Walking around the inside this covered bridge last weekend, I knew that it was the perfect subject for some HDR. I’m not a particular fan of HDR as a rule, but knew that this would be a good place to give it a try. I took a series of bracketed shots using the in-camera HDR feature in my camera. But when I got to playing with it in Lightroom, I decided to see what it looked like without actually blending the frames. As it turns out I think that I actually like it this way. I’ve had to make some pretty extreme exposure adjustments and it’s as noisy as my neighbor’s dog, but I think I’ve got the final result that I envisioned when I took the photo. And ultimately, if I get the result I’m looking for it really doesn’t much matter how I get there, does it?
Here’s a “before” shot just to see where I started:
Kathy & I spent a quiet and relaxing (except for the drive home) extended Thanksgiving weekend in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania visiting family and friends. As is my usual habit, I spent minimal time perusing the interwebs or watching television, so I enjoyed a blissful 5 days away from all of the messages telling me what I was supposed to be doing, buying or worrying about. Fortunately I returned to work today, so I was able to get my 5-minute daily dose (aggregated from all my visits to the break room during the day) of television “news,” so I am now up to speed again. Fiscal Cliff, blah-blah, Black Friday, blah-blah, Cyber Monday, blah-blah, Petraeus (or not Petraeus), blah-blah, Egypt, blah-blah, football, blah-blah, William and Kate, etc.
Somehow all of that stuff pales in comparison to cherished and overdue time with loved ones. I hope you all had time to spend with yours.
I’m getting back around to working on some photos from earlier this fall. In no particular order, just whatever my attention span allows me to concentrate on!
Hotel Roanoke and Railroad TracksCorned Beef & Company
I had mentioned in a previous post that Kathy & I had decided to spend our fall weekends differently than we have the past few years. Rather than chasing color up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway (something we enjoy but have grown a little weary of) we spent a weekend in Florida at a jazz festival, a weekend in Roanoke, VA visiting friends, and a weekend in which I took photos at a recreated pioneer village and photographed some kids. That was a different fall for us, indeed.
Steven
Kathy & I have had an attachment to Roanoke since spending a single night there very early in our marriage. I don’t even remember for sure what we did, where we stayed or where we ate, but we’ve always had good memories of our short time there, and have wanted to go back and spend some time. This year we got to go to Roanoke twice. Of course it was made easier because we have good friends there. We go to see Steven and Cheryl, and just like us, they enjoy wandering around town, taking random photographs, shopping and eating. What a deal!
Free!
We’ve found a nice historic hotel right in the downtown area that is walking distance to just about everywhere. We can literally park the car and enjoy the weekend without having to drive. Although this visit we did spend a little time exploring the countryside, visiting a winery and one of Steven & Cheryl’s favorite restaurants, which is now also one of our favorite restaurants!
Bright yellow leaves of Ginko Biloba trees celebrate fall in downtown Roanoke, VirginiaOrange!
One of my objections to the constant driving we have done in previous years is that I get tired of driving. And I get really tired of traffic. Kathy drives sometimes, but my creativity seems to suffer when I view the scenery from a moving vehicle, regardless of who is driving. And the addition of crowds just makes it harder.
Missing shutters
The other thing with fall is that it’s often very hard to find really interesting scenes. Fall color gives the impression of being interesting because everything is a different color, but in actuality it is much harder to make an interesting photograph in the fall because of the color. Much of what we see in the fall is just as boring as it is in the summer, it’s just a different color. My opinion, anyway.
Open and Shut
Fall happens everywhere, not just in the mountains. And it’s not just colored leaves that make up fall. The air is crisp and cool, the light is warm and contrasty, and a lot of interesting things happen in the fall, such as festivals, concerts and farmer’s markets. So my goal was to find and photograph fall in different places. I think it was a successful approach, and in many ways I think am happier with the results than I’ve been from those in previous years.
Boat Reflections on Far Creek, Englehard, North Carolina
Kathy & I are visiting Belhaven, North Carolina this weekend. One of our many favorite weekend destinations, Belhaven is ideally situated near a lot of places that I love to photograph. And this weekend has proven – once again – the advantage of returning time after time to some of the same places.
Boat Reflections near Swan Quarter, North Carolina
The weather has been perfect “Chamber of Commerce” weather. Clear, blue sky with no clouds to be found anywhere. Well, there were a few around late this afternoon, but not enough to make a meaningful difference in the weather forecast. A little tough for photography, but not if you know where to look. And I had a pretty good idea where to look!
Boat Reflections near Swan Quarter, North Carolina
I love shooting the boats around Swan Quarter and Englehard. I never get tired of going there, and these are especially good places in the late afternoon on these clear days when I know there will be golden light if I am patient enough.
Once the sun was low enough that the boats were cast in shadow we headed back down the road to Lake Mattamuskeet to see what like of post-sunset color we might find. We found a little, and it was quite nice.
Cypress Trees at Sunset at Lake Mattamuskeet near Englehard, North Carolina
One of the advantages of an early sunset is a little more time to spend processing photos, so I have broken from my usual routine to process a few photos from this afternoon and get them online the same day. I’ll have a few more once we get home and I get them processed on my regular computer.
Sunset at Lake Mattamuskeet near Englehard, North Carolina
Not a mistake, exactly. But definitely an outtake. But how can you resist that smile?
Great minds think alike, I guess. On the same day that I was thinking about this subject, my friends Monte Stevens and Paul Lester were also posting similar thoughts on their own blogs. In fact my reply to Monte’s post became the basis for this post, and if I hadn’t read Monte’s post first I might have posted the same comment on Paul’s post!
Monte talks about how the most emotional images aren’t necessarily the ones that exhibit technical perfection. Paul related an experience with a co-worker who didn’t appreciate Paul’s photograph that his daughter appeared in because it was “blurry.”
A little off center? OK, but it’s still a great expression!
We sometimes lose track of the fact that “technical perfection” is that technique that adequately expresses our vision. That doesn’t always mean sharp or even “properly” exposed. This past weekend I took pictures of the children of some friends. They are mostly candid shots of the kids playing, swinging, hanging from monkey bars, etc. Some of them are horribly overexposed and many of them are blurry or misfocused. On my first pass through the photos I marked a lot of them as Rejects. But I went back later and decided that some of them had merit, so I processed some of them and think that a few of them – happy accidents they may be – really express the emotions and energy of these 2 1/2 year-olds. And at that point, exposure, focus and sharpness take a back seat to the feeling that the photo portrays.
While we always strive for technical excellence, sometimes the shots that show the emotion we are trying to capture are not the ones that are “perfect,” but they end up being the ones the express our intentions “perfectly.”
And sometimes you nail it!
A great subject for a Friday – inspiration for the weekend!
Sunset from Currituck Heritage Park near Corolla, North Carolina
Here in North Carolina, we typically still have a lot of fall left in November. Especially in the lower elevations, there is often a decent amount of color around until Thanksgiving. Time will tell what the impact of the late-October storm will have on the fall for this year.
This month’s photo returns to the scene of the September calendar – Currituck Heritage Park in Corolla, North Carolina. In fact, this photo was taken about 35 minutes before the photo of the Whalehead Club that I used for the calendar just a few months ago. While it was still very warm when I took this photo, the colors are more fall-like. Winter is on the way though!
We all have something we do to pay the bills. For most of us that’s a job. And besides the obvious reasons, like needing to make the house payment and pay for food, our jobs have things about them that sometimes make them worth getting up in the morning. For me, one of the advantages is when a customer appreciates my work and takes the time to say so.
Window Reflections
Most of my time at work is what I call “widget based.” We have certain goals – The Company calls them production goals although we don’t actually produce anything – and the jobs or tasks we do have a certain number of points assigned to them. Every month our success (or lack thereof) is determined by how many of these widgets we do.
2000
Of course I’ve been doing this kind of work a lot longer than most of the people I work with, and I remember a time when our primary focus was taking care of our customers, no matter what we needed to do or how long it took. The Company says it still cares, and I suppose at the most basic level it still does. But my job, and The Company’s method for determining how well I do it, is based on the number of widgets I do. We don’t measure customer satisfaction, with me or anyone else.
Faucet and Awning
Sometimes though, while I’m sitting at my desk trying to figure out how squeeze out a few more widgets in order to earn enough points to keep my job, I get e-mails like this one from a customer who I made happy:
Hello Tom,
I received the renewal documents for the (loan). We have both signed and I will be mailing them back today in the self-addressed envelope.
Thank you for believing and trusting in our company. I did want to update you on the (balances) of these loans. As of Friday, I paid off the remaining balance on the credit card and I also paid down $70,000 on the line we are now renewing. Just wanted you to know.
Have a great week!
Thanks again,
So in this whole crazy world of business, even though I might not get any points from The Company for happy customers, I can still get points from the customers. And I think that makes for good Karma. And plenty of reason to go back tomorrow!
I really love fall because it is a great time to travel and take photographs. But the hard part about fall is that we do a lot of traveling and take a lot of photographs! I was already a few weeks behind on processing my photos from the last two weekends, and then this weekend I went and took another 1,000 or so photographs, so I’m even behinder now than I was before. But we’ll slow down a bit in November and December, so with any luck I’ll have some time to get caught up on my processing and my writing. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but that’s the plan.
Farmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, VirginiaFarmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, Virginia
Over the weekend of 10/19-10/21 we headed to Roanoke, VA to spend time with our good friends Steven and Cheryl. One of the things I had been looking forward to was visiting their Farmer’s Market, which is right downtown, in the Market Square area. There is a block-long section of street that has been permanently set up for local farmers and craftspeople to display and sell their goods. It was quite an experience, and for me it was a real photographic treat. And all I did was shoot vegetables! I could have make an entire day photographing people, although many of them were not nearly as photogenic as the food. 🙂
Farmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, VirginiaFarmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, Virginia
I’ve not spent a lot if time at farmer’s markets, although I certainly need to do more of it. The quality of food for sale is much better than that found at even the better local grocery stores. Most if it is truly local, and you can be pretty sure that whatever you buy was picked just a few days before you bought it. We always tell ourselves that we don’t buy enough produce to make it worth the trip, but I think there’s a lot to be said for buying fresh and for buying local.
Farmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, VirginiaFarmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, Virginia
The fall colors were coming into their own while we were there, and I’ll try to follow up with another post on that subject in the next few days.
Farmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, VirginiaFarmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, Virginia
I have a number of friends who seem to be able to race home and see who can be the first to process and post photos from their weekends, but I don’t seem to be able to come close to that, so I don’t care to waste much effort trying to compete. In the mean time I’m currently trying to download and process another batch of photos from our two latest adventures. One of them was for a paying client today, so I’ll have to give those photos a higher priority. But I’ll get back to these soon, so stay tuned.
Farmer’s Market in downtown Roanoke, Virginia
Special thanks to Riverstone Organic Farm from Floyd, VA for allowing me to shoot their vegetables!
Final Processed File using Lightroom 3 and Process Version 2010. Canon 5D with Canon 100-400 at 200mm 1/13 sec @ f22 ISO 200
A number of my non-photographer friends have asked me on numerous occasions why their photographs don’t look like my photographs. And of course the sentiment I hear most often is that “I must have a really great camera.” And I tell them, “of course I do, but I could make the photographs I make with just about any camera. It all has to do with how I take the photograph, and knowing what to do with it after I take it.”
Many people incorrectly attribute this answer to mean that I am “Photoshopping” my photos, but when they do, their impression is that that means something sinister or unethical. I try to explain that a lot of what I do is no different than what might have been done with film in a darkroom. I just don’t have to do it with chemicals, I do it with a computer.
This article is written primarily for me to be able to point my friends to something that explains, better than I could possibly do in the lunchroom at work or at dinner in a nice restaurant, what I mean when I say that I “develop” or “process” my photos in Lightroom. And hopefully some of my photographer friends will find this interesting and perhaps even informative.
This photograph was taken in October 2011 on one of those rare times when the fall color was just about at peak, and an early morning snowstorm came through with just about perfect timing. An hour before this photo was taken I was sitting in my car in the parking lot at Clingman’s Dome, being buffeted by gale force winds when a snow plow driver stopped to tell me that I had better get started down because he was planning to lock the gate. I wisely retreated to a lower elevation and found this scene.
The scene in front of me was overall pretty dark and lacking in contrast, because even though the sun was lighting up the clouds the light was pretty diffused and the sun was not shining through all that brightly. I knew from experience that my camera would try to overexpose to bring the values closer to an average exposure. But I also knew that the snow and clouds were on the brighter end of the scale and would cause my camera to want to under underexpose the snow and clouds. I figured (correctly) that the two would just about balance each other out and made no adjustments to what the meter was reading. I confirmed the exposure with the histogram after the shot.
At the time I was pretty certain that I had captured some good photographs of a pretty amazing scene, but I also knew that a great deal of post-processing would be required to obtain a final image that looked like what I “saw” while I was standing at that overlook. When I got home and imported the files into the computer, the first thing I saw was this flat looking gray mess that some people might be tempted to toss. But I had a plan and went to work.
Unprocessed RAW file as imported to Lightroom
The first thing I did was to adjust the white balance to warm the scene up a little. My camera does a very good job with finding the “right” white balance, but I knew I was going to need to add some warmth to get the look I was after. About 500 points was plenty to get what I wanted. Next, I knew I needed to add a lot of contrast, since the snow and clouds made for a very low-contrast scene. I ended up adding a lot of black – about 70 points (this is Process Version 2010 in Lightroom – the new adjustment tools had not been invented yet!). Some adjustments to the mid-tones and highlights and I was starting to get somewhere!
After some basic adjustments to white balance, tone and contrast.
My next step was to add some additional color contrast by using Split-toning to cool the shadows while keeping warmth in the highlights. This is pretty subtle but gives the scene a bit more vibrance.
After extensive use of the Adjustment Brush for localized dodging & burning, contrast and saturation
After a bunch of time spent cloning dust spots – the photo was shot at f22 – I was ready to move on to some fine tuning. I made extensive use of the Adjustment Brush to selectively darken and lighten specific areas of the photo, added some contrast and saturation to areas that needed it, and generally “shaped” the image to direct the viewer’s eye through the scene. A little vignetting to keep the viewer inside the frame, some tweaks to the capture sharpening and noise reduction and it’s done. Or done for now, as I haven’t yet tried to make a print of this photo. Doing that will undoubtedly require another round or two of adjustments once I see what it looks like on paper. I’d also like to experiment with this image using Process Version 2012 in Lightroom 4, but when I click the button to convert it the photo turns to crap again. So we’ll have to save that and printing for a future episode!
After some additional fine tuning and sharpening, and adding a subtle vignette.
Morning light and clouds at Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413
Kathy & I had a last-minute chance to take off to the mountains this past weekend and meet up with some friends. There are definitely signs of color in some spots, primarily the higher elevations. We didn’t spend a lot of time photographing, preferring instead to explore the towns of Waynesville and Sylva. I did manage to crawl out of bed early on Saturday for an attempt at sunrise, but we left with no evidence that the sun had risen other than the fact that the sky got lighter. We did end up seeing some sun later in the day and on Sunday, but for the most part things were on the cloudy and foggy side.
Like many weekends in the mountains, this was one of widely variable conditions. We found sun in some spots, were totally socked in with fog in some spots. We discovered fall color in some places, while in others summer was still holding on tight. We stopped by a waterfall along one of the side roads and in 15-20 minutes didn’t see a car, while earlier on the Parkway traffic was starting to get busy.
Waterfall on West Fork Pigeon River, Route 215 Lake Logan Road, Pisgah National Forest
I’m still struggling to find my photographic “groove” and I didn’t help myself much this weekend. I guess I’ve just allowed myself to get out of practice. It has been a crazy year so I have a good excuse, but it’s frustrating to feel so out of it, creatively. I’m back on the upswing though, and am confident that I’ll get things back on track over the next month or so.
All in all we had a great weekend. Good food and good times with friends are tough to top!
City lights of Hendersonville, NC shine through the pre-dawn fog from Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413.
***
I love the Blue Ridge Parkway, and it is one of my favorite places to visit any time of the year, especially in the fall. But more and more I find myself struggling with the sheer number of people that head for the Parkway when the leaves start to peak. In particular I’m bothered by what appears – to me at least – to be an increase in the irresponsible behavior and lack of respect that some drivers have. This past weekend I witnessed a number of “bad apple” drivers, in particular motorcycle riders, doing stupid and reckless stunts. Passing on curves and in no-passing zones, tailgating and intimidating drivers who weren’t going fast enough to suit them. It really takes away from the peaceful experience that I have always gone to the Parkway for. I understand that not everyone goes to the Parkway for peace and quiet, but when the antics of a few people manage to wreck the experience it is hard to tolerate.
I had already made plans to experience fall in other places this year, but after this past weekend and some similar experiences last year, I think I’m going to wait until I have time to plan my visits in mid-week to hopefully avoid most of the crazies. I realize that most drivers and riders are careful and responsible, and that for the most part their biggest offense is making a lot of noise, but I think I’ll wait and head back in November and December, when only the most hardy adventurers are willing to brave the elements.
Morning light and fall color at Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413
Fall happens everywhere, and I think my goal for this year will be to find Fall in some of the less-discovered places! We’ve got some interesting adventures coming up, so stop by again soon to see what we’ve been up to.
Morning light and fog at Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413
