a lot. I also darkened some of the bright pink areas in the far distance close to the horizon. That made the color more saturated. I also darkened some of the rocks up front surrounding the tree. Then I lightened the green of the tree. I though that needed to pop out at you more. So that’s it. How did I do?

Well I haven’t added an entry in a little while now. I guess the reason is that I haven’t had much to write about. I haven’t been out shooting any pictures either. It’s been so long since I’ve used a camera, that I’d have to re-charge my battery.

I still have more pictures that I have to go through from my last trip. But I haven’t really been in a mood to go through them. So they’ve pretty much been sitting there also. I think I’m getting lazy in my old age.

I decided to pick one of my pictures and talk about that. It’s from my Utah trip. On our way back home we stopped at one of the stop areas. The place was called Black Dragon Canyon. Here’s what it looked like.

The formations are really beautiful to look at. They had a sign there telling you they were made over 250 million years ago. And the reddish color is from  iron oxide. The iron in the rock ‘rusts’ over time and that’s the red color. I liked the contrast of the deep blue sky next to the reddish rocks. I also liked how the blue sky kinda gives you a peaceful feeling. At least it does for me anyway.

I don’t remember the exact time we where here, but it was midday-ish. Exactly the worst time to be taking pictures. You can tell it’s mid day because the shadows are almost directly under the bushes in the front of the picture. Meaning the sun is overhead. At this time of day, the colors are washed out from the sun also. The other thing you run into is the dynamic range you have to deal with. The dynamic range is the difference between the darkest part of the scene and the lightest part.

The human eye can see about 12 stops difference between the whitest white and the darkest black. Once you go above the whitest white you can see, anything above that will just look the same to you….white. The same thing for the black. Once you go as dark as you can see…..everything darker than that is just black.

Now when you bring in a cat….the cat can continue to see much further into the dark then you can. So when you are maxed out…and all you see is the blackest black, the kitty can continue and see things great. He sees much further than your limited 12 stops.

So what’s the point? Well when you take pictures, you are kinda like the cat, and the camera is like you. You can see much more than the camera can. Just because you can see a darker or lighter object doesn’t mean your camera will. Ever take a picture of a sunset or a scene with light coming towards the camera. And then there’s a tree or house or something between you and the camera? What happens? The sunset comes out ok, but the tree is black. But you can specifically remember seeing the tree and it wasn’t black. Well you can see about 12 stops, but the camera can only see about 5-6 stops.  The camera was maxed out, but you continued to see fine.

Here in this picture, I did have to deal with the high dynamic range, but there wasn’t too much dark shadow area to overcome. Just the areas under the brush up front, and also some in the rock formations in the back. So overall not too bad. But had there been other things in the shot it would have made things difficult. You wind up either getting the whites too white, with all the detail gone. Or you get the blacks too black, and all the detail there is gone. Or even worse, and probably what happens most often, you get both. You lose detail in the whites and blacks.

So in this photo, I decided to keep detail in the lighter areas, and let the darks go black. And since there weren’t too many dark areas, I lucked out. Wow….after dealing with all that adversity…and at my age…..I think I better go take a nap and recoup.

A few months ago I went out and bought this Photoshop Elements program. Since then I’ve been having fun playing around with. I think I’m just now finally mastering how to open the program….lol.

I went out and bought a few books on the subject and have been reading. It really is amazing what it can do. Kinda wild to see all the changes you can do to your photographs. I don’t think I’ve even touched 5% of what the program can do, but I’m having a good time learning and playing

So now that I’ve learned a little bit about how to use Elements, this week I’ve been looking at some of my old photos. I’m keeping in mind what I’ve learned so far, and I’m thinking about how I can make them better. I found this one picture that I thought would be fun to work on.

This particular picture I took over 20 years ago. I was on a trip to Florida and I saw this pink flamingo. Being from up north, it was something different for me. So I aimed my camera and shot the pic. The picture came out OK, but it had a few problems with it. Looking at it now….20 years later….. it has even more problems.

So here’s the picture I’m talking about.

I liked the flamingo because it was a differnt kind of subject than what I was used to. But I didn’t notice that white thing on the right side. I think it’s a huge distraction and ruins the picture for me. Another thing is that over the years, the colors have shifted and faded.

Now with Elements in hand, I thought I’d give it a whirl and see if I would improve this picture…..over 20 years later. So I had the picture scaned and I open it in Elements. The first thing I did was use the clone tool and worked on getting rid of that aweful white thing on the right side. Basically I just copied the areas right next white thing, and painted over the white distraction.

Then after that was done I looked at the picture and wanted to try and fix the color casting it picked up, and restore some of the colors that have faded. Elements has these adjustment layers you can play with. So I adjusted the colors and liked it much better. I also added some contrast to the picture to add some snap.

I played around a little with adding some darkness to the sides and edges to make the subject stand out more. Then finally I sharpened the picture up at the end. Yea….I know what you’re thinking…….enough with the details…..lets see it already. Ok… ok…..hold on…ok….here it is.

Overall I think Elements did a nice job. I think it gave it new life. What do you think? 

Have you ever been driving, and liked the scenery around you? That’s what was happening to me a few weeks ago. We were driving back to Vegas through the Utah desert. The scene was the road we were driving on, and then the nothingness of the desert.

To me roads have always been a sign that you have civilization all around you. Houses, people, pets, huge buildings, malls and all that. But this was just the opposite. Just the road and then empty space. I liked that huge contrast.

So I wanted to emphasize that. To me the way to do that was to take the picture from inside the car while driving. Well that was a bit easier said than done. I quickly ran into a bunch of difficulties.

The first problem I ran into was the windshield of the car. The windshield has a tint to it, so that kind of plays with colors and throws things off. You also get a glare reflecting back from the glass. On top of that our windshield was not the cleanest after driving, so that effected the shot too.

The next thing that you notice is that you are flying past the things in front of you. The closer the objects are to you, the faster they seem to go by you. This causes the objects to reproduce as blurs. Also as you’re driving, the car is bumping up and down, so that further leads to unsharp pictures.

Then the last thing was the weather. It had been kinda cloudy, hazy and drizzly as well. So that didn’t help get a nice clear image. But I shot anyway. Hey…it’s digital…..so why not.

But anyway, I just wanted to show the contrast between the road, and the vastness of the desert. Overall I don’t think I’m too happy with this shot.

I’m still going through the pictures I took a few weeks ago. It’s taking me a while to go through them all. I guess I’m getting lazy in my old age.

I did find one picture that I took, on the journey to the top of the world. Every so often, that one lane road, has a little rest area kind of thing. You pull over, and you can have lunch or something, and it’s also a place for you to just sit and look at the scenery.

In this particular area, we were still below the tree line level. You could see miles into the distance. You had pine trees all around you, and you could also see the peaks of the mountains. Then you could see where the trees stopped growing, and you have snow at the peaks.

I liked the feeling of openness. Plenty of space to look out into. So I wanted to try and capture that in a photo. Turns out it’s kind of hard to do that. When you’re there in real life, you have all your senses to help you process all the info. You can really appreciate the whole thing you’re looking at. But it’s a different story to try and get all that into a photo, and get the person who looks at it later to get that same sensation.

Usually when you try to get a picture of some wide open space, when you finally look at the picture, it just seems like a bunch of little things. The beauty of the whole thing just doesn’t come through. The other thing that happens, is that for such a wide open space, you’ll probably run into a lighting issue. The sky is MUCH brighter than the other parts of the scene. So either the sky comes out pure white with no detail, or the land and darker parts come out just black.

Well those were exactly the problems I was running into. So what did I want to convey in my picture? Well I wanted to show how wide open it was. The distances involved. I wanted to show the colors of all the things growing. I wanted the sky to look good, but at the same time I also wanted the darker parts of the scene to reproduce well too. I wanted to get in as much as possible, but yet at the same time, I didn’t want little microscopic dots, where you’d say….what’s this over there.

That’s a pretty tall order. Especially for someone like me. So I did my best, and here’s what I cam up with.

Overall I think it’s ok. I did manage to get a decent sky. The land and trees came out ok, they’re not too dark or blacked out. The colors are pretty nice. The couple gives you a sense of scale so that was cool. Yea….I guess I’m happy with it.