Category Archives: Technique

Post-processing Workflow, Software, Technique

What You Get Is Not What You See

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Recently I spent more than a week photographing in a beautiful area of the Sierra Nevada backcountry. A short walk above the spot where we camped was a magical meadow — a place filled with light, grasses still green but starting to turn golden, high elevation trees scattered around the edge of the meadows, and a deep valley separating us from alpine valleys topped by steep granite peaks and ridges with scattered snow fields. At times clouds would float by and add some interest to the blue Sierra Nevada sky.

What I saw

Here is one of several photographs I made in this meadow, with the first example being a small version of a print-ready final interpretation…

Subalpine Meadow, Forest, and Peaks
At the edge of a subalpine meadow, surrounded by forest and high peaks

Here is another version of the photograph, straight out of my raw file conversion program and before I did additional work in Photoshop…

File after raw conversion operations

I think it reflects fairly well what I saw while I stood behind the tripod as light softened by closer clouds spread across the meadow. I’m confident that anyone who had been there with me would agree.

What the camera saw

But that is not what the camera saw. Here is what my captured file looked like before I did my raw conversion post-processing…

RAW file as exposed before conversion processing

Yuck!

This SOOC (“straight out of camera”) image looks pretty bad. The sky is OK, but the meadow is dark and flat-looking, not showing the actual quality of light at all, and the forest appears to be almost completely black.

What’s up here? Am I trying to trick you and present a false version of the scene? Am I an incompetent photographer who completely blew the exposure? Am I trying to “compensate” for a bad exposure by using radical post-processing?

The answer is “none of the above.” Continue reading What You Get Is Not What You See →

Commentary, Equipment, Reader Questions, Technique

A Few (More) Thoughts on Back-Country Photography

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I recently was asked a few questions about backpacking photography, mostly related to equipment, so I thought I’d post something to augment an existing article on this website: My Backpacking Photography Equipment. (You’ll probably want to take a look at that one, too!)

Backpackers, Near MIlestone Basin
Backpackers, Near MIlestone Basin

Scott emailed recently to ask several questions, and I’ll consider some of them here. His first question has to do with gear, as in  “how much” to take. He suggests that it is hard to find a balance between high enough quality imagining, sufficient equipment to cover possibly opportunities, and carrying the stuff! Once you start carrying the stuff on your back, fundamental compromises among conflicting demands are necessary.

He carries the following gear: Continue reading A Few (More) Thoughts on Back-Country Photography →

Equipment, Reader Questions, Technique

Reader Questions — March 10, 2017

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Photographers write to me with questions, and I always try to reply. In many cases I prefer to reply here on the website so that others who may have the same questions can see the answers, too. Today I’m going through a backlog of questions on a variety of topics: neutral density filters, photographing in Utah, the Canon 5DsR, use of photographs by non-profits.

Pete writes: Dan enjoy your website! Question:Have the Mark III – May get the 5DSR – Has anyone used the 5DSR with Neutral Density Filters 6,10,15 etc.. and what have been the times -lengths – and outcomes? Any noise issues? Other problems noted?

Thanks for writing, Pete. I use a 10-stop neutral density (ND) filter sometimes and I use the 5DsR… but so far I haven’t used the two together! That said, I can’t think of any problems that would be specific to the use of these filters on the 5DsR. I do have experience using the 5DsR with much longer exposure times for night photography, and it works quite well for that.

For those who don’t know, the very dark 5-10 stop and more ND filters can be used to extend the exposure time in daylight conditions. Depending on the filter and your aperture choice you could get 30 second or long exposures. Their use presents a few challenges: Continue reading Reader Questions — March 10, 2017 →

Technique

Controlling Highlights (A Napkin Drawing)

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Earlier this month some friends and I got together in San Francisco, as we do every month, to share prints and talk photography. One friend shared prints of some beautiful night photographs he had made of a San Francisco subject. As we looked for little things that could make excellent prints even better we got to talking about highlights and how to control them. There are quite a few ways to do this, and I drew a little picture on a napkin to illustrate one technique I sometimes use to get a bit more detail out of areas that appear to be nearly pure white. The drawing looked a lot like the following.

Drawing on a napkin

It doesn’t look like much here, but trust me when I say that it made sense at the time. My friend picked up the napkin and took it with him as a reminder… and then a few days later contacted me to say he had lost the “napkin notes” from our conversation. He asked if I would mind describing the technique again. I said I’d do it — and three weeks later I finally got around to writing it up in this article!

Photographers using digital cameras have to watch out for over-exposing highlights. While we can recover a lot of detail from dark shadows, especially with current digital cameras, there is much less headroom at the bright end of the spectrum. When the exposure is too bright it is easy to end up with lost details in high luminosity areas. Go a little too far and you end up with that bane of digital photography, blown highlights, where the bright areas are simply pure white, leaving little or no hope of recovering the lost details. Continue reading Controlling Highlights (A Napkin Drawing) →