Sunny Day

Haze is a pesky thing. Always getting in the way of photos and ruining contrast. It's always such a bother when I'm shooting the mountains. Scenes that have a lot of contrast (looks like it with the eye) are really actually flat and bleh. They require some post work to bring the contrast back to where I think it should be.

Usually, on clear and sunny days, contrast is just over the top and pictures turn out too extreme. But today, wonderful haze had other plans. I was just trying to get some interesting pictures of the mountains, and haze had to go muck it up for me. The white capped peaks were still kind of interesting in the low contrastness, but I wasn't feeling it. With so many pictures of the mountains already, something had to change, and that wasn't going to happen today.

Just before I left, I happened to glance up at the scattered clouds. They were nice and puffy, so I though, why not see what a picture would look like?

Just looking at the histogram, it was a terrible image. The range of tones was from about zone 4 to 6, so it was basically a grey photo.... But viewed in b/w, it was strongly appealing. The cloud seemed to blend with the sky, with just subtle tonal shifts defining its shape.

I was shooting at sunny 16, which I think I've explained before. It's shooting at f/16, and your shutter speed is equal to your ISO speed. It usually provides the proper exposure for sunny situations.

Editing this was, minimal but extensive at the same time. I didn't do much to "correct" it as I usually do. Normally, I would have brought out more contrast, upped the clarity, gotten drama out of it...that sort of thing. However, for tonight, I did the opposite. I brightened things up quite a bit with the highlights and shadows, so that information was only in zones 6-10. Very, very bright image. Maybe a bit too bright. So I toned it down a bit, lowered the shadows, and added some midtone contrast. This gave me some more information into zone 5, with most of the info in 7 and 8. It's still a bright image, but the detail is in zones that you can still see detail in. Previous to the darkening, it would have been nearly impossible to see detail in the upper zones.

It's kinda funny, the darker side of the cloud is actually a highlight range on any other photo. It looks dark because we want to see it dark, but it's actually quite bright! Funny how the eye plays tricks.

This picture made possible by haze, lowering the contrast of image since literally the beginning of the world.

See you tomorrow!