Morning Light on Shoreline Trees. Yosemite National Park, California. September 19, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Early morning light illuminates shoreline trees, meadows and rocks at McCabe lake, with talus and forest-covered slopes beyond, Yosemite National Park.
We were camped at this lake for several days, and by this morning I had developed a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to photograph at different times of the day. My main interest in the early morning was in shooting almost straight back into the sun as it rose above the ridges to the east and began to backlight the lodgepole pines around the lake, especially those along the rocky and meadowy shoreline on the west and south sides. So on this morning, my second-to-last at this lake, I was up reasonably early and off to the other side of the lake before sunrise.
Once I reached the other side of the lake I had two tasks in mind. One was to make a few photographs in the very soft light before the sun reached this area. The other was to find and remember several compositions that might well work when the sun actually arrived. Around the west end of the lake I found several that lined up some of the small shoreline peninsulas and the rocks along the shoreline. After photographing those low light subjects for a while, I noticed that the light was beginning to strike a few trees along the west end of the lake, so I quickly got back in position to start doing the photographs as the sun began to arrive.
This morning presented one slightly unusual shooting challenge. For so late in the season there were a lot of bugs flying around the edges of the lake, including a surprising number of mosquitos. Unfortunately, the same light that so nicely picks up the edges of the backlit trees… also nicely highlighted all of the flying insects along the shoreline! These insects can show up in photographs as hundreds of small to larger blurring streaks – which must be laboriously and individually cloned out in post. Fortunately, I have a way to deal with this and make the process a little easier. I made two exposures of each composition, separated by a second or two. Since it was windless, the trees barely moved at all – but the bugs did move. Since their traces appear at different places in the two images, I can superimpose them in Photoshop and then mask out each bug in the upper image, substituting the corresponding bug free portion of the image from the layer below. It is still a bit of work, but not nearly as bad as trying to clone all of these problems out.
G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Yes, there are several ways that this could be done. For me, the clone darker approach (along with its evil twin, clone lighter) is most useful when working on a single layer but I can see how it might work here, too. But in this case, since the two images are essentially identical except for the bug trails, just simply putting a “hole” in the mask where the bug is quickly gives me the bug-free version.
Dan
I was thinking along the same lines, but still with two images. Put the second image in darken mode and the highlights in the lower image should go away. You would still need to mask out the other ares of the upper image in order that you don’t introduce new bugs into the scene.
I’m heading to the Eastern Sierras mid-October. It will only be a short 3-day trip, but I hope to make the best of it. Wish me good color, good light, and beautiful clouds.
Nancy
With a single exposure, I could set a layer to “darken” (since the bug trails tend to be lighter than the background) and then clone over them – this would replace only the outline of the insects. The only hang up might be if other light stuff was in the background.
In the past I’ve dealt with this using the spot removal tool in ACR or the more “traditional” sorts of cloning in PS.
Dan
The idea of eliminating the bugs with two exposures is genius. Do you think you could use a different blending method and eliminate the need to mask out the top layer?