Anywho! I went out to Young Hill tonight, and it was a pretty awesome sunset. Last summer, I went out to Young Hill a couple times every week to try to catch the sunset. Sometime you get these amazing light rays if the conditions are right, and I was determined to see them. Sadly, I realized the you really need to be in an airplane to get the best view, although from the hill it still looks amazing!
Young Hill is definitely one of my favorite spots on the island, there's really only one or two other places that surpass it. San Juan might not be one of those legendary tropical islands, but it still hold all, if not more, of the beauty of them. In fact, my friends and I named one of the trails on the south face of the hill ''Paradise.'' There's hardly a better and more beautiful place to grow up.
Back to photography though! I was on the hill for the sunset, but I started shooting a bit early. There were a few clouds in the sky, and they were really low and blocked the sun almost till the horizon. This gave me a unique opportunity. Usually, you have to shoot into the sun and have a lens flare or wait until the sun is almost under the horizon so you don't get a lens flare. It's kind of a trade off for color and also the spill light on the landscape. I usually shoot at both times and pick later, but tonight I had a different option. Have the spill light and wonder sky colors all at the same time with no lens flare! The clouds were low enough that I had the amazing colors and none of the side effects! Well, that's partly true. There were better colors later, but the composition I was going for was with mountains and they got washed out with haze as the sun set lower and the colors got more intense.
Out of the camera, the picture looked like this. It's a two (vertical) framed panorama.
Pretty good. But not quite what I saw in my head. I'd written on this before, but I take my photos and try to make them look like how I see and feel about the image. Simple capturing the light as it is doesn't usually do the image justice. I have to manipulate that light digitally in order to recreate the image I wanted to capture. Most of the time I can get close to what I want. Sometimes not.
When I was taking this image, I saw it as richer and more dramatic than how it looked to the camera. There is no flare, no depth. The colors are basically yellow and black. I saw the purples, the blues and green and reds. I wanted to bring those back and also show case the epic layered mountains of Vancouver island.
I started by manipulating the tonal curve. The shadows got raised, and the highlights brought down a bit. This left the overall contrast alone, but gave the midtones more pop. I did the opposite with the reds after that, but on a much lesser scale. This mainly gave the highlights more reds and color to them. Finally, I brought up the black point on the blues a bit to add blue across the board. Mainly to the shadows, but a little to the highlights. More purple!! (start wearing purple) Props to who gets that reference.
I finished up with a selective clarity raise to the mountains to bring the details out in them and separate them more.
That's about it! Little noise reduction would have been good buttttt you knowwwww. Lazy :)
See you tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment