“Reality” Is Just a Level Adjustment

BNSF Tracks in Cape Girardeau 04-11-2014I’m pretty much a photo purist. I don’t set up photos and I try to manipulate the image only enough that the finished product matches what my eye and mind saw when I pushed the button. On one of my walks from the river at dusk, I saw the light reflecting off the BSNF train tracks between the floodwall and Water Street.

It’s pretty similar to a shot I took in 2009, but that didn’t stop me from shooting it again.

That’s pretty much what my eye recorded, except that my eye saw the reflections on the rails as more red.

So, is THIS real?

BNSF Tracks in Cape Girardeau 04-11-2014One of the first things I do when I open a frame in Photoshop is decide if it needs cropping. The second step is to adjust the levels of the highlights, shadows and midtones. The program has a feature so you can adjust it by a graph rather than with your eye. You just keep moving a slider until the highlights or shadows block up, then you look at the picture and see if you want to tweak it. Generally you do.

In this case, I blindly moved the highlight slider to what should have been the “optimal” point and let go of the button. As you can see, the photo is radically different: the red reflections are gone, the sky has turned a brighter blue and the mural on the floodwall has become more prominent.

Neither iteration of the photo captures exactly what I was looking for, but it goes to show how a few twitches of your finger on a mouse can serve up two radically different views of the same subject.

Shooting What You See

Water Street and bridge in rain 04-02-2014The rain was just slacking off when I got out of a meeting Wednesday night, so I decided to take a run downtown to see if there was any wet street art to be made. I saw something promising on Main Street, but couldn’t find a parking spot nearby. I decided to go down Water Street and make another pass at it.

When I got to the intersection with Independence, the stop sign glared back at me. Nothing unusual about that, it’s supposed to reflect light when your headlights hit it at night.

That’s when I saw the reflection of the street sign and the stop sign in the water on the wet street. Fortunately, nobody was behind me, so I put it in back-up and angled into a parking space.

I got out of the car and slogged through the water until I thought I had the right angle.

The picture was gone

I’ve talked before about how you have to shoot as soon as you see a picture: if you don’t the magic might leak out. I figured that’s what had happened here: that in the 30 seconds it took for me to get out of the car, grab the camera and find the angle, maybe enough water had drained from the street to lose the reflection.

That’s when it dawned on me: REFLECTION. What had changed was that my headights were no longer hitting the signs, hence, there was no light to be reflected.

I got back in the car and changed from angle parking to aiming my lights down the street. I didn’t want to block the street, so I was still well off to the side. It was close, but not what I saw the first time.

There are no cars out

Water Street and bridge in rain 04-02-2014That’s when I realized that this is CAPE. There ARE no cars out on a rainy Wednesday night. I positioned my car in the travel lane and fired away. NOW I was seeing what I had seen behind the wheel.

This was one of the situations where the photo probably would have been better if I had gone the HDR route, which takes multiple exposures, then combines them into one frame. There were several reasons why I didn’t do that:

So, why didn’t I use HDR?

  • I don’t use HDR enough to be comfortable to setting the camera in the dark.
  • It required me to drag my tripod out.
  • My tummy was growling.
  • It was still sprinkling. Those last three things violate my Retirement Contract where I don’t (A) Go hungry; (B) Get wet or (C) Lift heavy objects.

 Other night weather photos

I’m a child of the night. I loved roaming the streets and alleys of towns after dark. After every cop in town had stopped my at least once, they tended to leave me alone.

Want to know why most car ads are shot with streets that have been sprayed with water? It makes them look cool. Here are a some of collections of night weather pictures.

 

A Winter Photo Tip

SEMO swim meet 12-10-1966

Cape had gotten about four inches of rain over the past few days, but a cold front moved through, dropping the temps down into the mid-teens and low 20s. That sets the stage for my assignment to cover a swim meet in the basement of Academic Hall on December 10, 1966.

My equipment had been sitting in the car for most of the day, so it was at the same temperature as the air, let’s say 20 degrees. I walked into the heated air of an indoor swimming pool where the humidity approached 100%. The first thing that happened was that the lenses fogged over with condensation. It took almost half an hour before the equipment warmed up enough that I could SEE through the lens.

Camera froze up

SEMO swim meet 12-10-1966After about six shots, the camera locked up hard. It wouldn’t fire; it wouldn’t advance; it was dead. I gambled that I had at least one usable shot and headed for Nowell’s Camera Shop. (The first shot above ran in the paper, so I got my $5.) (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Mr. Nowell opened it up and said that there was as much condensation INSIDE the camera as there had been on the outside of the lenses. All that moisture turned the dust inside the camera into mud.

I might have used that as an excuse to buy a new Honeywell Pentax body while he was fixing the frozen one.

Pool records, like my camera, were broken

You can read the whole story about the meet in The Missourian. It says that SEMO won the meet against Drury and Culvert-Stockton. The 400 medley relay team of Dave and Dan Ranson, Hal Bliggenstorfer and Dennis Lorch set a new varsity and pool record with a 4:24 time.

Arnold Moore set a varisty and pool record in the 100 freestyle with 13:40.6 and Charles Stevenson was timed in :29.4 in the 60 freestyle. Lorch also set a freshman, varsity and pool record in the 150 individual medley relay when he was clocked in 1:51.2.

Photo tip of the day

Your winter photo tip of the day: Do not leave your cameras out where it is cold, cold, cold, if you are going into somewhere that is hot and humid, humid and humid.

 

 

Tower Rock, Full Moon and HDR

Tower Rock full moon 07-22-2013 7300-7302_HDR2Warning: photo geek stuff to follow. If you’d rather just look at pictures of Tower Rock and the Mississippi River under the full moon, click them to make them larger.

I grew up doing Plain Jane photography. All I had to think about  was film type (color or black and white), film speed, shutter speed, aperture and focal length of the lens. Color / black and white was easy: until I got to The Palm Beach Post, all my work photography was black and white.

I almost always used Kodak Tri-X film for everything except available dark photography, where I experimented with all kinds of exotic film and developer combinations to be able to shoot where you could barely see.

Film speed and f/stops determined how much light hit the film. If you wanted to stop action, you’d use a fast shutter speed and a wide lens opening. If you wanted lots of stuff sharp, you’d stop down the lens and be forced to use a slower shutter. It’s all about math.

Lens choices were equally easy: want to get lots of stuff in, use a wide angle; want to shoot something a long way off, grab a telephoto.

Menus have menu menus

My new Nikon D7000 has more menus than a classy restaurant.  The submenus have submenus, most of which I have never explored. The other night, though, I ventured into the unknown. If I have time, I usually bracket my exposures: in other words, I shoot one at what the camera or I think is right, then I go an interval above and below that exposure in case the camera or I have made a bad first choice. I print or publish the one with the best action, composition, sharpness and/or exposure.

The  problem is that film, paper and sensors don’t have the range of the human eye. We can usually see detail in dark areas and bright areas at the same time. Cameras can’t – or couldn’t.

Enter HDR

Tower Rock 07-22-2013 7378-7380_HDR2There’s magic in those menus. I opted to enter the land of High-Dynamic-Range imaging, better known as HDR. It shoots those same bracketed images, then allows them to be reassembled into one picture. To be honest, I’ve avoided fooling with it because too many people use it to create what we called in school “technically dominated art shots.” Pictures, in other words, where how you did it becomes more important than the content of the photo.

Just because it’s magic doesn’t mean that it’s always GOOD magic. The photo immediately above looks like it could have been shot during the day. It saved too much ambient light. It was taken at 9:40 p.m. when I had to boost the ISO from 200 to 1000. The three exposures for this shot were 13 seconds, 6 seconds and 25 seconds. All were at f/5. I told the camera to overexpose the image by about 4 times because the meter was sensing all the lights from the shore and the reflections of the water and stopping down.

The photo at the top of the page was taken at 9:04 p.m. when I had the ISO set to 200. The exposures were 13 seconds, six seconds and 25 seconds @ f/3.5. I told the camera to overexpose by a factor of 1.33. The colored blur is a barge making its way upstream.

Old ways sometimes better

Tower Rock whirlpool full moon 07-22-2013_7338Because HDR merges photos taken slight intervals apart, sometimes you lose nice detail that is moving. This single frame shows the whirlpool south of Tower Rock starting to form. You can just barely make out the swirl. I zoomed to 55mm and set the ISO to 200. The exposure was 15 seconds @f/4. I overexposed by two stops.

Boat with HDR

Full moon off Tower Rock 07-22-2013 7372-7374_HDR2I’m not overly excited by this HDR shot of a towboat that conveniently paused across from us for some time.

Boat without HDR

Tow off Tower Rock full moon 07-22-2013_7374This is a single frame from the sequence that made up the vertical photo above. I cropped it tighter (just a little bit too tight at the top) and turned it into a horizontal. I find the moon less interesting than the idea of a pilot feeling his way up the Mississippi like pilots have been doing since the days when travelers were first devoured by the demons inhabiting Tower Rock.

Now that I’ve been exposed to HDR, I’ll use it like a torque wrench: something nice to have, but not a tool I grab every day.