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07/21/2005 08:53:07 AM · #126 |
Yeah, it's alive if people participate. I'm not gonna force it though. If I move too fast people will fall behind.
Define "Luminance" in my own words? It's very hard to do but you know it when you see it. Luminance (in the positive sense) is when the image seems to glow woth light. Lack of luminance is when it seems flat. It's not a matter of contrast, incidentally; frequently more contrast = less luminance. Basically, especially with raking/back light in landscape work, you want the image to positively glow, as if illuminated with an inner light. Cpaniotis "before and after" is a good example of bringing more luminance into a shot with careful post processing; this is synonymous, btw, with "making the shot more luminous"; "it nees to be more luminous" = "It needs more luminance", it's a noun/adjective thing.
Are we ready for our next assignment?
Robt.
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07/21/2005 09:04:18 AM · #127 |
Wouldn't simply bumping up the saturation increase the luminance of a photo? As for the lesson I'm ready when you are.
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07/21/2005 09:27:44 AM · #128 |
Originally posted by tristalisk:
Wouldn't simply bumping up the saturation increase the luminance of a photo? As for the lesson I'm ready when you are. |
Okay, let's just do it; to keep the two threads running in parallel for now, Next Assignment: BACKLIGHTING:
It's time to move on to raking light's close cousin, Backlighting: backlighting often contains strong textural references as light wraps around volumetric surfaces. It can work very effectively to present a sense of mass, of weight, and is very useful in producing "powerful" compositions. Check out the "Landscape" mentorship thread for examples of an Ansel Adams scene down with two different kinds of light and note the differences. Think about backlighting and try to do something creative with it. Ideally you'll give us a shot in which it's hard to imagine the same picture WITHOUT backlighting.
Please avoid doing pure silhouettes; this is a special category of backlighting. Be sure you have detail in the backlit object/s.
As to saturation and luminance, yes that's often the case, but your main luminance tool is the curves dialogue box. By way of illustration, luminance is THE major factor that sets Ansel Adams prints apart from those of his less-skilled followers, and those of course are pure B/W images.
Robt.
Message edited by author 2005-07-21 09:29:20.
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07/21/2005 01:34:47 PM · #129 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
Originally posted by TooCool:
Not the most exciting shot, but shows raking light bringing out the textures and defining the subject. |
Do us a favor, if this is close by and convenient, and shoot it in flat light, exact same framing, will ya? For comparison?
Robt. |
Sorry it took so long. Very busy at work this week...
People looked at me like I was stupid or something with my big flash taking a picture of a blank brick wall...
Message edited by author 2005-07-21 13:36:30. |
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07/21/2005 08:57:45 PM · #130 |
There ya go, thanx. Perfect illustration of WHY raking light should be a conscious part of your arsenal. Presumably I don't need to explain this to anyone, the evidence is right in front of us :-)
Robt.
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07/21/2005 09:42:22 PM · #131 |
No need at all, although I would think that there are times when raking light may detract from a photo. Example, if you're trying to get a shot inside a hollow tree or stump, then the raking light would tend to put it more in shadow than adding anything to it. Right?
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07/21/2005 09:44:28 PM · #132 |
Originally posted by Jewellian:
No need at all, although I would think that there are times when raking light may detract from a photo. Example, if you're trying to get a shot inside a hollow tree or stump, then the raking light would tend to put it more in shadow than adding anything to it. Right? |
Oh sure. Raking light can be very distracting. But we are learning to use it to reveal texture, which is what it shines at (pun intended).
R.
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07/21/2005 11:09:09 PM · #133 |
Duplicate Post from "Landscape" thread:
**************
For reference, here's a perfect example of raking light: The dominant plane is the church facade, and the light is raking it very acutely, highlighting every detail of the structure. The light on the ground itself is NOT raking light, it's just plain strong light. Of course, this is an "architectural shot", not a "landscape", but the principle obtains.
This one is more of a shot of the building within the landscape of the cemetery. Exact same light. Note the gravestones on the right: while it is true that the light is "raking" the thin planes of the stones that face me, nevertheless the light on these stones is more properly classified as "strong light" because the dominant plane is at right angles to the light and is very strongly lit.
Hope this clarifies things?
Robt.
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07/22/2005 12:31:09 PM · #134 |
I was going for the backlighted clouds, themselves, not the trees. Took at sunrise at about 5:45. Misty/hazy sky, but glowy, too! However, not sure if there's enough detail in the clouds to satisfy this assignment. So, here's another backlighted shot I took this morning of a leaf. More obvious detail in this one.
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07/22/2005 08:00:17 PM · #135 |
Originally posted by Evaan:
I was going for the backlighted clouds, themselves, not the trees. Took at sunrise at about 5:45. Misty/hazy sky, but glowy, too! However, not sure if there's enough detail in the clouds to satisfy this assignment. So, here's another backlighted shot I took this morning of a leaf. More obvious detail in this one.
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Both are excellent examples of backlighting. The assignment made no mention of detail. The cloud shot shows how backlighting in a landscape can produce an immense feeling of depth, as the further away elements are the more they grey out due to atmospheric diffraction. The leaf shot combines strong backlighting ont he leaf with strong raking light on the surface texture, giving a shot of great luminosity and crispness both.
Gold star.
Robt.
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07/23/2005 10:40:51 AM · #136 |
I took a number of backlit shots last night. The first one is a rockwall, that the backlight makes look BIGGER than it really is.
This group is from inside an amplitheatre, the fourth one is a shot of the opposit side showing what detail is there without the backlight.
   
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07/23/2005 11:39:30 AM · #137 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
Please avoid doing pure silhouettes; this is a special category of backlighting. Be sure you have detail in the backlit object/s.
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Robert, this was the segment of the assignment I was referring to when I said I was looking for "detail" in my clouds and leaf. Guess I made it more of a main consideration than it needed to be. |
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07/23/2005 12:31:04 PM · #138 |
The shot of the tower is a classic backlit shot. You are quite correct, that backlighting adds a sense of mass to subjects most of the time.
The shots of the bridge structure are silhouettes, a special category as mentioned earlier. When there is no detail in the backlit subject, you have a silhouette. Silhouettes tend to be 2-dimensional images, while backlit shots with good shadow detail are usually very 3-dimensional and can run the gamut all the way up to positively luminous (like evaan's leaf shot) depending mostly on the translucence of the backlit subject.
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07/23/2005 12:41:01 PM · #139 |
Back light and Strong light mixed. OK now, what the heck are you supposed to meter on when you are shooting a backlit subject? I know they say with film meter for the highlights and with slides and digital it's meter for the shadows. (I hope I don't have this backwards) However when I tried to meter the shadows in this scene, the entire sky blew out...
Message edited by author 2005-07-23 12:43:57. |
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07/23/2005 12:45:02 PM · #140 |
Originally posted by TooCool:
Back light and Strong light to mix moods... |
It's all backlight. Nice backlight, too, if the PP were tuned up a little; there's an overall, plastic-green cast to this that's not very appealing, but I am sure it is easily fixed from the original. I can see there could be a LOT more luminosity to this shot with different PP.
As an aside, it's pretty difficult to have a single shot in a naturallandscape that incorporates both strong light and backlight unless you're shooting at fairl extreme wide angle.
Robt.
Addendum; you have it backwards... with negatives the shadows have the least information in them (are thinnest) so we have to expose to fix the shadow detail and process to hold back the highlights. In positive images (transparency and digital shots) we have to be careful not to blow out the highlights to where there is no detail in them, so we tend to expose for the bright areas, maing sure we don't drive them off the right side of the histogram altogether.
When we are shooting pronounced backlighting in the landscape and the skies have no clouds etc lend detail, blown-out skies are a fact of life we have to deal with. If we make them dark enough to render tonality, they usually look artifically dark anyway. They can be adjusted with semi-transparent gradients in photoshop if necessary; there's often no "perfect" exposure possible for both sky and subject in backlit landscapes, and even with film/print work darkroom adjustments will be required.
Message edited by author 2005-07-23 12:51:30.
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07/23/2005 12:53:55 PM · #141 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
It's all backlight. Nice backlight, too, if the PP were tuned up a little; there's an overall, plastic-green cast to this that's not very appealing, but I am sure it is easily fixed from the original. |
This is more of what it really looked like. I'm really begining to hate color. I can never seem to get it exactly the way I want it. Oh, the wife said she liked the first version, go figure...
Originally posted by bear_music:
I can see there could be a LOT more luminosity to this shot with different PP. |
I was trying to add luminosity. Guess I don't quite have a grasp on the concept yet... |
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07/23/2005 01:22:03 PM · #142 |
I hear ya. Your basic problem here seems to be contrast-reducing, overall flare in the lens. What did you shoot this with? Fundamentally, to get luminance you enhance contrast. Saturation also, often, but almost always contrast. If you think about it you'll see why: imagine a glowing 100-watt bulb shot against a bright background, and the same thing shot against a dark background; up to a point, where's there's more contrast there's a greater sense of luminosity. Of course, the MOST "luminous" image might be the bright bulb glowing noticeably against a nearly-white, translucent, backlit BG, but that's a whole other area LOL.
I've taken a quick whack at doing your shot for more luminance, including throwing in a sky gradient liek I discussed earlier, though technically we're not gonna encourage use of such artificial "enhancements" at this stage. I'm nowehere near satisfied witht he rendering of the large tree, where the flare has robbed it of a lot of life, but this is ok for a quick-fix, if a bit exaggerated for pedagogical purposes.
Basically, I used cntrl-alt-tilde to select the highlight range, cntrl-j to make a layer, then selected highlight range again, inverted selection, and made another layer. I set the inverted layer to multiply (darkened the shadows) and the highlight layer to screen (lightened the highlights). I then used hue/sat to saturate the yellow channel +30, and in the green channel saturation +20 and brightness +30 or so. This gave more pop to things.
I used a levels layer to tune that up. I selected sky, used "select similar" to grab all the "holes" in the horizon trees, created a new layer from BG, and applied a blue-to-transparent gradient to the sky selection. I then faded the gradient layer, and adjusted its saturation as well.
Finally, I was left with a wishy-wasy looking flared-out big tree, so I used sponge tool to add saturation to the brighter leaves and the burn tool at 5% burn on shadows toincrease contrast in the tree itself.
Takes longer to explain it than it did to do it... It's far from perfect: the foreground may be too contrasty, the tree is unnaturally flat by comparison, the sky may be too artifical, but this shows a direction you can travel in.
R.
Message edited by author 2005-07-23 13:23:24.
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07/23/2005 09:02:03 PM · #143 |
Tried a backlit macro, subject was in partial shade with scattered backlighting. Wind made this challenging. |
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07/24/2005 01:42:09 PM · #144 |
I changed the shot to be a little wider.
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07/24/2005 01:52:25 PM · #145 |
On a sside note. I think I have learned alot about lighting. I am alot more concious of it before I shoot. But I am fidning even when I go out in the "golden hours". I either cannot move the subject or move to where I can get more dramatic ligthing. Do I just wait until I can and forget shooting?
Most of the stuff I shoot is pretty far from the beaten path..I am hanging on ledges and crawling with snakes and sliding down with rock / dirt slides.
On Saturday (23rd of july) me and singsunshine went on a 480 mile road trip for 12 hours into Colorado. The sun would peak out then go away...the mountains were 10,000-14,000 feet all around us and sometime were in 8,000 feet beneath them. So they often blocked out most of the early light and late light.
I guess I am just finding it hard to find available light...I mean I go and find something I like and if the lighting is good I shoot. If it is not I still shoot. I am just finding it frustrating because I have no control of the lighting. |
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07/24/2005 02:21:52 PM · #146 |
Originally posted by DustDevil:
On a sside note. I think I have learned alot about lighting. I am alot more concious of it before I shoot. But I am fidning even when I go out in the "golden hours". I either cannot move the subject or move to where I can get more dramatic ligthing. Do I just wait until I can and forget shooting?
Most of the stuff I shoot is pretty far from the beaten path..I am hanging on ledges and crawling with snakes and sliding down with rock / dirt slides.
On Saturday (23rd of july) me and singsunshine went on a 480 mile road trip for 12 hours into Colorado. The sun would peak out then go away...the mountains were 10,000-14,000 feet all around us and sometime were in 8,000 feet beneath them. So they often blocked out most of the early light and late light.
I guess I am just finding it hard to find available light...I mean I go and find something I like and if the lighting is good I shoot. If it is not I still shoot. I am just finding it frustrating because I have no control of the lighting. |
That is the lament of the landscape photographer, yes. It can be incredibly frustrating. In one sense there's absolutely nothing you can do, assuming you are on a schedule and must move on. In the best of all possible worlds, you'd have time on your hands and set up camp for days on end while waiting for the light; some of my best pictures resulted from such an approach. On the other hand, some of my best shots were happy accidents, seeing the light and leaping out of the car to set up the view camera in a desperate rusha gainst time.
One of Ansel's most famous images, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" was just such an accident. And Ansel was notorious for camping on a shot. The willingness to exhibit extreme patience is one of the defining characteristics of great landscape photographers, sensitivity to light being the other. They go hand-in-hand, of course. I can only advise that you learn the zen of shooting in a larger time-frame; fewer images, less movement, more waiting.
It's perfectly fine, of course, to rocket through the landscape snatiching whatever presents, but only by happy coincidence will you ever encounter the defining light if you do this. Still,t here's a vast middleground perfectly decent images that please tremendous numbers of people that are made with workmanlike, even pedestrian, light on the landscape. You just have to accept what you can get.
The following post, duplicated in the other thread, is a fairly good example of defining light, and it was created "intentionally" yesterday morning; I knew the conditions I wanted, I knew where I wanted to be and what time I wanted to be there, and I drove 20 minutes at dawn to accomplish the shot... It's hard to imagine "better" light for that scene and that mood.
R.
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07/24/2005 02:22:26 PM · #147 |
Duplicate Post from the Landscape Thread
Here's an example of an extreme wide angle shot (10mm on my 20D) that illustrates how the very nature of the light changes as you sweep across a wide arc. There are strong elements of backlighting, and nearly as strong elements of raking light: on the right side of the image it's totally backlit, in the foreground backlighting dominates, but as we move left the lighting in the BG changes to a strong, raking light.
Remember the original exercise where we changed our orientation and used the same light in different ways? Imagine that in this shot I was using, say, a 100 nn lens. Bear in mind that the angular coverage of my 10mm is nearly 100 degrees (!). So if I used the 100mm to shoot the foliage in the left BG, the light would be right on my right shoulder at 90 degrees, and it would be true raking light on the foliage. Now I rotate over 90 degrees to shoot the inlet on the roght, and I'm shooting directly into the light, basically; same light, but in that shot it would be backlighting.
So here, in a single extreme wide angle shot, I have BOTH backlighting and raking light, changing as the eye moves throught he image. the light itself is a constant; no light "is" one thing or the other, it's just light. It's the relationship of a the light to your subjects/surfaces that provide the definition of the "nature" of that light.
This goes to show, btw, that you have to be VERY sensitive to the light when shooting extreme wide angle.
Robt.
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07/24/2005 02:54:41 PM · #148 |
I guess I take things a bit to literally. Like "these are the types of light and exactly how to achive them". Which I know totally it does not work that way.
I general move through stuff because I can never go alone to shoot anything. I have 2 young sons (6 and 11) pretty much full time by myself. So they end up coming along but they can't sit still as long as I can. I have alot of patience for sitting or camping on a site and what not. But often Either do to time or children I simply can't do that.
I had several ideas for "wooden" challenge. Non of them turned out. I pictured every shot I wanted to try and get of what I might find on my roadtrip but nothing ever appeared how I thought it would.
Right now I have a decent idea for the challenge but not sure if the lighting will cooperate with me later this evening. I will probrably just trodge along and see if it works out or not. |
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07/25/2005 03:00:54 PM · #149 |
I realize that there are a lot of overblown highlights.....I will post a better outtake soon...sorry abt that
Message edited by author 2005-07-25 15:02:22. |
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07/25/2005 03:26:20 PM · #150 |
Can this be an example of raking light (on the petal behind the pistils?)
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