Forest Light

My family and I went for a walk today in the Avatar Grove. It's an old growth section of forest near Port Renfrew. Apparently, it's home to Canada's Gnarliest Tree (which is up for debate still).

When we started walking, it was pouring rain and very cloudy. I doubted that there'd be any good pictures to be had in the wet and flat lighting. There's not many situations were that flat light is good for photos...

But luckily, the sun came out! It wall still "raining" since drops were still falling from the trees. Even better, I was at a point in the trail were there was a little stream right next to me. I started shooting right away, trying to get the light rays that were streaming through the trees.

However, with the bright sun and the dark forest there was a lot of contrast in the scene. I didn't shoot directly into the sun, but it was pretty close. That's the direction the light rays were, so that's the way I needed to generally shoot.

To try to capture the whole tonal range of the scene, I bracketed by +-1 EV. From the last couple times trying to blend exposures, doing more than that is really  hard to blend in Ps. Even with luminosity masks, it's difficult and I haven't mastered the whole process yet.

ButI figures doing the bracketing would give me a better chance at making an accurate image, so I went with it.

With the stream, I wanted a long exposure to get some good water blending going on. My base exposure was f/11 at ISO100 and 1.6s. I based this one getting a "correct" exposure. To double check this, I looked at my histogram for the darker and brighter exposure to make sure I was getting the exposure information I wanted. For the brighter one, I wanted most of the data in the middle and upper parts of the histogram. This would mean I was getting the shadows as the midtones, and thus getting more information about the darker parts of the scene. In the darker exposure, I wanted most of the info to me on the left or lower parts so that I was getting more information into the highlights. When I composited this all in Ps, I would squish all the information into the one photo, and so there would be information everywhere in the exposure.

First thing I did in Ps was make luminosity masks for the darker layer. My plan was to add the shadow details to the darker exposure. I selected the dark areas of the dark image, and then painted them in very slowly with the mid exposure. I used a soft brush at a 10% flow to really be soft about it.  However, there was too much roll over into the highlights, and weird halos were being made everywhere. To fix this, I selected the highlights and painted them back into the darker layer. This worked really well, and the tonal range of the scene came together! I'll probably do some videos about this process more, and explain it a bit better.

Next, made a levels layer that brightened up the shadows a bit, and then a green photo filter to get the richness of the forest back. Both of these I used luminosity masks to apply only to the midtones and shadows. The filter I applied a bit to the highlights, but not too much. This was about the extent of the whole photo editing. Like I said, I'll do a video or two about it when I get back to good internet. Uploading something is out of the question right now...haha

See you tomorrow!