Long Exposure Extravaganza

I said in a recent post that I wanted to get more daylight long-exposure photos happening, and this is me making good on that promise.

(Below shot at normal exposure)

I’ve a growing collection of photos of this pier- I’ll try not to post all of them- as it’s one of the more photogenic in the area. Not too long ago I headed down with my setup and spent a little while shooting long-exposure and time-lapse photos. It was a perfect day for it- the sea was choppy, the sun was out, and the early morning light leant itself to using the polariser I layer with the ND400 filter (which allows me to darken the image without affecting the colour, so I can leave the shutter open longer). I shot at a few different exposure lengths, but found the sweet-spot with some 45-second exposures (like the one at top of this post) that turned the sea to mist, and some shorter (1-3 second) frames which allowed the waves to blur but still kept some of the choppy texture.

You can see the effect of the long exposure in the silky water, and also (in the longer exposures) the blurred clouds. Amazingly, the seagulls at the end of the pier were relatively sedate, mostly sitting around and bobbing their heads in the breeze, so they remain fairly static even in the 45-second frames.

It’s some of the details I love in these sorts of images, as the effect essentially ‘distorts’ or ‘re-represents’ reality. The streaming dribbles of water from the pier struts, for example.

I also enjoy the contrast between the 45-second exposure frames and shorter 2-second ones. Both blur the water, but the shorter exposures still give you some of the heave and swirl of the water. You can see this in the two shots below- the first at 45 seconds and the second at 3 seconds.

I actually shot a series of these at 1 second and turned them into a 3-second time-lapse movie. The effect is great, and marries two of my favourite photographic techniques- long exposure and time-lapse. Unfortunately I can’t figure out how to upload it without a catastrophic loss of image fidelity, so until I do that, you’ll just have to imagine it.

As I get more comfortable, familiar and proficient at taking long exposures, I’ll aim to get a few more into my portfolio. I’d love to be out more often when the light is changing, but unfortunately that tends to be at the busiest time of the day for families- breakfast and dinner. At any rate, this is a style of photography (and an effect) I really enjoy, so watch this space for more as I get my head around it a little more…

Incidentally, I’ve started hosting my photos at the photosharing website “500px”, which I quite like as a setup. It’s a little like flickr used to be before flickr got a bit too big for its own good, and a place where you can still get some decent interaction between photographers. My portfolio is still small, but I’m building on it. You can find it here if you’re interested.

Peace out.

-MA

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Shifting Light

Trying to balance the light across a frame is a fundamental part of photography. When the sun is out, this is easiest, as the sun throws lots of light onto the foreground of the shot, while the sky is comparatively darker. The variation of light coming off both ground and sky is relatively similar, and all parts of the image can therefore be quite well lit.

When the sky is cloudy, less light reaches the ground. At the same time, counterintuitively in some ways, the sky itself is far lighter than on a sunny day- because light is being reflected among the clouds. When the camera tries to account for this, it has a choice- it can either expose for the sky, leaving the foreground dark, or it can expose for the ground, leaving the sky blown out without texture. On the whole, unless you’re looking for silhouettes, this doesn’t result in the most appealing photos.

As such, photography on a cloudy day can be a frustrating experience. That said, it can also be extremely rewarding. As I’ve posted a few times, I love the sky, and clouds in particular. On days when the sky is full of texture- particularly partly-cloudy days when gaps open up in the sky and the full vertical extent of clouds and their textures can be seen- photography can be a lot of fun.

I took the following photographs a couple of weeks back with the family at a botanical garden east of Melbourne. It was a cloudy, rainy day and opportunities for good shots might have been limited- it was a great location and could have produced some really colourful shots under full sun. However, working with a few approaches, I was able to snap a handful of images that I quite liked, and that I think show some of the things you can do to try and account for less uniform lighting conditions. All these images (including the title image above) were taken over a 90-minute period on a single afternoon.

The first is look for the sun breaking through. Every so often, a patch of sun will come through and light the foreground. If the sky is especially dark, this can produce some dramatic effects. In this shot, light is falling on this stand of trees, while behind the clouds are dark and menacing. The contrast makes for an unusual and interesting image.

Of course, such breaks are relatively rare, and you have to be in the right position and ready to take them when they do appear. Another benefit though is that the softer light of a cloudy day, while perhaps leaving landscapes a little dull, make portraits much more viable. Strong, direct sunlight light casts shadows on faces that may not capture the detail and interest of a face in the way you want. Cloudy days, however, offer great portraiture opportunities. In this shot, the fact that the sky is a little blown out and textures are soft really doesn’t matter, as it’s Miss Nine in the foreground that you’re interested in.

Here she is again. You can see that the soft light coming from multiple directions (scattered by cloud) means her skin is gently textured without any hard shadows or patches of contrast. There’s some sunshine coming through at this particular juncture- enough to light up her hair- but it’s watered down. Not great for landscapes, but perfect for this sort of thing.

Sometimes the light just won’t cooperate when you’re in position, and you won’t have the luxury of waiting around. Here’s where using graduated neutral density filters can help you out. You can apply these onto the camera or in post-processing. I’ve done the latter with this image, where in the original frame, the foreground was underlit. By manually lightening the foreground, I’ve pulled up enough colour and detail to keep it interesting, and still maintained the darkness of the sky for drama and contrast. This is a slap-dash job, five minutes of fiddling with Lightroom. Doing it properly takes longer, but avoids darkening treetops at the horizon or leaving an unsightly glow where objects touch the sky. HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing does something similar by layering two identical images with different exposure values and blending the best parts of each. Unless done well, I find HDR tends to look artificial and unappealing.

Click to view a larger size.

Again with the portraiture. Watch for moments, even if there isn’t direct sunlight on the foreground, when there is just enough soft light on the foreground and an especially heavy background- this can be all the contrast you need to capture a really nice moment. Here, the surrounds are not really well lit enough for a landscape, but there’s enough of a glow on Miss Nine, and enough darkness in the sky, that the effect works well. Here, the clouds themselves provide the interest for the backdrop- depth, texture, movement and drama- and a nice compliment to Miss Nine in the foreground.

Using fill-flash can achieve a similar effect artificially, if natural light is not cooperating. This can also be achieved in post-processing to some extent, although you will need to ensure that your original exposure is within certain margins. If whites blow out or darks are too pronounced, you will not be able to recover them.

The real trick, though, is to be ready when the light does change- and it will. When you’ve got foreground sun and background clouds, you’ve got a recipe for a nicely-lit and often dramatic shot, and this is when your colours are really going to pop as well.

I would like to head back to the Australia Gardens in full sun and take a handful of landscapes, but I wouldn’t change the conditions we had that afternoon for anything. Not only does the changing light make for interesting, contrasty and often dramatic photography, but it keeps you on your toes. You have to be watching, ready and in the right place, trying to predict when that next shift in the light will come, and then pounce on it. Admittedly, you need a lot more time and patience for this sort of snapping. But when the light does work for you, it’s so much more rewarding.

All photos taken at the Australia Garden at Cranbourne, VIC.

 

 

Touching the Sky

One thing I love about the sky is that it’s constantly changing. We forget, I think, that the air is, from a mechanical standpoint, a fluid. Moisture, temperature and pressure interact to give us weather, and while to our busy, narrow perspective at ground level that change may seem a little slow or plodding, a simple time-lapse of the sky shows us cloud fronts breaking like waves on a shore, building up and breaking down like foam, or boiling away- as ethereal as steam from a kettle.

I don’t think I ever noticed the sky before I started photography. Not really noticed. Now, I love to stare at the clouds and study the layers, watch the way a low-angled sun strikes clouds differently at various altitudes, the range of textures of different cloudforms, or imagine what those clouds might look like from a plane window amongst them.

Even monochromatic skies have depth and interest. Using a polarizing filter teaches you about the different way that sunlight moves across a blue sky, and even with the naked eye you can see dark, rich spots and paler areas where the light seems to desaturate. Blue skies vary from place to place. My family have always enjoyed the very rich, pure blue that seems to accompany sunny days in Australia and New Zealand; growing up in Europe, somehow the sky there used to seem just a little washed out. In western Afghanistan, the winter sky was so clean, so void of moisture, that the edges of every building and every mountain spine stood out, close and sharp, a clarity I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

Life- any life- can have its monotonous stretches. Daily routines, slogs and grinds, times when things seem slow or bogged down. That will change- it’s the nature of life to shift, particularly when people want it to. But even when it feels like more of the same-old same-old, don’t forget to look up. The sky’s always changing, and that makes every day it’s own. If we can learn to celebrate those little things, we can touch the sky every day.

Rooftops

I went for a walk on a snowy morning in Calgary. I loved the geometry of these rooftops set against the blank canvas of a snow-filled sky.

In the Gardens, Part I

The wife and I took a day off recently and headed down to Werribee Mansion. It’s a huge old stately home which has been turned into a public attraction, and has some enormous and very beautifully manicured grounds. We spent the afternoon enjoying the patchy sunlight and exploring the gardens.

The home itself is an attractive piece of grand architecture which makes for a nice backdrop to the flower beds. The light was challenging- but this made it interesting. Shifting clouds meant that catching enough light on the foreground to reduce the difference between light sky and darkened ground (dynamic range) was tricky- but when it worked, the cloudy sky was full of movement, interest and contrast. There were a couple of classic old greenhouses beside the flowerbeds, starting to sag a little round the middle, and they made for interesting subjects as well. The day’s photoshoot was a fun mix of portraiture and scenery, full of colour and soft lighting.

Here are a few of my favourite shots, these ones of the grounds themselves:

In Passing

I’m not a fan of photographs from windows- any windows- as a rule, but when you’re in the field you spend so much time in four-by-fours (see Field Visit Bingo) that sometimes, you have no choice.

Shots from car windows tend to be bland and blurry. It’s a rule of thumb in landscape photography that you don’t take a landscape from where you are, but you move into the landscape to take the photo. Very rarely do the elements line up to give you the right composition- and when they do, they’re usually shooting by so fast that if you’re late by a tenth of a second you miss the moment, and if the shutter speed isn’t high enough, they blur right out. It’s rare to get a sharp image- although by shooting more forwards and less sideways, you reduce the movement of the landscape relative to yourself.

For me, the above image, snapped from a speeding Land Cruiser several hours out of Nairobi, isn’t perfect- but it somehow works for all its imperfections. There’s no hiding what it is- a photo taken hanging out of a car window: the location of the cyclists and the little corner of road make that clear. The foreground is blurred, and the cyclists moreso. The rear tyre of the second cyclist has been clipped by the edge of the frame, and there’s even a little lens-flare catching against the low sun.

But I love the elements. It was a gorgeous sunset, and the sky and terrain were both full of drama. The cyclists- one in a football shirt- are typical of the area and tell their own story about place. And I actually think their blur adds something to the image, a sense of moving towards a brighter horizon. For all its quirks, I was pleased with how this shot turned out.

A Study in Baobabs and African Skies

I love Baobab Trees. Their bulbous trunks and gnarled, clawing limbs make such a stark profile in a landscape often dominated by low scrub and dry grasses. They have an odd, distorted sort of form, and even the way their name comes off the lips- round and taut and satisfying- seems to reflect their tub-like demeanour. They’re such a feature of so many African landscapes, they’re deeply evocative to me.

I took this little series that follows out of a moving car window in southern Kenya. It’s a general no-no for me in photography, but sometimes, especially on field visits where you spend so much time in running up and down the countryside in a vehicle, you don’t have much option.

We were lucky enough to have a moody skyscape to provide as a backdrop, so I exposed for the sky and let the trees stand in silhouette. This had the added advantage of requiring a faster shutter-speed, reducing the foreground blur. Two rules of thumb, if you have to take pictures from a car window: First, the faster the shutter speed, obviously, the lower the blur- so try and maximise this. Second, due to the relative motion of the landscape past the car, objects nearest the car (e.g. pedestrians) will blur more than those further away (e.g. mountains), so try and ensure that the object you’re shooting at isn’t right outside the car window, and if possible cut out the objects closer to the car in favour of those further away.

As the sun went behind the clouds towards the end of the afternoon, the effect was beautiful, with beams of light breaking out across the sky. It was a memorable drive, and while I would much have preferred to stop every few minutes to take proper photos of the glorious landscape, at least I have a few visual mementos of a trip across one of my favourite countries in the world.

The trees are, to the best of my knowledge, Adansonia Digitata.