But on to happier times! Last night, I was treated to a sunset kayak tour with Discovery Sea Kayaks! I basically just hung out on the water for the evening taking pictures for them. The sunset was half way decent, and some good shots definitely came out of the tour.
I've never shot from a kayak before, and it obviously posed quite a few challenges. The first was keeping my camera dry. Easy, dry bag lashed to the hull in front of me. But then that only kept it dry when it was in the bag...I just accepted that it was going to get some salt spray on it when I was actually shooting with it. Which I guess is about as bad as using in the dust and with sweat dripping on it...etc. The camera is just a freaking work horse. Same with the 18-135 lens. It had all the range I needed for the evening, and I really didn't have to worry about killing it too badly. It's been through more than even the body has.
As for shooting, I mostly tried to wait until the sun set really got going before I started shooting. Like it said, the sunset wasn't thattttt good, but it did cast some really nice highlights on the water, and super saturated everything. A routine I got into was to shoot silhouettes of other people in the group with the sunset behind them. I was shooting in Tv mode with an auto ISO, so the camera took care of most of the exposure part. I just had to tell it what to meter off of. Depending on where you focus and where you point in the final framing, the camera will expose for the shadows or the sunset. I generally tried to get half way, so in post I could recover both. Getting the framing right just takes practice, and a bit of luck.
From the ones I got and liked, one edited photo really caught my eye. It was taken just as the sun went down, so the overall contrast was pretty low. I was able to get almost the full tonal range of the sunset and the boat in front of me (which was positioned perfectly thanks to my awesome kayak partner!).
1/320 to stop all the motion. kayaks move a lot in the water. f3.5 for light. 18mm. ISO400 for proper exposure.
Develop settings...
Highlight up 19
shadows +92
whites +17
vibrance +51
Local adjustment over the kayak that upped highlights and shadows +50 each. This brightened them up a bit while keeping some of the contrast. Which is basically the whole goal on how I process. I try to keep the overall contrast consistent while bringing out the details.
Now for todays photo...totally different.
Tonight, Victor and I tried some ink in water photos. Quite the learning experience...use a polarizer next time. We ended up using a giant black backdrop behind us to keep reflections down in the glass, but I was still illuminated by the flashes. Polarizer needed to get rid of that or at least tone it down.
The set up was fairly simple, fish tank with water in a mat box with two strobes. One in the back to light everything up, and one of the side to provide some cross light. Both set to 1/8 power.
I shot at 1/200 for motion stopping, f16 for DoF, and ISO400 to keep everything nice and bright.
I also shot tethered to Lr so that I could go directly from the camera to my hard drive, so no CF card needed. I highly recommend doing that, well worth it in controlled situations.
What really makes the photo tonight, IMO, was shooting from a very low angle so that the bottom of the water turned into a mirror. I've actually flipped this photo upside down, so the water on the bottom is actually the bottom of the layer of surface tension. If I am using the right words...it's late.
Anyway, for shooting ink, Victor counted down and then just squeezed ink out of syringe into the water. Which looked awesome. We experimented with swirling the water, doing drops...all kind of stuff. There's a whole album of the pictures on fb, check it out and I'd be happy to answer how a specific one was made.
For the one I'll show here, we swirled the water just before the fact so the ink took a very odd trajectory when it was squirted.
In editing, whites +100, shadows +21, clarity +37. Much details, very very high contrast. I reverted to my stock editing process that I do for this kind of planar image. I try to make it as isolated and simple as possible. I really try to do this with all my photos, clutter just annoys me. Doesn't usually work out as I want it to, but I try.
Even though I didn't get the quality of shots I wanted tonight because I forgot to use a polarizer, I'm still happy with what I did get. It's definitely something to do again soon.
See you tomorrow!
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