Guess What?

I took pictures of the mountains again! Crazy that I'd take pictures of mountains...right? Such boring things with no cool light at all, especially when they're covered with snow and lit by the golden setting sun.

Where to begin...

It was late after noon, and I needed to start really thinking about a photo. I should really start doing pictures in the morning too, but I'm just never awake or I'm in class! Sunrises are pretty dang cool though. Anyway, late afternoon...

From where I was, I could only see the sunset in the west. It was pretty decent, with some little clouds lit with gold here and there. Nothing really to write home about. Farther north, the clouds got a little better, with more color and contrast in them. As I kept looking and scanning the horizon though, they just kept getting better and better.

I quickly grabbed my camera and ran down the road a little bit to see farther north west. Boy, what a pretty sight. The rather boring sunset in the west grew into a fairly descent light show in the north, and then into a golden landscape in the east. The snow capped mountains (snowed earlier in the day) had a bank of clouds just above them, and everything, I mean everything, was glowing gold. The shadows had a darker purple look to them, which mixed perfectly with the gold.

I started shooting at f/8, 1/50 and ISO100. I wanted to shoot at f/8 to get a sharp image (my 70-300 isn't that sharp wide open), and to get a good exposure at ISO100 I needed 1/50. Unfortunately, that's not a fast enough shutter to get a sharp image handheld at 170mm focal length. You need about a 1/200, which is about 2.3 stops faster/darker. :(

Luckily, that lens has stabilization that lets you shoot about 3 stops slower than normally required! So I'd be shooting at 1/50 and get the sharpness of 1/320! (ish) That's really pushing it, and I should have been on a tripod for a really sharp image. But no time! The light was going away so quickly! It's still a decently sharp photo.

So, quick geeky photography thing. Basically, any given film/sensor can capture a range of tones of a scene. It'll be different for every film/sensor (I'm just going to say sensor since that's what we're talking about), in other words different levels of light will become pure white and pure black in a scene. With a very sensitive sensor setting, light of brightness A will be pure white, and light of brightness B will be shadows. With a not as sensitive sensor, A will be a midtown, and B won't be recorded at all since it's not bright enough for the sensor to record.

Note: I'm simplifying "sensor." It's really the sensor and processor/other hardware in a camera.

So, different sensors record light as brighter or darker, but they can also record a range differently. A third sensor might record A as a bright white and also B as a shadow. That sensor would have a high dynamic range or be able to record a white range of brightnesses.

This can have different effects on shooting a scene. If you have a sensor with a low dynamic range, the resulting photo will be more contrasty. If you have a sensor with a high dynamic range, then the photo will be less contrasty, with more information in the midtones.

Think of it like having a cold and tasting food. When you have a cold, you can't taste as well, and food is bland. There's no extremes. But when you're healthy, the very same food has all sort of flavor! If the same input, but the sensory can detect a greater range of inputs and the results is a lot better.

The same is with photography. The greater range of tones a sensor/film can capture, the more information you have to work with. However, sometimes the range you can capture is greater than what's in the scene. This is called having latitude in your scene.

Going back to the zone system, there's essentially 8 zones with information, and 2 (black and white) of just luminosity. Each zone is 1 stop of light difference. If you have a scene that only has 6 zones occupied, then you can chose where to put it. Metered to have an overall range of middle gray, or 18% reflectance, zone 3-8 will be occupied. If you were to overexpose by 1 stop, you could have more whites (zone 4-9 now occupied) but less blacks. Sometimes this is great, but other times it looks like a washed out photo. On the other end, you could underexpose by one stop and get more blacks (zone 1-7 occupied) but now there are no whites.

With post processing, all three of these cases can be corrected.

I shot with "correct" exposure, or metered for about middle grey. The photo has roughly zone 3-7ish with information in them. So the image is pretty flat. The first thing I did was to raise the contrast up to occupied the next two zones, 2 and 8. Now there's some deep shadows and some brighter whites. Looking good. But still not enough. I then bumped the highlights up one more stop into zone 9, or almost white. Yay, lots of contrast. I'm happy with that. But that's really only at the extremes of the tonal range. The midtowns are still pretty flat. I then upped the clarity to push the middle zones (4 and 6) farther out to 3 and 7. This gave more pop in the little details, while no actually sharpening the photo.

Next, I went into Ps and did a few little things. I removed a power line by use of the stamp tool (easy job, just time consuming). It takes a lot of time to remove lines when it's on a very information dense background. I also made a curves layer that increased the whites and lowered the midtones a bit. So say zone 7 and 8 go to 8 and 9, and zones 4 and 5 go to 3.5 and 4.5. That' enough to make a very dramatic difference. I only applied this layer to the clouds, clouds need more epic!

Since I was working with all the color channels, it increased the saturation or colors in the sky. By product of modifying contrast in a color image.

And then I was finally done.

See you tomorrow!